WarSclerotic

Abbas’s role | JPost | Israel News.

(  Credit where credit’s due… – JW )

By JPOST EDITORIAL

06/19/2014 21:47

What makes Abba’s comments in Jeddah so commendable is that he made them in Arabic and despite their lack of popularity among many Arabs and Palestinians.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has denounced the abduction of Naftali Fraenkel, Gil-Ad Shaer, and Eyal Yifrah. He should be commended for doing so.

Speaking at a meeting of the Islamic Cooperation Organization in Jeddah on Wednesday, Abbas said, “The three young men are human beings just like us and must be returned to their families.”

What makes Abba’s comments in Jeddah so commendable is the fact that he made them in Arabic and he made them despite their lack of popularity among many Arabs and Palestinians.

Indeed, at least some Israeli Arabs seem to believe that the kidnapping was a legitimate act of resistance against Israel, judging from comments made this week by one of their representatives in the Knesset, Balad MK Haneen Zoabi.

Moderate Palestinians who spoke with The Jerusalem Post this week, such as Nidal Fuqaha, the head of the Palestinian Peace Coalition for the Geneva Initiative, said that while the kidnapping hurt Palestinian interests, it nevertheless was seen by many Palestinians as justified – particularly because it was directed against settlers who cause Palestinians “suffering and agony.”

Mustafa Barghouti, head of the Palestinian National Initiative and an advocate of non-violent resistance, said, “There will be no peace until occupation stops. One round of violence will lead to another. Israel has to recognize Palestinians’ right to self-determination. This would have been possible if not for Israel’s settlement policy.”

In other words, for Palestinians the abduction of three young men, particularly if they are settlers or students learning in an institution located in a settlement, is an inevitable and legitimate response to Israeli “aggression.”

Too many prominent non-Palestinians feel the same way.

Ken Roth, head of Human Rights Watch, when commenting on the abduction on his Twitter account, said the following: “Attending school at illegal settlement doesn’t legitimize apparent kidnapping of Israel teens. They should be freed.”

As Hillel Neuer, executive director of UN Watch pointed out, instead of insisting unequivocally that the kidnapping was a blatant transgression of international law, Roth seemed to feel the need to qualify his statement as though there might be something to the claim that terrorism is legitimate when directed against settlers.

Even some leading Israeli pundits have provided excuses for the Palestinians. For instance, Ha’aretz’s leading columnist, Ari Shavit, argued this week that Israel squandered “seven good years” of relative quiet, saying that “The bloody attacks on Israeli cities and even the attacks on the settlements and settlers dramatically diminished.”

Shavit conveniently ignored the hundreds of Kassam rockets and mortar shells shot over these years at communities in the South. He also ignored several incidents of murder, dozens of foiled kidnapping attempts, and hundreds of incidents of rock-throwing and firebombings that have taken place throughout the West Bank.

In any event, according to Shavit, as a result of Israel’s purported intransigence, a vacuum was created. “When there is no movement forward, a backward slide is expected,” he writes. “When there is no peace process, an escalation is expected.”

In essence, what Shavit and other “mainstream” commentators are arguing, along with their Palestinian counterparts, is that as long as Israel refuses to make Judea and Samaria Judenrein or give up the Jewish state’s exclusive control over Jerusalem’s holy sites or accept the Palestinian “right of return,” the logical consequence will inevitably be Palestinian terrorism. It’s as though there is a natural law according to which Palestinians must blow themselves up, kidnap our children, or throw stones and firebombs if they are unable to achieve all their demands through peaceful means.

Abbas’s unequivocal condemnation of the kidnapping was significant precisely because it rejected this premise. No matter what the perceived injustices supposedly perpetrated by Israel, Palestinians are not doomed to resort to kidnappings, suicide bombings, Kassam rockets, and drive-by shootings to achieve their objectives.

If anything, it is Palestinians’ repeated embrace of violent terrorism as a means of achieving strategic goals that has been so devastatingly counterproductive, because it has convinced Israelis that establishing a Palestinian state alongside Israel would become an existential danger.

Yahya al-Abadseh, a Hamas legislator in the Gaza Strip, was not so far off the mark when he declared in response to Abbas’s condemnation that the PA president “has placed himself in confrontation with the entire Palestinian people.”

As a leader, Abbas needs to do this more often – until his people start getting the message.

Obama’s “up to 300 US military advisers” won’t stop ISIS-Sunni entrenchment in Iraq, DEBKAfile, June 19, 2014

ISIS also has plans to send its heavily indoctrinated foreign recruits back to their own countries primed for terror: “The people in that regime, as well as trying to take territory, are also planning to attack us here at home in the United Kingdom.”

Al Qaeda’s success in the face of Obama’s vacillations may infect Iraq’s neighbors with an epidemic of instability..

President Obama announced Thursday, June 19, after meeting his national security team, that the US would send up to 300 military advisers to help, advise and train Iraqi forces, and establish joint operations centers in Baghdad and the North. The US has been conducting “surveillance and reconnaissance missions for a better picture of the locations of ISIS forces,” he said.

US combat troops would not be returning to Iraq, said Obama firmly, but if regimes were in place in Syria and Iraq with inclusive agendas, the US would be willing to establish joint counter-terror platforms for regional partners to fight terrorism. He spoke of “targeted US military action if the situation required it” but only after consulting Congress and regional partners.

We talked to Iranians about their role in Iraq, Obama reported, and told them we hoped it would be constructive – unlike their posture in Syria which was on the side of a sectarian solution.

In its special video report earlier Thursday, DEBKAfile reported:

By dispatching the USS George W.H. Bush to the northern Gulf this week, Obama recalled his tactics at the outset of the Syrian civil war in 2011. He first piled up a menacing armada opposite Syrian shores and told Bashar Assad he must go. But then, he backed away from intervening in the Syrian crisis after all. Is that fro-and-back pattern being repeated in Iraq?

How to interpret the posting of a US warship opposite Iraq on June 15 and, for that matter, Barack Obama’s comment two days earlier: “We do have a stake in making sure these jihadists are not getting a permanent foothold in either Syria or Iraq.”

Has he again developed cold feet? The CIA and Pentagon have explained they have not been able to determine the exact makeup of Al Qaeda’s ISIS  – the Islamist State in Iraq and the Levant which has swallowed up much of Iraq’s Sunni heartland link.

According to DEBKA’s military and intelligence sources, the Islamists advancing on Baghdad are not one, but two armies: The Al Qaeda element has been joined by a hodgepodge of Sufi groups, Saddam Hussein’s old Baath Party guard, and US-trained Sunni Awakening Council tribes.

Iraq Wednesday formally requested US air support, including drone strikes and more surveillance. According to some reports, Washington will hold back anything more substantial that a hundred or so Special Operations personnel as non-combat military instructors for Iraq’s army.

Anyway, Al Qaeda lacks the fixed formations of a professional army, making it an elusive target for pinpointed attacks. So the jihadis’ advance may prove unstoppable and even if Baghdad survives, it may be too beleaguered to function as Iraq’s capital.

Shiite Prime Minister Nuri al Maliki is hardly posed to meet US expectations for setting up a national unity government to heal the strife. The Obama administration would much prefer to see al Maliki step aside and that may be one of its conditions for substantial military aid.

As the situation is developing now, Iraq is more likely to break up into pseudo states as a result of the Al Qaeda led Sunni revolt against Maliki’s regime. A Kurdish state in the north, a Shiite state in the south, and Al Qaeda and Sunni statelets in western, central and eastern Iraq, up to Baghdad’s outskirts.

ISIS also has plans to send its heavily indoctrinated foreign recruits back to their own countries primed for terror: “The people in that regime, as well as trying to take territory, are also planning to attack us here at home in the United Kingdom.”

Al Qaeda’s success in the face of Obama’s vacillations may infect Iraq’s neighbors with an epidemic of instability..

Assassinations, suicide missions and bombings in annual report for financial backers

The annual publication is called al-Naba, which is Arabic for ‘The News’ Reports for 2012 and 2013 were analysed by Institute for the Study of War ISIS claims to have carried out 10,000 operations in Iraq last year alone

These included assassinations, bombings and the freeing of prisoners Isis compiles it to attract donors and present themselves as organised Details emerged as new information about group’s funding came to light

By Leon Watson

Published: 04:50 GMT, 18 June 2014

Updated: 23:55 GMT, 18 June 2014

via ISIS militants log killings in annual report for financial backers | Mail Online.

With its carefully collated facts and figures, it reads like a set of company accounts.

But closer inspection of the 400-page document reveals it is a chilling breakdown of the murderous activities of the fanatics battling for control of Iraq.

For this is the ‘annual report’ of the Al Qaeda-inspired Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), designed to demonstrate its power and attract funds from potential donors.

Like any corporate document, it uses computer-generated graphics, details a management strategy, lists performance and targets.

But the jihadists’ statistics chart in numerical and geographical detail its lethal operations – bombings, assassinations, suicide missions and cities taken over.

In the latest edition of ‘al-Naba’ – the News – covering the 12 months up to last November, ISIS claims to have carried out nearly 10,000 operations in Iraq. That includes 1,000 assassinations, planting more than 4,000 roadside bombs and freeing hundreds of prisoners.

ISIS even records the number of people who renounced Islam then repented – and contains one sickening category headed ‘apostates run over’.

The report, written in Arabic with a photograph of an ISIS gunman on its cover, has been analysed by the US think-tank, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW), which has corroborated much of the information. John Lawrence, of the Washington-based institute said: ‘These numbers are not just purely propaganda figures.’

ISIS’s aim appears to be to demonstrate its record to potential donors, and ISW says the annual report, the second published in as many years, destroys the myth that the insurgents are a rag-tag band of Islamist militants.

The ISW analysis portrays an organisation ‘functioning as a military rather than a terrorist network’ with a clear political strategy aimed to eventually set up a Sunni sectarian state run under harsh Sharia laws.

Jessica Lewis, director of research at the institute, told the Financial Times: ‘The reports provide measures of performance in the way you roll out details for donors.

The latest annual report does not include the ISIS fanatics’ major gains in recent weeks, where they have swept through northern Iraq, carrying out summary executions. They are now battling government forces close to Baghdad.

This year has also been successful in financial terms for the terror group. Its fighters looted hundreds of millions of pounds from banks in Mosul, Iraq’s second city which was over-run by ISIS last week.