If ever there was doubt about Iran's terror-ties, here is a glaring one. Are you listening, Kofi?

Posted by: Alert at April 16, 2006 3:02 PM

Good news. It's about time the US stopped the welfare to that band of thieves and cut throats anyway. But doesn't that bring Iran just a little closer to western ideology? I mean, becoming a welfare state? What next, baseball and apple pie?

Posted by: krkrjak at April 16, 2006 3:07 PM

This is great news. Now Hamas can fight with and complain to the Mullahs when they don't get enough money from them.

Shi'te Iran ..... I wonder what strings are attached. Helping out Hizbullah? That Hamas hits Israel when Iran's nuclear facilities get whacked?

Posted by: dennisw at April 16, 2006 3:19 PM

It is good for the "Palestinians" to cease to receive money from the Western world, and to come to depend entirely on fellow Muslims. It is good for two reasons. The West -- Europe and America -- has got to see that all aid from Infidels to Muslims quickly takes on the character of the Jizyah. That is, the sums are not received with gratitude, but with a sense, that only increases, that these sums are due the Muslims, and the Infidels, too, begin to convince themselves that they must continue to pay these amounts, whether it is called military aid or "humanitarian aid" (the distinction in this case is a false one because any aid called "humanitarian" merely frees up other money to be spent on armaments to be used against Infidels; Egypt receives $2 billion a year from the United States, for example, and recently spent $7.5 billion in one year on foreign weaponry, more than any other country except China and India), lest the recipient Muslims begin to be displeased, and react badly.

Some will say that the receipt of money from Iran, or Saudi Arabia, by assorted "Palestinians" will be a bad thing, because it will make those "Palestinians" more "extreme." This is nonsense. There is no "making more extrreme" people who revel in mass murder, and hold up as models for their children the suicide bomber, whether on wall-posters, in texbooks, or on television programs intended for children.

What will happen is this: the Islamic Republic of Iran will give money to the "Palestinians," whom, it is not forgotten in Iran, helped put Khomeini in power. PLO operatives were very important in the early days of the Khomeinist revolt, and Arafat was the first official visitor to Khomeini when he assumed power. The Arabs have brought poisoned gift after poisoned gift to the superior civilization of the Perisans: first, Islam, and with Islam the attempt to impose a cultural and linguistic imperialism that, largely through the evident superiority of Persian poets (especially Firdowsi), was rejected; second, with Arafat and the PLO, that helped to inflict the last monstrous quarter-century (and counting) of rule by the most primitive mullahs and their primitive supporters, while the best people in Iran either fled, or remain, constantly harried, by this Arab-sponsored regime.

$50 million -- it will stick in the craw of Persians everywhere. $50 million -- being sent to those "Palestinians" whose cause many Persians are heartily sick of (others, including the lawrence-reza-ershaghis of the United States, the children of people who left Iran because of too much Islam, but who in their exiles failed to fully sever all family ties with Islam out of filial piety, thus leaving their children susceptible to the temptation of "re-disovering" Islam, with all that that entails). Nothing will do as much as the news of such aid to further inflame Iranian opponents of the regime, or even quasi-opponents, and to allow that regime to be depicted as merely a tool of the Arabs, wasting good Iranian money on them.

And the "Palestinians"? Oh, they would prefer to get their money from the Infidels, who never make any claims on them, and besides, it is so important to establish good habits among those Infidels, and never to let them break those good habits, once established. Worrisome, indeed, if the Americans and Europeans stop paying the JIzyah, and allow Iran, or the rich Gulf Arabs (especially Saudi Arabia) to be responsible for such support as the heirs to the PLO, whether it is Hamas with its Fast Jihad, or Abbas and Co. with their Slow Jihad, manage to drum up.

A good development, not to be deplored, not to be interfered with. And let the Saudis now be shamed, in order to supposedly combat Iranian influence, into shelling out something as well. But not a cent should ever again come from Americans, or from Europeans -- not a cent of Jizyah to these, the shock troops of the Lesser Jihad, which is merely one part of the Greater, world-wide Jihad.

Posted by: Hugh at April 16, 2006 4:49 PM

An absolutely superb post Hugh. Now how do we unload that$2 billion annual yoke to Egypt?

Posted by: krkrjak at April 16, 2006 5:01 PM

why do we give them 2 billion,anyway?

Posted by: patriot3 at April 16, 2006 5:22 PM

"Are you listening, Kofi? "

Do you really believe that Kofi will do anything but blame the US and Europe for this new alliance?? "You drove them to cosy up with the terrorists.!!"

Posted by: Lili at April 16, 2006 5:45 PM

"Now how do we unload that$2 billion annual yoke to Egypt?"
-- from a posting above

The same way we unstick ourselves from the Iraq tarbaby -- just do it. Decide to do it, tell Egypt that we have Ten Good Reasons to End the Jizyah, and that it is hereby over. The American people simply will not stand for shelling out $2 billion (my, what could that do for solar energy and wind enegy projects?) a year, some $60 billion and counting, to a country that is not part of the West, that does not share our beliefs or our assumptions, that does share beliefs and assumptions that, if they were somehow to prevail, would make our lives as Infidels much more unpleasant, expensive, and phsyically dangerous -- at the very least, and at the most, might pose a mortal threat.

Here are those Ten Good Reasons:

1)Egypt has failed to fulfill every single one of those intangible commitments it made to Israel udner the Camp David Accords, all that stuff about ending hostile propaganda and so on, and instead has prevented Egyptians from visiting Israel, prevented Israelis from participating in film and book festivals in Cairo, and done everything it can, in the press and on television (all of which are controlled completely by the government -- just try making noises about Mubarak's plans for his son), to make Egypt a hotbed of antisemitism. A multi-part television series based on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion does not exactly correspond to what Egypt committed itself to in order to receive, for the second time, the entire Sinai, together with oifields, and $16 billion (in 1979 dollars) in infrastructure put in by the Israelis.

2) Egypt has failed to make the Egyptian population grateful for the nearly $60 billion it has so far received -- and in fact we have come to understand that the American aid is a kind of slush fund for the Mubarak Family-and-Friends Plan, and so actually increases resentment by people in Egypt toward the Americans.

3) the discovery that many high officials were receiving sums from Saddam Hussein, that there has been evidence of collaboration between the regime of Saddam Hussein and Egypt on certain kinds of weapons development, and that in other ways Egypt was meretricious in how it hid all these dealings from the American government, cannot allow further sums to go to Egypt.

4) the failure of the Egyptian government to stop all the weapons smuggling into Gaza, though it has been made well aware, for years, of the situation, is a further violation of Egypt's commitments and of what the American government has a right to expect of it. Arms sent to such terrorist groups as Hamas (or Hezbollah, or Islamic Jihad) through Egypt, can only be sent with the knowledge of some Egyptian authorities. The government should have found them. It did not.

5) the endless and sustained anti-American campaign in the press and television have led Egyptians to be among the most thoroughly anti-American in their views, even among Muslims. The government should have been moving heaven and earth to change these attitudes if it expected American taxpayers to keep shelling out money to a regime, a country, and a people (or at least the Muslim component of that people) who do not wish us, as Infidels well, and whom we, in turn, have no obligation in the slightest to support, and many good reasons not to support.

6) the behavior of Egypt in protecting the Sudan, in preventing U.N. troops or any troops except the ineffective African Union contingent, shows that the government of Egypt has no moral objections to the Jihad being conducted against non-Arab (and therefore inferior in every respect) Muslims in Darfur. Egypt has in every way been defending that government, and throwing up obstacle after obstacle, as have other Arab and Muslim governments, to the continued mass murders in Darfur -- as it did, over the past 20 years, in more or less successfully preventing Western powers from stopping the genocide against Christian and animist black Africans in the southern Sudan. This is not surprising. During the Biafra War it was Egyptian pilots who gleefuly strafed Ibo and other Christian villages, killing tens of thousands of helpless villagers (who had not a rifle among them). Egypt's role in suppressiing the Christians during the Biafra War was promptly forgotten; it should not have been.

7) the stratokleptocracy -- or rule by a thieving military caste -- has led Egyptians to turn to Islam as the answer, as most Muslims inevitably will when they are confronted by assorted lords of misrule, and they inevitably will be so confronted, because it is within Islam itself that the habit of subservience to the ruler, and the habit of mental submission at every level, and the habit of discouraging free inquiry that leads to conspiracy theories, rumors, and sheer political craziness that prevents good government from being established. Therefore the more money Americans and other Infidels supply those corrupt and odious Egyptian rulers, the more, not less, will be their obvious gain, and that gain will be flaunted, leading to still more resentment by ordinary Egyptians not privy to the appropriation and divvying up of that aid. The more aid we give to Egypt, the more anti-Americanism will be encouraged.

8) the beavhior of the Egyptian officials, in the kidnapping and rape, or kidnapping and forced conversion, of Coptic girls, and the attacks, and even mureers, of Coptic priests and villagers and even Coptic schools and churches, are intolerable. These have often been carried out with the full knowledge, and sometimes the participation, of local police. This can continue, but it cannot continue with American aid money.

9) Egypt has made repeated threats, some official, and some unofficial, to the government of Ethiopia, and to others involved in agricultural development, warning that "the Nile belongs to Egypt" and that Ethiopia, a country which in recent decades has suffered from famine and drought, should not dare to divert some of the headwaters of the Nile without Egypt's explicit approval. It is clear that the Egyptian government backs the Sudanese Arabs in wiping out as many of the non-Arabs -- whether Muslim or non-Muslim -- as the Arab control of Sudan (which just a half-century ago had a black African majority) tightens, and this, in turn, is part of a larger effort, to extend Egyptian (i.e., Arab Muslim) control, so that Ethiopia, the old Christian kingdom that once was given a dispensation (because some of Muhammad's followers had been given temporary refuge in Ethiopia by the negus, thus earning a special exemption from the violent Jihad), will never dare to take decisions about the Nile waters, or anything else, without express permission of the Arab Muslim imperialists in Cairo.

10) Egypt is a corrupt country out of control, and by permitting successive governments to count on American support, the viciousness and corruption are allowed to continue without any consequences. From 1882 to 1922, the British brought some semblance of efficiency and much less corruption to the Egyptian Civil Service. )See Edward Cecil's classic "Memoirs of an Egyptian Official" with its famous epigraph: "Here lies one who tried to hustle the East."). Even after that period, Egypt enjoyed a period of good government, of an expanding economy, and of semi-decency in public life, reflected in the vivacity of its European and Levantine populations, that came to an end when Nasser and the other colonels arrived on the scene. There was the famous rioting against Jews, Copts, and Europeans, in Alexandria. Almost overnight, Greeks, Italians, Jews, and many others who had lived there, had their property stolen by the Egyptians, who called it "nationalization." Billions of dollars in property, the fruit in some cases of family entrepreneurial activity that had gone on for a century or more, was taken by the Egyptian Muslims who ran everything. Nasser was followed by Saint Sadat (the same Sadat imprisoned by the British for his pro-Nazi activities during World War II, who was awarded his sainthood by Jimmy Carter, who incidentally has also managed to award himself the same title), and to reward Saint Sadat for deigning to accept all of the Sinai -- territory which morally, having lost in a war of aggression started when Nasser demanded that U Thant pull out the U.N. peacekeepers, and then proceeded to block the Straits of Tiran in May, 1967, Egypt had no right to receive back yet again), rewarding him, and Egypt, with nearly $2 billion a year in American foreign aid -- which foreign aid became automatic, a tribute never to be interrupted, in other words -- Jizyah. This Jizyah has bought us nothing, unless you think that the anti-Americanism in Egypt has been swell, that the threats to Ethiopia and the support for the Sudanese government are acceptable, that the complicity in arms-smuggling into Gaza is perfectly understandable, that the continued, even growing, rapes and looting and murders of Copots is simply what one should expect of Muslims and not get too upset about it, and all the rest.

I don't. And I don't think other long-suffering American taxpayers, Infidels all, agree with The New Duranty Times, or those lazy officials or hangers-on in Washington who keep prating about the "need" to keep "our Egyptian ally" happy? Why? So they can torture, occasionally, the odd Al Qaeda suspect? But meanwhile, they can try to produce WMD, harass the Copts, plot diplomatically and with arms-smuggling against Israel, bully Ethiopia to endure further famine, and fill the press and television with the most disgusting and scandalous misrepresentations of the behavior of American soldiers, as they have done for decades in their misrepresentation of Israeli soldiers?

No, I have presented Ten Good Reasons For Stopping the Jizyah to Egypt.

I defy anyone in Washington to offer even One Good Reason for continuing the Jizyah to that meretricious and sinister regime, people, country.

It took precisely 22 minutes to compose this posting at one go. Why cannot those thousands of bigshots in Washington, in their think-tanks or in their well-paid government jobs, or at their newspapers and magazines, come up with these Ten Reasons, and Ninety Reasons more, and save us money, and stop squandering, start husbanding, and, when it comes to dealing with the menace of the Jihad everywhere, Start Making Sense?

Posted by: Hugh at April 16, 2006 6:17 PM

Hugh your posts above are one of the best! if you dont mind l have been copying them and sending them to some conservative radio people, Rush and Hannity. l was appalled when l listend to Savage on Good Friday, he thinks Islam was hijacked as well! one of these days Hugh they will read your posst and others from this website and something will sink in! l try to do this as often as permitted, and they will either kick me off for sending them, or actually read them!

Posted by: Lulu at April 16, 2006 8:53 PM

Do you really believe that Kofi will do anything but blame the US and Europe for this new alliance?? "You drove them to cosy up with the terrorists.!!"

Posted by: Lili at April 16, 2006 05:45 PM

You are not suggesting US and Europe are responsible to drive them to cozy up with terrorists? Are you?

Posted by: Alert at April 16, 2006 9:10 PM

Here are three more reasons to stop Jazia to Egypt:

1. Arafat.

2. Al-Zawahiri.

3. Atta.

Posted by: Alert at April 16, 2006 9:13 PM

I would just like to point out to the moderator or whomever that I posted a response under this article few hours ago and it has disappeared. I believe I was the first one to post, so maybe that is the problem. I did not curse or anything.

Posted by: mosmike at April 16, 2006 9:43 PM

Hugh, outstanding list. One of your classics. I would never have guessed that #2 could even be an issue until I had a heart-to-heart talk with an Egyptian doc several years ago. He told of the massive corruption in their civil service with US aid stolen, sometimes brazenly, by 'friends of Mubarak.' In a sense we are facilitating continuing corruption. The aid must stop.

Posted by: biorabbi at April 16, 2006 10:22 PM

Hugh,
Your posts are the best observations I have seen. After 9-11, the US said they will go after the terrorists, people who support terrorists, and countries who support and hide terrorists. In my opinion, Arafat should have been one of the first ones to have his aid cut off. He has been a problem since about 1968 and has succeeded in thrusting the image of “poor mistreated Palestinians” all over the Middle East and Europe. As a result, .all of the Arab countries conjure up any excuse to hate and blame Israel and the US. Now the whole Middle East is taken over by extreme hatred to where all they can see is revenge against all who is not Muslim. As you so well pointed out, Hugh, giving them aid only fuels their ability to further their activities - Hatred. Cut off aid to all of them. Let the Middle East show the rest of the world how much good their wonderful “religion of peace” can do to help themselves. Keep up the good work Hugh, Robert, staff, and all who post on Jihad Watch.

Posted by: THSIMJ at April 16, 2006 10:35 PM

By damn Hugh, you would make one helluva good Secretary of State. At the very least a seat in the House. Any political aspirations?

Posted by: krkrjak at April 16, 2006 11:37 PM

As to this news, it is about time. I'm not sure why we were supporting the Palestinians in the first place. They are not our friends.

Generally, separation of church and state is specific. It is not mosque and state. We are learning what the founders knew. Democracy requires cultural underpinnings. The Danish Cartoons, Van Gogh (the film maker) being murdered, the vitriolic nature of Muslim discussion.

I propose that we allow Muslim countries to invest in profit making schemes. But building mosques is cultural warfare, not investment.

I hope that you do not find the following inappropriate.

I discuss such issues in my book culturism. If you agree with my opinions, you can help me publicize them by voting for me @ www.bookmillionaire.com. If I win I can talk about culturism on TV. You can also go to www.pressjohn.com to find out more about culturism.

Thanks, John Press
pressjohn@hotmail.com

Posted by: jkp at April 16, 2006 11:45 PM

The Egyptians are dumb enough to blow up the pyramids, the Cairo museum, the sphinx etc. in case the Jiziya stops.

Perhaps they have already threatened the white house to do so, just in case...

Why & how did we ever agree to pay the Jiziya in the first place?

Posted by: sheik yer'mami at April 17, 2006 4:39 AM

France and Egypt collude to bust Western anti-Hamas funding-banking boycott

To transfer the $50 million dollars pledged to the Hamas-led Palestinian government, Tehran has simply opened an account at the Misr International Bank (MIBank) in Cairo, according to DEBKAfile’s Middle East sources. This back-door financing route was approved by the Egyptian government. Our sources add that control of the state-owned MIBank was acquired by France’s banking giant Societe Generale which is also, according to DEBKAfile’s intelligence sources, Tehran’s main banking channel in Europe. Therefore, the promised Iranian funding of $50 million can be transferred to Paris and thence to Cairo and the Gaza Strip, easily busting the aid and financing boycott the US and Israel imposed on the new Palestinian government.

The same vehicle is also available to Moscow. Another of France’s Societe Generale’s recent acquisitions is control of the big Russian bank Delta-Credit. Last Friday, April 14, Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov promised financial assistance to the Hamas government.

As for Egypt, Cairo may go through the motions of blacklisting the Palestinian government under radical Islamic rule, but Egyptian border officials have allowed the Gaza-Rafah crossing to become a two-way highway for the comings and goings of Hamas officials to any Arab or Muslim country they please. This license plus the availability of an Egyptian banking channel expose the Mubarak government as the silent backer of Hamas’ efforts to establish itself as the legitimate Palestinian government.

Posted by: desi_singh at April 17, 2006 6:23 AM

I have no disagreement with Hugh, but any discussion of Egypt without mention of the Suez Canal is incomplete.

Which in no way obviates any of Hugh's 10 points, but is a geographical piece of tremendous importance. Whatever else one thinks of Egypt, and there is little good to think of it under even the best circumstances, free access to the Suez Canal is vitally important to our economy and our security. Occupying Egypt and seizing the canal is not an option, therefore, its owner must be humored. Could free access be maintained while that $2 billion is drastically reduced? Most assuredly. After all, the only true defender of the right of free passage through the Suez is the USA, not the Egyptian Navy. Moreover, were the canal to be closed by some untoward action, it would hurt the Egyptians far, far worse than it hurt us, being their only revenue source other than tourism and cotton. (Strangely, I've never heard the muj suggest punishing the Egyptian government by closing the Suez Canal, unlike the attempts to punish the Saudis by damaging the refineries.) However, any attempt to reduce the jizya to Egypt must take into consideration maintaining free access to the Suez Canal.

Posted by: longtime lurker at April 17, 2006 8:34 AM

There is no need to bribe Egypt to do what it wants desperately to do -- to keep as much shipping going through the Suez Canal. The very idea that Egypt would have to be bribed, with $2 billion a year from the United States, is of a piece with the belief that "if" we Infidels don't do this or that, "they" will take measures that in fact they cannot possibly take. The introduction of large oil tankers that do not use the canal is one thing; pipelines being built all over the place are another; insurance surcharges on ships (including those resulting from Muslim pirates off the coast of Somalia) all have done enough to worry Egypt. The very idea that the Egyptians, who remember exactly what happened the last time they were forced to close the canal, would ever willingly close it down, is false.

And the same, of course, goes for all those worries, real worries based on false understanding, that the Arabs or Iranians have ever actually cut their production for political reasons. J. B. Kelly showed conclusively in "Arabia, the Gulf, and the West" that the whole boycott businesss was blague, designed to overawe the oil-consuming nations and make them accept OPEC's manipulation, as an oligopoly, of the market, and what's more, to refrain from doing the only sensible thing that could be done, and might have been done starting in 1973 -- which would have been for the American government to put a permanent, and steadily rising tax, on gasoline, and similar taxes on all other uses for oil.

Had this been done, it would have forced the Saudis, the swing producer, to calculate their "ideal" price for oil (to maximize the total value, over time, of their oil reserves) taking into account these new taxes (and dampening over demand) and therefore arriving at a lower price than before. And this could have permitted the recapture of oligopolistic rents, possibly a trillion or more. Instead, a few hundred or few thousand well-placed hirelings of the Saudis in the capitals of the West have managed to prevent, until now, any hint of a sensible energy policy.

The OPEC oil revenues not only provided the wherewithal for mosques, madrasas, campaigns of Da'wa world-wide, but also bought influence that has prevented changes in energy policy to prevent possibly irreversible environmental changes and damage. And the Saudis and other Muslim oil states have worked to prevent that as well.

The Jihad and the irreverisibility of climate change are the two greatest menaces to the world. And the answers to diminishing both threats are the same answer: diminish the money, and therefore the financial, diplomatic, and even military power, and the ability therefore to harm, of the Arab and Muslm oil states.

Posted by: Hugh at April 17, 2006 9:02 AM

of course there never was an "Arab oil boycott." There was a lot of scare publicity from Western journalists and diplomats.

Posted by: Eliyahu at April 17, 2006 6:54 PM

Bigoted, racist, totalitarian, and Islamic supremacist Iran embraces the Armageddon, or the destruction of ‘other people’s societies.’ We are faced with the dilemma again. The US, Israel, UK, Australia, & New Zealand (free societies) are waiting for the world’s immoral & oppressive regimes to provide the permission slip; to allow for the permission to eliminate Iran’s nuclear weapons capacity. Will Islamic supremacist, bigoted, racist, & totalitarian OPEC regimes grant the permission slip? Will socialist and anti-Semitic Europeans nations grant the permission slip? Will Islamic African genocide & slave regimes grant the permission slip? What about socialist Russia? Will communist China grant the permission slip?

Posted by: SFOD at April 17, 2006 10:42 PM