Pres Obama Dismisses Questions About Netanyahu’s Election Win – Cavuto, via You Tube, March 19. 2015
Archive for the ‘Gaza’ category
ISIS-Sinai Is packing large water tankers with explosives
March 14, 2015ISIS-Sinai Is packing large water tankers with explosives, DEBKAfile, March 14, 2015
(Please see also, IDF braces for Islamic State attack on Israel-Egypt border. — DM>
Egyptian military sources report that the ISIS Sinai affiliate has been discovered rounding up a large fleet of water and fuel tankers and big lorries and packing them with explosives for large-scale terrorist attacks on Egyptian and Israeli targets. The group which calls it’s the Sinai Province of the Islamist Caliphate tried the method out on March 4, using an explosives-packed water tanker to storm an Egyptian military compound in the Kawthar district of the northern Sinai town of Sheikh Zuweid. On March 10, they seized another water tanker at al-Towil east of El Arish, and on March 11, in the same area, they captured two large trucks of the Egyptian electricity company and pushed the drivers out.
Thursday, March 13, Col. Arik Hen of the IDF’s 80th Division said the military was on the alert for a major coordinated ISIS attack on Eilat from Sinai and the sea.
Hamas’ revamped naval commandos could pose a problem for Israel
March 14, 2015Hamas’ revamped naval commandos could pose a problem for Israel, Ynet News, Alex Fishman, March 14, 2015
Although all unit members were killed during last summer’s infiltration attempt at Zikkim, Hamas viewed this as a massive achievement and subsequently trained a new force whose role will be to carry out mass attacks on the Israeli home front.
Palestinian Islamist organization Hamas has completed the reconstruction of its naval commando force, consisting of dozens of trained divers, in order to hit strategic sites, Israeli and others’, in the Mediterranean Sea.
With the development of its underwater unit, Hamas aims to compensate for the failure of the offensive tunnels from the Gaza Strip, which it rules, which were supposed to reach into Israel. From just a handful, the force has grown into many dozens of fighters trained to strike the Israeli home front via abductions and killings.
Hamas’s operational approach sees the naval commandos as one long “tunnel”, extending from Gaza in Israel’s south to Rosh Hanikra in the north, through which it could hit any target along the entire Israeli coast. These could be strategic objectives such as power plants, coal terminals, gas rigs and so on. However, using Operation Protective Edge as a model, it seems that Hamas is training its commandos to create a continuous shockwave for Israeli society through the mass murder of civilians and soldiers.
Hamas’ infiltration attempt at Zikim during Protective Edge (Photo: IDF)
The Israeli defense establishment sees the strengthening of Hamas’ underwater activity – through the establishment of a large and professional commando unit – as one of the main lessons Hamas took from last summer’s conflict.
The Hamas commandos’ successful penetration a kilometer deep within Israeli territory, near Kibbutz Zikkim, is one of the organization’s major achievements during the 50 days of fighting, as this was the only time when Hamas special unit members managed to infiltrate Israel. If not for Israeli intelligence, it is likely the commando unit would have been able to penetrate the community or a nearby IDF base and carry out the mass murder it wanted.
Earlier this week, Egyptian newspaper “Al-Akhbar” reported that the creation of the naval commando unit was intended to harm Egypt’s facilities in the Mediterranean. The Egyptians, who have signed a gas deal with Israel, are worried about damage to the Tethys Sea group’s installation, while accusing Hamas of conducting sea-based attacks on Egyptian naval forces.
In November 2014, an Egyptian patrol boat was attacked as it conducted an operation against smuggling from the Gaza Strip. The attack was carried out by three rubber boats in the Egyptian Delta, near the port of Damietta. The perpetrators seized control of the ship, killed 13 Egyptian soldiers and hoisted the Islamic State flag.
The Egyptians blamed Hamas for supporting and being party to attacks of this kind, and significantly changed the security measures on their ships. Even the commands to open fire have changed, and the Egyptians shoot to destroy Gazan fishing boats that approach them without prior coordination.
In light of the accusations, Hamas leader Mahmoud Zahar was quick to issue a denial in the Al-Quds newspaper, saying that Hamas was not planning to wave underwater warfare in the area.
It was until Operation Pillar of Defense in November 2012 that the Hamas naval force was viewed as amateurish. But since that operation, Hamas was been working on setting up a large professional unit – its people were sent abroad for training, most likely to Iran, and it procured military-grade diving equipment.
During last summer’s infiltration at Zikkim, Israel registered the use of military standard systems, which prevent bubbles from surfacing during a dive. Hamas also has a small underwater craft, known as a “scooter”, for individual divers, and has even published pictures of them for propaganda purposes. It appears that following the collapse of diving tourism in Sinai, the club owners were happy to sell some advanced diving equipment.
The training of the reinvigorated commando unit is largely reminiscent of the training for elite units in conventional armies, including the ability to withstand physical and mental pressure that is customary within professional naval commando units in the region.
The defense establishment and the IDF are preparing for an increased threat from this underwater force. It should be noted that during Protective Edge, this unit only sustained partial damage, and in any future conflict its infiltration efforts will be a force to be reckoned with for Israel.
Palestinian forces detain 500 Hamas West Bankers, to thwart coup and Abbas assassination plot
March 10, 2015Palestinian forces detain 500 Hamas West Bankers, to thwart coup and Abbas assassination plot, DEBKAfile, March 10, 2015
Palestinian security forces detain Hamas activists
[O]ur sources also reveal that the PA chairman has asked Netanyahu through back-channels for a secret rendezvous somewhere in Europe. He proposed avoiding prominent capitals like London, Paris or Berlin, but meeting at a smaller venue for the sake of confidentiality.
Abbas also insisted that this meeting must be concealed from Washington, especially from Secretary of State John Kerry.
The Israeli prime minister has turned him down – and not just because the Palestinian request finds him in the middle of a tough race for re-election.
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Acting on direct orders from Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, Palestinian special forces raided the nine PA-ruled towns of the West Bank in the past 48 hours and detained 500 Hamas suspects, DEBKAfile’s military sources report. Abbas ordered the operation after discovering that Hamas had been hatching a plot for some weeks to stage an armed insurrection against the Palestinian Authority, starting in one of the Palestinian towns – possibly even the PA capital of Ramallah. They would assassinate him in the process of the coup.
Of late, Abbas has kept his distance from Ramallah and his seat of government and spends most of his time traveling in foreign countries, especially Arab capitals, where he feels safer under the protection of foreign security services than he does at home.
The wave of detentions from Sunday to Tuesday (March 9-10) is the most extensive the Palestinian Authority has ever conducted against Hamas’ West Bank cells. Not only prominent figures and known terror activists were taken into custody but also new figures.
Abbas ordered the operation amid a serious dilemma over his personal security.
Before him were reports presented by Palestinian Intelligence chief Maj. Gen. Majed Faraj revealing the preparations in train for his assassination, an event that would signal mass riots orchestrated by Hamas and Jihad Islami, leading up to the seizure of government from the Palestinian Authority – much as they did in the Gaza Strip.
At the same time, Abbas does not entirely trust Palestinian security services or their ability to safeguard him and his regime in Ramallah.
He therefore turned to Israel, touching off an IDF response that had nothing to do with Israel’s forthcoming general election on March 17 – as government opponents have claimed.
The 3,000 IDF soldiers plus 10,000 reservists called up this week were not posted on the West Bank to practice anti-riot tactics for putting down Palestinians disturbances against Jewish settlements – as reported. They were placed on the ready in case it was necessary to go into Palestinian towns and save them from being overrun by the radical Hamas and Jihad Islami.
The Israeli troops also rehearsed a possible scenario that might ensue from the murder of Mahmoud Abbas.
In view of the highly sensitive security situation on the West Bank, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu accompanied by Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon, paid a rare visit to the IDF’s Judea-Samaria command headquarters Tuesday, March 10, to inspect these preparations.
It was the Hamas conspiracy to seize power in Ramallah that prompted Ya’alon’s enigmatic remark that were it not for preemptive military operations, central Israel might now be under missile and mortar attack.
DEBKAfile’s military sources add that way the Palestinian issue has become a football for kicking around Israel’s election campaign, making it hard to penetrate the fog of anti-government propaganda and establish what is really going on.
For example, Netanyahu is being presented by his rivals as having agreed at a former stage in US-brokered peace negotiations with the Palestinians to withdraw to behind the 1967 lines. They have picked out one of the many papers drawn up by the Americans and discarded in the course of the negotiations – this one was written by a Shiite Iraqi academic in Oxford University and was never approved either by Israel or the Palestinians.
Turning to the real events afoot today, our sources also reveal that the PA chairman has asked Netanyahu through back-channels for a secret rendezvous somewhere in Europe. He proposed avoiding prominent capitals like London, Paris or Berlin, but meeting at a smaller venue for the sake of confidentiality.
Abbas also insisted that this meeting must be concealed from Washington, especially from Secretary of State John Kerry.
The Israeli prime minister has turned him down – and not just because the Palestinian request finds him in the middle of a tough race for re-election.
Scandal Rocks the U.N.
February 6, 2015Scandal Rocks the U.N., National Review Online, Anne Bayefsky, February 6, 2015
Setting aside all the legal verbiage, the politics are painfully clear. Criminalizing Israel’s efforts to exercise its right of self-defense against a foe openly committed to genocide strikes at the heart of the sovereignty, well-being, and legitimacy of the Jewish state. Demonizing a democratic society that is ready, willing, and able to ensure the accountability of its armed forces is not about protecting Palestinians. It is about endangering Israelis.
Human-rights law is being perverted for anti-human-rights ends, and it is about time human-rights lawyers — and all those who care about defeating the enemies of rights and freedoms — stood up and objected.
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A report on human-rights violations has been compromised not once but twice.
Four days ago, on February 2, the head of a U.N. commission of inquiry created to investigate war crimes in Gaza was forced to resign after it was revealed that he had taken money from the PLO for providing legal advice. William Schabas’s U.N. job was to expose war criminals and recommend how to hold them “accountable.” William Schabas’s PLO job was to show them how to use the International Criminal Court (ICC) to hold Israeli war criminals accountable. He didn’t think there was a problem.
His conflict of interest did not surface, however, until after the inquiry he was heading had “largely completed” its evidence-gathering, and the writing of the requisite report had begun, according to Schabas himself. But instead of taking the only legitimate route and setting aside the whole tainted exercise, the president of the U.N. Human Rights Council, Joachim Rücker of Germany, claimed he was “preserving the integrity” of the inquiry simply by accepting Schabas’s resignation.
The council — the U.N.’s top human-rights body — had voted to create the Schabas inquiry in the middle of the Gaza War last July. Palestinians garnered support from council members and human-rights authorities like China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates. The United States and the members of the European Union either voted against or abstained. A majority of the states that have seats on the council are not “fully free” (on the Freedom House scale).
The idea of the inquiry was to open a second front in the war, conducted by international lawyers, to tie the hands of Israeli decision-makers — political and military — behind their backs.
Hence, the Schabas inquiry’s mandate was to examine human-rights violations “in the occupied Palestinian territory,” not “in Israel.” The date cited for the beginning of the inquiry was June 13, 2014, because Palestinian terrorists had kidnapped (and later murdered) three Israeli teenagers the day before — and Israeli aggression was a given of the investigation. The mandate never mentioned “Hamas” or its terror tunnels, almost half of which opened into Israel.
With the terms of the “inquiry” set to ensure the desired outcome, Schabas and two others became the council’s tools. They were selected by President Rücker “in consultation” with the Palestinians in the belief that they could be counted upon to deliver a guilty verdict.
Little wonder, then, that Schabas was miffed about the council’s newfound concern over his past activities. He had earlier had plenty to say in public about the subject matter covered by his new position. In 2012, on camera, he lectured about “crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression, all of which I think it can be shown have been perpetrated at various times during the history of the State of Israel. . . . The International Criminal Court is in a position to exercise jurisdiction over crimes committed on the territory of Palestine . . . So much of my effort these times is addressed to try to get . . . the Court . . . to take up this burning, important issue. . . . With a bit of luck and by twisting things and maneuvering, we can get them before the courts.”
This was just the kind of lawyer who the U.N. Human Rights Council would think satisfied its rule requiring the “independence, impartiality, personal integrity, and objectivity” of all its “mandate-holders.”
The council could even be sure Schabas would go after Israel’s prime minister personally. Said Schabas on camera before he was hired: “My favorite would be Netanyahu in the dock at the International Criminal Court.”
His manifest bias, thought Schabas, should have saved him from his not-so-manifest conflict of interest. So he decided not to go quietly, even if it meant taking the council down with him. In his letter of resignation he divulged: “[W]hen I was asked if I would accept nomination to the Commission of Inquiry, I was not requested to provide any details of my past statements and other activities concerning Palestine and Israel.” He assumed that because his “views on Israel and Palestine . . . were well known,” the council was getting exactly what it wanted. And so was he.
What finally clued Schabas in to the fact that the jig was up? Shortly before he resigned, the council tried to save face all around by pretending “this matter” was so very complicated that it required an opinion from the U.N.’s legal office.
With Schabas gone, the legal opinion on the meaning of impartiality has been shelved — though it is a lesson the council evidently still needs. President Rücker moved the deck chairs around, appointing one of the two remaining members of the inquiry, the American Mary McGowan Davis, as chair, and fancies it is now business as usual.
The February 3 letter from Rücker to Schabas accepting his resignation thanks him for his “work over the past six months,” says that the “appearance” of a problem has now been solved, and says that Rücker is “looking forward” to the report, due out in March. Six months preparing the report, a month to go before publication, and the U.N. imagines all appearances of impropriety and contamination have vanished into thin air.
Rücker told McGowan Davis: “I am convinced that you will . . . uphold the highest standards of integrity, particularly the principles of independence, impartiality and objectivity.”
Seriously? Unlike Schabas, McGowan Davis previously worked for the same U.N. employer on the same subject! In 2010 and 2011 she was a member of a Human Rights Council committee responsible for promoting the implementation of the council’s infamous Goldstone Report on the 2008–09 Gaza War. She chaired this follow-up committee in the last months of its work. The Goldstone Report’s central lie was its claim that Israel set out to kill Palestinian civilians deliberately. After Goldstone himself retracted the slander, McGowan Davis told the Jerusalem Post his statement “does not have any impact” and she would continue “to take his report as a given.”
At that time, McGowan Davis had the specific task of assessing whether Israel had adequately responded to the Goldstone Report’s defamatory accusations — and lo and behold, in her own report she found Israel’s response wanting. Apparently her assessment of Israeli “proceedings” in one Gaza war between Israel and rocket-launching Palestinian terrorists leaves her “impartial” and “objective” about Israel’s “accountability measures” in the subsequent Gaza war between Israel and rocket-launching Palestinian terrorists. Her 2011 finding that Israel did not conform to the “international standards” required to avoid the dominion of the International Criminal Court mirrors precisely the end game of her current job.
Furthermore, throughout her work for the U.N. Human Rights Council, McGowan Davis has been a member of the board of directors of the American Association of the International Commission of Jurists, which according to its website is “an affiliated organization of the ICJ in Geneva.” The ICJ participated in the July council session that adopted the resolution creating the 2014 Gaza inquiry. Prior to the vote and only two weeks into the war, this group of lawyers made a statement to the council, judging Israel guilty of war crimes and making a specific suggestion: “[T]he ICJ calls on this Council to establish a commission of inquiry to investigate all breaches of international humanitarian law and gross violations of human rights committed during the Israeli military operations in Gaza.”
Not only did the council adopt the ICJ’s recommendation, it appointed a member of the board of directors of the ICJ’s American affiliate to do the job — Mary McGowan Davis.
Three days ago, she accepted Schabas’s chair with alacrity and promised “a report that meets the highest standards of independence and impartiality.”
In what universe?
There is a reason why the council — along with its Palestinian partners, who are working furiously behind the scenes to salvage the fiasco — is so desperate to plow ahead. We now know that Schabas provided the Palestinians with legal advice about how to move forward with the prosecution of Israelis before the ICC, a step that they subsequently took. There is no doubt that the Schabas/McGowan Davis report will immediately be sent to the ICC prosecutor to assist in deciding whether a “preliminary examination” already underway should become a full-fledged “investigation.” The report’s lack of credibility has put the credibility of the ICC in question.
Setting aside all the legal verbiage, the politics are painfully clear. Criminalizing Israel’s efforts to exercise its right of self-defense against a foe openly committed to genocide strikes at the heart of the sovereignty, well-being, and legitimacy of the Jewish state. Demonizing a democratic society that is ready, willing, and able to ensure the accountability of its armed forces is not about protecting Palestinians. It is about endangering Israelis.
Human-rights law is being perverted for anti-human-rights ends, and it is about time human-rights lawyers — and all those who care about defeating the enemies of rights and freedoms — stood up and objected.
Megyn Kelly & Ingraham Discuss Hamas on Campus
February 4, 2015The Imaginary Islamic Radical
January 28, 2015The Imaginary Islamic Radical, Front Page Magazine, Daniel Greenfield, January 28,2015
(Ask Secretary Kerry.
Please see also Muslim Brotherhood-Aligned Leaders Hosted at State Department. — DM)
Our problem is not the Islamic radical, but the inherent radicalism of Islam. Islam is a radical religion. It radicalizes those who follow it. Every atrocity we associate with Islamic radicals is already in Islam. The Koran is not the solution to Islamic radicalism, it is the cause.
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The debate over Islamic terrorism has shifted so far from reality that it has now become an argument between the administration, which insists that there is nothing Islamic about ISIS, and critics who contend that a minority of Islamic extremists are the ones causing all the problems.
But what makes an Islamic radical, extremist? Where is the line between ordinary Muslim practice and its extremist dark side?
It can’t be beheading people in public.
Saudi Arabia just did that and was praised for its progressiveness by the UN Secretary General, had flags flown at half-staff in the honor of its deceased tyrant in the UK and that same tyrant was honored by Obama, in preference to such minor events as the Paris Unity March and the Auschwitz commemoration.
It can’t be terrorism either. Not when the US funds the PLO and three successive administrations invested massive amounts of political capital into turning the terrorist group into a state. While the US and the EU fund the Palestinian Authority’s homicidal kleptocracy; its media urges stabbing Jews.
Clearly that’s not Islamic extremism either. At least it’s not too extreme for Obama.
If blowing up civilians in Allah’s name isn’t extreme, what do our radicals have to do to get really radical?
Sex slavery? The Saudis only abolished it in 1962; officially. Unofficially it continues. Every few years a Saudi bigwig gets busted for it abroad. The third in line for the Saudi throne was the son of a “slave girl”.
Ethnic cleansing? Genocide? The “moderate” Islamists we backed in Syria, Libya and Egypt have been busy doing it with the weapons and support that we gave them. So that can’t be extreme either.
If terrorism, ethnic cleansing, sex slavery and beheading are just the behavior of moderate Muslims, what does a Jihadist have to do to be officially extreme? What is it that makes ISIS extreme?
Our government’s definition of moderate often hinges on a willingness to negotiate regardless of the results. The moderate Taliban were the ones willing to talk us. They just weren’t willing to make a deal. Iran’s new government is moderate because it engages in aimless negotiations while pushing its nuclear program forward and issuing violent threats, instead of just pushing and threatening without the negotiations. Nothing has come of the negotiations, but the very willingness to negotiate is moderate.
The Saudis would talk to us all day long while they continued sponsoring terrorists and setting up terror mosques in the West. That made them moderates. Qatar keeps talking to us while arming terrorists and propping up the Muslim Brotherhood. So they too are moderate. The Muslim Brotherhood talked to us even while its thugs burned churches, tortured protesters and worked with terrorist groups in the Sinai.
A radical terrorist will kill you. A moderate terrorist will talk to you and then kill someone else. And you’ll ignore it because the conversation is a sign that they’re willing to pretend to be reasonable.
From a Muslim perspective, ISIS is radical because it declared a Caliphate and is casual about declaring other Muslims infidels. That’s a serious issue for Muslims and when we distinguish between radicals and moderates based not on their treatment of people, but their treatment of Muslims, we define radicalism from the perspective of Islamic supremacism, rather than our own American values.
The position that the Muslim Brotherhood is moderate and Al Qaeda is extreme because the Brotherhood kills Christians and Jews while Al Qaeda kills Muslims is Islamic Supremacism. The idea of the moderate Muslim places the lives of Muslims over those of every other human being on earth.
Our Countering Violent Extremism program emphasizes the centrality of Islamic legal authority as the best means of fighting Islamic terrorists. Our ideological warfare slams terrorists for not accepting the proper Islamic chain of command. Our solution to Islamic terrorism is a call for Sharia submission.
That’s not an American position. It’s an Islamic position and it puts us in the strange position of arguing Islamic legalism with Islamic terrorists. Our politicians, generals and cops insist that the Islamic terrorists we’re dealing with know nothing about Islam because that is what their Saudi liaisons told them to say.
It’s as if we were fighting Marxist terrorist groups by reproving them for not accepting the authority of the USSR or the Fourth International. It’s not only stupid of us to nitpick another ideology’s fine points, especially when our leaders don’t know what they’re talking about, but our path to victory involves uniting our enemies behind one central theocracy. That’s even worse than arming and training them, which we’re also doing (but only for the moderate genocidal terrorists, not the extremists).
Secretary of State Kerry insists that ISIS are nihilists and anarchists. Nihilism is the exact opposite of the highly structured Islamic system of the Caliphate. It might be a more accurate description of Kerry. But the Saudis and the Muslim Brotherhood successfully sold the Western security establishment on the idea that the only way to defeat Islamic terrorism was by denying any Islamic links to its actions.
This was like an arsonist convincing the fire department that the best way to fight fires was to pretend that they happened randomly on their own through spontaneous combustion.
Victory through denial demands that we pretend that Islamic terrorism has nothing to do with Islam. It’s a wholly irrational position, but the alternative of a tiny minority of extremists is nearly as irrational.
If ISIS is extreme and Islam is moderate, what did ISIS do that Mohammed did not?
The answers usually have a whole lot to do with the internal structures of Islam and very little to do with such pragmatic things as not raping women or not killing non-Muslims.
Early on we decided to take sides between Islamic tyrants and Islamic terrorists, deeming the former moderate and the latter extremists. But the tyrants were backing their own terrorists. And when it came to human rights and their view of us, there wasn’t all that much of a difference between the two.
It made sense for us to put down Islamic terrorists because they often represented a more direct threat, but allowing the Islamic tyrants to convince us that they and the terrorists followed two different brands of Islam and that the only solution to Islamic terrorism lay in their theocracy was foolish of us.
We can’t win the War on Terror through their theocracy. That way lies a real Caliphate.
Our problem is not the Islamic radical, but the inherent radicalism of Islam. Islam is a radical religion. It radicalizes those who follow it. Every atrocity we associate with Islamic radicals is already in Islam. The Koran is not the solution to Islamic radicalism, it is the cause.
Our enemy is not radicalism, but a hostile civilization bearing grudges and ambitions.
We aren’t fighting nihilists or radicals. We are at war with the inheritors of an old empire seeking to reestablish its supremacy not only in the hinterlands of the east, but in the megalopolises of the west.
Islamic State Deepens Grip in Future Palestine
January 23, 2015Islamic State Deepens Grip in Future Palestine, The Gatestone Institute, Khaled Abu Toameh, January 23, 2015
According to Israeli security forces, dozens of Hamas and Islamic Jihad members in the West Bank have defected to the Islamic State in recent months. Their main goal, according to sources, is to topple the Palestinian Authority and launch terror attacks on Israel.
Some 200 supporters of the Islamic State, who held up Islamic State flags, took to the streets of Gaza City to protest the latest cartoons published by the French satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo. They also chanted slogans that called for slaughtering French nationals, and burned French flags. Attempts by Hamas to impose a news blackout on the protest failed, as photos and videos found their way to social media.
The glorification of terrorists and jihadists by the Palestinian Authority, and the ongoing anti-Israel incitement by both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, is driving many Palestinians into the open arms of the Islamic State.
Hamas and other Palestinian groups are continuing to deny the obvious, namely that the Islamic State terror group has managed to set up bases of power in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.
The Palestinians do not feel comfortable talking about the fact that Islamic State is working hard to recruit Palestinians to its ranks.
The presence of Islamic State in the West Bank and Gaza Strip is an embarrassing development for both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority.
For Hamas, the fact that Islamic State has long been operating in the Gaza Strip is something that it does not want the world to know about.
Hamas cannot afford a situation where another Islamist terror group poses a challenge to its exclusive control over the Gaza Strip. Since it seized control over the Gaza Strip in 2007, Hamas has successfully suppressed the emergence of rival forces, first and foremost the secular Fatah faction headed by Mahmoud Abbas.
But if until recently it was Fatah that posed a challenge and threat to Hamas’s rule, now it is the Islamic State and its supporters in the Gaza Strip are openly defying the Islamist movement’s regime.
When the first reports about Islamic State’s presence in the Gaza Strip emerged last year, Hamas and other Palestinians were quick to dismiss them as “false.”
Salah Bardaweel, a senior Hamas official, said in February 2014 that the Islamic State “does not exist” in the Gaza Strip.
This week, however, it became evident that Hamas was lying when it denied the presence of Islamic State in the Gaza Strip.
Some 200 supporters of the Islamic State, who held up Islamic State flags, took to the streets of Gaza City to protest the latest cartoons published by the French satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo.
The protesters tried to storm the offices of the French Cultural Center in Gaza City. They also chanted slogans that called for slaughtering French nationals, and burned the French flag.
Palestinians waving Islamic State flags attempt to storm the French Cultural Center in Gaza City. Some in the crowd carried posters glorifying the terrorists who carried out this month’s attacks in Paris. (Image source: ehna tv YouTube screenshot)
The protest apparently caught Hamas by surprise. Hamas security forces that were rushed to the scene dispersed the protesters and arrested seven Islamic State supporters.
Attempts by Hamas to impose a news blackout on the Islamic State protest failed, as photos and videos of the demonstration found their way to social media. Needless to say, Hamas-affiliated media outlets ignored the protest. They were hoping that the world would also not see the Islamic State demonstrators on the streets of Gaza City.
Hamas’s biggest fear is that scenes of Islamic State supporters marching in the heart of Gaza City will scare international donors and dissuade them from providing badly needed funds for the reconstruction of the Gaza Strip. Hamas is also afraid that Western officials working with the United Nations and relief agencies will stop visiting the Gaza Strip after watching the footage of Islamic State supporters.
In recent weeks, it has also become evident that Islamic State has some kind of a presence in the West Bank — a fact that poses a serious threat to Abbas’s Palestinian Authority [PA].
Just last week, Israel announced arrests of members of an Islamic State terror cell in the West Bank city of Hebron. The three Palestinian members of the cell confessed during interrogation that had planned to launch a series of terror attacks against Israel. The three suspects were identified as Waddah Shehadeh, 22, Fayyad al-Zaru, 21 and Qusai Maswaddeh, 23.
Until recently, Hamas was considered the number one threat to the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. Now, however, it has become evident that Islamic State is also trying to set up bases of power in the West Bank. According to Israeli security sources, dozens of Hamas and Islamic Jihad members in the West Bank have defected to Islamic State in recent months. Their main goal, the sources, said, is to topple the PA and launch terror attacks on Israel.
Abbas is lucky that the Israeli security forces are still operating in the West Bank, including inside cities and towns controlled by the Palestinian Authority. Were it not for the IDF and various branches of the Israeli security establishment, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Islamic State would have toppled the Palestinian Authority and beheaded Abbas and his officials a long time ago.
Still, Abbas does not feel comfortable acknowledging the fact that a growing number of Palestinians in the West Bank are joining Islamic State. Abbas fears is that if he admits that Islamic State is already operating in the West Bank, this could dissuade many Western countries from supporting his effort to persuade the world to support the creation of an independent Palestinian state. Like Hamas, Abbas also fears that Westerners would stop visiting Ramallah and other West Bank Palestinian cities once they learn about Islamic State’s presence in these areas.
Although Hamas and the Palestinian Authority are continuing to bury their heads in the sand and deny what is there, they cannot avoid responsibility for the emergence of Islamic State in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. The glorification of terrorists and jihadists by the PA and the ongoing anti-Israel incitement by both the PA and Hamas, are driving many Palestinians into the open arms of the Islamic State.
This is something that the UN Security Council members will have to consider the next time they are asked to vote in favor of the establishment of a Palestinian state. Otherwise, they will be voting for the creation of an Islamic, and not a Palestinian, state.
Can Charlie Hebdo’s Spirit Include Israel?
January 9, 2015Can Charlie Hebdo’s Spirit Include Israel? Algemeiner, Noah Beck, January 9, 2015
Grieving Parisians gathered to mourn the victims of the Charlie Hebdo shooting. Photo: Screenshot, Vice News.
[H]ad Palestinian gunmen similarly attacked Israel’s most important daily newspaper and then escaped, would the event inspire such constant coverage or international sympathy? Israel has suffered countless massacres followed by a suspenseful manhunt for the Islamist terrorists; in each of these incidents, the world hardly noticed until Israel forcefully responded and Palestinians died (prompting global condemnation of Israel).
The best response to the Charlie Hebdo attack is to redouble the free expression Islamists meant to stifle. Similarly, the best response to Islamist attacks on the only Mideast democracy, Israel, is to increase support for it.
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The Islamist massacre at Charlie Hebdo has understandably captured global attention because it was a barbaric attack on France and freedom of expression. In a moment of defiant moral clarity, “je suis Charlie” emerged as a popular phrase of solidarity with the victims. Hopefully such clarity persists and extends to those facing similar challenges every day in the Middle East.
Christians and other religious minorities have been beheaded by Islamists for years, but it wasn’t until US journalist James Foley was beheaded that the West cared. The Islamic State raped and slaughtered thousands of Yazidis — leaving the surviving refugees stranded on Mount Sinjar — before the West took notice. But one Islamist besieging a cafe in Sydney, killing two, dominated global coverage for the entire 16-hour incident.
Western leaders and media must realize that religious minorities in the Middle East are the canary in the coalmine for the West when it comes to Islamist threats. And Israel provides the clearest early warning of all, precisely because — despite Israel’s location in a region of Islamists and dictatorships — the Jewish state has free elections, freedom of speech, a vigorous political opposition and independent press, equal rights and protections for minorities and women (who are represented in all parts of civil, legal, political, artistic, and economic life), and a prosperous free market economy.
But had Palestinian gunmen similarly attacked Israel’s most important daily newspaper and then escaped, would the event inspire such constant coverage or international sympathy? Israel has suffered countless massacres followed by a suspenseful manhunt for the Islamist terrorists; in each of these incidents, the world hardly noticed until Israel forcefully responded and Palestinians died (prompting global condemnation of Israel).
However, when there is an attack in Europe, North America, or Australia, there is widespread grief, solidarity, and an acceptance of whatever policy reaction is chosen. But when Israel is targeted, there is almost always a call for “restraint,” as happened last November after fatal stabbings by Palestinian terrorists in Tel Aviv and the West Bank.
If two Palestinians entered a European or North American church and attacked worshipers with meat cleavers, killing five people, including priests, the outrage would be palpable in every politician and journalist’s voice. But when Israelis were victims of such an attack, Obama’s reaction was spineless and tone deaf. Did Obama condemn the Charlie Hebdo massacre by noting how many Muslims have died at the hands of French military forces operating in Africa and the Middle East? Of course not. Such moral equivocation would be unthinkable with any ally or Western country except Israel.
Similarly, would Secretary of State John Kerry ever suggest that the Islamic State is somehow motivated by French policies (whether banning Muslim headscarves at public schools or fighting Islamists in Mali)? Obviously not. Yet Kerry did just that sort of thing with Israel when he suggested that the Islamic State is driven by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
And the media’s anti-Israel bias is well known but became even more obvious when they couldn’t get a simple story about vehicular terrorism against Israelis correct. Compare how The Guardian writes accurate headlines when France or Canada suffers an Islamist car attack but not when Israel does.
Consider all of the justifiable news coverage and outrage over the 2013 Boston bombings, and imagine if one of those happened every week. Would anyone dare suggest that the US make peace with any Islamists demanding changes to US policy? And yet Israel had such bomb attacks almost every week of 2002 and was invariably asked to restrain itself and make concessions to the very people bombing them (as happened again last summer, when Hamas fired thousands of rockets at Israel).
As Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has ruefully observed, “There is a standard for dictatorships, there is a standard for democracies, and there is still a third standard for the democracy called Israel.”
Even when compared to Western democracies, what other country gives incredibly forgiving medical care to terrorists and agrees to treat the children of those working to destroy it? Israel is where a Hamas family member finds refuge when he is a gay convert to Christianity but this is yet another inconvenient fact for the mainstream media (as is the fact that some Israeli Arabs supported the IDF’s 2014 war against Hamas). Why report what contradicts the one-sided, anti-Israel narrative that the media and groups like Human Rights Watch have adopted? That narrative is only reinforced on college campuses (leftist college history professors openly supported Hamas last summer). Nevertheless, US funding of anti-Israel groups continues to aggravate the misinformation problem.
Israel is still the country that everyone loves to hate. So it’s the cheap way to please Muslim voters in Europe and oil producers in the Gulf. But what happens to Israel eventually comes to the West, because Israel is an extension of the West. And just as surrendering Czechoslovakia failed to appease the expansionist appetite and murderous rampage of Nazi totalitarianism, so too will feeding Israel to Islamist totalitarianism fail to appease that movement. In the end, there is no set of concessions — short of civilizational surrender — that the Islamists will accept.
Nevertheless, an EU court decided to remove Hamas from the European Union’s terror list, even though Hamas is responsible for scores of terrorist attacks that have murdered hundreds of Israelis, North Americans, and Europeans, and has a charter calling for the destruction of Israel. And Western European countries have voted for Palestinian statehood at the UN and in their parliaments, effectively rewarding Palestinian terrorism and intransigence. Europe supports the Palestinian Authority as if Hamas couldn’t overthrow it in the West Bank as easily as Hamas did in Gaza Strip in 2007. How can Europe not know that Hamas has designs on the West Bank and that any Israeli withdrawal from that territory will only facilitate such a takeover? And how can Europe believe that Israel could ever make peace with Hamas, which has launched three unprovoked wars on Israel in the last five years (in the decade since Israel withdrew from Gaza)?
Moreover, if lofty concerns about self-determination and human rights are the true motivation behind Europe’s vocal support for Palestinian independence (despite its undemocratic and violent record), why is Europe deafeningly quiet on Kurdish statehood? Given that six million Jews were annihilated by a genocide on European soil, Europe’s hypocrisy on Israel should embarrass the continent even more.
Worse still, Europe’s gestures of appeasement only encourage the Islamists. The best response to the Charlie Hebdo attack is to redouble the free expression Islamists meant to stifle. Similarly, the best response to Islamist attacks on the only Mideast democracy, Israel, is to increase support for it.
IDF pulls units from locations bordering Gaza, ignoring rising Egyptian military and al Qaeda activity
January 4, 2015IDF pulls units from locations bordering Gaza, ignoring rising Egyptian military and al Qaeda activity, DEBKAfile, January 4, 2015
Egyptian troops battling terrorists in Sinai
Israelis living in a string of villages and towns bordering on the Gaza Strip protested in vain against Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon’s decision to withdraw the military presence keeping them safe, especially since the summer war on Gaza.
Four significant security events in the last 48 hours on both sides of the border added to their concerns:
Their government, at its weekly cabinet meeting in Jerusalem Sunday, Jan. 4, set up a committee to expedite the transfer of the bulk of IDF facilities from the center of the country to the south.
At the same time, Israelis living in the south within range of the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip saw the soldiers heading out and were advised to put their trust in local paramilitary “preparedness squads” taking over from the army. The local population believes that they are not up to the job of safeguarding them from more terrorist aggression – by missile, tunnel or intrusion.
Also Sunday, Egypt began expanding the security buffer zone along the 14km of the Gaza-Sinai-Israel border, doubling its breadth from one half to a whole kilometer. The mostly Palestinian inhabitants of this zone were evacuated.
Saturday, Jan. 3, Egyptian troops raided three towns in northern Sinai: Rafah (which is part located in the Gaza Strip), El Arish and Sheikh Zuweid, killing 7 militants of Ansar Beit al-Maqdis, which last month pledged allegiance to the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, and jihad against Egypt and Israel.
A few hours later, an Egyptian army explosives expert was killed and several soldiers injured when a large bomb planted on a road in Sheikh Zuweid blew up when they tried to dismantle it.
Saturday night, the IDF commander of the Gaza Division, Brig. Gen. Itay Virov tried to calm dwellers across from the Gaza Strip, who were up in arms about the withdrawal of their military safety net. He addressed members of Kibbutz Nahal Oz with a rare burst of frankness. He spoke of military policy, but his words no doubt reflected the strategic thinking of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Ya’alon, the outgoing Chief of Staff, Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz, and his successor next month Maj. Gen. Gadi Eisenkott.
The general may be commended for laying the truth about official policy on the table. However, instead of calming his audience, he bared evaluations that may give the rest of the country sleepless nights as well.
Here are the high points of his Nahal Oz lecture:
- Israel can’t deter Gazan Palestinians from making war, because they have no other options. So deterrence in this case is an empty value.
- Israel deliberately avoided going all the way to remove Hamas from power in Gaza in the summer war because salafist jihadists and al Qaeda would have moved in to replace them. It was deemed better to rely on Egypt to grapple with the terrorist threat, including al Qaeda, rather than the IDF.
- Brig. Virov termed the last Gaza operation a campaign based on the doctrine of prevention rather than a war of aggression.
- The political wing of Hamas looks after the population and wants peace and quiet, whereas the military wing lost no time in restoring the tunnels Israel blew up, conducting scores of test launches of rockets, and training hard for the next round of combat with Israel.
- Israel therefore has no option but to prepare for a replay of Defense Edge with operations 2, 3 or even 4. Hamas must be degraded militarily each time – but not so far as to be rendered incapable of buttressing the Hamas regime.
- The conclusion drawn from Gen. Virov’s lecture was that the Netanyahu government has provided Hamas-Gaza with a political and military guarantee of safety.
Like all policies, even those well thought out, this one too carries a price tag.
The general spoke of Hamas in terms of an independent entity whose operations and impact are confined to the Gaza Strip. He refrained from mentioning that, as recently as December, both of Hamas’ branches, the military and the political, jumped aboard the Iran-led Iraqi-Syrian-Hizballah alliance. This Palestinian group is now subject to Tehran’s policy decisions and directives. This omission from Israel’s policy calculations could be dangerous. Clearly, an undefeated Hamas remains a lasting menace.
Tehran’s decisions regarding Hamas may have an overarching effect, possibly touching on the moves directed by President Barack Obama. (See our Jan. 1 article on Obama’s New Year gift to Israel and the Middle East.).
Israel’s policy of relying on the Egyptian army to contain Al Qaeda’s Sinai network also comes at a price.
For now, Israel has quietly consented to large-scale Egyptian military strength entering Sinai: One and a half divisions, including fighter squadrons and tank battalions, have taken up positions, nullifying the key demilitarization clause of their 1979 peace treaty.
And that’s just for starters.
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