Ambassador (ret.) Yoram Ettinger is author of “Second Thought: a US-Israel Initiative” bit.ly/4lO4N5s
Is Syria’s Abu Muhammad al-Julani (Ahmed al-Sharaa) a terrorist in a Western suit, dissimulating Western policy makers, who are frustrated by the well-documented Middle East reality of 1,400-year-old ideology and religion-driven intra-Muslim and intra-Arab wars and terrorism, and are eager to replace it with a speculative alternate reality of money-driven peaceful coexistence, undermining Western interests?
Or, is he a reformed terrorist, an ideologue-turned-pragmatist, who is attempting to stabilize the highly fragmented Syria, and advance domestic and regional peaceful coexistence, advancing Western interests?
*The state-of-mind and vision of non-democratic Middle East leaders, such as al-Sharaa, the PA’s Mahmoud Abbas and the Ayatollah regime are most authentically represented by their school curriculum, Friday sermons in the mosques, official media and (positive or negative) interaction with domestic and external terrorist entities.
*Therefore, Western policy makers should precondition any gestures toward al-Sharaa (e.g., suspension of economic sanctions and renewal of diplomatic relations) upon uprooting anti-“infidel,” anti-“apostate,” anti-Western and anti-Israel hate education, hate sermons and hate media, as well as the termination of all ties with domestic and global terror entities. Western gestures should also be preconditioned upon an official public disavowal of the Muslim Brotherhood’s and the Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham’s ideology of toppling all national Muslim regimes, bringing the Western “infidel” to submission, and establishing Islam as the only legitimate and divinely-ordained religion in the world.
*Western expectations would be more realistic upon studying precedents of Middle East dissimulations, which have misguided Western policy makers into self-destructive policies. For example:
In July 2000, Bashar al-Assad became Syria’s leader, charming the West by his soft rhetoric and his background as a London-based ophthalmologist, married to a Britain-born Syrian woman, president of the Syrian Internet Association and speaking a few foreign languages. He was welcomed by the US State Department, the British Foreign Office and France’s Quai d’Orsay as a potential reformer, aiming to liberalize Syria and defuse Middle East violence.
Bashar Assad befriended Senator John Kerry and a few additional US legislators and managed to launch intelligence cooperation with some European countries. In 2008, he was invited by French President Sarkozy as a guest of honour at the official Bastille Day military parade on the Champs Elysees.
Contrary to the Western alternate reality, Bashar revealed himself to be more demonic than his ruthless father, triggering a civil war, in 2011, which claimed over 500,000 casualties, 7 million refugees and a similar number of domestically displace people.
In 1978, Ayatollah Khomeini surrounded himself with young, bright and eloquent Iranian graduates of Western universities, who spoke a number of foreign languages, instructing them to brief the State Department, the CIA, the US “elite” media and the US embassies in Tehran and Paris, showering these target audiences with (dis)information on Khomeini’s anti-Soviet and pro-US worldview, preoccupation with freedom for the Iranian people, limiting the planned Islamic Revolution to the boundaries of Iran, and commitment to peaceful co-existence with Iran’s Sunni neighbors.
The White House, State Department and the CIA were coaxed into brutally pressuring the anti-Khomeini Iranian military to facilitate Khomeini’s toppling of the Shah, and concluding that “Khomeini would be preoccupied with tractors, not tanks,” and that “Khomeini would be an Iranian edition of Gandhi.”
Refuting Western alternate reality-driven expectations, the fanatic ideology-driven Khomeini proceeded to execute a significant number of top military officers, and then took over the US Embassy, holding 50 Americans hostage for 444 days. Already in 1979, he transformed Iran from “The US Policeman of the Gulf” to the leading epicenter of anti-US terrorism, drug trafficking, money laundering and the proliferation of advanced military systems.
In 1993, Arafat issued peaceful statements - to Western, not Arab, audiences - which bamboozled an Israeli government and the Western foreign policy establishment, leading an arch-terrorist to the Nobel Prize for Peace. It, also, led Tom Friedman to describe Arafat as a reformed-terrorist transformed into a peace-pursuing statesman, consistent with his reference to Arafat (while serving as the N.Y. Times Bureau Chief in Lebanon, 1984-1988) as a “Teflon Guerrilla”, “Gipper” and a “Rock Star.”
While the Western foreign policy establishment tend to sacrifice Middle East reality on the altar of alternate reality, embracing the proposed Palestinian Arab state, all pro-US Arab regimes are entrenched in Middle East reality, aware of the Palestinian Arab track record, which has transformed them into a role model of intra Arab subversion, terrorism and treachery. Therefore, since 1948, they have refrained from flexing critical muscles on behalf of the proposed Palestinian state.
The transnational Muslim Brotherhood - which has evolved into the world’s largest Sunni terror organization - considers Al Sharaa’s ascension to power as an inspiration for similar development in all other Arab countries. Since its establishment in 1928, the Muslim Brotherhood has been skillful in obfuscating the State Department and most other Western policy makers, through dissimulation. They have employed a multi-pronged operation: the religious, educational, social and political “screensavers,” while perpetrating subversion and terrorism.
In fact, the ideology-driven Muslim Brotherhood has been dedicated to the toppling of every national Muslim regime, establishing a universal society, committed to Islam as the only legitimate, divinely-ordained religion and to the subjugation of the “infidel” West. While the Western foreign policy establishment does not consider the Muslim Brotherhood as a terror organization, all pro-US Arab regimes have the Muslim Brotherhood’s terrorist machete at their throats.
*The bottom line: while Al-Sharaa may be a reformed terrorist and an ideologue-turned-pragmatist, Western policy makers are advised to study the following observations by Sir John Jenkins, a top specialist on the Moslem Brotherhood and the Middle East, before rushing to a final verdict on Al-Sharaa:
“[The West] should resist the temptation to seek to understand the [Middle East] through our own cultural or epistemological [knowledge] categories…. Some may still be tempted to hope that when a malign or otherwise unsatisfactory regime is overthrown the subsequent trajectory must be progressive. [Middle East] experience suggests the reverse…. Authoritarianism is not weakened in such circumstances: it recurs….”