Archive for June 8, 2015

Syria Asks IAEA for Help Converting Nuclear Reactor

June 8, 2015

Syria Asks IAEA for Help Converting Nuclear Reactor, Jewish Press, Hana Levi JulianJune 8, 2015

The border police run an exercise, while they train for chemical , biological or atomic. warfare. Feb 14 2011.  Photo by Nati Shohat/Flash90. *** Local Caption *** îâá éøåùìéí  àéîåï àáë çìéôåú îéâåï àéîåï úéøâåì úøâéì Israeli’s Border Police training for chemical, biological, and nuclear attacks. Photo Credit: Nati Shohat / Flash 90

IAEA head Yukiya Amano told reporters Monday that Syria has told the agency it would ship the higher-grade uranium abroad.

However, it is not clear where Syria would ship the higher-grade uranium — Iran is Syria’s closest ally – and neither is it clear what grade its uranium currently is.

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The regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has asked the United Nations International Atomic Energy Agency for help with a nuclear reactor near Damascus, international media agencies reported Tuesday.

The UN agency is studying the Syrian request to help convert the reactor, which currently runs on highly-enriched uranium, into one that uses lower grade nuclear fuel.

IAEA head Yukiya Amano told reporters Monday that Syria has told the agency it would ship the higher-grade uranium abroad.

However, it is not clear where Syria would ship the higher-grade uranium — Iran is Syria’s closest ally – and neither is it clear what grade its uranium currently is.

Low enriched uranium is defined as that which is enriched to less than five percent of fissile purity. Weapons quality uranium is enriched above 20 percent but that which is used to fuel an atomic bomb is enriched to 90 percent.

Amano said the IAEA is studying the request and has yet to make a decision.

ISIS Reaches New Levels of Intolerance by Declaring War on Pigeons

June 8, 2015

Syria: Isis Executes 3 Pigeons on ‘Spying’ Charges

By Johnlee Varghese June 8, 2015 13:29 IST Via International Business Times

A not-so-kosher pigeon mock-up from WWII at the ‘Top Secret’ Spy Museum in Oberhausen, Germany. (Reuters)

(Folks, you just can’t make this stuff up! Just when you thought radical islam couldn’t be more intolerant.  Next up, exploding pigeons. – LS)

The Islamic State (Isis) militants in Syria have reportedly executed three pigeons that it had arrested on charges of spying.

The UK-based Express reported that the pigeons belonged to an anti-Isis group. The 5 June report noted that the executions were carried out recently.

The development has come at a time, when Isis has issued a dictate, banning pigeon breeding claiming the sight of the birds’ genitals as they fly overhead is sinful according to Islam.

The ban order issued by a radical Isis cleric in Dier ez Zour in Syria gave all local breeders one week’s time to stop, else face public flogging.

“All those who keep pigeons above the roofs of their houses must stop doing this entirely within a week of the date of the issuing of this statement,” Daily Mail reports, citing the Isis document.

“Whosoever violates it will be subject to consequences of reprimand including a financial fine, imprisonment and flogging,” the notice added.

This is, however, not the first time that Isis has come down on pigeon breeders.

In January, NBC News had reported that 15 boys and young men were arrested in the eastern province of Diyala, Iraq, by the jihadist group. Three of those arrested were executed for taking up the “un-Islamic” pastime, while the remaining children and young men were forced to join the Islamic State.

The father of one arrested 21-year-old, Abu Abdullah, told NBC News: “My son was standing beside me. I asked them why, and they said, ‘He is not following the real Islam, he must be punished for being a pigeon breeder. This habit is taking him away from worshipping Allah.” That was the last time the 52-year-old farmer saw his son.

Meanwhile, the Isis fighters put the pigeons in bags and burned them.

A pigeon flies by a mosque in Egypt. [Representation Pic]
A pigeon flies by a mosque in Egypt. [Representation Pic]Reuters File

Spy Pigeon Arrested in India

In May, the Indian Police had arrested a “spy pigeon”, who might have been carrying a secret message from Pakistan.

The bird was found by locals in the village of Manwal, near the India-Pakistan border in Punjab. The Times of India reported that the bird had strange markings on its feathers.

Later, the police officers discovered a message written in Urdu and a series of numbers.

Pathankot’s senior superintendent of police Rakesh Kaushal told Wall Street Journal India that police heard of instances of pigeons flying “with cameras” to spy on the ground.

Turkey: “An End to an Era of Oppression”

June 8, 2015

Turkey: “An End to an Era of Oppression,” The Gatestone InstituteBurak Bekdil, June 8, 2015

  • “We, through democratic means, have brought an end to an era of oppression.” — Kemal Kilicdaroglu, leader of the main opposition, Republican People’s Party (CHP).
  • Erdogan is now the lonely sultan in his $615 million, 1150-room presidential palace. For the first time since 2002, the opposition has more seats in the parliament than the AKP.

For the first time since his Islamist party won its first election victory in 2002, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was nowhere to be seen on the night of June 7. He did not make a victory speech. He did not, in fact, make any speech.

Not only failing to win the two-thirds majority they desired to change the constitution, the AKP lost its parliamentary majority and the ability to form a single-party government. It won 40.8% of the national vote and 258 seats, 19 short of the simple majority requirement of 276. Erdogan is now the lonely sultan at his $615 million, 1150-room presidential palace. For the first time since 2002, the opposition has more seats in parliament than the AKP: 292 seats to 258.

“The debate over presidency, over dictatorship in Turkey is now over,” said a cheerful Selahattin Demirtas after the preliminary poll results. Demirtas, a Kurdish politician whose Peoples’ Democracy Party [HDP] entered parliament as a party for the first time, apparently with support from secular, leftist and marginal Turks, is the charismatic man who destroyed Erdogan’s dreams of an elected sultanate. Echoing a similar view, the social democrat, Kemal Kilicdaroglu, leader of the main opposition Republican People’s Party [CHP], commented on the early results in plain language: “We, through democratic means, have brought an end to an era of oppression.”

What lies ahead is less clear. Theoretically, the AKP can sign a coalition deal with the third biggest party, the right-wing Nationalist Movement Party [MHP], although during the campaign, MHP leader Devlet Bahceli slammed Erdogan harshly for the embarrassing corruption allegations against the president. At the same time, a CHP-MHP-HDP coalition is unlikely, as it must bring together the otherwise arch-enemies MHP and HDP.

1098Turkey’s Nationalist Movement Party leader Devlet Bahceli addresses supporters after the release of preliminary election results, June 7, 2015. (Image source: MHP video screenshot)

The AKP management may be planning for snap, or early, polls but there are hardly any rational reasons for it except to risk another ballot box defeat. Parliament may try a minority government, supported by one of the parties from outside government benches, but this can only create a temporary government.

Two outcomes, however, look almost certain: 1) The AKP is in an undeniable decline; the voters have forced it into compromise politics rather than permitting it to run a one-man show, with in-house bickering even more likely than peace, and new conservative Muslims challenging the incumbent leadership. 2) Erdogan’s ambitions for a too-powerful, too-authoritarian, Islamist executive presidency, “a la sultan,” will have to go into the political wasteland at least in the years ahead.

The AKP appeared polled in first place on June 7. But that day may mark the beginning of the end for it. How ironic; the AKP came to power with 34.4% of the national vote in 2002, winning 66% of the seats in parliament. Nearly 13 years later, thanks to the undemocratic features of an electoral law it has fiercely defended, it won 40.8% of the vote and only 47% of the seats in parliament, blocking it from even forming a simple majority.

Cartoon of the day

June 8, 2015

H/t joopklepzeiker

Obama Palestinian

Off Topic: A Sucker is Born Every Minute

June 8, 2015

Woman Claims to Own the Sun and Sold 600 Parcels – Sues eBay for Shutting her Down

By Eric Reed June 7, 2015 Via BuzzPo

(Just a little humorous break I thought y’all might enjoy. – LS)

A woman is claiming ownership of THE SUN, and is selling 11 square foot parcels for $1 on eBay. But, now she’s suing the popular website for removing her listing.

The courts in Madrid have actually agreed to hear 54-year-old Maria Duran’s case next month. But they won’t be ruling on her claim of ownership. Rather, the $11,000 law suit is solely to determine if she violated eBay’s seller agreement.

eBay explained that nothing “tangible” was ever sold, so fearing a scam, they removed her listing.

The USA Today reported:

I am not a stupid person and I know the law,” Duran has said of her solar real estate gambit. She’s basing her claim on a loophole in the UN’s Outer Space Treaty that says no nation can stake ownership to a heavenly body but makes no mention of individuals—borrowing the strategy used by this entrepreneur’s claim on the moon. Duran, as you might imagine, is an eclectic character, observes the Washington Post. “She’s studied nursing and law, dreamt up her own religion, and penned a kinky romance novel,” writes Caitlin Dewey. The story notes that Duran is framing her sun fight as a statement against the corporate world and promises that any profits will go to charity. For those who want in, Duran is still selling parcels on her own website.

Still selling them? I’d like mine in a sub-tropical climate please. How will these so-called buyers access their HOT real estate? Perhaps Duran is assuring their safety by recommending they travel there at night. Maybe if you act now, she’ll even throw in a free pair of sunglasses with every order.

Stories like this are living proof that sometimes the real story is more far-fetched than anything made-up ever could be.
image

 

Directive 11: Obama’s Secret Islamist Plan

June 8, 2015

Directive 11: Obama’s Secret Islamist Plan, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, June 8, 2015

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What little we know about the resulting classified 18-page report is that it used euphemisms to call for aiding Islamist takeovers in parts of the Middle East. Four countries were targeted. Of those four, we only know for certain that Egypt and Yemen were on the list. But we do know for certain the outcome.

Obama’s insistence that human rights be made a core national security interest paved the way for political and military interventions on behalf of Islamists. Obama had never been interested in human rights; his record of pandering to the world’s worst genocide plotters and perpetrators from Iran to Turkey to Sudan made that clear. When he said “human rights”, Obama really meant “Islamist power.”

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Behind the rise of ISIS, the Libyan Civil War, the unrest in Egypt, Yemen and across the region may be a single classified document.

That document is Presidential Study Directive 11.

You can download Presidential Study Directive 10 on “Preventing Mass Atrocities” from the White House website, but as of yet no one has been able to properly pry number 11 out of Obama Inc.

Presidential Study Directive 10, in which Obama asked for non-military options for stopping genocide, proved to be a miserable failure. The Atrocities Prevention Board’s only use was as a fig leaf for a policy that had caused the atrocities. And the cause of those atrocities is buried inside Directive 11.

With Obama’s typical use of technicalities to avoid transparency, Directive 11 was used to guide policy in the Middle East without being officially submitted. It is possible that it will never be submitted. And yet the Directive 11 group was described as “just finishing its work” when the Arab Spring began.

That is certainly one way of looking at it.

Directive 11 brought together activists and operatives at multiple agencies to come up with a “tailored” approach for regime change in each country. The goal was to “manage” the political transitions. It tossed aside American national security interests by insisting that Islamist regimes would be equally committed to fighting terrorism and cooperating with Israel. Its greatest gymnastic feat may have been arguing that the best way to achieve political stability in the region was through regime change.

What little we know about the resulting classified 18-page report is that it used euphemisms to call for aiding Islamist takeovers in parts of the Middle East. Four countries were targeted. Of those four, we only know for certain that Egypt and Yemen were on the list. But we do know for certain the outcome.

Egypt fell to the Muslim Brotherhood, which collaborated with Al Qaeda, Hamas and Iran, before being undone by a counterrevolution. Yemen is currently controlled by Iran’s Houthi terrorists and Al Qaeda.

According to a New York Times story, Obama’s Directive 11 agenda appeared to resemble Che or Castro as he “pressed his advisers to study popular uprisings in Latin America, Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia to determine which ones worked and which did not.”

The story also noted that he “is drawn to Indonesia, where he spent several years as a child, which ousted its longtime leader, Suharto, in 1998.”

The coup against Mubarak with its coordination of liberals, Islamists and the military did strongly resemble what happened in Indonesia. The most ominous similarity may be that the Muslim mobs in Indonesia targeted the Chinese, many of whom are Christians, while the Muslim mobs in Egypt targeted Coptic Christians.

Both were talented groups that were disproportionately successful because they lacked the traditional Islamic hostility to education, integrity and achievement. Islamist demagogues had succeeded in associating them with the regime and promoted attacks on them as part of the anti-regime protests.

Chinese stores were looted and thousands of Chinese women were raped by rampaging Muslims. Just as in Egypt, the protesters and their media allies spread the claim that these atrocities committed by Muslim protesters were the work of the regime’s secret police. That remains the official story today.

Suharto’s fall paved the way for the rise of the Prosperous Justice Party, which was founded a few months after his resignation and has become one of the largest parties in the Indonesian parliament. PJP was set up by the Muslim Brotherhood’s local arm in Indonesia.

His successor, Bacharuddin Jusuf Habibie, was more explicitly Islamist than Suharto and his Association of Muslim Intellectuals (ICMI) conducted a campaign against Christians, Hindus and Buddhists. It helped purge non-Muslims from government while Islamizing the government and Indonesia’s key institutions.

Habibie had been the Chairman of ICMI and ICMI’s Islamists played a key role in moving Suharto out and moving him in. It was obvious why Obama would have considered the Islamization of Indonesia and the purge of Christians under the guise of democratic political change to be a fine example for Egypt.

While we don’t know the full contents of Directive 11 and unless a new administration decides to open the vaults of the old regime, we may never know. But we do know a good deal about the results.

In its own way, PSD-10 tells us something about PSD-11.

Obama’s insistence that human rights be made a core national security interest paved the way for political and military interventions on behalf of Islamists. Obama had never been interested in human rights; his record of pandering to the world’s worst genocide plotters and perpetrators from Iran to Turkey to Sudan made that clear. When he said “human rights”, Obama really meant “Islamist power”.

That was why Obama refused to intervene when the Muslim Brotherhood conducted real genocide in Sudan, but did interfere in Libya on behalf of the Brotherhood using a phony claim of genocide.

Positioning Samantha Power in the Office of Multilateral Affairs and Human Rights at the National Security Council was part of the process that made over the NSC from national security to servicing a progressive wish list of Islamist terrorist groups that were to be transformed into national governments.

Power, along with Gayle Smith and Dennis Ross, led the Directive 11 project.

Secret proceedings were used to spawn regime change infrastructure. Some of these tools had official names, such as “The Office of The Special Coordinator For Middle East Transitions” which currently reports directly to former ambassador Anne Patterson who told Coptic Christians not to protest against Morsi. After being driven out of the country by angry mobs over her support for the Muslim Brotherhood tyranny, she was promoted to Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs.

“The Office” is still focused on “outreach to emergent political, economic and social forces in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya” even though counterrevolutions have pushed out Islamists in Egypt and Tunisia, while Libya is in the middle of a bloody civil war in which an alliance of the Muslim Brotherhood and Al Qaeda controls the nation’s capital.

But even as Morsi’s abuses of power were driving outraged Egyptians into the streets, Gayle Smith, one of the three leaders of Directive 11, reached out to the “International Union of Muslim Scholars”, a Muslim Brotherhood group that supported terrorism against American soldiers in Iraq and which was now looking for American support for its Islamist terrorist brigades in the Syrian Civil War.

The men and women responsible for Directive 11 were making it clear that they had learned nothing.

Directive 11 ended up giving us the Islamic State through its Arab Spring. PSD-11’s twisted claim that regional stability could only be achieved through Islamist regime change tore apart the region and turned it into a playground for terrorists. ISIS is simply the biggest and toughest of the terror groups that were able to thrive in the environment of violent civil wars created by Obama’s Directive 11.

During the Arab Spring protests, Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit had told Hillary Clinton that his government could not hand over power to the Muslim Brotherhood. “My daughter gets to go out at night. And, God damn it, I’m not going to turn this country over to people who will turn back the clock on her rights.”

But that was exactly what Hillary Clinton and Obama were after. And they got it. Countless women were raped in Egypt. Beyond Egypt, Hillary and Obama’s policy saw Yazidi women actually sold into slavery.

Directive 11 codified the left’s dirty alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood into our foreign policy. Its support for Islamist takeovers paved the way for riots and civil wars culminating in the violence that birthed ISIS and covered the region in blood.

And it remains secret to this day.

ISIS purloined rockets from Hamas production lines to attack Israel. Netanyahu marks out wide sterile zone

June 8, 2015

ISIS purloined rockets from Hamas production lines to attack Israel. Netanyahu marks out wide sterile zone.

DEBKAfile Exclusive Report June 8, 2015, 11:28 AM (IDT)
The Grad missile which exploded at Netivot

The Grad missile which exploded at Netivot

Islamic State operatives in the Gaza Strip have been helping themselves to Hamas rockets in recent weeks after furtively penetrating the factory teams operating the group’s production and assembly lines, debkafile’s military and intelligence sources reveal. The jihadis then secretly passed the stolen rockets to their squads for launching against Israel.

By this device, ISIS newly arrived in Gaza has overcome its immediate deficiencies:

1. They are tapping a local manufacturing source to steal rockets, instead of having to smuggle them in from afar through Egyptian Sinai. As the ISIS presence in the Hamas-ruled Palestinian enclave expands, so too will the intensity of its rocket fire against Israel.
2.  The Islamists count on acquiring more advanced longer-range missiles by the same means as soon as they are developed by Hamas’ manufacturing plants.

It is hard to determine how this ominous reality relates to the comments the IDF OC Southern Command, Maj. Gen. Sammy Turjman, made to the heads of the local communities around the Gaza Strip Sunday night, June 7, to calm their fears over the resumption of rocket fire in the last two weeks.

“In the Southern Command we have noticed that Hamas is making an effort to stop the rocket fire, although we don’t absolve the organization of responsibility and will respond accordingly,” the general said.

He added: “Because of a few rockets exploding on empty ground, the IDF won’t embark on an operation in the Gaza Strip and jeopardize the gains we achieved [last summer].”

The problem with these platitudes, say debkafile’s military analysts, is that they represent a repeat of the mistake Israel made on its northern front, by letting the Hizballah terrorists pile up a huge arsenal of up to 100,000 rockets and missiles, all pointing one way – south.
Hamas may indeed be trying very hard to prevent rockets being fired against Israel from the Gaza Strip, but it has not been able to keep ISIS undercover agents out of its manufacturing plants or from stealing the rockets.  Gen. Turjman does not say how the Islamists managed to creep into the Hamas factories or whether they have been able to invade other parts of the Palestinian military organization.
The point is not how many rockets should be fired before the IDF goes to war in the Gaza Strip, but for how long Israel’s leaders can afford to pretend to make naught of the dangerous situation building up there. ISIS uses such make-believe to fuel its policy of expansion.

Israel, Egypt and Hamas are in fact working together, out of their respective interests, to put a stop to the rocket fire from the Gaza Strip. Egypt has been blowing up smuggling tunnels; Hamas contingents are out there trying to nab the rocket teams; Israel and its armed forces, acting on orders from Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, without informing the public, are marking out a broad anti-rocket sterile zone, stretching from the Gaza border to encompass the communities and towns in the south and up to the international airport to the north.

This area embraces a population of 1.6 million and ten cities – Ashkelon, Ashdod, Netivot and Beersheba, long sufferers of Gaza rockets, and further north: Modi’in, Ramle, Lod, Rehovot, Ness Ziona and Gedera. Another Iron Dome battery was positioned in Rehovot, in addition to those defending the south.
Most Israelis are not aware of the size and destructiveness of the long-range Grad missiles, at least three of which exploded in the last fortnight. debkafile has attached a photo to this article to illustrate the deadly weapon now in the hands of the Islamist State in Gaza.
Since Hamas and Islamic Jihad alone possess rockets capable of reaching Rehovot, some 30 km southeast of Tel Aviv and the same distance from the Ben Gurion international airport, it is now obvious that the Islamists have got hold of them, notwithstanding the efforts made by Israel, Egypt and Hamas.
ISIS’s ability to stealthily invade Hamas poses them all with their most daunting problem.

EU says no Iran deal without reckoning of nuclear activity

June 8, 2015

EU says no Iran deal without reckoning of nuclear activity | The Times of Israel.

Officials say it’s ‘essential’ Tehran cooperate with stalled probe into allegations it worked on atomic arms

June 8, 2015, 11:30 am
Federica Mogherini, European Union High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the European Commission, speaks to journalists after addressing the Security Council on May 11, 2015. UN/Mark Garten)

Federica Mogherini, European Union High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the European Commission, speaks to journalists after addressing the Security Council on May 11, 2015. UN/Mark Garten)

VIENNA — Iran must cooperate with a stalled UN probe of suspicions that it worked on atomic arms if the country wants a nuclear deal that will see removal of sanctions, the European Union said Monday.

The cautionary EU statement comes ahead of a June 30 target date for such an agreement.

It was obtained by The Associated Press ahead of its delivery at a meeting of the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency that opens Monday.

Iran denies any work on — or interest in — nuclear arms and has fended off IAEA demands for cooperation with its investigation.

The EU statement says getting to the bottom of the allegations “will be essential” to a nuclear deal.

Iran also would have to accept limits on its present nuclear activities.

US President Barack Obama is expected to huddle with his European counterparts over the emerging Iranian nuclear deal while at the G7 summit of world leaders in Germany this week.

The president was expected to try to push French President Francois Hollande on dropping some reservations about the pact in a meeting on the sidelines of the summit Monday.

France at times has taken a harder line and expressed more skepticism than Washington on the Iran negotiations.

Richard Fontaine, president of the Center for New American Security who worked on foreign policy in President George W. Bush’s White House, said he would advise Obama to deliver a direct message to Hollande.

“What is it going to take to get you back on the bus? Because let’s keep these disagreements behind closed doors, rather than doing this in the press, which is harmful to our position,” Fontaine said.

Times of Israel staff contributed to this report