IDF Hits Gaza Targets in Response to Rocket Barrage

by Yaakov Lappin, Ben Hartman

IDF responds to 30 mortar shells bombing Hamas terror targets in Gaza; escalation follows air strike on 2 terrorists in Rafah.

 
Photo: Ronen Zvulun/Reuters

The IDF struck targets in Gaza Monday in response to a barrage of more than 30 rockets and mortar shells fired into farming districts in southern Israel by Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
The IDF response involved both Air Force and tanks.

For details see:

Air Force strikes 2 'Global Jihad' targets in Gaza

An army source said that a tank directed fire at a Hamas position hidden inside a mosque located in southern Gaza. The source added that Hamas often uses "religious sites as cover for its terrorist activities against Israelis."

Five Palestinians were moderately injured in the IDF operations, Palestinian news agency Ma'an reported citing witnesses and a Gaza health ministry spokesman.

Earlier Monday, the Eshkol Regional Council in southern Israel was bombarded with dozens of Palestinian rockets and mortars. Local residents reported awaking to the sounds of explosions, and rushing for cover in safe rooms designed to protect them from the projectiles.

All of the strikes landed in open areas and caused no damage, except for a single house in the Eshkol Region that was lightly damaged by shrapnel.

There were differing reports on the number of strikes on the Eshkol region on Monday morning. While the Negev police said that from 6am to around noon there were a total of 23 strikes, the IDF spokesperson’s unit said there were a total of 30.

Ronit Minaker, of the Eshkol Regional Council, said that residents received SMS messages and heard alarms beginning at around 6am Monday morning, and heard dozens of strikes on the area over the course of around an hour and a half. The strikes began at the same hour of the morning when the local children usually wake up, and on Monday were required to spend the first few hours of their last day of the holidays waiting in bomb shelters, Minaker said.

Minaker said that at the moment residents are outside of the bomb shelters but have received instructions to stay within 15 seconds from a protected area.

She added that the council will hold a meeting on the situation later on in the day, and are waiting for a decision from the IDF on whether or not they can hold a planned Simchat Torah celebration Monday, which is scheduled to host a large number of people in an open area outside a local synagogue.

Minaker said the strikes hit land belonging to three different communities, causing damage to a house, a road, and some livestock.

The residents have become accustomed to a long period of quiet in the area, Minaker said, and the communities were hosting tourists and other visitors when the strikes began.

Hamas and Islamic Jihad said they targeted the rural district as a response to an Israeli air strike on Sunday night, which struck two members of an al-Qaida-inspired terror cell as they rode on a motorcycle in southern Gaza.

The two men, 23-year-old Talat Khalil Muhammad Jerbi, and 24-year-old Abdullah Mohammed Hassan Makawi, were in the finals stages of preparing a large and complex terrorist attack on Israelis, and were plotting on launching it from the Sinai Peninsula, the IDF said.

Makawi is a member of the Ashura council of Holy Fighters on the Edge of Jerusalem, an al-Qaida-inspired organization based in Gaza. Talat was involved in previous rocket-fire on Israelis, planting bombs, and building weaponry, the IDF said. He was also a senior planner of the June 18 cross-border terror attack from Sinai on the Israeli border, which killed an Israeli civilian, and took part in the attack, the IDF added.

Both were severely wounded in the air strike. Makawi later succumbed to his wounds Monday evening, Palestinian news agency Ma'an stated citing hospital sources in the Gaza Strip.
Palestinian medical sources said eight others were injured in the attack, including four children.
The air strike was the product of a joint effort by the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) and the Air Force.

Sunday's air strike is unrelated to the intrusion of a hostile drone into Israeli airspace on Saturday.

Yaakov Lappin, Ben Hartman

Source: http://www.jpost.com/Defense/Article.aspx?id=286975

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

Israel intelligence: Jihadi Attacks from Crumbling Syria

by Yaakov Lappin

Al-Qaeda-inspired terror organizations cannot be deterred. Once Assad falls, the radical elements can raid Syrian military bases, arm themselves with a range of devastating weapons, and turn their sights to the Israeli border.

As Israel's military watches Syrian sovereignty crumble and scores of militant groups form in the resulting vacuum, it is on alert for jihadi terrorist attacks from Syria.

The working assumption in Israeli defense circles is that sooner or later, Assad will fall, and Israel will have to deal with whatever will replace him.

The topping of Basher Assad will break the Tehran-Damascus-Beirut axis, which has seen Syria act as the critical bridge linking Iran to Hezbollah.

Should Syria's Sunni-majority succeed in putting together a new government, it will accurately view Iran and Hezbollah as aiders and abettors in the massacres perpetuated against tens of thousands of Sunni civilians who tried to overthrow Assad.

A Sunni Syria will, however, in turn take its place in a new radical Sunni bloc of Middle Eastern states, and link up with the Muslim Brotherhood-ruled Egypt, Hamas in Gaza, and Islamist Turkey.

The new Sunni Islamist bloc will be every bit as hostile to Israel as the Iranian-Syrian-Hezbollah axis, but also marked, in Syria and Egypt, by instability and power vacuums that will allow Salafi jihadi groups to do as they please.

Whether Syria disintegrates into warring sectarian mini-states, or transforms itself into a Sunni Islamist state, the outlook for regional security is not especially sunny.

An illustration of how edgy the situation is can be found in an incident on the border in recent days: an IDF lookout identified dozens of armed Syrians in civilian clothing approach the Israeli border.

It was not immediately clear who the armed men were – were they rebels engaging the Syrian army (the civil war has gotten so close to the Israeli border that IDF soldiers are saying they can hear mortar shells explode in Syria), or were they militant Islamist forces testing the IDF's response?

Taking no chances, the IDF evacuated the top of the popular Mount Hermon area, which, during the Jewish holiday season, is usually brimming with visitors.

Although the incident has passed, the danger has not; and the IDF's Military Intelligence has predicted that an attempted attack on an Israeli target from one of the growing number of radical forces operating in Syria is only a matter of time.

Combat forces stationed in the IDF's Northern Command, including infantry and armored divisions, have therefore been working closely with Military Intelligence to prepare for a rapidly changing environment.

Military Intelligence has been briefing commanders of Israeli armored vehicle brigades in the north on the new threats.

Gone are the days when the threat was primarily the centralized, hierarchical, Syrian army. Now, the threats are irregular terror militias armed with explosives, shoulder-held grenade launchers, roadside bombs, anti-tank missiles, and a range of firearms.

Once the intelligence is received, commanders on the ground must use the new information to create new contingency plans and new deployment patterns.

As the recent escalation between Turkey and Syria has demonstrated, the IDF must also continue to worry about the possibility of a confrontation with regular Syrian forces,.

With the Assad regime feeling its back to the wall, there is no way to know how the situation might proceed: decisions that now seem self-destructive from Syria's perspective, such as creating provocations with neighbors, or even a misfired shell (as with Turkey), could set off a chain of unpredictable events.

Similarly, suspicious movement of Syria's chemical weapons will spark a crisis.

To ensure that it can quickly mobilize its Artillery Corps to the Syrian front, the IDF held a surprise and vast live-fire exercise on the Golan Heights in recent weeks. During the drill, Artillery Corps soldiers were, without warning, airlifted from their routine security missions in the West Bank to the Golan Heights, where they assumed their positions and began firing at virtual targets.

The IDF is satisfied with the result of the drill: it proved to itself that it can quickly mobilize its heavy firepower and begin to shell targets at a moment's notice.

Standing Arab armies were a bigger threat to Israel's security, but because they were controlled by central governments, Israeli deterrence against that threat proved effective for decades.

Although the same deterrence is now in effect against terror organizations which have seized territory and power – Hamas and Hezbollah – the al-Qaeda-inspired terror organizations cannot be deterred. Once Assad falls, the radical elements can raid Syrian military bases, arm themselves with a range of devastating weapons, and turn their sights to the Israeli border.

So the Arab winter continues to take shape.

Yaakov Lappin

Source: http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3389/syria-jihadi-attacks-israel

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French Islamist Suicide Terror Cell had List of Paris Jewish Targets

by News Agencies and Israel Hayom Staff

French police officers at the entrance of a building in Strasbourg, France, Saturday Oct. 6, 2012, where a suspect was shot dead after firing at police. | Photo credit: AP

France is boosting security at Jewish religious sites after blank bullets were fired on a synagogue west of Paris, and amid renewed concerns about anti-Semitism around the country.

French President Francois Hollande met Sunday with leaders of the country's Jewish community, and pledged to fight extremism and anti-Semitism "with the greatest firmness."

He said that authorities "in the coming days, in the coming hours" will increase security at Jewish religious sites so they won't be subject to the kind of attack that targeted a synagogue in the Paris suburb of Argenteuil on Saturday night.

A representative of the synagogue says the building was targeted with about eight blank bullets and services were cancelled. The representative, who spoke on condition of anonymity because a police investigation is under way, said no one was hurt in the incident.

The attack on the synagogue came hours after police carried out raids across France against suspected Islamist cells. According to preliminary witness statements, the shots came from a car which slowed down as it approached the synagogue, before accelerating and fleeing the scene. 

"A person… heard a bang and saw flashes. They fired blanks; there were no impact signs from the bullets," a witness told police. 

Board of Jewish Communities in Val-d'Oise Chairman Moshe Cohen-Sabban told Le Parisien: "This was an act that was more against the Jewish community. This is very worrying." 

Meanwhile, the police raids earlier in the day were based on DNA taken from a grenade that exploded last month at a kosher grocery store, which led them to a suspected jihadist cell of young Frenchmen recently converted to Islam.

The man whose DNA was identified, named by police as Jeremy Sydney, was killed by police after he opened fire on them, wounding three officers in the eastern city of Strasbourg. Officials said he had been under surveillance since last spring — around the time a French Islamic terrorist went on a shooting rampage against a Jewish school and French soldiers, killing seven people.

The police unit was fired on after entering a fourth-floor apartment at about 6 a.m. (0400 GMT) in the Esplanade district of Strasbourg and an officer was wounded by shots that hit his bulletproof vest and helmet.

"During an anti-terrorist police operation in Strasbourg ... gunfire was exchanged between police and the suspect. The latter was killed," Strasbourg prosecutor Patrick Poirret said in a statement.

"The group was met with a .357 Magnum [revolver]," said Norbert Georgel, secretary for the region's police union, who said the wounded officer's life was not in danger.

Neighbors told Reuters that a couple had lived in the apartment with their two children for the past four to six months. The man was bearded and the woman wore the Muslim full-face veil, they said.

Reuters could not immediately confirm whether that man was the suspect shot by police.

The French Interior Ministry declined comment.

Eleven other suspects were arrested across the country Saturday, according to the Sipa news agency. One man was carrying a loaded gun, and police found weapons, cash and a list of Paris-area Jewish and Israeli associations during the raids.

Paris prosecutor François Molins said all the arrested suspects were French and recent converts to Islam. They were all born in the 1980s or early 1990s. Four of the men involved in the raid had written wills.

"You can imagine what their other plans could have been," counterterrorism official Eric Voulleminot said at a news conference with Molins.

The prosecutor described 33-year-old Sydney, sentenced in 2008 to two years in prison for drug trafficking, as a "delinquent who converted to radical Islam." He said others in the cell indicated they wanted to return to "the land of jihad."

A statement from President François Hollande praised the police for the raids and said the state would continue to "protect the French against all terrorist threats."

Last month's firebombing of the grocery, in a Jewish neighborhood in the Paris suburb of Sarcelles, happened on Sept. 19, the same day a French satirical paper published crude caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad. Anti-Western protests were also growing at the time against an anti-Islam film. One person was slightly injured, but the attack with a Yugoslav grenade came after a summer of what residents described as growing anti-Semitic threats.

"What happened in Sarcelles was just a start, or was just a test," Sammy Ghozlan, head of a French group that tracks anti-Semitism in the country, said. "Islamism is a force of influence and Islamists are going to seek out the weakest people to teach them to kill."

France, which has the largest Muslim population in Europe, is trying to contain the spread of a radical Islam hostile to Western influences. France has made similar anti-terrorism arrests before, only to release the suspects several days later without charges.

The prosecutor was careful not to draw direct links between Saturday's arrests and Mohamed Merah, a young Frenchman of Algerian descent who was killed in a shootout with police in March after his terrorist attacks on the French Jewish community, which has since ramped up security in many parts of the country.

Merah had studied at an Islamist paramilitary camp in Pakistan and claimed ties to al-Qaida. Molins said officials did not believe the men arrested Saturday had trained abroad, but cautioned that the investigation was ongoing.

News Agencies and Israel Hayom Staff

Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=6005

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

Pre-Benghazi Attack Pentagon Report: Al Qaeda Jihadists Significant Threat to Libya

by Andrew G. Bostom

The Pentagon knew how significant the jihadist threat in Libya was, prior to the terror attack that took four lives. The nonpareil national security investigative reporter Bill Gertz brings to our attention an internal 54 pp. Pentagon report obtained by the Washington Free Beacon:

"AL-QAEDA IN LIBYA: A PROFILE-A Report Prepared by the Federal Research Division, Library of Congress under an Interagency Agreement with the Combating Terrorism Technical Support Office's Irregular Warfare Support Program, August, 2012."

Prepared and issued  before the murderous 9/11/12 attacks, which left 4 dead-the US ambassador Chris Stevens, two former US Navy Seals (Glenn Doherty and Tyrone Woods), and a US Air Force veteran (Sean Smith)-the report emphasized how Al Qaeda Senior Leadership (AQSL), working via a large, powerful, and well-established jihadist infrastructure in Libya, sought to capitalize on the US and NATO-supported insurrection which toppled the Libyan despot Qaddafi, and fulfill its goal of making Libya part of an eventual transnational caliphate.   

Libyan Jihadists Per Capita and by Hometowns as of 2005 During the Iraq War

The report highlighted an ominous July, 2012 public jihadist rally, while emphasizing, with resigned sobriety, how such jiadist/Al-Qaeda discourse resonates with a significant swath of the Libyan population

In June 2012, Ansar al-Sharia staged a large-scale rally and military show of force involving dozens of military vehicles, with Islamists wearing the Afghan mujahidin's traditional outfit. Some leaders described themselves as Islamists and called for implementation of sharia similar to that which the Taliban had implemented in Afghanistan or al-Qaeda in Somalia and Yemen. The military show of force consisted of a parade in which some 30 battalions from Benghazi, Darnah, Misrata, Al-Nufilyah, Ajdabiyah, and other Libyan towns took part in the first meeting in support of sharia in Benghazi. Islamist leaders pointed out that the aim of the military parade was to terrorize (Arabic: irhab) those who do not want to be judged by God's law. Islamist leaders urged the Transitional National Council to clarify the identity of the state as Islamic or secular. Such a system of local affiliates might use neighborhood mosques as a support infrastructure for a religious and popular movement that could frighten politicians attempting to run on a moderate Islamic platform. ...A weak Islamist-dominated central government is unlikelyto confront such a radical movement, at least in the short term. The minister of religious affairs expressed his government's weakness when he lamented the "hijacking" of mosques by extremist imams imposed by militiamen. Two of these local Islamist-oriented militias-Ansar al-Sharia and al-A'hrar Libya-are the tip of the iceberg. They broadcast typical al-Qaeda-type propaganda on the Internet, and they have adopted the black flag, which symbolizes commitment to violent jihad promoted by AQSL.

AQSL's discourse may attract a sizable audience, especially among disenchanted former rebels, insecure tribal leaders, and Salafist clerics that could be turned into a support network and recruiting tool for jihadists. As demonstrated by ongoing rallies of supporters of the implementation of sharia, the Salafist movement is gaining ground in Libya and is most likely to adopt an uncompromising stance with regard to sharia and secularism close to the one typically promoted by al-Qaeda.

The  report's EXECUTIVE SUMMARY features these 10 points of emphasis, which raise serious questions about both the callous inattention to security for US diplomatic and ancillary personnel in Benghazi, as well as the abysmal failure of imagination regarding overall US policy in Libya, which has abetted the most fanatical jihadist movement extant -- Al Qaeda itself.

1. Al-Qaeda has tried to exploit the "Arab Awakening" in North Africa for its own purposes during the past year. Al-Qaeda Senior Leadership (AQSL), based in Pakistan, is likely seeking to build a clandestine network in Libya as it pursues its strategy of reinforcing its presence in North Africa and the Middle East, taking advantage of the "Arab Awakening" that has disrupted existing counterterrorism capabilities. Although AQSL's previous attempt to co-opt the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG) was inconclusive, the Libyan Revolution may have created an environment conducive to jihad and empowered the large and active community of Libyan jihadists, which is known to be well connected to international jihad.
2. AQSL's strategic goals remain restoration of the caliphate, instituting sharia, and ending the Western presence in Muslim lands. Al-Qaeda's primary goal in Libya is to establish an Islamic emirate as part of its overall objective to reestablish the caliphate.
3. AQSL in Pakistan issued strategic guidance to followers in Libya and elsewhere to take advantage of the Libyan rebellion. AQSL's strategic guidance was to:
- gather weapons,
- establish training camps,
- build a network in secret,
- establish an Islamic state, and
- institute sharia.
4. AQSL in Pakistan dispatched trusted senior operatives as emissaries and leaders who could supervise building a network. Al-Qaeda has established a core network in Libya, but it remains clandestine and refrains from using the al-Qaeda name.
5. Ansar al-Sharia, led by Sufian Ben Qhumu, a former Guantanamo detainee, has increasingly embodied al-Qaeda's presence in Libya, as indicated by its active social-media propaganda, extremist discourse, and hatred of the West, especially the United States.
6.  Al-Qaeda adherents in Libya used the 2011 Revolution to establish well-armed, well-trained, and combat-experienced militias. Militia groups, led by Wisam Ben Hamid and Hayaka Alla, have adopted similar behavior, with, however, fewer advertised grudges against the West. The only open-source material that has linked these groups, aside from their jihadist credentials and their defense of sharia, is their attachment to the flag that has come to symbolize al-Qaeda.
7. The al-Qaeda clandestine network is currently in an expansion phase, running training camps and media campaigns on social-media platforms, such as Facebook and YouTube. However, it will likely continue to mask its presence under the umbrella of the Libyan Salafist movement, with which it shares a radical ideology and a general intent to implement sharia in Libya and elsewhere.
8. Al-Qaeda affiliates such as AQIM are also benefiting from the situation in Libya. AQIM will likely join hands with the al-Qaeda clandestine network in Libya to secure a supply of arms for its areas of operations in northern Mali and Algeria.
9. The July 2012 elections failed to generate a strong and unified national leadership that could address the chronic insecurity posed by the multiplicity of local militias, which al-Qaeda's clandestine network has probably infiltrated.
10. Al-Qaeda's clandestine network is highly likely to recruit and train local and foreign jihadists to be sent to Syria.

Andrew G. Bostom

Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/10/pre-benghazi_attack_pentagon_report_al_qaeda_jihadists_significant_threat_to_libya.html

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

France Bows to Islam

by Giulio Meotti


The new French leftist government approved the mega project of the Islamic Emirate of Qatar to finance the disadvantaged suburbs, which are home to a significant number of France’s estimated 4-6 million Muslims.

Is Paris on sale to the Gulf monarchies, which support - anywhere in the world - radical Islam and jihad? Qatar's $ 65 million objective is to peddle religious hatred and separation among Muslims in France and other parts of Europe.

The intellectual polemicist of Jewish origin, Eric Zemmour, rightly said that Qatar's plan is like the Spanish and British nations financing Catholic and Protestants in France during the XVI century religious wars. Zemmour declares: "For Qatar, France is undoubtedly the land of Islam".

In France, there are now more Islamic mosques being built than Catholic churches, and there are more practicing Muslims than practicing Catholics:

Overall, the total number of mosques in France has already doubled to more than 2,000 in the last 10 years. Meanwhile, the Catholic Church in France had only 20 new churches built in the last 10 years, and formally closed more than 60 churches, many of which became mosques, according to research conducted by the French daily La Croix.

France is always willing to capitulate to the 'new ruler' on the field..

Marshal Phillippe Petain, “the hero of Verdun”, was one of the most revered figures who came to power democratically on the heels of the German invasion of France in 1940. As prime minister, Petain signed a collaboration agreement with Nazi Germany in exchange for keeping the smaller part of France, with its capital in Vichy, outside the Nazi occupation.

After the war, the new rulers were Stalin (France had Europe's largest communist party) and the Arabs.

In the 1967 Six-Day War, when Israel’s life was threatened, France’s President Charles de Gaulle took a pro-Arab policy and instituted a weapons embargo on the Middle East. He characterized the Jewish people “an elitist and domineering people.” This marked the first time since World War II that a head of state had directed an anti-Semitic remark at Israel and the Jewish people.

Jean-Paul Sartre is the incarnation of this cultural betrayal, the humanist guru who turned down a Nobel Prize for literature and founded left-leaning newspaper Liberation. During the Nazi occupation of Paris he was a cynical profiteer concerned exclusively with his own literary career and ready to compromise with the authorities. Sartre worked for “Comoedia”, a magazine financed by the Nazis; his work “The Flies” got the blessing of the Hitlerist censors; his companion, the feminist goddess Simone de Beauvoir, worked for the national pro-Germans radio.

After the war, Sartre rebuilt his image of grand-resistant in favour of Moscow. He already was familiar with the horrors of the Soviet Gulag, but did not reveal them so as "not to discourage the moral of the Billancourt’s workers," while French intellectuals organized a solidarity rally in Paris in support of the official Soviet position that Jewish doctors had assassinated communist leaders.

Much less known is Sartre’s praise for Arab terrorism. When 11 Israeli athletes were butchered at the 1972 Munich Olympics in, Sartre wrote: “Terrorism is a terrible weapon, but the oppressed poor have no others."

After Hitler and Stalin, France now bows to Islam.

A new literary case easily explains what's going on in Paris.

“I cannot even go to my office at Gallimard, I must work from home, like Cesare Pavese”, says Richard Millet to me in our interview. We don’t remember interventions of French prime ministers against a book. A few days ago, the Prime Minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, said he was “shocked” by the last book written by Millet, the most famous pamphlétaire of Paris.

“The prime minister has not read the book, he made use only of propaganda”, says Millet. His case, l’affaire Millet, as it’s now known in France, reveals how dangerous is to break the taboos on Islam in Europe.

The largest library of Belgium, Filigranes, voluntarily withdrew the copies of Millet’s “Eloge littéraire of Anders Breivik”. No court ordered them to do it. “For the first time in twenty-nine years, the library took a decision like this”, chanted the owner of Filigranes, Marc Filipson. “They are people always ready to kneel to the dominant ideology”, replies Millet.

Award-winning author of the Académie Françase, Millet was forced to resign from the reading committee of Gallimard, the publishing house that dominated the literature of the XX century, la maison of Proust and Gide, Kundera and Simenon, Camus and Genet, where Millet continues to follow tauthors as editor, but without making any decisions about the books to be published.

Millet discovered some of the winners of the Prix Goncourt, the most noble literary award in France, such as "The Kindly Ones” by Jonathan Littel and “The French art of war” by Alexis Jenni. Not only there, twenty novels and essays written by Millet are present in the famous catalog of Gallimard.
But let's put the story in its proper order:.

Earlier this summer, Millet published his new book “Langue Fantome”. At the end of the book, which mostly deals with the crisis of literature, Millet instrted a twenty page pamphlet entitled “Eloge littéraire of Anders Breivik”, a provocative reading of the massacre of Utoya, in Norway.

Millet does not excuse, does not seek to mitigate the monster, but he offers a scary, terrible, scandalous vision of the bloodbath. He sees it as the crisis of European identity and multiculturalism. “How do you think that I wrote an eulogy of Breivik?”, Millet says. “I wrote that he is a monster and a criminal”.

But now he fears for his own safety, because France, he says, can become a place that is dangerous. “For twenty days I had to watch my back and I removed my name from the mailbox”.

A few days ago, the weekly Nouvel Observateur slammed Millet on its cover under the title “The neo-fascists and their friends”, citing his name along with that of other well-known writers. “It’s a Stalinist method”, says Millet.

M.G. Le Clézio,a Nobel Prize writer, the leftist intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévi and others explicitly asked Gallimard to fire Millet.

Le Monde newspaper ran an appeal signed by 120 writers against him.

The Figaro held bank held a campaign against the demonization of the writer, while Élisabeth Lévy called it “the fatwa of Saint-Germain-Des-Prés”, a reference to Gallimard, the “temple of Literature”.

Bruno de Cessole, first pen of Figaro, called it “witch hunt”, while Denis Tillinac slammed the “soft petainism”, “the bigots of the new moral order” and the “leftist Torquemadas”.

The writer Gabriel Matzneff attacked “the attitude of the intelligentsia in Paris towards Islam". He said, "the explanation is clear: cowardice. In 2012, the Café de Flore kneels in front of bearded fanatics of Libya in Syria, as thirty years ago it knelt before Stalin. The French intelligentsia kneels always in front of the winner, or the future winner”.

The Café de Flore is the mecca of French intellectuals.

Millet denounced “the end of humanistic civilization”, “the ideology of anti-racism”, he says that “Europe is under intimidation from Salafism and political correctness” and that multiculturalism “is one of the forms of the cultural, spiritual and social decay of Europe”.

Millet defines Anders Breivik, the serial murderess of Utoya, as a “demonic symptom of our society” like Mohammed Merah, the Islamic mass murderer of Toulouse, where he killed four Jewish civilians, including three children.

"The tactics used today in France, writes the author, “are the same as Goebbels and Beria: decontextualizing, extrapolating, intimidating, insulting, liying”.

According to Millet, “literature, especially in France, is the new lie of ‘tolerance’”.

He thinks that multiculturalism “grows on the death of national cultures in the name of humanism. Multiculturalism has become a weapon. As Europe feels guilty for genocides and colonization, our continent cannot longer be itself. Europeans live in hatred of themselves, which is a form of nihilism. Breivik is the monstrous echo and the response to this hate”.

Millet does not retract the words he used on Islam. “It’s the new contemporary terror. It grows with the European sense of guilty”.

Meanwhile, all over France, Jews must protect themselves against lynching in the streets, harassment at the universities and shootings outside schools. The March attack at a Jewish school in Toulouse, which resembled that of Itamar (when an Israeli father, mother and three children were slaughtered in their beds by a Palestinian commando), triggered “an explosion” of anti-Semitic attacks across France.

According to the Service de Protection de la Communauté Juive, more than 90 anti-Semitic incidents took place in France only in the 10 days that followed the shooting.

Paris, where once even Pol Pot studied, is now the "mecca of culture" for betrayers of Europe's humanism. As it is today, France and Europe have no future. In the very moment when we closed this story, from Sweden came the news of a terror attack against a Jewish center and a kosher center was bombed in Paris.

To explain his involvement in the French Resistance, Jean Cavaillès said he prefers to read Paris-Soir than the Völkische Beobachter. Now on the boulevards you read Al Hayat.

To quote from Friedrich Nietzsche's Zarathustra, "die wuste wächst". The desert grows.

Giulio Meotti

Source: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/12268#.UHM2XlEyn3U

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

Iran Sends a Message. Is Obama Listening?

by Jonathan S. Tobin


Many in the West interpreted the unrest in the streets of Tehran last week in the wake of the collapse the rial as a sign that the Islamist regime was shaken by the sanctions that have been imposed on its economy. The assumption is that the ayatollahs are chastened by the hardships that their people labor under and that it won’t be too long before they are ready to return to the negotiating table and make the concessions needed to craft a deal that will end the standoff over their drive for nuclear capability. But the Iranians and their terrorist auxiliaries in Lebanon (some of who are currently deployed in Syria defending their ally Bashar Assad) have other ideas about the outcome of this confrontation.

Iran’s leadership cannot be completely sanguine about the willingness of their people to go on putting up with Islamist extremism at home and endless conflict abroad. But they also have no intention of being influenced by domestic public opinion or intimidated by Western leaders who are still foolish enough to believe that diplomacy can solve the problem. To the contrary, they believe that it is Israel and the West that can be intimidated and it is in that context that we should interpret the puzzling appearance of the Hezbollah drone aircraft that was shot down over the Negev desert this weekend. Instead of the Iranians receiving the memo the West wants them to read about the futility of further resistance to demands to end the enrichment of uranium that will make a nuclear bomb possible, they have just sent their own message. The drone is more than an indication that Iran will seek to retaliate against any strike on their nuclear facilities with one on Israel. It’s also a sign that the terrorists in Lebanon can strike anywhere in Europe as well as the Middle East. Rather than this drone being a reason for Israel and the West to stand down from a policy of pressing Iran to give up their nuclear dream, it is a warning that ought to reinforce the imperative need to stop them.


As Haaretz reports, the drone is not the first Hezbollah attempt to penetrate Israeli airspace in this manner. Nor is it the only provocation they have delivered in recent months:

Israel .. believes Hezbollah, with Iranian backing, is behind a string of attempted attacks on Israeli diplomatic targets in India, Thailand and the former Soviet republic of Georgia, plus a deadly bombing earlier this year that killed five Israeli tourists in a Bulgarian resort. Last week, Israel announced the arrest of an Arab citizen it accused of spying for Hezbollah, the latest in a string of such cases.
Many speculated that the aircraft was trying to gather intelligence on Israel’s secretive nuclear reactor in the southern desert town of Dimona.

Iran’s terrorist network is part of the regime’s security blanket which it thinks guarantees that it can never be forced to do give up its nuclear dream. Far from being on their last legs or being weakened, Tehran thinks it can intimidate the Europeans and Americans into thinking the attempt to muscle them on the nuclear question is hopeless. They long ago concluded that President Obama doesn’t have the intestinal fortitude to stand up to them and think all they need to do to win is to hold on while sending messages about their willingness to start a fire no one in the West is interested in putting out.

Instead of seeing Hezbollah’s drone as an indication of the folly of threatening the use of force, this should be a warning of the necessity of setting red lines that will make it clear that diplomacy will go out the window unless they stop enriching uranium. Without them, Tehran will continue to believe they need not fear American resolve on the issue and that they can, in turn, act with impunity. If President Obama is serious about his promise to stop the Iranians he will understand that a passive reaction to this provocation will produce the opposite of what he wants: an emboldened Iranian government that will see no point in bowing to the West on the nuclear issue.

Jonathan S. Tobin

Source: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2012/10/07/iran-sends-a-message-is-obama-listening-drone-hezbollah-nuclear/

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

Panic of the Progressives

by Bruce Thornton


“The past is never dead,” William Faulkner said, “it’s not even past.” The progressives’ fury over Obama’s meltdown in last week’s debate, and their desperate efforts to get him reelected by any means possible, have to be understood in the context of the long history of the left’s attempt to impose its ideology on the United States. Though successful at capturing the universities, schools, popular culture, and most churches, the left still lusts for the presidency, where the real power lies to change America in line with their ideology. Yet for the last four decades, the left has seen what appears to be victory slip from its grasp, as their presidential standard-bearer either lost the election or betrayed their ideals once in office.

Start in 1972. The left successfully hijacked the Democratic party and imposed its ideological aims on the party’s platform: creeping socialism, dirigiste economic policy, radical egalitarianism, income redistribution, a balkanizing identity politics, institutionalized assaults on traditional morality and religion, and a foreign policy predicated on the global malignity and oppressive policies of the United States. Unfortunately for the left, America wasn’t ready for such a radical transformation, and George McGovern lost to Richard Nixon by 23 points. Yet within a year, the media-hyped Watergate scandal mortally wounded Nixon, who was replaced by the ineffectual Gerald Ford.

Then in 1975, the anti-war left was seemingly vindicated by the collapse of South Vietnam in the face of a massive invasion by the North Vietnamese with the support of the Soviets and the Chinese. The truth, of course, was very different. The U.S. had snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by cutting the South off from air support and foreign aid. Yet the perception fostered by the sympathetic media was that the left had been right: America had fought an unjust, neo-imperialist war against a nationalist movement supported by a majority of the Vietnamese, a war disguised as resistance to communist aggression. Believing the endemic corruption and tyranny of America had been made manifest both domestically and abroad, the left was sure its chance had come to finish the work started in 1972.

Enter Jimmy Carter in 1976, a one-term governor of Georgia with scant national experience. Yet Carter was the perfect Trojan horse: a Southern evangelical Christian who could appeal to traditional conservative constituencies. Once in office, however, Carter’s presidency was marked equally by incompetence and leftish ideology, his policies predicated on American retreat and weakness. This tone of apology and retreat was obvious in his inaugural speech, where he admitted America’s “recent mistakes,” suggested we should not “dwell on remembered glory,” and sighed that “even our great nations has its recognized limits” and can “simply do our best.”

A few months later, he announced that America was now free of the “inordinate fear of communism,” and so he would put the promotion of human rights at the center of foreign policy, and push for a “freeze on further modernization and production of weapons and a continuing, substantial reduction of strategic nuclear weapons as well.” Hence Carter pursued moralizing internationalism, pushed for disarmament, and emasculated the CIA. A few years later came the famous “malaise” speech, in which Carter gloomily identified “a fundamental threat to American democracy,” what he called “a crisis of confidence . . . that strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our nation.” And of course, the major causes of this “crisis” were the two American original sins: “the agony of Vietnam” and the dishonoring of the presidency by the “shock of Watergate.”

The consequences of Carter’s foreign policy of self-loathing and retreat quickly became obvious during his presidency, as the Soviet Union and its satellites went on a geopolitical rampage, and cutbacks in U.S. weapons development were met with a Soviet military buildup. Worse yet in the long run, our steady ally in the Middle East, the Shah of Iran, was abandoned to the tender mercies of the jihadist Ayatollah Khomeini. Soon followed the storming of our embassy and the taking of American hostages, 52 of whom were held for 444 days. Carter’s groveling outreach to the mullahs in Iran––including a secret letter delivered by leftist former Attorney General Ramsay Clark that yearned for good relations “based upon equality, mutual respect, and friendship”––followed by a poorly planned and half-hearted rescue attempt that killed 8 American soldiers, whose charred remains were gleefully poked with canes by Iranian mullahs, convinced Americans once again that progressive policies damaged America’s security and interests. Nor were they ready to embrace the self-loathing and guilt that underlay those policies.

Thus followed the long, dark night of the progressive soul, Ronald Reagan’s two terms in the White House. Reagan’s success in turning around the economy and bringing down the Soviet Union convinced brighter progressives that the old leftist playbook had to be abandoned. If they wanted the presidency, they had at least to pretend to endorse more centrist policies, particularly when it came to foreign policy. After the interregnum of George H.W. Bush’s presidency, a tanking economy allowed once again a southern governor to come to the rescue. Even better, unlike the dour, self-righteous Jimmy Carter, the “New Democrat” baby-boomer Bill Clinton was “cool,” a draft-dodger, skirt-chaser, dope-smoker, and saxophone player. More important, he was a brilliant politician who could “feel your pain” and connect with voters much more intimately than the self-righteous scold Carter ever could. At the start of his term, Clinton seemed to deliver on the progressive agenda. He started work on creating government-run health care, the progressive Holy Grail, he improved the position of homosexuals in the military, he increased taxes on the wealthiest Americans, and he expanded entitlements such as the Earned Income Tax Credit. Then came the debacle of the midterm elections, when Republicans seized control of both houses of Congress.

Clinton responded, of course, by his now legendary “triangulation,” tacking to the right. At the start of his second term he announced, “The era of big government is over.” He committed a mortal sin for progressives: he cooperated with Republicans in reforming welfare, striking at the heart of progressive environmental determinism by recognizing the corruption of character that follows absolving individuals of personal responsibility. He signed off on legislation eliminating two provisions of the Glass-Steagall act, which had restricted banks from getting involved in securities, and he lowered the capital gains rate from 28% to 20%. Clinton then crippled the remainder of his presidency with the humiliating scandal created by his juvenile hijinks with a White House intern, becoming only the second president to be impeached by the House of Representatives. Once more, the left had been betrayed by its political great hope.

Yet waiting in the wings was Vice President Al Gore, a progressive true believer and prophet seemingly free of the character flaws that had compromised Clinton’s presidency. But the disputed 2000 election––stolen, progressives rationalized, by George Bush and the Supreme Court’s conservatives––brought to power another Republican, this one even more hateful than Ronald Reagan. Reagan, after all, was from an earlier generation who had missed out on getting his consciousness raised by the progressive take-over of the culture in the 60s. But George Bush was a baby-boomer, a privileged, partying frat-boy who, as the leftist myth has it, found Jesus and conservatism and parlayed his family connections to take control of the White House. But the wars in Afghanistan and then Iraq, and the seeming revival of the anti-war movement, reanimated the old progressive myth from the ’60s, when the left stopped another “unjust” neo-imperialist war. Yet in 2004, the Democrats nominated John Kerry, one of the Senate’s most left-wing members, but an incompetent campaigner full of rich-liberal hauteur and utterly lacking in charisma. Once more, the progressives had to spend four more years in the political wilderness.

Then in 2008 the progressive messiah arrived. A left-wing Dr. Frankenstein could not have created a candidate more perfect than Barack Obama. He was nominally black, “articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy,” as Joe Biden put it, lacking the frightening funk of a Jesse Jackson. He was Columbia and Harvard educated, and endowed with a photogenic family. More important, unlike Kerry or Carter, he possessed a seemingly Clintonesque ability to present political bromides and slogans with a winning smile. Best of all, he was staunchly progressive, his whole adult life before 2008 spent in the belly of the leftist beast: universities and Alinsky-inspired community organizing, with two-years’ worth of service in the U.S. Senate, where he was one of its most liberal members, railing against the 2006 “surge” in Iraq, which he called a “reckless escalation” redolent of Vietnam. Provided with the political Teflon created by white guilt and the yearning for racial and political reconciliation that he exploited in his speeches, and coddled by a protective media, Obama overcame the usually toxic effects of extreme liberalism on presidential candidates.

So the media went all-in for Obama, ignoring or dismissing the troubling details from his past like his grades in college, his incomplete health records, his friendship with unrepentant terrorist Bill Ayers, and his 20 years spent in his self-confessed “spiritual guide” Jeremiah Wright’s racist, anti-American church. Even his betrayal of progressive goals like closing down Guantanamo and quickly ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan did not damp the progressive ardor. He partially delivered on the leftist Holy Grail of nationalized health care, ramming through Obamacare with sleazy politicking the media studiously ignored. He went on the international “apology” tour, confessing America’s past sins and validating the old leftist indictment of America as a global villain. He dismissed American exceptionalism, and instead extolled the virtues of multi-lateral diplomacy and U.N. internationalism presumably scorned by his trigger-happy cowboy predecessor.  He also proscribed waterboarding, the most effective interrogation technique we had for extracting useful intelligence, but decried as “torture” by the left. He did ramp up drone attacks, another progressive mortal sin, but one ignored by the same media that meticulously documented every one of Bush’s alleged transgressions of international law. But this backsliding, along with other lapses such as maintaining rendition and other Bush-era policies like the Patriot Act, could all be forgiven, acceptable compromises necessary to win their standard-bearer another term, when without the pressure of reelection he could be more “flexible,” as he told the Russians. So when the reelection campaign started, the media shifted from their usual ideological bias to outright partisanship. They ignored or played down anything remotely damaging to Obama, from Joe Biden’s surreal gaffes to the attempt to cover up the disastrous mistakes that led to our ambassador being murdered in Benghazi, thus deflecting attention from Obama’s failed foreign policy.

Then came the debate. Without a friendly chorus to preach to and a cheerleading media to act as a filter, Obama was revealed to be what he had been all along: a mediocre mind, a terrible politician, and an arrogant narcissist who could only smirk and grimace as Mitt Romney took him apart.

At that point, 40 years of progressive frustration and betrayal erupted into hysterical rage. The possibility of Obama’s defeat and yet another repudiation of progressive ideology suddenly became more real. No amount of media spin, from Al Gore’s altitude sickness excuse to Bob Woodward’s made-up foreign policy “crisis,” could cover up the debacle of Obama’s performance. Like children who fear they might not get what they want, the media could only throw a tantrum and attack their messiah for revealing the feet of clay they had so desperately kept hidden.

Now the progressives are panicking. They can’t create a better candidate than Obama has been for smuggling progressive ideology under the guise of soothing centrism. And they can’t stand the thought of yet another competent Republican whose term will illustrate once again the real-world failures of progressive utopianism. What this history of 40 years of dashed hopes and abject failure tells us is that from now until election day, the desperate Dems and their media errand boys will use every dirty trick to defeat Romney and preserve their dream to “fundamentally transform America.”

Bruce Thornton

Source: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/bruce-thornton/panic-of-the-progressives/

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

How Hamas Terrorizes Gaza’s Citizens

by Joseph Puder


The U.S., along with the European Union and Israel, considers the Palestinian Hamas regime ensconced in Gaza a terrorist organization primarily because of its use of suicide bombers and its covenant which vows to replace Israel with a Palestinian Islamist state by force of arms.  Hamas refuses to recognize Israel’s right to exist, much less make peace with it. The Guardian reported on January 8, 2009 that

The incoming Obama administration [was] prepared to abandon George Bush’s doctrine of isolating Hamas by establishing a channel to the Islamist organization, according to a source close to the transition team.  In 2006 the U.S. Congress voted into law a ban on any U.S. financial aid to Hamas.  Most recently, despite Congressional objections, the Obama administration [as reported by Breitbart.com] on April 13, 2012, sent $147 million in U.S. taxpayer dollars to Hamas-run Gaza for “humanitarian purposes.”

It has since been revealed, in a report by Human Rights Watch (HRW), that Hamas is perpetrating gross human rights abuses against its own Palestinian people.

Joe Stork, Deputy Middle East Director for the New York-based HRW, charged this week that, “After five years of Hamas rule in Gaza, its criminal justice system reeks of injustice, routinely violates detainees’ rights, and grants impunity to abusive security services.”

According to Saudi-based Arab News, an HRW report titled “Abusive System: Criminal Justice in Gaza” alleged that Hamas security services failed to inform relatives of the whereabouts of detainees, and had arrested and abused lawyers.  Stork added that “Hamas should stop the kind of abuses that Egyptians and Syrians and others in the region have risked their lives to bring to an end.”

Stork is right about Hamas’s abuse of its Gaza residents and is somewhat correct about Egyptians and Syrians risking their lives to bring an end to the arbitrary justice meted out by these authoritarian regimes.  Regretfully, the Islamists have managed to hijack both revolutions, and it is apparent that Hamas’s Islamist “justice” will serves as a model for the future of criminal justice under the “revolutionary” Islamist regimes in Egypt and Syria.  The Islamic Republic of Iran – a key supporter of (Sunni-Muslim) Hamas — is another example of Islamist justice (of the Shia variety) where torture, rape, and murder of detainees are commonplace.

The HRW report calls on the Hamas regime in Gaza to institute urgent reforms, and a moratorium on the death penalty. One category of people upon whom the death penalty is imposed is alleged “collaborators with Israel.”  This distinction has become a convenient way in which to settle any criminal scores, and on many occasions is meted out without a shred of evidence.

The HRW report cited the case of Abdel Karim Shrair, who, according to family members and lawyers, was tortured under interrogation before being executed by a firing squad in May 2011, after confessing to collaborating with Israel.

The Guardian reported on October 3, 2012 that the European Union condemned the death sentences that were handed down last month to two men in Gaza, one for murder and the second for alleged collaboration with Israel.  Martin Barillas, a former US diplomat, a democracy advocate, as well as the editor of Spero News, reported on December 8, 2010 that a military tribunal composed of Hamas members convicted three men of alleged collaboration with Israel. One of them received the death penalty.

According to a Palestinian Authority (PA) law, the president of the PA must approve all execution orders before they can be carried out, yet Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas was not consulted since Hamas does not recognize the legitimacy of his presidency. And, earlier in April of 2010, Hamas subjected two men to capital punishment on charges of collaboration with Israel. In 2008, during Israel’s Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, at least eight people were murdered by Hamas for allegedly helping Israel fight terrorism by providing information on local terrorist groups.  In September 2011, Hamas cracked down on collaborators with Israel, detaining residents of the Gaza Strip, including two physicians, an engineer, and members of Hamas itself. Hamas refused to identify those who were arrested.

Martin Barillas reported that the “Hamas campaign has created fear and suspicion.” According to local media, a resident confided that the Islamist campaign has had a really bad impact on society.  People no longer trust each other. He said, “We don’t talk openly with each other.” And HRW charged that Hamas has killed at least 32 alleged informers and political opponents during and after Operation Cast Lead and maimed dozens of others.

The HRW report accused Hamas of failing to investigate alleged cases of torture and abuse, while granting impunity from prosecution to security services officials.  The HRW report claims, moreover, that “the intra-Palestinian political rivalry between Hamas and Fatah remains a significant factor behind many of Hamas’ abuses against detainees in Gaza.” The report goes on to say that the “Fatah dominated Palestinian Authority in the West Bank also arrests and detains Palestinians arbitrarily, including Hamas members or sympathizers, and similarly subjects detainees to torture and abuse.”

The Hamas missile attacks against Israeli civilians, especially women and children, as well as its disregard for its own people as indicated in the HRW report should put the Obama administration squarely against this terrorist group allied with the genocidal regime of Iran. But instead of seeking its demise some in the Democratic Party and in the Obama administration would like to portray Hamas as a “victim.” Ruben Navarrette, a nationally syndicated columnist with the Washington Post Writers group, wrote on September 12, 2012, “There has long been a constituency on the left that despises Israel for what it perceives to be abusive treatment of the Palestinians.  And, it seems, this element made itself heard at the Democratic National Convention.”

Navarrette pointed out that “[a]lso deleted [from the 2012 Democratic Party platform along with references to God and Jerusalem] was language recognizing Hamas as a terrorist organization and calling on the U.S. and its allies to continue to isolate Hamas until it renounces terrorism, recognizes Israel’s right to exist, and abide by past agreements.” And, while Jerusalem and God were hastily restored into the 2012 Democratic Party platform, a day later after an outcry in the media, the condemnation of Hamas was omitted.

This means, for all intents and purposes, that Obama, his administration and his party’s platform, consider the condemnation of a terrorist organization that murdered Israeli women and children, as well as Palestinians, too controversial to put in its platform. Will this week’s HRW report change the Obama administration’s attitude towards Hamas? I would side with the skeptics.

Joseph Puder

Source: http://frontpagemag.com/2012/joseph-puder/how-hamas-terrorizes-gazas-citizens/

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

Palestinian Authority Rigging Courts - Canada, UN Complicit

by Khaled Abu Toameh

The Canadian Development Agency, with the help of the UN Development Program, has been funding new courthouses in the West Bank "to improve the Palestinians' access to justice." But justice can be achieved even if the judges, lawyers, prosecutors and defendants sit in a tent. Instead of investing in new buildings, it would be more helpful if the Canadians and the UN agency demanded that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and his aides stop obstructing the work of the judges.

In an unprecedented move, Palestinian judges in the West Bank this week went on strike in protest against the Palestinian Authority's repeated attempts to meddle in the internal affairs of the judiciary system.

The judges' protest shows that the Palestinian Authority is making a mockery of the courts in the West Bank. Moreover, it shows that the Palestinian Authority leadership wants the judges to issue verdicts that do not embarrass or harm senior Palestinian officials.

The protest raises serious questions about the international community's efforts to help the Palestinian Authority build a proper and credible judicial system in the West Bank.

The Canadian Development Agency, with the help of the UN Development Program, has been funding projects aimed at building new courthouses in the West Bank "to improve the Palestinians' access to justice."

But building new courthouses is not exactly what Palestinians need. Justice can be achieved even if the judges, lawyers, prosecutors and defendants sit in a tent.

Instead of investing in new buildings, it would be more helpful if the Canadians and UN agency demanded that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and his aides stop obstructing the work of the judges.

Hasan Khraisheh, deputy speaker of the PLC, told the daily Al-Quds Al-Arabi that the Palestinian Authority was trying to seize control over the judiciary system by appointing its supporters to senior positions.

By seeking to appoint the justice minister as attorney-general, the Palestinian Authority leadership is trying to avoid the possibility of holding any of its senior officials accountable, Khraisheh added. "There should be complete separation between the executive and legislative bodies," he argued.

The attorney-general's job has been vacant since the resignation last month of Ahmed al-Mughni, who had filed corruption charges against two cabinet ministers.

"We want to be fully independent in our work," said Ibrahim Amr, chairman of the Palestinian Judges' Society. "We don't want anyone or any party to interfere with our work."

Amr said that decision to strike came after his colleagues and he felt that there were attempts to "affect judges' rulings."

He also warned the Palestinian Authority leadership against pursuing its attempts to take control of the judiciary system. "This marks the beginning of the collapse of the Palestinian judicial system," he cautioned.

The judges say they are particularly concerned by the Palestinian Authority government's attempt to appoint the justice minister also as attorney-general, saying the move violates the Palestinian constitution and threatens the independence of the judiciary system.

In addition, the Palestinian judges are angry because the Palestinian Authority has been amending and passing new laws without consulting them or seeking the approval of the Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC).

Now it remains to be seen whether the Canadians and UN agencies will listen to the voices of the angry judges and demand that the Palestinian Authority halt its attempts to control the judiciary system. Ignoring these voices will allow Abbas and his top aides to turn Palestinian judges into obedient servants of the Palestinian Authority leadership.

Khaled Abu Toameh

Source: http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3387/palestinian-authority-courts

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

Iran and Nuclear Deception

by Dore Gold

In a rare admission two weeks ago, the head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization, Fereydoon Abbasi, was quoted in al-Hayat saying the Iranian government had provided false information in the past to protect its nuclear program. Abbasi accused Britain's foreign intelligence service, MI-6, of spying on Iran to justify the fact that it had decided to lie to the international community. To further confuse analysts in the West, Abbasi said that sometimes the Iranians had presented certain weaknesses that they did not have, and alternatively they presented themselves as having strengths they did not possess. 

By admitting that their diplomacy was based on a system of lies, the Iranians further put into question whether any of their statements to the International Atomic Energy Agency could be relied upon in any way. The monitoring of nuclear programs around the world has always been based on their transparency and the confidence that international inspectors could have in the declarations of countries with nuclear technology that had signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. The result of what Abbasi was saying was that the IAEA should have serious doubts about what Iran was officially reporting.

Abbasi's admission should not have come as a surprise considering that deception has long played a critical role in Iranian diplomacy. It was Ayatollah Khomeini, the founder of the Islamic Republic, who wrote in his book, "Islamic Government," published in Najaf in 1970, that "the preservation of Islam and the Shi'i school" required that its adherents observe the "principle of taqiya" — a term which means "deception" though it is taken from the Arabic root "to shield." 

Using taqiya, Middle Eastern historians have written that Iranian Shiites facing oppression were able to protect their community from external dangers from the Sunni world. What Khomeini did was to make a virtue out of what had once been a necessity. Thus Abbasi had essentially applied what was part of Khomeini's ideological legacy for the Islamic republic to protect its nuclear program. He must have known that Iran's use of lies in its diplomacy in the past had been surprisingly effective. For one of the great problems with Iran's use of deception as a part of state policy is that many in the West refused to accept that they have been deceived. 

Just before Ayatollah Khomeini arrived in Tehran in 1979, he lived outside of Paris and met with Western academics and journalists and told them that he wasn't interested in exercising personal power and that he would seek to advance the protection of human rights. His deception campaign worked with gullible Westerners. Professor Richard Falk, who today attacks Israel regularly as a U.N. official, at the time wrote an op-ed in The New York Times entitled "Trusting Khomeini." An analysis in The Washington Post suggested that Khomeini would set up a western parliamentary democracy. 

The Iranians have been using the same techniques for years to weaken Western resolve to deal effectively with them. There was the case of a message to the Bush administration through the Swiss ambassador to Iran in 2003, with a supposed roadmap for a "grand bargain" normalizing U.S.-Iranian relations, the authenticity of which was denied by those closest to the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Then there was the Iranian claim that Khamenei issued a fatwa saying that nuclear weapons were contrary to Islam. Yet in 2005 when the deputy director-general of the IAEA asked for a copy of Khamenei's fatwa from the Iranian ambassador, Tehran never supplied anything in writing. 

The main reason why the Iranians use diplomatic deceptions of this sort is that they keep getting away with them. In this specific case on Abbasi's statement to al-Hayat, there may be an additional factor. In the past, Iran has exposed aspects of its nuclear program, like in 2009 when it exposed its enrichment plant in Fordow, when it feared it was in danger of getting caught. Sometimes, the Iranians unilaterally change the rules of inspections, like when they declared in 2007 that they only have to admit to the existence of nuclear facilities once they receive nuclear material, rather than when their construction is started. This way the Iranians try to sneak out of their commitments rather than break out dramatically like the North Koreans. 

Because of the use of techniques of this sort, the U.S. and its allies still suspect that Iran has nuclear facilities which it has failed to declare. It cannot be ruled out that Abbasi has tried to set up an excuse for why Iran has not accurately presented to the IAEA aspects of its nuclear program that it is required to open up to inspections. The motivation of the Iranians is ultimately unimportant. What is significant is that any future arrangement between the West and Iran must be based on an ironclad system of inspections, if such understandings are ever reached, given the role that outright deception continues to play in Iran's diplomatic relations with the West.

Dore Gold

Source: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=2644

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.