WarSclerotic

What You Aren’t Supposed to Know about America’s Closest Ally, Right Side News,  William Michael, August 4, 2014

(A suitable Israel – Hamas, et. al. peace broker, even though Israel says no? –DM)

The citizens of the United States, most who could not locate Qatar on a map, would be wise to second guess our strategic alliance with the corrupt Gulf state. Eventually, like the Israelis, Americans will wake up to the fact that our closest ally is not only a financier of Islamic terror, but also a state run drug cartel and slave dealing operation.

The Qataris, and their ruling al-Thani family, are slavers, narcotics traffickers, and financiers of international terrorism. They also happen to be America’s closest ally under Obama.

When analyzing the foreign policy interventions of the Obama administration with respect to the Middle East, it is hard to reconcile their respective approaches Libya (2011) and Iraq (2014).

In 2011, Obama justified the military action to remove Muammar Gaddafi on the basis of anticipated genocide by the Gaddafi regime. Speaking at the National Defense University on March 28, 2011, Obama explained “I refused to wait for the images of slaughter and mass graves before taking action.” In October of that year, Gaddafi was discovered by Libyan rebels, many whom were Islamists linked to al Qaeda, sodomized, and summarily executed. It is worth recalling that Gaddafi had been, since shortly after 9/11/2001, effectively an American ally, if an imperfect one, in the war on terror.

Yet following the fall of Mosul to ISIS in June 2014, and the subsequent exposure by the press of their horrific war crimes, the Obama administration acted strangely inert. The execution of defenseless Iraqi soldiers shocked the world, and ISIS (now known as the Islamic State, or IS) made no effort to hide their crimes: indeed, they proudly advertise them on YouTube. Despite the visual evidence of systematic war crimes and mass murder (à la the Nazi Einsatzgruppen), Obama announced that he would not provide air support for the Iraqi Army. Under the supervision of the Obama administration, Iraq has gone from relatively stable following the 2007 “surge,” to being occupied in large part by a genocidal army that targets Christians, Shiites, and all secularly-minded Muslims.

How does one reconcile Obama’s actions in Libya, which were allegedly precautionary in nature, to his non-action in Iraq, which amounted to declining to intervene in an actual, real, and ongoing genocide? The most obvious way to explain this is through the lens of America’s closest ally these days, the tiny Middle Eastern peninsula in the Persian Gulf: Qatar.

Qatar, from the very beginning, has been the primary agitator for the “Arab Spring.” Qatari forces were on ground in Libya, training rebels and planning their battles; and they were in the air, conducting air strikes with Dassault Mirage French-made fighter jets. The Qataris are one of the main benefactors of the Syrian rebels, where the murderous Islamic State began to coalesce. (ISIS was the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, after all.) In deposing Gaddafi and attempting to depose Bashar Assad in Syria, it can be said truthfully that the Obama administration and al-Thanis in Qatar were, and are, partners.

“A Kind of Marriage”

The alignment of American and Qatari foreign policy, while it may be disturbing, should not be wholly surprising. Qatar hosts two of the largest American bases in the world, Al Udeid and As Sayliyah. As Sayliyah is a huge pre-positioning base, the largest outside the United States, while Al Udeid is the home of CENTCOM in the region. ExxonMobil is the primary Qatari partner in extracting natural gas, from which the Qataris derive tremendous wealth; they are the richest country per capita in the world, and 17% of their tiny population (287,000 citizens) are millionaires. Lockheed Martin, and other American arms manufacturers, recently sold the Qataris $11 billion in sophisticated weaponry. According to a senior executive at the company, Boeing is “in a kind of marriage” with the al-Thanis, and agreed to sell them 50 wide-body jets this July. Prominent universities, such as Georgetown, Cornell, and Carnegie Mellon, have satellite campuses in Doha, Qatar. The Brookings Institute, one of the most influential American foreign policy think tanks, has a significant presence the Qatari capital as well.

Judging by the American presence, only lightly explored in the above paragraph, it is not hard to see that Qatar and the United States are in a kind of marriage. The phone book in Qatar reads like a Who’s Who for American institutions. The American military, commercial, and educational footprint in Doha are the shared values that hold the marriage together.

The symbols of the Hamas logo illustrate the group’s intractable attitude toward Israel. At the top is an outline of the territory of Israel, Gaza and the West Bank shown as one entity covered in green, Hamas’ symbolic color. In the center is the Muslim shrine the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, surrounded by banners bearing the phrases “There is no god but Allah” and “Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.” Underneath those are the words “Palestine” and “Islamic Resistance Movement—Hamas.” The swords are a common Islamic motif, representing the power of Islam and the desire to spread the religion, by force if necessary.http://www.ucg.org/middle-east/telling-symbolism-hamas-logo/

And yet Qatar’s support for Islamists now seems to translate into de facto American support for the same groups of barbarians, and not only in Libya, Syria, and Iraq. The Qataris have also been conclusively linked to Hamas, who is of course at war with Israel. Extending into Nigeria, paperwork discovered in July links the Qataris directly to Boko Haram. President Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry, and previously SecState Hillary Clinton have all been conspicuously soft on Hamasand Boko Haram. In 2013, the Obama administrationthreatened Nigeria with sanctions for fighting Boko Haram. Meanwhile, in Israel, Kerry has pushed for the Hamas-friendly ceasefire written by Turkey and Qatar.

A Vast Ocean of Illegal Funds

Qatar has two primary legal industries: energy extraction, mostly natural gas but also oil, and Qatar Airways, a global airline. But there is another aspect to the Qatari economy, far darker, that helps to explain the Qatari proximity to the Islamists. The Qataris benefit directly from trafficking in heroin, cocaine, and human beings.

Although few people think of drugs and slavery when they hear “al Qaeda,” narcotics and human trafficking are major sources of revenue for them. Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, or AQIM, are known smugglers across Northern Africa, in everything from cigarettes to Latin American cocaine. Boko Haram, who has now declared their allegiance to IS, are not only slavers, as evidenced by what they did to the kidnapped Christian girls, but also transnational drug dealers; they have been known to operate as far away as India, under the aegis of criminal mastermind Dawood Ibrahim. Ibrahim is known for many things, among them forced prostitution rings.

The Taliban’s affinity for opium and its derivative, heroin, is firmly established. The 2013 Afghan opium crop set a new record, and simultaneously Afghanistan continues to slip ever closer into the political grip of the Taliban. The Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI), the intelligence agency of Pakistan, has always been close to the Taliban. The Pakistani National Logistics Cell is a Pakistani military-owned logistical support company. While their primary purpose is to support the Pakistani military, they also function astransporters of Taliban heroin. And the NLC are in a strategic partnership with none other than Qatar.

It is not only Taliban-sourced heroin which goes through Qatar. Doha International Airport is a growing hub for the international narcotics traffic by way of South America, through the cartels. For example, large shipments of cocaine from Argentina have been seized from drug mules at the airport. [Note: It is not uncommon for cartels to bust their own mules, now and then, for several reasons, including: a convenient way to dispose of a liability, the pretense of proactive law enforcement, and as a sacrificialdistraction to get other mules through security checkpoints.)

Slaves and their Master

In preparation for the 2022 World Cup that they are still scheduled to host, Qatari authorities have embarked on an ambitious plan to build 12 new stadiums. Despite being the wealthiest country per capita, the laborers are making on average about $0.76 an hour, or $13/day. Many have not been paid in months. If projections hold, more than 4,000 will die in the construction process. Labor conditions are so bad in Qatar for the stadium workers that they have been termed “slaves” by the U.K.’s Guardian.

Logo of Boko Haram

There is good reason to consider these unfortunate laborers modern day slaves. The Qataris have links to human trafficking groups around the globe. Boko Haram, who shocked the world when they captured Nigerian girls and sold them into sex slavery, was set up by a Mauritanian proxyof Qatar as a “money making venture.” Boko Haram cells have also been discovered operating as far away as India, under the auspices of criminal mastermind, and terror financier, Dawood Ibrahim. Ibrahim’s brother, Anis, recently traveled to Lagos, Nigeria, to meet with the leader of Boko Haram. Ibrahim’s D-Company is “heavily involved” in organized prostitution rings. Speculation, meanwhile, grows that Dawood is working with the Nigerian-based terror group to set up several narcotics smuggling routes.

Of course, if you’re going to have a slave workforce, it helps to have a knowledgeable slave master.   The architectural firm contracted to build the Qatar stadiums is Albert Speer & Partner GmbH. It is headed by Albert Speer Jr., the son of the infamous Nazi Albert Speer, who pioneered slave labor of Jews and Slavs in the Third Reich.

Slave labor being a trade secret of the Muslim Brotherhood, it is without surprise we not that Hamas admitted to using child labor to build their extensive tunnel networks under Gaza.

A Second Guess

So irritated is Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu with how Obama and John Kerry have handled negotiating the conflict with (Muslim Brotherhood) Hamas, that he warned the administration “not to ever second guess me again.”

Money has a way, you might say, of papering over differences. The global narcotics trade and human traffic are immensely profitable enterprises. Given the Qatari involvement in Boko Haram and their proclivity for slave labor, we can assume with a strong degree of certainty that they profit from the worst kinds of “business.” The Qatari ruling family, the al-Thanis, do not only profit from natural gas exploitation, but receive substantial revenues from human suffering in the form of slavery, narcotics addiction, and terror. With this money, they subsidize the American military presence outside their capital.

The citizens of the United States, most who could not locate Qatar on a map, would be wise to second guess our strategic alliance with the corrupt Gulf state. Eventually, like the Israelis, Americans will wake up to the fact that our closest ally is not only a financier of Islamic terror, but also a state run drug cartel and slave dealing operation.

Bringing Back the Good War, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, August 4, 2014

(Approval by the “world community” of this species of proportionality — thus far rejected by Israel —  is selective. It depends on who are the favored side(s). Hamas can and does target civilians with impunity, but Israel is damned for any collateral damage that results unintentionally and despite her best efforts to avoid it.  — DM)

The good war is not a war in which no civilians die. It is a war that ends quickly and decisively with the side that is contextually more humane in peacetime triumphing. Wars are not ideal. They are exercises of lesser evils. The only way to fight a moral war is to remember that a war is only as moral as its eventual peacetime outcome.

During WW2 our understanding of a moral war was not a war in which we did not kill any civilians (we killed a lot of civilians), it wasn’t even a war in which we did not kill any civilians on purpose (we killed a lot of civilians on purpose), it was a war in which we did not kill civilians without having a good reason.

We might carry out mass bombings of entire cities to destroy the enemy’s wartime production capabilities and demoralize his population.

Until recently, those were considered good reasons for killing civilians.

The moral context for these actions, snipped away from anti-war works such as Slaughterhouse-Five or Grave of the Fireflies which reduce the American bombings of Dresden or Kobe to the senseless acts of brutal monsters, is that we were fighting Germany and Japan using their own tactics against them.

It was Germany which introduced the bombing of cities to Europe during WW1 and WW2. In 1917, after German bombings, Premier Lloyd George shouted to a working class London crowd, “We will give all back to them and we will give it to them soon. We shall bomb Germany with compound interest.”

WW2’s Blitz was repaid with compound interest over Germany. Japan’s firebombing of Chinese cities was repaid with compound interest with the firebombing of Tokyo. This wasn’t mere vengeance.  The rules of war are set by mutual consent. The humanitarian protections that we have come to take for granted as if they were natural laws are really mutual agreements between two sides.

On September 14, 2001, George W. Bush stood at Ground Zero and offered the working class New Yorkers amid the rubble an echo of Lloyd George. “I can hear you, the rest of the world hears you, and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon.”

Since then we have been mired in an extended debate which presumes wrongly that any laws of war ever applied to those men. The entire existence of terrorism is eloquent evidence that treating fighters who have placed themselves outside the social contract as if they were within it is foolishly destructive.

Mutuality makes morality and immorality in war self-regulating. If you firebomb someone else’s cities, someone else will firebomb your cities. If you want your prisoners of war to be treated well, you have to treat the prisoners you take equally well.

Such mutuality is the only international agreement that truly matters. It takes humanitarian behavior out of the realm of idealism and into the realm of rational self-interest. It creates a direct and working program for rewards and punishments that does not rely on a League of Nations or United Nations.

During the Cold War, mutuality saved the world. The only thing that restrained the USSR from pushing through into Western Europe with tanks and nukes was the knowledge that what it did would be done to it. MAD meant that there would be no more free lunches. It was scary and dangerous, but it forced everyone to be moral in a way that all the whiny disarmament marches against nukes never could.

Unilateral nuclear disarmament would have made WWIII inevitable by offering the USSR a free lunch.

But the era of the free lunch arrived with terrorism. We unilaterally extend protections to terrorists that they do not reciprocate. Terrorists are excused from the laws of war, while everyone else has to abide by them. This only incentivizes terrorism and makes fighting terrorists a grim and impossible business.

Israel’s fight against Hamas shows how unilateral humanitarianism decontextualizes warfare creating a completely impossible standard for a good war. With no context derived from what the other side is doing all that is left is the necessity of meeting a completely impossible standard in which no civilians on the other side ever die, even while the enemy uses them as human shields.

The Londoners who heard Lloyd George, the New Yorkers who heard George W. Bush and the Israelis who heard Benjamin Netanyahu understood the context in which the next phase of the conflict would be taking place. It was a context created by the tactics of their enemies.

But context is no longer acceptable in warfare. All wars must be fought to the same impossible standard.

The civilian combatant casualty ratio for modern wars has almost always been higher for civilians than soldiers. Israel is desperately scrambling for a 1:1 civilian combatant ratio even though this ratio is usually achieved by modern countries only in their own propaganda. But a 1:1 ratio is also technical context and war is now contextualized by the latest atrocity photo rather than by anything else.

“The suspicion that militants are operating nearby does not justify strikes that put at risk the lives of so many innocent civilians,” State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said.

Psaki is demanding that Israel’s strikes on terrorists abide by a higher standard than her own country’s strikes on terrorists. That’s absurd and irrational because the only reason the drone program wasn’t scrapped by Obama is that it’s the only part of the War on Terror that still works.

But when wars are stripped of context, then countries are obligated to endlessly chase an impossible standard that can always be improved on.

Every time Israel demonstrates that it has set an even higher standard, the goal posts are moved toward another standard. Now it’s being condemned for taking out terrorists outside UNRWA schools as if the attack had happened inside the school; even though UNRWA schools are demonstrably terror bases.

Israel obviously cannot fight terrorists who operate around civilians without killing civilians. But it also cannot be allowed to kill civilians because in a decontextualized conflict, killing any civilian is wrong.

These rules would have made it impossible to defeat Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Had Churchill and FDR been bound by the belief that bombing enemy cities is genocide, Hitler and Tojo would have been free to implement real genocide in Europe and Asia. If the United States had not dropped 635,000 tons of bombs on North Korea, all of Korea would be living under the Kim Dynasty.

And yet our wars now exist in a twilight zone in which context no longer matters. Instead of fighting genocidal enemies, we wrestle with ourselves, debating the ratio that we need to achieve to be moral.

With each war, from Korea to Vietnam to the War on Terror, the United States became more hesitant to finish it quickly with the use of overwhelming force leading instead to prolonged and bloodier conflicts.

General Curtis LeMay’s initial proposal for quickly breaking North Korea was considered immoral. Instead the more “moral” approach led to far more casualties on both sides and a divided Korea. The “moral” approach in Vietnam led to more casualties and a lost war. The War on Terror has become an indefinite war whose mangled version of morality means that it can never actually end.

Israel is trapped in that same moral twilight. Its attempt to make war moral has only stretched it out indefinitely while increasing civilian casualties on both sides. Its unilateral humanitarianism inflicts all the responsibility on it while leaving the terrorists free to pursue any tactics they please. That isn’t a recipe for limiting civilian casualties, but for infinitely expanding them.

The good war is not a war in which no civilians die. It is a war that ends quickly and decisively with the side that is contextually more humane in peacetime triumphing. Wars are not ideal. They are exercises of lesser evils. The only way to fight a moral war is to remember that a war is only as moral as its eventual peacetime outcome.

 If it’s without preconditions, Israel will consider it…

U.K. reviewing arms exports to Israel over Gaza conflict
Barak Ravid and Reuters Aug. 4, 2014 4:56 PM

The cluster f8ck begins. At least it’s not the USA, but with Obama and his executive order pen, anything is possible. – LS

Move similar to partial arms embargo undertaken by U.K. following Cast Lead, first reported in Haaretz; Gov’t-approved U.K. contracts – which include body armor, drone components, and missile parts – are worth over $13 billion.

The U.K. is reviewing all arms export licences to Israel in response to the conflict with Hamas in Gaza, a British government spokeswoman said on Monday. The move is similar to that taken by the British government after Operation Cast Lead in 2009, and which was first published in Haaretz.

Israel launched an offensive against Hamas almost four weeks ago following a surge in cross-border rocket salvoes. Gaza officials say 1,797 Palestinians, most of them civilians, have been killed, while Israel has lost 64 soldiers in combat and three civilians to Palestinian shelling.

“We are currently reviewing all export licenses to Israel to confirm that we think they are appropriate,” a spokeswoman for Prime Minister David Cameron told reporters. The decision to conduct the review was taken last week, she said.

According to a report by a British parliamentary committee last month, outstanding government-approved contracts for export of dual use or military goods to Israel are worth more than 7.8 billion pounds ($13.12 billion). These include contracts to supply body armor, drone components, and missile parts.

“Clearly the current situation has changed compared to when some licenses will have been granted, and we’re reviewing those existing licenses against the current situation but no decisions have been taken beyond going back again and reviewing,” the spokeswoman said. Britain’s opposition Labour party has accused Cameron of not condemning Israel’s behavior forcefully enough, a charge he rejects.

In July 2009, eight months after the conclusion of Cast Lead, the British government informed Israel that it was canceling five security export licenses and would not supply replacement parts and other equipment for Sa’ar 4.5 gunships because they participated in Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip earlier this year.

The embargo followed a government review of all British defense exports to Israel, which was announced three months ago. In total, the telegram said, Britain reviewed 182 licenses for arms exports to Israel, including 35 for exports to the Israel Navy. But it ultimately decided to cancel only five licenses, all relating to the Sa’ar 4.5 ships. The licenses in question apparently cover spare parts for the ship’s guns.

Redeployment serves Israel well
Maj. Gen. (ret.) Yaakov Amidror Monday August 4, 2014

Not sure I agree, but I’m just an armchair general and have not children being sent into harm’s way. I would, however, rename the article, ‘Digging in for a Long Protracted War’ or ‘How I Learned to Love the Rules of Engagement’ – LS

Israel has pulled back a large number of troops from inside the Gaza Strip. Once the remaining few tunnels are destroyed, the Israel Defense Forces will only leave a residual force along the border. The order of battle will shrink to the level that preceded the ground operation.

The troops will assume a better defensive posture that would not require any direct engagement with the Gaza Strip’s urban environment. They will essentially control the area in between the tunnels’ entry point inside Gaza Strip and the border fence on its perimeter.

The Diplomatic-Security Cabinet had a very clear objective when it authorized the ground offensive: destroying the tunnel network. The troops were told to limit their activity to those areas where the Israel-bound tunnels originated and their immediate surroundings.

With the tunnels taken care of, and without any new intelligence coming up, it was determined that the mission was accomplished. Keeping the troops inside any longer would have been disadvantageous. But now, having settled on a new tactical approach, Israel must decide about the next phase of Operation Protective Edge.

The conscripted army has shouldered most of the war effort, with the reserves serving in a supportive role. The younger troops will be the ones who go into Gaza in the event of a wide-scale ground invasion. Thus, to better prepare for such a contingency, it made sense to withdraw the troops and let them rest, resupply and recharge. Israeli troops would have to be at the top of their game if they were to endure a protracted campaign.

It is not just about seizing key parts of the Gaza Strip. The IDF would do that rather quickly. The problem is that the IDF would have to then begin demilitarizing the Gaza Strip by seizing weapon systems and arm-production facilities, as well as crackdown on terrorists. That would take months.

The IDF now has troops deployed along the entire border. This way they can tackle all the tunnels simultaneously and quickly. But this is not the best posture if one is to launch a large offensive. The IDF would be well served if it were to withdraw even further and position the troops in a battle-ready posture. It makes no sense to stretch them thin by deploying them along the entire length of the border.

When it comes to prosecuting the next phase of the operation, there are alternatives to a total occupation of the Gaza Strip, although that option should not be taken off the table, and it should be executable within days or hours.

Israel can afford to hold off on an occupation because Hamas has not been able to inflict significant damage on the homefront — thanks to the Iron Dome aerial defense system — and the threat the organization poses will likely diminish as it runs out of rockets (I believe it currently has between half and a quarter of what it had when the fighting began). Such a course of action would also let Israel gather more intelligence on Hamas.

The IDF would have fewer casualties by disengaging the enemy (especially if the troops remain vigilant and scrupulously follow the necessary procedures). Even as it prepares for a ground invasion, the IDF must continue targeting Hamas with precision-guided munitions and pinpointed attacks.

Israel has much more staying power because it has been able to maintain its strength, unlike Hamas, which cannot resupply and make up for the various shortfalls. That is why the pullout has won across-the board support. Israelis see eye to eye on this tactical move, be they proponents of an all-out campaign to conquer Gaza because this is the only way to solve the problem, or advocates of a new arrangement with Hamas, knowing full well that it will most likely collapse in a few years. Widening the scope of the operation without pulling out first would have turned out to be a colossal error. It is a good thing this was averted.

Israel must provide Gazans with humanitarian relief because their situation is grave and will only worsen, primarily because Hamas has launched rockets from civilian sites, resulting in many Gazans being hurt after Israel targeted rocket launching sites, command posts, manufacturing facilities and arms depots.

The number of fatalities in Gaza will likely reach 2,000 because there are some dead Hamas fighters who are unaccounted for. Some 10,000 Gazans will have been injured by the end of the conflict, and the number of internally displaced persons, who will have nothing but rubble to return to, will be much higher than that.

This terrible tragedy is of Hamas’ own making. That said, Israel must not ignore it.

IDF soldier in serious condition after shots fired in Jerusalem’s Mount Scopus tunnel | JPost | Israel News.

Update 2:  Tel Aviv port is under heavy police search right now.

Update:  High security alert was declared in the central of Israel due to a hot alert of a suicide bomber

By DANIEL K. EISENBUD

08/04/2014 16:32

Police: Victim shot in stomach, intensive search underway for assailant; Hebrew University says shooting unrelated to campus; incident comes shortly after man killed in tractor terror attack in capital.

An IDF soldier was shot in the stomach by a suspected terrorist in a tunnel in Jerusalem’s Mount Scopus Monday afternoon, less than three hours after a separate terrorist attack took the life of a pedestrian in the capital.

While details of the attack remain unclear, according to police, the incident took place at approximately 4 p.m., before the suspect fled the scene.

“Multiple shots were fired, one man was hit in the stomach and rushed to the hospital in serious condition,” said police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld. “Police units are now searching the area for the vehicle the suspect drove and hope to make an arrest shortly.”

Rosenfeld did not confirm if the two terrorist attacks are related.

Meanwhile, Hebrew University released a statement shortly after the shooting denying media reports that the shooting was somehow related to its Mount Scopus campus.

Will the US betray us? Israel Hayom, Isi Leibler, August 4,2014

We would have expected our ally to allocate the blame for the casualties to the death merchants of Hamas who target Israeli civilians and propagate casualties among their own people, whom they employ as human shields and then gleefully present to the world as victims of Israeli tyranny.

Instead, Obama has led the pack in hypocritically supporting our right to defend ourselves while blaming us for a disproportionate response when we retaliate against the source of the rocket fire whose command posts and missile launching sites are deliberately embedded in U.N. buildings, schools, hospitals and mosques. The gory scenes of Palestinian casualties highlighted by the global media should have been presented in the context of Hamas responsibility for deliberately orchestrating this nightmare. Instead, Obama’s behavior has merely encouraged Hamas to continue its barbaric strategy in the belief that the U.S. will rescue it from the jaws of defeat and reward it for its commitment to terrorism.

**********

The U.S. is Israel’s most important ally. It has provided us with arms and only last week Congress granted us additional funds to further develop the Iron Dome. It has also used its political clout to deflect hostile resolutions and sanctions at the international level. But we should be under no illusions — the relationship between Israel and the U.S. is currently under great strain.

Notwithstanding cryptic statements by both the Israeli and U.S. governments, denying the veracity of a recently publicized transcript of a toxic telephone conversation between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Barack Obama, Israeli public television’s highly respected foreign news editor Oren Nahari adamantly stands by his story, stressing that the source who gave him the transcript was a reliable senior U.S. official, not the Prime Minister’s Office.

The president is alleged to have harshly demanded that Netanyahu accept an immediate unilateral cease-fire and informed him that the U.S. was committed to ending the blockade of Gaza. Netanyahu pointed out that the U.S. administration was undermining the cease-fire by substituting Egyptian mediation with Qatar and Turkey, reminding Obama that the Muslim Brotherhood-aligned Qatar finances and provides arms to Hamas and other terrorist groups including the Islamic State group. He also could have pointed out that Turkey’s demagogic prime minister has been stoking hysterical anti-Israeli sentiment and vile anti-Semitism, even demanding that his own Jewish community condemn Israel.

Obama allegedly responded by telling Netanyahu that he was not in a position to advise America who should act as mediators. Lending credence to this exchange was House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi who, a few days later, told CNN that the U.S. must cooperate with the Qataris, “who have told me over and over again that Hamas is a humanitarian organization.” It is mind-boggling that a Democratic congressional leader can describe as “humanitarian” a genocidal organization with similar objectives to al-Qaida, whose charter explicitly calls for the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews.

There were also tense exchanges between the Prime Minister’s Office and Secretary of State John Kerry, now notorious for his inappropriate comments and contradictory statements.

There have been efforts by both parties to calm the waters. U.S. officials have reiterated their commitment to Israel and re-endorsed Israel’s right to defend itself. Obama has now, belatedly, followed the European’s lead and included the demilitarization of Gaza as an issue to be negotiated in conjunction with the lifting of the blockade after cessation of hostilities.

But there is no disputing that Obama has, consciously or otherwise, shielded Hamas. This is not a conflict in which the U.S. should act as a mediator or even hint at moral equivalency. This conflict was thrust upon us by a terrorist group promoting a culture of death and martyrdom reflected in the oft-quoted Hamas slogan: “Jews wish for life and we wish for a martyr’s death.” We are not confronting an entity seeking independence. It is a conflict between good and evil.

We would have expected our ally to allocate the blame for the casualties to the death merchants of Hamas who target Israeli civilians and propagate casualties among their own people, whom they employ as human shields and then gleefully present to the world as victims of Israeli tyranny.

Instead, Obama has led the pack in hypocritically supporting our right to defend ourselves while blaming us for a disproportionate response when we retaliate against the source of the rocket fire whose command posts and missile launching sites are deliberately embedded in U.N. buildings, schools, hospitals and mosques. The gory scenes of Palestinian casualties highlighted by the global media should have been presented in the context of Hamas responsibility for deliberately orchestrating this nightmare. Instead, Obama’s behavior has merely encouraged Hamas to continue its barbaric strategy in the belief that the U.S. will rescue it from the jaws of defeat and reward it for its commitment to terrorism.

In this context, the clearly synchronized outbursts from the White House, State Department and even the Pentagon, just prior to the announcement of the stillborn 72-hour cease-fire on Friday, condemning Israel for civilian casualties, including the shelling of a U.N. Relief and Works Agency school in Gaza as “indefensible” and “totally unacceptable,” were clearly designed to garner the support of Qatar and Turkey.

The U.S. is aware of the extraordinary measures, unmatched in any military conflict, which Israel employs to minimize civilian casualties. But innocent civilians die in a war– and obviously more so in a situation in which women and children are employed as human shields and deliberately housed in locations together with missiles launchers and command posts. When under fire from terrorists — even if they operate out of schools — Israeli soldiers must return fire or be killed. Beyond that, accidents are inevitable. Just recall the thousands of innocent French civilians who were killed by the allies during the invasion in 1944.

To appreciate the double standards and hypocrisy employed against us, the U.S. should take note of the hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians killed by allied forces in the course of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan and the carnage in Serbia incurred by NATO’s indiscriminate bombing of civilians in Belgrade to force Slobodan Milosevic to step down.

The tragic casualties among Palestinian civilians sadden us all. But it is revolting when the U.S. president expresses more outrage over the deaths of 1,500 Palestinians, a large proportion of whom are bloody terrorists, than the deaths of 180,000 butchered Syrians in the ongoing civil war.

It is utterly unacceptable to condemn a long-standing ally. How can the U.S. justify its focus on the loss of innocent lives without regard to the context and avoid directing the blame to Hamas who exult in both killing Israelis and the killing of their own people, whose suffering they openly exploit to discredit Israel and divert attention from their terrorist activities? It brings to mind Golda Meir’s oft-quoted quip that peace will only be achieved when our adversaries love their children more than they hate us.

Israel must stand firm. The public shock over the discovery of the myriad of terror tunnels and the extent of the missile range capability — which now covers the entire country — has united the people in a manner reminiscent of the Six-Day War. Close to 90 percent are adamant that Israel must not stop until Gaza is demilitarized or Hamas completely smashed, despite the terrible toll in casualties. Even the dovish Labor Party-led opposition is demanding this of Netanyahu.

Although it is not reflected in the extraordinary tsunami of global anti-Semitism and the double standards formally adopted by Western countries, there is a clear consensus that this war was imposed on us and there is a greater appreciation of the terrorist nature of Hamas and its contempt for human life.

There is also the radical reversal in the approach of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the Palestinian Authority and most of the Arab League who endorsed the Egyptian cease-fire proposal and whose fear and loathing of the Islamic fundamentalist extremists far exceeds their traditional hatred of Israel. The Egyptians and other moderate Arab states maintain that since his initial Cairo speech in 2009, Obama has emerged as a supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood — the creator of Hamas — and which they regard, justifiably, as an Islamic fundamentalist terror organization.

They consider the undermining of the Egyptian cease-fire proposals and turning towards Qatar and Turkey — supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas — as another example of the U.S. betraying its allies and engaging with its enemies. This was reflected in Kerry’s initial Qatar/Turkey-sponsored cease-fire proposal, which could have been written by Hamas, and which was unanimously rejected by the Israeli cabinet.

As of now, Israel has largely achieved its principal objectives of destroying the tunnels and substantially neutralizing the missile capability. But Hamas remains intact and unless demilitarization is imposed, we face inveterate jihadists who will not relent from their openly expressed objective of destroying us or at least eroding our morale by ongoing terror attacks.

The prime responsibility of any government is to protect its citizens. This is a time for Israel to stand firm and take whatever steps are necessary to defang Hamas and demilitarize Gaza. The responsibility for the fallout on innocent Palestinians rests exclusively on Hamas.

The brazen Hamas breach of the 72-hour cease-fire has led to a temporary global backlash against Hamas. Having neutralized those tunnels which the IDF was able to detect, the ground forces are being redeployed. However, Netanyahu has made it clear that the operation is not over.

The cabinet must speedily decide on one of two options. It can expand the ground campaign and conquer Gaza, which the majority of the nation would probably initially endorse but which would likely entail massive casualties and provoke concerted international pressure that would probably force us to withdraw unilaterally or face sanctions. It would appear that without ruling out this option, Netanyahu — at least in the short term — intends to continue degrading the rocket launchers and attacking Hamas from the air, thereby limiting Israeli casualties and providing greater leverage to achieve demilitarization.

The outcome rests largely with the U.S. If it rewards Hamas for its aggression by seeking to “lift the blockade” or provide them with funds without demilitarization, it will be betraying us. The U.S. will thus have destroyed whatever little global credibility it retains and will be seen as abandoning its long-standing ally and groveling to those who support fanatical Islamic terrorism.

Will the U.S. support Israel’s just cause against genocidal terrorism or act as a shield to protect the barbarians at our gates, effectively paving the way for a far more brutal war in the near future?

Hamas and Its Media Allies Summed Up in One Picture
By Dave Blount August 4, 2014

This illustrates the Hamas strategy:

I have two beautiful grandchildren this age and cannot even imagine doing this sort of thing to them or any other defenseless child. What we are dealing with here is pure evil. Sick bastards.-LS

Of course this strategy would be useless if the liberal media were not on their side. But they know that when these kids get maimed, the media will squeeze every last drop of blood out them on behalf of their shared cause, the eradication of Western Civilization.

It’s no wonder Muslims and the liberals who run the media make such good allies, despite their superficial differences. They have the same moral stature.

Horrifyingly, the strategy may be working. The malevolent vileness of Hamas, spun into sanctimonious victimhood by the liberal media, is winning public opinion to the side of the bad guys:

A demonstration drew thousands to the White House and the streets of downtown Washington on Saturday afternoon as participants from across the country called for an end to the continued violence between Israel and Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.

“Free, free Palestine, killing children is a crime,” the crowd chanted, several holding Palestinian flags, cardboard boxes decorated as coffins and posters with graphic images of the wounded.

Protester Beyhand Trock, 59, of Bethesda, is married to a Jew. Yet she proclaimed:

“People have to leave their racism at the door. Palestinians have the right to exist as humans and not under occupation.”

Israel must let Muslims kill them for being Jewish because doing anything to stop the thousands of rockets that have rained down on the civilian population would be racist.

Pro-Israel demonstrators were there too — but not for long:

Dan Merica, associate producer for CNN Politics has sent out a series of photos and reports on social media about Israel supporters being evacuated in police vans from in front of the White House after being surrounded by menacing Hamas supporters.

Pure evil is on the rise. If we don’t stop it, it will prevail.

Iran’s elite Guards fighting in Iraq to push back Islamic State
Reuters
By By Babak Dehghanpisheh
14 hours ago

For now, ISIS seems a small blessing for Israel by pitting Sunni against Shite. Soon they will be knocking on Iran’s door and it will be interesting to see how they respond to a real threat on THEIR homeland. Iran has invested billions in long range warfare. Handling a threat at their border is a different story. Let’s see how they like it. – LS

BEIRUT (Reuters) – In early July, hundreds of mourners gathered for the funeral of Kamal Shirkhani in Lavasan, a small town northeast of the Iranian capital Tehran. The crowd carried the coffin past posters which showed Shirkhani in the green uniform of the elite Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and identified him as a colonel.

Shirkhani did not die in a battle inside Iran. He was killed nearly a hundred miles away from the Iranian border in a mortar attack by the militants of the Islamic State “while carrying out his mission to defend” a revered Shiite shrine in the city of Samarra, according to a report on Basij Press, a news site affiliated with the Basij militia which is overseen by the Revolutionary Guards.

Shirkhani’s death deep inside Iraq shows that Iran has committed boots on the ground to defend Iraqi territory.

At least two other members of the Guards have also been killed in Iraq since mid-June, a clear sign that Shi’ite power Iran has ramped up its military presence in Iraq to counter the threat of Sunni fighters from the Islamic State, an al Qaeda offshoot that seized much of northern Iraq since June.

Iraqi security forces largely dissolved in the path of the Islamic State’s advance on Baghdad, proving that the Shi’ite-led government could hardly defend itself.

In late June, a spokesman for the militant group, formerly known as the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, announced that it was shortening its name to the Islamic State and would rule its territory as a Sunni Muslim caliphate overseen by its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.

The Islamic State considers Shi’ites to be heretics deserving of death, and made a point of filming its fighters gunning down Shi’ite prisoners as it advanced. Iranian and Iraqi Shi’ites see it as an existential threat.

Iran, with deep ties both to the Iraqi government and to a number of Iraqi Shiite militias, stepped in to stop it.

Senior Iranian officials have denied that any Revolutionary Guard fighters or commanders are inside Iraq. But there’s no doubt that prominent politicians and clerics in Iran have been rattled by the rapid gains of the Islamic State and the threat it poses, not only to the Iraqi government but to Iran itself.

Iranian president Hassan Rouhani pledged his government’s support to help counter the threat posed by the Islamic State if the Iraqi government requested it.

In late June, a senior Iranian cleric, Ayatollah Nasser Makarem Shirazi, said in a statement that waging jihad to defend all of Iraq, particularly holy shrines that are visited each year by millions of Shi’ite pilgrims, is “obligatory,” according to a report from the semi-official Fars News agency.

Samarra, a city on the Tigris north of Baghdad where Colonel Shirkhani was killed, is site of the first of those major Shi’ite shrines to land in the path of the Sunni fighters’ advance. Iraqi government forces and Shi’ite militia swiftly mobilized and have so far succeeded in defending it. The deaths of Shirkhani and two others is proof that Iranians were part of that successful response.

“When the Islamic State reached Shi’ite areas in Iraq, the Revolutionary Guards had forces there who fought them,” said Mohsen Sazegara, a founding member of the Revolutionary Guards who is now a U.S.-based dissident. “A number of them were killed.”

Qassem Soleimani, the head of the external operations branch of the Guards known as the Quds Force, recently traveled to Baghdad, according to reports from a number of Iranian news sites. An Iraqi parliamentarian posted a picture on the Internet of himself with Soleimani in Iraq in mid-June.

Regional experts believe the Revolutionary Guards have increased the supply of weapons and funds to proxy militant groups inside Iraq in recent weeks.

OPPONENTS BLAME TEHRAN

Critics of Iraq’s Shi’ite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki blame him for excluding Sunnis from government in Baghdad, inflaming sectarian tension and allowing hardliners like the Islamic State to cultivate support among Iraq’s Sunni community.

The Islamic State’s rise was partly Iran’s fault for doing too little to rein in the sectarian impulses of its ally Maliki, said Reza Marashi, a former Iran desk officer at the U.S. State Department who is now the director of research for the National Iranian American Council. “Iran overplayed its hand. They overreached,” he said. “By seeking to advance its interests with its Iraqi allies at the expense of other foreign and domestic players, look at what’s happened: the Maliki government helped give rise to ISIS.” Throughout the U.S. occupation of Iraq, which ended in 2011, Washington accused Tehran of funding, arming and training Shi’ite militant proxy groups behind some of the deadliest attacks against U.S. troops and revenge killings of Sunnis. Those militia groups have re-emerged in recent months to join the fight against Sunni fighters.

A high-level Iraqi security official who asked not to be identified because he was not authorized to speak to the media said Iran had now mobilized up to 20,000 Iraqi militiamen from groups it funded and trained.

The fighters are spread south from Samarra to Baghdad and down into the farming communities south of the capital, the official added.

Several thousand Iraqi fighters were also brought back from Syria where they were helping defend the government of president Bashar al-Assad, the same official said. Some have now joined units of security forces from the Iraqi Ministry of Interior and Ministry of Defence. Some of the groups were deployed since the spring with the blessing of Maliki, and put under a military chain of command, as the Iraqi security forces first struggled fighting in western Iraq and in Baghdad’s rural hinterlands.

In addition, there are dozens of members of Lebanon’s Shi’ite militia Hezbollah in Iraq, sources familiar with the group say. Hezbollah militants have been fighting in Syria to support Assad for more than two years. Their presence in Iraq now is a sign of the broader regional dimensions of the conflict which has pitted Shi’ite Muslims against Sunnis.

Unlike the fighters in Syria, the Hezbollah militants in Iraq are battle-hardened veterans leading and supervising operations, sources familiar with the group say. One Hezbollah commander, a veteran of the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel named Ibrahim al Haj, was killed near Mosul recently.

The presence of the Iranian Guards in Iraq also comes after months of committed military support from the Quds Force in Syria. Senior Iranian officials had denied Guard personnel were there until websites linked to the Guards and Basij began publishing pictures and posting video of the funerals of Iranian fighters killed in Syria.

Still, it was more than a year after the beginning of the Syrian conflict before reports of the first Guardsman killed there began to circulate on the web. In comparison, the three Guardsmen killed in Iraq since mid-June appear to indicate that the Guards have leapt more quickly into the fight in Iraq.

Aside from Shirkhani, the funeral for a second Guardsman killed in Samarra, Shojaat Alamdari Mourjani, was held in the southern city of Shiraz on July 4th. Mourjani, a pilot, “reached martyrdom while defending the shrine in Samarra,” according to a report from the Islamic Republic News Agency (IRNA).

The IRNA report does not give any further details whether Mourjani was killed in ground combat or while flying a combat mission. Pictures published by the Fars News agency show posters pasted on Mourjani’s casket with him wearing the uniform of the Revolutionary Guards and identifying him as a colonel.

Only a couple of days before Mourjani’s funeral, the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies published a report that Iran had delivered a handful of SU-25 ground attack aircraft to Iraq. The report notes that the only SU-25 aircraft owned by Iran are operated by the IRGC and that, “these aircraft were likely delivered to Iraq by Iranian pilots” but it is unclear who would be operating the aircraft once in Iraq.

The death of a third Guardsman, Ali Reza Moshajari, was reported by the Hengam News site in mid-June. The report, citing a Lebanese news source, included pictures of Moshajari in Revolutionary Guard uniform and noted that he had been killed in Kerbala while defending holy sites there, southwest of Baghdad.

Unlike in Samarra, there has not been sustained fighting around mainly Shi’ite Kerbala, although there have been occasional attacks in the area. The report, which also included a photo of Moshajari’s bloodied face framed by a white burial shroud, does not present any more details of the circumstances of Moshajari’s death. His funeral was attended by prominent Guardsmen, including Hussein Allah Karam, a former Guard commander who helped found a radical militant group, according to Hengam News.

Unlike in Syria, where Iran has staunchly defended Assad, a member of the Shi’ite offshoot Alawite sect fighting mainly Sunni opponents, Washington and other Western capitals hope Tehran will use its leverage in Iraq to help push for a more inclusive government in Baghdad to help defuse the crisis.

“The Iranians have seemingly calculated that they cannot preserve their interests in Syria without Bashar Assad, They have not made those same calculations about Maliki,” Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran analyst with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, wrote in an email.

“But the question is whether there exists a unifying alternative to Maliki, an Iraqi politician who’s both a steadfast Iranian ally and still palatable to Iraqi Sunnis and Kurds.”

(Reporting by Babak Dehghanpisheh; Additional reportin by Mariam Karouny in Beirut and Ned Parker in Baghdad; Editing by Peter Graff)

Pedestrian killed in tractor terror attack in Jerusalem | The Times of Israel.

Driver shot to death by police; 6 victims lightly wounded, reports say

By Stuart Winer August 4, 2014, 1:54 pm