Hamas and the nexus of global jihad by Caroline Glick

...As the administration’s continued embrace of the Muslim Brotherhood despite its full membership in the terrorist nexus that threatens the US and all of its closest allies, along with its desperate courtship of the Iranian mullahs, makes clear, the Obama administration has chosen to appease rather than combat America’s worst enemies. Perhaps the most sympathetic interpretation of Livni’s and Herzog’s unwarranted and harmful assaults against Netanyahu is that they simply cannot accept that the world has changed. But the trends are clear. The only responsible thing that Israel can do is to act accordingly. Today Israel’s closest ally is Egypt. Under Obama, the US is a force to be worked around, not worked with.

Caroline Glick..
CarolineGlick.com..
06 February '15..

On Wednesday, Hamas leader in Gaza Mahmoud Zahar called on Hamas terrorists in Lebanon and Syria to attack Israel “to help us liberate Palestine.”

At the same time, Zahar denied that Hamas has been involved in the terrorist insurgency in Egypt. As he put it, “Our guns are always trained on the enemy,” that is, Israel.

The Egyptian regime was not impressed by Zahar’s protestations.

Last Saturday, an Egyptian court upheld an October 2014 decision by the Egyptian government to outlaw Hamas’s terrorist shock forces Izzadin Kassam, and designate it a terrorist organization.

Both the government’s initial designation and the court’s decision were in some sense, watershed events. They represent the first time an Arab regime ever defined any Palestinian terrorist organization as a terrorist group.

But in truth, Egypt had no choice. Despite its insistent protestations that the Jews are its only enemies, Hamas, the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, has been a major player, indeed, arguably the key player in the jihadist insurgency in the Sinai Peninsula that threatens to destroy the political, economic and military viability of the Egyptian state. The declared purpose of the insurgency is to overthrow the regime of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and integrate Egypt into Islamic State’s “caliphate.”

Last week saw yet another devastating terror assault against Egyptian security forces and civilians in Sinai and in cities around Egypt. Thirty- two people, mainly soldiers, were killed in a coordinated, multifaceted attack that included Hamas’s three signature modes of operation – mortars, rockets and suicide bombings.

Last week’s assault, like almost all previous ones, was credited to Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis, a jihadist group that has pledged allegiance to Islamic State and declared Sinai a province of its “caliphate.”

According to a report by Yoram Schweitzer from the Institute for National Security Studies, Hamas members were among the original founders of Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis. The Egyptian government views Hamas-controlled Gaza as the rear headquarters of the group. In founding the group, Hamas cooperated with local Salafist Beduin and with al-Qaida terrorists who escaped Egyptian prisons during the January 2011 uprising against then-president Hosni Mubarak.

From the outset, Egyptian security forces alleged that Hamas terrorists conducted the prison breaches. Among the other Islamists released during the jail breaks was Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Morsi.

Morsi reportedly used Hamas terrorists as his regime’s Praetorian guard. They were charged with protecting the Muslim Brotherhood regime from protesters who opposed his moves to rapidly transform Egypt into an Islamist state and the spearhead of the Brotherhood’s sought-for global caliphate.

From an ideological perspective, there is no distinction between the Brotherhood and Hamas. From an organizational perspective, the Palestinian Muslim Brotherhood branch has no difficulty integrating its forces seamlessly into the wider Muslim Brotherhood operational structure to serve what it views as their common ends.

And this brings us back to the insurgency in Sinai. In addition to claiming that Hamas enables Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis, Cairo accuses Hamas of having directly carried out several mass casualty terror attacks against its security forces. The most recent one, carried out in late October 2014, killed 31 soldiers. It precipitated Cairo’s decision to expand its security zone between Gaza and Sinai from 1 to 2 kilometers and begin emptying the Egyptian side of the border-straddling city of Rafah. It was also the catalyst for the government’s decision to label Izzadin Kassam a terrorist group.

The timing of last week’s attack indicates the close coordination between Hamas-Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis and the Muslim Brotherhood. As The Washington Free Beacon reported, two days before the attacks the Muslim Brotherhood issued a call for “a long, uncompromising jihad” in Egypt.

Anbar - The Changing Face of Sinai

With a new regime governing Egypt, the lawless Sinai Peninsula has become a breeding ground for Israel's enemies and their proxies. After more than thirty years of relative quiet on the border, Israel has a new potential threat to manage

Ariel Anbar..
israeldefense.com..
28 March '12..

Iran seldom misses an opportunity to exploit the weaknesses of its adversaries. As the power vacuum in Egypt may result in political and military changes that pose a threat to Israel, it is imperative for the Jewish state to re-evaluate and re-gentrify its strategy, and accordingly, re-allocate resources to its southwestern border.

With the Obama administration welcoming the participation of the Muslim Brotherhood in the post-Mubarak Egyptian government, Iran's proxy operations will flourish in the Sinai Peninsula – the new safe haven for global jihad – which is becoming an integral part of Iran’s expanding terror network and infrastructure.

Akin to its cultivation of ties with Hamas and Hezbollah, Iran is determined to increase its influence wherever it can. It appears that Iran has successfully seized the opportunity in Egypt and Sinai.

The West’s miscalculation of Egypt's strategic trajectory (as with Turkey’s) has resulted in the Sinai Peninsula becoming a front for Iranian terrorist activity. In addition, as the rift between the Egyptian civilian government and the military closes, Iran will have a fertile breeding ground to further its interests and intensify its operations.

Since the toppling of Mubarak's regime, the Egyptian military has permitted events to occur that can only lead one to conclude that Egypt is seeking to strengthen ties with Israel's enemies, rather than maintaining strategic cooperation with Israel.

Vice-Prime Minister Moshe Ya'alon to Americans: Why cede strategic territory when Palestinians & Muslims continue goal to "liberate" Israel from Jews?

http://democast.tv
05 December '10

Israeli Vice-Prime Minister Moshe Ya'alon debunks Palestinian preparedness to live peacefully alongside Israel. Lt. Gen Ya'alon explains why creating a sovereign Palestinian Arab state at this stage of unpreparedness would constitute a victory for global Jihadism.



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Blair, Israel, and the Global Struggle

Evelyn Gordon
Contentions/Commentary
10 January '10

In a weekend interview with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Haaretz asked why British public opinion is “the most anti-Israel” in Europe. “Look, there’s criticism everywhere,” Blair responded. “But that’s partly because people don’t understand how difficult this situation is when you come under attack, your civilians come under attack, and you’re a democratic government and you’re expected to respond.”

Even by itself, that’s a remarkable statement: the problem, according to Blair, is not Israel’s actions; it’s that other Western countries, not facing the same daily assaults, refuse to recognize that if they did, they might respond similarly.

Even more remarkable, however, is the next sentence: “I mean, we face this [situation] continually. We face it now, actually, in places like Afghanistan.”

In short, Westerners should understand Israel because they’re in the same boat: their own armies are causing civilian casualties “in places like Afghanistan” for the exact same reasons.

So why do many Westerners either refuse to see the parallels or regard their own armies’ behavior with similar incomprehension and outrage? In Blair’s view, the heart of the problem is that too many Westerners fail to understand that they face a determined enemy waging a long-term global struggle, not a series of discrete, unrelated local conflicts.

“People sometimes say to me, no, it’s not really Iraq, it’s Afghanistan,” he said. “Someone else will say, no it’s Pakistan, and someone else will say it’s Iraq, and someone else will say it’s Yemen. But actually it’s all of these because in different ways, they represent different challenges that are unified by one single movement with a single ideology. And this is going to be resolved, in my view, over a long period of time. But what is important is that wherever it is fighting us, we’re prepared to fight back … unfortunately, we can’t say: ‘Look, let’s concentrate it here, but not here, and here, and here,’ because that’s not the way this thing’s working. …

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How the West Rejuvenated Pan-Islamism and the Global Jihad

Daniel Greenfield
Sultan Knish
23 December 09

The seeming suddenness with which Islamic terrorism went from a problem happening "out there" in the hinterlands to a problem happening across the street can be credited as much to the Islamists themselves, as to their enablers. What the backwardness of the Muslim world and the collapse of its empires of conquered regions into colonies themselves, ruled over by European powers achieved to break down Pan-Islamism, seemingly for good, was swiftly undone. And it was undone by the fact that virtually every major power in the 20th century fostered Pan-Islamism as a tool against its enemies.


Certainly the worst example of this phenomenon was the Cold War during which the US and the USSR helped create modern Islamic terrorism, by alternately training, arming and turning Muslim guerrillas and terrorists into weapons against each other. While the USSR helped create the modern Middle Eastern terrorist, the US helped create the Asian Muslim terrorist. And together, from the PLO to the Mujadeen, from Al Queda to the PFLP, from the Madrassas to the Patrice Lumumba Peoples’ Friendship University, the beast grew and swelled to fill a vacuum that the end of the Cold War created.

And as the modern Muslim terrorist was created out of the Cold War, so were the two major arguments used by conservative and liberal Westerners for supporting or tolerating Islamic terrorism. The Soviet Union crafted the core argument used by liberals who defend the sort of headchopping Islamist barbarians who would be happy enough to nail them to a wall simply for not having a beard, when it differentiated between "ancient" Pan-Islamism as a tool of religious repression and "modern" Pan-Islamism as a means by which oppressed people revolt against imperialist tyranny.

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