“There has been sanctions legislation before. There have not been sanctions before,” Ted Deutch (D-Florida) told The Jerusalem Post Tuesday after appearing on a panel addressing Iran sanctions organized by the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

“You’ll see over the coming days and weeks a real emphasis on ensuring that the comprehensive bill that was just passed is actually implemented, that the timelines are met, that the companies are identified, that ultimately sanctions are imposed on those companies.”

The commitment to implementation in a bid to stop Iran’s nuclear program is shared “across the political spectrum on Capitol Hill,” and that “right now the sense of urgency is great,” Deutch said. …

“If you look at the oversight and government reform committee, there are very few foreign policy issues that appear on its agenda,” said Mark Dubowitz, executive director of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, who testified Thursday at a Congressional hearing.

“I would say Congress is obsessed with this issue and relentless in getting their laws enforced, certainly in a way that we haven’t seen in 15 years” of legislation on the subject.

These supply disruptions -- and the specter of more to come -- have begun to buffet the Islamic republic’s already rickety economy.

[to] delay Iran’s nuclear program by sabotaging its procurement efforts and driving a wedge between the regime and the people.

This should not be an arduous task: since years of incompetent economic mismanagement and growing repression have created an already unbridgeable gap between the regime and its people, sanctions should aim to broaden that gap even further. Economic pressure must increase the already widespread discontent. …

If accompanied by a robust public diplomacy effort designed to keep the Iranian public informed, sanctions can further alienate them from their rulers.

[T]wo new bills are being designed to use the disinfectant of sunlight to help apply public pressure and, in many cases, give overworked government officials information they can use to shut down activities that run afoul of the law. …

Mark Dubowitz, executive director of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies … has identified joint ventures and other partnerships Iranian government-controlled entities have with foreign companies in energy projects off the coast of Scotland, in Croatia, Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan and India.

Even that, he notes, “probably barely scratches the surface of Iran’s foreign partnerships and investments.”

Rep. Ron Klein, Florida Democrat, who plans to introduce the joint-venture legislation this week, thinks his bill will help steer companies through a simple cost-benefit analysis. “Our provision says that companies must make a choice,” Mr. Klein explains: “Either do business with the U.S. government or do business with Iran, not both.”

is under serious pressure. Passage of weak U.N. sanctions was followed by unilateral sanctions by the United States, Canada, Australia and the European Union. Already, reports Reuters, Iran is experiencing a sharp drop in gasoline imports as Lloyd’s of London and other players refuse to insure the ships delivering them. …

All this pressure would be enough to rattle a regime already unsteady and shorn of domestic legitimacy. Hence Ahmadinejad’s otherwise inscrutable warning about an Israeli attack on two countries. (Said Defense Minister Ehud Barak to Fox News: “Who is the second one?”) It is a pointed reminder to the world of Iran’s capacity to trigger, through Hezbollah and Syria, a regional conflagration.

This is the kind of brinkmanship you get when leaders of a rogue regime are under growing pressure. The only hope to get them to reverse course is to relentlessly increase their feeling that, if they don’t, the Arab states, Israel, the Europeans and America will, one way or another, ensure that ruin is visited upon them.

Whether the erroneous conclusions in the 2007 NIE proceeded from Iranian deception or American self-deception, they undercut the case for taking more drastic action against Tehran. To the degree that other countries believed Iran had ended its nuclear program, they had little incentive to join us in imposing further sanctions.

is really to “symbolize interfaith cooperation,” if it’s really to be an “inter-religious center,” a 13-story home for “multi-faith collaboration,” should it not contain a synagogue and a church as well as a mosque?

I would recommend putting each on a different floor. On the highest floor, let’s put the church -- since Christians founded this great nation of ours. One floor down, let’s put a synagogue, since Jews were among the earliest immigrants to find religious freedom in America. And one floor farther down, we’d have the mosque, a place for a newer generation of immigrants to gather and worship freely.

Here’s my guess: If you propose this to [project organizer Imam Feisal] Abdul Rauf, emphasizing, as you have in the past, the First Amendment rule that the government “shouldn’t be in the business of picking” one religion over another, he will nonetheless refuse. He will offer all sorts of explanations, but the truth, I suspect, is that he believes that Islam is not “one of the world’s great religions” but rather the only true religion, that others are false and wicked. He will find it blasphemous that you want this center to give equal status to Christianity and Judaism. And he will see putting a church and synagogue on higher floors as symbolizing more than equality.

“[I]t’s a Muslim facility. We’re building a community center that serves the needs, cultural expectations and goals of knitting together segments of the Muslim community, who oft feel disenfranchised, with the larger community of lower Manhattan.”

Excellent article. I am of Arab descent (both set of grandparents immigrated from Lebanon) Muslims around the world should speak out against their extremists brothers and sisters and respect the thousands who lost their lives that terrible day.

“unavailable” and huddled in an important meeting in Malaysia … Some Americans are left grieving afresh, and many are left guessing, while the mysteries multiply. At least part of the answer lies in such details as where is the money coming from. For that matter, where is Imam Feisal looking for it? And when will he make himself available to tell us all about it?

Gingrich grasps that there is an enemy here and that it is a mortal threat to freedom. He knows that if we are to remain a free people, it is an enemy we must defeat. That enemy is Islamism, and its operatives -- whether they come as terrorists or stealth saboteurs -- are the purveyors of sharia, Islam’s authoritarian legal and political system.

Gingrich is going about the long-overdue business of resetting our understanding of the civilizational jihad that has been waged against the United States for some 31 years. It is the jihad begun when Islamists overran the American embassy in Tehran, heralding a revolutionary regime that remains the No. 1 U.S. security challenge in the Middle East, as Gingrich argued Thursday in a provocative speech at the American Enterprise Institute.

The single purpose of this jihad is the imposition of sharia. On that score, Gingrich made two points of surpassing importance. First, some Islamists employ mass-murder attacks while others prefer a gradual march through our institutions -- our legal, political, academic, and financial systems, as well as our broader culture; the goal of both, though, is the same. The stealth Islamists occasionally feign outrage at the terrorists, but their quarrel is over methodology and pace. Both camps covet the same outcome.

Second, that outcome is the death of freedom. In Islamist ideology, sharia is deemed to be the necessary precondition for Islamicizing a society -- for Islam is not merely a religious doctrine, but a comprehensive socio-economic and political system. As the former speaker elaborated, sharia embodies principles and punishments that are abhorrent to Western values. Indeed, its foundational premise is anti-American, holding that we are not free people at liberty to govern ourselves irrespective of any theocratic code, that people are instead beholden to the Islamic state, which is divinely enjoined to impose Allah’s laws. …

Islamists, violent or not, have very good reasons for wanting to destroy the West. Those reasons are not crazy or wanton -- and they have nothing to do with Gitmo, Israel, cartoons, or any other excuse we conjure to explain the savagery away. …

The main front in the war is not Afghanistan or Iraq but the United States. The war is about the survival of Western civilization, and we should make no apologies for the fact that the West’s freedom culture is a Judeo-Christian culture -- a fact that was unabashedly acknowledged, Gingrich reminded his audience, by FDR and Churchill.

recruiting virgin women for prostitution in a brothel located in the holiest site of one of the two holiest cities in Iran: the Imam Reza Shrine in Mashad.

The Taliban’s supreme leader, Mullah Omar, has ordered his forces to kill or capture any civilians, including Afghan women, who cooperate with Coalition forces.

[WikiLeaks head Julian] Assange says he is a journalist, but he is not. He is an activist, and to what end it is not clear. This week -- as when he released a video in April showing American helicopter gunships killing Iraqi civilians in 2007 -- he has been throwing around the term “war crimes,” but offers no context for the events he is judging. It seems that the death of any civilian in war, an unavoidable occurrence, is a “crime.”

The Pakistani army and the ISI [Pakistani intelligence] are now at war with their country’s jihadists, especially the Pashtun Islamists who make up the Pakistani Taliban. Lots of military and intelligence officers have now died in this conflict. The impulse to backtrack is no doubt still there -- an impulse made much more powerful by Americans who want to wash their hands of Afghanistan, and who somehow believe that Pakistan will be no worse off with an American withdrawal. … The militant forces in Pakistan, especially within the army and the civilian bureaucracy, who have argued all along that the Americans would leave defeated, would be supercharged.

To a great extent, Al Qaeda has already become a subcontinent terrorist organization (although its global ambitions remain undiminished). If there is one thing that the Americans could do to globalize the ambitions of the “new” Afghan Taliban and the radical Pakistani groups that have already shown an appetite and capacity for terrorism, abandoning those in Pakistan -- especially within the army and the ISI -- who have decided to fight their own demons is probably the best way to do it. We may all be tired of an “endless” war, but we really should have enough imagination left to see history repeating itself.

[T]he army (of which the ISI is the intelligence wing) sees itself as the guarantor of the world’s first nation created purely on the basis of Islam. Its motto: “Faith, Piety and Jihad in the Path of Allah.” Historically, even those generals who have had no interest in turning Pakistan into an Islamist state by formally applying Shariah law -- among them the dictators Ayub Khan and Pervez Musharraf -- have championed aggression toward Pakistan’s neighbors, primarily India and Afghanistan.

For Islamist-leaning generals, the army’s rank and file and most of the fervently anti-American Pakistani masses, bloodying America in Afghanistan represents a triumph over the infidel akin to what they experienced in 1989 when the last Soviet troops limped home. For the more secular minded, it gives Pakistan the so-called strategic depth it has long sought against its much larger neighbor India. ...

What, then, is the solution? In the short term, America can continue to nudge Pakistan to give up its support of the likes of the Taliban, Hekmatyar and Jalaluddin Haqqani through a combination of the carrot of aid and the sticks of stepped-up drone strikes and regular public admonishment. But in the long term, the problem the country poses to the region and the world will not change until Pakistan ceases to be what the Singaporean scholar Tan Tai Yong has termed a garrison state.

Pakistan has paid a terrible price for its commitment to fight terrorism. More Pakistanis have been killed by terrorism in the last two years than the number of civilians who died in New York’s Twin Towers. Over the past nine years more Pakistani than NATO troops have lost their lives fighting the Taliban. Two thousand Pakistani police have been killed; our mosques and hotels have been savagely attacked; scores of billion dollars of foreign investment were frozen; and tens of billions of dollars of funding for education and health have been diverted to the battlefield against the extremists. …

This is Pakistan’s war as much as it is a battle for civilization. Pakistan’s very existence and traditional way of life are at stake. We fight alongside our friends from all over the world to protect freedom.

The Cambodian genocide is especially worth recalling today not only for what it was, but for the public debates in the West that immediately preceded it. “The greatest gift our country can give to the Cambodian people is peace, not guns,” said then-congressman, now senator, Chris Dodd, by way of making the case against the Ford administration’s bid to extend military assistance to the pro-American government of Lon Nol.

In the New York Times, Sydney Schanberg reported from Cambodia that “it is difficult to imagine how [Cambodian] lives could be anything but better with the Americans gone.” Mr. Schanberg added that “it would be tendentious to forecast [genocide] as a national policy under a Communist government once the war is over.”

A year later, Mr. Schanberg was awarded a Pulitzer Prize, though not for tendentiousness.

All in all, America’s withdrawal from Southeast Asia resulted in the killing of an estimated 165,000 South Vietnamese in so-called re-education camps; the mass exodus of one million boat people, a quarter of whom died at sea; the mass murder, estimated at 100,000, of Laos’s Hmong people; and the killing of somewhere between one million and two million Cambodians.

nine influential American Muslim scholars have come together in a YouTube video to repudiate the militants’ message. …

Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, director of the Center for the Study of Terrorist Radicalization at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said of the video: “It can be a powerful outlet. It is the kind of thing that, format-wise, is matching what’s being done by the jihadist groups.”

He said that some of the scholars in the video were politically controversial but had credibility among many Muslims because they were not seen as “sell-outs.”

“Some would argue that they might be more effective than those perceived as more establishment figures,” said Mr. Gartenstein-Ross, the author of “My Year Inside Radical Islam.”

It was reported last year that up to 100 potential terrorists had attempted to become postgraduate students in Britain in an attempt to use laboratories.

Ian Kearns, from the Institute for Public Policy Research, told the newspaper: “The biological weapons threat is not going away. We’re not ready for it.”

The United States believes Russia is not fully complying with international pacts involving chemical and biological weapons … according to a State Department report …

The document says the U.S. government does not believe Russia is in compliance with the Chemical Weapons Convention because it has not declared all its stockpiles nor destroyed those it has acknowledged, despite a 1997 plan to do so.

The report also says Russia may not be in compliance with the international convention banning biological weapons. Russia committed in 1992 to dismantle a secret biological weapons program it inherited from the Soviet Union. Although Russia has said it is in compliance, it has “not satisfactorily documented whether this program was terminated,” according to the report.

Admitting the treaty is mediocre and denouncing missile defense (which remains the only way to protect America if a missile is launched) aren’t decent arguments for the treaty.

What makes linkage so useful to Western leaders is that it is a cheap way of reaching out to Arab hard-liners. …

To be sure, American support for Israel “angers” many in the Muslim and Arab world. But that only invites the question as to what else America does that also “angers” Muslims. Certainly the decriminalization of homosexuality by the Supreme Court disgusted many Muslims, at least judging by the responses to the decision in much of the Muslim media, and from Muslim clerics. Should we “link” the affirmation of gay rights to the success of our diplomatic efforts in the Middle East? And certainly many Muslims consider the decision by the electorates of some American states to recognize gay marriage an affront as well. Ought we to start beheading homosexuals -- the preferred way of dealing with them in Saudi Arabia -- to win the approval of the Muslim street? Where does this appeasement -- and there really is no other word for it -- of reactionary Muslim attitudes end? And what does it say about those in the West who would point to the words of Islamic fascists as rationale for their own policy prescriptions? …

Indeed, the frivolity of the linkage theory is apparent in the selectivity of the outrage it provokes. Why is it that Israeli apartment construction in East Jerusalem, and not, say, the mass killing of Muslims in Sudan, stirs the hearts of the Arab world? …

The reason why Israel is pointed to as the cause of so much Arab and Muslim rage is that it’s the most easily available excuse. The shopworn (and false) narrative of Jews living on stolen “Muslim land” (as if land could actually be claimed by a faith) is one that can be peddled to Muslim populations around the world, regardless of denomination. …

It is one thing to say that the Palestinian people deserve a state. It is another thing entirely to say that their lack of having one is in any way responsible for bombings in Bali, Baghdad, or Bagram. … One can be an adamant supporter of Palestinian statehood and a foe of Israeli settlement construction while also realizing the ulterior motives behind those who propagate the myth of linkage. …

“A Muslim has no nationality except his belief,” the intellectual godfather of the Islamists, Egyptian Sayyid Qutb, wrote decades ago. Qutb’s “children” are everywhere now; they carry the nationalities of foreign lands and plot against them. The Pakistani born Faisal Shahzad is a devotee of Sayyid Qutb’s doctrine, and Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, was another. ...

This is a long twilight war, the struggle against radical Islamism. We can’t wish it away. No strategy of winning “hearts and minds,” no great outreach, will bring this struggle to an end. America can’t conciliate these furies. These men of nowhere -- Faisal Shahzad, Nidal Malik Hasan, the American-born renegade cleric Anwar Awlaki now holed up in Yemen and their likes -- are a deadly breed of combatants in this new kind of war. Modernity both attracts and unsettles them. America is at once the object of their dreams and the scapegoat onto which they project their deepest malignancies.

No, Prime Minister. Gaza is not a prison camp. It is a terrorist camp.

That may win the new British government some points in Ankara. But the price will be paid by Israel, which has just seen the international campaign to delegitimize it gain a little more momentum.

If Mr Cameron really wants to make a valuable contribution to the Middle East, he would be better advised to call on Hamas to recognise Israel’s right to exist, and stop firing its rockets at Israeli civilians.

comments may have gone down well with an increasingly Islamist government in Ankara which is rapidly turning against the West, but they will seriously damage relations with Israel. They also fail to condemn the real source of Gaza’s problems -- the reign of terror carried out by Hamas -- a brutal terrorist organisation backed by Tehran and Damascus. …

IN THEIR OWN WORDS

IN THE MEDIA