Palestinian Islamic Jihad started a fire - Yaakov Lappin

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by Yaakov Lappin

The Iranian proxy group has been behind a string of attacks in recent weeks designed to sabotage Egyptian-led efforts to steer Gaza towards calm.

The Iranian-backed Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) terrorist organization—the second largest armed faction in Gaza—is responsible for the latest escalation in Gaza and Israel.

In recent weeks, PIJ, whose rocket arsenal is larger than that of Hamas, has conducted a string of attacks that it did not take responsibility for. The goal of these attacks appears to be the sabotage of Egyptian-led efforts to stabilize Gaza.

PIJ’s attacks include the launching of a rocket on April 29, which exploded in the Mediterranean Sea near a southern Israeli city. More recently, on May 3, the PIJ conducted a sniper attack on Israel Defense Forces soldiers on the Gaza border, during a Hamas-organized border riot. That shooting wounded an Israeli officer and a female soldier. It is that event that triggered the current flare-up. Starting on Saturday, hundreds of rockets and mortars have been fired from Gaza.

Israel accused the PIJ’s commander in northern Gaza, Bahaa Abu Al Ata, of being behind the April 29 rocket attack, which no group took responsibility for.

One possibility is that PIJ’s Syria-based radical secretary-general, Ziad Nakhala, who is extremely close to Iran and a frequent visitor to it, passed along orders to the faction’s commanders in Gaza to keep attacks on Israel going.

Egypt has worked hard to push Gaza away from the brink—efforts that the PIJ, Iran’s direct proxy, is apparently trying to undo.

Iran, for its part, is under growing economic distress and battling widening American sanctions. The Islamic Republic has a network of proxy groups around the Middle East, which it can activate in response to developments such as the recent U.S. designation of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization.

Iran could also seeking revenge for events in Syria. An air strike, attributed by international media reports to Israel, destroyed Iranian targets near the northwestern Syrian city of Masyaf on April 12, reportedly resulting in Iranian casualties.

On March 27, an Iranian weapons warehouse near the northern Syrian city of Aleppo was destroyed in an airstrike, which also reportedly resulted in casualties.

Israel is committed to preventing Iran from building military bases in Syria.

Either way, according to Israeli intelligence assessments, Hamas has been dragged into this latest escalation after failing to call out PIJ or enforce its sovereignty in Gaza.

During a conference call with journalists, the head of the IDF’s International Media Branch, Lt.-Col. Jonathan Conricus, confirmed that PIJ has “over the last week been trying to destabilize the area, and execute different attacks below the threshold, without being accountable, while trying to outsmart or trick Hamas.”

He described “numerous covert attempts” by PIJ to do this, while the faction simultaneously attends mediation talks in Egypt together with Hamas, which it pretends to cooperate with.

“Hamas has been unable so far to really control PIJ,” Conricus said. “We see that Hamas is deterred by PIJ, and [that it has] not been implementing its sovereignty over it.”

Hamas, for its part, has stuck with the “on-off” tactic of border riots and sending arson and explosive balloons over the border into Israel, as part of its extortion campaign to convince Israel to agree to its economic and infrastructure demands for Gaza. But that “controlled escalation” approach may well have collapsed over the weekend.

Following the PIJ sniper attack on Friday, the IDF responded by striking a manned Hamas position nearby, killing three members of Hamas’s armed wing. Conricus described that response as an “immediate tactical response … Our troops came under fire and we responded in the nearest place where we saw enemy officers.”

What followed was a wave of heavy rocket and mortar fire on Israeli civilians, launched by both PIJ and Hamas. Hamas abandoned its more “cautious” approach in favor of the escalation that PIJ initiated. Hundreds of rocket attacks followed.

“This is a reckless, coordinated fire effort by PIJ and Hamas, who are firing from almost all parts of Gaza at different Israeli civilian communities,” Conricus stated. “We have been responding by hitting military targets.”

As Gazan terrorist cells launch projectiles from densely populated urban areas in Gaza, Israel’s Iron Dome air defense batteries have intercepted most of the threats headed for populated areas. Conricus described the interception rate as “good.”

Israeli air strikes have killed some five to six Gazan terrorists thus far, according to the IDF. Israel targeted dozens of PIJ and Hamas sites—a combination of weapons production facilities and military posts.

Israel is expected to broaden its air campaign in the coming hours. The Israel Air Force also destroyed a cross-border PIJ attack tunnel, dug from the Rafah area of southern Gaza into Israel.

“They expedited the digging over the past weeks,” Conricus said, referring to PIJ, “in an attempt to have an operational infrastructure to conduct a terrorist attack. We monitored that digging for a long time. The tunnel did cross the fence into Israel. Now, we decided to attack and neutralize it.”

The Israeli military is preparing for what may come next, if the flare-up does not die down. At this stage, at least, it appears as if Israel’s goal is to get Hamas to rein in PIJ and commit to keeping it in check before considering any further steps.

In the meantime, Israel is reinforcing its air defense systems, sharpening intelligence capabilities and deploying Home Front Command crews around the country to aid civilians in dealing with rocket attacks.

Israel has sealed all the border crossings with Gaza and closed the fishing zone off the coast.
Meanwhile, Israeli civilians are on high alert, and authorities have called on them to be attentive to rocket alerts. Compliance with safety procedures saved lives on Saturday, Conricus said.

Alluding to where the escalation may lead, he added: “If needed, we have the ability to mobilize ground forces.”

This article is reprinted from JNS.org


Yaakov Lappin

Source: https://www.israelhayom.com/2019/05/05/palestinian-islamic-jihad-started-a-fire/

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Trump Considers Designating Muslim Brotherhood a Terrorist Org - Matthew Vadum

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by Matthew Vadum

Finally, a U.S. president who understands the threat.

The Trump administration is considering officially designating the Islamist group known as the Muslim Brotherhood as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, a policy unimaginable during the terrorist-friendly Obama administration which championed the group as an ally.

“The president has consulted with his national security team and leaders in the region who share his concern, and this designation is working its way through the internal process,” White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said in a statement April 30.

The Trump administration’s deliberations over the prospective designation come weeks after President Trump designated Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as an FTO to combat that theocratic dictatorship’s global campaign of terrorism. The designation gives the government more tools to fight terrorism.

“This unprecedented step, led by the Department of State, recognizes the reality that Iran is not only a State Sponsor of Terrorism, but that the IRGC actively participates in, finances, and promotes terrorism as a tool of statecraft,” Trump said in a statement. This designation, which took effect April 15, was “the first time that the United States has ever named a part of another government as a FTO.”

As Joseph Klein previously wrote at FrontPage, the mullahs’ regime “lives and breathes Islamic extremism, which it seeks to export through its global jihad terrorist network,” adding that the “IRGC sits at the center of that terrorist network,” providing “funding, equipment, training, and logistical support to terrorist proxy groups, including most notably Hezbollah in Lebanon and Syria.” The IRGC has also participated in attacks on Americans.

Although the Muslim Brotherhood still enjoys support throughout the Arab world, Bahrain, Egypt, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and the United Arab Emirates have already designated the group a terrorist organization, The Epoch Times reports. The Brotherhood-backed HAMAS organization has been designated a terrorist organization by the United States. Al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri was previously a member of the Brotherhood.

The UAE designated the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Brotherhood affiliate in the U.S. that poses as a Muslim civil rights group, a terrorist organization in 2014. In the U.S., CAIR was named an unindicted co-conspirator in 2007 in an alleged criminal conspiracy to support both HAMAS and the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development.

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi reportedly asked President Trump April 9 for the designation during a private consultation. Sisi overthrew the Muslim Brotherhood-backed president, Mohamed Morsi, in 2013, and then won election in his own right the year after. Since then he has cracked down on Muslim militants.

National Security Advisor John Bolton and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo reportedly favor the designation, but officials at the Pentagon and elsewhere in the administration have been dragging their heels.

The Obama administration was infested with Muslim Brotherhood backers.

For example, Hillary Clinton’s ties to the Brotherhood are well-documented.

The policies she carried out as President Barack Hussein Obama’s secretary of state from January 2009 to February 2013 caused the so-called Arab Spring, a period of civil unrest, wars, and revolutions in the Arab world that began in late 2010 and was followed by the Arab Winter, a backlash that made Islamism and authoritarianism ascendant in the region. She helped the Muslim Brotherhood overthrow longtime U.S. ally Hosni Mubarak in 2012 to clear the way for their candidate, Mohamed Morsi, to assume the Egyptian presidency.

Longtime Hillary lieutenant Huma Abedin has generational ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. In college she was an active member of the Muslim Students Association (MSA), a Muslim Brotherhood affiliate. She also worked at the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs which has ties to al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood.

Former President Obama’s policy of collaborating with the Egypt-based Muslim Brotherhood appears to have helped the notorious group infiltrate Bill and Hillary Clinton’s long-embattled public charity.

One apparent beneficiary of that policy was Gehad el-Haddad, a Muslim Brotherhood operative who worked at the Clinton Foundation in Egypt for five years. After the regime he was part of was ousted, the Islamic terrorist leader received a life sentence in Egypt for sedition.

Both the Clinton Foundation and the Obama administration worked closely with the Muslim Brotherhood, Clare Lopez, vice president for research and analysis at the Center for Security Policy said last year.

“It was U.S. policy at that time to support the Muslim Brotherhood both domestically and abroad. The Obama administration was riddled with such influences,” Lopez said.

Obama’s envoy to Egypt, Anne W. Patterson, “worked with the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood hand-in-glove–so did the Clinton Foundation,” Lopez said. “Obama’s White House and Hillary Clinton’s Department of State intended, wanted, supported the Muslim Brotherhood taking power in” Egypt and in select countries, she added.

In 2010, the Obama administration spelled out its policy of support for the Muslim Brotherhood in a still-classified document titled “Presidential Study Directive-11,” or PSD-11. The objective of the policy, according to leaked reports, was to help the Muslim Brotherhood come to power in Tunisia, Libya, Syria, and Egypt. In a March 6, 2011, Washington Post column, David Ignatius wrote, “This is the president as global community organizer—a man who believes that change is inevitable and desirable, and that the United States must align itself with the new forces shaping the world.”

In November 2018 the Center for Security Policy urged President Trump to declassify PSD-11.

The odds of the government declassifying that memo that is potentially devastating to Obama and friends just improved.

Matthew Vadum, formerly senior vice president at the investigative think tank Capital Research Center, is an award-winning investigative reporter and author of the book, "Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts Are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers."

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273662/trump-considers-designating-muslim-brotherhood-matthew-vadum

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Speaker Pelosi Defames Attorney General Barr - Joseph Klein

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by Joseph Klein

Maliciously accuses Barr of lying to Congress.

Speaker Nancy Pelosi has accused Attorney General William Barr of lying to Congress about Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report and the Special Counsel’s concerns with how Attorney General Barr characterized the report’s findings. “What is deadly serious about it is the attorney general of the United States of America is not telling the truth to the Congress of the United States. That’s a crime,” Speaker Pelosi told reporters. “He lied to Congress. If anybody else did that, it would be considered a crime. Nobody is above the law.”

Frustrated that their Russian-Trump conspiracy narrative has gone up in smoke, Democrats are looking to hang an obstruction of justice charge around President Trump’s neck and are targeting Attorney General Barr as a convenient scapegoat for getting in their way. Speaker Pelosi’s accusation of criminal conduct against Mr. Barr is a desperate act that crosses the line into malicious falsehood of her own.

Speaker Pelosi followed the example of such lightweights on the Senate Judiciary Committee as Democratic Senator Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, who made the same charge Wednesday during Mr. Barr’s appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee on which she sits. Senator Hirono followed up her baseless accusation with this bit of self-praise: "Please, Mr. Attorney General, give us some credit for knowing what the hell is going on around here with you." The only thing that Senator Hirono deserves “credit” for after her disgraceful performance during Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing and during Mr. Barr’s Wednesday appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee is how easily she embarrasses herself.

Pelosi and Hirono were apparently in a lather over testimony that Attorney General Barr gave to the House Appropriations Committee last month that his accusers claim was perjurious. They contend that Mr. Barr misrepresented his knowledge of the Mueller team’s displeasure over how he characterized the Mueller report's findings in his 4-page letter summary of the report’s bottom line conclusions that he presented to Congress and the public on March 24^th. A letter that Mr. Mueller had sent to Mr. Barr before Mr. Barr’s April 9^th testimony to the House committee had voiced Mr. Mueller’s concern that Mr. Barr had not fully captured “the context, nature, and substance” of the Special Counsel Office’s “work and conclusions.” In responding to a question by Rep. Charlie Crist (D-Fla) about press reports claiming that the Mueller team was unhappy with what Mr. Barr had written in his short summary of conclusions to Congress, Mr. Barr did not elude to the Mueller letter.
Here is the supposedly infamous exchange:

Rep. Charlie Crist, D-Fla.: “Reports have emerged recently, general, that members of the special counsel’s team are frustrated at some level with the limited information included in your March 24 letter. ... Do you know what they are referencing with that?”
Barr: “No, I don’t. I think I think, I suspect that they probably wanted more put out, but in my view I was not interested in putting out summaries.” 

There is absolutely nothing misleading in Mr. Barr’s response. As the attorney general told the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, his dealings were directly with Special Counsel Mueller, not members of his staff. Therefore, he could not be certain what was in their minds. Nevertheless, Mr. Barr correctly surmised that staff members were frustrated for the same reason that Mr. Mueller had expressed in his letter to Mr. Barr and his subsequent phone conversation. They wanted more information “put out” into the public domain, including the detailed summaries prepared by the Mueller team. However, Mr. Barr thought it was not wise to release portions of the Mueller report, including the detailed summaries, in a piecemeal fashion, especially before the review process for possible necessary redactions was completed. In any event, according to Mr. Barr, Special Counsel Mueller did not refute the accuracy of Mr. Barr’s March 24^th letter during a telephone conversation subsequent to Mr. Mueller’s letter to Mr. Barr. And as Attorney General Barr testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, the objective of his March 24^th letter was simply to “notify the people as to the bottom line conclusion. We were not trying to summarize the 410-page report. So I offered Bob Mueller the opportunity to review that letter before it went out and he declined."

Moreover, the whole matter involving how Mr. Barr characterized the Mueller report is now moot. More than 90 percent of the Mueller report was made publicly available within 10 days after Attorney General Barr’s testimony to the House Appropriations Committee. Congress and the public were soon able to read the report for themselves and draw their own conclusions.

There is also absolutely nothing misleading in Mr. Barr’s original March 24^th letter to Congress in how he described the bottom-line conclusions of the Mueller report. Regarding the allegation of conspiracy between the Trump campaign and Russians to interfere with the 2016 presidential election, the attorney general quoted from the Mueller report: “[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.” That was the verdict, to which the attorney general added some information from the Mueller report on the principal means by which Russia sought to influence the election. He also referenced the fact that there were multiple offers from Russian-affiliated individuals to assist the Trump campaign.

Regarding obstruction of justice, Attorney General Barr accurately reported that “The Special Counsel…did not draw a conclusion - one way or the other – as to whether the examined conduct constituted obstruction. Instead, for each of the relevant actions investigated, the report sets out evidence on both sides of the question and leaves unresolved what the Special Counsel views as ‘difficult issues’ of law and fact concerning whether the President's actions and intent could be viewed as obstruction. The Special Counsel states that ‘while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.’”

Again, Mr. Barr accurately communicated the bottom-line verdict – or, in this case, the lack of one – in the Mueller report. Mr. Barr did not summarize each of the incidents described in the Mueller report that might or might not give rise to a finding of obstruction of justice. He did not have to do so since the Special Counsel decided not to make a traditional prosecutorial judgment as to criminal liability regarding those incidents. Besides, the mostly unredacted report, with a full description of the incidents, would be made available to the public shortly thereafter.

Mr. Mueller left the decision up to the attorney general as to whether the conduct described in the Mueller report constitutes the crime of obstruction of justice. Attorney General Barr, along with Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, concluded that “the evidence developed during the Special Counsel's investigation is not sufficient to establish that the President committed an obstruction-of-justice offense.” For reasons far stronger than former FBI Director James Comey’s determination that Hillary Clinton had lacked the requisite intent to commit a crime in connection with her handling of government e-mails on her private server, the evidence described in the Mueller report comes nowhere close to proving corrupt intent beyond a reasonable doubt.

Speaker Pelosi owes Attorney General Barr an apology for her slanderous ad hominem attack on the attorney general’s character and veracity. Of course, this self-righteous Trump hater and her cohorts would never apologize. She is also a hypocrite of the first order. When Republicans in the House called for a contempt-of-Congress vote against then-Attorney General Eric Holder for allegedly failing to cooperate in their probe of the Operation Fast and Furious scandal, then-House Minority Leader Pelosi claimed that the Republicans were targeting Mr. Holder because his Department of Justice was cracking down on state voter ID laws. When the attorney general was a Democrat, Ms. Pelosi defended his obstruction of a congressional oversight investigation on nonsensical grounds. When the attorney general is a Republican, she distorts what the attorney general actually said and wrote to Congress just to score cheap political points, even if it means defaming his character with maliciously false charges. We should not be surprised.

Joseph Klein is a Harvard-trained lawyer and the author of Global Deception: The UN’s Stealth Assault on America’s Freedom and Lethal Engagement: Barack Hussein Obama, the United Nations & Radical Islam.

Source: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273658/speaker-pelosi-defames-attorney-general-barr-joseph-klein

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A premeditated Ramadan offensive - Daniel Siryoti

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by Daniel Siryoti

Hamas leader Sinwar took a calculated risk by telling his operatives to launch rockets on Israel even while he was away in Cairo.

The fact that Hamas and the Palestinian Islamic Jihad fired some 300 rockets toward Israel even as their senior leadership convenes in Cairo for talks shows that this latest escalation [is] premeditated. It began with the trickling of rockets early last week, followed by incendiary airborne devices, provocations along the Gaza Strip fence, and then the latest barrage.

As Hamas prepares for the holy month of Ramadan, which begins this week, it would like to extract more concessions from Israel and present them to Gazans a victory vis-à-vis Israel. Its chief goal is to make Israel transfer more cash from Qatar so that it can pay its employees running the Gaza Strip.

The fact that the Qatari intermediary has not shown up in the region proves that funds have already been transferred. But Hamas wants more funds, and Israel has so far vehemently refused.

Senior Hamas military leader Yahya Sinwar, unlike Hamas political bureau chief Ismail Haniyeh, knows how to read Israeli society, having spent decades locked up in an Israeli prison. He knows Israel will shy away from a full-fledged confrontation in the Gaza Strip just before Independence Day and the Eurovision Song Contest. That is why Sinwar took a calculated risk by telling his operatives to launch rockets on Israel even while he was away in Cairo.

It is still unclear how this latest escalation will end, but what is clear is that Israel’s killing of two Hamas operatives on Friday after two Israeli troops were shot on the Gaza fence, was not the trigger for the massive rocket barrage.

Daniel Siryoti

Source: https://www.israelhayom.com/2019/05/05/a-premeditated-ramadan-offensive/

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Iran and a Tale of Two Losers - Amir Taheri

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by Amir Taheri

Is a Plan B for Iran possible?

• Forty years after the Islamic Revolution, the clergy-led ruling elite was still behaving like a sect rather than a state, thus preventing Iran from behaving like a normal nation with all its merits and defects.
• The fifth and highest stage is that of "statehood," which becomes possible when society is used to the rule of law regardless of the quality of the law in force, and respects the primacy of state institutions as representations of the public will and interest.
• Ruling elites in the Islamic world, including even empire-builders such as the Ottomans and Safavids, progressed through the first four stages described above but never reached the fifth stage, that is to say, the creation of a proper "state" based on the rule of law.

Now, four decades after the Khomeinists seized power, Iran cannot behave like a nation-state while Islam, in its Iranian Shi'ite version, has suffered a historic setback. Pictured: Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1988. (Image source: emam.com/Wikimedia Commons)

Last November, Westminster University in London organized a seminar with an enticing theme: Is a Plan B for Iran possible?

In its simplest form, the main argument was that 40 years after the Islamic Revolution, the clergy-led ruling elite was still behaving like a sect rather than a state, thus preventing Iran from behaving like a normal nation with all its merits and defects.

In the paper that I presented, I drew on the teachings of several Iranian classical historians, most notably Abul-Fazl Beyhaqi (died in 1077 AD). Tracing the course through which the Ghaznavids, a Turkic warrior tribe, seized power in Iran and established a dynasty, Beyhaqi identifies five stages.

The first stage is that of "conquest" when Saboktakin, the warrior-chief seizes a chunk of territory to use as a base for future episodes in his saga. In the next stage, known as "domination," the conqueror tribe establishes itself as the predominant force within the territory seized.

The next stage is known as "control" and sees the new ruling elite set the agenda throughout the region seized, and preventing putative rivals from challenging it on major issues.

The fourth stage is that of "governance". In it, the power provided -- thanks to "control" -- is used to arbitrate among diverse, often conflicting, interests and agendas in a way that ensures a minimum of law and order and the elimination of the threat of civil war.

The fifth and highest stage is that of "statehood," which becomes possible when society is used to the rule of law regardless of the quality of the law in force, and respects the primacy of state institutions as representations of the public will and interest.

Thus, the creation of a "state" is regarded as the highest goal of politics and the sine qua non of what one might call civilization.

In the 19th century, some Muslim intellectuals, including many with a clerical background, identified the failure of the Islamic "ummah" in developing the structures of statehood as the principal cause of Islam's decline and eventual domination by Western powers.

Ruling elites in the Islamic world, including even empire-builders such as the Ottomans and Safavids, progressed through the first four stages described above but never reached the fifth stage, that is to say, the creation of a proper "state" based on the rule of law.

The same is true of most of the present-day Islamic nations. In many cases, what they offer is a caricature of statehood in the sense intended by Muslim classical historians.

In some instances, such as the Taliban "emirate" in Afghanistan, the Boko Haram "caliphate" in West Africa and the ISIS in Iraq and Syria - the process stopped at the second (domination) or the third (control) stages.

But, what about the "imamate" created by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in Iran?

By what may have been a coincidence, it seems that the "Supreme Guide" of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei may have been reading some of the texts that I had been re-reading last winter.

In what he terms "a guide for the new Islamic civilization", published last March, he claims that the Khomeinist revolution has successfully completed the first four stages of conquering, dominating, controlling, and governing Iran, but has failed in the fifth stage which is the creation of a state. And, yet, he argues that without building genuine state structures, he would be unable to realize his dream of creating "the new Islamic civilization" within the four-decade time-frame he has fixed.

In 40 years' time, Khamenei may still be around to assess the success or failure of his project for mankind under his ideal state.

For my part, since I doubt that I would be around to interject an "I-told-you-so", the best is to assert straightaway that, as far as creating proper state structures is concerned, the Khomeinist movement is unlikely to do any better than the Qarametah, the Thwarat al-Zanj (Revolution of the Blacks) and Hassan al-Sabah's Hashasheen not to mention Mullah Abdul-Rahman in Somaliland, Akhund Abdul-Ghafour in Swat, Muhammad Ahmad in the Aba island, and more recently, Mullah Omar and Abubakr al-Baghdadi.

Islamic history is full of instances in which a tribe, a group or even a charismatic leader, used religion as a rallying point in the service of a political project.

But those who succeeded beyond the first two or three stages did so by putting religion back in its proper place, and moving to the later stages of progress towards statehood. In some cases, that "putting back in its proper place" took the form of massacres of former allies. In other cases, the goal was achieved through reform, redefinition of roles and, as often in Islamic history, outright bribery.

In the best cases, there was a realization on all sides that confusing the political space with the religious one was bad for both. This does not mean adopting "secularism", whatever that means or, worse still, making religion subservient to the state as was the case in Kemalist Turkey.

In Iran of the 1930s, a group of intellectuals tried to guide the nation towards modern statehood not by shutting religion in a ghetto but by persuading and, when needed, coercing it, to know its place and play its proper, necessarily circumcised, role in society by abandoning totalitarian ambitions. The scheme worked by allowing Islam to prosper in its proper sphere while Iran recast itself as a modern nation-state.

Now, however, four decades after the Khomeinists seized power, Iran cannot behave like a nation-state while Islam, in its Iranian Shi'ite version, has suffered a historic setback.

Khamenei admits failure in creating a genuine state. And, Grand Ayatollah Abdullah Jawadi Amoli, one of Iran's highest-ranking Shi'ite clerics, signals an equally big failure on the religious front.

"In the past 40 years, the Seminary in Qom has not produced a single book that could be regarded as a reference," he told a conference of senior seminarians last month.

"If they take the Najaf Seminary from us, we won't have anything left."

Khomeinism has produced two losers: Iran as a nation and Shiism as a faith.

This article was originally published by Asharq al-Awsat

Amir Taheri was the executive editor-in-chief of the daily Kayhan in Iran from 1972 to 1979. He has worked at or written for innumerable publications, published eleven books, and has been a columnist for Asharq Al-Awsat since 1987.

Source: https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14180/iran-two-losers

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Tragedy Tomorrow, Comedy Tonight - Clarice Feldman

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by Clarice Feldman

Attorney General William Barr is about to join the handful of patriot heroes in the long-running collusion saga.

That’s the title of a great song in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, and that, it occurs to me, is an appropriate song for the media and the Democrats. For two years they vigorously promoted -- for their amusement and political benefit -- a fake Russian collusion story and now must watch it unravel and boomerang on them, their allies and the miscreants who created it. They had their fun, and the denouement has begun. 

This Week’s Hearings

There were two hearings on the Mueller report this week, one before the Senate Judiciary Committee and another before the House Judiciary Committee. The Senate hearings were marked by such silly questions and vituperative charges, often by senators who are seeking the party’s nomination and want publicity, that I was tempted to simply repeat some of them for laughs. Other developments, which I will explain, preempted that plan, but I cannot resist this exchange between the fabulist Senator Richard Blumenthal, who faked his war record, and the attorney general:

“Did you or anyone, either you, or anyone on your staff memorialize your conversation with Robert Mueller?” Blumenthal asked Barr.
“Yes,” replied Barr.
“There were notes taken of the call,” Barr said in response to Blumenthal asking who took the memos.
“May we have those notes?” Blumenthal asked.
“No,” Barr promptly replied.
“Why not?” Blumenthal shot back.
“Why should you have them?” Barr replied.

Not since Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld have I seen such terse, justifiable dismissal of blather and not since Edwin Meese have a seen a Republican attorney general who wasn’t a timid wretch.

As for the House hearing, the chairman set so many conditions for his appearance that Barr refused to attend and the takeaway of the hearing was Democratic Congressman Steve Cohen munching on fried chicken.

Factual Errors in the Mueller Report

I think there are a number of factual errors in the Mueller report which, if he ever testifies, might be more edifying than watching Cohen eat chicken. Here are just two. I still cannot understand how, when no government agency examined the DNC servers, he could possibly conclude the leaks from it were the result of Russian hacking as opposed to a download by someone with internal access to it.

More significant is the very basis for the investigation itself. Purportedly the investigation was triggered by George Papadopoulos’ conversations, not just the now thoroughly discredited Steele Dossier. At the Senate hearing the attorney general disclosed that Alexander Downer, a former Australian diplomat, was the source of the information, which, we are told, was the trigger for the investigation. While this had been reported earlier, this is the first time the government has publicly acknowledged Downer’s role. As for the information from Downer, it seems to me the conversation was thrown in to buttress the predicate for the entire witch-hunt, the Dossier clearly being an inadequate basis. Barr seems to agree:

Barr suggested in his testimony that he has concerns with the FBI’s rationale for opening the investigation based on the Aussie tip.
“I would have to see exactly what the report was from Downer, the Australian Downer, and exactly what he quoted Papadopoulos as saying,” Barr told Durbin.
“But from what you just read, I’m not sure what the correlation was between the Russians having dirt and jumping to the conclusion that that suggested foreknowledge of the hacking.”

Legal Poppycock in Part 2 of the Mueller Report 

Not only do the factual recitations in the Mueller report appear sloppy and unable to pass scrutiny, the legal arguments in the Second Section, presumably the reason why the investigation continued long past the point where the collusion contentions were proven unsustainable, are thin gruel as well. We now know that Barr himself brought this to the attention of Rod Rosenstein before he was named attorney general. It’s a certainty to me that Barr’s thorough legal argument and then his assumption of office led to the conclusion of the Mueller probe six weeks after he assumed office.

There’s a really fine analysis by Will Chamberlin of the “legal chess match” which Barr won. It involves the reading of 18 U.S.C. Sec. 1512 (c)(2), a section of the statute which Mueller’s team was exploiting to keep their game alive and the President hamstrung. As Chamberlin says, “Mueller adopted an expansive, acontextual, and constitutionally questionable interpretation [of the section] and used it to justify an extensive investigation into potential obstruction of justice by President Trump.”

It was clear from the direction of the Special Counsel’s investigation that this was the game. Barr went over Mueller’s head on June 8 of last year with a detailed 19-page memorandum to Rod Rosenstein in which he noted the President lacked the requisite intent of that provision but has also made clear that he disagreed with Mueller’s legal theories. 

(The goofy theory concerning obstruction reminds me of the goofy theory the prosecutors used to destroy the fine accounting firm Arthur Andersen in a case which the Supreme Court unanimously overruled. It’s no coincidence that the prosecutor in that case was on the Mueller team and certainly the architect of the notion that prosecutors ought to determine if perfectly legitimate conduct can be made the basis of a criminal proceeding if the prosecutor thinks the conduct somehow impedes his ability to convict on an actual crime.)

Professor Alan Dershowitz agrees with Barr’s determination:

In the absence of a contrary precedent, the general obstruction of justice statute should not be deemed applicable to the commission of an act by a president authorized by the Constitution, even if it was self-serving. This conclusion applies not only to the firing of Comey, but to all actions taken by President Trump pursuant to constitutional authority under Article II. [snip]
The real controversy is whether President Trump’s actions, authorized by the Constitution, could constitute the crime of obstruction of justice. Barr is right in concluding it couldn’t. Mueller is wrong in concluding it could.

In plain language, it would be a travesty if, like Spanish inquisitors, prosecutors could charge officials with wrongdoing when they were clearly acting within their legally authorized roles simply because the prosecutors disagreed with the decisions and had confected some cockamamie theory on how it could have impeded their investigation of a nonexistent crime.

The Hillary Clinton Investigation

If you will recall, it was James Comey, not Attorney General Loretta Lynch, who announced Hillary would not be charged for mishandling classified information on her private server. Eric Felten suggests that she was set up by Bill Clinton to force her to turn the decision on whether to prosecute to her staff, headed by Comey. He bases his argument on a transcript of her closed-door testimony before the House Committee on Oversight and Reform on December 19 of last year. Her testimony is far different than the description she’d earlier given reporters. In her congressional testimony this was anything but a chance meeting, but a deliberate intrusion by Bill Clinton who she could not get to leave and who prattled on for 8-10 minutes.

James Comey was FBI director at the time of the tarmac meeting. Much later -- just two days before Lynch’s closed door testimony on Capitol Hill -- Comey gave his own private congressional interview. He claimed to have been so troubled by the Lynch/Clinton get-together that he considered calling for a special counsel to investigate. But, he decided a special counsel wasn’t necessary. Which left him in the position to usurp from Lynch, with his July 5, 2016 press conference, the decision of whether or not to prosecute Hillary.
Let’s assume for the sake of argument that Lynch was not lying to Congress. If so, it seems to have dawned on her rather late that Clinton had compromised her, had put her in a jam. What if that’s exactly what he set out to do? It would explain the ex-president’s otherwise inexplicable behavior -- how one of the great glad-handers of all time leapt onto a plane in order to bore everyone to death. He was anything but clueless; he was demonstrating to the attorney general that he could cause her real trouble, and could do so with cheerful impunity. He didn’t have to make heavy-handed threats or otherwise put himself at risk of an obstruction of justice charge. No, all he had to do was darken the airplane doorway and prattle on with seeming obliviousness about grandkids, travel plans, coal mining, golf, and Brexit.
In the wake of that bravura performance, Lynch had to convene working groups to determine whether she needed to recuse herself from the Hillary probe. She would ultimately decide against recusal, but said she would accept the decision of career staff and the FBI on whether to prosecute.
What a mess. And what a splendidly innocent way of causing mayhem and conveying menace. Give Bill Clinton his due -- the man is no amateur.

Upcoming Events

House Intelligence Committee chair Devin Nunes Has some fact questions about Joseph Mifsud, often described as a Maltese professor. He was the man who told Papadopoulos that the Russians had email “dirt” on Hillary that could harm her campaign. The Mueller report indicates he was working for the Russians and was a counterintelligence threat. Devin Nunes says the Mueller report “omits any mention of a wide range of contacts Mifsud had with Western political institutions and individuals.” It was this offer from Mifsud that Papadopoulos purportedly mentioned to Downer and Downer somehow conveyed to the FBI and per Comey was a significant inspiration for the collusion investigation.

Nunes also is seeking information about the FBI’s contacts with Mifsud -- asking how the bureau knew to question Papadopoulos specifically about Clinton’s emails if it hadn’t already spoken to Mifsud. The congressman said, “it’s still a mystery how the FBI knew to ask Papadopoulos specifically about Hillary Clinton’s emails…”
Nunes’ letter is addressed to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Central Intelligence Agency director Gina Haspel, National Security Agency Director Paul Nakasone and FBI Director Chris Wray. It asks them to hand over all information they have on Mifsud by May 10.
In his letter, Nunes presents photographic evidence of Mifsud in close proximity to influential Western political and government officials.
“If Mifsud has extensive, suspicious contacts among Russian officials as portrayed in the special counsel’s report, then an incredibly wide range of Western institutions and individuals may have been compromised by him, including our own State Department,” Nunes wrote.

Mifsud vanished from public view and has been unavailable for comment or questioning. Il Foglio reports that Link Campus, an Italian college, had been sheltering him. On January 13, 2018 “Mifsud said that ‘the head of the Italian secret services contacted the president of Link Campus, Vincenzo Scotti, and recommended that the Professor shall disappear for some time in a safe location.’” Il Foglio reports that Link has “more to do with secret services than academia.”

Well, we now have Downer and Mifsud (Australia and Italy) involved in the effort to kick over the traces of this scandal. More evidence of spying both by U.S. and foreign intelligence operatives is coming.

Jonathan Moffa, deputy assistant director of the FBI, section chief of counterintelligence analysis, testified in another closed-door congressional hearing that the FBI from the earliest days of the collusion investigation enlisted not only Confidential Human Sources “but also the aid of outside intelligence agencies, U.S. foreign or both.”

Christopher Steele was an official informant expecting to be paid by the FBI for his dossier information. Moffa also confirmed that Steele’s status as a CHS had eventually been revoked. Moffa had been at a meeting where “closing” Steele as a Confidential Human Source was discussed, but Moffa declined to answer questions about what Steele did to lose his CHS status.
Steele was hardly the only CHS used in the FBI’s investigation. It has been widely reported that a retired Cambridge professor, Stefan Halper, was a CHS -- we’ve all been lectured not to use the word “spy” in describing him.
And now the New York Times has put in print what was long suspected, that the woman [Stefan] Halper presented to George Papadopoulos as his “assistant” was actually something else altogether. “Azra Turk” was an FBI asset sent across the Atlantic with a mission to get incriminating information out of Papadopoulos. It’s not clear whether she counted as a CHS herself, or whether she was an “investigator” with some other official status at the bureau.

It’s not clear which U.S. agency Halper works for. The last information I was able to obtain indicated he was on the Department of Defense payroll as late as September 2016.
There was a whole lot of spying going on.

Why Many in Washington Have a Lot to Worry About

At the Senate hearing, Barr made it clear that he intended to have a wide-ranging investigation of the origins of the collusion probe and justifications for “secret surveillance warrants against Trump team members” going back months before the fall 2016 justifications. He specified the opposition-concocted “Steele Dossier,” which he believes may have been Russian disinformation. He also is investigating leaks of classified information about the Mueller investigation. Kimberley Strassel accurately describes the mood here in Washington circles (if you couldn’t already guess from Cohen’s chicken-eating stunt and the hostile Senate questioning of the attorney general).

Do not underestimate how many powerful people in Washington have something to lose from Mr. Barr’s probe. Among them: Former and current leaders of the law-enforcement and intelligence communities. The Democratic Party pooh-bahs who paid a foreign national (Mr. Steele) to collect information from Russians and deliver it to the FBI. The government officials who misused their positions to target a presidential campaign. The leakers. The media. More than reputations are at risk. Revelations could lead to lawsuits, formal disciplinary actions, lost jobs, even criminal prosecution.
The attacks on Mr. Barr are first and foremost an effort to force him out, to prevent this information from coming to light until Democrats can retake the White House in 2020. As a fallback, the coordinated campaign works as a pre-emptive smear, diminishing the credibility of his ultimate findings by priming the public to view him as a partisan.
That’s why Mr. Barr isn’t alone in getting slimed. Natasha Bertrand at Politico last month penned a hit piece on the respected Mr. Horowitz. It’s clear the inspector general is asking the right questions. The Politico article acknowledges he’s homing in on Mr. Steele’s “credibility” and the dossier’s “veracity”—then goes on to provide a defense of Mr. Steele and his dossier, while quoting unnamed sources who deride the “quality” of the Horowitz probe, and (hilariously) claim the long-tenured inspector general is not “well-versed” in core Justice Department functions.
“We have to stop using the criminal-justice process as a political weapon,” Mr. Barr said Wednesday. The line didn’t get much notice, but that worthy goal increasingly looks to be a reason Mr. Barr accepted this unpleasant job.

Many unsavory practices and unlawful acts are going to be revealed. I believe this utterly. Attorney General Barr is about to join the handful of patriot heroes in this long-running sleazy saga.

Clarice Feldman

Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/05/tragedy_tomorrow_comedy_tonight.html

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The Solar Energy Racket - Norman Rogers

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by Norman Rogers

Rational, fact-based analysis appears to be politically incorrect.

If solar energy were not propped up by various government policies and subsidies, no utility would buy it. Not only does solar not work at night, but it does not work if it is cloudy or if a cloud passes in front of the sun.

Utility-scale solar requires a large solar farm consisting of photovoltaic panels. For $100 million, one can buy a solar farm capable of generating about 80 megawatts of electric power when the sun is squarely shining on the panels. Depending on the geographical location and the climate, the average power generated will be about 18 megawatts, more during the day and nothing at night. More in summer and less in winter. If the power can be sold for $50 a megawatt-hour, about the cost of wholesale electricity generated by natural gas, the annual revenue earned by the plant would be $7.8 million. But why would anyone want to pay $50 per megawatt-hour for electricity that does not work at night or when the weather is bad? Better to buy it from a natural gas plant that one can count on.

How much would a utility really be willing to pay for erratic electricity from a solar farm? The answer is $20 per megawatt-hour or less. The reason is as follows. No utility would ever incorporate a solar plant to reliably provide electricity. Solar electricity is unreliable. But solar electricity, if it is cheap enough, could be used as a supplement to save fuel in a utility's main natural gas plants. When the solar was working, some of the utility's gas plants could be throttled back to save fuel. The fuel to generate a megawatt-hour of electricity in a modern natural gas plant costs about $20.

How much does the electricity from a $100-million solar plant cost? The biggest cost is the $100 million spread over the 25-year life of the plant. If you take out a 25-year, $100-million mortgage, the annual payment will be between about $7 million and $9 million depending on the interest rate of between 5 percent and 8 percent. A 5% interest rate is what a corporation with excellent credit might get. With fair credit, a corporation might get 8%. If a corporation has a poor credit rating, nobody is likely to loan it $100 million. The plant will produce about 157,680 megawatt-hours of electricity per year, 18 megawatts per hour average times 8,760 hours per year. The cost of the electricity, counting only the contribution from the construction cost of the plant, will be between $45 and $60 per megawatt-hour. If you sold this electricity to a utility for $20 per megawatt-hour, you would lose millions every year. If all costs are taken into account, the real cost of utility-scale solar power, where there is excellent sunshine, is about $70 per megawatt-hour.

Solar electric plants are being built because there are two subsidies and one mandate. The mandate is provided by laws in about 30 states, requiring electric utilities to source some percentage of their power from "renewable" sources. These laws are called "renewable portfolio standards." By forcing utilities to develop sources of renewable power, mostly solar or wind, a ready market for solar power is created with creditworthy utilities willing to sign long-term contracts and pay whatever it takes to get solar power. These laws are special-interest legislation tailored to provide shelter for wind and solar developers. The "whatever it takes" cost is passed on to electricity customers.

The first of the two direct subsidies is the solar investment tax credit or the solar ITC. This is a federal subsidy for the construction of solar facilities, currently at 30% of the cost and set by current law to gradually decline to 10%. The second subsidy is less transparent. It consists of modifications to tax laws that make possible a scheme called tax equity finance. Tax equity finance uses a highly taxed corporate partner that can reduce its federal income tax by utilizing special accelerated depreciation available for solar energy facilities. The bottom line from the complicated shenanigans is that money that would have gone to the federal treasury as income tax payments instead goes to the developer of solar power and to the tax partner. The tax-writers in Congress knew they were doing a favor for solar and wind developers when they created this scheme. The net result of the mandate and subsidies is that about 70% of the cost of utility-scale solar plants is subsidized by electricity consumers and the federal government.

What is the justification for these laws bilking the public and subsidizing solar energy? It is claimed that solar energy will prevent global warming by reducing CO2 emissions. The problem is that building solar energy plants to reduce CO2 emissions ends up costing the government and electricity-consumers about $140 for each metric ton of CO2 emissions avoided. But you can buy a "carbon offset" that does the same thing in the carbon offset market for $10. The most prominent believers in global warming catastrophe — for example, James Hansen — advocate using nuclear energy to reduce CO2 emissions, not solar. It is useful to remember that 86% of CO2 emissions come from outside the United States, where they are increasing. But U.S. emissions have been decreasing due to substitution of natural gas for coal and due to energy conservation.

The other justification for solar is that we will run out of fossil fuels. The sun won't run out of sunshine for around 10 billion years. There is no prospect for running out of fossil fuels anytime soon. Fracking has just unleashed a 100-year supply of natural gas and oil. The U.S. has coal for 500 years. The supply of nuclear fuel is, for practical purposes, unlimited.

What we have is an alliance among hysterical environmental groups, profit-making solar developers, and politicians eager to make important friends. The environmental groups need a stream of impending catastrophes for which they propose impracticable or crackpot solutions. That's how they excite interest and stay in business. The Sierra Club and other groups are against all energy sources except wind and solar and some niche energy sources. The media, probably out of ignorance, go along with the propaganda in favor of solar energy. Rational, fact-based analysis appears to be politically incorrect.


Norman Rogers is the author of the book Dumb Energy: A Critique of Wind and Solar Power.

Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/05/the_solar_energy_racket.html

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Study sponsored by NOAA finds that poorly-sited air temperature monitoring stations have artificially boosted global warming data - Thomas Lifson

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by Thomas Lifson

A much-maligned skeptic is vindicated!

Anthony Watts of Watts Up With That reports on an important scientific paper sponsored by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (the official keepers of temperature records) that confirms what Watts and other critics have maintained for years. To its credit, NOAA decided in 2012 to test Watts’s critique that a substantial portion of the surface air temperature monitoring stations that are used to generate data for claims of global warming are located in places that have become surrounded by urbanization in the form of asphalt and concrete surfaces and other facilities that absorb heat during the day and discharge it at night -- thereby artificially raising the average air temperatures.

Here is one example Watts provides of a ridiculously-sited air temperature monitoring station:

USHCN weather station in a parking lot. University of Arizona, Tucson

As a scientist, Watts uses the scientific and technical terminology but explains it. For example:

I have published on the topic in the scientific literature, and found this to be true based on the science we’ve done of examining the USHCN and applying the siting methodology of Leroy 2010.
In Fall et al, 2011 we discovered that there was a change to the diurnal temperature range (DTR). It decreased where stations had been encroached upon, because of the heat sink effect of man-made materials (asphalt, concrete, bricks, etc.) that were near stations.
For layman readers that don’t know what diurnal variation is, it is the daily variation of temperature due to the variation of incoming solar radiation from rotation of the earth on its axis.

Lo and behold, the scientific paper promised in 2012 has been published and it confirms the critique. The language is technical, but the results make common sense and confirm that claims of global warming have been inflated:

Like I’ve said all along (and been excoriated for saying so) they found exactly what we did.

Impacts of Small-Scale Urban Encroachment on Air Temperature Observations

Ronald D. Leeper, John Kochendorfer, Timothy Henderson, and Michael A. Palecki

https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/10.1175/JAMC-D-19-0002.1

Abstract (bold mine)

A field experiment was performed in Oak Ridge, TN, with four instrumented towers placed over grass at increasing distances (4, 30, 50, 124, and 300 m) from a built-up area. Stations were aligned in such a way to simulate the impact of small-scale encroachment on temperature observations. As expected, temperature observations were warmest for the site closest to the built environment with an average temperature difference of 0.31 and 0.24 °C for aspirated and unaspirated sensors respectively. Mean aspirated temperature differences were greater during the evening (0.47 °C) than day (0.16 °C). This was particularly true for evenings following greater daytime solar insolation (20+ MJDay⁻¹) with surface winds from the direction of the built environment where mean differences exceeded 0.80 °C. The impact of the built environment on air temperature diminished with distance with a warm bias only detectable out to tower-B’ located 50 meters away.

The experimental findings were comparable to a known case of urban encroachment at a U. S. Climate Reference Network station in Kingston, RI. The experimental and operational results both lead to reductions in the diurnal temperature range of ~0.39 °C for fan aspirated sensors. Interestingly, the unaspirated sensor had a larger reduction in DTR of 0.48 °C. These results suggest that small-scale urban encroachment within 50 meters of a station can have important impacts on daily temperature extrema (maximum and minimum) with the magnitude of these differences dependent upon prevailing environmental conditions and sensing technology.

Hat tip: Roger Luchs

Thomas Lifson

Source: https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/05/study_sponsored_by_noaa_finds_that_poorlysited_air_temperature_monitoring_stations_have_artificially_boosted_global_warming_data.html

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Islamic jihad fire 200 rockets towards Israel - Christine Douglass-Williams

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by Christine Douglass-Williams

Each time Israel has given up land in efforts toward peace, land which it captured in defensive wars, its jihadist neighbors betrayed agreements and were instead, further emboldened.

Renewed fighting has escalated in Gaza: “approximately 200 rockets have been fired by Gaza militants towards Israel over the course of a few hours…In response, the IDF says it has carried out airstrikes on more than 30 militant targets in Gaza, including rocket launcher sites and other military compounds used by Hamas and Islamic Jihad.”

There’s nothing new about flareups in Gaza. The jihadist war against Israel began in 1948 and will continue until the Palestinian Authority, the PLO, Hamas and Fatah accept Israel’s right to exist, which they will never do. Each of these jihadist organizations aim to obliterate Israel in accordance with their charters, despite the ongoing lies and propaganda about: the Palestinian leadership making efforts toward a two-state solution, the so-called Israeli “occupation”, Israel “apartheid” etc.

The well-known declaration, “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free”, is an ongoing mantra which fixates on obliterating Israel from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.

Each time Israel has given up land in efforts toward peace, land which it captured in defensive wars, its jihadist neighbors betrayed agreements and were instead, further emboldened.

Yahya Sinwar, the leader of Hamas in Gaza, was loudly praising violent riots along the Gaza-Israel border in late March, “as tens of thousands of Palestinians massed along the border on the first anniversary of the “Great March of Return”.  Sinwar declared: “we want to bomb Tel Aviv.” Islamic Jihad is also now vowing to strike major Israeli cities. Intentions do not get clearer than that.

Such recent disturbing news does not stop there: with aid from the Islamic Republic of Iran, Hizballah has now built a new missile manufacturing facility in Beirut. Despite all, in early April, Israel again embarked on futile efforts toward peace, by negotiating an agreement with Hamas. Part of the agreement included an easing of “the restrictions on the fishing area and gradually open the Gaza crossings to allow additional goods through.” Meanwhile, Deputy Hamas leader Saleh al-Arouri emphasized that a Hamas-Israel agreement “is not a peace agreement”.

Appeasement of jihadists has never worked and will never work. It emboldens jihadist bullies.


“2 wounded as Gaza militants fire 200 rockets towards Israel: IDF”, by Andrew Carey, CNN, May 4, 2019:

Jerusalem (CNN)Approximately 200 rockets have been fired by Gaza militants towards Israel over the course of a few hours on Saturday, according to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF).
The Iron Dome aerial defense system intercepted dozens of the incoming rockets, the IDF added.
Two Israelis have been wounded, including an 80-year old woman in the city of Kiryat Gat, about twenty miles from Gaza, injured by shrapnel to her head and legs, according to Israel’s emergency response service, Magen David Adom.
In response, the IDF says it has carried out airstrikes on more than 30 militant targets in Gaza, including rocket launcher sites and other military compounds used by Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
The Palestinian Ministry of Health says one person has died as a result of the Israeli strikes, and seven others have been wounded.
Israel has also announced that it is closing the two border crossings between Israel and Gaza, as well as closing the Gaza fishing zone in light of the rocket fire.
The announcement came from the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT). The fishing zone was restricted to 6 nautical miles earlier this week following a rocket fired from Gaza that landed off the coast of Israel.
There was no specific date for when the crossings and the fishing zone would reopen.
Saturday’s rocket barrage comes less than a day after two militants from Hamas’s armed wing, the Qassam Brigades, were killed in an Israeli strike on Hamas posts in Gaza.
Israel launched airstrikes Friday after two Israeli soldiers were wounded by sniper fire along the Gaza border….

Christine Douglass-Williams

Source: https://www.jihadwatch.org/2019/05/flareup-in-gaza-hamas-and-islamic-jihad-fire-200-rockets-towards-israel

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