Protecting U.S. Strategic Assets

By Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld and Alyssa A. Lappen
FrontPageMagazine.com | March 24, 2006

While different port security bills have been proposed after the Dubai’s retreat from the deal, few, if any tackle the issue of foreign ownership. Yet, as Rep Christopher Shays noted, “We should want to pay particular attention to this because after 9/11 we’re not just fighting terrorism we are fighting radical Islamic terrorists.”

The failed DP World deal drew attention to the fact that most U.S. ports are managed by foreigners. Yet, while the American public was concerned about a deal with the Untied Arab Emirates (UAE), which assists the U.S. in the war on terror, but also assists HAMAS, few noticed that the Saudis have long owned a fifty percent stake in the Houston-headquartered Motiva Enterprises LLC. Saudi Arabia, of course, continues to fund the spread of radical Islam around the world.

Motiva is a joint venture of the Shell Oil Company and Saudi Refining, a subsidiary of Aramco, the Saudi government-owned company. Motiva ships petroleum products, including gasoline and aviation fuel, into Connecticut, where it owns and operates portions of the New Haven and Bridgeport ports.

Additionally, Motiva operates portions of 15 other ports nationwide, in Tampa; Fort Lauderdale; Dania, Fl.; Hollywood, Fl.; Baltimore; Lawrence and New York, N.Y.; Newark and Sewaren, NJ; Convent and Norco, La.; South Portland, Me.; Providence; Port Arthur and Port Nechas in Texas; Since 2002, Motiva received in one year alone, at least 14 port security grants totaling at least $4 million from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, according to undated DHS documents. The grants were awarded for “surveillance” and “physical enhancement.” Finally, Motiva owns two Louisiana refineries and full or partial interests in 47 product terminals. Motiva also owns above-ground storage tanks in the port of Baltimore, as in the other ports. Motiva and its partner Shell Oil, collectively account for about 10 percent of total refining capacity and a 13 percent share of U.S. gasoline sales. Continue reading “Protecting U.S. Strategic Assets” →

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The Mullah-Hamas Axis

By Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld and Alyssa A. Lappen
FrontPageMagazine.com | March 14, 2006

“We are continuing in Khomeini’s path,” HAMAS leader Khaled Mashaal declared on March 1, 2006, while in Iran for another of his many recent visits. Mashaal emphasized that HAMAS is the spiritual offspring of the Ayatollah Khomeini—a surprising reaffirmation that the Muslim Brotherhood’s influence extends to Shiite Iran, not only to Sunni organizations.

Mashaal’s statement should have come as no surprise, considering the February 22 public reassurance of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinedjad: â€œSince the divine treasures are infinite, you [HAMAS] should not be concerned about economic issues.”

The MB heavily influenced Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who developed the Iranian version of their ideology in the 1970s. Khomeini adhered to the teaching of Egyptian MB spiritual leader Sayyid Qutb and followed the lead of Muhammad Navab-Safavi, who fled from Iran to Egypt and was an MB guest donate a quarter of their income to HAMAS. Continue reading “The Mullah-Hamas Axis” →

Economic Jihad and U.S. Ports?

By Rachel Ehrenfeld and Alyssa A. Lappen
Washington Times | Mar. 12, 2006

Thanks to our congressmen who lined up against trusting the management and leases of U.S. ports to the sheikdom of Dubai, Dubai Ports World announced on March 9 that it will transfer its U.S. operations to an American entity. However, it is not clear that they gave up the ownership.

Our elected officials knew all along that this deal would have been a grave mistake. But even they did not realize this deal’s full implications. DP World’s acquisition of the British Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation (P&O;), is not merely a financial transaction. Rather, it signals a major advance in the economic jihad waged by the Islamic world against the West.

According to a fatwa issued on July 10, 2002 by Hussein Shihata, Professor of Islamic Economy at Cairo’s al-Azhar University, economic jihad’s “primary aim is to weaken the economy of the Zionists, the Crusaders and their allies, while at the same time, it strengthens the Arab and Islamic economy in a way that make it a self-dependent economy.”

The Dubai government’s recent acquisitions have serious global strategic and security implications, since it puts the Islamic city-state of Dubai, one of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), in control of major ports worldwide. On Feb. 26, while the uproar about the sale of the leases and management of 22 U.S. ports to Dubai was raging, a sister emirate, Abu Dhabi, demonstrated the real attitude toward the U.S. by confiscating a text book, ‘World Cultures,’ used at the American school there.

The Ministry of Education banned the book “for allegedly presenting Islam and the Muslim countries including Gulf States in a negative light while glorifying Israel on the other hand.” And despite repeated statements that the UAE joined the U.S. war on terrorism, after September 11, on December 4, 2002, Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank, controlled by members of the ruling family transferred $26,616.6 to Hamas’ Tulkarem Zakat and Sadaqat Committee. Another transfer on April 7, 2003 of $11,416 to the same Hamas organization, was also documented by the Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center at the Center for Special Studies. Yet the UAE is praised by members of the Bush administration as “an important ally against terrorism,” and “a good ally.”

Gaining possession of P&O;’s worldwide operation followed Dubai Ports World’s $1.15 billion 2004 purchase of the Florida-based CSX World Terminals, “a leading international container terminal developer and operator with operations in Asia, Europe, Australia and Latin America.”

The P&O; operations included “29 container terminals and logistics operations in over 100 ports, from China and India, to Argentina, Canada, the U.S., Russia, the Middle East and Africa. It also managed “freight and tourist passengers between the UK and Belgium, France, Holland, Ireland and Spain.” In addition, P&O; held property in the U.K., Europe and the United States. Now, most of these are controlled and operated by the Dubai government-owned DP World.

In Australia, for example, P&O; established “Defense Maritime Services, ” focusing “on the Government sector (with Defense, Science and Security) and the specialized bulk (port and ship) services sector.” From there, P&O;’s “primary operational regions were South East Asia, Australia, the Antarctic and Southern Oceans.” These, too, are now the possessions of the UAE through DP World. On March 9, 2006, DP World declared its purchase of P&O; complete. According to the announcement, “The deal makes DP World a top three global port operation, with 51 terminals in 30 countries across 5 continents.”

To help finance the purchase of P&O;, DP World has issued “the world’s biggest-ever Islamic bond issue,” a $3.5 billion Sukukbond — together with Dubai’s Ports Customs and Free Zone Corp. (PCFC). The Sukuk is the Islamic version of an asset-backed zero coupon bond, which pays yield and principle at maturity. This Sukuk was underwritten by the PCFC and Dubai Islamic Bank, and 30 percent of each bond is convertible into PCFC shares when the company goes public in 2007.

The Sukuk issue has attracted non-Muslim investors, including banks, asset management companies, and high-net-worth individual from across Europe and Asia. Since Islamic law governs the Sukuk, all these non-Muslim investors will subscribe to Islamic laws along with their bond purchases. This extremely attractive variable yield of 7.25 percent to 8.25 percent is some 250 to 350 basis points more than that offered on a two-year dollar Libor swap. In the current fixed-income market, where two-year U.S. Treasuries yield 4.66 percent, it is virtually impossible to find an investment-grade two-year bond with such a high interest rate anywhere else.

With such tempting returns, it is not surprising that Western investors have been lured into supporting the growing influence of the sharia-controlled Islamic financial system. This is one way in which the West weakens its financial underpinnings while strengthening “the Arab and Islamic economy in a way that make it a self-dependent economy,” as advocated by Hussein Shihata’s fatwa.

How long will it take for Islamic companies running Western ports and the banking institutions funding them to demand that all products shipped through these ports meet Islamic laws? How long before pork and alcohol are banned from ships going through ports controlled by Islamic companies and laws?

The purchase of P&O; promises Islamic interests a head start on gaining control over the majority of global shipping facilities, and marks an important step in the growing Islamic financial network.

Rachel Ehrenfeld is the director of American Center for Democracy and a member of the Committee on the Present Danger. Alyssa A. Lappen is a senior fellow at the American Center for Democracy.

The Other War

By Alyssa A. Lappen
AmericanThinker.com | March 11, 2006

In The Other War: Israelis, Palestinians and the Struggle for Media Supremacy, veteran journalist Stephanie Gutmann provides careful documentation of the myriad ways in which the mainstream media coverage of the Middle East has been grossly compromised. Gutmann spent part of her teenage years in Israel and the disputed territories with her psychologist father, who studies ‘cross-cultural features of aging.’ On her return to the U.S., she was hardly a Zionist. On the contrary, throughout her college years in Ann Arbor, and later, she hung out with the solidly anti-Israel ‘left.’

But in September 2000 when the current war against Israel began, Gutmann found herself glued to her television, and increasingly disturbed by the inaccurate portrayal of Israel as the next Tiananmen Square, where ‘Large Mechanized Brutes’ converged on ‘Small Vulnerable Brown People.’ Even in her leftist experiences, Israel was simply not a country that ‘would countenance regular, systematic brutality against civilians, [or] produce soldiers capable of doing such a thing.’

Thus in October 2000, she followed the ‘great herd of foreign press’ and freelancers that decamped to Jerusalem to cover some action and pad their bank accounts. She found the press, then and during a return trip in 2002, almost universally proâ€”Palestinian and antiâ€”Israel. Many foreign reporters, who habitually hang out in the American Colony Hotel, ‘on the other side of the Green Line, in East Jerusalem,’ cheerily announced this fact. Of course, this attitude does not make for unbiased, complete or factual news. But in general, whatever Palestinian officials say, reporters in Israel accept as unmitigated truth, without question or challenge. And whatever Israeli officials say, the same reporters consider suspect propaganda. The press rarely if ever applies equal skepticism to both sides. Continue reading “The Other War” →

The Hamas-Russia Connection

By Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld and Alyssa A. Lappen
FrontPageMagazine.com | March 10, 2006

Russia’s determination to undermine the U.S. policy in the Middle East may well weaken U.S. power. But opposing punitive sanctions for Iran at the U.N. and endorsing HAMAS is likely to cost Russia dearly.

On March 8, 2006, after discussing the Iran crisis with U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov conveyed Russia’s objections to sanctioning Iran, while warning that â€œthere is no military solution to this crisis.” Instead, he welcomed the European Union proposal to continue exploring diplomatic solutions with Iran, despite years of European-led negotiations that merely allowed Tehran to continue to develop its nuclear program. And nuclear weapons in Iran, are likely to pose a grave danger to Russia; much graver than to the U.S.

In a similar move, after visiting the State Department, Lavrov said that the HAMAS government should receive international funding because HAMAS chief Khaled Mashaal had assured him that the money would â€œbe spent in a transparent manner.” And Like Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas before him, Mashaal promised Lavrov to allow international monitors to ensure this.

It is not surprising, therefore, that Khaled Mashaal noted, â€œAt the Russian Foreign Ministry we felt that we were being understood.” Continue reading “The Hamas-Russia Connection” →

Ports and pitchforks

By Diana West
Washington Times | March 3, 2006

One of the weirder sideshows to open alongside a main event — the proposed operational transfer of six major American ports to a firm owned by the United Arab Emirates — is the growing chorus of road-company Zolas, “J’accusing” everybody opposed to the sale of “xenophobia,” “isolationist mass hysteria,” “bigotry,” “nativism,” “panic,” and “prejudice” against innocent Araby.

Such accusations are supposed to make you hang your head in shame. They make me shake mine in consternation — wondering how in tarnation a hefty chunk of the American elite has the chutzpah to castigate the American people (64 percent of whom, says a Rasmussen poll, think the deal is a Bad Thing) for “xenophobia” and “prejudice” on behalf of a culture that is the embodiment of xenophobia and prejudice. The words precisely describe the official state of normal in the Arab-Islamic world since at least 1948, when the modern state of Israel was founded.

Nonetheless, we’re the “pitchfork-wielding xenophobes” en route to the “Dark Ages,” says the New York Times‘ Thomas Friedman. I’d say we’re heading in the other direction, trying to escape the Dark Ages — as represented by the spreading influence of sharia (Islamic law), which, in terms of the sharia-compliant port deal, would make deep inroads into global financial markets. I would add, as Rachel Ehrenfeld and Alyssa A. Lappen have suggested in this newspaper, “It’s time for the United States to limit financial transactions that involve American companies” — and the U.S. government — “to governance by secular laws.” Continue reading “Ports and pitchforks” →