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Iran prepares to attack Northern Israel

February 22, 2015

February 21, 2015

Iran prepares to attack Northern Israel

By James Lewis

via Articles: Iran prepares to attack Northern Israel.

Take an old-fashioned iron bar magnet and a flat piece of white paper with hundreds of scattered iron filings. As soon as the paper is placed on the magnet, all the particles align around the two separate poles of the bar’s magnetic field. Every iron particle becomes polarized around one of the two extremes.

This is what Obama and Jarrett have managed to achieve in the Middle East. It is not an accident. We know that the two-person cult of Obama-Jarrett have been secretly “negotiating” with the mullahs since the beginning of the Obama years. But time is running out, and everybody over there is planning for the post-O years.

For the Iranians that means moving as fast as possible to capitalize on a historic moment of Western weakness, collusion, and accommodation. The mullahs remember what happened when Ronald Reagan won over Jimmy Carter. They have less than two years to grab whatever they can.

That is why Iranian Revolutionary Guard troops are now moving through Syria into high mountain positions to attack the Golan Heights, the northeastern tip of Israel. Syrian Army forces and Shi’ites recruited in Pakistan and Afghanistan are working under the command of Iran’s Guards.

DEBKAfile has a detailed article on this. (Debka is linked to Israeli intelligence, but this kind of stuff they don’t kid about).

DEBKAfile February 18, 2015, 9:04 AM (IDT)

“Even in stormy winter conditions, the Syrian army continued Wednesday to press forward with Iranian, Hizballah and imported Afghani and Pakistani Shiite forces towards the Golan and Israeli lines. Their immediate objective appears to be the lofty Tel al-Hara mountain fortress, which the Syrian army lost to rebel forces. … Our military sources report that the fall of Tel al-Hara would lay Quneitra (on the Goland Heights) open to attack. …(In) Quneitra… Tehran plans to establish a major military outpost and forward command center up against Israel’s Golan deployment. This is the first instance of Syria’s Bashar Assad agreeing to pass a warfront to Iranian command.”

In response, Israel has conducted a successful decapitation strike across the border, killing half a dozen top Guard officers and half a dozen Hizb’allah planners. Syrian artillery has reportedly killed 200 Guards in a “friendly fire” accident -– but Israel probably knows how to penetrate Syrian battlefield electronics.

Of all the extremely dangerous events that are now gathering momentum in the region, the Iranian-Syrian drive against northern Israel is the most dangerous. The reason is simple. Israel has a sophisticated nuclear, WMD, and missile deterrent, to be used under military doctrines similar to our own. For rational nations, WMDs are a last resort, only usable when a threat is direct and existential. Iran has always played the crazy card, a big show of irrational fanaticism and rage. Maybe they really are crazy — nobody knows for sure.

The mullahs are now trying to push Israel to the wall –- which is when a Western-style deterrent doctrine comes into force. Ayatollah Khamenei, the “Supreme Guide,” has obviously decided this is the moment when America will not defend its former allies. Maybe Obama and Jarrett have actually told him so; maybe Iran has penetrated this supremely foolish and malignant administration. Whatever the case may be, Iran is moving military forces through Syria toward Israel. Iran is also winning power in Yemen (which controls the narrow entrance to the Red Sea). All these moves directly threaten Saudi Arabia and Egypt, as well as Israel and U.S. naval and air force assets in the region.

This is an enormous Iranian gamble, maybe a martyrdom gamble, following Khomeinist war theology.

This is therefore the most dangerous moment since the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. It is a moment of unpredictable confrontation, with nuclear weapons in the offing.

Obama and the Iranians are gambling everything on the toss of a coin.

Israel does not have the manpower to match Iran, Syria, and Hizb’allah at the Golan border. If the Iranians stage a blitzkrieg against the Golan, using a force of fifty or more tanks now located in Syria, Israel may resort to unconventional weapons. These can range from massive electronic warfare to arming the Syrian Sunni rebels, to a wide range of WMD’s.

If the Golan becomes the flashpoint, a likely outcome is a huge regional war, pitting Shi’ite Iran against Sunni Arabs. Israel has long had contacts with the Saudis and Egyptians on how to respond to Iranian aggression. If Israel is drawn into regional chaos, it is likely to support the Sunni powers, who will need all the help they can get.

Iran has a Shi’ite martyrdom creed, which suggests it is trying to provoke an Israeli strike that will predictably enrage Obama and Western liberals, so that Iran can play the aggrieved victim. The Muslim world, which is 80% Sunni, may then back Shi’ite Iran.

The most intelligent form of preemption on the Golan is therefore the most invisible one. Big nuclear bangs are self-defeating. Silent strikes may work. There is now a range of unconventional weapons available to technically advanced nations. However, any local war can spread unpredictably around the Middle East.

Obama has brought us to the nuclear brink. It is vital to understand that this is not an accident. It is purposeful. It is a continuation of the Carter-Brzezinski strategy that put Ayatollah Khomeini into power forty years ago — the first Islamic Caliphate. The Obama-Carter strategy makes no rational sense at all, except perhaps in some drunken faculty lounge. The risks are enormous, and the potential for a major violent backlash against the United States and Europe is very great. Iran now has ICBMs that can reach Europe and soon, the United States.

The single biggest factor in this crisis is the vacuum of American power. For decades the United States was trusted to keep the peace in the Persian Gulf, where Persians and Arabs have been staring at each with implacable hatred for a thousand years, across fifty miles of water.

Obama has destroyed any trust in America. We have “community disorganized” the Middle East.

When Netanyahu comes to Washington in defiance of Obama, the Iranians and ISIS will cheer for Obama.

But maybe the American people will come to their own conclusions.

Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: Anti Semitism, Caliphate, IDF, Iran Scam, Iraq, Islam, Islamic Jihad, Islamic slaughter, Islamic State, Israel, Jihad, Middle East War, Muslim Brotherhood, Terrorism, UN, USA

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The Muslim Brotherhood-ISIS Connection

February 19, 2015

The Muslim Brotherhood-ISIS Connection

February 18, 2015 by Arnold Ahlert

via The Muslim Brotherhood-ISIS Connection | FrontPage Magazine.

President Obama’s ongoing antipathy towards Egypt is no accident. Our feckless president has long had a soft spot in his heart for the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), and Egypt’s removal of the terror group from the corridors of power has rankled the administration. So what is it the Egyptians understand and our president denies? The Egyptian Minister of Religious Endowments insists that ISIS was birthed by the MB.

Dr. Mohamed Mokhtar Gomaa and other Egyptian scholars have explained that while ISIS is publicly hostile to the MB, they share identical goals. Last August, the Ministry illuminated those goals. “They are both waging a war against their homelands with vandalism, destruction and murder—murder on behalf of the enemies of the state who fund them,” read a published statement. Other similarities include the exploitation of women to further their agenda, and the reality that both groups use “lying and deception in the name of religion,” and both have “ignorant and lying” leaders who “use religion to play with the minds of the public,” the statement explained. “The main commonality between the two groups is their terrorist acts,” it added.

A month later, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi, who pledged to support the Obama administration’s war against ISIS, urged the president to recognize the bigger picture of Islamic extremism that extends beyond the borders of Iraq and Syria. He cited terrorist threats in Libya, Sudan, Yemen and the Sinai Peninsula as examples of identical danger posed by ISIS. “We can’t reduce the danger lurking in the region to ISIL (ISIS). We have to bear in mind all the pieces of the puzzle,” he insisted. “We can’t just limit the confrontation to checking and destroying the Islamic State.”

Unfortunately for his nation, Al Sisi’s prescience proved correct: 21 Egyptian Christians were beheaded by ISIS in Libya, where they have established another presence. Such an opportunity was made possible by the Obama administration’s determination to topple Muammar Gaddafi—followed by its refusal to help the new U.S.-backed Libyan government train their police and military. As a result Libya is in complete chaos. Moreover the administration’s political pettiness has allegedly reached a new low: according to Oliver North, Obama denied both Egypt and Jordan targeting information on ISIS in Libya and Syria, despite the decapitation of the Egyptian Christians and the incineration of Jordanian pilot Muath al-Kaseasbeh.

The administration’s behavior in this context runs completely counter to the reality illuminated by Egyptian Foreign Minister Sameh Shukr. “Ultimately this extremist ideology is shared by all terrorist groups. We detect ties of cooperation between them and see a danger as it crosses borders,” he explained.

Part of that mix includes includes Hamas, also spawned by the MB. Writing for the Times of Israel, Ryan Mauro, National Security Analyst for the Clarion Project, wonders why the world agrees that ISIS is morally repugnant even as Hamas gets a pass. “Both implement sharia governance, deliberately target civilians, have genocidal beliefs and seek the establishment of a caliphate,” he writes. He further explains that ISIS’s determination to exterminate Iraq’s Yazidi population is “no more egregious” than Hamas’s determination to eliminate millions of Jews. And the only difference between the MB, Hamas and ISIS is in regard to their method of achieving the same goal. The MB and Hamas wish to establish a Muslim caliphate incrementally, while ISIS is willing to do anything and everything to bring one about as quickly as possible.

Moreover, the MB’s and Hamas’s desire to eliminate the Jews is nothing new. The MB was established in 1928 by Hasan al-Banna, who admired Hitler and wrote to him expressing his desire to collaborate with the Nazi Party. During World War II, the MB made good on that desire. Its members spied for Hitler in the Middle East and formed two Muslim Waffen-SS Handschar Divisions to fight for the Nazis. Following the war, the MB was supported by the West, who saw them as a counterweight to the Soviet Union’s Middle East aspirations. And while some MB members eschewed violence and built schools and medical clinics, others continued to promote violence that included two failed assassination attempts against Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. Hamas was spawned in 1987 by the MB in Israel.

Two years later, the MB’s Mujahedeen army repelled the Soviets from Afghanistan and then split into two groups—one of which was Al Qaeda. And as Americans are now fully aware, MB-educated Osama bin Laden became their leader. Both groups, along with other Sunni Islamists, were inspired by al-Banna’s successor Sayyid Qutb. In his 1964 manifesto, Milestones, he insisted that governments not based on Sharia Law are apostate, making them legitimate targets of jihad.

ISIS has ideological roots that trace all the way back to the Wahhabist strain of Islam founded by Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab during the 16th century in Saudi Arabia. Like ISIS, al-Wahhab believed in a strict and conformist form of Islam. Those who dissented were to be killed, their property confiscated, and their wives and daughters violated. The essential rift between the two groups arises from Wahhabism’s “One Ruler, One Authority, One Mosque” doctrine that refers to the Saudi king, the absolute authority of Wahhabism, and its control of the mosques and their teachings. ISIS rejects this doctrine, which explains why Saudi Arabia feels as threatened as anyone else by their rise, even as much of the kingdom still embraces Wahhabism. With the rise of Saudi oil wealth, the West preferred to look at the kingdom’s modernization, even as they ignored the Wahhabist part of the equation.

ISIS’s modern roots can be traced to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian street thug who arrived in Afghanistan too late to fight the Soviets. After a return to Jordan, he went back to Afghanistan a decade later, meeting bin Laden in 1999, but refusing to join al Qaeda. When the Taliban fell in 2001 he fled to Iraq, and in 2003 he set up ISIS’s precursor, Jama’at al-Tawhid w’al-Jihad (the Party of Monotheism and Jihad). It was comprised mostly of non-Iraqis, and al-Zarqawi’s primary targets were Iraq’s Shi’ite Muslim majority. By 2004 his campaign of suicide bombings in that nation made him a jihadist superstar, earning Bin Laden’s endorsement in the process. Al-Zarqawi returned the favor by rebranding his group al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI).

Yet by 2005, al Qaeda began to have misgivings about AQI’s brutality towards civilians. The American troop surge, coupled with Sunni Iraq’s own disenchantment with Zarqawi’s strict sharia rules gave birth to the “Awakening” that allowed the U.S. to prevail in Iraq—until the deadly combination of a Shi’ite-dominated Maliki government looking for payback after years of Sunni Ba’athist domination, coupled with the Obama administration’s precipitous troop withdrawal in 2011, laid the groundwork for ISIS’s current rise.

In 2011, AQI was being run by current ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and had become a largely Iraqi organization. Another rebranding took place as these “Sons of Iraq” became ISI, until their ranks were swelled by former commanders and soldiers in Saddam’s military. With the addition of new troops, Baghdadi opened a second front in Syria, once again targeting Shi’ite Muslims and their Shia sub-sect Alawite rulers led by Bashar Assad. When Syrian became part of the equation, ISI became ISIS.

And while all of this was occurring, Obama not only ignored the metastasizing threat, but used his 2012 presidential campaign to assure the American public that al Qaeda had been “decimated” and terror was “on the run.” More accurately, ISIS has been on a roll, seizing large swaths of both Iraq and Syria, along with billions of dollars, courtesy of bank seizures and oil revenue that make them the richest terrorist organization in the history of the world.

Moreover despite the “conventional wisdom” that al Qaeda and ISIS are enemies, the terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo indicates there was at least some indication that al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) and ISIS worked together to perpetrate that atrocity.

On 25 December, Egypt declared the MB a terrorist organization, with the Egyptian courts dissolving nearly all of its institutions, organizations and charities. By contrast on Feb. 4, Obama hosted a meeting at the White House with 14 Muslim leaders, including Azhar Azeez, President of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), and Hoda Elshishtawy of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC).

Both groups were founded by members of the MB.

Former congressman Pete Hoekstra was incensed. The Michigan Republican insisted it was “absolutely outrageous” for Obama to invite “the Muslim Brotherhood into our government to meet with the White House.” “These are people who are committed to destroying our way of life,” the Michigan Republican warned. “The policy failures go on and on and on, and that’s how we need to be addressing this president and challenging him that his policies are just not working.”

Such challenges will have to overcome that complicity, as well as the grim determination by this administration not to link terror with Islam. Both challenges are epitomized by the Summit on Countering Violent Extremism beginning today. As the AP explains, the Summit will “highlight domestic and international efforts to prevent extremists and their supporters from radicalizing, recruiting and inspiring others, particularly disaffected young people.”

The words “Islamist” or “terror?” Nowhere to be found. As for complicity, one of the Summit’s attendees is the Islamic Society of Boston (ISB) an organization with extensive ties to terror, including former Cambridge mosque worshipper Ahmad Abousamra who is currently ISIS’s top propagandist, as well as the Tsarnaev brothers who carried out the Boston Marathon bombing. The Cambridge mosque, ISB’s first house of worship was founded in 1982 by Abdulrahman Alamoudi, currently serving a 23-year prison term for his conviction as an al Qaeda fundraiser. Yusuf Qaradawi, the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, was a founding trustee at the ISB’s second mosque in Roxbury.

One of the Obama administration’s ostensible ideas for preventing recruitment and radicalization? State Department spokesperson Marie Harf, epitomized their enduring recklessness, insisting we cannot “kill” our way to victory against ISIS. “We need, in the longer term, medium and longer term, to go after the root causes that lead people to join these groups, whether it’s lack of opportunity for jobs,” she declared.

Jobs? Twenty-one Egyptian Christians went to Libya in search of jobs. ISIS decapitated every one of them.

The Obama administration is morally bankrupt. And as the history of the MB-ISIS connections presented here suggests, it is only a matter of time before Americans pay an unconscionable price for that bankruptcy.

Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: Anti Semitism, Caliphate, Egypt, Hamas, Iraq, Islam, Islamic Jihad, Islamic slaughter, Islamic State, Israel, Jerusalem, Jihad, Middle East War, Syria, Terrorism, Turkey, USA

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Egypt Sisi Islamic Reformer ISIS Terrorism

February 17, 2015

Egypt Battles ISIS and Sharia Supremacism

by Andrew C. McCarthy

February 16th, 2015 – 9:50 am

via Egypt Sisi Islamic Reformer ISIS Terrorism | Ordered Liberty.

How does Egypt differ from Saudi Arabia and Qatar? Two ways: (1) It was not invited to join President Obama’s ballyhooed “coalition” of Arab Muslim states fighting against ISIS, and (2) it is actually fighting against ISIS.

Obama, of course, has aligned himself with the anti-American, anti-Western and anti-Semitic Muslim Brotherhood, which, like ISIS, wants to impose sharia globally. Thus the State Department continues to host and consult with the Brotherhood about the future of Egypt, even though the Brotherhood has been outlawed as a terrorist organization – the government it dominated having been ousted from power after millions of Egyptians took to the streets to demand its removal.

Meanwhile, the new government of President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who was elected by a wide margin after the Brotherhood was cashiered, is taking the fight to ISIS – including cooperating with Israel in the Sinai, where ISIS is working with Hamas (the Brotherhood’s Palestinian branch), as Caroline Glick detailed last week, here.

Moreover, the New York Times reports that Egypt is conducting airstrikes against ISIS’s new operations base in Libya (the country that Islamists have destabilized and largely overrun thanks to President Obama’s decision to help Islamists overthrow the Qaddafi regime). Unlike the former Brotherhood government that freed jihadist leaders and abetted the persecution of Coptic Christians, Sisi’s government is attacking the jihadists to avenge ISIS’s savage murder of Egyptian Christians. The Times’ David Kirkpatrick notes that:

The Egyptian military said on Monday that it had carried out two rounds of airstrikes in Libya in retaliation for the beheading of more than a dozen Egyptian Christians by a branch of the Islamic State extremist group there.

In a statement Monday morning, the Egyptian military said that it had conducted airstrikes at dawn against training camps and arms depots of the Islamic State group in Libya, but it did not provide further details. The Foreign Ministry said that Egyptian warplanes had struck Derna, a town in eastern Libya that is a hub of Islamist militancy.

* * * * * * *

In a televised address late Sunday night, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi of Egypt vowed that his country would take action to avenge the killings.

“Egypt preserves the right to respond, with the appropriate manner and timing, in order to carry out retribution on those killers and criminals who are stripped of the most basic of human values,” Mr. Sisi said.

The Egyptian military said in a statement issued around 8:30 a.m. that the dawn strikes were “retribution and response to the criminal acts of terrorist elements and organizations inside and outside the country.”

“We stress that revenge for the blood of Egyptians, and retribution from the killers and criminals, is a right we must dutifully enforce,” the statement said. Egyptian state television showed footage of F-16s taking off in the dark as the statement was read on the air.

* * * * * * *

Egypt’s air assault came less than 12 hours after the main Islamic State group released a video online that appeared to show fighters from the group’s self-proclaimed Tripolitania Province beheading more than a dozen Egyptian Christians.

The Christians were among the thousands of Egyptians who routinely travel across the border to Libya to find work in its oil-rich economy, forging a deep connection between the two neighboring states. About 20 Egyptian Christians disappeared around the coastal city of Surt weeks ago, and last month the Tripolitania Province released a picture showing that it had captured them.

As Roger Simon and Ray Ibrahim have recounted, Sisi, a devout Muslim, began this year by admonishing Islam’s most influential scholars at al-Azhar University that Islam must reform – that it must, in his words, have a “religious revolution.” He was not simply making the fatuous but oft-repeated claims that Islam is innately peaceful and predominantly practiced in moderation. He was imploring sharia jurists to reject unambiguously both violent jihadism and, crucially, the scripturally-rooted ideology that fuels this terrorism:

It’s inconceivable that the thinking that we hold most sacred should cause the entire umma [Islamic world] to be a source of anxiety, danger, killing and destruction for the rest of the world. Impossible!

That thinking—I am not saying “religion” but “thinking”—that corpus of texts and ideas that we have sacralized over the years, to the point that departing from them has become almost impossible, is antagonizing the entire world.

So here we have what American officials have always said we’ve desperately needed: A respected Muslim leader of a vitally important Muslim country who is courageously opposing – in word and deed – the jihadists and their ideology. And what is the president of the United States doing? He is denying them the support they need and driving them into the arms of Vladimir Putin.

Besides remaining miffed that Egypt has outlawed the Brotherhood, Obama is busy helping Iran become a nuclear power – even as Iran-backed terrorists seize Yemen and target Israel. So Russia has moved in, pledging to aid economically strapped Cairo in both fighting terrorists and building a nuclear power industry.

If President Obama did not have a disastrous foreign policy, he’d have no foreign policy. Our Islamic allies in combating “violent extremism” are not sharia-supremacists like the Muslim Brotherhood and the regimes in Saudi Arabia and Iran. Our ally is Egypt.

Update: PJ Media’s Patrick Poole catches al-Jazeera — the jihadist propaganda arm hosted by President Obama’s “coalition” partner, Qatar — recycling old pictures of dead children to make it look like they were killed by Egypt in the retaliatory strikes against ISIS.

Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: Egypt, Islam, Islamic Jihad, Islamic slaughter, Islamic State, Jihad, Middle East War, Muslim Brotherhood, Peace Process, President Obama, Terrorism

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Nasrallah: Israel will always be ‘haunted by the blood’ of Imad Mughniyeh

February 16, 2015

Nasrallah: Israel will always be ‘haunted by the blood’ of Imad Mughniyeh

via Nasrallah: Israel will always be ‘haunted by the blood’ of Imad Mughniyeh – Arab-Israeli Conflict – Jerusalem Post.

Hezbollah leader makes comments in speech memorializing group’s martyrs.

Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah said Monday that Israel would always be “haunted by the blood” of Imad Mughniyeh, the group’s former military leader who was killed in an Damascus car-bombing widely attributed to Israel in 2008.

Speaking at an event commemorating Hezbollah’s “martyrs,” Nasrallah also spoke of Imad Mughniyeh’s son, Jihad, as a martyr. Jihad Mughniyeh was killed in an airstrike on a Hezbollah convoy in southern Syria last month that has also been attributed to Israel.

“The blood of the martyr Jihad has revived the memory of the commander Hajj Imad Mughniyeh and returned this brilliant and historic leader to the forefront of events once again, confirming that his presence is still strong in the minds of friends and in the mind of the enemy, which will always be haunted by Imad Mughniyeh’s blood,” Naharnet quoted Nasrallah as saying.

Nasrallah also spoke out against the threat of Sunni jihad groups, saying he supports calls for a national counter-terrorism strategy to confront the jihadi threat. He said that Hezbollah agrees with its political opponents in Lebanon, such as former prime minister Rafik Hariri, on the need for a strategy to fight terrorists. However he added that they disagreed on the need to fight Israel.

Nasrallah opened his speech by strongly condemning Islamic State terrorists who decapitated 21 Coptic Christian Egyptians in Libya on Sunday.

“I want to strongly condemn ISIS’s crime against the Egyptian workers, which cannot be tolerated by any religion. We extend our condolences to the Egyptian people and the Coptic Church and this crime has affected both Islam and Christianity,” Naharnet quoted him as saying.

Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: Anti Semitism, Islam, Islamic Jihad, Islamic slaughter, Israel, Jihad, Middle East War, Terrorism

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Islamic State ‘province’ in Libya claims capture of town

February 16, 2015

Islamic State ‘province’ in Libya claims capture of town

By Thomas JoscelynFebruary 15, 2015

via Islamic State ‘province’ in Libya claims capture of town – The Long War Journal.

One of the Islamic State’s so-called “provinces” in Libya claims to have captured the town of Nawfaliyah. The group has released a photo set showing a large convoy entering the town. The military-style parade likely took place earlier this month. One of the photos can be seen above and the rest are at the end of this article.

In addition to the jihadists’ purported gains in Nawfaliyah, the organization’s fighters seized several key buildings, including radio and television stations, in the city of Sirte. Separate photos posted on social media show the Islamic State’s province broadcasting propaganda from one of the captured media facilities. The WAL News Agency in Libya reports that the radio station has been broadcasting a speech by Abu Muhammad al Adnani, the Islamic State’s spokesman.

The Islamic State’s province also seized control of a passport office in Sirte, demanding that its employees “repent” for their failure to swear fealty to the “caliphate.”

Assessing the extent of the Islamic State’s presence in Libya and elsewhere is difficult, as the group’s propaganda machine has exaggerated its fighters’ gains. (The same is true for the Islamic State’s jihadist rivals.) For instance, press reports said late last year that the Islamic State’s supporters had taken over the city of Derna, with a population of about 100,000 residents. But this wasn’t true.

While the Islamic State has a significant presence in Derna, Abu Bakr al Baghdadi’s followers are not in control of the entire city. Other jihadist groups that are not allied with the Islamic State, including the Abu Salim Martyrs Brigade (ASMB), remain deeply entrenched in Derna. In December, the ASMB announced the creation of the Mujahideen Shura Council (MSC) of Derna, a jihadist alliance that has not sworn allegiance to Baghdadi. The United Nations has even erroneously reported that Ansar al Sharia in Derna, which is part of al Qaeda’s network and allied with the MSC, has defected to the Islamic State. This isn’t true either, as Ansar al Sharia’s leadership has not come out in favor of Baghdadi.

Still, the Islamic State’s network in Libya has been growing. And independent reports confirm that the group has been operating in and around Sirte.

In early February, gunmen attacked an oil field south of Sirte, killing 12 people. The French oil company Total owns a stake in the field, and French officials blamed the attack on the Islamic State’s followers.

The Islamic State’s jihadists have also kidnapped 21 Egyptian Coptic workers in Sirte. The Guardian (UK) reports that the men were captured in two separate operations in December and January.

The Coptic hostages were featured in the latest edition of Dabiq, the Islamic State’s English-language magazine, which was released last week. Photos in Dabiq show the men being marched along the coastline as their captors brandish knives. The images are reminiscent of how the Islamic State has paraded and then beheaded its captives in Iraq and Syria.

Dozens of Toyota trucks are pictured in the Islamic State’s photo set from Nawfaliyah. The photos suggest a large presence of Islamic State fighters, perhaps totaling in the hundreds.

Islamic State propaganda photos showing military parade in Nawfaliyah, Libya

Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: Islam, Islamic Jihad, Islamic slaughter, Jihad, Libya, Middle East War, Muslim Brotherhood, Terrorism

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Getting Paid to Kill Jews

February 16, 2015

Getting Paid to Kill Jews

Monday, February 16, 2015 | Ryan Jones

via Getting Paid to Kill Jews – Israel Today | Israel News.

It is by now no secret that the Palestinian Authority uses large portions of the international financial aid it receives to provide salaries and other payouts to terrorists who kill Jews.

But a fresh investigation by journalist Edwin Black has revealed that this is not some automatic, blind welfare system, but rather a very deliberate effort to reward those who have chosen the path of violence, and therefore encourage others to do the same.

America today contributes about $400 million a year in direct financial aid to the Palestinian Authority, and another $400 in other assistance and investments. The European Union provides a similar amount.

In 2011, Itamar Marcus of Palestinian Media Watch spoke before the US Congress to explain how this money was being cynically used to encourage the slaughter of Israeli Jews by paying healthy monthly salaries to those sitting in Israeli jails, or to the families of terrorists killed during successful attacks.

A year later, two Hamas operatives from the Gaza Strip admitted to an Israeli court that they had gotten into terrorism game in order to earn a decent living. Killing Jews, they said, was the best way to secure a good and steady income.

Last summer, Israel’s Knesset was shocked to learn that in 2012 the Palestinian Authority had paid no less than $150 million to jailed terrorists and their families. It was further revealed that these salaries were determined on a sliding scale according to the length of the terrorists’ sentence. In other words, the more Jews killed, the worse the sentence and the bigger the reward.

In the course of his research, Black successfully sued to gain access to previously court-sealed documents pertaining to cases heard before US courts.

Those documents revealed what Black called a “meticulous, exacting official process” in which Palestinian leaders all the way up to President Mahmoud Abbas were involved in the direct reward and encouragement of terrorism against Israel’s Jews.

One example from the documents details the case of a Palestinian Authority police officer who in 2002 participated in a number of terrorist attacks that left a total of 12 Israelis dead and many more wounded. Following his capture, Israel sentenced the officer to 13 life sentences.

The case was only reviewed in 2009, but the Palestinian Authority decided to retroactively compensate the terrorist policeman back to the time of his incarceration. He was even later given promotions and accompanying pay raises while sitting in an Israeli jail.

A second example involved a terrorist, also a member of the Palestinian Authority security forces, who was killed while carrying out an attack that left two Israelis dead on the streets of Jerusalem.

The Palestinian Authority’s Ministry of Social Affairs subsequently determined that this terrorist, like many others, was “martyred while performing his national duty,” and that his closest living relative, his mother, would be compensated accordingly.

Black concluded by noting that “most taxpayers in donor countries have no idea that their well-intended money is actually financing the flames of terrorism.”

Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: Anti Semitism, Hamas, Islam, Islamic Jihad, Islamic slaughter, Israel, Jihad, Middle East War, Palestinian Authority, Palestinians, Terrorism

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The Only Strategy to Defeat Jihad

February 11, 2015

The Only Strategy to Defeat Jihad

By Jonathan David Carson

February 11, 2015

via Articles: The Only Strategy to Defeat Jihad.

An imam on British television taught me more in a few minutes than any of the books I have read on Islam, some of them quite instructive. After railing at Israel and America, the imam smiled knowingly and said that if God did not want those skyscrapers to fall, he wouldn’t have let airplanes fly into them. I almost shouted, “Then I guess God wants Palestinians to suffer, or else he wouldn’t let Israelis do all those awful things you say they do!”

I hear endless lamentations about our not having a strategy to defeat “Islamic extremism” or whatever the day’s euphemism is. The cynic in me says that what we really need is to get rid of our strategy of helping the Muslim Brotherhood and the mullahs in Iran. But if we have to have a strategy, here it is.

We blow some ISIS bastard to smithereens and shout, “Allahu Akbar!” We take out Iran’s nuclear reactors and say, “If Allah wanted Iran to have a nuclear bomb, he wouldn’t have dropped those bunker-busters.”

Islam holds that there are no “secondary causes,” that is, that God never acts indirectly, by means of natural law, but always directly, willing everything that happens. Fine, then, let secondary causes, cruise missiles, for instance, or rifle bullets, kill as many of our enemies as it takes for them to have to come to their senses. Make them believe that Allah is killing them. Make them believe it for so long that they stop believing the absurd promise that heaven is full of beautiful virgins waiting lustfully for their smelly carcasses. Tell them over and over again that Allah is killing them, and doing it directly, without intermediaries, such as drone pilots or Marine snipers, and they will just want a drink.

Franklin Roosevelt said that the Doolittle Raid was launched from Shangri-La. That’s the idea. We won that war.

People frequently make the mistake of thinking that Islam is like Christianity, only different. They are opposites.

Christianity thrives under adversity. What’s killing Christianity is comfort and ease. Christianity is for people in trouble. Judaism too.

Islam thrives on success. Muslims won one battle, and Mohammed said it was God’s will. That seemed to make sense. They won another battle, and they were convinced. They won another battle, and Mohammed’s boast began to make sense to their enemies. They won another battle, and their enemies were convinced. Enemies fled and fled until they had a mighty empire.

Then they ran into men who knew to fight the long defeat, as the elves in The Lord of the Rings put it, and, lo, the defeat was not so long anymore.

We must fight whether we expect to win or not. We are not cowards who won’t fight without a guarantee of victory from God.

I don’t want to hear any “moderate Muslim” crap. Who are these mythical beasts? The Saudis, who in the name of sexual morality won’t let girls escape from burning buildings improperly dressed and who then buy sex slaves from India and Pakistan? Selling us oil makes them moderate? They won’t even drill for it themselves. We have to do it, just as we have to defend them from Saddam Hussein. What makes them moderate is that we are fools.

I also don’t want to hear that most victims of Islamic extremism are Muslims.

For a while the hobbits sat in silence. At length Sam stirred. ‘Well, I call that neat as neat,’ he said. ‘If this nice friendliness would spread about in Mordor, half our trouble would be over.’

‘Quietly, Sam,’ Frodo whispered. ‘There may be others about. We have evidently had a very narrow escape, and the hunt was hotter on our tracks than we guessed. But that is the spirit of Mordor, Sam; and it has spread to every corner of it. Orcs have always behaved like that, or so all tales say, when they are on their own. But you can’t get much hope out of it. They hate us far more, altogether and all the time. If those two had seen us, they would have dropped all their quarrel until we were dead.

Colonialism has been roundly condemned as oppressive. Maybe so. But what the Islamic world needs is oppression. When the West oppressed the Muslim world, we didn’t have this problem. And the Muslims were better off. They could gradually become sane, as they noticed that Allah was not winning any battles for them.

The reason so many of us are complacent about the threat from Islam is that the colonial era, which ended only recently in historical terms, made us feel safe. It made Muslims feel impotent and made us feel invincible. We got swelled heads and saw too many movies and decided that Muslims were peaceful when they were simply afraid. Now the Establishment reassures them of our peaceful intentions and destroys our best defense: their fear.

Not every Muslim is a terrorist, but Islam is a terrorist religion. Mohammed was a mass murderer and child molester, and devout Muslims have been following his example ever since. As long as there is Islam, there will be “Islamic extremists.”

The only way to get rid of Islamic extremism is to get rid of Islam, and it can be done. Several times Islam has been near collapse, only to be rescued by infidels. The Great Powers of the West, more fearful of each other than of Islam, rescued it in hopes of using it against their European enemies. During the Cold War, Russians and Americans tried to turn the Islamic world against each other. Now both live in fear of it.

Islam will collapse in reverse order. One victory led to another and another and another. One defeat will lead to another and another until either some Obama rescues it or it collapses. The no secondary causes doctrine works only on the way up.

The reason we lost the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is that we don’t know our enemies — or anybody else for that matter. We think that we have to “win the hearts and minds” of Muslims. That is insane. No Iraqi or Afghan is going to fight for us. They will fight for themselves, some of them. Afghans will not fight for America; they might fight to protect themselves from the Taliban.

We don’t have to be liked or even respected. Afghans have to be brave enough to fight for freedom. We can help them be brave by killing some of their enemies. The Muslim god is an illusion, American military might real.

Do not in your arrogance think that Afghan villagers are so much less intelligent than we are that it is impossible for them to grasp the obvious: Allah cannot protect the Taliban from determined Americans. Afghans are like anyone else: they want to be on the winning side. So don’t lose.

Squeamishness means death all around, even death for our enemies. Wait until a nuclear weapon goes off in an American city, or the anti-Semites have their way and Israel is on the brink of destruction. That is when you will see real death of Muslims, deaths of millions or tens of millions.

The issue is how many Muslims we will have to kill. The liberals would have us kill more, far more, than is necessary. We could kill a billion Muslims on a lazy afternoon. We don’t do it because we are not killers, not because we can’t. They, on the other hand, would kill a billion of us if they could. They just can’t.

The more we wring our hands and say we are weary, the more we praise Islam without any real knowledge of it or any intention to obey its cruel rules, the more we temporize, the more we pride ourselves on our compassion and understanding, the more Muslims will die.

Obama is presenting a false American face to the Islamic world, which is getting the idea that Americans are just a bunch of European weenies, just when Europeans giving up on being weenies. We are not “war weary”; we are weary of wars we lose. Even if we win, we lose, as when we put in place a regime in Iraq more beholden to Iran than to us or a regime in Afghanistan no one should have to live under.

Obama is not America, as Muslims are going to find out. The sooner, the better

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Tags: Anti Semitism, Islam, Islamic Jihad, Islamic slaughter, Israel, Jihad, Middle East War, Muslim Brotherhood, Nukes, Terrorism, Turkey, UN, United Nations, USA

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Bibi, Iran’s Nukes, and Military Force in a Changed Middle East

January 30, 2015

By: J. E. Dyer

Published: January 30th, 2015

via The Jewish Press » » Bibi, Iran’s Nukes, and Military Force in a Changed Middle East.

IRAN-US-POLITICS-MILITARY

{Originally posted on author’s website, Liberty Unyielding}

Over at The Atlantic, there’s a comprehensive worldview being built on the question of whether there’s a “military solution” to the Iran nuclear problem, and how Benjamin Netanyahu has Israel positioned vis-à-vis the problem in general.

Jeffrey Goldberg thinks Netanyahu has Israel positioned very poorly indeed.

James Fallows’ conclusion, agreeing with Goldberg on the worldview, is encapsulated in a quote from a war-game director and retired Air Force officer in 2004:

“After all this effort, I am left with two simple sentences for policymakers,” our main war-game designer, retired Air Force colonel Sam Gardiner, said at the end of our 2004 exercise. “You have no military solution for the issues of Iran. And you have to make diplomacy work.” That was true then, and truer now.

I don’t doubt at all the sincere belief Fallows has in this conclusion. But if you unpack the work that led to it 2004, you find that it was based on a fatally flawed premise. (More on that in a moment.)

Moreover, the situation of 2004 no longer obtains. That means that the calculations of two major players must now be different. One is Israel; the other is the United States. The calculations I refer to include not merely the consequences of each party’s actions, and whether the parties’ capabilities are sufficient for the necessary task. They also include what the threat has become, and the fact that it is graver now than in 2004.

Don’t make assumptions about what I mean by that. It may not be what you think.

Why the 2004 conclusion about “military force” is flawed

I’ll begin by explaining my point that the premise of the 2004 war game sponsored by The Atlantic was flawed. There are several criticisms that can be levied, but this is the one that matters most. (And I don’t mean to impugn the care and diligence that went into the war game. You’ll see, however, why I found it fatally flawed at the time – before I was an active blogger – and still do.)

To illustrate what I’m talking about, I’ll quote a key passage from the 2004 war-game summary. Several players were assembled to act out the roles of the Principals Committee of the National Security Council, and James Fallows narrates the events of the game:

The President wanted to understand the options he actually had for a military approach to Iran. The general and his staff had prepared plans for three escalating levels of involvement: a punitive raid against key Revolutionary Guard units, to retaliate for Iranian actions elsewhere, most likely in Iraq; a pre-emptive air strike on possible nuclear facilities; and a “regime change” operation, involving the forcible removal of the mullahs’ government in Tehran. Either of the first two could be done on its own, but the third would require the first two as preparatory steps. In the real world the second option—a pre-emptive air strike against Iranian nuclear sites—is the one most often discussed. Gardiner said that in his briefing as war-game leader he would present versions of all three plans based as closely as possible on current military thinking. He would then ask the principals to recommend not that an attack be launched but that the President authorize the preparatory steps to make all three possible.

The fatal flaw here is posing the problem set by the president as one of creating options for a “military approach” to Iran. That’s why the options end up being, respectively, useless, vague, and appalling.

Asking what a “military approach to Iran” would look like is asking the wrong question. The first question – the right question – is always what the objective is. If you read through the war-game summary, I believe you’ll agree with me that no strategic objective was ever set for the players. The three options outlined above imply three different objectives. If I were the president, and those three options were presented to me, I would ask what could have possessed my staff to forward options one and three.

Fallows relates that the Principals Committee players spent most of their time thinking of reasons why option three was bad. Of course they did. But why they were even discussing it is the real question.

They spent very little time on option two, according to Fallows, which is the only option that would have fit the objective as most Americans understood it: to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons by inflicting destruction on her nuclear program. This is his account of the time they gave to it:

The participants touched only briefly on the Osirak-style strike [i.e., option two] during the war game, but afterward most of them expressed doubt about its feasibility.

This is by no means the only reason to dispute the conclusion the war-gamers came to. But it’s the most important one. They were not asked to respond to a specific objective with options for accomplishing it. In particular, they weren’t told to focus on the objective that was relevant and widely understood to be the potential purpose of military operations – and they didn’t focus on it!

They were asked, in the absence of a specific objective, to discuss some random options for using military force. That tells us nothing about the efficacy of military force. It tells us that the planning process asked the wrong question.*

Fast-forward to 2015

In 2015, we are no longer in the situation of 2004. Three important conditions have changed since then. The importance of these conditions can’t be overstated, in fact, because they change both what’s possible, and what matters.

Jeffrey Goldberg wrote the following on Tuesday (emphases below are added by James Fallows):

Whatever the case, the only other way for Netanyahu to stop Iran would be to convince the president of the United States, the leader of the nation that is Israel’s closest ally and most crucial benefactor, to confront Iran decisively. An Israeli strike could theoretically set back Iran’s nuclear program, but only the U.S. has the military capabilities to set back the program in anything approaching a semi-permanent way.

Fallows disagrees with him, invoking the 2004 war game to assert that “military force,” per se, just can’t get the job done:

Israel doesn’t have the military capacity to “stop” Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, and neither does the United States, at least not in circumstances short of total war.

The key problem with working off of either of these premises, Goldberg’s or Fallows’, is that their framing is stuck in 2004. Here are the three conditions that have changed since then:

(1) The U.S. no longer has the conventional military capability to “set back Iran’s nuclear program in something approaching a semi-permanent way.” This is a relative condition, and it’s because of the loss of readiness in our armed forces, independent of any other reason.

(2) Iran’s nuclear program is considerably advanced from 2004, and setting it back has a different definition now. This doesn’t mean it’s infeasible, but it does mean that no one now has the capability to use a conventional strike campaign to set Iran’s program back to where it was ca. 2004 or earlier. A setback can only be to some much more advanced point in Iran’s progress.

(3) Iran’s geopolitical posture in the Middle East has changed materially since 2004. The regime’s intentions have never changed, but the facts on the ground about what territory Iran can use to menace her neighbors – as well as U.S. interests – have changed dramatically.

I’ll discuss each of these factors in turn.

Decline in U.S. military capabilities

Here is the thing to keep in mind about U.S. capabilities. In 2004, it was correct to say that the capabilities we had were sufficient to contemplate destroying every Iranian facility related to the nuclear weapons program, using conventional means. Not only did we have the weaponry; the weapon systems were in a readiness state high enough to be deployed and used.

There was a political question, certainly, about how hard we wanted to hit Iran. There were a number of factors to consider, and valid reasons why it was not done. But it was feasible to do it, with the arsenal we had readily available.

In 2015, we could no longer conduct that same attack: the attack that was necessary in 2004, against a smaller and less advanced nuclear program. We don’t have the same assets available now, because our strike-fighters, in the Air Force and Navy, are unable to maintain the same level of force-wide readiness they could in 2004. When they’re not deployed or within 3-5 months of deploying, our strike fleet aircrew and aircraft now fall to the lowest level of readiness, and can’t be “worked up” on a short timeline.

There are no extra ready squadrons to call on today, and fewer are routinely present in the CENTCOM area of responsibility than in 2004. The same is true of aircraft carriers and Tomahawk missile shooters. (Read more about how we got to this point here, here, here, here, and here.)

If the president wanted to assemble a force to attack Iran, the force would be smaller than what he would have had in 2004, and any “build-up” would involve pulling assets off the front line in other theaters: Europe, where NATO is trying to deter Russia with an enhanced military presence, or the Far East, where we are trying to deter North Korea and China.

Alternatively, the president could ask Congress for the funding to increase force readiness so that there would be more of the strike fleet available at a given time. Implementing that approach would take at least six months to see the first effects: e.g., one or two squadrons at improved readiness. The issue isn’t just things like pilot qualifications; it’s things like non-deployed aircraft being cannibalized for parts, and the whole fleet being backed up with deferred maintenance.

We continue to keep our global strategic bombers – B-2s and B-52s – at a generally higher level of readiness, and could use them to attack Iran with conventional ordnance. Their operations would be constrained, however, by the limitations of strike-fighter readiness and specialty aircraft (e.g., the Navy F/A-18 “Growlers” that provide electronic warfare support). The bombers need escorts, as they need in-flight refueling; having enough ready bombers isn’t the same thing as having enough ready capability.

Moreover, the U.S. could expect to have limited access to airfields in the Persian Gulf region. It became clear as early as 2010 that Gulf nations would seek to restrain U.S. operations against Iran from their bases, and today, we should expect the Gulf emirates to be very picky about what they allow. They won’t buy into tentative, non-decisive military operations that leave Iran able to retaliate against them. If they fear that we aren’t going to act decisively enough, it’s likely that all three of our major hosts – Bahrain, Qatar, and Kuwait – would deny us the use of their bases for an operation against Iran.

That limiting condition would take out the Air Force as a source of strike-fighters, and make it much harder to operate tankers, reconnaissance aircraft, and AWACS.

Add in factors like the uncertain future of the Tomahawk missile (the Obama administration proposed to end production in 2014), and what we have today is a much more limited set of options than we had in 2004. Although we still have a capability to attack Iran’s nuclear-related facilities, we can’t mount the kind of crippling attack we could have in 2004. What we could achieve now is limited to a smaller effect.

Put it this way: in 2004, the five-day attack described in option two of the Atlantic war game was less than what was needed to impose that “semi-permanent setback” referred to by Jeffrey Goldberg. But we could have mounted that option two attack with negligible inconvenience to ourselves. It was well within our capabilities. We also had the means, by deploying more force, to bring off the larger attack required to administer the “semi-permanent setback.”

In 2015, something like the five-day attack is the very most we could bring off. It was less than what was needed to achieve a semi-permanent setback to Iran’s program in 2004 – and today, it is far less.

Advances in Iran’s nuclear and missile programs

Iran has made significant advances in her nuclear and missile programs since 2004, demonstrating the ability to enrich uranium to near-weapons-grade purity; demonstrating the ability to enrich uranium on an industrial scale; acquiring enough enriched-uranium stock for 7-8 warheads; and demonstrating the ability to boost a payload into orbit, and therefore, inevitably, a ballistic missile to ICBM ranges. Iran had none of these capabilities in 2004, and in fact was not even close to having them.

(It is worth noting that the January 2015 appearance in Iran of a launch platform capable of supporting an ICBM has occurred right on schedule, in terms of when analysts in the last decade thought it would. As of 2015, we have seen most of the developments that were predicted in the Iranian nuclear program in the 2005 NIE – see here as well – and the missile-system developments predicted in that NIE and an East-West Institute analysis published in 2009.)

ICBM-capable launcher observed near Tehran in Jan 2015. (Israel Ch. 2)

The Iranians have also installed missile silos for their medium-range ballistic missiles (MRBMs) – hardening them against attack – and, according to British intelligence, successfully launched a solid-fuel mobile MRBM to a range of 2,000 km (1,200 statute miles) in 2011. The latter feats mean Iran has a no-notice, shoot-and-scoot MRBM capability that can reach well into Europe.

These various advances, and other related ones, have two significant implications. One is that the “bottleneck” of Iran’s nuclear weapons program – the part of it we would get the highest payoff from attacking – has shifted.

There are other, related implications, such as the right way to attack elements of the program. It wouldn’t be enough today to simply blast away at the Natanz uranium enrichment complex, for example; we would have to follow through afterward and actively prevent Iran from rebuilding a uranium enrichment capability, which the Iranians now have more than ample expertise to do. In 2004, it would have been a tremendous setback to them to lose Natanz. They still couldn’t absorb such a loss easily, but their recovery now would be a matter of time and money, not rebuilding from scratch.

At any rate, the bottleneck, or critical node, in their program shifted some time ago, from uranium enrichment, which Iran has mastered, to weaponization of a warhead: that is, fitting a functioning warhead to a delivery system (presumably a ballistic missile, at least to begin with. Cruise missiles would come later). Although we have a reasonable idea of which sites to hit to attack that “weaponization” bottleneck, it is the most shadowy aspect of the Iranian nuclear program. Our confidence in what to hit is slightly lower than it is for the uranium chain or the missile design and production chain.

The other key implication about Iran’s advances is, of course, that the threat has increased. It is greater today, and it’s more imminent. We can less afford to do nothing about it than we could in 2004.

And what that means is that even if we can only do less now than we would prefer, the urgency of doing it has increased.

Iran’s geopolitical posture and the resulting threat

That is one facet of the situation faced by Israel. It’s also a situation faced by the United States, now that Iran is ten years closer to having an ICBM capability, and at the very least could soon be able to hold every partner we have in the Middle East hostage with nuclear-armed MRBMs.

For Israel, however, it isn’t possible to separate the security implications of the nuclear-missile problem from the geopolitical problem. Both work together to change Israel’s security conditions – which is what Iran intends.

Jeffrey Goldberg wrote his piece Tuesday as if nothing has changed for Israel, other than that there are now face-to-face negotiations between the U.S. and Iran. But since January 2011, Israel’s security situation has changed significantly, and Iran is one of the biggest factors in that.

Graphic used by retired Gen. Jack Keane to brief Congress 27 Jan on 4-fold increase in radical Islamic threat since 2010. (Graphic: Institute for the Study of War; CSPAN video)

It’s particularly meaningful to frame the issue by starting from the fact that Israel’s capability against the Iranian nuclear program has always been more limited than America’s. (Stay with me; this does relate to the Iranian geopolitical posture.) It’s possible for America to recover the ability to pressure and intimidate Iran into a level of compliance, along the lines of the strategy outlined in my footnote below. It will never be possible for Israel to do that.

If Israel is going to act, it will have to be with an actual attack. And that means that what Iran has to do is make it as hard as possible for Israel to bring off such an attack. That is a driving facet of the geopolitical problem Iran sets for herself. Iran has larger designs on the region; her plans against Israel “nest” into them. But the focus on Israel is unmistakable, and one of the key reasons is that hemming Israel in with threats will dilute Israel’s capability to mount an attack against Iran’s high-value facilities.

As little as five years ago, Iran’s options for servicing this requirement were quite limited. Hamas and Hezbollah could launch rockets and dig tunnels from Gaza and southern Lebanon. Hezbollah had successfully used an Iranian-supplied anti-ship missile in 2006, but there was little likelihood of such an attack being brought off again.

Iran, however, had begun sending warships to the Horn of Africa for antipiracy operations as early as December 2008, and with the onset of the Arab Spring, her military profile across the region metastasized. The presence of Iranian warships has become routine in the Red Sea, and in 2011, Iran sent warships through the Suez Canal for the first time since the 1979 revolution. Iran has announced deploying submarines to the Red Sea as well. Every new weapon the Iranian navy tests or drills with in the Persian Gulf – including cruise missiles and high-speed torpedoes – it intends to use in its forward patrol areas, which now include the waters of the Red Sea, and potentially the Eastern Mediterranean.

Meanwhile, Iran now has Special Forces deployed in Iraq, as well as wherever the Assad regime is in (nominal) control of territory in Syria. There is intriguing evidence that the Iranians have taken over a nuclear-related facility in western Syria: in fact, that they arranged for Hezbollah to “liberate” it from Sunni jihadists because it’s a nuclear facility, and is being used for Iran’s purposes.

Iran’s aggressively expanding posture across the region. (Google map; author annotation.)

And earlier this month, the Iranians sent a very high-level military delegation to perform reconnaissance in the Golan Heights – just one of the recent pieces of evidence that Iran wants to open a new front for Israel to have to defend. The Iranians want to preoccupy Israel’s military, and increase her insecurity overall by forcing Israel to counterattack into Syria, thus creating the ongoing danger of escalating an already unstable situation.

Google map; author annotation. Inset: Wikimedia Commons, author annotation)

It’s important to understand that Iran’s campaign serves multiple purposes, because its implications for Israel are therefore bigger. Israel isn’t just concerned now about Iran’s nuclear program. Netanyahu has to be concerned about what Iran, with or without nuclear arms, will do with her expanding territorial leverage in the region. Iran gaining a foothold in Yemen with the Houthi coup there is the latest disturbing development, one that could give the Iranians a base from which to deploy midget submarines into the Red Sea, for example, or base military aircraft, or position missile launchers to complicate Israel’s missile defense picture. Yemen could certainly become a waypoint for the flow of illicit arms from Iran to a variety of recipients. Where once Israeli intelligence could focus on ports in Sudan, it now may have the entire western coast of Yemen to contend with.

The brewing crisis in the Golan may by itself be enough to present Israel with a matrix of game-changing decision points in the next 12 months. There’s a limit to how much harassment Israel can afford to live with and retain viability as a free and secure nation, making a good life possible for her people. The confrontation with Iran is growing in more than one dimension, and Israel can’t treat the Iranian nuclear program as a theoretical, specialized threat, separate from the overall menace Iran presents to her.

right, IRGC General Mohammad Ali Allahdadi, one of two IRGC general officers and six Iranians conducting reconnaissance in the Golan Heights on 18 Jan 2015, when their convoy was struck by (presumably) the IDF. Allahdadi is seen here hanging with former President Khatami in 2009. (Image: Iranian TV via Twitter)

It’s not 2004 anymore

The profile of Iran’s activities makes it abundantly clear that none of what she does is “about” Israel making concessions on West Bank settlements, or otherwise falling in with proposals made by the Obama administration for a final status agreement. Iran is all over the region – Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Sudan – taking advantage of the opportunities created by the aftermath of the Arab Spring.

Jeffrey Goldberg suggests that Israel should strengthen Obama’s negotiating position by making more concessions to the Palestinian Arabs. But in 2015, nothing in the region’s main dynamic is even about that anymore. The main dynamic is the feeding frenzy for the territory of Syria and Iraq. The various actors are shaping up to be Iran, ISIS, the Kurds, and some combination of others who still retain a legacy set of “status quo” objectives (including, e.g., the U.S., Saudi Arabia, and perhaps Turkey).

Not one of those actors can be deterred or influenced by artificially forced developments in the now-defunct Oslo process. But at least two of the actors – Iran and ISIS – will exploit Israel however they have to, to gain advantage for themselves. That’s what Iran is doing with her foray into the Golan, which gives “top cover” to her nuclear program, but also has the real potential to become as much of an existential threat to Israel as an Iranian bomb.

Israel can’t afford to ignore the fact that the whole unfolding strategy interlocks. In essence, Iran has already begun a new phase in her long-running campaign against Israel, and the Obama administration is asking Israel to behave toward the negotiations with Iran as if that hasn’t happened: as if it’s still 2004, and everyone still has the same situation and the same options.

An emerging trigger point

Israel doesn’t. It’s not 2004 anymore. There was a time, as little as a year ago, when the triggers for Israel to have to attack boiled down mainly to these two: either Iran was about to cross the “red line” Bibi briefed to the UN in 2012, or the Iranians were about to deploy a modern anti-air missile system that would make it too difficult for Israel to pull the attack off, once it was in place.

But we’re past that point now. Developments in the nuclear program, or inside Iran, aren’t Israel’s only concern. The Israelis may well have to execute a preemptive strategy that baffles and blunts Iran’s whole package of activities in the Israeli security perimeter. Attacking the Iranian nuclear program – facilities in Iran – will probably form some element of that, but it won’t be enough.

And the trigger matrix has changed. The intolerable juncture for Israel is likely to be connected with Iran’s emerging campaign in the Golan. Neither the prompts for military action, nor its purpose and targets, will be bounded by the old outlines of the “Iranian nuclear” problem. The problem is bigger now: simultaneously more threatening and immediate, and more diffuse. A strike campaign against Iranian nuclear facilities, with F-15s, is no longer the main mental picture we should have.

Like the Oslo-legacy negotiations, the Obama administration’s negotiations with Iran have little relevance to the security conditions Israel faces today. One of the most important things the U.S. could do to reset the clock is now out of reach: that is, pacify and effectively settle the situation in Syria and Iraq, where Iran, like ISIS, is gaining strength and position from conflict. The Obama administration doesn’t seem aware that the situation has changed, and with it the motives and concerns of everyone in the region. Netanyahu has to deal, nevertheless, with a reality that’s changing under our feet with each passing day.

Center, with scarf: Iranian Qods Force commander Gen. Qassem Soleimani, with local Iraqi military leaders in Iraq in 2014. A U.S. defense official said in 2013 that Soleimani was “running the whole Syrian war by himself.” (Quoted by Dexter Filkins in “Shadow Commander,” The New Yorker, 30 Sep 2103. Image via Twitter)

* I’m fully aware, incidentally, that policy is sometimes made in just this way. But that doesn’t mean that we can accurately judge whether military force would be effective by approaching our evaluation through an inherently flawed policy-making process.

An objective and a strategy

For what it’s worth, this is what I would have asked the NSC and principals to look at back in 2004. The strategic objective would have been to rope Iran into a heavily and genuinely supervised mode with her nuclear program, understanding that political change in Iran might be encouraged that way (alongside other methods), through frustrating the regime and weakening its reputation, but would ultimately have to come in other ways from the Iranian people. Outreach to reformers in Iran would have been the highest American priority overall.

The objective of using military force would have been to set Iran’s nuclear program back significantly – by at least 24 months – and inflict some level of additional damage as a deterrent, against both immediate retaliation and future activities.

I would have wanted a process of escalating pressure on Iran with a concurrent military build-up in the Gulf region, designed to force Iran to open up all the facilities identified by the IAEA and Western intelligence as suspect. If Iran didn’t comply in good faith by a deadline, the strikes would start. The strike threat would have been implied, not spelled out. The deadline would have been a short one (30-45 days), only long enough to accommodate the build-up, but not so long that Iran could change all her program arrangements to evade attack.

The scope of military strikes for which the build-up was designed would have included the significant “bottleneck,” or critical node, of Iran’s program at the time – the uranium enrichment complex at Natanz – as well as the suspicious special-use facilities in the Parchin area southeast of Tehran.

There would have been some other targets in the nuclear and missile programs, but those two installations would have been the top priorities. Equally important targets would have been the IRGC assets most useful for projecting power outside Iran’s borders, including ballistic missiles, coastal cruise missiles, and submarines, as well as the IRGC’s paramilitary organization. Attacking the air defense network and national command and control nodes would have been necessary to hold air superiority for U.S. forces while they were operating in Iranian air space.

Ideally, the preparations for this, and the escalating pressure on Iran (very possibly including intense economic pressure), would have gotten Iran to make some meaningful concessions at the time. We need not oversell what we could have wrested from Iran without an attack, but odds were better than even that we could have gotten meaningful concessions: concessions that justified the effort, even if they weren’t everything we wanted. Rinsing and repeating would almost certainly have been necessary.

My own preference would be for an extended process in which we could force Iran’s program more into the open, and keep pushing Iran back, without having to strike. Instead of letting Iran play for time, we should be playing for time: time for Iranian reformers, who poked their heads up in 2009, and who are still there to be worked with.

About the Author: J.E. Dyer is a retired US Naval intelligence officer who served around the world, afloat and ashore, from 1983 to 2004.

Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: Anti Semitism, Hamas, Iran, Isis, Islam, Islamic Jihad, Islamic slaughter, Islamic State, Israel, Jihad, Middle East War, Palestinians, Syria, Terrorism, USA

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Muslim Brotherhood-Aligned Leaders Hosted at State Department

January 28, 2015

Muslim Brotherhood-Aligned Leaders Hosted at State Department

Brotherhood seeks to rally anti-Sisi support

BY: Adam Kredo Follow @Kredo0
January 28, 2015 5:00 am

via Muslim Brotherhood-Aligned Leaders Hosted at State Department | Washington Free Beacon.

The State Department hosted a delegation of Muslim Brotherhood-aligned leaders this week for a meeting about their ongoing efforts to oppose the current government of President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi of Egypt, who rose to power following the overthrow of Mohamed Morsi, an ally of the Brotherhood, in 2013.

One member of the delegation, a Brotherhood-aligned judge in Egypt, posed for a picture while at Foggy Bottom in which he held up the Islamic group’s notorious four-finger Rabia symbol, according to his Facebook page.

That delegation member, Waleed Sharaby, is a secretary-general of the Egyptian Revolutionary Council and a spokesman for Judges for Egypt, a group reported to have close ties to the Brotherhood.

The delegation also includes Gamal Heshmat, a leading member of the Brotherhood, and Abdel Mawgoud al-Dardery, a Brotherhood member who served as a parliamentarian from Luxor.

Sharaby, the Brotherhood-aligned judge, flashed the Islamist group’s popular symbol in his picture at the State Department and wrote in a caption: “Now in the U.S. State Department. Your steadfastness impresses everyone,” according to an independent translation of the Arabic.

Another member of the delegation, Maha Azzam, confirmed during an event hosted Tuesday by the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy (CSID)—another group accused of having close ties to the Brotherhood—that the delegation had “fruitful” talks with the State Department.

“Maha Azzam confirms that ‘anti-coup’ delegation, which includes 2 top [Muslim Brothers], had ‘fruitful’ conversations at State Dept,” Egypt expert Eric Trager tweeted.

Assam also said that the department expressed openness to engagement, according to one person who attended the event.

Trager, a fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), told the Washington Free Beacon that the State Department is interested in maintaining a dialogue with the Brotherhood due to its continued role in the Egyptian political scene.

“The State Department continues to speak with Muslim Brothers on the assumption that Egyptian politics are unpredictable, and the Brotherhood still has some support in Egypt,” he said. “But when pro-Brotherhood delegations then post photos of themselves making pro-Brotherhood gestures in front of the State Department logo, it creates an embarrassment for the State Department.”

When asked to comment on the meeting Tuesday evening, a State Department official said, “We meet with representatives from across the political spectrum in Egypt.”

The official declined to elaborate on who may have been hosted or on any details about the timing and substance of any talks.

Samuel Tadros, an Egypt expert and research fellow at the Hudson Institute who is familiar with the delegation, said that the visit is meant to rally support for the Muslim Brotherhood’s ongoing efforts against to oppose Sisi.

“I think the Muslim Brotherhood visit serves two goals,” Tadros said. “First, organizing the pro Muslim Brotherhood movement in the U.S. among the Egyptian and other Arab and Muslim communities.”

“Secondly, reaching out to administration and the policy community in D.C.,” Tadros said. “The delegation’s composition includes several non-official Muslim Brotherhood members to portray an image of a united Islamist and non-Islamist revolutionary camp against the regime.”

The delegation held several public events this week in Maryland and Virginia, according to invitations that were sent out.

Patrick Poole, a terrorism expert and national security reporter, said the powwow at the State Department could be a sign that the Obama administration still considers the Brotherhood politically viable, despite its ouster from power and a subsequent crackdown on its members by Egyptian authorities.

“What this shows is that the widespread rejection of the Muslim Brotherhood across the Middle East, particularly the largest protests in recorded human history in Egypt on June 30, 2013, that led to Morsi’s ouster, is not recognized by the State Department and the Obama administration,” Poole said.

“This is a direct insult to our Egyptian allies, who are in an existential struggle against the Muslim Brotherhood, all in the pursuit of the mythical ‘moderate Islamists’ who the D.C. foreign policy elite still believe will bring democracy to the Middle East,” Poole said.

Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: Foreign Policy, Islam, Islamic slaughter, Jihad, Middle East War, Muslim Brotherhood, President Abdel Fattah al-Sis, Terrorism

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How Iran continues to deceive the West

January 27, 2015

How Iran continues to deceive the West

By Missing Peace

via How Iran continues to deceive the West | Missing Peace | missingpeace.eu | EN.

Last week’s IAF strike on a Hezbollah convoy near Kuneitra on the Israel-Syria border in which six members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) were killed has led to increased Iranian threats to annihilate the Jewish State.

Iranian top officials vowed to hit Israel with ‘devastating thunderbolts’ that would cause “the collapse of the Zionist regime”. The IAF strike killed Brig. Gen. Mohammad Ali Allahdadi who oversaw Iranian military actions in Syria on behalf of Syrian president, al-Assad.

The presence of the IRGC members on the Golan Heights in Syria has led to speculation that Iran and Hezbollah were on the verge of executing a military operation against Israel.

Eyal Ben Reuven, a retired Israeli major general and former deputy head of the Northern Command of the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) last week said that if the “highest level of Hezbollah and IRGC commanders were in the Golan Heights it means that what they’re planning could be an operation on a high level”.

Other reports claimed that Hezbollah planned to bring rocket launchers to the Kuneitra area in order to open a new front against Israel from the Golan Heights.

This seems to be pure speculation. The fact of the matter is that IRGC members were on a reconnaissance mission on the Golan Heights.

What does that mean? It is new evidence of Iran’s success in advancing its strategy for Syria and other parts of the Middle East (Iraq,Yemen,Gaza,Bahrain)

The aim of this strategy is to widen Iran’s influence in the Middle East and beyond. It is for this reason too that Iran develops nuclear weapons and long-range ballistic missiles and it is one of the reasons it aims to destroy Israel, the sole regional superpower. It is therefore more reasonable to assume that Israel delivered a strong signal to Iran to not upset the delicate status quo on the Golan Heights and that it will put limits on Iran’s activities adjacent to Israeli borders.

Iran’s involvement in Syria

Israel apparently realizes that Iran has taken over control of (what remains of) Syria from President al-Assad.

Here is how that happened.

In late 2012 Assad was on the ropes in his battle with opposition groups such as al-Nusra in the north of Syria and the area around Damascus. He had to make tough choices and decided to shift his forces from the Qusayr area to the area of Damascus and to eastern Ghouta and Daraya.

At that point Hezbollah and IRGC stepped in to defend Qusayr to make sure that Homs would not be cut off from Damascus and to secure access from the Beqaa Valley in Lebanon to Damascus and Homs.

However as has become clear from a recent Der Spiegel report there was another reason for the Iranians to step in at Qusayr. The German Magazine reported on January 9^th that it had obtained secret information that made clear that the world had again been misled about Syria’s nuclear ambitions. A new nuclear facility had been built after Israel destroyed Syria’s nuclear reactor in Deir al-Zur in 2007.

This new nuclear facility is located west of Qusayr, two kilometers from the border with Lebanon. The area saw heavy fighting between al-Nusra and elite Hezbollah units in the spring of 2013. Hezbollah suffered heavy losses but succeeded in holding the area.

Intercepted radio traffic between a high-ranking Hezbollah operative and Ibrahim Othman, the head of the Syrian Atomic Energy Commission delivered the clearest proof that an underground nuclear facility has been built in Qusayr. The Hezbollah man referred to the site as the “atomic factory”. During the intercepted conversations he also mentioned that members of the IRGC were working at the facility.

According to Der Spiegel it is almost certain that Chou Ji Bu, the engineer who built the nuclear reactor in Yongbyon in North Korea is also involved in the new nuclear project at Qusayr.

Der Spiegel labeled the secret facility at Qusayr “a new Syrian push for nuclear weapons”. However the area has been controlled by Hezbollah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard since mid-2013. The commander of the Iranian paramilitary al-Quds Force, Qassem Soleimani was the one who fully orchestrated the Hezbollah take-over of Qusayr.

Though it is true that al-Assad originally directed the work in Qusayr that began in 2009, today it is clear that Hezbollah and the IRGC are the ones controlling the facility.

Members of the Free Syrian Army in the area of Qusayr reported on January 12^th that Iranian officers were supervising the secret facility and that the Syrian regime is only a cover-up for this.

Another indication that Iran has de facto taken over Syria came from IRGC commander Haji Zadeh. He said that Iran is now manufacturing Iranian missiles on Syrian soil. He also said that Iranian missiles were made to hit Israel in the first place.

From Zadeh’s statement it becomes clear that Iran uses the territory of Syria to advance its quest for regional domination and to advance its plans for the destruction of Israel.

Qusayr and JPOA

It is no coincidence either that Iran now controls a nuclear facility outside its own territory. Although Syria is a signatory to the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons inspections by the IAEA are not possible because of the turmoil in the country. This is an ideal situation for Iran that is currently negotiating with the P5+1 countries about a deal designed to curb its nuclear program.

Under the Joint Plan of Action (JPOA) that was part of the interim deal between Iran and the six UNSC countries from November 2013, Iran should halt activities at its plutonium plant in Arak. The White House fact sheet stated: “Iran has committed to no further advances of its activities at Arak and to halt progress on its plutonium track.”

Observers were quick to notice that the text contained a loophole. The reference to activities at Arak seemed to allow unlimited research and work on locations away from the site as long as they did not physically happen at Arak.

Later it became clear that Iran had noticed the loophole too. Foreign Minister Zarif announced that Iran would continue construction at the facility. State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki did not see any problem when reporters pressed her on the issue. “What’s the big deal about a road here or a building there”, she said.

Foreign Policy last month reported that the United States has privately accused Iran of an international shopping spree to acquire components for a heavy water reactor such as in Arak. The magazine wrote that a U.S. delegation informed a UNSC panel of experts that Iranian procurement agents have been increasing their efforts to illicitly obtain equipment for the reactor at the Arak nuclear complex.

It is not clear yet what type of nuclear facility has been built at Qusayr. Weapons expert Jennifer Dyer says it is certainly not a centrifuge facility like the complexes in Natanz and Fordo in Iran. It could be a plant where yellowcake is converted to UF4 and is metalized into fuel rods for a reactor. But it also could be a plutonium facility.

The reactor in Deir al-Zur was assessed to be a gas-graphite reactor like the one in Yongbyon, North Korea. That reactor could produce enough plutonium for one or two plutonium bombs per year, Dyer wrote.

Whatever the type of nuclear facility in Qusayr, the fact is that Iran has decided to use Syrian territory to advance its nuclear program. The US State Department however, insists that the facility in Qusayr has nothing to do with the Iranian nuclear program and that the issue will not be discussed in the ongoing negotiations with Iran.

Israeli TV shows Iranian IBM

Other evidence of Iran’s aggressive ambitions was published by Israeli TV Channel Two last week.

The Channel showed a satellite image taken by the Israeli EROS B satellite of a twenty seven meter long Iranian Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (IBM) on a launch pad close to Teheran. This type of missile is generally used to carry a nuclear warhead and can reach the United States.

The existence of such a missile was known to Israeli intelligence. But Channel Two now reported that although images of the missile were never shown in the US and Europe, the existence of the IBM has been known to the West for at least two years. So both EU and US knew about the existence of the missile before they signed the interim agreement with Iran.

Iran is obligated by United Nations Security Council resolutions to suspend work on ballistic missiles. The images published by Channel Two clearly show that Iran has violated these UNSC resolutions.

More astonishing however, is the fact that the JPOA that was part of the interim agreement between Iran and the 5+1 countries did not impose any restrictions on ballistic missile development. Originally an US National Security Council official said that an Iranian ballistic-missile test would” be in violation of the agreement” and cause the deal to “cease to exist”. Obama officials however, clarified their stance. Instead of imposing absolute restrictions on such tests, the JPOA apparently imposed no restrictions on ballistic missile tests. As a result Iran now possesses a missile that can carry a nuclear warhead to the United States.

Twelve fruitless years of negotiations

These recent developments involving Iran show clearly that the regime in Teheran has not changed its ways and is still advancing its agenda of exporting the Islamic revolution by destabilizing the region.

It is also very clear that Iran keeps making progress on its nuclear program and is only conducting talks with the P5+1 -countries to buy time.

How do we know this? In fact it is a simple story. The West has been negotiating with Iran for twelve years now. Iran’s position has remained unchanged since 2003 when the EU3 countries started to engage Iran regarding its nuclear program, through 2008 when U.S. Under Secretary of State William Burns joined the negotiations, until today when the Obama administration is trying to obtain a deal.

The regime in Teheran insists on its right to enrich uranium and to build new nuclear facilities. Iran continues to work on the development of ballistic missiles which are used to carry nuclear warheads. The Iranians also breached the JPOA by feeding gas into IR-5 centrifuges and by testing advanced IR-8 centrifuges. They illicitly acquired parts for their heavy-water reactor and busted through energy caps every single month of the deal. Iran is also heavily involved in a new nuclear facility in Syria that could be a plutonium plant.

Last week IAEA director Yukiya Amono said that Iran still refuses to give the Atomic Agency all the information it needs to determine if all of the Iranian nuclear activities are for peaceful purposes.

Here is what Amono said during a speech at the University of Indonesia last Friday: “As far as Iran is concerned, the Agency is able to verify the non-diversion of nuclear material declared to us by Iran under its Safeguards Agreement. But we are not in a position to provide credible assurance about the absence of undeclared nuclear material and activities in Iran, and therefore to conclude that all nuclear material in Iran is in peaceful activities.”

When the moment of truth came in the current negotiations in July and November last year the Iranians refused once again to accept the proposals to limit their nuclear program.

At the same time the positions of the West have totally collapsed. Gone is the demand that Iran dismantles its centrifuges and ship its uranium stock to a third country. Also gone is the demand that Iran ceases all uranium enrichment as well as the demand to downgrade its plutonium reactor. And finally the original demand to halt all proliferation-sensitive missile activity has gone too.

The original Western threat that “all options (including the military) are on the table” to stop Iran from becoming a nuclear threshold power has become a joke. Now the U.S. administration even opposes a Congressional bill to impose deadline-triggered sanctions against Iran if no reasonable deal is reached by July of this year.

During a closed-door meeting of Senate Democrats in Baltimore last week Obama charged that the Congressmen who favor the bill were doing so only to please “donors”. Everybody in the room understood that he meant Jewish and pro-Israel donors. Senator Robert Menendez who initiated the bill took this as a personal affront but Obama didn’t back away from his statement.

In CBS’ ‘Face of the Nation’ Senator John McCain this weekend said that the president has lost touch with reality. He said that Iran is on the march everywhere and there is no strategy to defeat them. McCain stated that there is a need for congressional ratification of any agreement that is made and that it is important that Israeli PM Netanyahu speaks to the American people about the dangers of a nuclear Iran.

Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: Anti Semitism, Iran, Islamic Jihad, Islamic slaughter, Islamic State, Jihad, Middle East War, Terrorism

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