Canada & the Saudis: Snowflake Versus Tyrant

BY RAHEEL RAZA Clarion Project

Canada’s ongoing spat with Saudi Arabia can be likened to a snowflake versus tyrant.

In a recent tweet, Canada reminded Saudi Arabia about its human rights record, specifically relating to the incarceration of liberal blogger Raif Badawi and now his sister, a women’s rights activist.

The kingdom responded by imposing trade restrictions, recalling its ambassador and declaring Canada’s ambassador persona non grata.

Small potatoes

Two points are worth noting about this incident:

First, Canada is operating from a very weak and isolated position. The Canadian government has steadily weakened all trade accords under NAFTA and has lost its position of authority among G7 nations after a series of diplomatic and trade gaffes, including a disastrous trip to India by Prime Minster Justin Trudeau.

Trudeau has come to be known as a man-child and after his trip to China, he was nicknamed “Little Potato.” The Trudeau government also has been appeasing Iran, which irks Saudi Arabia.

Such is the lure of oil. Yet even Western countries are not supporting Trudeau on the latter decision.

(On a side note, Pakistan has come out in support of Saudi Arabia’s human rights record. What an interesting conundrum that none of Trudeau’s members of parliament of Pakistani origin have condemned Saudi Arabia. Talk about infiltration!)

Saudi Arabia probably has the worst human rights record in history. They have beheaded more people than ISIS. The day after they tried to defend their human rights record, they bombed a school bus in Yemen. The death toll is currently at 40.

And it was their second such atrocity in a week.

Second, the real reason the Saudis are paranoid about social media regarding human rights or any criticism of their attitude towards women is because most of the Arab Spring uprisings were started through social media.

If this is true, it is an indication of how vulnerable Bin Salman feels about criticism and social media. Reforms are necessary if another Arab Spring is to be avoided sometime in the future, but reforms are not welcome in fundamentalist Islam. 

While Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman (MBS) speaks of reforms, Muslims have been struggling for reform for 1,400 years. And as much as they claim to have changed, the Saudis are by no means reformers.

Between their turf war with the equally evil regime of Iran and their constant export of their Salafi/Wahabbi ideology, they will eventually destroy the Muslim world if not the entire world.

As noted by J.J. McCullough in The Washington Post, “If Canada’s goal is a foreign policy oriented to endorse the spread of global liberalism, it is not at all obvious how a prolonged fight with Riyadh is more principled than tighter trade ties to Beijing or an embassy in Tehran.”

Just when I was beginning to believe that Foreign Minister Christia Freeland was a very capable minister, she pulls this trick out of her hat. Foreign policy by Twitter may work for bullies, and Christia may be a bully at heart but she cannot back up her bullying like Donald Trump can. Her only form of support is Trudeau and being known as 'Snowflake' or 'Little Potato' severely limits Justin's usefulness as an international heavyweight. Only another strongman can take on a strongman. Christia needs to find more traditional methods to practice diplomacy.

Pentagon in Internal Struggle Over Calling out Salafi Jihadism

Pentagon in danger of allowing reality into strategy

Staffers from Special Operations Command want to include a section on Salafi jihadism in the next edition of the National Military Strategy.

BY ELLIOT FRIEDLAND



From time to time, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the country’s most senior military officer below the commander-in-chief himself, puts out a National Military Strategy. This document is intended for senior American military commanders around the world and sets out big picture strategy guidance for how the U.S. military ought to cope with the myriad threats it may face in the line of duty.

New Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Marine General Joseph Dunford is compiling a new National Military Strategy. Special Operations Command (SoCom), the branch of the military charged with hunting down and killing terrorists, is providing input and expertise to the report.

SoCom is pushing for Salafi jihadism to be discussed in the report as the branch of Sunni Islam responsible for most global terrorism in the world today. It is the ideology shared by the Islamic State and al-Qaeda.

“If you look at threat doctrine from that perspective, it’s a much bigger problem because it’s not just the violent jihadists, it’s the non-violent jihadists who support them,” one person knowledgeable about the National Military Strategy told The Washington Times. “Pretending there is no relationship between the violent jihadists and Islam isn’t going to win. We’re completely ignoring the war of ideas. We’re still in denial. We’re pretending the enemy doesn’t exist.”

Dunford’s staff declined to comment on the upcoming report, which will be classified. The last National Military Strategy, by the previous chairman, General Martin Dempsey, was released publicly on the Joint Chiefs of Staff website.  It did not make mention the ideological roots of terrorism.

Sources close to the team responsible for preparing the National Military Strategy told The Washington Times  Dunford’s staff was not persuaded on the merits of including the term.

Quintan Wictorowicz, one of the architects of Obama’s national counter extremism policy, charted the relationships between Salafi jihadist groups (although he did not use that term) and other sects of Islam in a 2005 academic paper entitled A Genealogy of Radical Islam.

“Al Qaeda and the radical fundamentalists that constitute the new ‘global jihadi movement’ are not theological outliers. They are part of a broader community of Islamists known as ‘Salafis’ (commonly called ‘Wahhabis’).”

He distinguished between violent and non-violent Salafis saying “The jihadi faction believes that violence can be used to establish Islamic states and confront the United States and its allies. Non-violent Salafis, on the other hand, emphatically reject the use of violence and instead emphasize propagation and advice (usually private) to incumbent rulers in the Muslim world.”

Wictorowicz details several important theological points that distinguish this movement, notably the use of takfir to brand the enemies of the jihadi movement as apostates deserving of death and the concept of jahilliya which posits that the contemporary Muslim world is not really Muslim because they follow man-made laws and are therefore akin to the pagans who ruled Arabia before the time of Mohammed.

He names Muslim Brotherhood ideologue Sayyid Qutb as a central figure in the development of this doctrine.

Understanding this application of radical theology to the political sphere helps us to identify why certain groups are dedicated to fighting the United States and helps in setting out clearly the differences between Salafi jihadism and Sunni Islam in general.

What Really Happened on Corsica, I Think

Burkini Versus Bikini Round Two:

Showdown in Corsica

A huge fight broke out between Muslim immigrants and native Corsicans

after women wearing burkinis were photographed by a tourist.

BY LESLIE SHAW


Scene from the fight on Corsica (Photo: Video screenshot)

On Sunday August 14, 2016, Bernard Cazeneuve, French Interior Minister, issued the following statement after a violent clash between locals and Muslim immigrants on the island of Corsica:

"A violent confrontation, the circumstances and motives of which will be determined by a police investigation, erupted on Saturday evening in Sisco, Upper Corsica, between local residents and a group of around ten out-of-towners. The four people injured, including a pregnant woman, were evacuated to the hospital in Bastia. Their injuries are not life-threatening. Three vehicles were set on fire causing major disruption of traffic and a brush fire was rapidly brought under control." 

According to eyewitness accounts reported in the French media, on the evening of Saturday, August 13, a group of young Corsicans waged a battle with a group of Muslims at a beach next to Sisco. The fight broke out after women wearing burkinis were photographed by a tourist, provoking the Muslims to retaliate with insults and cries of " Allah Akbar."

They then began throwing stones at the tourists and a group of Corsican teenagers further along the beach. The Muslim men, aged around 40, then began to hit the teenagers, one of whom was wounded by a blow from a machete.

Several older Muslim men then arrived armed with axes and blades and attacked the Corsicans, aged from 15 to 18, on the beach. Following this, the parents of the Corsicans intervened and two of them were wounded with harpoons. People from a neighbouring village arrived, claiming their car tires had been slashed by Muslim women. In retaliation, the Corsicans overturned a car belonging to a Muslim and torched two others.

One of the Muslims shouted, "Just come and see us at Lupino" [a housing project in Bastia, capital of Upper Corsica]. Around 100 residents of Sisco gathered at the scene, but order was restored by an equal number of police officers, gendarmes and firefighters.

On Sunday morning, a group of around 500 demonstrators gathered at the Bastia town hall, where a delegation met with local government officials. When they emerged from the meeting, the crowd chanted, "To arms, we are going to Lupino because this is our homeland."

The demonstrators then headed for a housing project in the Lupino neighbourhood. One of the demonstrators declared, "The attackers live here. We will show their brothers, friends and everyone
they know that we will not tolerate these kinds of acts in our land."


Scenes from the fight (Photo: Courtesy)

The crowd was barred from entering by gendarmes. They continued on to the hospital in Bastia, where stones were thrown at police vehicles. Ange-Pierre Vivoni, the mayor of Sisco, appealed for calm.

On Monday, August 15, after a meeting of the Sisco municipal council, he issued a decree banning  burkinis. He also cancelled the festivities planned for August 15, a public holiday in France.

Relations between Corsicans and Muslims have been on a knife-edge since Christmas 2015, when firefighters were lured into an ambush in a Muslim neighbourhood of Bastia. When they arrived to put out a fire, they were attacked with rocks and petrol bombs.

The following day hundreds of Corsicans went to the neighborhood looking for the culprits and ransacked the local mosque. In April 2016 a prayer room was set on fire in Mezzavia.


A sign of things to come across France?

These incidents show that forced multiculturalism has failed in Corsica and could be a prelude of things to come on the French mainland. The mayor of Sisco described the incident at the origin of the violence as "trivial” but it is not. To French and other European hard-line secularists, the burkini is a deliberate and aggressive symbol of the refusal of Salafist Muslims to adapt to the French way of life.

It is inevitable that such hostility to the culture of a host population will provoke inter-community tensions and violence.

Leslie Shaw is an Associate Professor at the Paris campus of ESCP Europe Business School and President of FIRM (Forum on Islamic Radicalism and Management).

Salafists and Wahabbis will never assimilate into western cultures and must, by their core beliefs, alter western societies to fit their warped and twisted religion.