WarSclerotic

Israel Hayom | Are Israel and Russia on the same page?.

Syria fighting rages amid reports of chemical attacks | JPost | Israel News.

Muslims conquering Europe! A Spy reveal the truth! PART 1 of 4 Leaks from inside reality 2013 – YouTube.

( A four part Israeli documentary about the Muslim influx and takeover of Europe.  Well made and very worth watching.  Hebrew with English subtitles. – JW )

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

–

They’ll Take Sweden | FrontPage Magazine.

Night after night last week, as the tumult in Stockholm not only continued but kept spreading to more and more neighborhoods and then to other Swedish cities, the media in that country, by and large, kept pretending that it was all about things like unemployment and social marginality, all of which were supposedly aggravated by Swedish racism (and, especially, by the insufficiently respectful attitude of police officers toward immigrant “youths”); meanwhile, the foreign media, which, as the disorder persisted, found it increasingly difficult to pretend that all this wasn’t happening (the New York Times finally ran a four-sentence Reuters item about the bedlam on Thursday), largely echoed the domestic disinformation.

Of all the reports I looked at, the one that most effectively epitomized the asinine, mendacious approach of the Western media to this latest nightmare was a piece from Reuters that had no fewer than eight names attached to it. I would strongly recommend that you read the whole thing; in fact, I would suggest that it be taught in future history courses as a prime example of the high level of duplicity of which the early twenty-first-century Western media were capable when confronted with raw displays of Islamic power on their own turf. Credited to Niklas Pollard and Philip O’Connor, with “additional reporting” by Johan Ahlander, Mia Shanley, Patrick Lannin, and Simon Johnson, writing by Alistair Scrutton, and editing by Janet McBride, the Reuters piece was headlined “Sweden riots expose ugly side of” – no, not of “European immigration policies” or “Islam,” of course, but of the “Nordic model.”

Yes, it’s all the fault of the “Nordic model”: the roots of the Stockholm unrest, Reuters (and virtually every other major Western news organization that deigned to report on the disturbances) would have us believe, lay “in segregation, neglect and poverty,” in years of “fruitless job hunts, police harassment, racial taunts and a feeling of living at the margins.” And so on. Which means, I suppose, that 9/11 revealed the flaws of the American model, and the car-burnings in French suburbs reflect the weaknesses of the Gallic model, and the explosions in Madrid were all about the failings of the Spanish model, and the savage murder of Lee Rigby in London last week…well, you get the idea.

The dispatch from Reuters suggested that Sweden’s “lowered taxes” (which are still absurdly high) and “reduced state benefits” (which are still staggeringly bounteous) are responsible for rising economical inequality and segregation, and thus for the pandemonium in the streets. An Ethiopian-born woman interviewed by Reuters maintained that Swedish kids won’t play with her daughter “because she’s dark.” (There was no mention, needless to say, of the real problem in an increasing number of Scandinavian schools, namely the systematic harassment, and worse, of ethnic Swedish kids by their immigrant-group classmates.) On late-night trains from downtown Stockholm to the suburbs, the Reuters team told us, you’ll see “exhausted-looking Arabic or Spanish speaking immigrants returning home from menial jobs”; an “Asian diplomat” lamented that immigrants in the Swedish capital “are mostly selling hotdogs.”

The point of all this being – what, exactly? That it’s the hard-working holders of low-level jobs who are setting fire to cars and buildings? That it’s legitimate for a newcomer to Sweden to go on the rampage because he’s got to work as a hot-dog vendor? Nowhere was there a hint that the extraordinary history of immigrant success in North America, for example, was written by people who worked themselves up from employment of that very sort. Nowhere, moreover, was there a hint that what counts as poverty in Sweden would be considered remarkable affluence in the hellholes most of these punks’ families hail from. Yes, the Reuters gang acknowledged (fleetingly) Sweden’s generosity to its foreign-born inhabitants, but the implication remained that the free housing and endless handouts somehow just aren’t enough – that the state should find a way to shield them from every variety of professional frustration and personal disappointment, from a failure to land the ideal job to the unspeakable fate of being tired at the end of a long workday.

The boys and girls of Reuters, while taking obvious pains not to give a remotely negative impression of the Stockholm hoodlums, cited without comment hoodlums who pretty much blamed the police for everything that’s happened. “In the beginning it was just a bit of fun,” one of the rioters insisted. “But then when I saw the police charging through here with batons, pushing women and children out of the way and swinging their batons, I got so damned angry.” Yes, if the cops had only left them alone to burn a few cars, it would all have been over by now! Plenty of participants in the nocturnal melees – as well as busybody agitators from the mischievous, rabble-rousing group Megafonen – threw around charges that police officers, in addressing the troublemakers, had used insulting language, including racist words.

Those accusations seem dubious, to say the least, given that the Stockholm police, far from treating the city’s delinquents with the aggression they deserved, seemed determined not to hurt or offend them in the slightest. On Wednesday night, according to the BBC, they didn’t make a single arrest – supposedly because their “priority was to disperse mobs and ensure access to fires for the fire brigade,” but really, one strongly suspects, because of Swedish authorities’ manifest terror of doing anything that might open them up to charges of insensitivity, let alone brutality and – heaven forfend – racism. On Saturday night the number of arrests reached 35, but this was still a drop in the bucket (to be followed, one can pretty safely wager, by 35 slaps on the wrist). “Police can put down these riots in five minutes – if the politicians were to allow them,” a Sweden Democrat politician, Kent Ekeroth, said. Journalist Ingrid Carlqvist agreed: “The police could do so much, [but] have told the public that they mean to do as little as possible.” Though police suspect that all the mayhem is being planned via social media, with Megafonen playing a lead role, they haven’t hauled that group’s leaders in for questioning, but have instead, in good Nordic fashion, tried (so far unsuccessfully) to arrange a “dialogue.”

As it happens, both of the above-quoted comments by Ekeroth and Carlqvist about the straitjacketing of the police appeared at the website of the Russian news organization RT – one of the few major outposts of honesty about the week’s events. Ekeroth also observed that immigrants to Sweden get “welfare, access to the educational system – up to university level…access to public transport, libraries, healthcare….And still they feel that they need to riot.” Carlqvist, for her part, called the riots the work of immigrants who “don’t like Sweden” and don’t “want to integrate,” but who’ve settled in the country “because they know that Sweden will give them money for nothing.” Alas, when Sweden’s Parliament discussed the strife on Thursday, Jimmie Åkesson of the Sweden Democrats was upbraided by Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt himself simply for mentioning the plain fact that the whole megillah was started by immigrants. Some of those immigrants, Reinfeldt thundered back, are actually trying to calm the mob. “These are my heroes!” he declared.

On Friday, Friatider recounted remarkably frank comments made by Ulrika By of the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter in an interview with Timbro, a libertarian think tank. Admitting (as paraphrased by reporter Maria Lindström) that Swedish journalists “don’t report on problems in the multicultural suburbs,” By defended this practice, saying that the media shouldn’t write neutrally about things like the Stockholm riots – or, for that matter, on any other developments that might conceivably be exploited by bigots. “Journalists should strive not to exacerbate xenophobia,” she pronounced, acknowledging that “we opt out of stories and events that can be easily put to xenophobic purposes. We do not quote everything we hear and do not tell about everything we see.” What can one say about someone who’s so proudly honest about systematically lying?

The most stirring piece I ran across – the one that did by far the best job of saying what needed to be said – was an editorial in Saturday’s Jyllands-Posten. (That’s the Danish daily, of course, that’s famous for printing the Muhammed cartoons in 2005 and for standing up to the ensuing turmoil and death threats.) Headlined “The Swedish Lie,” the editorial underscored the fact that the goons in Stockholm aren’t just “youths” – as the euphemism-loving Swedish media would have it – but Muslim bullies, products of a “Middle Eastern culture of violence,” who are “turning their aggression on other people’s property and the public order” in what is “clearly a demonstration of power.”

The editors noted that for years, self-congratulatory members of the Swedish elite have contrasted their country favorably with Denmark, which they smeared as racist for its relatively open immigration debate; the self-delusionary implication was always that Sweden – by virtue of its, well, virtue – was immune to the “conflicts, clashes, criminality, welfare fraud, so-called honor killing, innumerable assaults on women, [and] waves of violence” that plagued the rest of Western Europe. But in fact, the “ruthless macho culture” from which these perpetrators spring “knows no national boundaries,” and thrives especially on situations in which it meets with no significant opposition. And it’s precisely this –  as the editors of Jyllands–Posten sagely, devastatingly, and eloquently pointed out – that makes Sweden, more than other nations, “a paradise for the masked men of violence, who, under the cover of night and the media’s complaints of police violence, can see their will realized and, house by house, month by month, gang by gang, show who’s boss, while Sweden sleeps.” It’s time, the editors urged, for Sweden to wake up.

They’re right. But don’t hold your breath. Sweden is sleeping very deeply indeed, and its dreams are far sweeter than the reality to which it refuses to awaken.

Rocket fired from Lebanon toward Israeli Metula. Hizballah calls up reserves.

DEBKAfile Special Report May 27, 2013, 8:14 AM (IDT)

Missile from Lebanon aimed at Metula

Residents of Israel’s northernmost town of Metula were roused before dawn Monday, May 27 by an exploding rocket fired from the Lebanese town of Marjayoun about 10 kilometers north of the border. It landed on open ground, causing no casualties or damage. debkafile’s military sources report: Just 48 hours after Hassan Nasrallah’s war speech, Hizballah, Iran’s proxy, had joined the war of attrition President Assad has directed against Israel from the Golan.

The IDF has so far made no mention of the widely reported rocket attack although Lebanese media said an Israeli drone was hovering over the Marjayoun area.
Metula was attacked the day after three Grad missiles were fired from a point east of Mt Lebanon to explode in the Hizballah-controlled Dahiya district of Beirut, injuring five people and causing some damage.
It was fired by local Sunni elements sympathetic to the Syrian rebels. The Shiite Hizballah decided to retaliate against northern Israel – for a reason. It made clear that the position laid out by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon that “Israel is not involved in the Syrian war” is not reciprocated either by Syrian President Bashar Assad or Hizballah’s leader Hassan Nasrallah.

Nasrallah’s strategy in the face of domestic criticism of his heavy military commitment to Assad is to demonstrate that the troops he sent to fight in the Shiite-Sunni conflict raging in Syria are in fact waging war on the common enemy, the Jewish state.

This rocket against Metula was also intended to direct attention away from the massive ongoing boost of the Lebanese terrorist group’s military contingents fighting in Syria. Sunday and early Monday, another 2,000 elite Hizballah combatants poured into Syria from Lebanon to augment the 5,000-6,000 already present there.
Neither the United States nor Israel or Turkey has raised a finger to block this dangerous influx of Hizballah fighting forces into Syria although it is strongly tipping the scales of war in Assad’s favor.

Sunday overnight, Hizballah secretly ordered the call-up of reserves to reinforce its strength for fighting on three active fronts, Syria, Israel and opponents at home. Its agents went around Hizballah centers in towns and villages across Lebanon with orders for members to report for duty at once.

Israelis asked to take cover as chemical warfare drill begins | The Times of Israel.

Blaring sirens to simulate missile attacks on the civilian population, sending schoolchildren and workers to shelters at 12:30 p.m.

Children in a school in Tel Aviv during a home front exercise, in the school’s safe bunker, May 26 2010 (photo credit: Uri Lenz/Flash90)

Air-raid sirens were set to wail across Israel on Monday, alerting the population to scramble to shelters as part of a massive military drill focusing on coping with chemical weapons attacks. The week-long nationwide exercise, code-named “Home Front Eitan 1,” is to drill the civilian population as well as military and emergency services for a possible war in which missiles will rain down on the home front, primarily from Syria and Lebanon.

The exercise will include two sirens: at 12.30 p.m. and at 7.05 p.m. The sirens are to sound a continuous monotone with no “all clear” signal. The IDF Home Front Command, which is organizing the drill, said that people should wait for 10 minutes in sheltered areas before emerging and resuming their day. In the event of a real attack on Israel during the exercise, the sirens will change to a rising and falling modulation.

The first siren is aimed at drilling civilians in finding appropriate safe areas during their workdays. Schools across the country are also to take part in the exercise, with pupils heading from classrooms to shelters. The second siren is scheduled to catch people at home, where they are also requested to retreat into sheltered areas.

The drill is to mark a first test for a new network of early-warning systems. In addition to sirens, civilians are to receive alerts from various sources, including cellphones, social networks, and the television.

The exercise was originally scheduled to take place three weeks ago, but it was postponed due to tension with Syria.

On Sunday night, Lebanese media reported that a missile was fired from Lebanon at Israel. The missile apparently exploded near the town of Metula, where there were no reports of injury or damage.

All areas of the country are to be included in the drill, with the exception of communities located close to the Gaza Strip. Residents of those areas, who have endured years of relentless rocket fire from Gaza, protested to the Home Front Command that putting their children through a traumatic exercise was unfair. In response, the IDF agreed to exclude their communities from the practice run.

In some areas a different siren sound will be tested to indicate a possible chemical weapons attack, Yedioth Ahronoth reported Monday.

According to a map on the Home Front Command website, in the event of a rocket attack from the north, the Tel Aviv and Gush Dan area can expect up to two minutes’ warning,  as opposed to just a minute and a half in Jerusalem. The further north a community, the less warning it will get, and those on the border with Lebanon and Syria will have only seconds to run for cover. 

The head of the IDF’s Home Front Command, Maj. Gen. Eyal Eisenberg, said last week that the outbreak of a war in which Israel would be hit with a “large volume of rocket fire” was a certainty. “Our opponents hold long-range missiles with large warheads and the capacity to carry hundreds of kilos,” he said.

“We are not angling for war with Syria, but it’s not only up to us,” Home Front Defense Minister Gilad Erdan told Channel 2 last Saturday.

“There is no change in Israel’s policy towards Syria,” said Erdan, echoing Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon’s statement from earlier last week that Israel is not interested in interfering in the Syrian civil war, but would retaliate for Syrian attacks and do everything in its power to prevent Syrian weapons from reaching Hezbollah forces.

Asked about the possibility of Syria attacking Israel with chemical weapons, Erdan said that though there was a higher chance of that happening than in the past, it was still considered a “low-probability scenario.”

“Our enemies realize that the use of chemical or nonconventional weapons will draw a devastating response, and the IDF’s capabilities are well-known,” said Erdan.

US Secretary of State John Kerry spoke recently to “strong evidence” that the Syrian regime had used chemical weapons against its people. Kerry’s comments came the same day that Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu cited tests on Syrian war casualties being treated in Turkey that indicated they had been attacked with chemical weapons.

Damascus’s large stockpile of chemical weapons, and President Bashar Assad’s refusal to sign international accords banning them, has become a major international concern as the civil war in Syria rages on.

‘5,000 Hezbollah troops in Syria, with 5,000 more set to join them’ | The Times of Israel.

Israel should try to stay out, but is increasingly likely to be drawn into the conflict, expert tells the World Economic Forum

Hezbollah fighters hold party flags during a parade in a southern suburb of Beirut, Lebanon. (photo credit: AP/Hussein Malla/File)

DEAD SEA, Jordan — Lebanon’s Hezbollah has 5,000 troops fighting alongside President Bashar Assad’s forces in Syria, and another 5,000 are getting ready to join them, a World Economic Forum gathering heard Sunday.

Salman Shaikh, director of the Doha Center of the Brookings Institution think tank, said there were also 1,500-2,000 fighters from Iraq in the battlegrounds of Syria. He said that not only was Syria “on the abyss,” but that after two years of civil war, there was growing danger that the fighting could draw in “the entire region.”

Shaikh cited the Hezbollah figures a day after the Shiite group’s leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah admitted for the first time that his group had deployed fighters to Syria, saying his group would not stand idly by while its chief ally is under attack.

Shaikh said Israel “should do its best to stay out of the conflict.” But “it should also give up on the old paradigm of ‘better the devil you know.’” He said his fear was that “Israel will be increasingly drawn in” — in part because of ongoing Russian weapons supplies to Syria, and because the UN peacekeeping forces in Syria and Lebanon were coming under increasing strain.

Salman Shaikh (Photo credit: Courtesy)

Shaikh said that the US hesitation over intervention in Syria derived in part from the legacy of the “illegal war” in Iraq. President Barack Obama, he said, “doesn’t want to get involved in the complexity of the Syrian crisis.” He said that hesitancy was likely to persist, though it could be affected by the use of chemical weapons and the degree of extremist involvement in the fighting.

But only a fool would believe that the latest attempts at negotiation were going to make a difference, he said. The Assad regime does not take the so-called Geneva process seriously, he said. Instead, it is looking ahead to elections next year, and has already “calculated” the result — a victory for Assad with 70-75 percent of the vote.

The killing of civilians in Syria “is going to on for a very long time,” he said. “Many more are going to die in the months and possibly years ahead.”

At the same panel, Sarah Leah Whitson, director of Human Rights Watch’s Middle East and North Africa division, said the regime was responsible for the overwhelming majority of human rights abuses since the fighting broke out. She said HRW had recently found torture devices used by the regime — included devices used “to stretch people to death.” HRW had not found a basis for allegations of widespread rape, she said.

The gathering was told that there are currently some 1.5 million Syrian refugees in neighboring countries — and that this number would likely double by the year’s end.

More than 70,000 people have been killed since the uprising against Assad erupted in March 2011 and escalated into a civil war. The Syrian government and Hezbollah deny there is an uprising in Syria, portraying the war as a foreign-backed conspiracy driven by Israel, the US and its Gulf Arab allies.

Khamenei heads for dynastic rule – his repression and Syrian role unopposed by the West.

Favorite presidential runner Golam Ali Haddad-Adel

In the presidential election of June 14, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei aims to grab the whole pot: He has whipped out a dark horse contestant who is both tame – in strong contrast to the outgoing president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – and also family.

debkafile’s Iranian sources name him as former Majlis Speaker Gholam Ali Haddad-Adel, 68, whose daughter is married to the ayatollah’s son, Mojtaba Khamenei. He would be trusted to comply with his boss’s plan to keep the presidential seat warm for Khamenei Junior to claim unopposed in 2017.
The Iranian voter may not approve of the plan to establish a Khamenei dynasty for ruling the country. But the Leader is leaving nothing to chance.

He has placed two faithful henchmen in charge of guaranteeing the desired results at the ballot. They are Heydar Moslehi, Minister of Intelligence since 2009, and Ali Fallahian, a proven undercover expert in eliminating enemies of the regime.

The two frontrunners of last week discovered they had been dropped, our Iranian sources disclose. Senior nuclear negotiator and National Security Council head Saeed Jalili was the favorite, trailed closely by Ali Akbar Velayati, Khamenei’s close adviser, the more experienced of the two in government administration. Now, the supreme leader expects them to muster their fans to bolster Haddad-Adel’s prospects of winning the election.
But first, the ayatollah took care to knock his adversaries out of the race by baldly manipulating the Guardians of the Constitution Council into disqualifying former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Esfandyar Rahim Mashee, Ahmadinejad’s own kinsman.

The US put up a weak protest over the watchdog’s disqualification of hundreds of candidates. Only eight survived – all Khamenei loyalists, barring one. The ayatollah achieved this unopposed by the simple device of conspicuously posting Revolutionary Guards units in Tehran and other strategic points Tuesday night, May 21, the night before the Council published its final list of approved candidates.
Wednesday, the guardsmen began withdrawing from the streets and by Thursday they were gone, although they kept watch vigilantly from the shadows.

By then, Ahmadinejad understood that his own in-law, Esfandyar Rahim Mashee, whom he had planned to use as the stopgap for his own “Putin exercise” in the 2017 vote, was out of the running. A hint that he could face jail or even “a road accident” helped him to decide to go quietly.
Rafsanjani, for 30 years backbone of the revolutionary Islamic regime of Iran, was also deterred from kicking up a fuss before the Iranian media by the hanging in Tehran on May 19 of two men accused of spying for the CIA and the Israeli Mossad. There were whispers of a similar fate awaiting his son and daughter for alleged financial wrongdoing.
That the new dark horse is destined to be a stopgap president is attested to by the fact that in the conduct of state affairs, he is a virtual nonentity.  A political philosopher and poet who as Speaker dealt with academic and cultural matters, he has none of the qualifications required for grappling with Iran’s acute economic ills which demand urgent attention.

Mojtaba Khamenei, the Ayatollah’s son and heir, will no doubt gradually take over the reins of government behind the scenes and prepare for the smooth transfer of the presidency when the 2017 election comes around.

The June 14 election is therefore not expected to change anything in the hard-line policies driving Iran’s aspirations to become a nuclear and regional power, or its massive military support for Syrian President Bashar Assad in beating down the rebellion against his rule.

Neither the United States nor Israel – or any Western government – has raised a dissenting voice against the growing repression under Khamenei autocratic rule, just as they turn a blind eye to Tehran’s crude violations of UN Security Council resolutions and sanctions by shipping military units and equipment to Syria.

Before them is a resolution issued under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, in which the UN Security Council barred Iran from “exporting troops, military equipment or military aid beyond its borders, and pledged to take measures against Iran in the event it is found in breach of those requirements.”

When Israel hits Syria, it hones military edge for wider war – Firstpost.

by FP Staff 28 mins ago

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – When Israeli jets bomb Syria to deny it or its allies “game-changer” weapons, they play according to one core rule: ensuring the Jewish state maintains the military superiority to swiftly prevail in any war.

On Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s target list are four types of advanced arms, Russian- or Iranian-supplied, whose transfer from Syria to Lebanese Hezbollah guerrillas next door would hinder Israel’s strategic options.

Although they outgun Syria, Hezbollah and Iran, the Israelis assume all three allied adversaries may have to be fought at once – an unprecedented scenario complicated by the probable launch of thousands of missiles into the Jewish state.

That, air force chief Major-General Amir Eshel cautioned in an unusually forthright speech last week, meant the Israeli military had to be ready to lash out “with the full spectrum of its might” almost anywhere and at a few hours’ notice.

But Eshel said this capability was challenged by Syria’s acquisition, at a time when President Bashar al-Assad is fighting a two-year-old rebellion, of “the best Russian air defence systems available”.

One such system, the SA-17, was on a convoy bound for Hezbollah when it was hit by Israel warplanes in late January, intelligence sources said. Two other air strikes near Damascus this month destroyed formidable Fateh-110 ground-to-ground missiles flown in from Iran and awaiting transit to Hezbollah.

The other two types of arms Israel says it is monitoring for any sign of handover to Hezbollah are Syria’s chemical warheads and Russian-supplied Yakhount anti-ship missiles, which could repel Israel’s navy and threaten its Mediterranean gas rigs.

Short on land, the Israelis have long relied on their hi-tech warplanes, helicopters and drones to keep any war mainly on enemy turf. But while the air force could best any Middle East adversary one-on-one, it might struggle to keep up far-flung sorties – especially if more-distant Iran were involved.

“Sustaining massive air operations far from home has not been an objective within the Israeli mission set,” said Philip Handleman, an American aviation expert and author.

“MASSIVE FIREPOWER”

The most potent Russian air defence system, the long-range S-300, is “on its way” to Syria, Eshel said. He did not say where he got his information but it could indicate that appeals by Netanyahu to Russia to scrap such a deal had not succeeded.

Russia’s foreign minister said on May 13 that it had no new plans to sell an advanced air defence system to Syria but left open the possibility of delivering such systems under an existing contract.

One senior Israeli official quoted Netanyahu as saying privately that the S-300 could “turn Israel into a no-fly zone” as well as curb its currently unrestrained Lebanese overflights.

Amos Gilad, an Israeli defence official, said in a radio interview that the S-300, if delivered to Syria, could end up in Iranian hands and thus “threaten the Gulf” – hamstringing any plan for a pre-emptive attack on Iranian nuclear sites.

Sounding similar warnings about the limits of Israel’s conventional arsenal, Eshel said it would not achieve any “knock-outs” but would have to “prevail in the war within a few days – and that will require massive firepower”.

“The homefront will be hit no matter how much we defend it,” Eshel said. He was referring to some 200,000 missiles and rockets Israel believes are aimed at its interior from Hezbollah, Syria, Iran and Palestinian guerrillas in Gaza.

The Fateh-110 would significantly increase the potency of Hezbollah’s stockpile. Accurate to a few dozen yards (metres) at ranges of 300 km (190 miles), carrying half-ton warheads and designed to be fuelled up and fired at short notice, they could disrupt the military command and commercial centres of Tel Aviv.

Israel suffered thousands of shorter-range missile strikes during its wars with Hezbollah and in Gaza in 2006 and 2008-2009. Its firepower also exacted a vastly greater casualty toll in Lebanon and Gaza than it suffered, drawing unfriendly media coverage and diplomatic pressure to relent.

With their regional isolation deepening, the Israelis predict they will have “days” in which to wage another offensive before foreign remonstrations become impossible to resist.

“In modern times, because war is all the time on television, people see this and can’t take it. There are limits. There is a price you pay,” then-deputy prime minister Dan Meridor said in 2011, remarks echoed recently by Israeli officials and officers.

That the Assad family has never brandished chemical weapons against Israel during its 43 years of rule suggests a parity with the Jewish state’s reputed nuclear arsenal. But such deterrence may not apply, some Israeli experts argue, for non-state actors like Hezbollah or the Islamist militants among the Syrian insurgents fighting to overthrow Assad.

Yet Amos Yadlin, the former chief of Israeli military intelligence who now runs the INSS think-tank at Tel Aviv University, parted with the government’s chemical arms fears.

With their lack of a comprehensive military structure, Hezbollah guerrillas are even less likely than Syria to use such weapons, were they to obtain them, he told Reuters.

“I am not at all worried by the chemical weaponry. On the operational level, it is not efficient or easy to operate. It is more dangerous for those launching it.”

(Additional reporting by Crispian Balmer; Editing by Mark Heinrich)

Sweden: Muslim riots rage in Stockholm for sixth night – Jihad Watch.

And still the media persists in denying and obfuscating who is rioting and what the root cause of the riots really is.

“Stockholm riots spread west on sixth night,” from The Local, May 25 (thanks to C. Cantoni):

Stockholm experienced a sixth straight night of riots early Saturday, with cars torched in several immigrant-dominated suburbs, as Britain and the United States warned against travelling to the hotspots.Nearly a week of unrest, which spread briefly Friday night to the medium-sized city of Örebro 160 kilometres west of Stockholm, have put Sweden’s reputation as an oasis of peace and harmony at risk.

The unrest has also sparked a debate among Swedes over the integration of immigrants, many of whom arrived under the country’s generous asylum policies,
and who now make up about 15 percent of the population.

An AFP photographer witnessed a car engulfed in flames before firefighters arrived in the Stockholm district of Tensta. Cars were incinerated in three other areas of the capital as well, according to the Swedish news agency TT.

“I’ve never before taken part in anything that lasted so long and was spread over such a wide area,” police spokesman Lars Byström told TT.

Another police official said earlier that Stockholm police were about to receive reinforcements from Gothenburg and Malmö, the country’s second- and third-largest cities, but declined to disclose how many would arrive.

In the city of Örebro, police reported a fire at a school as well as several cars ablaze, but quiet had returned around midnight. The unrest in Stockholm had “rubbed off”, police told TT.

About 200 right-wing extremists were reported to cruise around Stockholm suburbs in their cars late Friday, but intense police surveillance apparently prevented any kind of serious violence.

The nightly riots have prompted Britain’s Foreign Office and the US embassy in Stockholm to issue warnings to their nationals, urging them to avoid the affected suburbs.

Firefighters were dispatched to 70 fires the night between Thursday and Friday, extinguishing torched cars, dumpsters and buildings, including three schools and a police station, the fire department wrote on Twitter. This was down from 90 blazes the night before.

Parents and volunteer organisations who have patrolled the streets in recent nights have helped decrease the intensity of the unrest, police have said.

Police, who have so far concentrated on putting out fires, are beginning to round up people suspected of criminal acts, so far arresting at least 29.

“Even if we don’t intervene, we regularly make video recordings and get information from the public. That way we can get people a couple of days later,” police spokesman Byström told TT.

The troubles had begun in the suburb of Husby, where 80 percent of inhabitants are immigrants, triggered by the fatal police shooting of a 69-year-old Husby resident last week after the man wielded a machete in public.

Local activists said the shooting sparked anger among youths who claim to have suffered from police brutality and racism.

One of the rioters in Husby told Sveriges Radio that racism was rampant where he lived, and that violence was his only way of being noticed.

“We burned cars, threw rocks at police, at police cars. But it’s good, because now people know what Husby is… This is the only way to be heard,” said the rioter, identified only by the pseudonym Kim.

Stockholm county police chief Mats Löfving said Friday the rioters were local youths with and without criminal records.

In addition, “in the midst of all this there is a small group of professional criminals, who are taking advantage of the situation to commit crimes like this,” he told Sveriges Radio.

A 25-year-old who grew up in Husby said he didn’t think the riots had anything to do with the shooting.

“I’m not saying there are no problems… but people are glorifying this a little bit,” said the man, who declined to be named, adding that the rioters were often aged 12 to 17.

“I can imagine they get a big kick out of seeing themselves on TV,” he said.

Due to its liberal immigration policy, Sweden has in recent decades become one of Europe’s top destinations for immigrants, both in absolute numbers and relative to its size.

But many of those who have arrived struggle to learn the language and find employment, despite numerous government programmes.

Official data show unemployment was 8.8 percent in Husby in 2012, compared to 3.3 percent in Stockholm as a whole.

Eric Zemmour, a right-wing French commentator known for his controversial views, meanwhile told RTL radio the riots showed that the Swedish “kingdom of social democracy and of political correctness” was little different from countries like Britain and France.