WarSclerotic

CIA reportedly monitoring extremists in Syria for drone strikes | The Times of Israel.

( If true, this will open the door for Israel to do likewise. – JW )

Unit that runs covert drone program in Pakistan and Yemen is collecting intel on Islamic militants in Syria, some of whom are aligned with al-Qaeda

In this Monday, December 17, 2012 photo, Syrian rebels listen to their trainer teaching them how to use the RPG in Maaret Ikhwan, near Idlib, Syria (photo credit: AP/Mohammed Muheisen)

As fighting in Syria entered its third year, a new report contended Friday that the CIA had stepped up its secret contingency plans in the war-torn country and collected intelligence on Islamic extremists for possible lethal drone strikes for the first time.

The Los Angeles Times, quoting current and former US officials, reported that the Counterterrorism Center, which runs the CIA’s covert drone program in Pakistan and Yemen, recently relocated several targeting officers to improve intelligence collection on militants in Syria, some of whom are closely affiliated to al-Qaeda, who might pose a terror threat to the US and its allies. The targeting officers formed a unit with their colleagues who were tracking al-Qaeda operatives and other fighters in Iraq, some of whom have joined other Islamic extremists in Syria in their fight against President Bashar Assad’s regime.

The intelligence gathering could also help the US zero in on more moderate opposition figures in the element that things spin out of control in Syria, which has increasingly become a haven-like location for Islamic militias, the report added.

The news about the CIA’s covert operations in Syria comes as calls for supplying lethal weapons to the Syrian rebels have become more vocal. The top US Democrat in the House Foreign Affairs Committee Representative Eliot Engel, is set to introduce legislation to train, arm, and support the Syrian opposition Monday — which would constitute a major escalation in US involvement in the two-year-long civil war.

The brutal conflict has taken the lives of approximately 70,000 Syrians and displaced over 1 million refugees, according to UN estimates.

A different report this week claimed that the US had trained between 200 and 300 Syrian rebels at a camp in Jordan. The US declined to comment on the ostensible training, which is expected to see up to 1,000 Syrian opposition fighters.

The US had previously refused to provide the rebels with arms. It recently approved an aid package that would supply opposition fighters with nonlethal aid, such as medical equipment. US Secretary of State John Kerry announced at a conference in Rome last month a $60 million package of nonlethal assistance, the first direct help to the opposition forces trying to overthrow Assad.

France, Britain flout US objections on arms to Syrian rebels.

DEBKAfile Special Report March 16, 2013, 9:45 AM (GMT+02:00)

Hollande, Obama, Cameron – no longer a threesome on Syria

Working through Jordan, Britain and France are determined to get arms shipments to the Syrian rebels fighting Bashar Assad –  parting ways for the first time with the Obama administration’s objections to this course throughout Syria’s two-year civil war

The two European powers have embarked on  concrete step to make this possible..
debkafile’s exclusive military sources reveal that Jordanian Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Mashal Mohammad Al Zaben was secretly flown into Brussels by British military plane Friday, March 14, as 24 European Union leaders led by German Chancellor Angela Merkel voted down the motion put before them by UK Prime Minister David Cameron and French President Francois Hollande to end the bloc’s embargo on arms for the Syrian opposition.

European Council President Herman Van Rompuy said EU foreign ministers will again assess the embargo at a meeting on March 22-23 in Dublin.

Outside the chamber, the Jordanian general sat down quietly with British army and security officials to work out the details of the transfer of British arms through his country, and decide to which Syrian rebel units they would be allotted.

This choice is of paramount importance because President Barack Obama accounts for his objection to letting the rebels have Western arms by the risk of their falling into the hands of Islamist militias, such as the al Qaeda-linked Jabat al-Nusra.

In the twelve years since the US-led NATO invasion of Afghanistan, Britain and France have walked faithfully in step with the United States in their military and intelligence policies towards the Muslim world – although they were not always of one mind. The two European powers’ open pursuit of an independent line on a volatile Middle East conflict is therefore worthy of note.

After the EU summit rejected their demand to lift the arms embargo, Cameron declared: “Britain is a sovereign country. We have our own foreign, security and defense policies. If we want to take individual action, we think that’s in our national interest, of course we are free to do so.”
Blunt defiance indeed from a US ally of a presidential policy on a key international issue. It was in sharp contrast to the accent placed by British leaders and their foreign ministers in recent years on the seamless “special relations” between London and Washington.
President Hollande had this to say: “Assad is not interested in a political solution to the two-year old conflict and Europe cannot be passive as Syrians are slaughtered. We must also take responsibility,” he said.
This was a diplomatic way of saying that Paris had lost patience with President Obama’s wait-and-see policy, which relegates the ending of the bloody Syrian civil war to the diplomatic initiatives of Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Hollande was also evening the score with Obama for his failure to rally around militarily when the French launched their expedition in January to rescue Mali from the clutches of al Qaeda-linked Islamist terrorists.
For the British prime minister, the decision was harder. It places his government on the side of Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Arab Gulf emirates. They disapprove strongly of Obama’s attempt to enclose the non-supply of weapons to Syrian rebels in a larger package that would include Iran’s consent to give up part of its nuclear program – a hopeful quid pro quo in support of Tehran’s bid to strengthen its alliance with the Assad regime and the Lebanese Hizballah.

Jordan’s King Abdullah decided to join the Anglo-French decision on arms to the Syrian rebels after he was leaned on hard by Saudi Arabia, which argued that unless al Qaeda was stopped, its territorial conquests would not just cover parts of Syria but Iraq too, bringing the jihadists right up to two of Jordan’s borders.

Obama, Netanyahu agree on Iran − but not on timing – Israel News | Haaretz Daily Newspaper.

Obama strengthened by electoral victory and almost free of political exigencies, can take advantage of Netanyahu’s situation and reach agreements that that otherwise would be unattainable − especially on the Iran issue.

By Barak Ravid | Mar.16, 2013 | 2:18 AM | 13

U.S. President Barack Obama meets with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the Oval Office, March 5, 2012. Photo by AP

It seems that the timing of U.S. President Barack Obama’s arrival in Israel next Wednesday could not be worse. The political world is roiling, coalition negotiations have taken over every spare minute, precluding serious discussions in Israel’s political-military establishment, and the new government is to be sworn in just two days before the wheels of Air Force 1 touch down at Ben-Gurion International Airport.

But precisely for all these reasons, the visit could not have come at a better time. Obama knows that the Benjamin Netanyahu who greets him on arrival will be a weakened prime minister.

The White House also knows that Netanyahu cannot wait for Obama to get here. He longs for the photo-ops, the press conferences and all the trappings that will make Israelis forget how over the past month he has been tarred and feathered. Obama, who arrives in Israel strengthened after his electoral victory and almost completely free of political exigencies, can take advantage of Netanyahu’s situation to reboot relations between them, reaching agreements that in a different political atmosphere would be unattainable − especially on the Iran issue.

In his interview Thursday on Channel 2, Obama made a supreme effort to let bygones be bygones and show friendship when he called Netanyahu “Bibi” at least 10 times.

Senior American and Israeli officials involved in preparations for the visit said the differences between Washington and Jerusalem over the Iranian nuclear program have narrowed. They have reiterated over the past few days that Obama is undergoing a maturation process regarding the possibility that diplomatic efforts aimed at Iran could fail, and he might have to order a strike against Iranian nuclear facilities. According to American officials, the senior U.S. military brass is undergoing a similar process.

Proof that the parties are moving closer could be seen in the Channel 2 interview: Obama used the term “red line,” which Netanyahu is so fond of, although he placed it farther off than the prime minister does. Obama also began defining the Iranian threat as attaining “nuclear capability,” not just attaining its first nuclear bomb.

Obama also made clear that the military option exists, although he preferred not to use it. He said the decision to attack or not was his and his alone, and that Secretary of State John Kerry and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel − whose dovish positions toward Iran have Netanyahu and his associates worried − agree with him on the Iranian issue.

Where does disagreement still lie? On the key matter of timetables. While Netanyahu has set the deadline for a decision on attacking Iran between April and July, senior American officials have been talking over the past few weeks about the need to decide by the end of 2013. But in Thursday’s interview Obama set an even more distant deadline, saying Iran needs at least a year to attain a nuclear weapon.

“The American clock is big and slow and the Israeli clock is small and fast,” a senior Israeli official said. “We agree on the seriousness of the threat and the intelligence, but Israel is more threatened and has fewer military capabilities. The more time passes, the difference between the clocks could become irrelevant because the whole Iranian nuclear program will be underground and neither we nor the Americans will know what is happening.”

Obama will ask that despite all the doubts, he will be given more diplomatic legroom regarding Iran. Obama’s challenge will be to persuade Netanyahu that he is not bluffing on Iran. In Netanyahu’s current political situation, the task might be a little less difficult.

Middle East in turmoil 10 years after Iraq invasion that officials said would bring peace | McClatchy.

Unrest continues in Egypt | Keith Lane/MCT

By Nancy A. Youssef | McClatchy Newspapers

CAIRO — President George W. Bush kept it simple in his short television address the evening of March 19, 2003: U.S. forces had begun their campaign to unseat Saddam Hussein, he said. The goals, he outlined in his first sentence, were straightforward: “to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger.” Some 522 words later he promised the result: “We will bring freedom to others and we will prevail.”

As he spoke, members of the U.S. Army’s 3rd Infantry Division and the 1st Marine Expeditionary Force were already crossing from Kuwait, where they’d been preparing for weeks, into southern Iraq. In those sands, it was Thursday, March 20, the dawn of a new day.

Ten years later, the era that dawn ushered in looks anything but simple. After tens of thousands of deaths, not just of Americans, but also of Iraqis – many, if not most, at the hands of other Iraqis – that country is still in turmoil. American troops are gone and a democratically elected government rules. But bombings and massacres continue, and the country remains mired in sectarian feuding between Sunni and Shiite Muslims.

Elsewhere, conflict rules – in some cases, coincidentally, with anniversaries that fall also around this weekend:

– In Libya, French planes under NATO command opened the campaign to topple Moammar Gadhafi on March 19 two years ago. Today, a democratic government is in place, though it controls little in the face of Islamist militias whose unchecked presence frequently forces the national assembly to cancel sessions. Libyan weapons, taken from Gadhafi’s unguarded stores, were crucial to the advance of Islamist fighters in Mali.

– In Syria, the civil war marks its second year on Friday, with most observers calling the conflict a stalemate and the death toll likely to have passed 70,000 – and rising every day. The Obama administration has called for the defeat of President Bashar Assad even as it denounces as a terrorist group the most effective anti-Assad rebel military faction, the Nusra Front – a branch of al Qaida in Iraq, the same radical Islamist group that the U.S. fought in that country and that the current Iraqi government also is battling.

– Even the relatively peaceful January revolutions that ushered in what came to be known as the Arab spring two years ago are unsettled. In Egypt, the world’s most populous Arab country, a religiously affiliated political party fights to establish its pre-eminence against a group of revolutionaries who demand a share of political power but seem incapable of organizing for upcoming parliamentary elections. Anti-government demonstrations have become so frequent that they hardly deserve news coverage, and the economy is in free fall.

Never has the region seen so much change in the nine decades since the end of World War I, when Western powers carved up the territories of the defeated Ottomans by drawing lines across a map.

The role in that turmoil of U.S. intervention – direct, in the cases of Iraq and Libya, and through rhetoric, in Syria and Egypt – remains an open question.

In Iraq, the people think their security situation is better since American troops left the country at the end of 2011. A Gallup poll released earlier this month found that 42 percent think that, despite the occasional car bomb, the security situation has improved since U.S. troops withdrew. But they have doubts about their government. Only 11 percent said there was less corruption and only 9 percent said there was less unemployment.

Sunnis, who’d enjoyed privileges under Saddam, were particularly negative about Iraq. For 69 percent of them, corruption has gotten worse, compared with 39 percent of Shiites, whom Saddam’s regime had repressed, though they’re a majority in the country. In a clear reference to Iran, a Shiite-ruled theocracy, 39 percent of Sunnis said there’d been worse foreign intervention since U.S. troops had left. Only 27 percent of Shiites felt that way.

Iraq’s leaders openly express alarm at what’s going on in nearby Syria. That worry was particularly strong earlier this month, after gunmen deep inside Iraq killed at least 50 Syrian civilians and soldiers who’d fled their country during a rebel offensive and were being escorted by Iraqi troops to another border crossing for repatriation. Days later, the Islamic State of Iraq, the al Qaida in Iraq umbrella group, claimed the attack, which also had killed Iraqi troops, and Iraqi officials conceded that after a dozen years of training alongside American troops and billions of dollars worth of U.S. equipment, they’d been unable to defend themselves. The attack was the most sophisticated they’d seen in years, Iraqi officials said.

“We need equipment. We need electronic surveillance. We need an air force,” Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari told McClatchy earlier this month. “We need a border control system. Definitely. We don’t have it. We have only the concrete blocks that the Americans left for us, lined up along the borders.”

No one knows how long the conflict in Syria will go on. President Barack Obama first called for Assad to step down 19 months ago. U.S. officials no longer say Assad’s days are numbered, and the United Nations published a report this past week that says neither side may claim the military upper hand, though rebel advances seem to outnumber those of the Syrian military.

The United States agreed earlier this month to provide the anti-Assad opposition coalition with $60 million to help it get organized, and the European Union agreed to ease its arms embargo to allow some direct aid to the rebels, including armored personnel carriers.

But with Russia and China firmly on Assad’s side and blocking a series of anti-Assad U.N. resolutions, there’s no legal basis for broader international intervention – and no consensus that such intervention would end the bloodshed.

Perhaps most surprising is how much the tone of the effort in Syria has changed. Though it once was presented as an attempt to bring democracy to the country, the Islamist militant groups that dominate the rebel fighting oppose the very idea. Unable to win on their own, democracy proponents have aligned with those groups, with the head of the U.S.-supported Syrian Opposition Coalition, Mouaz al Khatib, openly denouncing the State Department’s designation of the Nusra Front as an al Qaida-linked terrorist group.

Earlier this month, as anti-Assad fighters moved through Raqqa province – first capturing a strategic dam, then the provincial capital and then the government building itself – they distributed fliers calling democracy un-Islamic.

“Beware of democracy,” they read.

That’s a lesson that in a different way might resonate in Egypt and Libya, where free elections have yet to mean stability.

Indeed, security worsened in the months after Libyans went to the polls to pick a national assembly last July in voting that was widely proclaimed as free and fair. Americans became sharply aware of that in September, when, on the anniversary of the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, Islamist extremists overran U.S. diplomatic outposts in Benghazi, an eastern city that had been the capital of the anti-Gadhafi uprising. Four Americans were killed, including the U.S. ambassador, Christopher Stevens.

U.S. officials acknowledge that the way the anti-Gadhafi campaign unfolded, with no American or European forces on the ground to establish order after the government fell, is in part responsible for the uncertainty in that country now.

“When the Gadhafi regime collapsed, and there was, essentially, for a period of time no governmental control, it was in that environment that extremist organizations and criminal organizations took advantage of that situation to establish themselves and in some cases re-establish themselves,” said Army Gen. Carter Ham, the head of Africa Command, the U.S. military group that’s responsible for that continent.

Those groups remain unchallenged by Libya’s inexperienced police and security forces and have spread across North Africa, Ham said. Collecting intelligence on them is one reason the United States has asked neighboring Niger for permission to open a base for pilotless drone aircraft.

In its latest travel warning, issued Monday, the State Department warned Americans to stay away, describing the country as unpredictable.

Egypt has been spared the kind of widespread insurgent violence that’s plagued its neighbor but it’s still beset by political and social upheaval, despite elections that everyone agrees were the first honest ones in its history.

The Obama administration had endorsed the removal of leader Hosni Mubarak when it became clear that he’d lost the support of his people and the military. Now analysts wonder whether Egypt’s first democratically elected president, Mohammed Morsi, isn’t slowly doing the same.

Unemployment levels grow monthly, the official inflation rate is 9.3 percent and the value of the Egyptian pound is falling. Crime and general mayhem seem out of control. Soccer fans routinely defy police, shut down bridges and set fire to rival clubs’ headquarters, simply because they can. Police able to respond to more routine matters are difficult to find. Rape is common at public demonstrations. Dissatisfaction is palpable in the streets.

In a nation where $200 a month is a bounteous wage, fruit is a luxury for a huge swath of the population. So are tomatoes.

Morsi’s approval rating has plummeted, according to the polling firm Baseera. Immediately after his election last summer, it stood at 75 percent; last month it was 49 percent. Yet Morsi’s political opposition remains divided going into parliamentary elections scheduled for next month.

In May 2011, Obama spelled out lofty goals in a speech that’s considered his defining remarks on the Arab spring.

“There’s no straight line to progress, and hardship always accompanies a season of hope,” he said. “But the United States of America was founded on the belief that people should govern themselves. And now we cannot hesitate to stand squarely on the side of those who are reaching for their rights, knowing that their success will bring about a world that is more peaceful, more stable and more just.”

Those goals aren’t much different from what Bush articulated from the White House 10 years ago this Tuesday. But they may be just as far off.

Email: nyoussef@mcclatchydc.com; Twitter: @nancyayoussef

Israel Hayom | About those talks with Iran.

Dore Gold

“Iran Could Develop 4-5 Bombs if it Wants”.

Or Heller

14/3/2013 Maj. Gen. Aviv Kochavi (Photo: IDF Spokesperson)

We Salute the Women of the IDF – YouTube.

Hamas accuses Egyptian media of anti-Palestinian incitement | The Times of Israel.

Press had reported that seven Palestinians detained in Cairo were planning to target local installations

A Palestinian smuggler in a tunnel along the Gaza-Egypt border in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip on October 4, 2012 (photo credit: Abed Rahim Khatib /Flash90)

Hamas leaders on Thursday attacked the Egyptian press for attempting “to sow strife between Egypt and Gaza” by reporting that seven Palestinians detained at the Cairo airport were planning to target vital infrastructures in the country.

Egyptian media reported the arrest of the seven, who arrived in Cairo on a flight from Damascus early Wednesday morning, after they were found carrying maps of installations and documents specifying ways of manufacturing explosives.

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But Hamas deputy political bureau chief Moussa Abu-Marzouq said the reports were baseless and amounted to nothing but “an attempt to insert the Palestinian issue in internal Egyptian conflicts.”

“The moment the seven Palestinians were sent to questioning, which is a routine procedure, certain media outlets hurriedly fabricated a wave of lies claiming they had previously entered through the tunnels, saying they were found with maps of sensitive locations and buildings in Egypt,” wrote Abu-Marzouq on his Facebook page Wednesday evening.

Relations between the Palestinian Islamic movement and Egyptian media have been strained since an August 2012 terror attack against an Egyptian army outpost on the Egyptian border with Israel and Gaza which claimed the lives of 16 Egyptian soldiers. The terrorists who carried out the attack were believed to have infiltrated from Gaza to Egypt, which promptly began sealing smuggling tunnels on its side of the border.

While criticizing the smear campaign by Egyptian media, Hamas leaders have always been cautious of flatly accusing the Islamist government of President Mohammed Morsi of incitement.

“We implore all media to examine their information and stop publishing harmful reports about our Palestinian people, sowing strife between us and the Egyptian people,” wrote Abu-Marzouq.

Sami Abu-Zuhri, a spokesman for Hamas in Gaza, on Thursday stated that airport officials at Cairo airport grew suspicious of the Palestinians  for not having Syrian entry and exit stamps in their Palestinian passports.

“For a while now Egyptian media has been waging a smear campaign against Hamas and its military wing in particular, and against the Palestinian people in general,” said Abu-Zuhri in an official statement.

Abu-Marzouq, the Hamas leader, explained that Syria does not recognize Palestinian passports due to its principled objection to the Oslo process which created the Palestinian state, causing Syrian airport authorities to stamp a separate paper, which the seven Palestinians carried with them on the flight to Cairo.

But Egyptian media on Wednesday reported a more convoluted and suspicious story regarding the seven Palestinians. According to independent daily Al-Masry Al-Youm, the men had traveled to Iran from Syria, using separate travel documents.

“All the plans [found on the men], pertaining to ambushes, night combats, the range of heavy missiles, plans to attack installations, military training and explosives production are all within the framework of their work in one of the Palestinian security agencies, and not directed at any particular state or at Egypt,” an anonymous security official at Cairo airport told the daily.

Al-Masry Al-Youm identified the men as Nader Abu-Shazifah, Mahmoud Abu-Shazifah, Muhmmad Al-Ghor, Ahmad Miqdad, Muhammad Tafish, Musab Abdul Aal and Muhammad Abdul Aziz Muhammad.

In January, Hamas accused a Coptic organization in Egypt of fabricating and propagating media reports that Hamas had sent 7,000 movement members to take part in pro-Morsi demonstrations in Cairo.

State-linked report blames Hamas for killing Egypt soldiers | The Times of Israel.

Terrorist group threatens to sue magazine; ‘Those writers should have prioritized siding with the Palestinian people,’ says spokesman

Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip, in October (photo credit: Abed Rahim Khatib/Flash90)

CAIRO — A report by a state-owned Egyptian weekly magazine on Thursday accused the Palestinian militant movement Hamas of carrying out one of the bloodiest attacks against the Egyptian army in years — the killing 16 of soldiers in the Sinai Peninsula in August 2012. Hamas’ military wing angrily accused Egypt’s state media of spreading “flagrant lies.”

It was not possible to verify contents of the report. The magazine Al-Ahram al-Araby is closely connected to security agencies, and Egypt’s military currently has a strained relationship with President Mohammed Morsi, who hails from the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood group from which Hamas is an offshoot.

Military officers have been issuing thinly veiled warnings that the armed forces might return to the politics. Morsi’s government has been shaken by a bitter conflict with the opposition and by economic shortages, but security in the Sinai is a particular sensitivity. After the August attack, Morsi sacked a number of top military and intelligence chiefs.

The mountainous peninsula is beset with several interrelated security challenges, including a long-running Islamist insurgency that has intensified since Egypt’s 2011 uprising and Bedouin-run smuggling networks.

The military recently stepped up its crackdown on smuggling into the Gaza Strip, a Hamas-ruled territory under Israeli blockade. A day before the report came out, Egypt arrested seven Hamas members at Cairo International Airport, according to a security official meanwhile Egypt’s military frequently reports demolishing underground tunnels used by Hamas in smuggling weapons, militants and goods.

Al-Ahram Al-Araby’s article, based on an alleged report by an unnamed high ranking official, published the names of three top Hamas commanders whom it said masterminded and executed the attack. It said that Hamas militants received help from Islamic extremists in Sinai.

Among them was Ayman Nofal, a Hamas militant arrested in the Sinai three years ago, when authoritarian leader Hosni Mubarak was in power, and accused of planning bombing attacks. He escaped from prison during the chaos of the 2011 anti-Mubarak uprising and sneaked back to Gaza through a smuggling tunnel.

Abu Obeida, spokesman for Hamas’ military wing Izzedine al Qassam, described the report as “only illusions and dreams in the minds of the editor … which is consistent with the role of the Zionist propaganda efforts to drive wedges between the resistance and the Egyptian people.”

Covering his face with a Palestinian keffiyeh scarf, he derided the report as “flagrant lies,” in a presser held in Gaza. Abu Obeida said his group would sue the editor-in-chief of Al-Ahram al-Araby, adding, “Those writers should have prioritized siding with the Palestinian people.”

Other Gaza officials also denied the reports. A top security official told Associated Press in Gaza that Hamas worked closely with Egypt in investigating the August attack and that the Egyptians found no links between Gaza and the attack on the soldiers. Both he and the Egyptian security official spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to the press.

The publication came a day after Egypt’s Defense Minister Gen. Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi said during an address to border guards said that the military would confront “anyone who dares to harm Egypt’s security or armed forces.”

“We will never forget those who killed us while we were fasting,” he was quoted by the daily Al-Shorouk as saying. The border guards were killed as they broke the fast for the holy month of Ramadan.

At the time of the attack, Egypt blamed a group of 35 militants from both Sinai and Gaza, home to a wide range of Islamist groups including some that are more radical than Hamas. It said 35 gunmen stormed the post and killed the guards before commandeering an armored vehicle they later used to try to storm across the border into Israel. It said Gaza militants supported the attack by firing mortar round at a nearby post. President Mohammed Morsi said the attackers “will pay dearly.”

The Israeli military said the attack was part of a plot to abduct an Israeli soldier, and two vehicles commandeered by the attackers crashed into Israel, where one blew up.

“Fortress Israel:” A necessary response to the Islamic Winter | Jerusalem Post – Blogs.