IRANIAN OFFICIALS CONVICTED OF CORRUPTION TO BE WHIPPED, JAILED, FINED. Three directors of the state-run National Iranian Gas Company convicted of receiving bribes have been given jail and whipping sentences, judiciary spokesman Alireza Jamshidi told a press conference in Tehran on January 15. He said their sentences have to be confirmed by a higher court. Jamshidi said a judiciary department handling corruption cases gave the three unnamed directors 10-year prison terms and fines, ordered them to be whipped 74 times each, and banned them from state-sector service for life. They were convicted of receiving bribes from contractors over various projects. Jamshidi said each convict is to repay the state about $2.5 million, ISNA reported. Jamshidi added that two contractors involved in the case have been fined and given three-year jail terms. VS

IRANIAN NEWS AGENCY SUSPECTS TURKMENISTAN EMULATING RUSSIA IN GAS DEALS. ISNA reported on January 15 that the price of natural gas that Turkmenistan sells to Iran has risen from $42 per 1,000 cubic meters over the past two years to $75, and observed that "this little exporter" may now be emulating Russia by using gas as a means to pressure Iran and force it to pay even more. Turkmenistan cut supplies of gas to Iran despite sub-freezing temperatures late in December 2007. Iranian Oil and Gas Minister Gholamhossein Nozari said recently that talks on raising the price for Turkmen gas to $140 will resume only when supplies are restored. The news agency reported that Russia's Gazprom has raised the price it pays Turkmenistan for gas from $100 to $130 per 1,000 cubic meters. Gas supplies have given Russia some political leverage in the past with importers like the EU and neighbors Belarus and Ukraine. ISNA added that the head of the Iranian parliament's Energy Committee, Kamal Daneshyar, has suggested taking Turkmenistan to an international court for cutting off Iran's gas supplies. Separately, Ahmad Nurani, a trade official or attache at the Iranian Embassy in Ankara, has said Iran plans to export gas to Turkey through a separate pipeline to prevent a repetition of the recent cut in gas exports, Fars reported on January 15, citing Turkish newspapers. Nurani said Iran halted exports to Turkey recently because export gas was running through Iran's domestic, nationwide gas supply system, which saw a fall in pressure and interruptions due to rising demand. VS

U.S. COMMANDER SAYS PAKISTAN READY TO FOCUS ON COUNTERINSURGENCY NEAR AFGHAN BORDER. Speaking to reporters on January 16 in St. Petersburg, Florida, U.S. Navy Admiral William Fallon, commander of U.S. Central Command, said that recent violence and instability inside Pakistan has prompted Pakistani leaders to conclude that they must focus more intensively on Al-Qaeda hideouts near the border with Afghanistan, Afghan and international media reported. He viewed this as a significant shift from Pakistan's historical focus on India as a source of threats to its national security and much more in line with U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates' recent comment that Al-Qaeda terrorists hiding in the border area are increasingly aiming their campaign of violence at targets inside Pakistan. "My sense is there is an increased willingness to address these problems, and we're going to try to help them," Fallon said, adding that the U.S. assistance would be "more robust," but refusing to discuss details. A U.S. military incursion into Pakistani territory to combat Taliban and Al-Qaeda militants remains a highly sensitive subject among Pakistanis. MM

A Congressman for Jihad

By Robert Spencer
FrontPageMagazine.com | 1/17/2008

Former U.S. Congressman Mark Deli Siljander (R-MI) was indicted Wednesday for money laundering, conspiracy and obstruction of justice, in connection with charges that a Muslim charity, the Islamic American Relief Agency (IARA), was involved in efforts to finance the Afghan jihad terrorist Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. The IARA was named a specially designated global terrorist organization by the U.S. Treasury Department in 2004.

John F. Wood, U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Missouri, declared: “An organization right here in the American heartland allegedly sent funds to Pakistan for the benefit of a specially designated global terrorist with ties to al-Qaeda and the Taliban…. The indictment also alleges that a former congressman engaged in money laundering and obstruction of a federal investigation in an effort to disguise IARA’s misuse of taxpayer money that the government had provided for humanitarian purposes.”

According to the indictment, the IARA sent around $130,000 to bank accounts controlled by its parent organization, the Islamic Relief Agency (ISRA), in Peshawar, Pakistan, where the money went to Hekmatyar’s activities. The ISRA’s headquarters are in Khartoum, Sudan, with the Columbia, Missouri-based IARA as its American office until it was shut down. According to the Treasury Department, “IARA is formerly affiliated with Maktab Al-Khidamat (MK), which was co-founded and financed by UBL [Osama bin Laden] and is the precursor organization of al Qaida.” The IARA has also funneled money to Hamas.

How did an American congressman get mixed up with a group co-founded and financed by Osama bin Laden? The indictment charges that the IARA hired Siljander in 2004 to lobby for its removal from a Senate Finance Committee list of organizations suspected of supporting terrorism, and reinstatement as an “approved government contractor.” The IARA, according to the indictment, paid in $50,000 that had been stolen from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) – and Siljander is also charged with helping to launder other money stolen from USAID. The IARA, then known as the Islamic African Relief Agency, had received the funds for relief work in Mali. Questioned by the FBI in December 2005 and April 2007, Siljander lied, says the indictment, about his connections with the IARA – he told agents that he had not been hired by IARA and had simply received “donations” from them to help him write a book about Islam and Christianity.

And that may provide a clue as to what may have led Siljander down this path, or how he justified it to himself. In a revealing November 2007 address, Siljander described how his thought evolved, and spoke of his forthcoming book, A Deadly Misunderstanding: A Congressman’s Quest to Bridge the Muslim-Christian Divide, which was set to be published this summer. Siljander said that during his tenure in Congress (1981-1987), he was angry when the Qur’an was read during the National Prayer Breakfast. He wrote to the Breakfast’s emcee: “How can you read the book of the devil at a prayer breakfast?”

Afterward, however, he began to read the Qur’an himself, and was impressed: “I found out that Jesus was mentioned in the Quran 110 times, either directly or indirectly, and there was not a single word about Jesus that was horrible, disgraceful or, in my opinion, inconsistent with what the Bible says about him.” He explained that he had discovered “paradigm crashing” ways to harmonize Christian and Islamic beliefs on issues on which the two religions disagree, and hoped they would “create a movement, a dynamic” to bring Christians and Muslims together.

Siljander also spoke about his meeting with Sudan’s Omar al-Bashir, one of the architects of the Darfur tragedy, when he went to Sudan for the UN in 2006 to mediate the Darfur conflict. Al-Bashir was so impressed with his “paradigm crashing” views of Islam and Christianity, said Siljander, that he had him address the Khartoum Sharia Law School. “We were the first white American Christians to speak on a Friday afternoon at the Khartoum mosque,” Siljander noted. “That happened, not because we’re so good looking, but because we built bridges of respect.”

Siljander’s lying to FBI agents about the nature of his relationship with the IARA suggests that he had no illusions about what he had gotten into. Still, it may be that his indictment today is the bitter fruit of his naivete. Siljander would not be the first naïve Westerner to establish, out of zeal to build bridges of respect between Muslims and Christians, ties with Muslims who had a far deeper connection to the global jihad than he would ever have imagined. Siljander’s experience should also serve as a cautionary tale for all who pursue “bridge-building” and “dialogue”: while these may be laudable, they are beset with pitfalls, and the universal purveying of the politically correct fiction that Islam is a religion of peace that has been hijacked by a tiny minority of extremists has only had the effect of leading many to grow complacent about many areas in which jihadists are actively operating – notably, Islamic charities. Were there a more forthright and honest public discussion of the elements of Islam that jihadists use among peaceful Muslims to recruit and motivate terrorists, Siljander may never have succumbed to the naïvete that he manifested in his November 2007 address.

If he was really naïve at all. Columnist Debbie Schlussel opines that Siljander is less naïve than greedy. Having worked with him in his Congressional office in the 1980s, she remembers him before his change of heart, and recalls that he was a “Born-Again Evangelical Christian. We had fast days in his office. There were prayer circles. So deeply religious and so deeply against the Islamic threat, Siljander was known, at the time, as the most pro-Israel Congressman on Capitol Hill, with many Jewish and pro-Israel Evangelical contributors from all over the world.” She said that Siljander “was decades ahead of his time in understanding the Islamist threat worldwide and to America. That he’d reverse course sickens and saddens me.”

Schlussel doubts Siljander’s story of the evolution of his thought concerning Islam. “I don’t believe he thinks any differently about Islam — and this is all phony…He was just too enlightened about what Islam was all about when I worked for him to change for anything but cash.” At her website she wrote: “I think this was about money. Since he lost his Congressional seat, he was hard up for money and was involved in many failed business ventures, including an AIDS-Test-By-Mail. (He also ran, unsuccessfully, for Congress from Virginia.) Desperation and money do bad things.”

Ultimately, whether he was motivated by a naïve hope to bridge the gap between the Muslim world and the West, or by a simple need for money, or by something else, the outcome is the same: if the charges are true, Siljander was working with people dedicated to the destruction of the United States, and working to that end under the guise of charitable activity while funding violent jihad against Israel and against American troops in Afghanistan. It may be that he is among the multitudes in America today who fail to take this threat seriously – after all, there has not been a major terror attack on American soil since 9/11. It may be that, if he was aware of the IARA’s activities on behalf of Hamas and in Sudan, that he saw both – again like so many multitudes of Americans -- as regional conflicts with no geopolitical significance beyond those regions. Had he had a full and informed awareness of how Islamic charities, because of the nature of Islamic charitable giving and the status of jihad in Islam, are so often tied to jihadist activity, he might have hesitated to get involved with the IARA, even though it did bill itself as a “relief agency.” Had he had a comprehensive understanding of the jihad ideology, and an appreciation of the significance of some of the IARA’s choices of venue for its labors, he might have thought twice – unless, of course, the money was good enough to overcome even that. America fights against global jihadists with, thanks to the oil weapon, an essentially inexhaustible supply of income. The Saudis in particular use that money to buy armies of Mark Siljanders – lobbyists who fight for their causes in Washington with complete ignorance of or indifference to the ways in which our own national interests are thus compromised.

The best outcome of the Mark Siljander indictment would be an investigation of those lobbying efforts, and the framing of new laws that would require complete transparency as to the origin of the funds used by Muslim groups to pay such lobbyists. The case should also lead to a comprehensive reevaluation of Islamic charities, and a call to those still operating to cooperate fully with investigations of the jihadist money trail.

If the charges against him are true, Siljander’s story is a tragedy. But it could yet bear good fruit, in an American public newly prepared to meet the multifaceted challenge of the global Islamic jihad.
Robert Spencer is a scholar of Islamic history, theology, and law and the director of Jihad Watch. He is the author of seven books, eight monographs, and hundreds of articles about jihad and Islamic terrorism, including the New York Times Bestsellers The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) and The Truth About Muhammad. His latest book is Religion of Peace?.

Reform Immigration Policy
By Newt Gingrich
Posted: Wednesday, January 16, 2008

ARTICLES
Washington Times
Publication Date: January 16, 2008


Senior Fellow
Newt Gingrich

The last of two excerpts of the book Real Change: From the World That Fails to the World That Works. Click here to view the first excerpt.

Our current immigration troubles are almost entirely problems of success. Our challenge is to seize that success and turn it into a boon for America, rather than allow bureaucrats to turn it into yet another failure.

America has the best economy in the world. America has the greatest opportunity for hardworking people to be upwardly mobile and to dream that their children can have even better lives. America creates jobs on a scale that Europe and Japan envy. In fact, America creates more jobs than there are Americans to fill them.

There is a clear path to an effective immigration solution that is better for America and better for immigrants. The challenge is to get the elites to listen to the American people.

For four hundred years, since the first European immigrants landed at Jamestown, America has attracted energetic, ambitious people from all over the world. If we adopt the right economic policies and the American economy continues to be the most productive and prosperous, we will continue to draw people from around the world.

This is a good challenge. It is better to be the country people want to join than the country people want to leave. It is better to have the highest standard of living in the neighborhood than the lowest. It is better to have hardworking, energetic, ambitious people clamoring to join you than to have them seeking desperately to leave.

However, this opportunity requires a level of honesty from our political elites that they have not delivered. There has been more demagoguery and less honest dialogue about immigration than about any other topic in the last six years. The elites desperately try to ignore the needs of the American people and close their ears to demands for reform. The American people are furious at the elites because they have lied about immigration and lied about what we need to do to fix our immigration system.

In 1986 I voted for the Simpson-Mazzoli immigration bill because we were told it would solve the problem of massive illegal immigration. In his diaries, President Ronald Reagan said he was going to sign the bill because we had to regain control of our borders. The Simpson-Mazzoli bill contained three promises:

The government would make a concerted effort to control the borders.
An effective employer verification program would ensure that only legal workers were hired.
One-time amnesty would be granted for people illegally in the United States.
All three promises were broken. The government has made no serious effort to control our borders. It has made no serious effort to develop and implement an effective employer verification program. There are millions more in our country illegally today (twelve to twenty million) than there were in 1986. And we are now facing yet another flurry of amnesty proposals. Today's popular anger with the elites stems from the twenty-year failure of the government to keep the promises made in the Simpson-Mazzoli bill.

There is a clear path to an effective immigration solution that is better for America and better for immigrants. The challenge is to get the elites to listen to the American people.

I owe a lot to Helen Krieble and the Krieble Foundation for their groundbreaking work in listening to the American people and trying to find a solution that meets our values and would be acceptable to the vast majority of Americans. Republican congressman Mike Pence deserves a lot of credit for working with the Krieble Foundation. Had President Bush worked with Congressman Pence and Republican senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, there might well have been a successful immigration reform bill in 2006.

Unfortunately, the Washington elites have agreed on a definition of success that is infuriating to the average American. The elites on the left oppose border control, oppose English as the official government language, oppose expanding legal immigration, and want to find a way to allow everyone here illegally to stay, all while prohibiting illegal immigration in the future. The country is convinced that this so-called solution is incompatible with American values and will weaken America's future.

In trying to force their left-wing solution on a country that rejects it, the elite have resorted to describing their critics as racist, xenophobic, unrealistic, and much worse. Those attacks are merely a sign of the elites' desperation.

Becoming American

One of the biggest gaps between the elites and the average American is on the issue of American civilization, American history, and English as the official language of government.

Elites on the left have worked furiously to eliminate American history from school curricula (or to teach contempt for a pro-America version of American history). They have opposed English as the dominant language. They have rejected assimilation into America in favor of a multicultural system with no norms. The American people reject all these attitudes as undermining American unity.

This cultural struggle over the future of America--and the very definition of America--underlies the immigration fight. The gap between the leftist elites and the rest of America could hardly be broader.

By 87 percent to 11 percent, the American people favor English as the official language of government. Even when they learn that this designation might mean no longer printing ballots or any other government document in a foreign language, they still support English as the official language by 74 percent to 23 percent.

Overwhelmingly, by 83 percent to 17 percent, Americans believe new immigrants should be required to learn English. The American people are willing to pay for their belief in English. By 83 percent to 15 percent, they would support a program offering intensive English instruction to all who need it, including stipends to help immigrants attend the program. Americans are also prepared to allow businesses to require employees to speak English while on the job (80 percent to 17 percent).

On all these topics there is a huge gap between the news media, the academic Left, and left-wing politicians on one side and the overwhelming majority of Americans on the other.

Newt Gingrich is a senior fellow at AEI.