An unnamed Hamas official said the terror group has been negotiating with Israel via Egyptian intelligence services, according to BBC News. The report said terrorists would stop firing missiles at Israeli civilians “within hours.” Israeli officials have not responded to the report.
The report linked the rocket fire – dozens over the past week, including more than 50 on Thursday alone – to Israel’s manhunt for the killers of Eyal Yifrah, Gil-Ad Sha’ar and Naftali Fraenkel, and to the Arab rioting in Jerusalem over the the murder of Mohammed Abu Khdeir. The network did not mention the fact that more than 300 rockets have been fired from Gaza since the end of Operation Pillar of Defense in November, 2012.
Hamas has threatened to “open the gates of hell” if Israel invades the Gaza Strip, where the terror group has ruled since 2006. Since the beginning of the Oslo War in September, 2000, terrorists have fired more than 12,000 rockets over the Gaza border at civilians inside Israel, some reaching as far as the outskirts of Jerusalem, 90 kilometrers away.
Israel continued Thursday night to mass troops on the Gaza border ahead of a possible operation to reign in the rockets.
Gershon Baskin, a veteran left-wing activist who claims to have negotiated the 1,027 terrorist-for-Gilad Shalit deal, wrote on his Facebook page that he had warned the Hamas leadership that Israel is committed to “taking firm decisive military action against Hamas leaders, even though it was known that Hamas was not shooting the rockets” (how,exactly, Baskin knows this is unclear). Baskin also indicated he had information that Israel would resume targeted killings of Hamas leaders if the rockets do not stop.
“A senior Israeli official who I spoke with at the 4th of July party at the US Ambassador’s residence, told me last evening (knowing that I would pass the message to Gaza) that Israel was extremely serious and that if the rockets did not stop, senior Hamas leaders would pay with their lives. Last evening one of the Hamas leaders sent me a message stating that they (Hamas) were doing everything in their power to stop the rockets and that their mission was not easy,” Baskin wrote.
Not that the warning helped, at least in the initial term: Palestinian terrorists from Gaza fired multiple rockets at Israeli communities early Friday morning.
The terrorist rocket fire from Hamas-controlled Gaza continued Sunday afternoon. Twelve rockets struck Israel in total in the latest salvo, and landed in the Eshkol and Shaar Hanegev regions. One of the rockets exploded inside a Jewish community and caused a fire to break out. No one was hurt.
Terrorists have fired a total of more than 110 rockets at Israel in the escalation that took place in recent weeks, following the abduction and murder of three yeshiva students and the subsequent IDF operation against Hamas in Judea and Samaria. Most of these rockets struck empty spaces. Ten rockets were intercepted by the Iron Dome system.
A military source rejected the criticism of the IDF’s policy of restraint vis-a-vis the escalation in Gaza. A military source said that the IDF has the capacity to carry out any operation in Gaza, including its reconquest, but “the circumstances, conditions and consequences” must be examined.
The source said that the IDF is raising its level of preparedness, but that Israel prefers to avoid escalation and prevent “a general conflagration.”
The response to the murder of the three abducted Israeli teens, Eyal Yifrah, Gilad Shaar, and Naftali Fraenkel, has been predictable in its call for restraint and moderation. Left-wing organizations like the Israeli political party Meretz, the New Israel Fund, and J Street, wedded to nebulous and self-serving concepts like “social justice,” ramble on about calm, measure, reconciliation, and the larger interests of communal peace — as if avowedly vicious and homicidal entities like Hamas and its offshoots will feel humbled and ashamed of their murderous practices and will experience a benign change of heart.
In fact, they are busy celebrating what they regard as a revanchist victory — indeed, candies were handed out to mark the abduction and the ambulance ferrying the bodies of the slain teens was pelted with stones and spray-painted by Palestinian villagers — and will not be deterred from carrying out further atrocities in the future if they are allowed to get away with them. Perhaps the principals of our conciliatory organizations would feel differently if their own children had been kidnapped, tortured, and killed. But one thing is certain: for all their “prayers for the suffering families” and “calls for peace,” they are incapable of imagining what their own people endure and are barren of genuine feeling, while full of empathy and concern for their assailants, who wish only for their speedy death and the subsequent extinction of the Jewish state. There is only one word for such flaccid, self-righteous and ultimately self-immolating appeasers: idiots.
As for the Israeli leadership, it’s a mixed bag. Outgoing president Shimon Peres is a grande fromage who over the years has grown gamy and rancid, with a soft European rind. Benjamin Netanyahu should be cut a little slack given the intense pressures, domestic and international, that he labors under — but he is not his father, who was cut in the mold of the pragmatic and unyielding patriot Ze’ev Jabotinsky. (See Benzion Netanyahu, The Founding Fathers of Zionism.)
With only a few exceptions, like Defense Minister Moshe Yaalon, Foreign Affairs Minister Avigdor Lieberman, and Deputy Defense Minister Danny Danon, the Israeli leadership comprises a motley crew best left to their often lucrative but generally undistinguished careers, prone to log-rolling and corruption, devoid of segulah (Hebrew for virtue or inner treasure), more preoccupied with their American holdings and European vacations than with the security of their beleaguered nation.
The theory, of course, that presumably governs their behavior is that diplomacy and treating with perennial enemies or political adversaries — e.g. acceding to American bullying, glad-handing Turkey, subsidizing the PA, victualing Gaza, engaging in outrageously disproportionate prisoner swaps, giving a hostile and often traitorous Israeli media and academy a free pass, etc. — is a way of ensuring the ultimate security of the country. On the contrary, Israeli citizens are rendered increasingly unsafe by the prosecution of such measures.
When it comes to Israel’s Muslim belligerents, anyone with more than an ounce of common sense knows that working with murderers and ideological maniacs is counter-productive. As Caroline Glick has pointed out, exchanging one kidnapped soldier for over a thousand Muslim terrorists is the height of folly. “In every instance, these terrorist releases have led to the murder and abduction of other Israelis.” The result is that Israeli policies “have placed targets [on] the backs of every citizen of Israel.” How, then, should Israel have responded to Hamas, the abductors of Gilad Shalit? The terrorist organization should have been given three days to return its captive, or risk its total destruction, which Israel has the power to accomplish. There is, really, no other effective way of dealing with a musteline pack of jihadist predators and barbarians than to credibly threaten it with extinction. Gilad Shalit would have been back home in record time, and the three Israeli teens would not have been abducted and killed. The thousands of Israeli citizens murdered and maimed in the various intifadas would still be alive and hale.
The time for temporizing, fruitless negotiations, so-called realist politics, and tolerance of an active and toxic fifth column that diligently and indefatigably strives to undermine the safety of Israeli citizens and the security of the state, is demonstrably over.
The heinous events that have just occurred should be change accelerators in Israeli thinking to redeem the political and moral parvitude too many of its leaders have exhibited for so many years. If the IDF doesn’t smash utterly the terrorist infestations that have wrought so much harm on the country and will continue to do so, then there is no forgiving, international opinion and diplomatic pressures notwithstanding. At the same time, every left-wing media outlet and treasonous university department in the country should be rigorously monitored and in some cases, if necessary, shut down. Much of the Shomron must be annexed. Now may be the time for the imposition of martial law in order to evade the insidious complicities of the Supreme Court. Without these determined initiatives, such events as we have just witnessed will inevitably keep happening — rocket attacks, abductions, killings, the disruption of ordinary life, the whole ball of filthy wax. For such a sensible if aggressive policy of vigorous, comprehensive, and meaningful retaliation, rather than tit-for-tat reprisals, is nothing less than a kind of mitzvah with social, ethical, and national implications.
Many Western commentators have adopted the narrative that al Qaeda and its ilk are the exception to the “religion of peace” — Islam.
However, the rise of “political Islam,” the brainchild of the Muslim Brotherhood, is more akin to a highly infectious disease. No vaccine is available; its spread can only be halted by identifying and eliminating the sources of infection. Yet, despite the mortal danger posed by the increasingly violent global jihadist movement, willful blindness persists in the United States and the West.
Once the Soviet Union imploded and Islamist fundamentalism exploded, Muhammad replaced Marx and Lenin, and radical Islam replaced the socialist-nationalist doctrines of the Arab revolutionaries. The collapse of the Soviet Union served as the catalyst for an alliance between radical Sunni and Shiite movements that helped to revive Islamist fundamentalism. The spread of the Islamist ideology was paid for by the oil-rich Arab/Muslim states, which also used their money to buy Western “opinion makers,” including businessmen, politicians, the media, and academics.
New communication technologies allowed the increasingly vitriolic Islamist rhetoric to spread instantaneously. Instead of taking measures to stop the instructive incitement for murder, the West sank further into appeasement, thus encouraging the spread of the jihadist agenda.
While the bloody attacks of ISIS and Hezbollah in Iraq and Syria are portrayed as a Sunni vs. Shiite struggle, the role of Ayatollah Khomeini, as the leader of the “Islamic Revolution,” should not be forgotten.
After successfully taking over Iran, the Ayatollah Khomeini began calling for the unification of Muslims throughout the world, and for exporting his Muslim Revolution to wherever Muslims live so that Muslim domination could be achieved. “We are at war against Infidels,” the Ayatollah told a large group of Pakistani military officers on a pilgrimage to Qom in January 1980. “Take this message with you … I ask all Muslims [emphasis added] … to join the Holy War. There are many enemies to be killed or destroyed. Jihad must triumph.” He stressed that the “Iranian Experiment” should be followed, and that the realization of the true Islamic State should be carried out forcibly and without compromise.
These plans for Islamic unification were accelerated by the Gulf War. The war helped the leaders of Islamist groups throughout the globe to enforce their vision that jihad, holy war, is the only formula for protecting Islam from extinction by the West — led by the U.S. This opinion was and is repeatedly voiced by every Islamist leader. “Bush and Thatcher have revived in the Muslims the spirit of Jihad and martyrdom,” wrote the Palestinian leader of the Islamic Jihad, Sheikh As’ad Bayyud al-Tamimi. He promised that all Muslims “will fight a comprehensive war and ruthlessly transfer the battle to the heart of America and Europe.” Despite the advancement of the ISIS, many in the West continue to dismiss such statements as pure rhetoric. Instead, they are hanging on to statements, made by Muslim and Arab leaders and politicians, that ISIS and the other jihadists are aberrations that should be eliminated.
Yet, the U.S. and other Western countries are trying, again, to negotiate, i.e., submit to demands of their mortal enemies, supposedly to avoid further escalation, often accepting statements the like of which were made by Egyptian Sunni theologian Mahmud Shaltut (1893-1963), in his al-Qur’an wal-Qitāl:
“Muhammad revealed a book [the Quran] containing the principles of happiness. It commands to judge by reason, it propagate science and knowledge, it gives clear rules, it proclaims mercy, it urges to do good, it preaches peace, it gives firm principles concerning politics and society, it fights injustice and corruption.”
He also declared, “The Islamic community is commanded to do only what is good and are forbidden to do what is reprehensible and evil. The Islamic mission is clear and evident, easy and uncomplicated. It is digestible and intelligible for any mind. It is a call of natural reason, and therefore not alien to human intellect. This is the mission of Muhammad to humanity.”
While Shaltut’s argument that “it is the interest of humanity to gather enthusiastically under Islamic rule,” has not been accepted, yet, the U.S. efforts to ignore the Islamic plague and its sources, only help to spread it.
Is He stupid, out of touch, Preparing to close Gitmo, or did He just do His best to emulate Joe Btfspik? Does it augur well for a good outcome of the continuing Iran Scam?
I wrote an article about the ransoming of Sgt. Bergdahl on June 2nd and updated it through June 6th. The thrust of that article is that Sgt. Bergdahl must be tried by general court martial so that legally cognizable evidence (not opinion and not speculation) can be presented and made public. Unfortunately, for the reasons stated, I do not think that will happen. There has been more speculation since June 6th, but little if any significant, adequately verified and legally admissible evidence has become available since then.
Here’s a YouTube video of a June 6th PJTV discussion about why “our” Commander in Chief ransomed Sgt. Bergdahl by returning five high-ranking Taliban commanders to active duty. The discussion includes Tammy Bruce, a conservative talk radio hostess and Ebony K. Williams, an attorney, radio show hostess and Democrat who voted for President Obama in 2008 and 2012. The consensus seems to be that He screwed up royally and appears to have acted for political reasons, hoping for popular approval. Ms. Williams’ conclusion is that He is not necessarily evil but lives in an echo chamber, where He now receives undiluted support from His underlings regardless of what He wants to do or how incredibly incompetent or worse He will seem if He does it.
There are any number of other reasons why He may have acted as He did, including these:
He hates America and wants to destroy transform her in His own image;
He hates the U.S. military and approves of Sgt. Bergdahl and others who also hate it;
He wants to help Vice President Biden seem competent by comparison;
All of the above;
None of the above.
There are doubtless other possibilities. What do you think?
The Iran Scam
Whatever may have been His reasons, they are important if for no reason other than that by ransoming a probable deserter or worse by freeing five extremely dangerous terrorists — likely to result in the killing of honorable U.S. military personnel serving with distinction — and the taking of more hostages, He may well have suggested the outcome of His dealings with Iran.
TEHRAN — Iran’s chief negotiator said Sunday that direct talks agreed between Tehran and Washington are essential, as discussions on his country’s disputed nuclear program are entering a “serious phase.”
. . . .
“We have always had bilateral discussions with the United States in the margin of the P5+1 group discussions, but since the talks have entered a serious phase, we want to have separate consultations,” said Abbas Araqchi, Iran’s chief negotiator in comments reported by state news agency IRNA.
. . . .
Araqchi said the talks with the US in Geneva will only address the nuclear issue, referring to Iran’s ballistic missile program that Washington had hoped to include in negotiations. [Emphasis added.]
The US delegation will be led by Deputy Secretary of State Bill Burns and Jake Sullivan, a White House adviser, previously part of a tiny team whose months of secret talks in Oman brought Iran back to the P5+1 negotiating table last year.
Having apparently agreed with Iran that its missile delivery systems development is none of the business of the P5 + 1 negotiators, what else will the Obama Administration agree is unworthy of discussion because it might undermine the Iran Scam? What does President Obama seek? The public approval of an amorphous “deal” that prevents Iran from having nukes — or, if she has or gets them, from using them — until after He leaves office in January of 2017? Peace in His time?
Until President Obama leaves office in January of 2017 we are unlikely to learn what happened in Geneva or its consequences for the P6 + 1 negotiations. We can expect Him to tell us only pleasant fairy stories. Reasons not to accept them will be deemed racist and therefore unworthy of serious consideration.
Kreitner refers “vicious commentary” about Bergdahl, who, he writes, was only guilty of having “served on the front lines of the American imperial machine with the unenviable misfortune of doing so with eyes wide open.” Let us put this another way. What he is saying is that because he thinks Bergdahl rightfully opposed the U.S. mission, he was a hero for deserting. Bergdahl wrote his parents an e-mail before deserting, in which he famously said: “I am ashamed to be an American. And the title of US soldier is just the lie of fools. I am sorry for everything. The horror that is America is disgusting.” To The Nation, that position makes him a hero. [Emphasis added.]
That e-mail by Bergdahl is most revealing of his disdain for his country. Kreitner , however, sees it as candid and true. As he puts it, Bergdahl only “saw reality too clearly.” He was doing nothing more than “struggling with issues of conscience.” The Army, he writes, was wrong to not inform Bergdahl that he could be let out of duty for issues of conscience, thus forcing him to desert. Got that? It’s the U.S. Army that put him in this position. Of course, Kreitner confuses what this sergeant did — deserting — with an act of conscience. Hatred of the U.S. and disdain for his comrades, which he made clear in his e-mail, is definitely not grounds for leaving the U.S. Army because of conscience. If it were, anyone could leave the armed forces for which he or she volunteered because they changed their mind about their mission.
Kreitner ends by writing that putting “slugs into human flesh” is not the “promotion of democracy.” Only a Nation author could think there is something immoral about fighting America’s sworn enemies on the battlefield.
Is that President Obama’s perception as well? By how many libruls is it shared?
Follow the timeline to understand the impact on Benghazi. It’s provided in the linked article.
…. and now we have the specific tracking of Stinger Missile serial numbers showing they were delivered from the CIA to the government of Qatar; while intended for Libyan “rebels”, but delivered to the Taliban…. and used to kill our guys.
…. AND where do we choose to send the GITMO-5 ?
Although probably more competent, are they President Obama’s kind of guys?
UPDATE, June 9th
In an article at PJ Media titled Fictions as Truth, Victor Davis Hanson lists fantasies President Obama has asked us to accept as reality concerning (along with five other subjects) the ransoming of Sgt. Bergdahl. He lists these:
1. Sgt. Bergdahl was in ill health; thus the need for alacrity. Surely we will expect to see him in an enfeebled state on his return to the U.S.
2. Sgt. Bergdahl was in grave and sudden danger from his captors; thus the need for alacrity. We expect to see proof of that on his return to the U.S.
3. The five Taliban detainees will be under guard in Qatar for a year. We expect in June 2015 to know that they are still there in Qatar.
5. Sgt. Bergdahl served with “honor and distinction.” We expect to have confirmation of that fact once his intelligence file is released and more evidence is adduced that all of his platoon-mates were wrong (or perhaps vindictive and partisan) in stating that he voluntarily left their unit — deserted — to meet up with the Taliban.
6. Sgt. Bergdahl was captured on the “field of battle”; we expect to have confirmation that he was taken unwillingly by the enemy amid a clash of arms.
7. Sgt. Bergdahl was not a collaborator. We expect to learn confirmation of the fact that he did not disclose information to his captors.
8. Bergdahl’s fellow soldiers in his platoon are either partisan operatives or sorely misinformed, and we will shortly learn that their accounts of Bergdahl’s disappearance were erroneous.
9. The U.S. has traditionally negotiated to bring home even deserters, and did so frequently, for example, both during and after the Korean War when GIs crossed into North Korea.
11. There is no law stopping the president from releasing terrorists from Guantanamo, only legal fictions promulgated by right-wing critics of the president.
12. The five Taliban terrorists are now old outliers, rusty, and mostly irrelevant to the war in Afghanistan.
Does President Obama, who prefers fantasy to reality, actually believe them? The pattern continues to become clearer.
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