This blog will examine most of the inequities involving the law, immigrations, education, employment, political, health care. It will showcase current news events concerning US and world economic, Middle-eastern revolt issues while trying to explain and resolve those issues.
Campaign for America's Future's co-director Robert Borosage issued the following statement on the current Congressional budget standoff:
Get out the togas; Congress is fiddling while Rome burns. As the grim economic numbers show, this economy is barely moving, crippled by government cutbacks that once more cost jobs. 25 million people are in need of full time work, a number that is growing as the economy is failing to generate enough jobs even to employ those coming into the labor market for the first time.
Pell Grants
And while this is happening, conservatives in Washington are intent on exacting even more cruelty on the vulnerable. It is simply beyond shame that Tea Party Republicans suggest that the Boehner plan isn't harsh enough, demanding that deep cuts in Pell Grants that allow deserving low income children a chance to afford college. The notion that Pell grants that help low income kids go to college is a way to sweeten legislation to make it more attractive to right wing extremists is unspeakable. The Tea Party right in Congress offends not only the majority of Americans, but the majority of their own supporters.
Every plan before Congress will make the economy worse. Every plan tramples the priorities of the vast majorities of Americans.
This week, hundreds of Americans crowded into, phoned or emailed Congressional offices at home and in Washington to make their displeasure known. We need to keep the pressure on and continue to demand that Congress listen to the vast majority of Americans, who want Social Security and Medicare and Medicaid protected, and millionaires and billionaires and corporations to pay their fair share. We will continue to build a movement to defend an American dream that is increasingly being shattered by corrupted policy and perverted values.
The Campaign for America's Future (CAF) is a center for ideas and action that works to build an enduring majority for progressive change. The Campaign advances a progressive economic agenda and a vision of the future that works for the many, not simply the few. The Campaign is leading the fight for America's priorities - for good jobs and a sustainable economy, and for strengthening the safety net.
Fund Libraries, Places where the homeless go
The best stimulus policy would be simpler and more generous help for the unemployed. On paper, direct government purchases of goods or services with high domestic content ought to give the economy a bigger push per dollar—infrastructure spending, or accelerated replenishment of run-down military inventories, for instance. But the discretionary element in initiatives like these has been a problem. Actually getting the money spent is hard. In the same way, aid for state and local governments ought to pack a lot of punch as well, but it hasn’t. States have applied a lot of the aid they received not to maintaining jobs and services, as intended, but to improving their financial balances. Just as consumers can save a tax cut, states can save their federal aid—and they have.
Spending last of his benefits
The unemployed, especially those with limited savings, will spend all or most of their benefits. And they just happen to be the principal victims of the recession, so calculations of equity and stimulus power point the same way. Access to benefits is too complicated. The rules reduce take-up; the goal should be to increase it. Numerous ad hoc changes in eligibility and duration, like those seen of late, make matters worse. Unemployment insurance needs to be simplified and codified in a settled way, so that people understand the system and more of them can get the help they need when they need it. A well-designed system provides timely help and effective stimulus automatically, with no need for political intervention—a big advantage so long as Congress remains a broken institution.
Aid for the unemployed needs to be extended in other ways. Generous support for retraining and relocation should be part of the package. A template exists in the Trade Adjustment and Assistance program, which the Obama administration wants to enlarge (as part of efforts to establish new free-trade agreements). Republicans resist the idea. The administration is right, but needs to be more ambitious. TAA confines its help to those who are unemployed because of imports, which narrows take-up and piles on the complications. From an equity point of view, this restriction is absurd. Unless it was your own fault, it should not matter why you became unemployed. TAA-like assistance needs to be scaled up so that it is available for every victim of the recession.
The deadlock between the White House and Congressional leaders over increasing the U.S. debt limit is increasing the chances of a ratings agency downgrade for Washington. A money management research company raised the chances of a downgrade, placing at 40 percent the odds that Congress and the White House would not reach a deal in time for the Aug. 2 deadline to raise the debt ceiling.
Even as House Speaker John Boehner is pressuring Republicans to toe the line for a Thursday vote on his two-step bill, the Democrat-dominated Senate vows to reject the legislation and advisers of President Barack Obama hinted they will recommend its veto.
International Strategy & Investment said the ratings made by agencies are important for investors, who rely on the ratings for judgment on the bond quality. Some investors are required by their rules to purchase only high-grade bonds.
The managing director of sovereign credit ratings at Standard & Poor’s said it is not sufficient for American politicians to hike Washington’s $14.3-trillion borrowing limit, but they must also agree on a deficit reduction package to avoid a downgrade of the U.S.' AAA credit rating.
The S&P executive said the political divide that has caused the impasse will not likely be closed in the next three, six or 12 months. The agency gave a 50 percent odds forecast that Washington’s debt rating would be downgraded within the next three months unless the country’s political leaders could craft a meaningful deficit-reduction package.
According to JPMorgan Chase, a credit rating downgrade would hike Treasury rates by 60 to 70 basis points over the medium-term, which would increase the U.S.’s borrowing costs by $100 billion yearly.
Oil futures fell as the impasse over the U.S. debt ceiling hardened, while a surprise drop in U.S. durable-goods orders also weighed.
Later today, market participants should shift their attention to the U.S. Department of Energy's weekly report on U.S. oil and fuel inventories.
Light, sweet crude for September delivery was down 97 cents, or 1%, to $98.63 a barrel in early trade on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Brent crude on the ICE Futures Europe exchange fell seven cents, or 0.1%, to $118.21 a barrel.
U.S. Congress and Senate are still far from an agreement to raise the U.S. debt ceiling before Aug. 2, a date when the U.S. Treasury Department has said the government will run out of cash to pay its bills. Republican leaders have put forth a plan in the House of Representatives to raise the country's borrowing limit, but they delayed a vote on the bill until Thursday.
AAA Credit Rating
If the government fails to reach an agreement, the three major ratings agencies have said they willdowngrade the U.S.'s triple-A credit rating. That could raise the cost of borrowing and possibly slow the economic recovery in the world's biggest crude consumer. An actual default on U.S. obligations could be even more disastrous, some analysts warn.
"Ratings agencies can already easily make the case for a downgrade of the U.S. credit rating from AAA to AA," analysts at JBC Energy, a consultancy based in Vienna, said in a research report. "We think this is going to happen, reflecting not only the relatively dire state of the U.S. economy, but also the inability of the political system to cope with the current situation in a responsible manner."
Crude futures extended their losses following a surprise drop in U.S. durable-goods orders last month. The decline signals the sluggish economy is weighing on the country's manufacturing sector, a major user of energy.
Manufacturer's orders for goods like transportation, computers and machinery fell 2.1% to a seasonally adjusted $191.8 billion, the Commerce Department said. Economists surveyed by Dow Jones Newswires had expected orders would rise 0.4%.
Attention is likely to shift to the Energy Department's weekly report at 10:30 a.m. EDT. A similar report from the American Petroleum Institute late Tuesday showed a surprise increase in inventories, sending crude futures lower in after-hours trading.
The industry group said oil stockpiles rose four million barrels last week. A rise in stockpiles can signal weaker demand from refiners and can weigh on oil futures.
I'm not playing fair but more people are using public transportation
Analysts are expecting the DOE to report a 1.4 million-barrel drop in U.S. oil inventories, according to a survey by Dow Jones Newswires. Gasoline stocks are seen rising 400,000 barrels, while inventories of distillates, including heating oil and diesel, are seen rising 1.7 million barrels.
Does anyone remember those days not so long ago when nearly everyone was talking about the economic gap between rich and the poor? Now, when was the last time you heard someone say anything about this gap? You haven't, because the disparity gap is being successfully combated.
Here's one of the weapons used to chip away at the "Haves" and bring them equal with the "Have Nots"
Wealth Re-Distribution is one just one of the weapons that our President has deployed on the haves without ever considering that these "haves" may also be employers, But his capital has been levied against with taxes to the point that he can no longer afford to keep employment doors open.
Going back to biblical times there have been protests about the concentration of wealth. It thus seems that there must be some underlying reasons why this remains a popular idea. Several arguments can be made in favor of a more equitable distribution of wealth.
Arguments For
The moral argument:
Many of the major religions condemn the accumulation of wealth. The most obvious example is found in the well-known sayings of Jesus. But many eastern religions expect their true followers to disdain wealth, or in some cases material possessions altogether.
The fairness argument:
As all people come into the world equally helpless they should ultimately reach at least approximate equality of condition when they mature. People have an innate sense of what is fair as many psychological experiments have demonstrated. The intrinsic sense of fairness requires basic economic equality.
The economic efficiency argument:
Having a population with gross inequalities of wealth causes economic inefficiencies. For example, if too many people are too poor there will be limited markets for the output of industry and agriculture. This will limit the growth potential of the economy. Some also argue that excessive wealth produces waste as the rich spend there money on items which are economically inefficient. Buying jewelry instead of investing in new enterprises.
The social stability argument:
When societies get too out of balance social unrest increases. In the most extreme cases this leads to civil disturbance or revolution. This resentment against the wealthy may lead to their death or banishment and the forcible taking of their property. The most popularly cited example is the French revolution, but there are many other cases. Even where the rebellion doesn't succeed the damage to the society may be severe and long lasting.
The democratic argument:
The concentration of wealth in a small group allows for anti-democratic influence of social policy. The wealthy have the ability to create their own "think tanks" and astro-turf front organizations. These are then used to create the perception that the public is in support of their self-serving objectives. Recent studies have shown how these techniques were used in the repeal of the estate tax debate as well as in the rise of new factions opposing the liberal social policies of the Episcopal Church. When such vast amounts of money are under the control of a tiny group the basic mechanisms of democracy are undermined.
My Argument:
Progressive taxation is socialist wealth redistribution and state theft. Whatever may happen in the future, for the present at any rate, progressive taxation is the chief means of redistributing incomes, and, without it, the scope of such a policy would be very limited.
As is true of many similar measures, progressive taxation has assumed its present importance as a result of having been smuggled in under false pretenses.
Karl Marx
In 1848 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels frankly proposed "a heavy progressive or graduated income tax" as one of the measures by which, after the first stage of the revolution, "the proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeois, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state." And these measures they described as "means of despotic inroads on the right of property, and on the condition of bourgeois production ... measures ...which appear economically insufficient and untenable but which, in the course of the movement outstrip themselves, necessitate further inroads upon the old social order and are unavoidable as a means of entirely revolutionizing the mode of production.".
Perhaps this is where President Obama get his Marxist ideaology. I am certain that most people would agree that stealing would not be considered a moral act, even if what was stolen was given to someone who needed it more than its original owner. Imagine someone walking into your home and taking $10,000 off your table, walking out the door, and giving your $10,000 to someone else. There are few who would stand for this, but every year we allow the federal government to essentially do the same thing with little more than a grumble on tax day. We would fight off a burglar in our home, but do nothing to fight off the government burglar who pilfers from our coffers.
In these times of inequality of wealth we hear a lot from the left about wealth redistribution, laws to set ratios between the salaries of workers and CEOs and other ideas to try to force an economic egalitarianism on the free market as the expression of a socialistic ideal of economic class warfare.
It is assumed on the left that the welfare of the people as a whole is threatened by growing wealth inequality, that the rich increase their wealth at the expense of the rest of society, and that our current unstable economic times have created opportunities for unscrupulous businessmen to enrich themselves while driving down the economy for everyone else. This is the fallacy of inelastic wealth, which mistakenly assumes that increase of wealth in one sector comes from the other sectors of the economy rather than primarily from that part of the economy which is growing.
Edmund Burke
This theory is fundamentally untrue, but it is the basis for what Edmund Burke described as the desire to "cut the throats of the rich" for the benefit of society. Just as there was more than 200 years ago, there is an element of the political left today which is absolutely convinced that if you just took away the earnings of the wealthy class and redistributed them, you'd be able to make everyone equal and solve all the problems of poverty.
Burke summed up this economic dynamic, which the equalizers don't understand, succinctly when he wrote to Prime Minister Pitt advising against such a policy:
The laboring people are only poor because they are numerous. Numbers in their nature imply poverty. In a fair distribution among a vast multitude none can have much. That class of dependent pensioners called the rich is so extremely small, that, if all their throats were cut, and a distribution made of all they consume in a year, it would not give a bit of bread and cheese for one night's supper to those who labor, and who in reality feed both the pensioners and themselves.
Many people who support socialism, do so because they want a fair, poverty free world, with justice for all. Therefore, if you support socialism, i.e. wealth redistribution and a large government that deploys a heavy set of social programs to achieve all that, I would just like to let you know of the following:
The socialist methods deployed to supposedly achieve a better world unleash an avalanche of negative side effects that utterly dwarfs any of their original intentions, and brings more poverty, more inequality, more injustice, less prosperity, and more misery. This is because those methods go against an essence of human nature that cannot be changed even by people with the best of intentions.
Much of the money that goes to the government ends up being wasted, resulting in ineffective government programs, and less wealth for everybody.
Many are tempted to assume that money collected by the government goes to help the poor and downtrodden. However, much of that money ends up in the hands of the rich and politically connected, those who have the most resources and ability to lobby for it.
Socialism concentrates money and power in the hands of the government. When government grows, the greedy and corrupt don’t go away. Conversely, they now have a more powerful tool in their hands, the government itself.
The transfer of earned wealth that socialist policies mandate are a detriment to entrepreneurship and innovation. Entrepreneurship and innovation are driven by the potential for material rewards. If we take away or reduce the material rewards, we’ll have less innovation. Less innovation means less of all the cool, useful, and life-saving stuff we all love.
High taxes and government regulations make it more difficult to start and grow a business, thereby leaving much greater opportunities for those who are already rich and have the resources to overcome those difficulties.
Social programs create more demand and need for those very programs in a self perpetuating cycle because given government handouts, people come to expect and rely on them. And therefore, you can never spend enough, because the more you do, the greater the need to do so becomes.
Social programs are a disincentive to work and act responsibly. After all, if some or all of your needs are taken care of, and if someone else picks up the tab whenever something goes wrong, why would you worry about such minor details as work ethic, productivity, financial responsibility and family obligations? Consequently, when productivity takes a downturn, leading to a shrinking economy, guess who suffers… everybody! Oh and as always, the rich suffer the least.
I was in the chair getting my head shaved on Wenesday when my barber brought up the current back and forth in Washington on the debt limit. He wanted to know what most people want to know - why can't the Congress get its act together and cut a deal.
My barber is a transplant from Washington, D.C., so he's no stranger to the political people who come through his door from time to time.
He absolutly was not ready for my response. "Rod," I said. "Think about it. You see people every day who don't come in for a hair cut until they absolutely have to."
Yes, he said, readily acknowledging that people don't like to be poked and prodded with sharp instruments around their face and head, until they absolutely positively have to seek a barber’s skill.
"So why should the Congress be any different?" I asked.
It doesn't make their current battle over the debt limit any more acceptable, but it is a reminder that the Congress isn't too different from ordinary people.
Thursday brought no real change in the debt limit debate in Congress, as lawmakers returned home after a long day in chambers in Washington, D.C.
The White House did announce a veto threat against the "Cut, Cap & Balance" bill from Republicans, which was voted on Tuesday in the House, belittling it as "an empty political statement."
Neither setting arbitrary spending levels nor amending the Constitution is necessary to restore fiscal responsibility," the White House statement read, opposing both Cut, Cap & Balance and a Balanced Budget Amendment, for which I take as Obama’s way of spending us into non-existence. This unfortunate veto threat should make clear that the issue is not congressional inaction, but rather the President’s unwillingness to cut spending and restrain the future growth of our government.
So, both sides remain in their corners. No one is really reporting any headway on the budget and debt limit, making someone like me wonder about what's next, like, will we default, or take the obvious way out and raise the debt ceiling.
Is this just the final series of partisan political attacks from both sides, which has now given way to deal making on Capitol Hill and at the White House?
Or have we entered a new political realm, where things really do go off the tracks?
Former Sen. Jesse Helms
It reminds me of the story Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC) told on the floor a couple of times, where a friend of his goes by the National Archives, and sees the motto, "Past is Prologue."
The guy asks his cab driver, what that saying means to him - and the cabbie responds without missing a beat.
"You ain't seen nothing yet."
Back to my barber for a final thought - he told me that I’m going bald. But instead of making a quick appointment to deal with it, I told him I’ll just keep it shaved as I have done since noticing “The Spot”.
Just like the Congress, where the motto often seems to be, "Why Do Something Now That You Can Do Later."
Sometimes you get away with a decision like that, but sooner or later the day of The Spot, Reckoning arrives, just like for lawmakers, sooner or later the day of Budget Reckoning will be upon them.
Republicans in Washington are gamely trying to prevent the debt ceiling debate from spinning out of control and becoming a defeat for the party. Currently there are two large-scale efforts on the table to resolve the immediate debt crisis. The first is the still-amorphous Gang of Six plan. It is nearly always wise to be wary of proposals negotiated behind closed doors by bipartisan groups of Senators; the Gang of Six plan, which exists only in outline form, appears to be no exception.
Extream times call for extream measures
The Good
Unlike President Obama, the Gang of Six is not consumed by class-warfare resentment. The plan envisions that the top personal income tax rate will fall to no higher than 29 percent.
The corporate income tax rate will fall to no higher than 29 percent as well, something that is long overdue since the average corporate tax rate in Europe is now down to 23 percent.
The Bad
The much-heralded spending caps do not apply to entitlement programs. This is like going to the doctor because you have cancer and getting treated for a sprained wrist.
A net tax increase of more than $1 trillion. It's expected that number will be much higher when further details are divulged.
The plan targets some provisions of the tax code – such as IRAs and 401(k)s) – that are not preferences, but instead exist to mitigate against the double taxation of saving and investment.
There is no Medicare reform, just tinkering and adjustments to the current system.
The Ugly
The entire package is based on dishonest Washington budget math. Spending increases under the plan, but the politicians claim to be cutting spending because the budget didn’t grow even faster. …
A requirement that the internal revenue code maintain the existing bias against investors, entrepreneurs, small business owners, and other upper-income taxpayers. This “progressivity” mandate implies very bad things for the double taxation of dividends and capital gains.
Jeff Sessions and Paul Ryan
Yesterday ranking Budget Committee member Jeff Sessions also issued a cautionary statement on the Gang’s plan. He, too, emphasized the fact that, even though the Senators have been talking for months, there is little detail available on their proposal:
Several preliminary questions and concerns emerge from the executive summary. The proposal asserts overall deficit reduction of about $4.5 trillion. But if the measures outlined in the summary were followed to the letter, total deficit reduction would add up to only $1.2 trillion over 10 years.
The authors note that, in effect, the discretionary savings will be achieved by a freeze on spending at current levels. There would be no net spending cuts. We must have true reduction of current levels since baseline discretionary spending has increased 24 percent in the last 2 years—we cannot ‘freeze in’ this inflated level.
It is also important to note that any savings are compared to baselines in which spending is already projected to increase dramatically over the next 10 years—the spending cuts only slow ongoing increases in spending. Total spending in this decade is projected to reach around $46 trillion. No amount of taxing can cover that bill.
It's gott so bad that the pork is about to cut us free
Overall, it would seem taxes under this proposal will go up by at least $1 trillion.
Another feature of the executive summary is the assertion that it would ‘stabilize’ the debt. Similar claims were made about the president’s budget. Stabilize is Washington-speak that suggests the debt no longer grows, when it would in fact continue to grow every single year. The term simply means that the authors of the proposal believe that growth in the economy will keep pace with growth in publicly-held debt so that it will remain at roughly 70 percent of GDP. But this number is dramatically too high— it would mean a gross debt-to-GDP ratio of roughly 100 percent or more (a figure estimated to result in at least million lost jobs a year).
No one will touch or even mention Entitlement reform
Finally, I do not see evidence that this plan contains the type of entitlement reforms necessary to avoid an explosion of debt down the road.
So I do not see the Gang of Six plan as a promising means of resolving the debt crisis.
I am considerably more in sympathy with the “Cut, Cap and Balance” plan that passed the House yesterday. That plan is spot-on in its call for immediate spending cuts and a spending cap. But the idea of conditioning an increase in the debt ceiling on Congressional passage of a balanced budget constitutional amendment is misguided for two reasons.
First, there is no chance of the legislation getting through the Senate, so Democrats are credible when they denounce the act, in the context of the current debate over the debt limit, as political posturing.
Second, and more important, I think it would be a strategic mistake for conservatives to make a constitutional amendment the centerpiece of our fiscal strategy. We need control over federal spending now. We need entitlement reform soon. We need the federal debt to start coming down, not rising. Achieving these goals will not be easy, and may prove impossible. At best, it will require every ounce of energy and political capital a united conservative movement can muster. The last thing fiscal hawks need at this point is a diversion that will consume years in potentially fruitless, state-by-state efforts.
"National Default" Coming August 3, 2011
The call for a balanced budget amendment brings to mind the Equal Rights Amendment. In the early 1970s, the feminist movement was making great strides. Beginning in 1972, when the amendment passed Congress, securing its enactment became that movement’s central goal. The effort ended in futility, as the feminist movement’s political energies were drained over a period of years in an endless attempt to secure ratification in the necessary 38 states. In the end, while the ERA took the steam out of the feminist movement, it didn’t matter: equal rights became a reality even as the amendment languished, a few states short of the needed total. That, of course, won’t happen here: the federal spending problem won’t solve itself if conservatives’ energies are diverted to the endless pursuit of a constitutional amendment.
Setting to work on a constitutional amendment would put our government in a position analogous to that of an alcoholic who announces that he will immediately devote a million dollars to creating a foundation to combat alcoholism, and that he plans to quit drinking in ten years. The alcoholic needs one thing–to quit drinking, now. Our government needs one thing–to curb spending, now. Efforts devoted to collateral goals, however laudable they might be in principle, will distract from what must be done now.
So, where does that leave conservatives with regard to the debt ceiling issue? In the immediate term, Republicans and conservatives need above all to prevent the debt ceiling issue from turning into a disaster. If there is a last-minute grand bargain, negotiated behind closed doors, announced only in general outline and voted on before the public and most in Congress understand what is in it, we all know what the result will be: a fiasco for conservatives and for the American people. At this point, Republicans should just try to get something–anything–in exchange for their agreement to a higher debt limit. The best consideration would likely be a statutory spending cap.
Having achieved that limited victory, the GOP can go back to fighting the ongoing budget battle where it ought to be fought–in the legislative process. Jeff Sessions is the Republican who has seen this most clearly from the beginning. It is an absolute outrage–an illegal outrage, in fact–that our national government has functioned for more than two years without a budget. It is ridiculous that to this day, the Democrats in Congress will not propose a budget, nor will President Obama go beyond generalities and platitudes and put a spending proposal on paper. (He no longer pretends to defend his FY 2012 budget, which was essentially a joke and failed to garner a single vote in the Senate.) The only way that meaningful fiscal reform is ever going to happen is through the legislative process: a budget needs to be written, to be debated in committee, to be amended, to be published to the American people, to be studied by informed third parties, to be debated on the floors of the House and the Senate, and ultimately enacted. Secret, closed-door deals don’t work for conservatives. Political horse-trading will never generate fiscal responsibility. Conservatives should strive to put the debt ceiling issue behind us and move forward with a transparent process to constrain and reform federal spending.
Iran’s Revolutionary Guard shot down an unmanned U.S. spy plane that was trying to gather information on an underground uranium enrichment site Wednesday.
Fordo uranium enrichment site
Ali Aghazadeh Dafsari, a state-owned news site said the drone was flying over the Fordo uranium enrichment site near the holy city of Qom in central Iran but the report did not say when the plane was shot down.
Iran is locked in a dispute with the U.S. and its allies over Tehran’s disputed nuclear program, which the West believes aims to develop nuclear weapons. Iran denies the accusations, saying its nuclear program is aimed at generating electricity and producing isotopes to treat medical patients.
Long kept secret, the Fordo site is built next to a military complex to protect it in case of attack. Iran only acknowledged Fordo’s existence after Western intelligence agencies identified it in September 2009. The facility is reportedly located 295 feet (90 meters) underneath a mountain.
Iran's foreign minister, Manouchehr Motakki
Iran's Foreign Ministry said that the Islamic Republic is installing a new generation of uranium enrichment centrifuges in the country's nuclear facilities for what he called Iran’s “peaceful nuclear program.”
U.S. nuclear experts say by increasing the enrichment level and its stock of nearly 20 percent low-enriched uranium, Iran could reach a “break out” capability that would allow it to make enough weapon-grade uranium for a nuclear weapon.
Iran has claimed to shoot down U.S. spy planes in the past. Earlier this month, Iranian military officials showed Russian experts several U.S. drones they said were shot down in recent years.
Estimates of when Iran will be able to manufacture and to deliver a nuclear warhead vary from several months to three years.
Vice President Fereidoun Abbasi
Vice President Fereidoun Abbasi also announced that Iran plans to triple its output of the higher enriched uranium. The uranium enrichment lies at the heart of Iran's dispute with the West, which is concerned that the activity masks efforts to make nuclear weapons — a charge Tehran denies, insisting the work is peaceful and only meant to generate electricity.
At the time, the labs were still under construction inside former ammunition depots carved into a mountainside. This has added to the international concerns because these centrifuges would allow Tehran to accelerate the pace of its program and potentially enable Iran to amass more nuclear material in a shorter time that could be turned into the fissile core of missiles, should it choose to do so.
Cascade Uranium Enrichment Process
Centrifuges are machines that are used to enrich uranium. Low-enriched uranium — at around 3.5 percent — can be used to fuel a reactor to generate electricity, which Iran says is the intention of its program. But if uranium is further enriched to around 90 percent purity, it can be used to develop a nuclear warhead.
Iran has been producing uranium enriched up to 5 percent for years and began the higher enrichment — up to near 20 percent, considered a threshold between low and high enriched uranium — in February 2010, claiming it needs the higher enriched uranium to produce fuel for a Tehran reactor that makes medical radioisotopes needed for cancer patients.
According to Abbasi, the nuclear chief, the new centrifuges at Fordo would be more advanced than the decades old P-1 type once acquired on the black market and in use at Iran's main enrichment facility in Natanz.
"Soon, we will install 164-machine centrifuge cascades of the new generation at Fordo," Abbasi was quoted by the official IRNA news agency as saying after a Cabinet meeting.
He also added that Iran would triple the output of its higher enrichment program this year and would move the entire program to Fordo from Natanz. The U.N.'s nuclear watchdog, the International Atomic Energy Agency, would monitor the transfer, he said.
Last month, the IAEA said in a report that Iran estimates it has produced a total of about 125 pounds, or 56.7 kilograms, of uranium enriched to 20 percent by May 21st.
When Iran first announced it activated the 164-machine centrifuge cascades for higher enrichment last year, IAEA said the move was contrary to U.N. resolutions demanding Iran suspend all enrichment.
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
Abbasi's announcement came a day after President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad criticized the IAEA chief Yukiya Amano, claiming the director has discredited the world body by alleging that Iran may be working on a nuclear weapons program.
Ahmadinejad was reacting to Amano's earlier comments alleging that some aspects of Iran's nuclear activities could be linked to a weapons program, according to latest information obtained by the U.N. watchdog.
Wednesday May 25, 2011 a group of Egyptians, led by founding member Emad Abdel Sattar proclaimed the establishment of “a contemporary frame of reference” Nazi Party.
Al-Masry Al-Youm
Sattar reportedly stated that the party, whose founding deputy is a former military official, would bring together prominent figures from Egyptian society, and vest all powers in a “carefully selected” president.
The Egyptian Leftist publication Al-Masry Al-Youm, at its English website, further contends the Nazi party operated clandestinely during the Mubarak regime which had prevented party leaders from carrying out their activities in the open. Two Facebook pages which appearedrecently under the title of “the Egyptian Nazi Party,” may confirm the party’s public emergence since Mubarak was deposed.
Whether or not the inchoate new Egyptian Nazi Party, operating within a “modern framework,” becomes a significant political force, Nazism and its ugly resonance with the country’s Muslim masses, has a prolonged, disturbing legacy in Egypt.
Aribert Ferdinand Heim
Aribert Ferdinand Heim, was a member of Hitler’s Waffen-SS, and a psychopathic “medical doctor” who *committed* the most heinous atrocities at the Buchenwald, Sachsenhausen and Mauthausen concentration camps, including: the performance of operations on prisoners without anesthesia; removing organs from healthy inmates, who were then left then to die on the operating table; injecting poison, including gasoline, into the hearts of others; and taking the skull of at least one victim as a “souvenir.”
As revealed in this February 4/5, 2009 New York Times story, Heim, like many Nazi war criminals, lived safely in Egypt, perhaps for up to three decades, following his flight from Europe in 1962.
A dusty briefcase with rusted buckles, sitting nearly forgotten in storage here in Cairo, hid the truth behind Dr. Heim’s flight to the Middle East. Obtained by The New York Times and the German television station ZDF from members of the Doma family, proprietors of the hotel here where Dr. Heim resided, the files in the briefcase tell the story of his life, and death, in Egypt.
Josef Kohl, a former inmate at Mauthausen, gave the following testimony regarding Heim to a United States war crimes investigating team on Jan. 18, 1946, less than a year after the German surrender.
Dr. Heim had a habit of looking into inmates’ mouths to determine whether their teeth were in impeccable condition. If this were the case, he would kill the prisoner with an injection, cut his head off, leave it to cook in the crematorium for hours, until all the flesh was stripped from the naked skull and prepare the skull for himself and his friends as a decoration for their desks.
Simon Wiesenthal
During 1979, Heim (who died on Aug. 10, 1992, according to his son and the death certificate), wrote a letter to the German magazine Spiegel, after the publication of a report about his war-crimes case. Whether he ever sent the letter, which was found in his files along with numerous others were “written in meticulous cursive style in German or English” is unclear. According to the report, the letter…accused Simon Wiesenthal, who was interned at Mauthausen, of being “the one who invented these atrocities.” Dr. Heim went on to discuss what he called Israeli massacres of Palestinians, and added that “the Jewish Khazar, Zionist lobby of the U.S. were the first ones who in 1933 declared war against Hitler’s Germany.” The Turkic ethnic group the Khazars were a recurring theme for Dr. Heim, who kept himself busy in Cairo, researching a paper he wrote in English and German, decrying the possibility of anti-Semitism owing to the fact, he said, that most Jews were not Semitic in ethnic origin.
Heim converted to Islam (in his case, at the Cairo mosque of Sunni Islam’s foremost religious teaching institution, Al Azhar), becoming “known to locals” as Tarek Hussein Farid. Apparently, Heim, aka, Dr. Death, became a devout Muslim, “maintained the discipline to walk some 15 miles each day through the busy streets of Egypt’s capital…to the world-renowned Al Azhar mosque”, and bonded with his Muslim neighbors, who knew him as “Uncle” Tarek Hussein Farid.
He formed close bonds with his neighbors, including the Doma family, which ran the Kasr el Madina hotel, where Dr. Heim lived the last decade before his death. Mahmoud Doma, whose father owned the establishment, said Dr. Heim spoke Arabic, English and French, in addition to German. Mr. Doma said his neighbor read and studied the Koran, including a copy in German that the Domas had ordered for him. Mahmoud Doma, 38, became emotional when talking about the man he knew as Uncle Tarek, whom he described giving him books and encouraging him to study. “He was like a father. He loved me and I loved him.”
He recalled how Uncle Tarek bought rackets and set up a tennis net on the hotel roof, where he and his siblings played with the German Muslim until sundown. But by 1990, Dr. Heim’s good health began to fail him and he was diagnosed with cancer.
Thus Heim epitomized scores of other Nazis, who found safe haven in Egypt, most importantly, the pious Muslim jihadist and Nazi ideologue, Johannes “Omar Amin” von Leers. Historian Bat Ye’or has described this phenomenon:
Alfred Zingler
…they lived under false names and worked in anti-Zionist propaganda centers, such as the Institute for the Study of Zionism, which was founded in Cairo, in 1955. Its director, Alfred Zingler (alias Mahmoud Saleh), worked together with Dr. Johannes von Leers (d. 1965, alias Omar Amin), who had been a specialist on the “Jewish Question” in Josef Goebbels’ propaganda department. Zingler’s main assistants were Dr. Werner Witschale and Hans Appler (Saleh Shafar), who had also served on the staff of Goebbels’ ministry, as well as Louis Heiden. Heiden was the editor of one of the many Arabic versions of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and of a translation of Hitler’s Mein Kampf into Arabic. In 1955, the Cairo Egyptian special services for anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist propaganda hired Appler.
Other Nazis settled in Egypt as well. Most of them worked with the Egyptian government as advisers on anti-Zionist propaganda or assisted with the organization of police forces or as military trainers in Palestinian terrorist camps. In 1957, according to Frankfurter Illustrierte [August 25, 1957], the number of Nazis in Egypt was two thousand. [emphasis added] Erich Altern (Ali Bella), the chief of the Jewish section of the Gestapo in occupied Galicia [Eastern Central Europe, between Poland and Ukraine] during the war, escaped to Egypt in the early 1950s, where he served as a military instructor in the Palestinian camps. [Standartenfuhrer (an SS regiment leader)] Baumann (Ali Ben Khader), who had collaborated in the extermination of Jews in the Warsaw ghetto and went into hiding, became a military specialist in Egypt for the army of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).
Colonel Anwar El-Sadat
The pervasive impact of this ugly mentality is perhaps best illustrated by then Colonel Anwar El-Sadat’s 1953 “Letter to Hitler”. When, in September, 1953 several news agency reports were circulated claiming that Hitler was still alive, the Cairo weekly Al Musawwar, posed this question to a number of Egyptian personalities, including Sadat: “If you wished to send Hitler a personal letter, what would you write to him?” In response, Sadat wrote the following, published September 18, 1953:
My dear Hitler,
I congratulate you from the bottom of my heart. Even if you appear to have been defeated, in reality you are the victor. You succeeded in creating dissensions between Churchill, the old man, and his allies, the Sons of Satan. [emphasis added] Germany will win because her existence is necessary to preserve the world balance. Germany will be reborn in spite of the Western and Eastern powers. There will be no peace unless Germany once again becomes what she was. The West, as well as the East, will pay for her rehabilitation—whether they like it or not. Both sides will invest a great deal of money and effort in Germany in order to have her on their side, which is of great benefit to Germany. So much for the present and the future. As for the past, I think you made mistakes, like too many battlefronts and the shortsightedness of Ribbentrop vis-a vis the experienced British diplomacy. But your trust in your country and people will atone for those blunders. We will not be surprised if you appear again in Germany or if a new Hitler rises up in your wake.
Bat Ye’or
Almost 40 years ago (1973/74) Bat Ye’or published a remarkably prescient analysis of the Islamic anti-Semitism and resurgent jihadism in her native Egypt, being packaged for dissemination throughout the Muslim world. The primary, core Anti-Semitic and jihadist motifs were Islamic, derived from Islam’s foundational texts, on to which European, especially Nazi elements were grafted.
Nazi academic and propagandist of extermination Johannes von Leers’ writings and personal career trajectory — as a favored contributor in Goebbels’ propaganda ministry, to his eventual adoption of Islam (as Omar Amin von Leers) while working as an anti-Western, and anti-Semitic/anti-Zionist propagandist under Nasser’s regime from the mid-1950s, until his death in 1965 — represents the apotheosis of this convergence of jihad, Islamic anti-Semitism, and racist, Nazi anti-Semitism, described by Bat Ye’or.
Hajj Amin el-Husseini
Upon his arrival in Egypt in 1956, it was the jihadist and Nazi ally, Hajj Amin el-Husseini, former Mufti of Jerusalem, who welcomed von Leers, stating, “We are grateful to you for having come here to resume the struggle against the powers of darkness incarnated by international Judaism.” The ex-Mufti oversaw von Leers’ formal conversion to Islam, and remained one of his confidants. And von Leers described the origins of the Muslim “forename,” Omar Amin, that he adopted as part of his conversion to Islam in a November, 1957 letter to American Nazi H. Keith Thompson,
I myself have embraced Islam and accepted the new forename Omar Amin, Omar according to the great Caliph Omar who was a grim enemy of the Jews, Amin in honor of my friend Hajj Amin el Husseini, the Grand Mufti.
Already in essays published during 1938 and 1942, the first dating back almost two decades before his conversion to Islam while in Egypt, von Leers produced analyses focused primarily on Muhammad’s interactions with the Jews of Medina. These essays reveal his pious reverence for Islam and its prophet, and a thorough understanding of the sacralized Islamic sources for this narrative, i.e., the Koran, hadith, and sira. which is entirely consistent with standard Muslim apologetics.
Von Leers’ 1942 essay simultaneously extols the “model” of oppression the Jews experienced under Islamic suzerainty, and the nobility of Muhammad, Islam, and the contemporary Muslims of the World War II era, foreshadowing his own conversion to Islam just over a decade later. And even earlier, in a 1938 essay, von Leers sympathized with, “the leading role of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem in the Arabians’ battles against the Jewish invasion in Palestine.” Von Leers observes that to the pious Muslim,
…the Jew is an enemy, not simply an ‘unbeliever’ who might perhaps be converted or, despite the fact that he does not belong to Islam, might still be a person of some estimation. Rather, the Jew is the predestined opponent of the Muslim, one who desired to bring down the work of the Prophet.
Von Leers, for example, offers this reverent summary characterization of Muhammad’s activities in Mecca, and later Medina, which is entirely consistent with standard Muslim apologetics:
[Mecca] For years Muhammad sought in Mecca to succeed with his preaching that there was only one God, the sole, all-merciful king of Judgment Day. He opposed to the Christian Trinity the unity of God, rejected the Christian doctrine of original sin and salvation, and instead gave every believer as a guiding principle the complete fulfillment of the commands of the righteous, given by a compassionate and just God, before whom every individual person had to account for his acts.
[Medina] September 622 he left Mecca for Medina, where he took up residence. Here he encountered the Jewish problem for the first time. He believed in the victorious power of good in the world, he was firmly convinced that the religion of the one and only God, with its easy, practical, reasonable, basic laws for human life was nothing other than the original religion. He wanted to take mankind out of the current turmoil and lead it toward the original, clear vision of God. But since he had to deal with people who had been influenced by both Christianity and Judaism, he said that it was the religion in which Abraham (Ibrahim) had already believed, and which Christ and Moses had proclaimed, only each time it had been distorted by human beings. He said that this had been revealed anew to him by God. He wanted to make the path easy to follow for both Christians and Jews; thus at first he allowed his followers to pray facing toward Jerusalem. He repeatedly emphasized that he only wanted to purify the existing religions, to establish the restored, newly revealed faith. At the same time he was a skilled statesman. When the Arab tribes were unified, the Jews became a minority in Medina. Muhammad provided them with a kind of protectorate agreement: they were to retain their administration and their forms of worship, help the faithful defend the city, not ally themselves with Muhammad’s opponents, and contribute to the faithful’s wars. The Jews could have been satisfied with this. But they began a general hate campaign against Islam, which proclaimed a pure conception of God.
Citing (or referring to) the relevant foundational text sources (i.e., Qur’an 13:36; 8:55–58; 59:1–15; the sira and canonical hadith descriptions of the fate of individual Jews such as Abu Afak and Ka’b ibn Ashraf and the Jewish tribes Banu Qaynuqa, Banu Nadir, Banu Qurayzah, as well as the Jews of the Khaybar oasis), von Leers chronicles Muhammad’s successful campaigns that vanquished these Jews, killing and dispersing them, “or at most allow[ing] them to remain in certain places if they paid a poll tax.” Von Leers further describes the accounts (from the hadith, and, more elaborately, the sira) of Muhammad’s poisoning by a Khaybar Jewess, and also notes the canonical hadith that records Caliph Umar’s rationale for his putative expulsion from northern Arabia of those remaining Jews who survived Muhammad’s earlier campaigns:
On his deathbed Mohammed is supposed to have said: “There must not be two religions in Arabia.” One of his successors, the caliph Omar, resolutely drove the Jews out of Arabia.
And von Leers even invokes the apocalyptic canonical hadith that forty-six years later became the keystone of Hamas’s 1988 charter sanctioning a jihad genocide against the Jewish State of Israel:
Ibn Huraira even communicates to us the following assertion of the great man of God: “Judgment Day will come only when the Moslems have inflicted an annihilating defeat on the Jews, when every stone and every tree behind which a Jew has hidden says to believers: “Behind me stands a Jew, smite him.”
Von Leers’s 1942 essay concludes by simultaneously extolling the “model” of oppression the Jews experienced under Islamic suzerainty and the nobility of Muhammad, Islam, and the contemporary Muslims of the World War II era, foreshadowing his own conversion to Islam just over a decade later:
They [the Jews] were subjected to a very restrictive and oppressive special regulation that completely crippled Jewish activities. All reporters of the time when the Islamic lands still completely obeyed their own laws agree that the Jews were particularly despised. . . .
Oriental Jewry
Mohammed’s opposition to the Jews undoubtedly had an effect—oriental Jewry was completely paralyzed by Islam. Its back was broken.
Oriental Jewry has played almost no role in Judaism’s massive rise to power over the last two centuries. Scorned, the Jews vegetated in the dirty alleys of the mellah, and were subject to a special regulation that did not allow them to profiteer, as they did in Europe, or even to receive stolen goods, but instead kept them fearful and under pressure. Had the rest of the world adopted a similar method, today we would have no Jewish question—and here we must absolutely note that there were also Islamic rulers, among them especially the Spanish caliphs of the House of Muawiyah, who did not adhere to Islam’s traditional hostility to Jews—to their own disadvantage. However, as a religion Islam has performed the immortal service of preventing the Jews from carrying out their threatened conquest of Arabia and of defeating the dreadful doctrine of Jehovah through a pure faith that opened the way to higher culture for many peoples and gave them an education and humane training, so that still today a Moslem who takes his religion seriously is one of the most worthy phenomena in this world in turmoil.
Islamic-Nazi Symbol
Seven decades ago, University of Notre Dame historian Waldemar Gurian, and Protestant theologian Karl Barth, each elucidated the profound attraction of Islam for a hardcore Nazi ideologue such as von Leers—which also underpins the subsequent Islamic-Nazi symbiosis so evident in post World War II Egypt.
Gurian, a refugee, who witnessed first hand the Communist and Fascist totalitarian movements in Europe, concluded (circa 1945) that Hitler, in a manner analogous to the 7th century precedent of Muhammad, had been the simplifier of German nationalism.
A fanatical simplifier who appeared as the unifier of various German traditions in the service of simple national aims and who was seen by many differing German groups — even by some people outside Germany — as the fulfiller of their wishes and sharer of their beliefs, with some distortions and exaggerations — such, as long as he had success, was Adolf Hitler.
Based upon the same clear understandings, and devoid of our era’s dulling, politically correct constraints, Karl Barth [from, The Church and the Political Problem of Our Day] had offered this warning, published in 1939:
Participation in this life, according to it the only worthy and blessed life, is what National Socialism, as a political experiment, promises to those who will of their own accord share in this experiment. And now it becomes understandable why, at the point where it meets with resistance, it can only crush and kill — with the might and right which belongs to Divinity! Islam of old as we know proceeded in this way. It is impossible to understand National Socialism unless we see it in fact as a new Islam [emphasis in original], its myth as a new Allah, and Hitler as this new Allah’s Prophet
Investigative journalist John Roy Carlson’s 1948-1950 interviews of Arab Muslim religious and political leaders provide consummate independent validation of these Western assessments. Perhaps most revealing were the candid observations of Aboul Saud, whom Carlson described as a “pleasant English-speaking member of the Arab League Office.” Aboul Saud explained to Carlson that Islam was an authoritarian religio-political creed which encompassed all of a Muslim’s spiritual and temporal existence. He stated plainly,
You might describe Mohammedanism as a religious form of State Socialism…The Koran give the State the right to nationalize industry, distribute land, or expropriate the right to nationalize industry, distribute land, or expropriate property. It grants the ruler of the State unlimited powers, so long as he does not go against the Koran. The Koran is our personal as well as our political constitution.
Hassan al-Banna
And after interviewing Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna himself, who “preached the doctrine of the Koran in one hand and the sword in the other,” Carlson observed:
It became clear to me why the average Egyptian worshipped the use of force. Terror was synonymous with power! This was one reason why most Egyptians, regardless of class or calling had admired Nazi Germany. It helped explain the sensational growth of the Ikhwan el Muslimin [Muslim Brotherhood]
However, as Brynjar Lia’s 1998 analysis of the Muslim Brotherhood’s formative years (1928-1942) points out,
…al-Banna was anxious to distance himself from the aggressive chauvinism and racism that flourished in several countries in the 1930s, and rejected racial theories as utterly incompatible with Islam. In fact, the Muslim Brothers used to make fun of the Young Egypt Party (Misr al-Fatah) which they saw as trying to imitate the German Nazis.
Lia acknowledges how Al-Banna’s and the Muslim Brotherhood’s vision remained steadfastly Islamic—hence its deep resonance with the timeless aspiration of the Muslim masses to establish a transnational Muslim Caliphate via jihad.
Quoting the Qur’anic verse [2:193] “And fight them till sedition is no more, and the faith is God’s,” the Muslim Brothers urged their fellow Muslims to restore the bygone greatness of Islam, and to re-establish the Islamic empire…[T]het even called for the restoration of “former Islamic colonies” in Andalus (Spain), southern Italy, Sicily, the Balkans, and the Mediterranean islands…When they did express admiration of certain aspects of Nazism or Fascism, it was usually in the context of demonstrating that the Europeans had implemented some of “the principles of Islam,” such as modest dress code, encouragement of early marriage, a strong patriotism, and a military jihad spirit.
Remarkably concordant views on jihad were expressed by von Leers during the same era, prior to his formal conversion to Islam. I was able to obtain (from the Russian State Military Archive of captured Nazi documents), and have translated from the original German, an unpublished ~ 6000 word essay Leers’ wrote during World War II (apparently in 1942), entitled, “Philosophies of Peace and War in Islam.”
Disingenuously ignoring the explicit imperial designs of jihad—to subjugate all of mankind under Islamic Law, as detailed with lucidity in the Koran, sunna, and a millennial continuum of Muslim jurisprudence—von Leers provides this hagiographic overview of Islam’s bellicose institution for global conquest, linked to his condemnation of Western European Christendom:
For quite a long time, however, the great colonial powers have been using treaties between themselves and smaller nations merely as a mutual means of help, that is, until one nation has become stronger than the other in its leadership and its means of war. The Qur’an intends and demands that treaties be established upon the bases of justice and equal rights of access, without ulterior motives or underhanded intentions – otherwise, there will never be peace upon the earth.
Leers amplifies this traditional Muslim apologetic in his assessment of the Koranic injunction—verse 9:29—for timeless jihad against Judeo-Christian societies.
“Fight those who believe not in God and the Last Day and do not forbid what God and His Messenger have forbidden — such men as practice not the religion of truth, being of those who have been given the Book — until they pay the tribute out of hand and have been humbled”. One must therefore fight against those who possess the Book and who threaten the land and life of the Muslims, who oppress the people or want to convert the Muslims to their faith. This enemy, when defeated, must pay tribute….This payment, therefore, is not a “payment of reparations” in the European sense, by which the enemy is completely ruined.
Predictably, Leers also highlights this traditional Koranic statement of Jewish perfidy in relation to wartime treaties. But again, Leers “exegesis” on Koran 8:55 is entirely consistent with the gloss on this verse in the seminal, mainstream Koranic commentary Tafsir al-Jalalayn which maintains that 8:55 refers specifically to the Jewish tribe Banu Qurayza.
The Qur’an considered the Jews, who never remained true to the treaties they made with the Prophet, to be lower than cattle. It says concerning them, “ Surely the worst of beasts in God’s sight are the unbelievers, who will not believe, those of them with whom thou hast made compact, then they break their compact every time, not being godfearing”
Until his death in 1965, von Leers remained unrepentant about the annihilationist policies towards the Jews he helped advance serving Hitler’s Reich. Indeed he was convinced of the righteousness of the Nazi war against the Jews, and as a pious Muslim convert, von Leers viewed the Middle East as the succeeding battleground to seal the fate of world Jewry. His public evolution over the course of three decades illustrates starkly the shared centrality to these totalitarianisms — both modern and ancient — of the Jews as “first and last enemy” motif.
Over fifty years later ignorance, denial, and delusion have engendered the sorry state of public understanding of this most ominous conversion of hatreds, by all its potential non-Muslim victims, not only Jews. This lack of understanding is little advanced by the spate of contemporary analyses which seek “Nazi roots” of the cataclysmic September 11, 2001 acts of jihad terrorism, and see Nazism as having “introduced” anti-Semitism to an otherwise “tolerant”, even philosemitic Islamic world beginning in the 1930s. Awkwardly forced, and ahistorical, these analyses realign the Nazi cart in front of the Islamic steed which has driven both global jihadism and Islamic anti-Semitism, since the 7th century advent of the Muslim creed, particularly during the last decade of Muhammad’s life.
Finally, an October 1957 US intelligence report on von Leers’ writing and activities for Egypt and the Arab League confirmed his complete adoption of the triumphal Muslim worldview, desirous of nothing less than the destruction of Judeo-Christian civilization by jihad (#382):
He [Dr. Omar Amin von Leers] is becoming more and more a religious zealot, even to the extent of advocating an expansion of Islam in Europe in order to bring about stronger unity through a common religion. This expansion he believes can come not only from contact with the Arabs in the Near East and Africa but with Islamic elements in the USSR. The results he envisions as the formation of a political bloc against which neither East nor West could prevail.
The so-called “Arab Spring” has unleashed jihadist forces—most notably within Egypt itself—pious Muslim convert “Omar Amin” von Leers long ago foresaw, and cherished. Those who wish to preserve our uniquely Western heritage of freedom must not ignore, or worse still, delusively re-interpret this existential threat.
