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A guest post by AKUS
Since it is Passover, and organizations like Hamas and Hezbollah, and a country like Iran, have thousands of rockets which they launch into Israel with great regularity, you may have been wondering why this single North Korean rocket is different from all other rockets.
If you’ve been able to avoid the endless repetition on US TV of the Trayvon saga, you have probably been watching the media obsessing over the North Korean rocket launch.
For example, this is the headline in the Washington Post:
Our friends at the Guardian also reported the launch, pointing out that the North Korean have defied “international warnings” about this “provocation”:
This is what Time Magazine had to say about it in the build-up to the “scarier than you think” launch:
North Korea’s Space Threat Is Scarier Than You Think
But just the idea of North Korea aiming for space — and having the missile muscle to get there — led to hair-on-fire panic in east Asia and a more measured but very real angst in the rest of the world. A loonytoons country with nuclear weapons and global reach is no one’s idea of a good thing. The key questions — still unanswerable — are whether North Korea may soon have the technical chops to reach orbit and if they do, does that mean anything?
But, for example, this blasé mention of 300 Israeli casualties is how Guardian ace reporter Harriet Sherwood reported on the threat Hezbollah’s thousands of Iranian-supplied rockets represent to Israel:
So why is one rocket from North Korea creating such panic, while thousands aimed at Israel are not?
Well, you see, it turns out that Hezbollah’s rockets cannot reach Europe or the USA.
But North Korea’s rockets, eventually, will be able to.
It’s funny how attitudes change when the possibility of a rocket crashing through your roof becomes more real.
Lest I forget – the issue being hyped up now that the rocket launch failed is that in the past this kind of show-piece has been the lead-up to an underground nuclear test by North Korea.
It’s also funny how upset some countries seem to be about this, while being rather complacent about Iran’s nuclear program and assistance from North Korea to various Islamic countries. But perhaps they feel that Iran’s nuclear threat is, shall we say, more local at this time. It will be interesting to see if that changes when Iran launches its first intercontinental ballistic rocket and conducts its first underground (we hope) nuclear test.
And that, dear reader, is why a North Korean rocket, launched coincidentally during Passover, is different from all other rockets.
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Like this:
Metula, overlooking Lebanese border
There’s a fence just beyond the white building on the upper left of the photo, where the border between Lebanon and Israel stands.
So far, there’s been no GMJ related provocations, though the IDF thinks there’s a good chance it may sometime during the day.
I just met a man in Metula, in northern Israel along the Lebanese border, whose home overlooks the field shown in the photo – who not only let me recharge my laptop battery by his garage, but invited me in his home to chat.
George is a Christian Lebanese-Israeli. That is, he is Lebanese but fled S. Lebanon with his family not too long after Israel withdrew in 2000. Their decision to leave was based entirely on the fear of Hezbollah and what he thought would be the corresponding intolerance towards Christians as the result of the ascendant Shiite Islamist movement.
George told me, when asked, over a cup of intense Lebanese coffee, that he would never consider returning to his country of birth, even if his safety could be assured.
Israel is now his home.
Just one little anecdote perhaps, but a tale which speaks volumes about the small physical fissures, and quite large moral ones, separating the Jewish state from its neighbors.
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Today, the Guardian had a live online reader Q & A with contributors Saeed Kamali Dehghan and Richard Norton-Taylor, on the Iranian nuclear issue (the Iran nuclear crisis: Q & A with Saeed Kamali Dehghan and Richard Norton-Taylor, March 12).
The piece was introduced with this:
The prospect of armed conflict with Iran seems to grow more likely by the day. Israel has warned that it will not countenance an Iranian nuclear weapons programme, and the US has argued that, while it wants to give diplomacy time, all options remain on the table.
The rhetoric was ratcheted up again last week with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to Washington DC. But to what extent should we take the sabre-rattling at face value? And what’s being said inside Iran?
So, I decided to weigh in, and wrote this:
(I also provided links in my original comment to buttress my claims)
Saeed Kamali Dehghan then responded to me:
First, Iranian leaders haven’t just been “crazy with their words”. As I pointed out, and what Saeed ignored, they’ve also been crazy with their deeds: funding and arming Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hamas and Hezbollah.
And, when has Israel called for the annihilation of Iran, or offered a state-sponsored religious justification for the mass murder of Iranian civilians?
Second, yes, we can “measure which one is more dangerous to the world”.
According to the U.S. State Department, Iran is the most active state sponsor of terrorism in the world.
Finally, his last point suggests that both Iran and Israel discriminate equally against “others”.
Boy, where to begin?
Has Israel hanged gays like Iran? No.
Actually, Israel has only executed one person since its founding: Adolf Eichmann.
And, more to the point, Israel is, by far the most gay-friendly nation in the Middle East. In fact, Tel Aviv was voted the most gay-friendly city in the world in poll conducted by the LGBT travel website gaycities.com.
Has Israel discriminated against their religious minorities like Iran? No again.
While, in Iran, the Bahai face systemic persecution, and a Christian pastor faces imminent execution for refusing to recant his Christian faith, religious minorities – Muslims, Druze, Bahai and Christians – are thriving in Israel, and their numbers have grown considerably since the Jewish state’s founding in 1948.
Further, while women in Israel are free and represented in all sectors of society, Iran systemically denies women equal rights - and even executes women for the crime of adultery.
Also, note that Saeed didn’t even attempt to address the fact that Iran arms and funds at least three proscribed terrorist groups on Israel’s borders. That is, the Islamic Republic of Iran has been engaged for years in a proxy war against Israel, arming groups with the explicit aim of destroying the Jewish state.
Finally, this blog has long argued that the Guardian Left simply does not represent genuinely progressive values in even the broadest sense of the term.
Israel’s liberal advantages over Iran are stark and simply beyond debate.
A genuinely liberal voice would understand this painfully obvious moral truth.
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- Rocket attacks on Israel, and reporters without borders (of integrity) (cifwatch.com)
- More Pro-Iranian “Hasbara” at ‘Comment is Free’ (cifwatch.com)
- Anti-Zionist propaganda as literary criticism: How the Guardian demonizes Israel without really trying (cifwatch.com)
- Guardian “reporter” Chris McGreal & the socially acceptable antisemitism of the Left (cifwatch.com)
- Buried by the Guardian: The paper fails to report Iranian leader’s religious justification for genocide (cifwatch.com)
- Guardian changes course & (permanently) removes Gilad Atzmon’s book from their online shop (cifwatch.com)
- AKUS @ AIPAC Conf: House leader vows Congress will declare red lines for action on Iran (cifwatch.com)
Following the death of the Lebanese Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, one of the original spiritual guides of Hezbollah, CNN senior Middle East affairs editor Octavia Nasr Tweeted the following.
Despite an attempt at an apology, Nasr was subsequently fired by the network, which released a statement noting that Nasr’s “credibility…as senior editor for Middle Eastern affairs has been compromised going forward.” You think?!
Just to be clear, the Hezbollah leader Nasr was Tweeting support for was an unequivocal supporter of suicide bombing against Israeli civilians, had issued a fatawa justifying the suicide bombing which attacked the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, and was a Holocaust revisionist.
A year or so after the incident, during an interview with Asharq Al-Awssat (an Arabic international newspaper based in London), Nasr blamed, yes, the “Zionist lobby” for her dismissal, a narrative echoed by the Guardian’s Brian Whitaker in a CiF column he wrote shortly after Nasr was fired.
Yet, the brave Octavia Nasr, clearly undeterred by the powerful Zionist forces aligned against her, recently Tweeted support for her latest terrorist crush – Islamic Jihad leader Khader Adnan.
Another Tweet to us by Nasr, declaring the conversation over:
Who did she block? After noticing that she was no longer listed as someone we were following, I tried to follow her, only to find this:
After being axed by CNN for a pro-Hezbollah Tweet, no doubt Ms. Nasr is a wee bit sensitive about being called out again for shilling on behalf of a terrorist.
Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad are worthy of her sympathy, but CiF Watch is evidently a hate site.
If Octavia Nasr didn’t exist the “Zionist lobby” would SO have to invent her.
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A guest post by Hadar Sela
Since the publication of the two-part report on the Global March on Jerusalem scheduled for March 30th, further information and several new developments have come to light thanks to the work of some wonderful people.
Aaron took a look at the subject of the registration and hosting of the various GMJ websites and found that they share an IP address with the website of the AhlulBayt Islamic Mission – the Islamic Republic of Iran aligned Shia missionary organisation in the United Kingdom. The server hosting both the AhlulBayt site and the GMJ sites is registered to a Leicester resident named Shabbir Hassanally. Read all the details here.
Mr Hassanally appears to be quite a fan of Hizbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah. In fact he puts considerable effort into making English language sub-titles for Nasrallah’s frequent speeches which he then posts on his own blog – apparently unconcerned by the fact that Hizbollah’s military wing is proscribed by his own government and that the glorification of terrorism is a criminal offence in the UK.
Hassanally has also acted as roving reporter in Lebanon for the Palestine Telegraph – founded and edited by Sameh Habib (aka Sameh Akram Subhi Habeeb) who is also spokesman for the flotilla-organising ‘European Campaign to End the Siege on Gaza’ which was set up by the Muslim Brotherhood’s European arm – the Federation of Islamic Organisations in Europe (FIOE) – in 2007. The Palestine Telegraph proved to be too extreme even for its former patron Jenny Tonge and it and its editor have been involved in multiple scandals.
Here is Shabbir Hassanally celebrating the 32nd anniversary of the Iranian regime last year. Note his apparent subscription to the messianic Mahdi concept and his description of Israel as “the cancer occupying our beloved Palestine“.
If UK readers are now pondering the efficacy of their government’s ‘Prevent‘ counter-terrorism policy upon which so much of their taxes have been spent, they will certainly not be reassured by the fact that Hassanally has also been given a platform at the Muslim Shia Welfare Foundation in Leicester, which is – of course – a registered charity.
A variety of interested parties are making intense efforts to bring Jerusalem to the top of the publicity agenda ahead of the planned march next month, including a conference in Qatar earlier this week (for some reason apparently attended by UN representative Robert Serry), an incendiary press release by the Muslim Brotherhood’s spiritual mentor Yusuf al Qaradawi and publicity on the websites of Hamas and ‘Unified Umma’.
However, it would appear that all is not rosy in the world of joint Sunni-Shia/Red-Green alliance project management.
From the Facebook account of ‘Viva Palestina Australia‘ (h/t to F.) we learn that initial enthusiasm for the GMJ project has been somewhat dampened due to apparent differences of opinion with co-ordinator Zaher al Birawi.
Feb 19
Feb 21
Feb 21/22
Feb 22
Feb 21
Feb 21
Feb 22
Meanwhile, over at ISM California, Paul Larudee is chastising his fellow activists for not getting behind the GMJ in sufficient numbers.
Well well; it seems as though some people even within the ‘pro-Palestinian’ movements are waking up to the extremist nature of the GMJ venture and its leaders and organisers and the fact that such publicity stunts do nothing to help the Palestinian people.
About time.
Related articles
- ‘Global March to Jerusalem’ endorsed by Guardian approved ‘saxophonist’ Gilad Atzmon (cifwatch.com)
- CiF Watch Special Report on extremists behind ‘Global March to Jerusalem’: Pt 2, Europe Chapter (cifwatch.com)
- CiF Watch Special Report: Extremists & terror supporters organizing ‘Global March to Jerusalem’ (cifwatch.com)
This essay was written by Michael Ross, and originally published at National Post
Thai police officers escort Iranian bomb suspect Mohammad Kharzei (C) during an investigation at his rented house in Bangkok on February 20, 2012. Police in Thailand said on February 17 they were hunting for a fifth Iranian suspected in a failed bomb plot in Bangkok that has sent tensions between Israel and Iran soaring.
In a recent article in The Guardian entitled, “Iran seems an unlikely culprit for the attacks on Israeli diplomats”, University of London scholar Arshin Adib-Moghaddam contends that Iran wouldn’t plan attacks in India, Thailand and Georgia because Tehran enjoys good relations with these countries. Mr. Adib- Moghaddam is either very naive or enjoys good relations with the Iranian regime but either way, his article flies in the face of very damning evidence. A long look at Iran’s state-sponsorship of terror would indicate to the most casual observer that the regime couldn’t give a damn about it’s multilateral relationships with those countries.
Mr. Adib-Moghaddam even floats the absurd theory that these were dissidents belonging to an anti-regime faction or part of the “Indian Mujahedeen” ostensibly bent on wrecking relations between India and Iran. I guess this theory works for some if confined to the Indian sub-continent, but it’s going to be very hard to convince the government in Azerbaijan that this is the case as details emerge today of the arrest of an IRGC-QF/Hezbollah cell that was gathering intelligence, purchasing firearms, ammunition, explosives and devices, and making other preparations in order to commit terrorist acts on Israeli targets in Baku.
As more details emerge about the Iranian cell’s activities in Bangkok, the first thing I examined were their flight records. At least four of the six Iranians flew to Bangkok on direct flights originating in Tehran – and in the case of Leila Rohani, the woman involved in the plot – on a flight directly back to Tehran. I don’t have much experience as a dissident, but it seems to me that I’d probably want to avoid any travel that would ultimately take me into the waiting arms of the regime’s security services. But it’s not just the direct flights; it’s the airline they used. As it happens, the members of this cell flew on Mahan Air, an Iranian commercial airline that was designated by the U.S. last year under Presidential Executive Order 13224 blacklisting it due to links to Iran’s support for terrorism.
Mahan Air is known in counter-terrorism circles as “IRGC Air” due to its busy schedule ferrying IRGC-QF/Hezbollah/MOIS operatives, weapons and money around the world. The U.S. is especially displeased with Mahan Air as it emerged that the airline was covertly flying IRGC-QF officers in and out of Iraq to engage in all manner of mayhem directed at coalition forces and in support of the Shia militias in the south of that country. Mahan Air has also been one of the air links facilitating weapons transfers between Iran, Syria and their enfant terrible, Hezbollah, based in Lebanon. The cargo manifests belonging to this airline have a long history of omitting certain shipments that are transferred between these three countries.
Also emerging from the plot in Bangkok is the use of stickers bearing the word “SEJEAL” to mark possible target zones at various points along a 1.5-km route on roads and public transit in Bangkok. These stickers were similar to ones located at the house where the first blast occurred and at another house rented by Leila Rohani. The stickers were also found under the seat of a seized motorcycle belonging to the Iranian cell. As it happens, Iran-sponsored Hamas refer to their rockets as “Sejeal Stones” after a passage in the Koran that tells of a miracle when birds dropped “Sejeal Stones” on an army attempting to kill Mohammed.
Iranians flying on Iranian documents from Tehran to Thailand on Mahan Air and caught en flagrante on one of the busiest streets in Bangkok with their stickers, explosive devices and motorcycle would seem to point in directions other than the “Indian Mujahedeen”.
I’m curious to know how far The Guardian’s writers and editors will bend themselves into contortions of Iran denial before they just end up looking silly.
The only “false flag” I can detect is flying from the roof of the British newspaper.
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Like this:
The Tweets by Chris Gunness, spokesperson for UNRWA (United Nations Relief and Works Agency), are worth following for those Twitterers amongst you interested in gleaning insights into the mind of those in the Palestinian Refugee industry.
Gunness has nary an unkind word for Hamas, the authoritarian Palestinian leadership in Gaza representing the only government in the world led by a recognized terrorist movement, yet continually imputes guilt to Israel for engaging in efforts to stop the flow of rockets to the strip, 676 of which were fired last year from the territory.
Here’s a quote by Gunness in a 2011 Guardian piece, which interprets Israeli efforts to prevent deadly arms from reaching Hamas as systemic cruelty, whose intent is to sow misery upon innocent civilians.
“It is hard to understand the logic of a man-made policy which deliberately impoverishes so many and condemns hundreds of thousands of potentially productive people to a life of destitution.”
Moreover, by UNRWA’s expansive definition of what constitutes a Palestinian refugee, based on a quote from the same Guardian piece, 1.5 million Palestinians living in a Palestinian run polity in Gaza are still considered “refugees”.
Further, as research by NGO Monitor has demonstrated, UNRWA funds (almost entirely provided by voluntary contributions from governments and the European Union) “are often used for UNRWA schools and other facilities…[which] teach hatred and encourage incitement, [and] the evidence demonstrates that UNRWA staff allowed terror related activities in its camps [in Gaza and the West Bank].”
I have found nothing Gunness has written or Tweeted suggesting he is aware or concerned about such incitement, which provides context for this recent Tweet about Ali Abunimah, co-founder of Electronic Intifada, and CiF contributor through 2009.
Boy, where to begin?
Abunimah is an American pro-Palestinian activist who opposes the Jewish state’s existence, and who has not hesitated to compare Israel to South African apartheid and even Nazi Germany - describing Gaza as a “ghetto” and a “concentration camp” and arguing that “Zionism is not atonement for the Holocaust, but its continuation in spirit.”
Abunimah has also characterized the Jewish state as “supremacist”, echoing a trope popularized by, among others, David Duke and Gilad Atzmon, and has also described Israeli policy towards Palestinians as “potentially genocidal”.
Further, Abunimah has suggested that suicide bombings and other acts of terrorism by Hamas and Hezbollah against Israeli civilians could justly be seen as legitimate to the degree such tactics resemble ”other nationalist movements facing foreign occupation”.
So, the anti-racist Ali Abunimah is a proponent of the demise of the Jewish state – a nation which he has characterized as “supremacist”, potentially genocidal, and even Nazi-like – and has sought to justify terrorism against Jewish civilians.
If your name is Chris Gunness, it’s all apparently enough to make you giggle.
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Ian Black
The latest report by the Guardian’s Middle East editor, Ian Black, Feb. 13, is titled “Israeli embassy attacks in Delhi and Tblisi could set off conflagration“.
Black’s analysis attempts to contextualize the recent attack on the Israeli embassy in India, and the thwarted attack in Georgia, (likely committed by Iran or Hezbollah) with the “ongoing campaign of sabotage and assassination against [Iranian] scientists” working on a nuclear programme”.
Black characterizes such covert acts as representing a “highly volatile element in an extremely unstable landscape.”
Adds Black:
Against a background of extraordinary turbulence across the Middle East, the Israeli-Iranian confrontation is by far the most dangerous element.
Black’s analysis of the Iranian-Israeli conflict includes the following:
- A requisite obfuscation over Iran’s nuclear intentions. Black non-judgmentally contrasts Iran’s insistence that its program is peaceful with “Israel and western countries adamant [that it] is not”, failing to cite the latest IAEA report, available on the Guardian website, which states: “the information indicates that Iran has carried out…a structured program…to develop an explosive nuclear device.”
- The suggestion that Iranian attacks on Israeli targets are justified: Black quotes a former British diplomat accusing Israel of “international state terrorism [which] invit[es] a response. It looks like a further twist that will lead to a tit-for-tat.”
However, the most egregious distortion in Black’s report is the historical analogy he attempts to draw in the penultimate paragraph, suggesting that Israel is looking for a “pretext” to war.
Nor could the stakes be higher [for the Middle East]. In June 1982 an assassination attempt on the Israeli ambassador to London by the renegade Palestinian faction led by the Iraqi-backed Abu Nidal provided the pretext for war against Yasser Arafat’s PLO in Lebanon, despite a ceasefire that had held for nearly a year. Ariel Sharon, then defence minister, was pressing to attack and persuaded the prime minister, Menachem Begin, to go ahead
Full scale invasion, thousands of dead and years of war and occupation were the result.
Black’s characterization of the cause of the 1982 war, about which he attempts to draw an analogy to the current crisis, is grossly ahistorical.
The roots of the Lebanon war lay in the bloody expulsion of the PLO from Jordan, the terror group’s relocation to Lebanon in 1971 and subsequent staging of hundreds of terrorist acts across Israel’s northern border.
In March 1978, PLO terrorists infiltrated Israel, hijacked a bus and ended up murdering 34 Israeli civilians on board.
In response, Israeli forces crossed into Lebanon and overran terrorist bases, pushing the PLO away from the southern border.
The IDF shortly withdrew and allowed UN forces to enter, but UN troops were unable, or unwilling, to prevent PLO terrorists from re-infiltrating the region and introducing new, and more dangerous arms – a striking similarity to the complete failure of UNIFIL troops to keep southern Lebanon free of Hezbollah weaponry, per their mandate under UN Resolution 1701, following the 2nd Lebanon War in 2006.
Violence escalated with a series of PLO attacks and Israeli reprisals, which culminated n a U.S. brokered ceasefire agreement in July 1981.
However, the PLO repeatedly violated the cease-fire over the ensuing 11 months, carrying out terror assaults from Jordanian territory. (Between July 1981 and June 1982 26 Israelis were killed and 264 injured.)
Meanwhile, a force of over 15,000 PLO members was encamped in of locations throughout Lebanon, including thousands of foreign mercenaries. Israel later discovered an extensive cache of weaponry – which included mortars, Katyusha rockets and an antiaircraft network. The PLO also brought hundreds of T34 tanks into the area, and even surface-to-air missiles.
Israeli commando raids were unable to stem the growth of the PLO army, the of frequency of attacks forced thousands of Israeli residents in the Galilee to flee their homes and spend large amounts of time in bomb shelters.
So, while the final provocation occurred in June 1982 when a Palestinian terrorist group led by Abu Nidal attempted to assassinate Israel’s Ambassador to the UK, Black’s suggestion that Israel cynically used the assassination as a pretext break a peaceful “truce”, in order to launch an unnecessary war, is patently untrue.
What country on earth would permit a terrorist group (with an increasingly deadly arsenal of weaponry) on its border to launch frequent terror attacks against its citizens without a robust military response?
In fact, the important historical analogy with Iran today and the PLO in the early 1980s, which the Guardian’s Middle East editor fails to observe, is that Israel is again faced with increasingly well-equipped terrorist militias on their borders (Hezbollah, Hamas and Islamic Jihad) – with funds, training and increasingly sophisticated weaponry provided directly by the regime in Tehran.
Every cross border raid, every missile attack, and every attempt to abduct Israeli soldiers by Iranian proxy armies in Lebanon and Gaza over the years have represented acts of war – military aggression by an Islamist state which is attempting to develop nuclear devices, producing rockets capable of delivering such a lethal payload, and whose leadership has provided explicit religious justifications for the use of weapons of mass destruction on Jewish civilians.
Black’s last paragraph included the following, which he no doubt views as an incriminating quote by Menachem Begin, to buttress the overriding narrative of an Israeli state determined to use any pretext to ignite a dangerous regional conflagration.
“Abu Nidal, Abu Shmidal,” [Menachem] Begin reportedly replied as his security chiefs explained the crucial detail and significance of the London attack.
However, those of us who understand the circumstances of Israel’s wars against hostile state and non-state actors since its founding (be it Nasser, the PLO, Hezbollah, Hamas or Iran) are not swayed by Black’s crude caricature of an Israeli antagonist. We read the attributed quote and see an Israeli leader who understood that his first role was to protect his nation from harm, and that the threat posed by a well-equipped military force reigning terror down on Israeli civilians more than justified an assertive military response.
The casus belli for Operation Peace for the Galilee was self-evident, building for years, and needed no “pretext”.
The antagonists have changed, but Israeli leaders today similarly face a very real threat by an even more powerful foe.
Today, as in 1982, the Jewish state will not shy away from confronting clear and present dangers it faces, and need not morally justify – to Ian Black or others who fancy themselves sophisticated, dispassionate political sages – its fierce and unapologetic defense of its national interests, and its citizen’s lives.
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A guest post by Marc
Amongst the names of Palestinian prisoners freed by Israel in the second wave of releases in exchange for Gilad Shalit was a man named Tastos Zaki Husni Sultan.
(Full list available here and in English here though only the Hebrew actually states the crimes they were indicted for).
I remember well the day we arrested him in his home town Nablus. Though it wasn’t what he eventually was convicted of, we were told at the time by the Shin Bet that the main reason he was important to the terrorist networks was that he was the link between Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade and Hezbollah.
We were also told that he would be armed and ready to fight when we came for him. He was convicted for (forgive the direct translations from the Hebrew):
“Firing at people, throwing Molotov cocktails, membership in an unknown terrorist organization, providing shelter to terrorists.”
The mission resulted in the arrest of both Tastos and another terrorist named Jamal Sa’adon.
Both were among the top 5 most wanted terrorists in the city and we had rehearsed the operation that would ultimately result in their capture many times. It was in 2004 (when I was approaching the end of my service) that that we grabbed them. We had already aborted the operation in various stages of carrying it out many times due to last-minute intelligence telling us that he was no longer in the hideout we were targeting.
The operation was considered so sensitive that military vehicles had been forbidden from driving past the apartment block that his family lived in for fear that it would spook him from returning there and ruin our chances of picking him up.
We were guarding the settlement of Migdalim when we were told to get our body armour on and pile into the vehicles. I didn’t think that the op was going to go ahead after it had already been aborted so many times, but the drivers gunned their engines and we were off. I waited for the mission to be aborted right up until the point that the vehicles stopped outside the building and we launched out into the hostile territory outside.
Once the residents of the block had been brought out of the building the search team went in, and no one was under any doubt that this man would come quietly. I spotted a hand emerge from the building to close a window when everyone was supposed to be outside. The squad commander directed the search team to an apartment they had already searched.
After the 2nd unsuccessful search they took no chances, and threw in a grenade.
Once the noise of the explosion died down the search team could hear muffled cries of surrender coming from somewhere deep within. A hand emerged from a kitchen cabinet that was only waist-high. The terrorists had pulled a small brick out of the back of this cabinet and squeezed into a tiny hollow that they had carved out behind it.
We had only expected to find Tastos, so Sa’adon was an extra surprise, who had previously spent 17 years in an Israeli prison.
After serving that term, he murdered the son of the mayor of Nablus by mistake while trying to kill the mayor – who he evidently considered to be too moderate. The list of his crimes was endless and he was not one of those released in the deal for Shalit.
Tastos had been a wanted man in the Casbah of Nablus for years prior to finally being captured. He had been responsible for terror attacks that had undoubtedly resulted in deaths of innocent civilians, and provided a level of technical sophistication to the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigade that allowed them to perpetrate attacks and gain information that otherwise wouldn’t have been available to them.
But when the army came for him, when he was looking death in the face, he knew better than the fellow terrorists he inspired and so chose prison instead – despite the fact that he was armed when he surrendered.
Tastos is just one out of a thousand people who have now been thrown back into the mix for Gilad Shalit.
There is no right or wrong answer to the question of whether it was worth it or not.
The whole country breathed a collective sigh of relief when Gilad came home and now we all just have to wait and see what damage terrorists like Tastos may do.
Related articles
- Lost in anti-Zionist translation? Guardian’s McGreal repeats mistranslated answers of Shalit in Arab interview (cifwatch.com)
- Guardian Letters Editor abets distortion of Gilad Shalit’s comments about Palestinian prisoners (cifwatch.com)
- Why is anti-Israel extremist Gary Spedding affiliated with Holocaust Memorial Day Trust? (cifwatch.com)
- Guardian publishes letters arguing Shalit’s release (in exchange for 1027 terrorists) is unfair to Hamas (cifwatch.com)
- Guardian’s Middle East Editor, Ian Black, equates Gilad Shalit with Palestinian terrorists (cifwatch.com)
- Arnold & Frimet Roth, whose daughter Malka was murdered by terrorists in 2001, responds to Shalit news (cifwatch.com)
Given the total lack of any mention of it on the ‘Comment is Free’ Israel page, one can only assume that the CiF editors find nothing newsworthy about the launching from Lebanon of several Katyusha rockets at sleeping Israeli civilians late on Monday night.
Things were not much better in the Guardian World News Middle East section, where the incident received all of 57 words and 49 seconds-worth of attention in a video showing Israeli fire-fighters extinguishing the blaze caused as one of the rockets hit a gas tank and another a chicken farm. (Surely the famous chicken rights defender Harriet Sherwood should have been interested in that?).
As ‘Honest Reporting‘ rightly pointed out, the Guardian even managed to bungle the headline.
The moral equivalence implied in the headline is developed further below:
“The Israeli military say they responded after a volley of rockets were fired across the border from Lebanon, raising fresh tensions in the volatile region”
Hmm; so according to the Guardian, a sovereign state’s targeted response to missile attacks on its civilians by terrorist groups raises ‘fresh tensions’ in precisely the same way as the rocket fire itself?
Of course we are more than used to this type of shoddy reporting every time similar incidents occur in the southern communities near Israel’s border with the Gaza Strip. Consistently keen to muddy the waters of cause and effect, Guardian editors are very fond of suggesting some kind of equivalence between the actions of the IDF and the war crime of deliberately firing rockets and mortars at civilian population centres.
But what is also interesting is that the Guardian has not seen fit to provide its readers with any background whatsoever regarding the perpetrators of Monday night’s rocket fire, the possible reasons for it, or the implications of the fact that it is highly unlikely that such an attack could have taken place without the knowledge of Hizballah.
Similarly, the Guardian chooses to disregard the fact that according to the very patchily implemented UNSC resolution 1701, there should be no militias and no weapons which do not belong to the LAF south of the Litani River.
The 2006 Lebanon war could have been prevented if the international community – as represented by UNIFIL in southern Lebanon – had taken serious steps towards enforcing its own UNSC resolution 1559 which called for “the disbanding and disarmament of all Lebanese and non-Lebanese militias”.
The next war is being made a certainty by the same abject failure to implement UNSC resolution 1701 as demonstrated by the events of Monday night. But that, of course, will come as a total surprise out of the blue to Guardian readers schooled only in lessons of ‘moral equivalence’.
We may, of course, never know with certainty if Israel was behind the recent explosion at Alghadir missile base at Bid Ganeh, Iran which killed seventeen of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards, including a man described as the “architect” of the country’s missile programme, Major General Hassan Moghaddam.
However, the manner in which Julian Borger and Saeed Kamali Dehghan framed the issue, in “Iranian missile architect dies in blast. But was explosion a Mossad mission?“, Nov. 15, was classic Guardian.
Though assigning blame for the blast on Israel is more than plausible, to characterize such an act, as Borger and Dehghan do, as “a dramatic [Israeli] escalation in a shadow war over the Iranian nuclear programme” is a classic Guardian style moral inversion. And, it is thoroughly consistent with a recent Guardian editorial lecturing the Jewish state on the folly of not only a pre-emptive missile strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities but even against covert action, cyber attacks, and economic sanctions.
Of course, opining that Israeli responsibility for the explosion is a “dangerous escalation” represents either remarkably myopia or willful blindness in the face of undeniable evidence regarding Iran’s role as one the biggest exporters of terrorism on the planet.
In addition to the Islamic Republic’s role in “continuing to fund, train, and provide weapons and ammunition to Shia extremist groups that carry out attacks against Iraqi and U.S. forces,” Iran, primarily through the efforts of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, continues to employ a sophisticated arms smuggling network through Syria to Hizballah in Lebanon, and to Hamas in Gaza – representing an Iranian proxy war against the Jewish state.
In fact, Iran has been so successful at re-arming Hezbollah after the 2nd Lebanon War that Israeli authorities estimate the Shiite terror group to have a rocket arsenal of over 50,000, many which could strike almost anywhere in Israel.
Further, experts believe, in the next Lebanon war, Hezbollah could fire 400-600 rockets at Israeli towns per day.
Yet, strangely, Iran’s arming of terrorist groups who fire rockets at Israeli towns is, for some reason, not considered a “dangerous escalation” by the Guardian.
Further, evidently the moral and political experts at the Guardian are unmoved by an Iranian regime which both denies that the Holocaust, while inciting for another one against the Jewish state – what Irwin Cotler, former Justice Minister of Canada, terms “incitement to genocide. Said Cutler:
“[We are] witnessing s incitement to genocide, we can see the unfolding of one case where there is a responsibility to act. This incitement, dramatized by parading in the streets, promotes the wiping of Israel off the map and religiously sanctioned genocide. The inflammatory epidemical metaphors used by Iran, are reminiscent of the Metaphors used by Nazi Germany. These metaphors are used by Ahmadinejad along side the denial of the Holocaust.
These calls of Ahmadinejad and other senior officials are also reminiscent of Rwanda government’s incitement to the elimination of the Tutsi.
The failure of state parties and the United Nations to act is a fatal blow to the corpus of international law and the United Nations, especially to the Genocide Convention. The international community must promote preventative action, accountability and not impunity for the sake of international peace and security.”
Not only don’t Guardian editors and journalists even marginally share Cotler’s concern, but a recent Guardian editorial decried the Israeli notion that it can, or should, engage in efforts to halt Iran’s nuclear aspirations as the foolish belief that “they can stop history.”
Israel, it seems, should listen to the sage advice from London, let history take its course, and just meekly accept their fate – a moral formula which, I assume we are to believe, has worked so well for the Jewish community throughout history.
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Would 1 million citizens out of a population of 7.8 million seem like a significant percentage to you?
Well, the figure of one million only includes the threat posed by Gaza terrorists in the south and not from Hezbollah in the north, who, Israeli authorities believe, are in possession of tens of thousands of rockets, many which can reach almost anywhere in Israel.
Not included in this graphic: The Iranian made Zelzal 2, Hezbollah is in possession of, which has a range of up to 400 Km
Since 2001, more than 10,000 rockets and mortars were fired from Gaza, resulting in 35 dead, more than 1,500 injured and thousands traumatized.
Hezbollah fired nearly 4,000 rockets into Israel during the Second Lebanon War alone, resulting in 43 killed and over 2000 injured.
Some facts to consider the next time Harriet Sherwood or other Guardian reporters callously dismiss such threats in future reports about terrorist rocket fire into Israel.
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- Harriet Sherwood’s latest Guardian report on terror attacks from Gaza redefines the word “Sporadic” (cifwatch.com)
- The Guardian’s Harriet Sherwood: Terror Propagandist. (cifwatch.com)
- If rockets are fired at your city but the Guardian doesn’t cover it, did the attacks really occur? (cifwatch.com)
- Guardian interactive map rewrites Israeli-Arab history (cifwatch.com)
- The Guardian’s permanent (Israeli) “war crimes” page that just won’t die (cifwatch.com)
- The wretched scandal of David Miliband’s liberal racism (cifwatch.com)
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‘Airflotilla 2′ & “normal, average Europeans”
April 13, 2012 in Comments which are off-topic, ad hominem, racist, vulgar or include threats of violence will be deleted | Tags: airflotilla2, anti-Zionism, Antisemitism, BDS, Flotilla, Fly2Palestine, Flytilla, Global March to Jerusalem, Hamas, Hezbollah, Mazin Qumseh, Mustafa Barghouti, Palestine Solidarity Campaign, PFLP, Victor Batarseh, Welcome to Palestine, Welcome2Palestine | by Israelinurse | 36 comments
Earlier in the week the organisers of the ‘Airflotilla 2′ (‘Welcome to Palestine’) campaign held a press conference in Bethlehem. Among the speakers the organisers chose to address journalists was the mayor of Bethlehem, Victor Batarseh who urged Israel to allow the flytilla activists in.
Whilst he can certainly talk the talk, Mayor Batarseh’s ‘message of peace’ should be seen in light of the fact that he recently took part in the ‘Christ at the Checkpoint‘ conference held in his town, during which he told the audience that the Palestinians were being crucified by Israeli security measures, Bethlehem was a giant prison and that Jesus Christ, embodied by the Palestinian people, was imprisoned in the city by the security barrier.
Batarseh is known to be allied to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) – a terrorist organization proscribed by Canada, the EU and the US. In January this year Batarseh attended a memorial service for PFLP founder George Habash held in Beit Sahour. Terror attacks perpetrated by the PFLP include:
Also speaking at the ‘Welcome to Palestine’ press conference was project organizer Mazin Qumsiyeh who said of the campaign’s participants:
Hooliganism is defined as ‘rowdy, violent or destructive behaviour’ or alternatively; ‘willful, wanton and malicious destruction of the property of others’. Some might say that the attempts of Mazin Qumsiyeh and his Palestine Justice Network to eliminate the Israeli state amount to little less.
Certainly, Mazin Qumsiyeh and Mustafa Barghouti – an endorser of the ‘Air Flotilla 2′ – do not qualify as being best placed to define hooliganism in light of their equally suspect definition of the recent March 30th ‘Global March to Jerusalem’ events (which they also co-organised) as ‘non-violent resistance’ and Barghouti’s active participation in the Qalandiya riots.
Neither, of course, is Qumsiyeh’s definition of the ‘Air Flotilla 2′ participants as “normal, average Europeans” at all accurate. Average Europeans do not – unlike the members of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign or London BDS (both of which are involved in ‘Welcome to Palestine’) – align themselves with the oppressive human-rights abusing, terror financing and supporting Iranian regime by promoting and participating in ‘Al Quds Day‘ marches.
Normal Europeans do not march under the flags of terrorist organisations such as Hizbollah and Hamas who indiscriminately murder civilians. Average Europeans do not disrupt cultural events and call for boycotts of a democratic country as a means of bringing about its dismantling. And ordinary Europeans certainly do not try to deliberately get themselves deported from other countries by knowingly engineering provocations.
As for Qumsiyeh’s claim that the ‘Air Flotilla 2′ participants wanting to “learn” about the conflict – that of course is highly dubious. Seasoned activists such as these are precisely what they are because of the fact that they have no desire to have their well-entrenched opinions challenged by facts and knowledge.
But let’s say they did. A viewing of this video made by Mustafa Barghouti shows exactly what participants in the ‘Air Flotilla 2′ will be ‘learning’ on their trip – should they actually arrive.
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