The beginning

From James Forsyth in The Spectator.

Today is the 18th anniversary of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini declaring a Fatwa on Salman Rushdie for writing the Satanic Verses. It was a wake up call to the coming challenge to the freedoms of a liberal society but one that we failed to heed.

The Rushdie affair demonstrated the spinelessness of the British political class in the face of Islamic extremism. The Crown Prosecution Service refused to prosecute those who openly called for Rushdie’s death. The Islamist Kalim Siddiqui amazingly got away with telling a public meeting, “I would like every Muslim to raise his hand in agreement with the death sentence on Salman Rushdie. Let the world see that every Muslim agrees that this man should be put away.”

Both Labour and Tory politicians embarrassed themselves and failed to grasp how essential it was to protect the right to free expression. The Labour deputy leader called for the paperback edition not to be published and some backbench Tories whinged about how much Rushdie’s protection cost. Indeed, Rushdie ended up being pressured into contributing to his own security costs. All in all, a shameful episode.

The first of many to come, all with the same message, "Try it on. We'll just fold and probably apologise as well".

New Year fun

A little bit of joy to end 2007.

A few days ago, 40 Jews got out of Iran and made it to Israel. This was not in the script for the Leader that wants to bomb the Zionists into oblivion, but is on the best of terms with his fellow nationals who happen to share the same unfortunate birthright as the above-mentioned, to-be-annihilated Zionists.

So a state organ, PressTV, published an article denouncing the heinous lie that Jews had fled Iran, and to demonstrate the love that the state of Iran feels for its resident Jews, accompanied it with this photograph.


It may be that they were just trying to highlight the lawlessness of the Web, but they did not acknowledge the authorship of the photo. Its source was The People's Cube ("We do the thinking for you"); specifically, an article published in 2005 entitled "Israel Dismantles; World's Problems End". Amazingly, the article was of a satirical bent, and (this is important) the image was photoshopped. Unbelievably, the original placard did not express undying love of the Jews, but the determination to have a nuclear program (with, possibly, the consequences for the Jews that the Beloved Leader has had occasion to mention).

The photo was replaced after 2 days. To read the whole story, including links to screenshots of the original article, go here.

Eurovision fatality

The Israeli song for the Eurovision Song Contest ain't about adolescent love. It pushes different buttons.



But it may not get to Helsinki. There is talk of banning it on the Euro-principle that what is not harmless is positively dangerous.

Hedonists root for Satan

Like meets like in Sudan. Ahmadinejad with more statesman-like rhetoric.

The Zionists are the true manifestation of Satan.

Moreover, he's nailed down the motivation of the West in supporting Israel. Imperialism? Capitalist greed for oil? The domination of innocent Arabs? Nope.

Many Western governments that claim to be pioneers of democracy and standard bearers of human rights close their eyes over crimes committed by the Zionists and by remaining silent support the Zionists due to their hedonist and materialist tendencies.

The coming war

The next war against Israel is being prepared. It will, of course, be entirely the fault of the Israelis if anyone dies. The Times.

Hezbollah, the militant Shia organisation, is building a new line of defences just north of the United Nations-patrolled zone in south Lebanon ahead of a potential resumption of war with Israel.

The military build-up, only six months after the last Lebanon-Israel conflict, is being conducted in valleys and hillsides guarded by uniformed Hezbollah fighters in the rugged mountains north of the Litani river — the limit of the 12,000 strong UN Interim Force In Lebanon (Unifil).
Christian and Druze-owned land is being bought for cash by a Shia businessman. Hezbollah’s opponents believe the goal is to create a Shia-populated belt spanning the northern bank of the Litani, allowing the Lebanese group to operate away from prying eyes.

“The state of Hezbollah is already in existence in south Lebanon,” the Druze leader and arch Hezbollah critic Walid Jumblatt told The Times.

From another article in The Times:

These purchases will create a continuous Shia zone running from the edge of the long-disputed Shebaa Farms area all the way across to the coastline. Lebanon is in effect being physically divided by this initiative. This is terrain in which Hezbollah will soon be able to function much as it wishes. It is beyond the reach of the UN and its soldiers. It is already being described in the region as a “new Maginot Line”.

There is, though, a crucial difference. The original Maginot Line was defensive in its character. This one is not.

In a speech given in South Beirut on February 16, 2007, Hassan Nasrallah said

We are being very clear and we are saying that we have arms. We are not lying and [we are] telling it to the whole world. ...It [Hezbollah] is saying it in public, adding that it is rearming and increasing the scope of its armament in order to get more dangerous arms…

The resistance [i.e., Hezbollah] notes that it is transporting the arms to the front. We stress our commitment to the resistance [interpret as you wish], to the cause of the resistance and to the project of the resistance that defends the homeland...

Hezbollah… is willing to wage jihad and persist with its struggle for justice in all areas…

Us and them against them

Robert Satloff is the author of a book called Among the Righteous: Lost Stories From the Holocaust's Long Reach Into Arab Lands. He recounts the experiences of many Jews who were saved from Nazi persecution by their Arab neighbours, one of whom Khaled Abdelwahhab, is being considered for the award of Righteous Gentile from the Yad Vashem, the Holocaust remembrance authority. I excerpted from an article about the book here.

Satloff has just been to Cairo to present the book and speak to a lot of very influential Egyptians. He notes a turn in Sunni opinion that we should use to our advantage: they are frightened of the growing reach of Shia Iran. He thinks we must seize this "possibility of building new forms of cooperation across old battle lines". At the cultural level, this includes engaging Sunni Arabs candidly and frankly on once-taboo topics such as Holocaust denial.

At the strategic level, this means challenging Sunni Arab leaders to build on their common interests with Israel and force a practical regional framework to counter Iran.

Innocent Iranians strike back

Another great fauxtograph. After the Americans accuse them of supplying arms to the insurgents, the Iranians come back with the old You too! beloved of school children the world over.

The Fars news agency published an article saying that home-grown terrorists are being supplied by the US and they have a photo to prove it. The LA Times swallows it and regurgitates it. Charles Johnson and friends demolish it.

Bernard Lewis interview

I have a lot of time for Bernard Lewis because he has a lot of respect for the culture he so often criticises. This long and very interesting interview with the Jerusalem Post is typical.

He's hard on the Iranian regime, but soft on the Iranian bomb. He wants regime change, but not an invasion of Iran. He draws good distinctions. On the bomb.

Look at it from the Iranian point of view: The Russians in the north have it, the Chinese in the east have it, the Pakistanis in the south have it, and the Israelis in the west have it. "Who is to tell us that we must not have it?"

However,

Previously it had some support, but it is now increasingly being realized that this is a method of strengthening the regime, which means that it is bad.

Is a closed system of government inherent in Islam?

No, it is not inherent in Islam. It is inherent in the kind of government under which they have lived for the last 200 years or so. In the earliest stages of Islam, the government was more open. Traditional Islamic governments devoted great importance to consultation, to content, to limited authority, to government under law; all these things are part of the traditional Islamic background.

This is a good question.

A Syrian philosopher published an article not long ago in which he said the only question about the future of Europe is: "Will it be an Islamized Europe or Europeanized Islam?"

Feelgood Khatami at Davos

Mohammad Khatami has been pressing flesh at Davos, specifically that of Yediot Ahronot's senior economic editor, Sever Plotsker.

When Plotsker introduced himself as an Israeli journalist, Mr Khatami shook his hand and said: "I want to visit your country." Israel is listed on Iranian passports as forbidden to visit.

He got all avuncular about Moshe Katsav, the Israeli president, who was born in Iran and may be about face prosecution on several charges of rape.

"Tell me, please, what are you doing over there to my townsman? What are you doing to Moshe, Moshe Katsav?"

And then there was this.

When Plotsker asked about the recent conference of Holocaust deniers in Tehran, Mr Khatami said: "Write my words down exactly. I totally condemn that conference. The Holocaust of the Jewish people was the greatest sin against mankind in our time. There isn't a shadow of a doubt about it being a fact. I recommend to everybody to take this subject off the Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Arab agenda. The Israeli-Palestinian dispute must be solved with consideration of the interests of both sides."

No idea what to make of this. Is it just for Western consumption? Is it reported back home? And was it Khatami who charmed John Kerry's foot back into his mouth?

Kerry criticized the Bush administration's foreign policy during the session, saying it has caused the United States to become 'a sort of international pariah.'

On Iran

Former CIA director James Woolsey at the Herzliya Conference.

On who the Wahhabis hate more: Iran or us

The Wahhabis, al-Qaida, the Vilayat Faqih in Teheran, although often lethally competitive with one another in the way the Nazis and communists were in the 1930s, are capable of unification. Those who say that these movements will never work together because of their ideology are precisely as correct as those who in the 1930s said that the communists and Nazis will never work together. They didn't, until they did.

On approaches to Iran

...there is a very substantial likelihood that if the diplomatic approach failed - and I think it will - and non-violent regime change won't work [in Iran], there is no alternative except for the US to use force.

On the worst option

I agree with [Senator] John McCain: Using force against Iran to stop its nuclear program is the worst option we have, except for [the option of] letting Iran have a nuclear weapon.

A curiosity. There are six Google ads on the page that I arrived on. The first offers analysis of the rumours that Osama bin Laden is dead. The second offers the services of the Shura Corp if you want to

immediately identify explosives and chemicals used in terrorist attacks.

The next three are on politics and security, but the last is very particular. It is selling a glass film that will protect you from shattering windscreen or window glass - it's your Invisible Coat Of Armor.

Must be great living out there.

Rabbit Iran

Another view of the threat from Iran.

Middle East expert Kenneth Katzman argued "Iran's ascendancy is not only manageable but reversible" if one understands the Islamic republic's many vulnerabilities.

Tehran's leaders have convinced many experts Iran is a great nation verging on "superpower" status, but the country is "very weak ... (and) meets almost no known criteria to be considered a great nation," said Katzman of the Library of Congress' Congressional Research Service.

The economy is mismanaged and "quite primitive," exporting almost nothing except oil, he said.
Also, Iran's oil production capacity is fast declining and in terms of conventional military power, "Iran is a virtual non-entity," Katzman added.

The administration, therefore, should not go out of its way to accommodate Iran because the country is in no position to hurt the United States, and at some point "it might be useful to call that bluff," he said.

But Katzman cautioned against early confrontation with Iran and said if there is a "grand bargain" that meets both countries' interests, that should be pursued.

This view of the nation Iran may well be accurate, but you would have put Afghanistan even further down the threat rankings on September 10th, 2001. The damage a nation can do is not to be measured just by its economy and military. If it has the will to harm you and the means are to hand, then it will do so. Iran is already doing so in Iraq, has done so in Lebanon, and will seek to do so in the Palestinian territories. Failing to see any grand bargain in the offing, I would go for the bluff-calling in the near future.

(via Hot Air)

Iraq, Iran, counter-insurgency and school ma'ams

Michelle Malkin and Bryan Preston (of Hot Air) are back from Baghdad and have posts, photos and video to prove it. Michelle Malkin's is more of a pep talk, though she promises big stuff on the AP-Jamil Hussein affair. Bryan Preston's much longer post is excellent, most of it about the mistakes made by the US planners and conceivers up to now. It's worth reading it all.

A point or two from Preston's post.

The Iranians want Iraq to remain unstable and they want us to have to keep a large force there dealing with the insurgents, terrorists and militias, which is why the ISG’s belief that chaos in Iraq is against Iran’s interests was met with such derision by the troops in Iraq. And believe me, it was.

This is going to be one of the most interesting fields of battle to watch in the next few months: how to handle Iran. And Iran must be handled with decisiveness. Having said that, I'm not sure how to follow up. If the Americans could secure the border, they would have done so by now. In any case, I don't think defensive measures will be enough. The Iranians need to be hurt, to feel that it is very risky to continue supplying and supporting the Mahdi Army and whoever else.

The troops in Iraq will tell you about three successful American occupations if you ask them–the Philippines, Japan and Germany. The latter two took five years to go from defeated enemy to ally, and decades after that before they really stood on their own feet. The Philippine insurgency took 8 years to quell and that country still has myriad problems that keep it from enjoying true First World status a century after the US put down its insurgency. Iraq is a far more complex place than either Japan, Germany or the Philippines and should therefore be expected to take longer to make the full transition to standalone state.

He doesn't mention Italy, which had a complexity of its own. Insurgency would not be the right word; it was more a simmering violence that lasted, on and off, for more than three decades. But the Allies stuck at it, and, as one writer to Corriere della Sera says,

Ask yourself what would have happened, in 1945, the war barely over, if the Anglo-American forces had abandoned us to our fate. My hypothesis: after years of civil war, we would have ended up in the hands of the Soviets.

Replace Soviets with Iranians.

The last excerpt is here because it reminded me of one of Marshall McLuhan's peremptory generalisations. Somewhere in Understanding Media, he said that Westerns were about the long battle to create an order in town that permitted a school ma'am to walk down the street in peace. The following quote is a contemporory gloss on the same idea.

The media poo-poos events like the re-opening of schools in Iraq because as defined on American terms, re-opening a school doesn’t mean much at all. But in Iraq, the re-opening of a school represents a community in the end state of achieving normalcy. A community that has a functioning school also has a liveable level of security, it has functioning services like power and water and has families that aren’t so worried about local violence that they won’t send their children outside their homes. It means there are probably jobs in the area, and it means that those jobs give families a level of economic security where they can think about their children’s future. Re-opening a school in Iraq means civil society itself has returned to that school’s community. It’s a big deal.
[emphasis in original]

I am not Osama bin Laden

Michael Totten interviews Sayyed Mohammad Ali El Husseini, a Shia alama who lives in the dahiyeh, the Hezbollah stronghold in Beirut. He is, however, firmly opposed to Hezbollah, wants the Iranians out, is grateful to Bush for getting the Syrians out, is a bit cagey about Israel, approves of the American removal of Saddam Hussein and seems favourably disposed towards democracy, or at least, sees dictatorship as violence. In other words, not your raving Muslim cleric that we can't get enough of. I wish we'd heard from blokes like this during the Cartoons ruckus or similar upheavals in the Arab and Muslim Street.

While I was in Germany, I met a student. He told me that I am a Muslim, that I am a terrorist. I told him that he is the German, that he burned people. I said Why are you talking to me? I didn’t burn anybody. I told him also that I didn’t terrorize anybody, and that I was the first person to condemn what Osama bin Laden did to America on 9/11. I told him that we, the Shia people, in Iraq we were the first victims. Saddam killed civilian people, he cut off our heads, he blew up our houses. I told him that Hitler burned the Jews. Nobody in the world has done what he did. Then I told him we are the same. You are German, and you are not Hitler. I am a Muslim, but I am not Osama bin Laden.”
[Italics in original]

Wish I'd been there for that conversation. About the Hezbollah protests in downtown Beirut

“All of those people,” Husseini said, “most of them, who go to the protest downtown have no work to do. They earn 30 dollars per day.”

“Being downtown they get paid 30 dollars a day?” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “If they had work to do, they will not go down there. This is Iranian money, the green money. Nasrallah talked about it. We must exchange it with government money.”

Iranians on holiday

Bill Roggio on striking at Iran in Iraq.

U.S. forces raided the Iranian consulate in Irbil in northern Iraq, and detained five Iranians, along with computers, documents and other evidence the Iranians were colluding with the Sunni insurgency and Shia death squads.

While Russia decried the raid on the consulate as "a flagrant violation of the Vienna convention on consular relations," Iran admitted "the office did not have formal diplomatic status." The Iraqi and local Kurdish government are pressing for the release of the Iranians, however.

There are lots of Iranians wintering in Iraq at the moment, evidently. Perhaps we should talk to them, find out how we can help them get over the anger.

Not in our name

What Hirsi Ali was asking for in Riyadh, Cairo, Lahore, Khartoum or Jakarta has at least happened in Washington.

Local Muslim leaders lit candles yesterday at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum to commemorate Jewish suffering under the Nazis, in a ceremony held just days after Iran had a conference denying the genocide.

After the speeches yesterday, Bloomfield invited the visitors to light candles to remember the Holocaust victims and Muslims who rescued some of the besieged Jews. One by one, the guests silently shuffled along the wallside bank of candles: the tall imam in his round Muslim cap, known as a kufi; a woman in a Muslim head scarf; Muslim men in business suits; and three elderly women in pantsuits from the D.C. suburbs, survivors of the genocide.

One of them, Johanna Neumann, recounted at the ceremony how Muslims saved her Jewish family. Members of her family had fled from Germany to Albania, where Muslim families sheltered them and hid their identity during the Nazi occupation.

"Everybody knew who we were. Nobody would even have thought of denouncing us" to the Nazis, said the tiny 76-year-old Silver Spring resident. "These people deserve every respect anybody can give them."

Even more important, this ceremony of light was brough about by a Muslim.

The idea for the ceremony originated with Magid, whose Sterling mosque has been active in interfaith efforts. After hearing radio reports about the Iranian meeting, "I said to myself, 'We have to, as Muslim leaders . . . show solidarity with our fellow Jewish Americans,' " Magid recalled after the speeches.

This is the first time I have heard of Muslims organising so publically to say 'Not in my name' in the face of an outrage committed by co-religionists. How come it can happen in the US and not elsewhere?

You may also like to read Anthony Julius and Simon Schama's response to Berger's call for yet another boycott of Israel. They show how the tired old rhetorical trope of comparing Israel to apartheid South Africa is fatuous, misleading and self-defeating, how the aims of such a boycott are meaningless and its motivation questionable. In other words, this latest call is just more blather from a group of people who lost all moral authority many years ago and have little to say that would help anyone, Palestinian or otherwise.

Wake up

Tony Blair speaking yesterday in Dubai.

There is a monumental struggle going on worldwide between those who believe in democracy and modernisation, and forces of reaction and extremism. It is the 21st century challenge. Yet a great part of our own opinion either thinks there is no common theme to it all; or if there is, is inclined to believe that it is our - that is America and its allies - fault that this is so.

In any other situation in which terrorists with almost incredible wickedness butcher completely innocent people, provoke sectarian conflict, spread chaos and despair, in almost any other situation we would say well our response should be to stand up and fight back. In Iraq, in Afghanistan, but seeping across the board, voices instead say: we shouldn't be involved: better leave well alone; it is none of our business.

Here are elements of the Government of Iran openly supporting terrorism in Iraq to stop a fledgling democratic process, trying to turn out a democratically elected Government in Lebanon, flaunting the international community's desire for peace in Palestine - at the same time as denying the Holocaust and trying to acquire a nuclear weapon capability: and yet a huge part of world opinion is frankly almost indifferent. It would be bizarre if it weren't so deadly serious.

We have in my view to wake up...

We should stop buying into this wretched culture of blaming ourselves, of pandering to a wholly imagined grievance on the part of those we are fighting. We should take on the nonsense that says when terrorists who claim to be Muslim kill innocent and true Muslims in Iraq or Afghanistan, that it is somehow the fault of American and British soldiers being present there.

We should proclaim what is so obviously correct, that what holds back the Palestinian people are not those of us striving to make a reality of a stable, viable Palestinian state next door to Israel, but those who pretend to champion that cause but deny the very two state solution that is Palestine's only hope of salvation.

Other Iranians

In the light of events in Tehran this week, an escape into the past and to another Iran.

Abdol Hossein Sardari didn't look like a hero. But when Paris fell to Hitler in June 1940, the 30-year-old Muslim-a dapper man with a receding hairline-took it upon himself to save Jews trapped inside Nazi-occupied France. Sardari, a junior official at the Iranian Embassy, had been left behind to look after the building when the Iranian ambassador and his staff abandoned Paris to establish residence in Vichy, the new home of France's pro-Nazi government. Once the Nazis began rounding up Jews, Sardari, without authorization from his government, made liberal use of the embassy's supply of blank Iranian passports to assign new, non-Jewish identities to those in need, creating his own version of Schindler's list.

Ibrahim Morady, who died this past June in Los Angeles at the age of 95, was one of the hundreds of Jews Sardari helped spare from deportation. "My father moved to Paris from Persia when he was six," recounts his son Fred. Once Morady, a well-to-do rug merchant, had his new identity, he and two colleagues arranged to purchase false papers for about 100 other Jews of Iranian descent. Sardari served as their go-between, passing a bribe to a German official. In return, these Jews were given documents asserting that they were members of "some strange tribe in Iran-Djouguti, or something like that," Fred Morady explains. "I asked my father: 'What does this name mean?' And he said: 'They just made it up.'"

They just made it up. That's what Ahmedinejad organised his conference to say, though his field of reference is a little difference, even if related.

In "How my grandad invented the Holocaust", Eugene peers back at a generation of his family that all but disappeared, pace Ahmadinejad and his "scholars".

Iran (be)heading for leadership battle

According to Michael Ledeen at Pajamas Media, things are on the move in Iran. Supreme Leader Ayatollah ali Khamenei is evidently very close to meeting some of the heroic martyrs he has helped towards dusty death and the blood-letting to decide his successor is well under way. Students are demonstrating on the campus of Tehran University, calling for a “death to despotism,” and “death to the dictator.” Speaking of which,

A week ago, the Majlis (the national assembly) passed a law effectively reducing the presidential term of Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nezhad by a full year. This was universally seen as an attack in favor of former President Hashemi Rafsanjani, Ahmadi-Nezhad’s most visible political rival, and a candidate to succeed Khamenei.

Regime Change Iran has more on the protests here and here, including a photo of a poster reading, “AS IF WE WANT ANYTHING OTHER THAN FREEDOM”.

(via Dinocrat)

Lebanon Q & A

Jeha adds a little dollop of hope to a smorgasboard of worrying maybes.

Excerpts.

Are we moving towards a civil war in Lebanon?
In Lebanon, anyone who grows to big for is own boots is pulled back in by the other groups, who will find plenty of allies in doing so. Willing or unwillingly, we are all minorities in this country; whoever tries to impose their will on the others faces war. With assassinations in Lebanon, and suicides in Syria, we are indeed in the middle of a “cloak and dagger”, stealthy war.

Why hasn’t the “real” shooting started?
Syria’s greed is keeping things quiet, for now. With the new US Congress, our sister is hoping for a return to the buffet, in a “Grand Bargain”. As long as it is hoping to get Lebanon back, it will not break it directly. It may hope to spark civil strife by assassinations, demonstrations, but it will shy away from any larger scale confrontation.

[T]he Syrians are smart enough not to move to a direct confrontation, and would try to initiate another “battle of the marionettes ”. Indeed, the assassination of Pierre Gemayel may have been an attempt at sparking another civil war... The fires of anger were quickly quenched, but one should not expect Syria and Iran to give up so easily.

Will the United States be “Defeated” by Iran or Syria?
[B]efore you chant the “Vietnam” mantra, recall that there was not much oil in Indochina. The United States may have “lost its way” and Israel may be scared , but it is no South Vietnam . And Iran is no Soviet Union.

I am reassured, however, by Amine Gemayel’s stance; coming from a father who had just lost a son, his call to calm and prayer has gone a long to calm passions, and saved us another war. Whatever their fault, many of March 14th leaders, have apparently learned the lessons of the civil war and the occupation.

Meanwhile the marionettes are busy.

Truly scary

Gideon Rachman has an off-the-record interview and is surprised. He outlines the interviewee's background and his own expectations of someone

with longstanding and continuing involvement in the Middle East peace process and personal knowledge of all the major protagonists. So I expected him to say something like this: “The situation is worrying, but there are areas we can make progress in. In particular it is vital to make a new effort on the Israeli-Palestinian problem and to engage Iran and Syria.”

That was from a post on the 9th of November. He mentions the same point in a post today because a commenter had complained about the 'neo-con' nature of the interviewee's views. Rachman reiterates that

the whole point of that reported conversation was precisely that it did not come from the usual neo-con suspects, but from someone with impeccable peacenik credentials. Over the past months I’ve heard similar views not just from the Americans and the Israelis, but from the French and from non-aligned diplomats involved in peace efforts.

What are those views? Well, very similar to those of Walid Phares in the World Defense Review that I posted yesterday. And that, too, is the point.

The interviewee sees the major destabilising force in the region

as an expansionist and over-confident Iran, that is bidding for regional dominance. In his opinion the war in Lebanon over the summer was the “first Israel-Iran war in all but name.” He believes that there will be further Iranian-Israeli wars – perhaps next year.

He believes that

Hizbollah unleashed the fighting, more or less on the direct orders of Tehran. Under pressure because of their nuclear plans, “the Iranians wanted to show that they could destabilise the region just like that”. The Iranians are also using their nuclear programme to further their regional ambitions. A regional nuclear arms race is already beginning.

He has met Ahmadinejad

and describes him as “truly scary”. He adds that he is used to dealing with populist Arab leaders, “but when you talk to them in private, they are usually quite reasonable and rational. Ahmadi-Nejad is not like that.” His impression is that Ahmadi-Nejad is now calling the shots in Iran, and has intimidated the moderates into silence: “They are all scared of him.”

The Saudis, the Jordanians and the Egyptians have told him that they expect all this to end in war. Not only that

They are also much more concerned about Iran than Israel, because “they know that Israel is not really an expansionist power”. Indeed the moderate Arab states would like to form a de facto alliance with Israel to contain Iran – but opinion on the “Arab street” prevents them from doing it.

And finally,

The next round of the struggle will kick off internally in Lebanon.