WarSclerotic

The Nature of the Enemy – The Daily Beast.

There are explanations for why Iran (the most likely suspect), perhaps in conjunction with Hezbollah (a plausible suspect as well), yesterday murdered seven Israeli tourists and wounded 33 more in Bulgaria.

Iran may be retaliating for Israel’s assassination of its scientists. Hezbollah may still be seeking revenge for Israel’s assassination of master-terrorist Imad Mugniyah, the man reportedly responsible for Hezbollah’s 1994 attack on a Buenos Aires Jewish Community Center.

There are explanations in the same way that Osama Bin Laden offered explanations for Al Qaeda’s murder of Americans: He was furious over the stationing of American troops on Arabia’s sacred soil. But such explanations don’t help us fully understand.

They don’t help us understand why certain regimes, and certain movements, intentionally kill civilians, people who just happen to be in the wrong office building or tourist bus. In this case, the only way to understand such horrors is to understand the character of the Iranian regime, a regime willing to torture, murder and rape its young in order to keep itself in power. What Tehran did yesterday in Bulgaria was export its fundamental disregard for the dignity and sanctity of human life.

Yes, democracies can act barbarically abroad as well. In the 1950s, Britain murdered tens of thousands of Kenyans during the Mau Mau rebellion. The United States killed even more during Vietnam. But democracy also fosters certain habits, inclinations and patterns of thought that restrain government abuse. That’s why the United States never dominated Western Europe, or even Latin America, with the brutality that the Soviet Union dominated Eastern Europe. It’s why Turkey didn’t respond to the deaths of its citizens on the Gaza flotilla by sinking an Israeli merchant ship. And it’s why Israel, even if severely provoked, would never blow up a bus in an attempt to kill scores of innocent civilians.

Reinhold Niebuhr spent the early cold war reminding the left that America really was morally superior to the Soviet Union and reminding the right that America would only remain morally superior if it honored the fragile system of democratic constraints that checked its capacity for evil. At Open Zion, we spend a lot of time echoing Niebuhr’s latter imperative, and decrying the erosion of democratic norms in Israel. But on certain days, it is Niebuhr’s first insight that constitutes the most relevant truth. Seven Israelis are dead and 33 are wounded not simply because Israel is locked in a geopolitical struggle with Iran, but because it is struggling against a regime fundamentally different from itself. It is a struggle Israel and the United States must win. And in the process, hopefully, Iran’s leaders will be called to account for the evil they committed in Bulgaria yesterday.

IDF on alert, cancels weekend breaks over Syri… JPost – Defense.

( Over Syria?  Really?  The first concrete indication that “something” may actually be up.  – JW )

Photo: IDF Spokesman’s Office

‘US, Israel discuss destroying Syrian weap… JPost – Middle East.

Iran denies responsibility for Bu… JPost – Diplomacy & Politics.

Photo: REUTERS

Iran’s embassy in Bulgaria denied on Thursday Israeli accusations that Tehran was behind a bomb attack on an airport bus in the city of Burgas that killed five Israeli tourists.

“The unfounded statements by different statesmen of the Zionist regime in connection with the accusations against Iran about its possible participation in the incident with the blown-up bus with Israeli tourists in Burgas is a familiar method of the Zionist regime, with a political aim, and is a sign of the weakness … of the accusers,” the Islamic Republic’s mission in Sofia said in a statement.

The attack targeting Israelis killed at least seven people in the city of Burgas, soon after a charter plane, Air Bulgaria flight 392 arrived from Ben-Gurion Airport. The seven included five Israelis, the driver, and the suicide bomber, the Foreign Ministry said.

Since the explosion, Israel’s highest officials have accused Iran and Hezbollah of perpetrating the attack, and vowed a powerful retaliation.

In unusually tough remarks, President Shimon Peres on Thursday said that Israel will hit terror nests around world.

“We were witnesses to a deadly terror attack coming out of Iran … we know there were other attempts, and this time they succeeded,” the president stated.

“It [Israel] has the means and the will to silence and paralyze terror organizations,” Peres asserted.

Defense Minister Ehud Barak said Thursday that Hezbollah was responsible for the terror attack in Burgas under the auspices of Iran.

Echoing his comments from Wednesday evening, Barak told Israel Radio that Israel would do everything in its power to to find the perpetrators, and bring them to justice.

In response to Bulgarian President Rosen Plevneliev’s statement that Mossad did not warn Bulgaria of an expected attack, Barak said that Israeli intelligence services transfer all information of this nature that it receives. However, he said he did not think that intelligence services had accurate information such as the information it obtained in order to thwart the terror attacks in Cyprus and Thailand earlier in the year.

Reinforcing Barak’s comments, Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman told Israel Radio on Thursday that Israel has solid information that Hezbollah, in close cooperation with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) carried out the terror attack in Burgas.

According to Liberman, Israel’s information identifies with certainty and beyond all doubt the Iranian fingerprint on the attack, but did not specify further. Iran and Hezbollah have not stopped operating against Israel for a moment, he added.

On Wednesday, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said Iran was likely behind the attack on Israeli civilians in Bulgaria, and vowed a powerful Israeli response.

“All the signs lead to Iran. Only in the past few months we have seen Iranian attempts to attack Israelis in Thailand, India, Georgia, Kenya, Cyprus and other places,” Netanyahu said in a statement.

“This is an Iranian terror campaign that is spreading throughout the world,” Netanyahu said. “Israel will react powerfully against Iranian terror,”

“Eighteen years exactly after the blast at the Jewish community center in Argentina, murderous Iranian terror continues to hit innocent people. This is an Iranian terror attack that is spreading throughout the entire world.”

Opposition leader Shelly Yechimovich responded to the “murderous terror attack” in Bulgaria on Wednesday, saying “there is no doubt that the instability in the region is spawned by Iran aiming especially for Israelis and Jews throughout the world.”

“Israeli security forces have succeeded to prevent several attempted attacks targeted at traveling Israelis in recent months,” Yechimovich added. “Unfortunately, today in Bulgaria we were forced again to cope with terror operations.”

Herb Keinon contributed to this report.

Ex-Revolutionary Guard member: Iran ready with terror plans to hit U.S. if Israel attacks – CBS News.

(CBS News) Eight people were killed Wednesday and dozens injured when a bomb went off inside an Israeli tourist bus in Bulgaria.

Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said Thursday the Iranian-backed Lebanese group Hezbollah carried out the terrorist attack.

What we saw Wednesday in Bulgaria is part of the escalating tensions between Iran, Israel and the West.

A former Iranian agent from that country’s feared Revolutionary Guard corps – a man who’s been on the inside – tells CBS News that a surrogate, stealth war, carried out in the shadows by both sides, has been going on for more than a year.

It began with the targeted killings of Iranian scientists working on that country’s nuclear program.

Then a computer virus was covertly deployed against Iranian nuclear sites. The virus was designed to make the sites self-destruct. Iran publicly accused the U.S., Great Britain and Israel of being behind the plots.

And now, it appears Iran is striking back.

“They’re looking at this saying, ‘We’ve got to respond. Aggression has been taken against us,”‘ says former CIA analyst Phil Mudd. “So that’s the first factor. The second factor is, in the background, they’re hearing the drumbeats of war.”

That drumbeat is the continued discussion over if or when Israel might launch airstrikes against more than a dozen underground suspected Iranian nuclear sites.

But Iran hasn’t backed away.

Since the killing of the last Iranian scientist, Iran has been linked to a series of plots:

— A bomb attached to the car driven by the wife of an Israeli diplomat in India

— A plan to use local organized crime hit men in a sniper attack in the U.S., and Israeli targets in Azerbaijan and the nation of Georgia

— A plot using a Mexican drug cartel to kill the Saudi ambassador in a crowded restaurant in Washington, D.C.

— And just days ago, in Kenya a suspected plot to attack a synagogue in Nairobi and Israeli-owned hotels in the coastal city of Mombasa

The two suspected Iranian agents captured in Kenya on July 3 are believed to be members of Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guard force.

Reza Khalili was once a member of that force himself and for years, he says, a double agent who supplied information to the CIA.

He says these attacks are Iran’s version of a warm-up, in the event of a full conflict with Israel.

“They’re just sending signals that they are capable of, and the order is by Ayatollah Khamenei, the Iranian supreme leader that, should war break out, then all terror cells will become activated and attack major interests of America, Israel, European countries and even within America,” Khalili warns.

But, given the number of alleged plots by Iran against Israeli targets, some analysts wonder why Iran would seem to keep provoking the very attack they say they want to avoid.

“The mindset of this organization that is the Iranian intelligence service and this government is not a Western mindset,” Mudd observes. “We see stability as a goal. They see instability and revolution as a goal.”

Khalili says, in the event of an Israeli airstrike, Iran is prepared to up the ante, not by responding militarily, but with a global campaign of terror attacks.

“Should it become an all-out war, then they will definitely respond on the world stage by terrorist attacks within the U.S., in Europe, and against America’s interests, against Israel’s interests,” Khalili says.

Intelligence officers believe Iran has already done the pre-operation surveillance for a series of terrorist attacks.

There’s plenty of evidence that Tehran has scoped out targets, taken photos and written plans for terrorist strikes in the Mideast, Europe, South America, and even the United States.

Israel Hayom | Eyes peeled to the north, on alert for a casus belli.

Israel’s defense establishment has explicitly proclaimed that the transfer of chemical weapons, advanced anti-aircraft systems and long-range missiles from Syria to Lebanon would be cause for war. Yoav Limor

Netanyahu – Unlike Olmert – Refuses Explicit Iran Attack Threat | Dissident Voice.

by Gareth Porter / July 18th, 2012

IPS — The perception that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is threatening to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities unless sanctions and diplomacy succeed in shutting them down has been the driving force in the Iran crisis.

But although Netanyahu and Defence Minister Ehud Barak have made some tough statements, especially over the past several months, there is still one gaping hole in the record of their rhetoric on Iran: neither Netanyahu nor Barak has ever made an explicit public statement threatening to attack Iran.

And in recent months, both have refused to make anything like such a threat when invited to do so by interviewers.

The absence of any such explicit threat of force by Netanyahu and Barack does not in itself rule out the possibility that he is prepared to attack Iran under some circumstances. A review of the history of Israeli declaratory policy toward Iran, however, reveals that the government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert twice actually did issue explicit threats to attack Iran if it did not end its nuclear programme.

In February 2006, then Defence Minister Shaul Mofaz declared that, if diplomacy failed to “delay or curb” the Iranian nuclear programme, Israel couldn’t “sit idly by” while Iran was on the threshold of achieving nuclear capabilities.

That language suggested a serious threat, because it is well known that the People’s Republic of China warned the U.S. Army early in the Korean War that it could not “sit idly by” if the U.S. forces crossed the 38th parallel, before making good on its threat by sending massive ground forces to fight them in North Korea.

On June 8, 2008, Mofaz, then deputy prime minister in the Olmert government, was even more explicit, declaring, “If Iran continues with its programme for developing nuclear weapons, we will attack it.”

In contrast to those straightforward conditional threats to use military force against Iran, Netanyahu and Barak have either refused to address the issue in speeches and interviews or have limited themselves to much broader statements about “all options” being “on the table” and Israel’s “right to self-defence”.

When asked by CNN’s Fareed Zakaria on November 20 whether Israel was going to attack Iran, Barak would not answer, saying it was not a “subject for public discussion”. Instead Barak talked about the vague notion of an Iranian “zone of immunity”, in which a sufficient proportion of Iran’s nuclear capabilities would be in sites protected from a potential Israeli attack so that such an attack would be futile.

In Ottawa before his visit to Washington in March, Netanyahu said only, “(L)ike any sovereign country, we reserve the right to defend ourselves against a country that calls and works for our destruction.”

In his speech to the influential lobby group American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) March 5, Netanyahu sought to refute the argument that “stopping Iran from getting the bomb is more dangerous than letting Iran have the bomb” and likened it to arguments made by the United States against bombing Auschwitz in 1944.

But that appeared to be an argument against the Barack Obama administration’s policy of refusing to attack Iran in the absence of evidence of moves to enrich uranium at weapons grade. Netanyahu refused to say under what circumstances his government would resort to force against Iran.

“I read about what Israel has supposedly decided to do or what Israel might do,” he said. “Well, I’m not going to talk to about what Israel will do or will not do. I never talk about that.”

In an interview with Greta Van Susteren on Fox News March7, Netanyahu repeated that generic idea: “If it’s necessary we’ll act in our own defence.” But when she asked if Israel could act alone, he said, “You know I never talk about that.”

The closest Netanyahu has come to a direct threat of war was on March 10, when he said he hoped “there won’t be a war at all, and that the pressure on Iran will succeed,” but added that the “eleventh hour” is approaching for Iran to “halt its nuclear programme or suffer the consequences”.

Netanyahu and Barak apparently went much further in off-the-record meetings with a small number of Israeli reporters. The message, wrote Ari Shavit of Haaretz in a March 26 report, was, “If the international community doesn’t stop Iran by summer, Israel will soon strike.”

But Shavit and other reporters were forbidden from quoting from those briefings or identifying the officials giving them.

The public reticence of Netanyahu and Barak may reflect the fact that the two leaders are not in a position to commit the Israeli government publicly to an attack on Iran. Press reports have portrayed Netanyahu and Barak as representing a distinct minority on the issue in Israel’s nine-member “security cabinet”.

Even Deputy Prime Minister Moshe Ya’alon, who argued publicly last month in an interview with Haaretz that the only alternatives in regard to Iran are “bomb or bombing”, was said by his interviewer, Ari Shavit, to express “deep concern” in private conversations about Netanyahu being dragged by Barak into a “wanton Iranian adventure”.

In late October 2011 it was leaked to the Israeli Hebrew language newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth that Netanyahu and Barak were seeking to convince the Israeli cabinet to support an attack on Iran. Barak then told Israel Radio that no decision had been made and that it would not be taken by two people.

Raviv Drucker, political commentator for Israel’s channel 10, noted that such press speculation “works rather well for Netanyahu, as he can be portrayed as keen to deal with Iran but being ‘held back’ by others in the Israeli establishment.”

Netanyahu and Barak may also be constrained by the consensus of the Israeli national security establishment in opposition to an attack on Iran under present circumstances. IDF and Mossad officials have told Netanyahu that Israeli intelligence agrees with the U.S. intelligence community that Iran has not yet decided to take the critical steps that would be required to have nuclear weapons.

Barak even alluded to that fact himself in an interview with Israel Radio March 22. He said Iran “wants to achieve a military nuclear capability” but was “not breaking out”. One of the reasons, Barak said, was its “fear of what will happen, if, God forbid, the United States or maybe someone else acts against them.”

That statement implied that Iran was already being deterred from advancing to nuclear weapons – a position at odds with the Netanyahu government’s posture.

Netanyahu’s refusal to make a public threat to attack Iran is also consistent with his well-established reputation as an extremely “risk averse” political figure.

“Netanyahu is known for his caution,” said David Makovsky of the Washington Institute for Near Policy in an interview with The Tablet in May.

The unambiguous Mofaz threats of 2006 and 2008 did not signal an actual readiness to strike at Iranian nuclear facilities, because at that point, the Israeli Air Force did not have the capability to carry out an effective attack.

Retired U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. Rick Francona, who visited Israel in November 2006 and met with Israeli Air Force officials, concluded that they did not have the capability to destroy Iranian nuclear sites. In an interview with this writer in 2007, Francona said the Israeli officers “recognised they have a shortfall in aerial refueling”.

But Olmert and Mofaz may been emboldened to issue explicit threats by the knowledge that Iran would not be close to a breakout capability for a few more years.

Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, was published in 2006. Read other articles by Gareth.

Peres: Israel will hit terror nes… JPost – Diplomacy & Politics.

Photo: Marc Israel Sellem

In unusually tough remarks, President Shimon Peres responded Thursday to the Burgas terror attack saying that Israel will hit terror nests around world.

The attack targeting Israelis killed at least seven people in the city of Burgas, soon after a charter plane, Air Bulgaria flight 392 arrived from Ben-Gurion Airport. The seven included five Israelis, the driver, and the suicide bomber, the Foreign Ministry said.

“We were witnesses to a deadly terror attack coming out of Iran … we know there were other attempts, and this time they succeeded,” the president stated.

“It [Israel] has the means and the will to silence and paralyze terror organizations,” Peres asserted.

Earlier Thursday Defense Minister Ehud Barak stated that Hezbollah was responsible for the terror attack in Burgas under the auspices of Iran.

Echoing his comments from Wednesday evening, Barak told Israel Radio that Israel would do everything in its power to to find the perpetrators, and bring them to justice.

In response to Bulgarian President Rosen Plevneliev’s statement that Mossad did not warn Bulgaria of an expected attack, Barak said that Israeli intelligence services transfer all information of this nature that it receives. However, he said he did not think that intelligence services had accurate information such as the information it obtained in order to thwart the terror attacks in Cyprus and Thailand earlier in the year.

Reinforcing Barak’s comments, Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman told Israel Radio on Thursday that Israel has solid information that Hezbollah, in close cooperation with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) carried out the terror attack in Burgas.

According to Liberman, Israel’s information identifies with certainty and beyond all doubt the Iranian fingerprint on the attack, but did not specify further. Iran and Hezbollah have not stopped operating against Israel for a moment, he added.

On Wednesday, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said Iran was likely behind the attack on Israeli civilians in Bulgaria, and vowed a powerful Israeli response.

“All the signs lead to Iran. Only in the past few months we have seen Iranian attempts to attack Israelis in Thailand, India, Georgia, Kenya, Cyprus and other places,” Netanyahu said in a statement.

“This is an Iranian terror campaign that is spreading throughout the world,” Netanyahu said. “Israel will react powerfully against Iranian terror,”

“Eighteen years exactly after the blast at the Jewish community center in Argentina, murderous Iranian terror continues to hit innocent people. This is an Iranian terror attack that is spreading throughout the entire world.”

Opposition leader Shelly Yechimovich responded to the “murderous terror attack” in Bulgaria on Wednesday, saying “there is no doubt that the instability in the region is spawned by Iran aiming especially for Israelis and Jews throughout the world.”

“Israeli security forces have succeeded to prevent several attempted attacks targeted at traveling Israelis in recent months,” Yechimovich added. “Unfortunately, today in Bulgaria we were forced again to cope with terror operations.”

Reuters contributed to this report.

Suicide Bomber Kills 6 Israelis on Tourist Bus in Bulgaria – NYTimes.com.

By NICHOLAS KULISH and MATTHEW BRUNWASSER

BURGAS, Bulgaria — The attack on a tour bus carrying Israeli vacationers outside the airport here was carried out by a suicide bomber carrying fake American identification, officials said on Thursday.

Seven people, including six Israelis, were killed along with the bomber when the bus exploded in a fireball on Wednesday and dozens more were injured in what Bulgaria, Israel and the United States called a terrorist attack. Israel quickly blamed Iran and promised a firm response.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility but Israeli officials blamed Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group, and Iran.

Speaking to reporters at the airport at this Black Sea resort on Thursday morning, Interior Minister Tsvetan Tsvetanov said the bomber was carrying a fake Michigan driver’s license at the time of the blast. One of the six Israeli victims died overnight, along with the 36-year-old Bulgarian bus driver.

Mr. Tsvetanov described the bomber as a man with long hair wearing a backpack. The man looked like a tourist and blended in with the travelers from Israel as he placed the backpack in the bus’s baggage compartment before it exploded, security footage showed.

“In no way did this person distinguish himself from the arriving tourists who were in the area,” Mr. Tsvetanov said. “The person who did this act directed it specifically against Israeli tourists.”

The identity of the bomber had not been determined, Mr. Tsvetanov said, but the police were checking his fingerprints against international databases. Authorities were also analyzing the attacker’s DNA.

“Our priority now is to determine the identity of the attacker,” Mr. Tsvetanov said.

Bulgarian authorities said they were working together with the F.B.I., the C.I.A., Israeli intelligence services and Interpol. Mr. Tsvetanov said that the F.B.I. determined that the driver’s license was a fake and that the person described on the card did not exist. He said that Bulgarian government had spoken with John O. Brennan, President Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, overnight.

An Israeli Defense Force plane carrying 33 of the wounded took off from Burgas for Israel Thursday morning is expected to land at Ben Gurion Airport, then disperse passengers to hospitals around the country, an military spokesman in Jerusalem said. The dead were to be flown back later in the day.

Israel’s foreign minister said Thursday morning that there was clear evidence that Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group with close ties to Iran, was responsible for the attack, “with the close cooperation of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.”

“I cannot get into all the operational details, but the identification is certain,” the minister, Avigdor Lieberman, said in an interview on Israel Radio. “From immediately after the attack, we worked hard and now the puzzle is put together, the identity and the responsibility are completely clear.”

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who on Wednesday night promised a “forceful response” to the attack, spent much of the morning in security briefings. Danny Ayalon, Israel’s deputy foreign minister, said the response would be diplomatic as well as operational, including a complaint to the United National Security Council and an effort to have Hezbollah added to the list of international terror groups.

Meanwhile, Defense Minister Ehud Barak found himself on the defensive for failing to thwart the attack, as Bulgarian and Israeli intelligence officers managed to do with a similar attempt in January.

“The world is big and full of places where these people act,” Mr. Barak said. “We try to find every crack. The success of our intelligence and of others has been great, but there are days that are painful, and yesterday was one such day. This is a mishap, mishaps happen, this is not negligence.”

Iran had no immediate official comment on Israel’s accusations but news agencies quoted state television as rejecting the accusation.

No group claimed responsibility for the blast but if the Israeli accusations are confirmed, the blast would be the first successful attempt by Iranian operatives to kill Israelis in attacks abroad after a string of failed bomb plots targeting Israeli diplomats in Georgia, India and Thailand this year.

Even without such confirmation, the Bulgarian explosion escalated the tensions between Israel and Iran that are already high because of the Iranian nuclear energy program, which Israel has called a guise for Iran to develop nuclear weapons despite Tehran’s repeated denials.

The explosion came only a few days after a suspected operative of Hezbollah was arrested in Cyprus on suspicion of plotting to kill Israeli tourists there.

In the capital, Sofia, home to most of the 5,000 Bulgarian Jews in the overwhelmingly Christian country of more than seven million, the mayor ordered police deployments in all public places linked to the Jewish community, The Associated Press reported.

In Washington, President Obama said in a statement that he strongly condemned “today’s barbaric terrorist attack on Israelis in Bulgaria,” but he did not specifically accuse Iran.

In what appeared to be an Obama administration effort to reinforce his support for Israel, which Mr. Obama’s Republican adversary, Mitt Romney, has called into question, the White House also said in a separate statement that Mr. Obama had called Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to offer his condolences, and had “pledged to stand with Israel in this difficult time, and provide whatever assistance is necessary to identify and bring to justice the perpetrators.”

“All signs point to Iran,” Mr. Netanyahu said in a statement Wednesday. He and other Israeli officials noted that the explosion came on the 18th anniversary of a bombing of an Argentine Jewish center in Buenos Aires that killed 85 people and wounded hundreds, an attack for which Argentine prosecutors have blamed Iran.

Bellicose adversaries, Israel and Iran have a long history of accusing each other of terrorist attacks. Iran, which does not recognize Israel’s right to exist and has sometimes referred to Israel as a Zionist plague on the Middle East, has blamed Israeli agents for a string of assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists over the past five years, for which Iran has vowed revenge.

Israel has never confirmed or denied responsibility for those assassinations.

Mr. Netanyahu’s statement recalled what Israel has described as Iranian plots to target Israelis in Thailand, India, Georgia, Kenya, Cyprus and other countries. He called such a pattern a “global Iranian terror onslaught, and Israel will react firmly to it.”

Burgas is a popular destination for Israelis. The explosion occurred outside the terminal shortly after the victims arrived via a charter flight from Tel Aviv with 154 people, including eight children.

“We were just getting on the bus when suddenly someone came near the bus’s front door and exploded,” Gal Malka told an Israeli television station. “We heard a boom and next thing we saw were body parts scattered on the ground. There were wounded people also on the ground. I could see a burned hole in the side of the bus.”

Oren Katz described tamping down the flames of a woman who had caught fire. “It was strange that there were so many security people around but none of them seemed to be focused on actually helping the wounded people, and couldn’t believe that I of all people was the one taking care of this burning woman and stopping her from burning up.”

Burgas is 250 miles east of Sofia. In recent years Burgas has become popular as an inexpensive destination for groups of Israeli teenagers taking trips after finishing high school and before their military service.

Some Iran analysts in Israel counseled caution about assigning responsibility for the Bulgaria blast until more evidence was presented. “It’s far too early to conclude who was behind the bombing in Bulgaria today,” said Meir Javedanfar, an Iran expert at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel. “For now all we have to go on are assumptions, and a list of credible suspects.”

He did not rule out Al Qaeda, recalling the deadly attack on Israeli tourists at a hotel in Mombasa, Kenya, in 2002.

Diplomania-Israel News – Haaretz Israeli News source..

In wake of terror attack, Israel launches diplomatic campaign to demand Hezbollah and the Quds Force of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard be added to EU’s list of terror organizations.

After the terror attack comes the diplomatic campaign. Israel and Bulgaria are working with the U.S. and other countries to draft a condemnation of the Burgas terror attack for the UN Security Council, say sources in the Foreign Ministry. At the same time, Israeli ambassadors worldwide have been instructed to appeal to the heads of state of their respective countries to issue official condemnations of the attack.

“Expressions of condemnation by leaders of foreign countries are critical and send a clear message from the international community to terrorists and Iran,” said a telegram sent by acting Foreign Ministry spokesman Lior Ben-Dor early this morning to the heads of Israeli delegations around the world.

“It is crucial for us that you act diligently in the media, in interviews, briefings, articles, etc,” Ben-Dor wrote. “A concerted effort is needed to make the public fully aware of the murderous terror threat spearheaded by Iran and Hezbollah.”

In the telegram to Israeli ambassadors, Ben-Dor stressed that in all of the recent terror attacks in Cyprus, Kenya, New Delhi and Thailand, “Iran and Hezbollah’s fingerprints are visible.” The telegram also directed ambassadors to emphasize that “it is obvious Teheran is directing the terror attacks through the Quds Force of the Revolutionary Guard and Hezbollah.”

“It should be noted that these two organizations have not been placed on the terror lists of the EU or of other organizations,” the telegram states, “which until now has prevented any decisive action to restrain them.”

The Foreign Ministry asked Israeli ambassadors to emphasize that the terror attack may have been directed against Israelis but American, Italian, Slovakian and Bulgarian citizens were among the casualties as well.

“This shows that Iran does not discriminate amongst its victims,” stated the telegram. “Iran continues to use the tool of terror as a means of deterrence against the West, even at the cost of harming the interests of states with which it has no quarrel.”

Since yesterday’s attack, several condemnations have been issued, including one from U.S. President Barack Obama.

“I strongly condemn today’s barbaric terrorist attack on Israelis in Bulgaria,” Obama said. “The United States will stand with our allies and provide whatever assistance is necessary to identify and bring to justice the perpetrators of this attack.”

Aside from issuing the condemnation, Obama telephoned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and expressed his condolences over the deaths of the Israelis in the terror attack. The Prime Minister’s Office stated that the two leaders agreed during the conversation that Israel and the U.S. would cooperate in investigating the attack.

Netanyahu thanked Obama for the call, and told him that Iran and Hezbollah were waging a worldwide terror campaign. “Iran is a global terror state. It should be made to bear the consequences,” Netanyahu said.

UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon also condemned the terror attack in Bulgaria, as did the EU foreign minister and the French foreign ministry.