Woolsey Warns of Global Jihad at Herzliya Conference

[Anna]

Woolsey Warns of Global Jihad at Herzliya Conference
Monday, January 22, 2007 / 3 Shevat 5767

Two Islam experts warned participants at the Herzliya Conference on Monday that global jihad is on the rise -- and must be taken seriously.

Islamic expert and historian Bernard Lewis spoke back-to-back with former CIA director James Woolsey at the Herzliya Conference Monday, sounding the alarm on the global Jihad and dismissing the concept of a Palestinian state.

“In the self-perception of the Muslim world, their primary identity is to deliver Islam to the world – to not keep it selflessly to themselves but to give it to mankind,” explained Lewis. He added that the Islamic revolution in Iran in 1979 signified the first major victory in the global Islamic push toward that goal.

“There are competing leaders to take this fight ahead,” he said. “The Sunni Wahabi cause is represented by Bin Laden. Another is the Shi’ite version, which began with the first Iranian revolution, and the second Iranian revolution, taking place at this moment. The whole Arab and Muslim world is experiencing the second stage of the Islamic revolution in Iran.

“I have been told by Iranian friends that Ahmadinejad is indeed crazy, but not stupid,” Lewis warned. “He really believes in the end of days that he is heralding. There is a widespread belief among Shi’ites that that time has come. Mutually assured destruction is not a deterrent to Ahmadinejad, but an inducement.”

James Woolsey, former director of the United States Central Intelligence Agency, addressed the conference next. Unlike many of the speakers, Woolsey, a guest of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs was present the previous day and attended nearly all of the conference’s Sunday sessions.

Woolsey on Islamic Bid for World Control
Woolsey summarized several opinions that had been previously expressed, lauding UN sanctions, negotiations and the state of the world. “I do not represent a majority view – but on all of these points I beg to differ,” he said.

Woolsey proceeded to lament the fate of Europe, which he sees as already having been compromised in what he calls World War IV – the third having been the Cold War. “I wish we had a partnership with Europe, but I am afraid it is deteriorating,” he explained. “Europe is accommodating Sharia [Islamic law] and becoming increasingly affected by the Muslim demographics in their countries.”

Woolsey said he sees no distinction between the Islamic onslaught in Israel, Iraq or elsewhere. He compared the war against Islamism with that against Nazism and Communism.

As a former director of the world’s largest intelligence agency, Woolsey dismissed claims by Iran and its apologists that the Islamic Republic seeks nuclear capability for peaceful means.

“With its huge oil and natural gas reserves, Iran is not the least bit interested in nuclear power,” he said. “And negotiation with a movement that defines itself by its goal of the destruction of Israel and the United States is like trying to persuade Hitler to give up anti-Semitism.”

Woolsey displayed in-depth knowledge of the various theological movements and streams vying for the soul of the Islamic world. “The Ujutiya – end of time – movement represents a major part of Iranian politics today,” he warned. “If we look at it like a chess game, the nuclear bomb is the queen.”

Woolsey, like Lewis, warned that the Iranian Shi’ite sect is not the only threat posed by Islam.

“In 1979, with the seizure of the great mosque in Mecca and the rise to power of a Shi’ite theocracy in Iran, a rise in Wahabi-ism took place as well. This was funded largely by the increase in the price of oil. Today, little boys are taught to want to be suicide bombers both in Pakistani madrassas and in the West Bank with Wahabi oil money.”

Woolsey said that those warning against Islam’s push to establish Islamic law across the globe are accused of being Islamophobic. “We are not Islamaphobes,” he said, “but we are theocraphobic."

“We, Jews, Christian and others are inheritors of the rule of law,” Woolsey said. “Democracy without the rule of law is a mob and capitalism without democracy is theft. Jefferson said, and it is printed on his memorial: ‘I have sworn on the altar of Almighty G-d eternal hostility toward every form of tyranny over the mind of man.’ ”

Asked what role he saw the media playing in the current global plight, Woolsey had harsh criticism for most journalists’ inability to classify religious believers as anything but crazy.

“The media on the whole and certainly in the US is not interested in ideology and does not take it seriously. They tend to think anybody who is religiously motivated about his views is crazy – whether religious Christians, Muslims or whatever. And that is a problem, because you can be absolutely crazy about your objectives and extremely shrewd about your implementation. I think our media on the whole is very ostrich-like on this issue.”

Woolsey outlined scenarios in which Iranians, who have changed their government through general strike thrice in the 20th century, could preclude an attack by replacing their regime – but said that it should not be counted upon.

“We should be prepared for the fact that if an attack is necessary, it must take place when we are as certain as we can be that they do not yet have a nuclear weapon. The problem is that North Korea’s primary exports today are counterfeit American money, heroin and ballistic missile technology. I see no reason why Kim Jong won’t ship off a couple kilograms of nuclear material. So we are living with the daily threat that Iran could go nuclear.”

Woolsey again entered the conversation enthusiastically after a questioner addressed former IDF Chief of Staff Moshe Yaalon, who dismissed a two-state solution and the creation of a Palestinian state as worthy approaches.

“If I could just respond here,” Woolsey commented. “Insofar as the U.S. government is pressuring Israel to negotiate with a Hamas-led Palestinian Authority – the United States is simply wrong.”

Following applause, Woolsey went even further, suggesting that a PA state should not be on the table until the generation of youth raised on Wahabi-funded suicide-bomber ideology has been taught otherwise and the PA can be held to the same standards as an Israel with one million Arab citizens.

“If Palestinians were held to the same standards as the Israelis, then there could be not only 250,000, but 500,000 Jews living freely wherever they want in the West Bank – in Hevron and elsewhere. Once that is the case – when Palestinians are held by the same standards – then there might be some progress toward working toward permanent borders.”

Following the morning session which questioned the prudence of further withdrawals and the creation of a PA state, Defense Minister Amir Peretz outlined his willingness to negotiate with Hamas and carry out further unilateral destruction of Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria. Peretz had not been present during the morning sessions and declined to take questions following his address.

Lunch was presided over by Shimon Peres, who assured participants that the “prophets of doom” have sounded alarms before and said that Israel has survived much harder times. “Israel will not fall,” he declared, following several jokes. “Ahmadinejad will fall.”
 
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/news.php3?id=120034

[nonesuche]

Anna thank you for posting this, reading it in entirety again takes my breath away. I wonder if our citizens are listening and factoring through what this truly means for the future of our country?

Terrifying .......

[Anna]

Day Two:

Israel faces nuclear Holocaust warns Gingrich

Newt Gingrich: Haifa, Tel Aviv, Jerusalem facing mortal Iranian threat, says former US Speaker of the House; emphasizes 'three nuclear weapons are a second Holocaust'
Yaakov Lappin



The Israeli people are facing the threat of a nuclear Holocaust, former US Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich warned the Herzliya Conference held by the Institute for Policy and Strategy at IDC Herzliya on Tuesday afternoon. Meanwhile, he said, the United States could lose a few million people or a number of cities to a terrorist attack with weapons of mass destruction.


 

Gingrich, who addressed the conference via satellite from the United States, said he thought Israel's existence was under threat again for the first time in 40 years.

 

"Israel is in the greatest danger it has been in since 1967. Prior to '67, many wondered if Israel would survive. After '67, Israel seemed military dominant, despite the '73 war. I would say we are (now) back to question of survival," Gingrich said.

 

He added that the United States could "lose two or three cities to nuclear weapons, or more than a million to biological weapons."

 

Gingrich added that in such a scenario, "freedom as we know it will disappear, and we will become a much grimmer, much more militarized, dictatorial society."

 

"Three nuclear weapons are a second Holocaust," Gingrich declared, adding: "People are greatly underestimating how dangerous the world is becoming. I'll repeat it, three nuclear weapons are a second Holocaust. Our enemies are quite explicit in their desire to destroy us. They say it publicly? We are sleepwalking through this process as though it's only a problem of communication," Gingrich said.

 

The former House speaker expressed concern that the Israeli and American political establishments were not fully equipped to take stock of the current threat level.

 

"Our enemies are fully as determined as Nazi Germany, and more determined that the Soviets. Our enemies will kill us the first chance they get. There is no rational ability to deny that fact. It's very clear that the problems are larger and more immediate than the political systems in Israel or the US are currently capable of dealing with," said Gingrich.

 

'Time to come to grips with threat'


"We don't have right language, goals, structure, or operating speed, to defeat our enemies. My hope is that being this candid and direct, I could open a dialogue that will force people to come to grips with how serious this is, how real it is, how much we are threatened. If that fails, at least we will be intellectually prepared for the correct results once we have lost one or more cities," Gingrich added.


 

He also said "citizens who do not wake up every morning and think about the possible catastrophic civilian casualties are deluding themselves."

 

"If we knew that tomorrow morning we would lose Haifa, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem, what we would to stop it? If we knew we would tomorrow lose Boston, San Francisco, or Atlanta, what would we do? Today, those threats are probably one, two, five years away? Although you can't be certain when our enemies will break out," he warned.

 

Earlier, Mitt Romney, former governor of Massachusetts, said that Islamic jihadism was "the nightmare of this century."

 

"The war in Lebanon demonstrated that Israel is facing a jihadist threat that runs through Tehran, to Damascus, to Gaza. Hizbullah are not fighting for the coming into being of a Palestinian state, but for the going out of being of the Israeli state," he said.

 

Romney emphasized that Iran could not be compared to the former Soviet threat, because the Islamic Republic was following a suicidal path. "For all of the Soviets' deep flaws, they were never suicidal. Soviet commitment to national survival was never in question. That assumption cannot be made to an irrational regime (Iran) that celebrates martyrdom," he said.

 

The former governor called for the utilization of the widespread opposition held by the Iranian people to their own regime, in order to facilitate regime change, while also adding that "the military option remains on the table."

 

"Iran must be stopped. Iran can be stopped," Romney declared, receiving applause.
 
 
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3356103,00.html

[Anna]

Nonesuche,
Yes, it is truly terrifying but I don't think many are paying the least bit of attention.  And after all, we don't like Newt, right?  So that gives us the right to totally ignore anything he says.

We hear only opposition to Bush and any and everything he proposes or might ever hope to propose but not one word on The Third Great Jihad now well underway.  It's as if it doesn't exist and if we ignore it, it will just go away.  Nothing could be further from the truth and even if the liberals get their way and we totally cut and run in utter defeat in Iraq as seems to be their fondest hopes, it is still very much alive and well.


From today's Boston Globe


 
 
 
JEFF JACOBY
Democrats' silence on jihad is deadly
By Jeff Jacoby, Globe columnist  |  January 24, 2007

THE SURGE is underway, and more rapidly than many of us were expecting. The influx of new troops into Iraq? No, of candidates into the 2008 presidential contest.

So far this month, Senators Hillary Clinton of New York, Barack Obama of Illinois, and Chris Dodd of Connecticut, plus Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico -- Democrats all -- have formally launched White House campaigns (or "exploratory committees"). Already in the race were former senators John Edwards of North Carolina and Mike Gravel of Alaska, former governor Tom Vilsack of Iowa, and Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich.

Eight Democrats, eight would-be commanders-in-chief -- all running for president in a time of war. So which of them, on getting into the race, had this to say about the nature of the enemy confronting us?

"We are engaged in a war against an axis of Islamists, extremists, and terrorists. It is an axis of evil. It has headquarters in Tehran and Waziristan. But because of the unconventional nature of this war, it also has headquarters in cities throughout Europe and Asia and Africa and the United States of America, in cells that operate in the shadows but are prepared to strike us again as they did on September 11th, 2001.

"The enemy we are fighting is . . . totalitarian. It is inhumane. It has a violent ideology and a goal of expansionism and totalitarianism. It threatens our security, our values, our way of life as seriously, in my opinion, as fascism and communism did in the last century."

Can't match that assessment of the global jihad with the Democratic candidate who uttered it? Don't feel bad; it was a trick question. Those words were actually spoken by Senator Joseph Lieberman at a forum on Iraq this month. Lieberman shared the podium with GOP colleague John McCain, who was no less blunt in his evaluation of the war and its stakes.

For McCain, a Republican presidential hopeful, the struggle against the Islamists is the paramount issue of the day. His campaign website, while spare, highlights a recent speech in which McCain called stopping radical Islam "our most important moral obligation." He described the jihadists as "moral monsters but . . . also a disciplined, dedicated movement driven by an apocalyptic religious zeal, which celebrates martyrdom and murder."

Sounding nearly as resolute is former governor Mitt Romney, whose campaign website puts "Defeating the Jihadists" first in its list of key campaign issues. "The jihadists are waging a global war against the United States and its allies," Romney is quoted as saying, "with the ambition of replacing legitimate governments with a caliphate -- a theocracy." Speaking in Israel yesterday, Romney asserted that "a central purpose of NATO should be to defeat radical Islam," through means both military and ideological.

The Democratic candidates, by contrast, are virtually silent on the subject.

Barack Obama launched his exploratory committee with an online video that mentioned the economy, healthcare, vanishing pensions, college costs, and the fractiousness of partisan politics. His only nod to national security was a passing reference to the war in Iraq, which he opposes. But 9/11 and its aftermath? The worldwide jihad? The global conflict between democratic freedom and Taliban-style repression? Not a word.

Hillary Clinton's highly praised kickoff video likewise included nothing about the overriding threat of our time. Her website does contain a speech she gave at the Council on Foreign Relations last October, but it is filled with vague rhetoric about diplomacy and international conferences and how we must address the "troubled conditions terrorists seek out." New Yorkers don't need to be told "that we are in a war against terrorists who seek to do us harm," Clinton says. But if she recognizes that the future of the civilized world depends on winning that war, she shows little sign of it.

What is true of Obama and Clinton is more or less true of Edwards, Richardson, and the others. The Democrats seem prepared to emulate John Kerry, who insisted in 2004 that "we have to get back to the place we were" before 9/11. Back, that is, to treating Islamist terrorism not as "the focus of our lives," but merely as "a nuisance" that we need "to reduce" -- like gambling, he said, or prostitution.

Heading into the 2008 campaign, our political universe is still divided. On one side are those who see the Islamists as a nuisance to be controlled. On the other: those who regard them as an existential enemy to be destroyed. On the relative strength of those two camps, the next election may well depend.

Jeff Jacoby's e-mail address is jacoby@globe.com.  
 


© Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

[A's Fever]

Thanks for posting all of this information, Anna, it is well worth the read and our complete attention.  Truly sceery stuff.

[nonesuche]

Anna-

Thank you, I've been to busy with other things to catch up on all of this without your help. How can anyone not read Newt's comments and get that this can be within a year from now? He named the correct cities they would bomb as well, hit a triad that effectively spreads the largest radiation cloud over the US !! How can the US have committed so many years to preserving Israel to only now allow al jihad to blow them off the face of the earth as well?

Hillary has another Q & A at her site tonight, I'll be sitting there banging out these questions over and over to her. She likely cherrypicks what she responds to or her aides do, but it won't stop me from asking.  

[Tylergal]

Anna, this is so informative.  Thank you.  It makes one think about all the unimportant things we ponder daily and how it is that we can buy into the propaganda fed to us through the mainstream media.  I suppose they think we are pablum digesters and just feed us anything that makes them look better.  

This war will be like Vietnam on many levels, that the mainstream media, the climbers and drumbeaters will lose it because we have withdrawn not only our support but our good common sense, but the effects will not be the same.  The loss of this war in Iraq is the impetus for the Islamofascists in concert with their idealistic now old-wanna-be-young-again-wanderlust babby boomers nearing Social Security (and who still want to feel that revival in their loins again)  to destroy what was once a great country.

[LouiseVargas]

Thank you, Anna, for all that information.

I just have one small comment from your article: "He also said "citizens who do not wake up every morning and think about the possible catastrophic civilian casualties are deluding themselves."

Let me tell you that when I wake up in the morning, my first thought is what has happened in the world overnight? Every day I turn on my TV with trepidation, scared that they will be reporting another world altering catastrophe. I am almost relieved to hear that there is a fire in Malibu, a school shoot em up, whatever. Greatly relieved that no one droped a nuke on Israel, that all the major cities in the world are still standing, no one put nerve gas in any underground metro, etc.  

I will never again wake up in the morning with the sense of well being that I had before my daughter called me at 7 a.m. from MN on September 11 and told me to turn on the TV.

[nonesuche]

Well I don't think we've even touched upon Russia in our discussions here but read this and weep...

http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/01/24/uranium.sting.ap/index.html?eref=rss_topstories

[Dihannah1]

Thanks for the post Anna, it is definately more of an eye opener.   I want to add to LV's post.  I tend to do the same thing every morning when getting up for work, I turn on the news to see if anything has happened over night that has forever changed our world again.  Sadly, though, this is what the terrorists want.  When we do this and live in fear, then they have won, and have accomplished just exactly that, if they haven't yet accomplished another great catastophe.   It's one more point for them knowing we live in fear!

[Anna]

There is a difference in living in or with fear and allowing it to rule our lives.  All of us know fears now that we did not have in the past since being attacked on U.S. soil on 9-11 but still, we carry on.  We go about our daily lives much the same as we always have and overcome our fears on a daily basis in order to carry on with the business at hand of living our lives.

I don't know one person who buries their head under the covers and stays in bed because of fear of terrorist attacks.  We have our intelligence community and our military to thank for this as much as anything, too.

And the sad truth is that never in our lifetime will we be able to go back to the state of not knowing about the global effort on the part of Islamic extremists to dominate the world with their ideology and to implement it throughout the entire world.  It has taken decades to bring their efforts to fruition and it is against an ideology that we must do battle.  None of us as adults at this time are likely to ever know a day when this battle is over.  

We didn't start it and we can't finish it.  It is war on their terms and it won't be over until there is a change in the ideology that says their religion should rule the world.  This is not likely to come about through anything we do or do not do.  No leader we may elect is going to make one bit of difference in what the Extremist believe.  All we can do is try our best to counter their measures and ward off their attacks.  We are not accustomed to being on the defensive and it is going to be very difficult for most of us.

And this is not some Doomsday scenario that might happen some day long in the distant future.  Those in the know fully expect major attacks in our country easily within the next decade.  

How wonderful it would be if we were not viciously divided and were all pulling together to confront this but nothing could be farther from the truth of the matter.  Perhaps at some point in the future we will rethink our divisiveness and through mutual tragedy learn to unit in our effort to survive what the experts say is for a fact coming soon.

[nonesuche]

well said Anna, well said.