The device which was set off on Har Dov was certainly a response by Hezbollah to that same attack, but the three bombs that went off on the Golan Heights — the first which was detonated near an IDF jeep in the Al-Khader region in December 2013 following the targeted killing — according to foreign reports — of senior Hezbollah operative Hassan Lakhis in Beirut; the second of which was neutralized near the entrance to Quneitra earlier this month; and the third which blew up this week and wounded four soldiers — appear to be an attempt to create a new balance of terror in the north.
Sometimes I think the entire British left has dropped acid. There can be surely no other explanation for its addiction to insane, inverted political visions of a surreal quality that might suggest the left was readier for the madhouse than any sort of political power. Really though, it is not funny ha-ha. There is nothing amusing about the treachery of the modern British left, its abandonment of the values of freedom, equality and solidarity. Julie Burchill rightly rages against the modern British left’s obsessions with the hang-ups of the chattering classes; but if ever there was a collective criminal act by which the British left has betrayed its own foundational values, it is its iniquitous and venomous loathing of Israel and its denial of the Jewish people’s inalienable right to national self-determination in that land.
The Israeli military said a total of four rockets were fired Thursday from Gaza. Israeli officials previously refused to confirm any cease-fire deal was in place.
“Our mujahedeen responded to the Zionist aggression by firing tens of rockets,” Islamic Jihad said in a statement to the BBC.
“The rockets fired today came in response to the occupation aggression against us and does not mean the collapse of the ceasefire agreement [with Israel],” it said.
End the brutal and senseless preoccupation with the Jews!
Because impotence and obsession are what Hamas and companies are all about: if only Israel didn’t exist; if only the Jews disappeared (after being plundered — let’s not be in too much of a hurry about this); if only the “occupation aggression” did not include trade throughput, medical assistance, basic utilities deliveries, employment, and so on, then the Arab mind (of the Islamic Jihad) might find itself at peace.
If as much was true then, it’s certainly true now. Hamas may value its post-Cast Lead (2009) truce with Israel, but it evidently cannot contain either itself or less encumbered — for being less governmental — Islamic Jihad movements on its own block.
Last night, Israel returned like fire in response to yesterday’s rocket and mortar barrage (the latest news reports four more rockets fired from Gaza today). That tit-for-tat is an old show: curtain up, please, on the mindlessness, the essential empty thoughtlessness, of Islamic Jihad and the whole bogus mission that has proved convenient for shielding the destruction of other cultures and the theft of wealth (for Gaza, start with the UNRWA annual contribution intended to secure some benefits in qualities of living, and then move swiftly on to Arafat and funds never accounted).
Because of what it really represents, because of what it does to its own constituents and others, because of its self-serving and grandiose delusions, Hamas finds itself in trouble today.
An Egyptian court ruled on March 4 to forbid all activities in Egypt by Gaza-based terrorist group Hamas. The court ruling cuts off all official Hamas-Egyptian ties and closes all Hamas offices and infrastructure within Egypt.
It would appear that when it comes to attacks against Israel, which it falls to Hamas to police, Hamas has found itself between a fiercely active and impossibly passive place: it either can’t or won’t stand up to or stall “Gaza’s secretive jihadist groups”; it won’t itself step out from beneath the Muslim Brotherhood umbrella; it won’t step forward to make peace with the Jewish State of Israel but it will allow itself to be cajoled and dragged into fairly begging Israel for incursion and real occupation on the turf it was supposed to govern (x suspect election followed by civil war with Fatah) independently.
In fact, Hamas has gotten itself so into trouble, so isolated between worlds, so caught between al-Qaeda, the Ayatollah, Egypt, and Israel, that I would not be surprised were it to look to the IDF to defend its interests from the local competitors that have infiltrated its writ and compromised whatever integrity and self-possession it once may have had.
Salafi groups have been suspected in the bombings of Internet cafes and music stores, intimidation of Gaza’s small Christian community, the kidnapping of a BBC journalist in 2007 and more recently, the death of an Italian activist in 2011. Salafi groups are also believed to cooperate with militants in the neighboring Sinai Peninsula in Egypt to attack Egyptian and Israeli targets.
Gaza’s Salafis support al-Qaida’s campaign of global jihad, but are not believed to have direct links with the global terror network. In contrast, Hamas says its struggle is solely against Israel.
Since Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005, terrorists have fired more than 8,000 rockets into Israel. Over 3.5 million Israelis are currently living under threat of rocket attacks.
More than half a million Israelis have less than 60 seconds to find shelter after a rocket is launched from Gaza into Israel. Most rockets launched from Gaza into Israel are capable of reaching Israel’s biggest southern cities.
Israel’s military said more than 20 rockets were fired. Israeli media reported more than 50 rockets were fired.
The Iranian-backed Islamic Jihad has killed dozens of Israelis in suicide bombings and other attacks over the years. Israel’s military said they had targeted the militants on Tuesday after they fired at Israel.
If the weapons stored in Gaza allow it, this can only escalate unless or until the IDF steps in with boots to stop it.
The news also tells the effect of having intercepted a major arms shipment last week: is the one shipment caught, however substantial it may be, the only shipment that needed to be caught?
A top Hamas official publicly boasted this week that the Iran-backed terror group intends to blanket Israel with missiles and rockets during any future conflagration. Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon had warned as far back as last fall that Hamas was arming itself in anticipation of “a renewal of violence,” an assessment that came amid increasingly specific intelligence indicating that the organization was looking to provoke a conflict with Israel in order to reverse what had become a precipitous decline in its domestic and international positions.
Competing to hate, to express more hate than someone else’s hate, to do more with hate and thereby garner “prestige” . . . .
What’s garnered universally by such a philosophy: contempt.
On one hand, Iranian President Hassan Rouhani continues to engage the international community in a diplomatic process over Tehran’s nuclear program. He has achieved many successes in a charm offensive designed to rebrand his country as a reasonable and more moderate international player.
Simultaneously, the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), and its overseas special operation unit, the Quds Force, are strengthening, financing, and arming terrorist organizations all over the Middle East.
Iran, at a glance, has been sewing conflict around the middle east, building its own energy industry, establishing itself as a nuclear power — well, no one has yet stalled that ambition or dampened the regime’s enthusiasm for achieving it — and it illustrates its efforts in blood, or else why release Hezbollah to defend and sustain the brutality of the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad? Against that sweeping influence in regional payola and arms shipments, Israel’s recent interdiction of arms intended for Gaza provides but a glimpse of Ayatollah Khamenei’s greater ambitions as the middle east’s greatest Lord of War.
At 21:15 local time Iraq, on December 26, 2013, Camp Liberty was targeted by dozens of missiles of different types. In the early hours 3 members of the Iranian resistance were slain and more than 50 were reported injured, some in critical condition.
This is the fourth missile attack on Iranian dissidents in Camp Liberty (Iraq) in 2013, while the Iraqi government has not yet delivered the bodies of those massacred during the September 1, 2013 attack on Camp Ashraf, to Liberty residents for burial.
While American President Barrak Obama gives diplomacy and peace a chance over Iran’s developing nuclear weapons building potential, Ayatollah Khamenei’s efforts to produce influence and obtain it throughout the region has been also developing unobstructed. With that in mind, Israel’s interception of a lone arms shipment doubtless intended to arm Hamas for the destruction of the Jewish-majority state represents but a small interruption in the Ayatollah’s efforts to turn a large wheel, a wheel that, in fact, has turned.
I saw this clip some time ago but am watching it now and appreciating it perhaps more than I did when first encountered.
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FTAC composed while listening to the above:
Without Judaism — and I believe without Hillel the Elder (look him up if you are not familiar with the rabbi) — I believe there would have been no Christianity or Islam. Mohammad appears to borrow directly from Hillel, who said, ” whosoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whosoever that saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world.” I suggest only that we are more bound by our common humanity than by our will to destroy those who disagree with us; and that the Jews have been working on ethical and psychological issues — start with Pharaoh, that great malignant narcissists, start with Cain, that jealous brother — for 5,000 years. I know how you feel about the “poor Palestinians” but it might surprise you to know that Jews feel about the same way, but not so much about the PLO, PFLP, Fatah, or Hamas who exploit or keep their own in ethnic identification captive to the world’s oldest hate.
“Arabs were made to pay for the crimes of the Europeans by the creation of Israel.”
I know that is what has been heard and the fiction constructed around it total, but Zionism predates WWII, and thousands of Arabs were drawn before it to the agricultural fields of the nascent Jewish state.
If you believe statehood in the name of religion must go, then Rome must go, as must Pakistan, Saudi Arabia — well, actually all Islamic kingdoms and dictatorships — as the same have become “real headaches for the entire civilized world, completely engulfed in injustice and violence.”
The only “inescapable issue” in the reconstruction that is the modern State of Israel is the 5,000+ year existence of Jews and Jewish culture — beliefs, calendar, customs, language, religion — on the land and continuously. Ancient Israel, the Roman “Palestine”, and modern Israel have never been “Judenrein” (as some might wish).
Jews don’t “deserve a homeland” — Jews have a homeland.
Regarding terrorism, have a look independently into war and low-intensity conflict across 2,000 years.
Also, you may want to look into how Ben Gurion crushed the terrorist Irgun at the earliest opportunity.
Your emphasis tells where you want to go (anti-Semitic / anti- Ziionist, actually, anti-justice) but the deeply poisonous programming and scripting that got you there has to this hour stayed out of the picture.
I beg you for patient new introspection and scholarship, for fresh ears and eyes, for skepticism in regard to a destructive loyalty.
I ask no less of myself and do read, say, Ma’an and look into issues having to do with the refugees of 1948 and their humanity, which one may believe better than that of their leaders who build and disseminate libels for a living.
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The response was to a writer in India who ran through the common anti-Semites screen, from declaring the State of Israel a colonial project directly and only corresponding to the destruction of the Jews of Europe in the Holocaust of World War II to suggesting the entire state should have been constructed elsewhere.
What a load of fictional crapola one wakes to if participating the “middle east conflict”, which has weirdly become the signifier for Israel’s conflict with the Arab world while the same Arab world melts down in conflicts within its portion of the Islamic Small Wars (e.g., signaled by political violence in Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Yemen, Syria).
Nowhere is the “Religion of Peace”, nor the states founded on it, at peace, and not even within themselves, the Muslim Brotherhood gangs ever threatening established state power, the same state power incompletely in control of powerful families willing to back al-Qaeda and its affiliates and likenesses.
Corey Gil Shuster (CGS): Do you think you live in an Apartheid state?
Ibrahim: This country is an advanced country. It proves itself totally. It’s progressive in all ways. If you look at the highways, the hospitals, it couldn’t be any better.
CGS: As an Arab Israeli Palestinian, do you think the treatment you receive on the street or at hospitals is different than if you were a Jew?
Ibrahim: It’s amazing, I was in the hospital for a year and a half and I was like their son, they treated me so well.
CGS: So you don’t feel separate from Jews?
Ibrahim: No way. No way. I was treated so well.
I’ve posted the video farther down in this post. The interview takes place about 12 minutes into the clip.
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The free world has endured more than six decades of related nonsense, as have, and God only knows, the refugees of 1948 and their descendants.
However, political, religious, and secular intellectual poisons course through cultural systems on that scale. Few of such misdirect attention quite the way that Jew hate does, and nowhere is that more apparent than in the political families, cliques, and movements that rely on it for whipping the passions of deluded, gullible, subjugated, and weak.
Arab leaders and states have penned a substantial portion of the refugees of wars against Israel in camps in Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, and Egypt.
Jews do not maintain such camps.
In the preoccupied territories, perhaps today more heavily contested for complete Jewish-majority Israeli sovereignty but nonetheless home to Arabs, Christian and Muslim, Israel and the free world have been waiting through the same decades for Fatah and Hamas to produce governance meeting contemporary standards in elections, law, and in human rights.
Tamim became a folk hero in the Arab world for publicly embarrassing the Mossad–which is why many Arabs were surprised, a year and a half later, to see Tamim declare that he would not hesitate to relay intelligence to Israel to help thwart terror attacks on its soil.
The report issued by Palestinian Independent Commission for Human Rights (ICHR) calls out the PA and Hamas for many instances of torture and oppression, according to Mosaic Magazine.
“Evidently, most Western governments, journalists and human rights organizations have chosen to endorse the Palestinian Authority’s stance that the only evil-doers are the Israelis,” Mosaic reported. “And that is precisely why the ICHR report on the anarchy, lawlessness, and human rights violations by the Palestinian Authority and Hamas will be completely ignored in the West.”
GAZA CITY, GAZA STRIP – The Gaza Strip’s Hamas authorities have blocked a U.N. refugee agency from introducing textbooks promoting human rights into local schools, saying the text ignores Palestinian cultural mores and focuses too heavily on “peaceful” means of conflict resolution.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said recently that “800 millionaires and 1,600 near-millionaires control the tunnels at the expense of both Egyptian and Palestinian national interests.”
There is something for everyone. An all-inclusive package to fight “evil corporations”, “apartheid”, “racism”, “militarism”, “gender oppression” — or any other perceived discriminations. On university campuses all across Europe and North America, the BDS’s message is simple: “If you have a grievance worth getting mad about, we have just the right punching bag for you.”
The BDS campaign camouflages itself as the reincarnation of the Résistance, the Civil-Rights Movement or the Gandhian Civil-Disobedience movement in our times. The fact that it has nothing to do with the reality of Israel isn’t allowed to dampen the mood at this anti-Israel slugfest.
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