WarSclerotic

Netanyahu at Holocaust ceremony: Stop Iran.

Netanyahu: World is gradually accepting Iran’s extermination calls – Haaretz – Israel News.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday called on the world “to confront Iran’s exterminatory intentions and act resolutely to stop Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.” Netanyahu spoke at the state ceremony on the eve of the Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Day at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. “The historic failure of free societies to confront the Nazi beast was that they did not face it in time,” Netanyahu said. “And today we are witness to the old hatred of Jews once again, fueled by extremist Islamic authorities, led by Iran and its satellites.” “Iran’s leadership is racing to develop nuclear weapons and declares its intention to destroy Israel. The world is gradually accepting Iran’s exterminatory declarations regarding Israel and still we do not see the international determination required to stop the arming of Iran. But if we learned something from the Holocaust, it is that we cannot remain quiet or flinch in the face of evil.” Earlier in the ceremony, President Shimon Peres said the world must not repeat its indifference at the face of new cries for the destruction of the Jewish people. Peres went on to say that “Israel will never forget the two decrees which the Holocaust enforced.” “The firm demand to sustain an independent Jewish state, one that holds its security in its own hands while at the same time tirelessly seeking peace as well as the demand to treat threats of annihilation, Holocaust denials, and terror mongering with the utmost severity.” Referring to comments made by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has threatened to “wipe the Zionist regime off the map,” Peres said that it was Israel’s right “and duty to demand the nations of the worlds never to repeat their indifference, one which cost millions of lives, including their own.” “The ears of the United Nations must be attuned to the threats of annihilation made by one member of the UN against another. Otherwise, the foundation which holds the UN charter will collapse,” Peres said. Referring to efforts to make the Middle East a nuclear-free zone, the president said that “in order to reach clean skies in the Middle East we must first dismantle the threats of annihilation.” “Weapons of mass destruction in hands capable of destroying masses accompanied by voices calling for such destruction are the combination most perilous to world peace. They turn the world into an uncontrollable place,” Peres said. The President added that he believed that some “parts of the Iranian people are themselves ashamed of the tyranny which has taken hold of it,” adding that he thought the Arab states were “aware that Ahmadinejad’s anti-Israel incitement is meant to disguise his real aim, which is establishing Iran as a regional power.” “The [Second] World War broke with the Nazis’ devilish incitement, claiming that they were a supreme race and Deutschland Uber Alles. We must never return to the beastly conception according to which there is such a thing as a supreme man, or supreme regime, or supreme race which can do whatever it sees fit,” Peres said. Earlier in his speech, President Peres said that with night falling on all of Israel, evening had also fallen “not long ago on Antopol, Zhoromin, Rodnik and Mikhalova, towns that three quarters of their population was was wiped out. Not a single Jew is left.” “Night has fallen on the village of Tostanovitza, where 2,803 Jews were murdered, on Libau in Latvia, where 7,101 Jews were murdered, on Khelm by Lublin from which 15,000 Jews were sent to their death,” Peres said, adding that “darkness has also started covering the shadows of Dachau, Auschwitz and Birkenau, as well as Vishnive, where I was born and visited again as an Israeli minister, with not even one wooden beam left from the Jewish homes and the synagogue.” Recalling the trip to his childhood town, Peres said he “visited the well that stood in our backyard. The water did not burn. I drew the bucket to taste the wasters of my childhood, and the water burned in my mouth, the taste of the fire which destroyed the town’s people, my family, who remained there.” “This night spread like a mourner’s hut on the thousands of communities whose existence became a petrified tombstone, whose people and culture burned to ashes.” A sundown covering the devastated synagogues and shuls, theaters and cultural institutions, the books that were set alight, the schools that turned to ashes. All erased, the lives, the houses, the culture, a world’s smoky embers.” “That fire will continue to burn within us, as an impossible farewell to our six million brothers, men, women, and elderly people, to a million and a half of our children, an immense potential of life and talent that was annihilated, an unreturnable loss.” “He who passes today through the town of Zivorov in the Ukraine cannot know that in that place, one summer day in the beginning of 1941, a thousand Jews were shot to death and buried in two pits in the town.” “He who passes today cannot hear the cry of April 9, 1943, when 2,300 Jews were forced to dig their own graves near the Sokolinaya gymnasium. They were murdered and thrown into the pits they dug with their own hands.” “‘What shall I equal to thee, that I may comfort thee, O virgin daughter of Zion?'” asks the Book of Lamentations, and asked the survivors of the ramps in Treblinka, Auschwitz and Birkenau, and asked those who arrived in Israel and immediately enlisted to the defense of the people in their fight for independence.” Also referring to the defense of the Jewish people in light of the lessons learned by the Holocaust, Israel Defense Forces chief Gabi Ashkenazi said earlier Sunday that never again would the Jewish people lack the means to defend themselves. Speaking at the Yad Vashem memorial, Ashkenazi said the Jewish people “will never again be dependent on the benevolence of others,” Ashkenazi said. “Never again will Jewish children be fearful or begging for mercy. Never again will an advocate of evil be able to dictate the future of the Jewish people.” “In the name of my father and his family who fought for a sovereign and independent state and in the name of the millions who were unable to witness the realization of their dream, I stand here today as the commander of the Hebrew defense force, the Israel Defense Forces.” Ashkenazi talked about the experiences of his father, a Holocaust survivor from the Bulgarian city of Plovdiv. “On the night of March 9th, 1943, my father’s family opened their door to find Bulgarian police ordering them to prepare to be deported from Bulgaria within a few hours,” Ashkenazi said. “Along with 6,000 other Jews, my father assembled in the yard of the school and recited the prayer ‘Shema Yisrael.’ In the end, my father and the Jews of Plovdiv were not sent to the death camps. The cancellation of their deportation order arrived when they were already at the train station, a short time before they were supposed to depart.

A “green light” to Israel?

“We’re probably going to get another UN Security Council resolution, and that’s really important in its own right, in terms of isolating Iran.  But it’s also important in terms of a legal platform for organizations like the E.U. and individual countries to take even more stringent actions against Iran.”

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U.S. Defense Secretary: A nuclear Iran is not inevitable – Haaretz – Israel News.

Meet The Press: Gates: Iran not yet ‘nuclear capable’

Iran is not yet “nuclear capable” and the U.S. government has not concluded that it is inevitable that Tehran will get the bomb, Pentagon chief Robert Gates said in remarks aired on Sunday.

“It is our judgment … they are not nuclear capable, not yet,” Gates, the U.S. defense secretary, said on NBC’s Meet the Press.

Asked if the U.S. government had concluded this was inevitable, Gates said, “No. We have not … drawn that conclusion at all, and in fact we are doing everything we can to try and keep Iran from developing nuclear weapons.”

However, he added that “they [the Iranians] are continuing to make progress on these [nuclear] programs. It is going slower than they anticipated but they are moving in that direction.”

U.S. President Barack Obama is pressing other global powers to agree to a fourth round of United Nations sanctions against Iran over its refusal to halt nuclear work that the West suspects is aimed at making bombs, a charge Iran denies.

But some critics of Obama’s attempts to engage Iran have said they fear his administration may be preparing to shift from a strategy of keeping Iran from getting the bomb to a strategy of containing a nuclear-armed Iran.

“We are probably going to get another UN Security Council resolution” of sanctions on Iran, Gates told NBC.

Gates added that the United States and other countries will continue trying to convince the Iranians that they are “headed down the wrong path” by pressuring Iran with sanctions as well as more missile defense and other military cooperation in the Gulf region.

“At the end of the day, what has to happen is that the Iranian government has to decide that its own security is better served by not having nuclear weapons than by having them,” Gates said.

Earlier Sunday, Iran’s foreign ministry said that the Islamic republic will lodge a complaint with the UN about what it sees as Obama’s threat to attack it with nuclear weapons.

Obama made clear last week that Iran and North Korea were excluded from new limits on the use of U.S. atomic weapons – something Tehran interpreted as a threat from a long-standing adversary to attack it with nuclear bombs.

“The recent statement by the U.S. president … implicitly intimidates the Iranian nation with the deployment of nuclear arms,” Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in a televised meeting with military and security officials.

“This statement is very strange and the world should not ignore it since in the 21st century, which is the era of support for human rights and campaigning against terrorism, the head of a country is threatening to use nuclear war.”

Foreign ministry spokesman Ramin Mehmanparast told the semi-official Fars news agency Iran would lodge a formal complaint with the UN, a move backed by a letter signed by 255 of Iran’s 290 members of parliament.

Reflecting fears of attack on its nuclear sites from the United States or its closest Middle East ally Israel, the defense ministry said Iran had started producing a prototype of an advanced anti-aircraft missile system.

“The Mersad air defense system … is able to destroy modern aircraft at low and medium range altitude,” the ISNA news agency on Sunday quoted Defense Minister Ahmad Vahidi as saying.

“The mass production of this product has begun and in the course of the current year a large number of them will be delivered to the armed forces,” he said.

While Iran hopes the development of its own system will make it more self-sufficient in weapons defense, it is also urging Russia to resist Western pressure not to deliver the S-300 missile defense system it has ordered.

On Friday, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said Iran’s nuclear program was “irreversible” despite limits on importing foreign technology and the threat of new sanctions, and he unveiled a prototype of an improved centrifuge which would enrich uranium faster than existing models.

Western analysts say Iran has exaggerated progress in the past to bolster domestic pride about its nuclear program and to improve its bargaining position with major powers.

The head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization played down the idea that Iran faced big technical hurdles.

“Iran’s nuclear issue is not a technical issue … we are not in a hurry. Second generation centrifuges will be mass produced in the next few months … in a year we will have prototype cascades of the third generation,” Ali Akbar Salehi told ISNA

IRAN: Tehran’s unveiling of new air defense system seen as a warning to the West | Babylon & Beyond | Los Angeles Times.

Iran unveiled a new “homemade” missile defense system on Sunday that its defense minister claims is capable of destroying “advanced airplanes flying at low and medium altitudes” in a show of force that can easily be read as a warning to Western powers seeking to pressure Iran over its nuclear program.

The Mersad air defense system was debuted days after President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced technological advances in nuclear fuel production that could, if implemented, greatly advance Iran’s nuclear ambitions.

“The main components of this new system are detection radars, software and hardware networks, launching pads and control centers,” Defense Minister Brig. Gen. Ahmad Vahidi told state television. “We owe this digitally designed system to our experiences of eight-year war with Iraq.”

He added that the system was also capable of “resisting electronic warfare” and that it would be handed over to Iranian armed forces by the end of this year.

According to some media reports, the system was tested Friday using a Shahin medium-range rocket. Previewing the system is being widely interpreted as a warning to Israel and the United States that Iran is prepared to defend itself against a possible Israeli air attack on its nuclear facilities should the new round of U.S.-led sanctions fail to pass or prove ineffective.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, speaking to top military brass on Sunday, attacked President Obama over the U.S. leader’s recently unveiled nuclear strategy, which did not rule out a nuclear attack on Iran.

“In recent years, the Americans did their best to make the world believe that the Islamic Republic of Iran has not come clean about its nuclear programs,” Khamenei said. “Now, it is clear that the nuclear-armed governments and those who disgracefully threaten to use atomic bomb against others are unreliable. The U.S. president’s remarks are scandalous.”

But according to an ABC News interview with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Obama administration doesn’t appear to be panicking over Iran’s military capabilities, nuclear or otherwise.

“When it comes to Iran, we take everything they say with more than a grain of salt because we know that they have a — a tendency to say things that may or may not be carried out, may or may not be accurate,” Clinton told ABC’s White House correspondent Jake Tapper Sunday. “But in fact their belligerence is helping to make our case every single day.”

— Meris Lutz in Beirut

Photo: Iran’s attempts to beef up its missile defense system have been seen as a warning to Israel and the West. Credit: Agence France-Presse

Ray Takeyh – A link to break: Iran and Mideast peace talks.

Sunday, April 11, 2010

In the midst of the recent U.S.-Israeli tumult, a curious conventional wisdom is starting to evolve. A Washington that cajoles Israel on its settlements and resumes the peace process in earnest may finally garner Arab support for dealing with Iran’s nuclear menace. Although pressuring Israel to restrain its settlements may be a sensible means of gaining constructive Arab participation in the peace talks, it is unlikely to affect the region’s passive approach to Iran. Indeed, should Tehran perceive fissures and divisions in U.S.-Israeli alliance, it is likely to further harden its nuclear stance.

The notion that the incumbent Arab regimes are reluctant to collaborate with the United States on Iran because of the prevailing impasse in the peace process is a misreading of regional realities. The Arab states, particularly the Persian Gulf sheikdoms, have an odd policy toward Iran. In private, as any visiting American dignitary can attest, they decry Iran’s ambitions, fear its accelerating nuclear program and even hint at the advisability of using military force against its atomic installations. Yet they are loath to be part of an aggressive strategy, which they would see as unduly antagonizing the Islamic Republic. The Arab states will gladly purchase U.S. arms and enhance their defenses, but they would be reluctant to participate in coercing Iran. Arab leaders would prefer that someone else take care of the Iran problem without their active complicity. Absent such a solution, they are likely to coexist with the Iranian bomb. No degree of peacemaking between Israelis and Palestinians is likely to alter that calculus.

Meanwhile, the guardians of Iran’s theocracy understand their neighborhood better than the succession of U.S. emissaries who journey to the Gulf in hope of Arab solidarity. Iran’s leaders appreciate the limits of Arab belligerence and realize that a strong regime of economic sanctions and diplomatic confrontation will not emanate from the sheikdoms. U.S. allies will assess their own capabilities and vulnerabilities, shape alliances and pursue their interests understanding that they are susceptible to Iranian influence predicated on religious ties and political subversion. A policy of hedging their bets is more in line with the traditions of the emirates, with their penchant for caution and circumspection.

If Iran dismisses threats from the Gulf states, it similarly discounts the possibility of U.S. military retaliation. Since becoming Iran’s president in 2005, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his hard-line supporters have assured their compatriots that U.S. preoccupations with Iraq and Afghanistan provide Iran with a deterrent policy. No American administration, they insist, is likely to jeopardize the fragile stability of its war-torn charges by forcefully taking on Iran’s nuclear portfolio. It is entirely possible that Iranians are once more misjudging America’s predilections. The history of the Middle East, after all, is riddled with rulers who misapprehended Washington’s intentions. However misguided they may be, Iran’s leaders comfort themselves with thoughts that their nuclear provocations will not trigger American retribution.

Israel, then, looms large in Iran’s strategic calculations. Unlike the Arab states, Israel approaches Iran with resolution. And unlike the United States, Israel is not entangled in conflicts that Iranian mischief can aggravate. Hamas and Hezbollah are not only unreliable proxies but ones that Israeli armor can handle. Fulminations aside, Iranian leaders take Israeli threats seriously and are at pains to assert their retaliatory options. It is here that the shape and tone of the U.S.-Israeli alliance matters most. Should the clerical oligarchs sense divisions in that alliance, they can assure themselves that a beleaguered Israel cannot possibly strike Iran while at odds with its superpower patron. Such perceptions cheapen Israeli deterrence and diminish the potency of the West’s remaining sticks.

All this is not to suggest that Washington cannot criticize Israeli policies, even publicly and forcefully. The ebbs and flows of the emerging peace process will cause disagreements and even tensions between the two allies. But as they plot their strategies for resuming dialogue between Israel and its neighbors, U.S. policymakers would be wise to vociferously insist that the dynamics of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations will not affect Washington’s cooperation with Israel on Iran. A concerted effort to decouple the peace process from Iran’s nuclear imbroglio is the best means of declawing the Islamic Republic.

The writer is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Thank you, Mr. President – Israel Opinion, Ynetnews.

Dan Calic says Obama doing great job convincing liberal Jews he’s bad for Israel

Dan Calic

‘Obama shouldn’t have excluded Iran’.

By ASSOCIATED PRESS

TEHERAN, Iran — Iran will file a formal complaint with the UN against the United States after US President Barack Obama excluded Iran from a pledge not to use nuclear weapons against countries that do not have them, the Iranian Foreign Ministry said Sunday.

IDF Chief at Yad Vashem: Never again will we be unable to defend ourselves – Haaretz – Israel News.
IDF chief of staff Gabi Ashkenazi told a General Staff forum assembled at Yad Vashem Sunday that never again would the Jewish people lack the means to defend themselves.

Speaking on the eve of the Holocaust Martyrs and Heroes Day Ashkenazi said “We will never again be dependent on the benevolence of others,” Ashkenazi said. “Never again will Jewish children be fearful or begging for mercy. Never again will an advocate of evil be able to dictate the future of the Jewish people.”

“In the name of my father and his family who fought for a sovereign and independent state and in the name of the millions who were unable to witness the realization of their dream, I stand here today as the commander of the Hebrew defense force, the Israel Defense Forces.”

Ashkenazi talked about the experiences of his father, a Holocaust survivor from the Bulgarian city of Plovdiv.

“On the night of March 9th, 1943, my father’s family opened their door to find Bulgarian police ordering them to prepare to be deported from Bulgaria within a few hours,” Ashkenazi said. “Along with 6,000 other Jews, my father assembled in the yard of the school and recited the prayer ‘Shema Yisrael.’ In the end, my father and the Jews of Plovdiv were not sent to the death camps. The cancellation of their deportation order arrived when they were already at the train station, a short time before they were supposed to depart.

Iranian Spy for CIA: %u2018Weak West%u2019 Will Cause War with Iran – Defense/Middle East – Israel News – Israel National News.

The American-led “engagement” policies towards Iran is going to result in the very war it wants to prevent, according to an Iranian CIA spy. He says the only way to prevent a possible nuclear war with Iran is to attack the country now.

In the meantime, Iran announced Sunday it has started mass-producing a new medium-range anti-aircraft missile that “can destroy modern planes in low and medium altitudes.”

Writing under the pseudonym Raza Kahlil, his book “A Time to Betray” reveals that he began to spy on Iran for the CIA after he was disillusioned by the 1979 revolution and fled the Islamic Republic.

Interviewed by Reza Aslan of the Daily Beast web site, “Kahlil” predicted that if Iran obtains a nuclear weapon, which it apparently will do, “The Iranian people are going to pay a very, very heavy price. And you could see major destruction in Iran.”

He reasoned that the West is “dragging out” its attempts to place harsher sanctions on Iran and “is not dealing with it the way they should. One thing they could do very simply is cut off shipping lines—all airspace and shipping lines closed to everything coming into Iran and going out of Iran,” which is an act of war.

“Let it be an act of war.” he said. “You’ve got two choices: Either take out the [Revolutionary] Guard right now, or wait until they have a bomb. It’s a matter of who takes the more serious step. Let it be an act of war and let’s see what Iran does. Give them a deadline. No one has taken a serious stand to see if they will back down, and unless you do, they’re going to become a nuclear-armed state.

“So the decision comes to this, and this is the bottom line: Do we accept Iran as a nuclear-armed state or not? Anything else is just total hot air. It is just one question, do we accept it or not?”

He also explained that there is an illusion among the media and analysts that the Guards are becoming an independent entity. He insisted that they are part and parcel of the Muslim-led country. The Guards are “a big organization…, spread throughout the Middle East, the Persian Gulf, Africa,” he maintained. “Basically they want to become a nuclear-armed organization. They will achieve that. They’ll achieve reaching the point where they can put together an atomic warhead.”

Admitting he betrayed “the system” but not Iran, Kahlil said he had access “to a lot of information” by virtue of his position that utilized his expertise in dealing with the infrastructure of the Guards. “I was in a base where one of the intelligence units was also based,” he revealed.

“The majority of the forces are true believers—common people with not much education. And these are mostly from the poorer population. I was among them. I saw them. I lived with them. We went to the front [in the Iran-Iraq War] together….They take orders from the leadership of the Guards, [whose leaders] leaders cannot survive independently if the clerics do not support them. Both need each other. The Guard is under full control of the clerics, as is Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

“I believe that Ahmadinejad is among the group that believes that we shouldn’t give a damn about the world and just move full speed ahead. That’s the group that is in power now.

“Now just imagine that they have a nuclear bomb. The Saudi kingdom would be in jeopardy. Iraq… forget about it, it’s already under control of Iran. They’re helping the Taliban. In Lebanon, Hezbollah is ruling. Jordan could be in danger, Syria could be empowered, Israel could be threatened day and night, Hamas would be empowered. You could see nuclear proliferation moving into Venezuela. It is going to be unimaginable.” (IsraelNationalNews.com)