WarSclerotic

EJP | News | UK | British FM Hague: Iran will ‘pay for’ attack on our embassy in Tehran.

Tuesday’s attack involved students who threw petrol bombs and stones while chanting ‘death to

LONDON (EJP)—British Foreign Minister William Hague has warned Tehran it faces ‘serious consequences’ over an attack on the British embassy in the Iranian capital.

He said the embassy staff were put at risk and ‘extensive damage’ was caused when hundreds of protesters surged on two compounds in the capital.

“Iran has committed a grave breach of the Vienna Convention, which demands protection of diplomats and diplomatic premises,”” the minister said.

He added: “We hold the Iranian government responsible for its failure to take adequate measures to protect our embassy as it is required to do.”

He called the Iranian Foreign Minister to demand “immediate steps” to ensure the safety of embassy staff and said he had received an apology.

Tuesday’s attack involved students who threw petrol bombs and stones while chanting ‘death to England’. They also tore down a picture of the Queen and burned the flags of Britain and Israel.

The violence erupted two days after Iran decided to downgrade diplomatic relations with Britain over its support of tough new sanctions over Tehran’s disputed nuclear programme.

Tammuz missile gets major upgrade – Israel News, Ynetnews.

Greater accuracy, greater sense of control and ability to shift missile trajectory to avoid civilians are all part of the IDF’s upgrade for Tammuz anti-tank guided missile. Watch as the missile avoids hitting a target

Yoav Zitun

Just months after it was revealed, the Tammuz anti-tank guided missile is getting an upgrade: The IDFArtillery Corps’ electro-optic guided missile, which was first presented last summer, is getting another technological upgrade.

Troops operating and firing the missile will enjoy an even more accurate guidance system thanks to a special dot that will pinpoint the target from the missile’s initial trajectory, when it is fired from the launcher – and right through to the moment the missile hits its target.

As is the habit in the past few years, a camera is installed on the missile to document the missiles movement and progress towards the target for the soldiers. In addition to the increased accuracy, the new upgrade is supposed to give the soldiers a greater sense of security and control.

PRESS HERE FOR VIDEO

The technological innovation was recently declared operational and is at this stage already being supplied to the troops.

The Tammuz system is expected to take part in combat activities against terror groups in the Gaza Strip, if and when it will be needed by the forces. Tammuz’s technology will also address the issue that made negative headlines for Israel in the Goldstone Report: Harming uninvolved parties.

As the video, shown here for the first time reveals, the soldiers follow the missile’s trajectory (before the new upgrade). When the building is identified as one belonging to uninvolved civilians, the missile is shifted at the last minute to an open area where it explodes without harming innocent civilians.

“We have some very advanced simulators where we already practice urban warfare because the Tammuz’s purpose is actually to be an anti-tank and tough target missile,” the David’s Sling Division commander Colonel S. told Ynet.

Tammuz missile system gets an upgrade (Photo: IDF Spokesman)

“Of course this is all connected to the troops’ high values and norms; they are well versed with how to respond if they identify civilians in the line of fire.”

Meanwhile, the Artillery Corps – under the command of Chief Artillery Officer Brigadier General David Swissa – is preparing for the establishment of a new IDF rocket system that would allow the firing of advanced rockets to a greater range. These rockets are still in the advanced development stage.

Second huge blast in 20 days at Iranian nuclear facility | Nuclear Iran News | The Week UK.

Iranians continue to pretend they are not under attack. But about those rockets landing in Galilee?

LAST UPDATED AT 10:07 ON Wed 30 Nov 2011

WHAT’S HAPPENED?

It has emerged that an Iranian nuclear facility in the city of Isfahan was rocked by a massive explosion on Monday afternoon, 24 hours before the British Embassy fracas in Tehran stole the headlines. The blast caused tower blocks to shake in the city and a large pall of smoke to hang over the uranium conversion facility on the outskirts of Isfahan, according to The Times.

WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

This is the second time in the space of 20 days that such a site has been hit by a mysterious blast. On November 12 a massive explosion at the Bid Ganeh missile base (pictured above) on the outskirts of Tehran killed up to 30 members of the Revolutionary Guard, including General Hassan Moghaddam, the architect of Iran’s missile programme.

The latest incident suggests that Iran’s nuclear facilities are now coming under a concerted attack. The question is whether Israeli forces had a hand in either blast.

An Israeli intelligence source has told The Times that there was “no doubt” that the plant at Isfahan was struck deliberately on Monday and that the attack had “caused damage to the facilities [there], particularly to the elements we believe were involved in the storage of raw materials”. The source refused to say whether Israel had been involved.

The Iranian authorities have yet to issue an official line on the blast. An initial claim by Isfahan’s governor Alireza Zaker-Isfahani stated that it was the result of a military exercise in the area, but this report was quickly removed by the state-run news agency, and the government then issued a denial that anything at all had happened.

There were similar conflicting messages following the November 12 incident. Initially, the Iranian military blamed the blast on an accident. “My dear colleagues in the Revolutionary Guards were moving munitions in one of the arsenals at that base when, due to an incident, the explosion happened,” a spokesman said. But Tehran subsequently claimed they had been testing a missile with which to strike Israel.

Many observers have suggested that Mossad was behind that and other attacks, including a strike in October 2010 on a base at Khoramabad, 300 miles southwest of Tehran, which killed 18 Revolutionary Guards.

The amount of immediate information that Israel has had of the attacks would suggest Mossad involvement. As has the nod-and-a-wink approach of some Israeli officials. Dan Meridor, the Israeli intelligence minister, told reporters after the Isfahan blast: “There are countries who impose economic sanctions and there are countries who act in other ways in dealing with the Iranian nuclear threat.”

WHAT’S NEXT?

The Iranians continues to deny the existence of a nuclear weapons programme in the face of last month’s International Atomic Energy Agency report. The question is how long Tehran will continue to put up up a smokescreen around these blasts – and how long before they retaliate.

Or have they already hit back? That’s a theory put forward by Time’s Karl Vick. He points out that a few hours after the Isfahan blast, four 122mm Katyusha rockets launched from southern Lebanon landed in Israel’s northern Galilee region. Southern Lebanon is controlled by Hezbollah, a client of Iran. “If the timing was a coincidence,” says Vick, “it was a nice-sized one: there’s been no attack like it for more than two years.” ·

‘Blast in Iran struck uranium enrichment facil… JPost – Defense.

(Wow!  Truly amazing!  The war has begun…  JW)

    Satellite imagery “clearly showing billowing smoke and destruction” has proven that an explosion Monday damaged a nuclear facility in the Iranian city of Ifsahan, according to a Times of London report Wednesday.

The report quoted Israeli intelligence officials saying that there was “no doubt” that the blast damaged and uranium enrichment site, and asserted that it was “no accident.”

Officials from Isfahan have been denying that the city had been hit by an explosion.

Mohammad-Mahdi Esma’ili, Isfahan’s deputy governor in political and security affairs, called the reports “sheer lies” according to the IRNA news agency. An official from the city’s fire department also denied that there had been an explosion.

The mysterious explosion Monday rocked the Iranian city of Isfahan, which hosts a nuclear facility involved in processing uranium fed to the Natanz fuel enrichment facility.

The source and target of the explosion were initially unclear. Some reports claimed it took place in a military base and others said it was a gas explosion.

Two weeks ago, on November 12, an explosion hit an Iranian military base near the town of Bid Kaneh, killing 17 members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and Maj.-Gen. Hassan Moghaddam, chief architect of the Islamic Republic’s ballistic missile program. Israel’s Mossad has been accused of orchestrating the blast.

Head of the Military Intelligence Research Directorate Brig.-Gen. Itay Brun told the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee on Monday that the November 12 blast at the missile base could delay Tehran’s development of long-range missiles.

“The explosion at the site to develop surface-to-surface missiles could stop or delay activities on that track and in that location, but we must emphasize that Iran has other development tracks in addition to that facility,” Brun said.

Israel faces new form of warfare, Arens says | The Canadian Jewish News.

Moshe Arens

TORONTO — Israel faces a new kind of warfare aimed at undermining its existence, a former Israeli cabinet minister said last week.

The war of delegitimization is the third and latest manifestation of hostility that Israel has faced since its emergence as a sovereign state in 1948, Moshe Arens told an audience at Beth Sholom Synagogue Nov. 21 in a speech sponsored by the Friends of Simon Wiesenthal Center for Holocaust Studies.

“Israel has been under constant attack,” noted Arens, a former professor of aeronautics who was elected to the Knesset in 1974 and who later served as ambassador to the United States, defence minister and foreign minister.

The first phase of the Arab world’s effort to eradicate Israel lasted from the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948 to the Yom Kippur War in 1973, said Arens, whose political career largely spanned the 1980s and 1990s and who lost his parliamentary seat in 2003.

Having been unable to defeat Israel in conventional wars, major Arab states such as Egypt and Syria concluded that Israel was militarily unbeatable.

The next Arab phase of war against Israel took the form of terrorism during the second Palestinian uprising, said Arens.

The objective of the intifadah, which broke out in 2000, was to shatter Israeli society, but the Israeli army crushed it by military means.

“We’ve not had a resurgence of that sort of terrorism, but we still have to deal with [Hamas] and [Hezbollah] rockets.”

According to Arens, the newest attempt to wage war on Israel turns on the international campaign to delegitimize it.

“It’s a pernicious effort to destroy Israel through propaganda,” he said, adding that it’s led by a coalition of antisemites, Holocaust deniers, leftists and self-hating Jews in the Diaspora and even Israel.

Arens, who was born in Lithuania and immigrated to Israel from the United States after the 1948 War of Independence, declared that the Jewish people are “defenceless no more.”

As he put it, “We have a long reach to protect Jews where that protection is required.”

Turning to current affairs, Arens said he has no doubt that Iran is trying to build a nuclear bomb. “This is a problem not just for Israel, but for the entire world.”

For years, few countries considered the possibility of an Iranian nuclear arsenal as a problem, he said.

But with the publication of a recent report by the International Atomic Energy Agency that Iran is working to assemble a nuclear device, the world has been jolted by what he described as “a wakeup call.”

With western countries such as the United States, Canada, France and Britain having enacted new economic sanctions against Iran, Israel is not alone in confronting the spectre of an Iranian atomic bomb, Arens said.

In a reference to the Palestinians, he said they can’t achieve statehood by bypassing Israel and taking their case to the United Nations.

He claimed that the Quartet –consisting of the United Nations, the United States, the European Union and Russia – is trying to wrest political concessions from Israel in a bid to reboot negotiations with the Palestinian Authority.

Arens was pessimistic about the popular rebellions currently brewing in the Arab world. “The Arab Spring is rapidly turning into the Arab Winter,” he said, predicting that Islamist parties will assume power through democratic elections.

Citing “a big change” in Canada’s foreign policy, Arens hailed Prime Minister Stephen Harper as one of Israel’s best friends. “We greatly appreciate his position on Israel.”

Arens was in Toronto to promote his book, Flags Over the Warsaw Ghetto, a revisionist account of the 1943 Jewish revolt. Published last month, it claims the uprising was led not only by Mordechai Anielewicz’s left-wing Zionist group, the Jewish Fighting Organization, but also by Pawel Frenkel’s right-wing Zionist formation, the Jewish Military Organization.

Jewish Tribune – Military strike against Iran necessary, Israeli security expert asserts.

Britain pulls embassy staff out of Iran – Israel News, Ynetnews.

Foreign Office confirms embassy employees leaving Tehran after Iranian protesters storm two British diplomatic compounds. Iran parliament speaker says ‘hasty’ UN condemnation aimed at ‘covering up previous crimes of America and Britain’

Reuters

Britain has evacuated its diplomatic staff from Iran, Western diplomatic sources told Reuters on Wednesday, a day after protesters stormed and ransacked its embassy and a residential compound.

The UK’s Foreign Office confirmed that some embassy employees were leaving Tehran.

Britain said it was outraged by the attacks and warned of “serious consequences“. The UN Security Council condemned the attacks “in the strongest terms”. US President Barack Obama called on Iran to hold those responsible to account.

Meanwhile, the speaker of Iran’s parliament criticized the UN Security Council over its condemnation of the storming of the British embassy in Tehran and said the resolution, passed unanimously on Wednesday, put global security at risk.

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Britain’s Foreign Secretary William Hague on embassy attack

“The hasty move in the Security Council in condemning the students’ actions was done to cover up previous crimes of America and Britain while the police did all they could to keep the peace,” Ali Larijani told parliament in an address broadcast live on state radio.

“This devious action will lead to instability in global security,” he said.

On Tuesday, Iranian protesters stormed two British diplomatic compounds in Tehran, smashing windows, torching a car and burning the British flag in protest against new sanctions imposed by London.

The attacks occurred at a time of rising diplomatic tension between Iran and Western nations, which last week imposed fresh sanctions over Tehran’s nuclear program that they believe is aimed at achieving the capability of making an atomic bomb.

Deepening infighting

Iran, the world’s fifth biggest oil exporter, says it wants nuclear plants only for the generation of electricity.

The embassy storming was also a sign of deepening political infighting within Iran’s ruling hardline elites, with the conservative-led parliament attempting to force the hand of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and expel the British ambassador.

“Radicals in Iran and in the West are always in favor of crisis … Such radical hardliners in Iran will use the crisis to unite people and also to blame the crisis for the fading economy,” said political analyst Hasan Sedghi.

Violence and looting in embassy compund (Photo: MEHR News)

Several dozen protesters broke away from a crowd of a few hundred outside the main British embassy compound in Tehran, scaled the gates, broke the locks and went inside.

Protesters pulled down the British flag, burned it and put up the Iranian flag, Iranian news agencies and news pictures showed. Inside, the demonstrators smashed windows of office and residential quarters and set a car ablaze, news pictures showed.

One took a framed picture of Queen Elizabeth, state TV showed. Others carried the royal crest out through the embassy gate as police stood by, pictures carried by the semi-official Fars news agency showed.

Situation ‘confusing’

All embassy personnel were accounted for, a British diplomat told Reuters in Washington, saying Britain did not believe that any sensitive materials had been seized.

Demonstrators waved flags symbolizing martyrdom and held aloft portraits of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei who has the final say on matters of state in Iran.

Violent protesters attack embassy (Photo: MEHR News)

Another group of protesters broke into a second British compound at Qolhak in north Tehran, the IRNA state news agency said. Once the embassy’s summer quarters, the sprawling, tree-lined compound is now used to house diplomatic staff.

An Iranian report said six British embassy staff had been briefly held by the protesters. British Foreign Secretary William Hague said the situation had been “confusing” and that he would not have called them “hostages”.

“Police freed the six people working for the British embassy in Qolhak garden,” Iran’s Fars news agency said.

A German school next to the Qolhak compound was also damaged, the German government said.

Police appeared to have cleared the demonstrators in front of the main embassy compound, but later clashed with protesters and fired tear gas to try to disperse them, Fars said. Protesters nevertheless entered the compound a second time, before once again leaving, it said.

British Prime Minister David Cameron chaired a meeting of the government crisis committee to discuss the attacks, which he said were “outrageous and indefensible”.

“The failure of the Iranian government to defend British staff and property was a disgrace,” he said in a statement.

“The Iranian government must recognize that there will be serious consequences for failing to protect our staff. We will consider what these measures should be in the coming days.”

The United States, alongside the European Union and many of its member states also strongly condemned the attacks.

There have been regular protests outside the British embassy over the years since the 1979 Islamic revolution that toppled the US-backed shah, but never have any been so violent.

The attacks and hostage-taking were a reminder of the 1979 takeover of the US embassy in Tehran carried out by radical students who held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days. The United States cut diplomatic ties with Iran after the hostage-taking.