From Huffington Post, 24 April 2011, by David Harris:
No, this isn't a bad joke.
The very same Syria that today is mowing down its own people in the streets could well be elected a member of the UN Human Rights Council on May 20th.
Here's how it works:
The Council is comprised of 47 member states. Each is elected for a three-year term, with one-third of the seats becoming vacant each year. According to the UN General Assembly resolution creating the Council in 2006, Asia is assigned 13 of the 47 seats, with the other four regional blocs divvying up the remaining 34. Four of the 13 Asian seats become vacant now.
This year, there's what's called a "clean slate," meaning that four countries were chosen within the Asia group for the four seats. They are India, Indonesia, Philippines, and, yes, Syria. (Syria's candidacy has also been embraced by the Arab League and the Organization of the Islamic Conference.) Unless more Asian countries now opt to vie for the vacant seats, it could soon be a done deal.
Traditionally, when the general vote occurs, the candidate countries selected by their respective regional blocs are automatically endorsed, with perhaps a few dissenting votes, by the larger group.
To indicate its willingness to comply with the Council's mission, Syria has formally pledged "its commitment to respect and to support the inalienable nature of all human rights," adding it "would contribute to accomplish the objectives of the Council, and would support the national and international efforts for promotion and protection of human rights for all, without distinction and selectivity or politicization."
Don't laugh. The Syrian government expressed this with all due solemnity. Given the abysmal record of some others who've been chosen to serve on the Council, it could be enough to get it elected.
Of course, putting Syria on the UN Human Rights Council would make a mockery of the whole exercise.
One hardly knows where to begin in documenting Syria's utter and total disregard for human rights. And, incidentally, this long predates the current bloodshed.
For starters, the regime has no legitimacy. In 2000, Bashar Assad inherited power from his father, Hafez Assad, who himself was no Jeffersonian democrat nor was he, shall we say, the product of the free will of the people. The ruling elite come from the Alawite community, which comprises just 12 percent of the total population.
Open elections in Syria? No. Protection of civil liberties? No. Due process? No. Independent judiciary? No.
Emergency rule? Yes. Torture? Yes. Administrative detention? Yes. Censorship? Yes.
What's more, Syria not only flouts human rights protections at home, but beyond its borders as well.
Damascus houses terrorist groups like Hamas, whose stated aim is the destruction of Israel and the murder of Israelis wherever they may live.
Syria, a bosom buddy of Iran, is involved in the trans-shipment of weaponry to Hezbollah from Iran, in flagrant violation of UN Security Council resolutions and with the aim of strengthening a terrorist entity at the expense of the centralized government in Lebanon.
Until 2007, when Israel took action, Syria pursued a clandestine nuclear-weapons program in collaboration with North Korea. To what end? It's not hard to guess. Whether it has sought to restart that program remains an open question. What's not in question, however, is Syria's failure to cooperate with the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on inspections.
And it was clear to French President Jacques Chirac that Syria had a central hand in the murder of his friend, Rafik Hariri, the former prime minister of Lebanon, and 21 others in Beirut in 2005.
But despite this deplorable record, Syria has gotten off quite easy.
Bashar Assad was mistakenly seen as a reformer from the get-go by many observers who presumably would rather not have their comments at the time recalled. Because he had spent time in England, was computer savvy, had an attractive wife, and represented a generational shift from his thuggish father, Assad was heralded as ushering in a new era.
Less than one year after he took office, Syria was elected to the UN Security Council as a candidate of the Asian group, with 160 out of 177 votes.
More recently, an unending procession of Western dignitaries have made their way to Damascus in the misplaced, if stubborn, belief they could draw Assad away from the Iranian orbit, laud internal progress, and encourage closer ties. The visitors have included several notable members of the U.S. Congress.
After President Sarkozy took office in 2007, France began to reverse course on the hostile stance towards Syria of President Chirac. Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan embraced the Syrian leader and struck defense and other deals with him. Russia agreed to sell deadly missiles to the Syrian regime. And the U.S. returned its ambassador to Damascus in January, after downgrading bilateral ties in 2005 over the Hariri assassination.
Vogue, the fashion magazine, went so far as to feature the Syrian First Lady in its March issue. The spread could not have been more fawning -- or ill-timed.
And now, lest there have been any doubts all along, Syria has shown its true colors for the world to see.
While uttering empty words about reform, Assad has unleashed the vast power of the state to kill hundreds of his countrymen who dared to peacefully and courageously challenge his rule -- and the end is not in sight.
He's tried to keep the media out, but social media can't be stopped as easily, so we've heard loud and clear from opposition groups. The world knows what's happening there.
What next?
Well, in the case of Libya, after initial hesitation, the international community sprang into action to confront Gaddafi's crimes.
The UN Human Rights Council met in special session. It recommended the suspension of Libya's membership -- which itself had been a travesty when it occurred in 2010. The UN General Assembly endorsed the suspension. And, of course, the UN Security Council took important decisions.
With Syria, it's still unclear. It could go either way.
Within weeks, Syria could be elected a member of the UN Human Rights Council and, despite its own horrendous record, sit imperiously in judgment of others for the next three years.
Or, like Libya, it could instead become the target of a special session of the UN Human Rights Council -- and possibly other UN bodies -- for its systematic violations of human rights and possible crimes against humanity.
The world should be watching closely.
It will reveal a great deal about how the Council works, how regional blocs -- in this case, Asia -- either embrace or reject murderers in their midst, and how individual countries act. Remember that each country has one vote, and those votes will determine the outcome.
We can only hope that a clear majority of the Council will get "Syria-ous."
Wednesday, April 27, 2011
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
US radicals participate in planning the next blockade-busting "flotilla"
From Canada Free Press, Sunday, April 24, 2011, by Jim Kouri:
The main organizers of last year’s so-called Gaza Flotilla ...and assorted radical-left leaders such as President Obama’s friends and colleagues William Ayers and Jodie Evans, are preparing a new blockade-busting voyage, the operation’s leader said Saturday.
Bulent Yildirim, leader of the planned flotilla, said his group and supporters are getting the flotilla ready and warned that there will be a ship from every country in Europe. He said the Turkish-registered ship “Mavi Marmara” will be part of it.
The participants have warned that until the Israeli defense blockade is lifted on Gaza, the intifada will continue by land, by sea and by air. The blockade is a result of weapons, rockets, and other contraband being smuggled into the Palestinian territory in the Gaza Strip and being used against the Israeli people.
...The organizer of [last year's] blockade-busting action was a known radical group called Free Gaza. The “Free Gaza” flotilla was far more than a collection of innocent “peace activists” trying to provide humanitarian aid to Gaza, as they were portrayed by many news organizations.
Free Gaza sponsored the flotilla that engaged in deadly clashes with Israeli special forces troops. Among its members were Weather Underground founders William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn—who perpetrated a series of terrorist attacks—as well as Jodie Evans, the leader of the radical activist organization Code Pink. Besides the U.S. radicals, Islamic groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah and Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood contributed to the flotilla.
As is well-known in the United States, Ayers and Dohrn were close associates of President Obama for years in Chicago. Meanwhile, Jodie Evans was a fundraiser and financial bundler for Obama’s presidential campaign. In fact, one of Obama’s fundraisers was held in the home of Ayers and Dohrn.
Evans later worked on Attorney General Jerry Brown’s successful run for the governorship of California.
“Ayers’ and Dohrn’s continued activities appear to elude the attention of the people responsible for reporting the news without bias. They are terrorists, plain and simple, so why would anyone be surprised to discover their connection to an anti-Semitic organization that supports terror groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah, the Muslim Brother and even al-Qaeda?” asks former New York Police detective Michael Snopes.
The passengers reportedly included 100-plus members of various Muslim Brotherhood chapters, at least 20 of whom taped al Qaeda-style “martyr” videos before embarking on their anti-Israel mission, according to terrorist expert Steve Emerson, founder of The Investigative Project on Terrorism
According to Emerson’s IPT investigation, the chief organizers had more than “peaceful” intentions for the flotilla.
The respected Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) reported that a Gaza-based Hamas leader declared three days before the voyage started that the captain of the [Gaza Flotilla] ship had told him: “We will not allow the Zionists to come near us, and we will wage resistance against them.”
Meanwhile, Congressman Trent Franks (R-AZ) responded to ongoing criticism of Israel following the incident near Gaza where Israeli Defense Forces personnel engaged the flotilla of six ships attempting to overrun an Israeli naval blockade.
Rep. Franks cited reports indicating that individuals on board the ships were carrying weapons and attacked Israeli soldiers as they were trying to stop the advance of the flotilla. The blockade exists to keep the terrorist organization Hamas, which has routinely launched attacks against innocent Israeli citizens, from supplying its forces with weapons and other materials while allowing necessary humanitarian supplies to reach those living in Gaza, Franks stated.
“The conflict that took place aboard the Turkish flotilla was a completely unnecessary and deliberate attempt to provoke Israel to action. The Gaza blockade was put into place in an attempt to prevent Hamas from continuing to use the Gaza strip as a launching pad for literally thousands and thousands of rockets fired into innocent Israeli citizen populations. Humanitarian shipments into Gaza are routinely used to smuggle weapons and other dangerous materials into Gaza for Hamas,” said Congressman Franks.
“The United States must maintain a strong position of support for Israel as the U.N. once again tries to make them a punching bag for the rest of the world. The Obama Administration must also commit to vetoing any resolution from U.N. Organizations like the Security Council or the Human Rights Council that would condemn Israel and encourage the terrorist groups who provoked the raid,” said the Arizona lawmaker.
Obama supporters in the midst of discussion regarding the current Egyptian civil unrest are claiming that the Muslim Brotherhood is not a terrorist organization and that its members are not major players in the Egyptian protests and uprising. They also claim there are no connections between the Obama administration and radical Islamists such as the Muslim Brotherhood, in spite of the activities of Ayers, Dohrn and Evans, who are known associates of the U.S. President.
“If the House Republicans, who are now the majority, wish to investigate the current administration and its abysmal performance on national security incidents, they should start with the President’s relationship with far-left radicals and Islamic fascists,” said Det. Snopes.
The main organizers of last year’s so-called Gaza Flotilla ...and assorted radical-left leaders such as President Obama’s friends and colleagues William Ayers and Jodie Evans, are preparing a new blockade-busting voyage, the operation’s leader said Saturday.
Bulent Yildirim, leader of the planned flotilla, said his group and supporters are getting the flotilla ready and warned that there will be a ship from every country in Europe. He said the Turkish-registered ship “Mavi Marmara” will be part of it.
The participants have warned that until the Israeli defense blockade is lifted on Gaza, the intifada will continue by land, by sea and by air. The blockade is a result of weapons, rockets, and other contraband being smuggled into the Palestinian territory in the Gaza Strip and being used against the Israeli people.
...The organizer of [last year's] blockade-busting action was a known radical group called Free Gaza. The “Free Gaza” flotilla was far more than a collection of innocent “peace activists” trying to provide humanitarian aid to Gaza, as they were portrayed by many news organizations.
Free Gaza sponsored the flotilla that engaged in deadly clashes with Israeli special forces troops. Among its members were Weather Underground founders William Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn—who perpetrated a series of terrorist attacks—as well as Jodie Evans, the leader of the radical activist organization Code Pink. Besides the U.S. radicals, Islamic groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah and Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood contributed to the flotilla.
As is well-known in the United States, Ayers and Dohrn were close associates of President Obama for years in Chicago. Meanwhile, Jodie Evans was a fundraiser and financial bundler for Obama’s presidential campaign. In fact, one of Obama’s fundraisers was held in the home of Ayers and Dohrn.
Evans later worked on Attorney General Jerry Brown’s successful run for the governorship of California.
“Ayers’ and Dohrn’s continued activities appear to elude the attention of the people responsible for reporting the news without bias. They are terrorists, plain and simple, so why would anyone be surprised to discover their connection to an anti-Semitic organization that supports terror groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah, the Muslim Brother and even al-Qaeda?” asks former New York Police detective Michael Snopes.
The passengers reportedly included 100-plus members of various Muslim Brotherhood chapters, at least 20 of whom taped al Qaeda-style “martyr” videos before embarking on their anti-Israel mission, according to terrorist expert Steve Emerson, founder of The Investigative Project on Terrorism
According to Emerson’s IPT investigation, the chief organizers had more than “peaceful” intentions for the flotilla.
The respected Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) reported that a Gaza-based Hamas leader declared three days before the voyage started that the captain of the [Gaza Flotilla] ship had told him: “We will not allow the Zionists to come near us, and we will wage resistance against them.”
Meanwhile, Congressman Trent Franks (R-AZ) responded to ongoing criticism of Israel following the incident near Gaza where Israeli Defense Forces personnel engaged the flotilla of six ships attempting to overrun an Israeli naval blockade.
Rep. Franks cited reports indicating that individuals on board the ships were carrying weapons and attacked Israeli soldiers as they were trying to stop the advance of the flotilla. The blockade exists to keep the terrorist organization Hamas, which has routinely launched attacks against innocent Israeli citizens, from supplying its forces with weapons and other materials while allowing necessary humanitarian supplies to reach those living in Gaza, Franks stated.
“The conflict that took place aboard the Turkish flotilla was a completely unnecessary and deliberate attempt to provoke Israel to action. The Gaza blockade was put into place in an attempt to prevent Hamas from continuing to use the Gaza strip as a launching pad for literally thousands and thousands of rockets fired into innocent Israeli citizen populations. Humanitarian shipments into Gaza are routinely used to smuggle weapons and other dangerous materials into Gaza for Hamas,” said Congressman Franks.
“The United States must maintain a strong position of support for Israel as the U.N. once again tries to make them a punching bag for the rest of the world. The Obama Administration must also commit to vetoing any resolution from U.N. Organizations like the Security Council or the Human Rights Council that would condemn Israel and encourage the terrorist groups who provoked the raid,” said the Arizona lawmaker.
Obama supporters in the midst of discussion regarding the current Egyptian civil unrest are claiming that the Muslim Brotherhood is not a terrorist organization and that its members are not major players in the Egyptian protests and uprising. They also claim there are no connections between the Obama administration and radical Islamists such as the Muslim Brotherhood, in spite of the activities of Ayers, Dohrn and Evans, who are known associates of the U.S. President.
“If the House Republicans, who are now the majority, wish to investigate the current administration and its abysmal performance on national security incidents, they should start with the President’s relationship with far-left radicals and Islamic fascists,” said Det. Snopes.
Thursday, April 21, 2011
What is the point of dragging Israel, victim of Hamas terrorism into the question of Arrigoni’s death?
From Il Giornale, April 16, 2011, by Fiamma Nirenstein:
The cruelty of the public execution of a young man who had family and friends, as it was the case with Vittorio Arrigoni's killing, is always awful. And this is clear.
What isn’t clear to the European public is that it is patently evident that the killers are his old Islamic Jihadists friends from Gaza. But they could have been Afghanis, or Iraqis.
In 2002, Daniel Pearl was killed in Karachi with similar methods because he was a Jew; in 2004 the decapitation of the American Nick Berg in Iraq was filmed, the Jihadists said, «to give a clear message to the West»; the Italian Fabrizio Quattrocchi was executed because he was «an enemy of God, an enemy of Allah» and Vittorio Arrigoni, as his butchers say it in the video, in the words that scroll across the screen, because «he was spreading western immorality in Gaza» and because «Italy fights against Islamic countries».
It has been repeated again and again that Hamas, with whom Arrigoni was on friendly terms, has condemned the crime. But in actual fact it doesn’t matter if the assassins are members of Hamas or not. They have been, they will be, they are all controlled by Hamas. Even Al Qaida, which has a presence in Gaza, is seen by Hamas in a better or worse light, depending on the moment. But Hamas is always top dog in Gaza.
Hamas is responsible for the captivity of Gilad Shalit; it was responsible for the armed destruction of the UN recreational camp for children, which did not abide by Islamic dictates; it was responsible for arresting 150 women under the accusation of witchcraft and the execution of several of them; it is Hamas that has introduced by law death penalty, whipping, cutting off hands and crucifixion, according to Sharia. Hamas killed the 32-year old Christian book salesman Rami Khader Ayyad, guilty of selling Bibles.
Not all those who carry out these operations, or which Hamas gives orders to fire Qassam missiles against Israel, are members of the terrorist organization that rules Gaza; indeed at times it pretend to fight them.
Hamas is a movement, a party, a fundamentalist State. Its statute stipulates that it wants to destroy the Jewish State, to exterminate Jews and impose an Islamic caliphate on the entire world. Salafite fringes and those linked more to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, those influenced to a greater or lesser extent by Iran or Al Qaeda and based in the Gaza Strip, join up and leave Hamas by turns. The fact that Hamas has now disowned the killers of Arrigoni is not of the slightest importance. In any case, they were still employed by Hamas as members of the Al Qassam Brigades.
To understand the death of this Italian activist, one important fact must be grasped: his death was triggered by the spurious way he mixed his humanitarian ideals with the cause of fundamentalist Gaza, by the fact that he mixed his life with that of his potential enemies, that he thought about as his best friends.
But fundamentalists do not have stable affinities. Only their interpretation of Quran counts. Hamas Gaza, where Arrigoni has been killed, is for us a land ruled by awful and distant laws. Arrigoni loved the Palestinians, but he remained a total foreigner for them. It is for us unconcivable, even if you are a militant like Arrigoni, to live alongside those who fire missiles on civilians, wear belts packed with explosives and hand out sweets when an Israeli family is killed in Itamar, including a three months baby, a four years old child and another of nine.
This is a crucial issue: when you go to Gaza, or Afghanistan, you have to realise that our conception of life, is complitely different from any Islamic political conception of life. You can die because you are Jewish, because you are Italian, or Christian, because you are an apostate, or a corrupt Westerner... the extremist mentality, make no bones about it, cancels out friends and allies.
No matter how much you have worked against the «Zionist power» or that you have called Zionists «rats» (and Arrigoni did this), nothing is of any worth if you break their rule, a rule which will remain unclear until the knife blade comes. Arrigoni was fan of political Islamism because he was an enemy of the Jews, but this did not save him from a cruel execution in front of the camera, just as the one of many others friends or enemies of Hamas or the Islamic Jihad, never mind.
So it is intellectually sad and even dangerous that a demonstration in front of the Italian Parliament blamed Israel and Italy for Arrigoni’s death; or that the ISM, the pro-Palestinian NGO Arrigoni belonged to, attributed «moral responsibility to the State of Israel». These reactions seem to be triggered only by ideological hatred.
But what is more striking still, with sincerest respect for the figure of the President of Republic, was the statement of condolences which Giorgio Napolitano rightly delivered; instead of laying the blame on Islamic fundamentalism, he asked that «a negotiated solution be found to the conflict which sees bloodshed in the region». With the same coherence, he could have invoked any good cause: the fight against world hunger, or child prostitution.
Yet instead, Israel is being summoned to face some mysterious responsibility.
But the fault is only of Islamic fundamentalism; what is the point of dragging the pained witness and victim of Hamas terrorism into the question?
The cruelty of the public execution of a young man who had family and friends, as it was the case with Vittorio Arrigoni's killing, is always awful. And this is clear.
What isn’t clear to the European public is that it is patently evident that the killers are his old Islamic Jihadists friends from Gaza. But they could have been Afghanis, or Iraqis.
In 2002, Daniel Pearl was killed in Karachi with similar methods because he was a Jew; in 2004 the decapitation of the American Nick Berg in Iraq was filmed, the Jihadists said, «to give a clear message to the West»; the Italian Fabrizio Quattrocchi was executed because he was «an enemy of God, an enemy of Allah» and Vittorio Arrigoni, as his butchers say it in the video, in the words that scroll across the screen, because «he was spreading western immorality in Gaza» and because «Italy fights against Islamic countries».
It has been repeated again and again that Hamas, with whom Arrigoni was on friendly terms, has condemned the crime. But in actual fact it doesn’t matter if the assassins are members of Hamas or not. They have been, they will be, they are all controlled by Hamas. Even Al Qaida, which has a presence in Gaza, is seen by Hamas in a better or worse light, depending on the moment. But Hamas is always top dog in Gaza.
Hamas is responsible for the captivity of Gilad Shalit; it was responsible for the armed destruction of the UN recreational camp for children, which did not abide by Islamic dictates; it was responsible for arresting 150 women under the accusation of witchcraft and the execution of several of them; it is Hamas that has introduced by law death penalty, whipping, cutting off hands and crucifixion, according to Sharia. Hamas killed the 32-year old Christian book salesman Rami Khader Ayyad, guilty of selling Bibles.
Not all those who carry out these operations, or which Hamas gives orders to fire Qassam missiles against Israel, are members of the terrorist organization that rules Gaza; indeed at times it pretend to fight them.
Hamas is a movement, a party, a fundamentalist State. Its statute stipulates that it wants to destroy the Jewish State, to exterminate Jews and impose an Islamic caliphate on the entire world. Salafite fringes and those linked more to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, those influenced to a greater or lesser extent by Iran or Al Qaeda and based in the Gaza Strip, join up and leave Hamas by turns. The fact that Hamas has now disowned the killers of Arrigoni is not of the slightest importance. In any case, they were still employed by Hamas as members of the Al Qassam Brigades.
To understand the death of this Italian activist, one important fact must be grasped: his death was triggered by the spurious way he mixed his humanitarian ideals with the cause of fundamentalist Gaza, by the fact that he mixed his life with that of his potential enemies, that he thought about as his best friends.
But fundamentalists do not have stable affinities. Only their interpretation of Quran counts. Hamas Gaza, where Arrigoni has been killed, is for us a land ruled by awful and distant laws. Arrigoni loved the Palestinians, but he remained a total foreigner for them. It is for us unconcivable, even if you are a militant like Arrigoni, to live alongside those who fire missiles on civilians, wear belts packed with explosives and hand out sweets when an Israeli family is killed in Itamar, including a three months baby, a four years old child and another of nine.
This is a crucial issue: when you go to Gaza, or Afghanistan, you have to realise that our conception of life, is complitely different from any Islamic political conception of life. You can die because you are Jewish, because you are Italian, or Christian, because you are an apostate, or a corrupt Westerner... the extremist mentality, make no bones about it, cancels out friends and allies.
No matter how much you have worked against the «Zionist power» or that you have called Zionists «rats» (and Arrigoni did this), nothing is of any worth if you break their rule, a rule which will remain unclear until the knife blade comes. Arrigoni was fan of political Islamism because he was an enemy of the Jews, but this did not save him from a cruel execution in front of the camera, just as the one of many others friends or enemies of Hamas or the Islamic Jihad, never mind.
So it is intellectually sad and even dangerous that a demonstration in front of the Italian Parliament blamed Israel and Italy for Arrigoni’s death; or that the ISM, the pro-Palestinian NGO Arrigoni belonged to, attributed «moral responsibility to the State of Israel». These reactions seem to be triggered only by ideological hatred.
But what is more striking still, with sincerest respect for the figure of the President of Republic, was the statement of condolences which Giorgio Napolitano rightly delivered; instead of laying the blame on Islamic fundamentalism, he asked that «a negotiated solution be found to the conflict which sees bloodshed in the region». With the same coherence, he could have invoked any good cause: the fight against world hunger, or child prostitution.
Yet instead, Israel is being summoned to face some mysterious responsibility.
But the fault is only of Islamic fundamentalism; what is the point of dragging the pained witness and victim of Hamas terrorism into the question?
Iran implicates Siemens in Stuxnet cyberattack
From Computerworld, April 18, 2011 by Gregg Keizer:
...Iran's Brigadier General Gholam Reza Jalali laid some of the blame for the Stuxnet worm that attacked his country's nuclear facilities, on Siemens.
...Jalali heads Iran's Passive Defense Organization, a military unit responsible for constructing and defending the country's nuclear enrichment facilities. He is a former commander in Iran's Revolutionary Guard.
Stuxnet, which first came to light in June 2010 but hit Iranian targets in several waves starting the year before, has been extensively analyzed by security researchers, most notably a three-man team at Symantec, and by Ralph Langner of the German firm Langner Communications GmbH.
According to both Symantec and Langner, Stuxnet was designed to infiltrate Iran's nuclear enrichment program, hide in the Iranian SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) control systems that operate its plants, then force gas centrifuge motors to spin at unsafe speeds. Gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium, can fly apart if spun too fast.
..."The investigations and research showed that the Stuxnet worm had been disseminated from sources in the U.S. and Israel," said Jalali, who added that the worm sent reports of infected systems to computers in Texas.
Jalali's allegations of U.S. and Israeli involvement were the first from an Iranian official, although President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has repeatedly blamed the two countries for trying to destabilize his government.
In January, the New York Times, citing confidential sources, said that Stuxnet was jointly created by the U.S. and Israel, with the latter using its covert nuclear facility at Dimona to test the worm's effectiveness on centrifuges like the ones Iran employs.
According to the Times, Siemens cooperated in 2008 with the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) to help experts there identify vulnerabilities in the SCADA hardware and software sold by the German firm. The lab -- located about 30 miles east of Idaho Falls, Idaho -- is the U.S. Department of Energy's lead nuclear research facility.
...Symantec ...has said that Stuxnet was very successful. In a February update to its research on the worm, Symantec said the first attacks in June 2009 infected Iranian computers just 12 hours after the worm was compiled. The average time between compilation and infection was 19 days for the 10 successful attacks Symantec monitored over an 11-month span.
...Iran's Brigadier General Gholam Reza Jalali laid some of the blame for the Stuxnet worm that attacked his country's nuclear facilities, on Siemens.
...Jalali heads Iran's Passive Defense Organization, a military unit responsible for constructing and defending the country's nuclear enrichment facilities. He is a former commander in Iran's Revolutionary Guard.
Stuxnet, which first came to light in June 2010 but hit Iranian targets in several waves starting the year before, has been extensively analyzed by security researchers, most notably a three-man team at Symantec, and by Ralph Langner of the German firm Langner Communications GmbH.
According to both Symantec and Langner, Stuxnet was designed to infiltrate Iran's nuclear enrichment program, hide in the Iranian SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) control systems that operate its plants, then force gas centrifuge motors to spin at unsafe speeds. Gas centrifuges, which are used to enrich uranium, can fly apart if spun too fast.
..."The investigations and research showed that the Stuxnet worm had been disseminated from sources in the U.S. and Israel," said Jalali, who added that the worm sent reports of infected systems to computers in Texas.
Jalali's allegations of U.S. and Israeli involvement were the first from an Iranian official, although President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has repeatedly blamed the two countries for trying to destabilize his government.
In January, the New York Times, citing confidential sources, said that Stuxnet was jointly created by the U.S. and Israel, with the latter using its covert nuclear facility at Dimona to test the worm's effectiveness on centrifuges like the ones Iran employs.
According to the Times, Siemens cooperated in 2008 with the Idaho National Laboratory (INL) to help experts there identify vulnerabilities in the SCADA hardware and software sold by the German firm. The lab -- located about 30 miles east of Idaho Falls, Idaho -- is the U.S. Department of Energy's lead nuclear research facility.
...Symantec ...has said that Stuxnet was very successful. In a February update to its research on the worm, Symantec said the first attacks in June 2009 infected Iranian computers just 12 hours after the worm was compiled. The average time between compilation and infection was 19 days for the 10 successful attacks Symantec monitored over an 11-month span.
How good an ally is Israel?
A Passover Hymn (Da'ye'nu) 2011, about US-Israel relations, from Ambassador (ret.) Yoram Ettinger, Jerusalem, Israel:
"How many degree of beneficence hath the Almighty conferred upon us?! If He had brought us forth from Egypt, and had not executed judgment upon the Egyptians, it would have sufficed (Da'ye'nu)...
If He had inflicted justice upon them..., it would have sufficed (Da'ye'nu')..."
If Israel were merely the most effective battle-tested laboratory available to the USA, the source for over 600 modifications of the F-16, and thousands of cutting-edge modifications in hundreds additional US military systems, enhancing US national security, while providing the US defense industries a unique mega-billion dollars competitive edge in the global market, expanding US employment, research & development and export infrastructures - Da'ye'nu (it would have sufficed to crown Israel as a unique two-way-street ally of the USA);
If Israel were merely the source of breakthrough battle tactics, which were the first to penetrate/jam/destroy the most sophisticated Soviet/Russian surface-to-air missile batteries and radar systems, in addition to transferring to the US the first Soviet MIG-21 and 23 and other Soviet military systems, which tilted global balance of power in favor of the USA, providing the US defense industries with mega-billion dollars bonanza - Da'ye'nu;
If Israel were merely the source of intelligence - shared with the USA - which exceeds the scope of intelligence received by the US from all NATO countries combined (according to Senator Daniel Inouye, former Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and current Chairman of the full Appropriations Committee) and is equal to five CIAs (according to retired General George Keegan, former Chief of US Air Force Intelligence) - Da'ye'nu;
If Israel were merely the country which destroyed Iraq's nuclear reactor in 1981 (in defiance of global opposition), thus providing the USA a conventional option in the 1991 Gulf War, sparing the US a potential
traumatic nuclear confrontation - Da'ye'nu;
If Israel were merely a source of battle-proven experience and military systems - combating IEDs, car bombs, suicide bombers and generic terrorism - shared with US Special Operations units, which battle Islamic terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan, thus minimizing US losses - Da'ye'nu;
If - as stated by the late General Alexander Haig, former Supreme Commander of NATO and former Secretary of State -Israel were merely the largest American aircraft carrier which does not require a single American personnel, which cannot be sunk, which is the most battle-tested and cost-effective, and located in a region, which is critical to vital US economic and national security interests - Da'ye'nu;
If there would not be an Israel in the eastern flank of the Mediterranean, and the US would have to deploy to the region real aircraft carriers with tens of thousands of American servicemen, costing the US taxpayers $20BN annually and possibly dragging the US into local and regional conflicts - all of which has been spared by the existence and capabilities of the Jewish State - Da'ye'nu;
If there would not be havoc in Arab lands, highlighting the Jewish State as the only stable, reliable, credible, capable, predictable, democratic and non-conditional ally of the USA - Da'ye'nu;
If Israel were not the place where- according to Warren Buffett - hundreds of major American companies and investors shop for innovative ideas, which they transform into technologies, products and manufacturing lines, benefitting both American and Israeli employment, trade, research & development and exports - Da'ye'nu;
If Israel were not the source of hundreds of revolutionary medical device, healthcare, telecommunications, Internet, laptops, cellular and social networking technologies/products.- enhancing quality of life in the US and throughout the globe - Da'ye'nu;
If US-Israel covenant were not uniquely based on shared values (dating back to the Pilgrims and the US Founding Fathers), joint interests and mutual threats - Da'ye'nu (It would have sufficed to crown Israel as a unique two-way-street ally of the USA).
"How many degree of beneficence hath the Almighty conferred upon us?! If He had brought us forth from Egypt, and had not executed judgment upon the Egyptians, it would have sufficed (Da'ye'nu)...
If He had inflicted justice upon them..., it would have sufficed (Da'ye'nu')..."
If Israel were merely the most effective battle-tested laboratory available to the USA, the source for over 600 modifications of the F-16, and thousands of cutting-edge modifications in hundreds additional US military systems, enhancing US national security, while providing the US defense industries a unique mega-billion dollars competitive edge in the global market, expanding US employment, research & development and export infrastructures - Da'ye'nu (it would have sufficed to crown Israel as a unique two-way-street ally of the USA);
If Israel were merely the source of breakthrough battle tactics, which were the first to penetrate/jam/destroy the most sophisticated Soviet/Russian surface-to-air missile batteries and radar systems, in addition to transferring to the US the first Soviet MIG-21 and 23 and other Soviet military systems, which tilted global balance of power in favor of the USA, providing the US defense industries with mega-billion dollars bonanza - Da'ye'nu;
If Israel were merely the source of intelligence - shared with the USA - which exceeds the scope of intelligence received by the US from all NATO countries combined (according to Senator Daniel Inouye, former Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee and current Chairman of the full Appropriations Committee) and is equal to five CIAs (according to retired General George Keegan, former Chief of US Air Force Intelligence) - Da'ye'nu;
If Israel were merely the country which destroyed Iraq's nuclear reactor in 1981 (in defiance of global opposition), thus providing the USA a conventional option in the 1991 Gulf War, sparing the US a potential
traumatic nuclear confrontation - Da'ye'nu;
If Israel were merely a source of battle-proven experience and military systems - combating IEDs, car bombs, suicide bombers and generic terrorism - shared with US Special Operations units, which battle Islamic terrorists in Iraq and Afghanistan, thus minimizing US losses - Da'ye'nu;
If - as stated by the late General Alexander Haig, former Supreme Commander of NATO and former Secretary of State -Israel were merely the largest American aircraft carrier which does not require a single American personnel, which cannot be sunk, which is the most battle-tested and cost-effective, and located in a region, which is critical to vital US economic and national security interests - Da'ye'nu;
If there would not be an Israel in the eastern flank of the Mediterranean, and the US would have to deploy to the region real aircraft carriers with tens of thousands of American servicemen, costing the US taxpayers $20BN annually and possibly dragging the US into local and regional conflicts - all of which has been spared by the existence and capabilities of the Jewish State - Da'ye'nu;
If there would not be havoc in Arab lands, highlighting the Jewish State as the only stable, reliable, credible, capable, predictable, democratic and non-conditional ally of the USA - Da'ye'nu;
If Israel were not the place where- according to Warren Buffett - hundreds of major American companies and investors shop for innovative ideas, which they transform into technologies, products and manufacturing lines, benefitting both American and Israeli employment, trade, research & development and exports - Da'ye'nu;
If Israel were not the source of hundreds of revolutionary medical device, healthcare, telecommunications, Internet, laptops, cellular and social networking technologies/products.- enhancing quality of life in the US and throughout the globe - Da'ye'nu;
If US-Israel covenant were not uniquely based on shared values (dating back to the Pilgrims and the US Founding Fathers), joint interests and mutual threats - Da'ye'nu (It would have sufficed to crown Israel as a unique two-way-street ally of the USA).
US Impotence in the face of Hysterical Hypocrisy at the UN
From Fox News, April 18, 2011, by Anne Bayefsky:
...Democracy-seekers are dying all over [Syria]. Meanwhile, at the United Nations, negotiations over what would be the organization’s first-ever definition of terrorism ended with deadlock on Friday after fifteen years of talking about it.
Leading the naysayers from the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) was Syria, a country that claimed that murdering its preferred antagonists doesn’t count. That might be just a bad joke, except for the fact that the Obama administration has made the U.N. the centerpiece of its national security policy.
Friday marked the last day of a week-long effort by the U.N. ad-hoc Committee on Measures to Eliminate International Terrorism to finalize a comprehensive convention on international terrorism. Negotiations began back in 1996, and courtesy of American taxpayer dollars, they pick up now and again about every six months. Back in 2003, there was a draft put forward by a coordinator charged with bridging gaps, but the OIC objected because a definition of terrorism should “distinguish it from the legitimate struggle of peoples against foreign occupation.” Then again in 2007 a draft compromise failed because the OIC said the proposed definition failed to draw a “distinction between terrorism and peoples’ struggle for self-determination and against foreign occupation.”
On Friday, with four more years of diplomatic lunches under their belt, the OIC and its Syrian spokesperson said no deal because there is a “distinction between terrorism and the struggle for the rights of self-determination by people under foreign occupation and colonial or alien domination.” Representatives from Egypt, Iraq and Saudi Arabia immediately voiced their wholehearted agreement. In plain language, Islamic states including Muslim “allies” of the United States, insist that all Israelis, Americans who get in their way, or anybody else nowadays who objects to President Bashar Assad’s idea of “self-determination,” are fair game.
And Syria’s run at the U.N. on Friday didn’t end there.
Syria is currently running for a seat on the U.N.’s flagship “human rights” body, the Human Rights Council. Seats are allocated to five regional groups, and just to make sure Syria’s ascendancy is unimpeded, the Asian group has only nominated the same number of states as they have seats. So barring any unexpected additions, Syria will join fellow U.N. human rights authorities like Saudi Arabia on the Council in May.
The U.N. does have a “test” for Human Rights Council wannabes. They call it a pledge system – candidates should promise to protect human rights. In the words of the 2006 General Assembly resolution that created the Council (the Bush administration and Israel casting a negative vote), when electing candidates “voluntary pledges and commitments made” “to the promotion and protection of human rights” should be “taken into account.”
Syria has been a quick study. Its pledge, obligingly posted on the U.N. website, says: “Promotion and protection of human rights are of highest importance to Syria…Syria’s candidature to the Human Rights Council signifies its commitment to respect and to support the inalienable and indivisible nature of all human rights.”
That might be another bad joke. Except that the Obama administration announced on March 30 that it was so “pleased to note the landmark achievements of the most recent session of the U.N. Human Rights Council” that it was going to seek a second term. That characterization of the Council’s main March session is somewhat dubious, at least if the administration cared at all about the concept of equality and the welfare of Israel. The last session was the worst on record for the demonization of the Jewish state, the Council adopting more anti-Israel resolutions in one sitting than ever before. The wildly premature announcement – the U.S. term will end in December 31, 2012 according to a new General Assembly deal – erases any possibility of using prospective U.S. membership or associated dollars as clout.
Which brings us back to Syria. Obama diplomats have been making tiny noises about attempting to institute criteria for belonging to the Council that have something to do with a country’s actual human rights record. On Friday, Syrians diplomats treated the toothless Obama speechifying with the ridicule it so richly deserved.
Syrian U.N. Ambassador Bashar Ja’afari warned “those who call for reviewing membership criteria” that the move “would bring unpleasant surprises.” In addition to his country’s penchant for bashing heads, what he meant by this threat was a list of seventeen membership “criteria that have to be met in case this matter is re-visited.”
Syrian thugs think these states should be disqualified from Human Rights Council membership: “colonial states,” states which “…have taken part in the slave trade and not apologized,… propagate Islamophobia…and all forms of cultural discrimination, …ignore international legitimacy,…interfere in the internal affairs of other UN members,…foster state terrorism,…and cause greenhouse effects and global warming.”
However ludicrous, make no mistake about how this classic U.N. debate will turn out. The U.S. idea of caring about human rights as a qualification for membership will be set off against Syria’s list and result in maintaining the status quo – namely, the laughable pledge. There is no possibility whatsoever, that the same countries who comprise the majority of members of the U.N. General Assembly – only 87 of 192 are fully free democracies according to Freedom House – are going to police themselves. Even if the Syrian candidacy is eventually challenged, there is no shortage of like-minded comrades to join Cuba, China, Russian and the Saudis on the U.N.’s idea of a human rights body.
Sadly, none of the above stopped United States Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice from telling lawmakers on Capitol Hill a week ago that “the U.N. promotes universal values Americans hold dear” and “the United Nations… make[s] Americans safer.” With the Obama administration looking to the U.N. for guidance on protecting “human rights” and combating “terrorism,” Americans are in serious trouble.
...Democracy-seekers are dying all over [Syria]. Meanwhile, at the United Nations, negotiations over what would be the organization’s first-ever definition of terrorism ended with deadlock on Friday after fifteen years of talking about it.
Leading the naysayers from the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) was Syria, a country that claimed that murdering its preferred antagonists doesn’t count. That might be just a bad joke, except for the fact that the Obama administration has made the U.N. the centerpiece of its national security policy.
Friday marked the last day of a week-long effort by the U.N. ad-hoc Committee on Measures to Eliminate International Terrorism to finalize a comprehensive convention on international terrorism. Negotiations began back in 1996, and courtesy of American taxpayer dollars, they pick up now and again about every six months. Back in 2003, there was a draft put forward by a coordinator charged with bridging gaps, but the OIC objected because a definition of terrorism should “distinguish it from the legitimate struggle of peoples against foreign occupation.” Then again in 2007 a draft compromise failed because the OIC said the proposed definition failed to draw a “distinction between terrorism and peoples’ struggle for self-determination and against foreign occupation.”
On Friday, with four more years of diplomatic lunches under their belt, the OIC and its Syrian spokesperson said no deal because there is a “distinction between terrorism and the struggle for the rights of self-determination by people under foreign occupation and colonial or alien domination.” Representatives from Egypt, Iraq and Saudi Arabia immediately voiced their wholehearted agreement. In plain language, Islamic states including Muslim “allies” of the United States, insist that all Israelis, Americans who get in their way, or anybody else nowadays who objects to President Bashar Assad’s idea of “self-determination,” are fair game.
And Syria’s run at the U.N. on Friday didn’t end there.
Syria is currently running for a seat on the U.N.’s flagship “human rights” body, the Human Rights Council. Seats are allocated to five regional groups, and just to make sure Syria’s ascendancy is unimpeded, the Asian group has only nominated the same number of states as they have seats. So barring any unexpected additions, Syria will join fellow U.N. human rights authorities like Saudi Arabia on the Council in May.
The U.N. does have a “test” for Human Rights Council wannabes. They call it a pledge system – candidates should promise to protect human rights. In the words of the 2006 General Assembly resolution that created the Council (the Bush administration and Israel casting a negative vote), when electing candidates “voluntary pledges and commitments made” “to the promotion and protection of human rights” should be “taken into account.”
Syria has been a quick study. Its pledge, obligingly posted on the U.N. website, says: “Promotion and protection of human rights are of highest importance to Syria…Syria’s candidature to the Human Rights Council signifies its commitment to respect and to support the inalienable and indivisible nature of all human rights.”
That might be another bad joke. Except that the Obama administration announced on March 30 that it was so “pleased to note the landmark achievements of the most recent session of the U.N. Human Rights Council” that it was going to seek a second term. That characterization of the Council’s main March session is somewhat dubious, at least if the administration cared at all about the concept of equality and the welfare of Israel. The last session was the worst on record for the demonization of the Jewish state, the Council adopting more anti-Israel resolutions in one sitting than ever before. The wildly premature announcement – the U.S. term will end in December 31, 2012 according to a new General Assembly deal – erases any possibility of using prospective U.S. membership or associated dollars as clout.
Which brings us back to Syria. Obama diplomats have been making tiny noises about attempting to institute criteria for belonging to the Council that have something to do with a country’s actual human rights record. On Friday, Syrians diplomats treated the toothless Obama speechifying with the ridicule it so richly deserved.
Syrian U.N. Ambassador Bashar Ja’afari warned “those who call for reviewing membership criteria” that the move “would bring unpleasant surprises.” In addition to his country’s penchant for bashing heads, what he meant by this threat was a list of seventeen membership “criteria that have to be met in case this matter is re-visited.”
Syrian thugs think these states should be disqualified from Human Rights Council membership: “colonial states,” states which “…have taken part in the slave trade and not apologized,… propagate Islamophobia…and all forms of cultural discrimination, …ignore international legitimacy,…interfere in the internal affairs of other UN members,…foster state terrorism,…and cause greenhouse effects and global warming.”
However ludicrous, make no mistake about how this classic U.N. debate will turn out. The U.S. idea of caring about human rights as a qualification for membership will be set off against Syria’s list and result in maintaining the status quo – namely, the laughable pledge. There is no possibility whatsoever, that the same countries who comprise the majority of members of the U.N. General Assembly – only 87 of 192 are fully free democracies according to Freedom House – are going to police themselves. Even if the Syrian candidacy is eventually challenged, there is no shortage of like-minded comrades to join Cuba, China, Russian and the Saudis on the U.N.’s idea of a human rights body.
Sadly, none of the above stopped United States Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice from telling lawmakers on Capitol Hill a week ago that “the U.N. promotes universal values Americans hold dear” and “the United Nations… make[s] Americans safer.” With the Obama administration looking to the U.N. for guidance on protecting “human rights” and combating “terrorism,” Americans are in serious trouble.
Friday, April 15, 2011
Assassinating Hope
From the translation of an op-ed in El Imparcial, a new prestigious Spanish digital daily, April 2011, by Ely Karmon, PhD, Senior Research Scholar, International Institute for Counter-Terrorism (ICT) and The Institute for Policy and Strategy (IPS) at The Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) Herzlyia, Israel:
...On April 4, 2011, the Israeli-Arab actor-director and pro-Palestinian political activist Juliano Mer-Khamis was shot dead by a hooded assassin outside The Freedom Theatre, which he founded in a refugee camp in the West Bank city of Jenin. The theatre provides children and youth of the refugee camp with opportunities to develop creative skills, self-knowledge and confidence as a model for social change.
Juliano, son of a Jewish mother and a Christian-Palestinian father, both communists, was a unique cultural and activist figure. He opened the Freedom Theater in 2006 in partnership with UNESCO. UNESCO head, Irina Bokova, condemned the assassination and described Mer-Khamis as “a social committed artist” and “an ardent defender of peaceful co-existence.”
...In a “scenario” prophesized by Juliano a year ago in a documentary movie, he said he will finish by a bullet shot in his head by a young Islamist Palestinian angry of him corrupting the “Islamic youth” and his presence in the Jenin refugee camp with his blonde Finnish wife! A suspected Hamas assassin was arrested by the Palestinian security forces.
After the Hamas violent takeover of the Gaza Strip in June 2007 a boost of Islamization and radicalization process began. School girls are instructed to wear head covers and full-length robes otherwise they risk to be suspended. The High Judicial Council instructs female lawyers to come to court wearing Islamic dress. On Hamas Television Channel all female announcers wear veils. Hamas forbids mixed gender swimming at sea and mixed gender ceremonies.
Under Hamas rule several Salafi groups proliferated in Gaza and opened an all-out war against internet coffee shops, shops that sell women lingerie, but also against Palestinian Christians. They attacked the YMCA library, the Rahabat Al Wardia School run by nuns, and the Beit Lahiya UN School.
The uprisings in the Arab world have raised the hope for a democratization process and a brighter future for the beleaguered Arab masses, after decades of autocratic rule. But at the same time, the specter of organized Islamist movements taking control of Egypt and Tunisia, Syria or Libya and imposing a strict Islamist way of life à-la-Iran or Taliban, poses a great question mark on the revolutionary outcomes of the uprisings.
In Tunisia, the assassination of a priest, anti-Semitic incidents, a series of Islamist attacks against prostitution houses have shaken the public. Several weeks ago some 15,000 people demonstrated against Tunisia's Islamist movement, calling for religious tolerance.
In Egypt, Sheik Mohamed Hussein Yacoub, a prominent Cairo cleric, generated outrage by claiming the country belongs “to the observant” and “those who object could emigrate to North America.“ Salafi activists in Upper Egypt cut a teacher’s ear accusing him of renting an apartment to prostitutes. In the oasis of Fayoum Salafists destroyed places selling beer. Dozens of Salafis staged a protest in Cairo, accusing the church of abducting Camilla Shehata, a Coptic priest's wife who some believe converted to Islam and is being held against her will. Elsewhere in Egypt, Coptic Christians evacuated 340 female students from their university dorms to church-affiliated sanctuaries over concerns for their safety.
Jordanian Salafists were taking advantage of the atmosphere of openness witnessed these days to demand Islamic law be imposed on the state and called for jihad as the "way to liberate Muslim lands from autocrats."
The emblematic assassination of a renowned, ardent, secular pro-Palestinian artist bodes badly for the future of the Palestinian society, for the prospects of a peace process between the Israelis and Palestinians and if exemplary for the trends in the “new” Arab world, for the future of this region and its relation with the outside world.
...On April 4, 2011, the Israeli-Arab actor-director and pro-Palestinian political activist Juliano Mer-Khamis was shot dead by a hooded assassin outside The Freedom Theatre, which he founded in a refugee camp in the West Bank city of Jenin. The theatre provides children and youth of the refugee camp with opportunities to develop creative skills, self-knowledge and confidence as a model for social change.
Juliano, son of a Jewish mother and a Christian-Palestinian father, both communists, was a unique cultural and activist figure. He opened the Freedom Theater in 2006 in partnership with UNESCO. UNESCO head, Irina Bokova, condemned the assassination and described Mer-Khamis as “a social committed artist” and “an ardent defender of peaceful co-existence.”
...In a “scenario” prophesized by Juliano a year ago in a documentary movie, he said he will finish by a bullet shot in his head by a young Islamist Palestinian angry of him corrupting the “Islamic youth” and his presence in the Jenin refugee camp with his blonde Finnish wife! A suspected Hamas assassin was arrested by the Palestinian security forces.
After the Hamas violent takeover of the Gaza Strip in June 2007 a boost of Islamization and radicalization process began. School girls are instructed to wear head covers and full-length robes otherwise they risk to be suspended. The High Judicial Council instructs female lawyers to come to court wearing Islamic dress. On Hamas Television Channel all female announcers wear veils. Hamas forbids mixed gender swimming at sea and mixed gender ceremonies.
Under Hamas rule several Salafi groups proliferated in Gaza and opened an all-out war against internet coffee shops, shops that sell women lingerie, but also against Palestinian Christians. They attacked the YMCA library, the Rahabat Al Wardia School run by nuns, and the Beit Lahiya UN School.
The uprisings in the Arab world have raised the hope for a democratization process and a brighter future for the beleaguered Arab masses, after decades of autocratic rule. But at the same time, the specter of organized Islamist movements taking control of Egypt and Tunisia, Syria or Libya and imposing a strict Islamist way of life à-la-Iran or Taliban, poses a great question mark on the revolutionary outcomes of the uprisings.
In Tunisia, the assassination of a priest, anti-Semitic incidents, a series of Islamist attacks against prostitution houses have shaken the public. Several weeks ago some 15,000 people demonstrated against Tunisia's Islamist movement, calling for religious tolerance.
In Egypt, Sheik Mohamed Hussein Yacoub, a prominent Cairo cleric, generated outrage by claiming the country belongs “to the observant” and “those who object could emigrate to North America.“ Salafi activists in Upper Egypt cut a teacher’s ear accusing him of renting an apartment to prostitutes. In the oasis of Fayoum Salafists destroyed places selling beer. Dozens of Salafis staged a protest in Cairo, accusing the church of abducting Camilla Shehata, a Coptic priest's wife who some believe converted to Islam and is being held against her will. Elsewhere in Egypt, Coptic Christians evacuated 340 female students from their university dorms to church-affiliated sanctuaries over concerns for their safety.
Jordanian Salafists were taking advantage of the atmosphere of openness witnessed these days to demand Islamic law be imposed on the state and called for jihad as the "way to liberate Muslim lands from autocrats."
The emblematic assassination of a renowned, ardent, secular pro-Palestinian artist bodes badly for the future of the Palestinian society, for the prospects of a peace process between the Israelis and Palestinians and if exemplary for the trends in the “new” Arab world, for the future of this region and its relation with the outside world.
Wednesday, April 13, 2011
Israel must not succumb to false alarms
From an article published 12 April 2011, by Moshe Arens:
The important thing is to stay calm, not press the panic button, and not listen to those familiar faces who reappear every now and then with a new-old initiative suggesting that Israel announce it is prepared to withdraw to the '67 borders.'
...our defense minister...has already sounded the alarm.
According to him, Israel will be hit by a political tsunami in September. His warning bell is being echoed by many who demand the government launch a daring initiative before it is too late, before the tsunami hits us. But they have a pleasant surprise awaiting them: Israel will still be here in September....
States have never been created by UN declarations and never will be. For those who have forgotten, Israel was not created by UN resolution 181 in November 1947, but by David Ben-Gurion's declaration of Israeli independence on May 15, 1948 and by the IDF's ability to take and control the areas of the new state.
A UN declaration, whether at the Security Council or the General Assembly, recognizing a Palestinian state within the borders of the April 1949 armistice lines with Jordan, with Jerusalem as its capital, will be no more effective than Security Council resolution 1701, which prohibited Hezbollah from military operations in southern Lebanon, or General Assembly resolution 3379, which equated Zionism with racism.
If this latest declaration is actually passed, it will merely serve as another reminder of the impotence of the United Nations and its irrelevance when it comes to dealing with international conflicts. The U.S. government must surely be aware of this.
All this brouhaha about the coming tsunami skirts the fundamental issues preventing an agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. Namely, that such an agreement must constitute the end of the conflict, and that the Palestinian signatories to the agreement must be capable of assuring that no acts of terror will be launched from territories that Israel turns over as part of the agreement.
The current Palestinian spokesman, or president if you like, Mahmoud Abbas, is not capable of satisfying either of these conditions. At best, he represents only half of the Palestinians, and regardless of what commitments he undertakes, Hamas and other Islamic jihadists will have plenty of additional claims on Israel even after Abbas signs an agreement. His control over areas in Judea and Samaria is limited at best, and he certainly cannot be relied on to prevent acts of terror against Israel from those areas Israel would withdraw from.
Until the Palestinians get their act together, there seems little chance of reaching an Israeli-Palestinian agreement. That is the sad truth, and no amount of theatrics by Abbas, and maneuvering by the Quartet, the United States and the United Nations, or all of them in concert, will change that. That is what Israeli spokesmen should be explaining to everyone - friends, do-gooders and enemies alike.
And one other point must be made: What they call the 1967 borders are in fact the armistice lines that were agreed on with Jordan in April 1949, an agreement that was violated by Jordan in June 1967. There is nothing sacrosanct about these lines, while many things have changed in the intervening 62 years that cannot be wished away.
The important thing is to stay calm, not press the panic button, and not listen to those familiar faces who reappear every now and then with a new-old initiative suggesting that Israel announce it is prepared to withdraw to the "'67 borders." And to not make any hasty, half-baked statements under the illusion that they will appease those applying pressure on Israel.
At this point, their minds are made up. And such statements will only come to haunt us in the future when the time becomes ripe for proper negotiations with the Palestinians. Only when it is clear that the Israeli government is standing firm on its positions will the pressure on Israel be relaxed.
The important thing is to stay calm, not press the panic button, and not listen to those familiar faces who reappear every now and then with a new-old initiative suggesting that Israel announce it is prepared to withdraw to the '67 borders.'
...our defense minister...has already sounded the alarm.
According to him, Israel will be hit by a political tsunami in September. His warning bell is being echoed by many who demand the government launch a daring initiative before it is too late, before the tsunami hits us. But they have a pleasant surprise awaiting them: Israel will still be here in September....
States have never been created by UN declarations and never will be. For those who have forgotten, Israel was not created by UN resolution 181 in November 1947, but by David Ben-Gurion's declaration of Israeli independence on May 15, 1948 and by the IDF's ability to take and control the areas of the new state.
A UN declaration, whether at the Security Council or the General Assembly, recognizing a Palestinian state within the borders of the April 1949 armistice lines with Jordan, with Jerusalem as its capital, will be no more effective than Security Council resolution 1701, which prohibited Hezbollah from military operations in southern Lebanon, or General Assembly resolution 3379, which equated Zionism with racism.
If this latest declaration is actually passed, it will merely serve as another reminder of the impotence of the United Nations and its irrelevance when it comes to dealing with international conflicts. The U.S. government must surely be aware of this.
All this brouhaha about the coming tsunami skirts the fundamental issues preventing an agreement between Israel and the Palestinians. Namely, that such an agreement must constitute the end of the conflict, and that the Palestinian signatories to the agreement must be capable of assuring that no acts of terror will be launched from territories that Israel turns over as part of the agreement.
The current Palestinian spokesman, or president if you like, Mahmoud Abbas, is not capable of satisfying either of these conditions. At best, he represents only half of the Palestinians, and regardless of what commitments he undertakes, Hamas and other Islamic jihadists will have plenty of additional claims on Israel even after Abbas signs an agreement. His control over areas in Judea and Samaria is limited at best, and he certainly cannot be relied on to prevent acts of terror against Israel from those areas Israel would withdraw from.
Until the Palestinians get their act together, there seems little chance of reaching an Israeli-Palestinian agreement. That is the sad truth, and no amount of theatrics by Abbas, and maneuvering by the Quartet, the United States and the United Nations, or all of them in concert, will change that. That is what Israeli spokesmen should be explaining to everyone - friends, do-gooders and enemies alike.
And one other point must be made: What they call the 1967 borders are in fact the armistice lines that were agreed on with Jordan in April 1949, an agreement that was violated by Jordan in June 1967. There is nothing sacrosanct about these lines, while many things have changed in the intervening 62 years that cannot be wished away.
The important thing is to stay calm, not press the panic button, and not listen to those familiar faces who reappear every now and then with a new-old initiative suggesting that Israel announce it is prepared to withdraw to the "'67 borders." And to not make any hasty, half-baked statements under the illusion that they will appease those applying pressure on Israel.
At this point, their minds are made up. And such statements will only come to haunt us in the future when the time becomes ripe for proper negotiations with the Palestinians. Only when it is clear that the Israeli government is standing firm on its positions will the pressure on Israel be relaxed.
Thursday, March 31, 2011
The baby dictator prepares for a long battle
From JPost, 31 March 2011, by JONATHAN SPYER:
Assad wants to keep his job - his speech indicated he will use all the violence and subterfuge he deems necessary to do.
President Bashar al-Assad’s speech to the Syrian parliament was noteworthy more for what the Syrian dictator did not say than for what he did.
Remarks by Assad aides to the media in the last days had raised expectations that Assad might try to defuse protests by offering a series of concessions. In particular, the possibility of a lifting of emergency laws in place in Syria since 1963 had been hinted at by senior adviser Bouthaina Shaaban.
No such commitments were forthcoming from the Syrian president. The brief address was an announcement by the regime of its determination to stand its ground. It reflected a belief on the part of Assad that to appear to waver at this moment might prove costly. He apparently believes that his regime is sufficiently strong to be able to wear down the protesters without seeking to compromise with their demands.
Instead of wavering, he chose to reiterate the core elements of his regime’s by-now-familiar take on current events in Syria and the wider region.
Since the outbreak of the unrest, the official information channels of the Syrian regime have maintained that an Israeli plot is responsible for the protests. Sana news agency has claimed to have identified mysterious “armed gangs” seeking to commit acts of violence against civilians. The Syrian media has also cited SMS messages coming from Israel that encourage Syrians to take part in the revolt.
Assad’s speech followed and developed this line.
“Plots are being hatched against our country,” he told the assembled parliament members. “Saboteurs are trying to undermine and divide Syria, and to push an Israeli agenda.”
Assad likened the current events to the situation in 2005. In that year, a popular uprising in Beirut and the presence of US forces in Baghdad forced Syria to end its 15-year occupation of Lebanon. The regime faced a Kurdish uprising in the same period.
“Similar to 2005,” the Syrian president told his parliament, “there is chaos in the country under the pretext of reform, especially among sects.”
The reference to sects is perhaps evidence of Assad’s sense of irony, since his own regime rests on the support of the minority Alawi sect, who comprise 12% of the population.
The protesters, meanwhile, hail overwhelmingly from Syria’s 75% Sunni Muslim majority.
But Assad’s irony is no laughing matter. This reference, and the remark about an attempt to “divide” Syria, signal that the regime is accusing the protesters of two of the cardinal sins in the professed Arab nationalist viewpoint of the Baathist regime in Syria.
It matters little whether Assad himself takes seriously his own rhetoric. The point is that this type of terminology has the sound of a regime preparing for a long and ruthless fight against an internal enemy which it is seeking to characterize in the most negative terms at its disposal.
The reference to 2005 is instructive in another way. In that year, the Syrian regime was on the ropes, with some commentators predicting its imminent demise. By citing it, Assad is also reminding his listeners and the world of his staying power. By its favored methods of clandestine violence and intimidation, the Assad family dictatorship bounced back hard from the doldrums in the subsequent years. Bashar believes it can do so again.
Hence the tone of defiance that summed up the speech.
Here the dictator’s feline sense of humor was on display again. “We don’t seek battles,” said Bashar (an assertion which would come as news to the peoples of Israel, Lebanon and Iraq, frequent targets of the myriad proxy military groups maintained by the Syrian regime).
“But if a battle is imposed on us today – ahlan wasahlan – welcome.” Syria would fight the “domino project,” and make it fall.
So there it all was. Israeli plots, domino projects for fragmentation and division.
Armed gangs, chaos, and a welcoming of the battle by the Syrian dictator, casting himself in the nationalist-tragic mode which is the style of stifling rhetoric that he and other regional leaders of his stripe prefer. All by way of a not-soveiled threat.
This time against his own people.
This was the authentic voice of the Arab old order – or at least the military dictatorial part of it. Intoning its old certainties.
No mention of reform or change. “Stability” said Assad, was the number one interest.
The response was swift in coming, and suitably irreverent.
The Facebook page “Syrian Revolution 2011 against Bashar Assad,” a few minutes after the speech, carried a message beginning with the ringing call, “To the public squares, youth of Syria – grab freedom from these clowns, go down now to the streets.”
But if anyone among the Syrian opposition or elsewhere was still under the impression that the Assad family dictatorship would consent quietly to reforming itself out of existence, Wednesday’s speech should be sufficient to put them right.
Bashar Assad wants to keep his job. All the familiar and wearying clichés were on offer, beneath which he will prepare the violence and subterfuge he deems necessary to ensure his survival.
Assad wants to keep his job - his speech indicated he will use all the violence and subterfuge he deems necessary to do.
President Bashar al-Assad’s speech to the Syrian parliament was noteworthy more for what the Syrian dictator did not say than for what he did.
Remarks by Assad aides to the media in the last days had raised expectations that Assad might try to defuse protests by offering a series of concessions. In particular, the possibility of a lifting of emergency laws in place in Syria since 1963 had been hinted at by senior adviser Bouthaina Shaaban.
No such commitments were forthcoming from the Syrian president. The brief address was an announcement by the regime of its determination to stand its ground. It reflected a belief on the part of Assad that to appear to waver at this moment might prove costly. He apparently believes that his regime is sufficiently strong to be able to wear down the protesters without seeking to compromise with their demands.
Instead of wavering, he chose to reiterate the core elements of his regime’s by-now-familiar take on current events in Syria and the wider region.
Since the outbreak of the unrest, the official information channels of the Syrian regime have maintained that an Israeli plot is responsible for the protests. Sana news agency has claimed to have identified mysterious “armed gangs” seeking to commit acts of violence against civilians. The Syrian media has also cited SMS messages coming from Israel that encourage Syrians to take part in the revolt.
Assad’s speech followed and developed this line.
“Plots are being hatched against our country,” he told the assembled parliament members. “Saboteurs are trying to undermine and divide Syria, and to push an Israeli agenda.”
Assad likened the current events to the situation in 2005. In that year, a popular uprising in Beirut and the presence of US forces in Baghdad forced Syria to end its 15-year occupation of Lebanon. The regime faced a Kurdish uprising in the same period.
“Similar to 2005,” the Syrian president told his parliament, “there is chaos in the country under the pretext of reform, especially among sects.”
The reference to sects is perhaps evidence of Assad’s sense of irony, since his own regime rests on the support of the minority Alawi sect, who comprise 12% of the population.
The protesters, meanwhile, hail overwhelmingly from Syria’s 75% Sunni Muslim majority.
But Assad’s irony is no laughing matter. This reference, and the remark about an attempt to “divide” Syria, signal that the regime is accusing the protesters of two of the cardinal sins in the professed Arab nationalist viewpoint of the Baathist regime in Syria.
It matters little whether Assad himself takes seriously his own rhetoric. The point is that this type of terminology has the sound of a regime preparing for a long and ruthless fight against an internal enemy which it is seeking to characterize in the most negative terms at its disposal.
The reference to 2005 is instructive in another way. In that year, the Syrian regime was on the ropes, with some commentators predicting its imminent demise. By citing it, Assad is also reminding his listeners and the world of his staying power. By its favored methods of clandestine violence and intimidation, the Assad family dictatorship bounced back hard from the doldrums in the subsequent years. Bashar believes it can do so again.
Hence the tone of defiance that summed up the speech.
Here the dictator’s feline sense of humor was on display again. “We don’t seek battles,” said Bashar (an assertion which would come as news to the peoples of Israel, Lebanon and Iraq, frequent targets of the myriad proxy military groups maintained by the Syrian regime).
“But if a battle is imposed on us today – ahlan wasahlan – welcome.” Syria would fight the “domino project,” and make it fall.
So there it all was. Israeli plots, domino projects for fragmentation and division.
Armed gangs, chaos, and a welcoming of the battle by the Syrian dictator, casting himself in the nationalist-tragic mode which is the style of stifling rhetoric that he and other regional leaders of his stripe prefer. All by way of a not-soveiled threat.
This time against his own people.
This was the authentic voice of the Arab old order – or at least the military dictatorial part of it. Intoning its old certainties.
No mention of reform or change. “Stability” said Assad, was the number one interest.
The response was swift in coming, and suitably irreverent.
The Facebook page “Syrian Revolution 2011 against Bashar Assad,” a few minutes after the speech, carried a message beginning with the ringing call, “To the public squares, youth of Syria – grab freedom from these clowns, go down now to the streets.”
But if anyone among the Syrian opposition or elsewhere was still under the impression that the Assad family dictatorship would consent quietly to reforming itself out of existence, Wednesday’s speech should be sufficient to put them right.
Bashar Assad wants to keep his job. All the familiar and wearying clichés were on offer, beneath which he will prepare the violence and subterfuge he deems necessary to ensure his survival.
U.S. leaders should not excuse the brutality of Syria’s dictator
From NRO, March 30, 2011, by Claudia Rosett, journalist-in-residence with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and heads of its Investigative Reporting Project:
If Pres. Barack Obama prefers not to intervene on behalf of the protesters being slaughtered in Syria, the least his administration could do is refrain from endorsing their tyrant.
In Obama’s speech Monday night about America’s interest in defending Libyans and standing alongside other freedom-seekers of the Arab world, Syria didn’t even rate a mention. That discussion was handled Sunday in remarks by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, speaking on CBS’s Face the Nation. Not only did Clinton nix any thoughts of action on Syria, she ran interference for Syria’s murderous president, Bashar Assad, saying: “Many of the members of Congress of both parties who have gone to Syria in recent months have said they believe he’s a reformer.”
Such deference to U.S. lawmakers was absent from Obama’s decision to go to war in Libya; the president sought a resolution from the United Nations, but not from Congress. But if Congress is now back in the loop, with some members singing the praises of Assad, clearly the State Department needs to do a much better job of briefing them on the realities.
Clinton could start by highlighting the findings of her own department’s annual reports on human rights in Syria. These reports go far to explain why, after 40 years of the Assad family’s totalitarian rule, Syrians are so unhappy with this regime that tens of thousands of them have been risking prison, torture, and death in order to burn offices of the ruling Baath party, topple a statue of the late Hafez Assad, and march through the streets of cities across Syria, demanding freedom from the current Assad. The most recent State Department report, dated 2009, does not include the current season of shooting protesters. But it covers more than enough to convey the general idea.
The report begins with the observation that during 2009, the government and members of its security forces “committed numerous serious human rights abuses, and the human rights situation worsened.” Then come accounts of “arbitrary or unlawful deprivation of life” and “enforced disappearances” that go back to the vanishing of “an estimated 17,000 persons in the late 1970s and early 1980s.” Those numbers, which look like a conservative estimate, presumably include the regime’s 1982 massacre in the city of Hama, which was how the elder Assad dispatched an uprising of the Muslim Brotherhood. Hillary Clinton, in her remarks Sunday, dismissed that mass murder with the comment, “There is a different leader in Syria now.”
Yes, but since the younger Assad took over in 2000, the reign of terror, reinforced by the echoes of Hama, has carried on. The State Department report lists a slew of “suspicious” deaths, disappearances, and arrests in 2009 alone, for offenses such as “degrading speech” or “insulting the president and the judicial system.” The Syrian government, with its long record of allegedly “disappearing” individuals, offered no legal redress and “did not investigate or punish any security force members for their role in disappearances.”
There is a description of the methods of torture and abuse inflicted on the inmates of Syria’s filthy and crowded prisons. Among these are: “electrical shocks; pulling out fingernails; burning genitalia; forcing objects into the rectum; beating, sometimes while the victim was suspended from the ceiling; other times on the soles of the feet.” (I heard a first-person account of this technique some years ago from a survivor of Syria’s prisons, who showed me the horrible scars.) In a 21st-century reprise of the medieval rack and wheel, other methods include “hyperextending the spine; bending the detainees into the frame of a wheel and whipping exposed body parts; . . . [and] using a backward-bending chair to asphyxiate the victim or fracture the victim’s spine.”
This report goes on to enumerate other forms of agony, insult, theft, and repression inflicted by the Assad regime on the 21 million people of Syria. Corruption is rampant. Assad’s Baath Party keeps its monopoly on power by prohibiting criticism of the government and violating its own constitution in order to severely restrict such rights as freedom of assembly. A permit can be required for a gathering of more than three people. There is brutal censorship. Among the cases cited in this report is that of a blogger who was sentenced to three years in prison for “publishing information aimed at weakening national morale.”
For a source other than the State Department, consult the Washington-based Freedom House. The organization puts out a handy report on “The World’s Most Repressive Societies”; in 2010, Syria ranked, as usual, among these “Worst of the Worst.” Freedom House also puts out a country report on Syria. The 2010 version includes an illuminating note about the regime’s practice of rewarding or coercing Syrians into informing on their own relatives, friends, and associates.
This is the regime that Syrians, with incredible courage, are now daring to defy. Assad is shuffling his cabinet and promising concessions he says will “please all the Syrian people.” But it’s a sure bet his security forces will be standing by, just in case the people aren’t pleased enough to stop protesting. One can see what Assad means by “please all the Syrian people” by looking at Syria’s 2007 elections, in which Assad officially produced a voter turnout of 96 percent and won 98 percent of the vote.
Along with all this, Assad’s Syria is a threat to the U.S. and its democratic allies — notably Israel. Its officials welcome terrorists and sanctions-busting weapons traffic, and Syria has amassed its own considerable arsenal of missiles and chemical weapons. It is one of four countries currently on the State Department’s list of terror-sponsoring states, a list it has helped populate since 1979. Under Assad, Syria hosts an array of terrorist groups, including leaders of Hamas, which controls Gaza.
Syria’s regime is a bedfellow of the terror-sponsoring, nuclear-bomb-seeking mullocracy in neighboring Iran. The country supports and abets the flow of weapons to the terrorists of Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed terrorist group that now controls the government of neighboring Lebanon — which Syria occupied from 1976 to 2005. Not only is Syria a longtime missile client of North Korea’s, but under Bashar Assad, Syria became an enterprising nuclear client as well, building a secret reactor with North Korean help (it was destroyed by an Israeli air strike in 2007) and displaying a continuing and alarming interest in nuclear development to this day.
Calling Bashar Assad a “reformer” might satisfy the likes of the United Nations Human Rights Council, where — with Libya only recently suspended — Syria has now brazenly entered the running for a seat. For the U.S. State Department, which, along with those giddy congressional delegations, has been trying to “engage” Assad, it may look like reform when Assad grants them an audience, or Assad’s wife trots out her French designer handbag for an interview with Vogue. Or perhaps Obama and Clinton consider it simplest to try to dismiss Syria’s protests in whatever way might most seem to favor continuing attempts at “engagement” with the Damascus regime.
If it was right for America to intervene in Libya to protect people trying to rid themselves of a bloody tyrant, there can be no excuse for American officials’ doing anything that might help or encourage Assad in his efforts to hold on to power. The long and ugly record of Assad’s regime suggests that he will try to crush this uprising by jailing, torturing, and killing as many protesters as he needs to. Obama may be chiefly concerned with trying to avoid another military intervention in the Middle East. But with his administration praising Assad and signaling that Syria’s regime is exempt from the kind of punishment now descending on Qaddafi, Obama risks ending up with a lot of blood on his hands.
If Pres. Barack Obama prefers not to intervene on behalf of the protesters being slaughtered in Syria, the least his administration could do is refrain from endorsing their tyrant.
In Obama’s speech Monday night about America’s interest in defending Libyans and standing alongside other freedom-seekers of the Arab world, Syria didn’t even rate a mention. That discussion was handled Sunday in remarks by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, speaking on CBS’s Face the Nation. Not only did Clinton nix any thoughts of action on Syria, she ran interference for Syria’s murderous president, Bashar Assad, saying: “Many of the members of Congress of both parties who have gone to Syria in recent months have said they believe he’s a reformer.”
Such deference to U.S. lawmakers was absent from Obama’s decision to go to war in Libya; the president sought a resolution from the United Nations, but not from Congress. But if Congress is now back in the loop, with some members singing the praises of Assad, clearly the State Department needs to do a much better job of briefing them on the realities.
Clinton could start by highlighting the findings of her own department’s annual reports on human rights in Syria. These reports go far to explain why, after 40 years of the Assad family’s totalitarian rule, Syrians are so unhappy with this regime that tens of thousands of them have been risking prison, torture, and death in order to burn offices of the ruling Baath party, topple a statue of the late Hafez Assad, and march through the streets of cities across Syria, demanding freedom from the current Assad. The most recent State Department report, dated 2009, does not include the current season of shooting protesters. But it covers more than enough to convey the general idea.
The report begins with the observation that during 2009, the government and members of its security forces “committed numerous serious human rights abuses, and the human rights situation worsened.” Then come accounts of “arbitrary or unlawful deprivation of life” and “enforced disappearances” that go back to the vanishing of “an estimated 17,000 persons in the late 1970s and early 1980s.” Those numbers, which look like a conservative estimate, presumably include the regime’s 1982 massacre in the city of Hama, which was how the elder Assad dispatched an uprising of the Muslim Brotherhood. Hillary Clinton, in her remarks Sunday, dismissed that mass murder with the comment, “There is a different leader in Syria now.”
Yes, but since the younger Assad took over in 2000, the reign of terror, reinforced by the echoes of Hama, has carried on. The State Department report lists a slew of “suspicious” deaths, disappearances, and arrests in 2009 alone, for offenses such as “degrading speech” or “insulting the president and the judicial system.” The Syrian government, with its long record of allegedly “disappearing” individuals, offered no legal redress and “did not investigate or punish any security force members for their role in disappearances.”
There is a description of the methods of torture and abuse inflicted on the inmates of Syria’s filthy and crowded prisons. Among these are: “electrical shocks; pulling out fingernails; burning genitalia; forcing objects into the rectum; beating, sometimes while the victim was suspended from the ceiling; other times on the soles of the feet.” (I heard a first-person account of this technique some years ago from a survivor of Syria’s prisons, who showed me the horrible scars.) In a 21st-century reprise of the medieval rack and wheel, other methods include “hyperextending the spine; bending the detainees into the frame of a wheel and whipping exposed body parts; . . . [and] using a backward-bending chair to asphyxiate the victim or fracture the victim’s spine.”
This report goes on to enumerate other forms of agony, insult, theft, and repression inflicted by the Assad regime on the 21 million people of Syria. Corruption is rampant. Assad’s Baath Party keeps its monopoly on power by prohibiting criticism of the government and violating its own constitution in order to severely restrict such rights as freedom of assembly. A permit can be required for a gathering of more than three people. There is brutal censorship. Among the cases cited in this report is that of a blogger who was sentenced to three years in prison for “publishing information aimed at weakening national morale.”
For a source other than the State Department, consult the Washington-based Freedom House. The organization puts out a handy report on “The World’s Most Repressive Societies”; in 2010, Syria ranked, as usual, among these “Worst of the Worst.” Freedom House also puts out a country report on Syria. The 2010 version includes an illuminating note about the regime’s practice of rewarding or coercing Syrians into informing on their own relatives, friends, and associates.
This is the regime that Syrians, with incredible courage, are now daring to defy. Assad is shuffling his cabinet and promising concessions he says will “please all the Syrian people.” But it’s a sure bet his security forces will be standing by, just in case the people aren’t pleased enough to stop protesting. One can see what Assad means by “please all the Syrian people” by looking at Syria’s 2007 elections, in which Assad officially produced a voter turnout of 96 percent and won 98 percent of the vote.
Along with all this, Assad’s Syria is a threat to the U.S. and its democratic allies — notably Israel. Its officials welcome terrorists and sanctions-busting weapons traffic, and Syria has amassed its own considerable arsenal of missiles and chemical weapons. It is one of four countries currently on the State Department’s list of terror-sponsoring states, a list it has helped populate since 1979. Under Assad, Syria hosts an array of terrorist groups, including leaders of Hamas, which controls Gaza.
Syria’s regime is a bedfellow of the terror-sponsoring, nuclear-bomb-seeking mullocracy in neighboring Iran. The country supports and abets the flow of weapons to the terrorists of Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed terrorist group that now controls the government of neighboring Lebanon — which Syria occupied from 1976 to 2005. Not only is Syria a longtime missile client of North Korea’s, but under Bashar Assad, Syria became an enterprising nuclear client as well, building a secret reactor with North Korean help (it was destroyed by an Israeli air strike in 2007) and displaying a continuing and alarming interest in nuclear development to this day.
Calling Bashar Assad a “reformer” might satisfy the likes of the United Nations Human Rights Council, where — with Libya only recently suspended — Syria has now brazenly entered the running for a seat. For the U.S. State Department, which, along with those giddy congressional delegations, has been trying to “engage” Assad, it may look like reform when Assad grants them an audience, or Assad’s wife trots out her French designer handbag for an interview with Vogue. Or perhaps Obama and Clinton consider it simplest to try to dismiss Syria’s protests in whatever way might most seem to favor continuing attempts at “engagement” with the Damascus regime.
If it was right for America to intervene in Libya to protect people trying to rid themselves of a bloody tyrant, there can be no excuse for American officials’ doing anything that might help or encourage Assad in his efforts to hold on to power. The long and ugly record of Assad’s regime suggests that he will try to crush this uprising by jailing, torturing, and killing as many protesters as he needs to. Obama may be chiefly concerned with trying to avoid another military intervention in the Middle East. But with his administration praising Assad and signaling that Syria’s regime is exempt from the kind of punishment now descending on Qaddafi, Obama risks ending up with a lot of blood on his hands.
Egypt Minister Proposes Opening ‘New Page’ With Iran
The bad guys include Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas...then Lebanon, Turkey ....now EGYPT TOO???
From Bloomberg, Mar 30, 2011, by Mariam Fam:
Egypt is ready to “open a new page” with Iran, with which it hasn’t had full diplomatic relations since 1979, Foreign Minister Nabil el-Arabi said, according to the state-run Middle East News Agency.
From Bloomberg, Mar 30, 2011, by Mariam Fam:
Egypt is ready to “open a new page” with Iran, with which it hasn’t had full diplomatic relations since 1979, Foreign Minister Nabil el-Arabi said, according to the state-run Middle East News Agency.
“The Egyptian government doesn’t consider Iran to be an enemy state,” MENA cited el-Arabi as saying. “We’re opening a new page with all countries, including Iran.”...Egypt has accused Iran in the past of using proxy groups such as the Lebanese Shiite Hezbollah movement to increase its influence in the Middle East. The two countries haven’t had full diplomatic relations since 1979, when former Egyptian President Anwar Sadat gave refuge to the deposed Iranian shah, Reza Pahlavi.
ALL South Koreans study Talmud
From Ynet (Hebrew version), 24 March 2011, translated by The Muqata, 27 March 2011, by Jameel:
Close to 50 million people live in South Korea, and almost everyone is taught the Talmud at home by their parents.
Almost every home in South Korea now contains a Korean-translated Talmud. But unlike in Israel, the Korean mothers teach the Talmud to their children. In a country of close to 49 million people who believe in Buddhism and Christianity, there are more people who read the Talmud - or at least own their own copy at home - more than in the Jewish state. Much more.
It is doubtful if the Amoraic scholars, Abbaye and Rava imagined their discussions of Jewish law in the Beit Midrash in Babylon would be taught hundreds of years later in East Asia. Yet it turns out that the laws of an "egg born on a holiday" ("ביצה שנולדה ביום טוב") is actually very interesting to the South Koreans ...
"We were very curious about the high academic achievements of the Jewish people”, explains Korean Ambassador to Israel, Mr. Young Sam Ma, who was hosted on the channel 1 TV programme “Culture Today”.
Ambassador Ma says the he himself studied the Talmud at a very young age: ...“I, for example, have two editions of Talmud: one my wife bought and the other I got from my mother in law”....
Koreans don't only like the Talmud because they see it as promoting genius, but because they found values that are close to their hearts.
Close to 50 million people live in South Korea, and almost everyone is taught the Talmud at home by their parents.
"We tried to understand why the Jews are geniuses, and we came to the conclusion that we think it is because they study Talmud," said the Korean ambassador to Israel, Mr. Young Sam Ma. And this is how "Rav Papa" became a more well known scholar in Korea than in Israel.
A Talmud translated into Korean, courtesy of the South Korean Embassy to Israel.
Almost every home in South Korea now contains a Korean-translated Talmud. But unlike in Israel, the Korean mothers teach the Talmud to their children. In a country of close to 49 million people who believe in Buddhism and Christianity, there are more people who read the Talmud - or at least own their own copy at home - more than in the Jewish state. Much more.
It is doubtful if the Amoraic scholars, Abbaye and Rava imagined their discussions of Jewish law in the Beit Midrash in Babylon would be taught hundreds of years later in East Asia. Yet it turns out that the laws of an "egg born on a holiday" ("ביצה שנולדה ביום טוב") is actually very interesting to the South Koreans ...
"So we too will become geniuses"
"Jews have a high percentage of Nobel laureates in all fields: literature, science and economics. This is a remarkable achievement. We tried to understand what is the secret of the Jewish people? How they - more than other people - are able to reach those impressive accomplishments? Why are Jews so intelligent? In our opinion, one of your secrets is that you study the Talmud”.
"Jews study the Talmud at a young age, and it helps them, in our opinion, to develop mental capabilities. This understanding led us to teach our children as well. We believe that if we teach our children Talmud, they will also become geniuses. ..."
Koreans don't only like the Talmud because they see it as promoting genius, but because they found values that are close to their hearts.
"In the Jewish tradition, family values are important," explains the South Korean Ambassador. "You see it even today, your practice of the Friday evening family meal. In my country we also focus on family values. The respect for adults, respect and appreciation for the elderly parallels the high esteem in my country for the elderly."Another very significant issue is the respect for education. In the Jewish tradition parents have a duty to teach their children, and they devote to it lots of attention. For Korean parents, their children's education is a top priority.
Hamas is to blame for Palestinian misery
From an interview of IDF spokesman Captain Avichai Adraee on Al Jazeera, 24 October 2009, but freshl;y relevant now:
(In Arabic with English subtitles)
(In Arabic with English subtitles)
"...if they store weapons in a civilain house then we will strike it because otherwise they'll use those missiles against us."
Tuesday, March 29, 2011
Jordan Facing Violent Demonstrations, Demands for Change
From Arutz Sheva, 28 March 2011, by Chana Ya'ar:
Jordan is facing violent demonstrations and political protests that have the potential to destabilize the country...On Sunday, the Jordanian parliament voted to make sure there would be no legislative challenge to the king's authority.
...A demonstration in Amman last Friday by the grassroots “March 24 Youth” activist group demanded the government dissolve the lower house of the parliament and reform the constitution...But the rally ended in violence as supporters of King Abdullah II hurled rocks at the demonstrators. At least 30 were injured. Meanwhile, some 10,000 demonstrators rallied in support of the king in a parallel protest.
The violence was followed by the resignations of 21 of the 53 members of the National Dialogue Committee established by King Abdullah II to sooth tensions in the kingdom. Reformist protesters also blamed the government for allowing the king's supporters to beat them.
Three Islamist members who were appointed to the new committee refused to participate in deliberations over amendments to the Elections Law and Political Parties Law, unless constitutional amendments were on the agenda as well.
The committee did not bend to the will of the Islamists, and in general, the government has thus far ignored most demands for reforms with the exception of reshuffling the cabinet, and creating the new committee.
However, Jordanian journalists are reporting that tensions are rising in the Hashemite Kingdom.
Jordan, located on Israel's eastern-most border, was the second Arab nation to sign a peace treaty with the Jewish State and has long been a partner with Israel in numerous business, scientific and other regional projects.
Jordan is facing violent demonstrations and political protests that have the potential to destabilize the country...On Sunday, the Jordanian parliament voted to make sure there would be no legislative challenge to the king's authority.
...A demonstration in Amman last Friday by the grassroots “March 24 Youth” activist group demanded the government dissolve the lower house of the parliament and reform the constitution...But the rally ended in violence as supporters of King Abdullah II hurled rocks at the demonstrators. At least 30 were injured. Meanwhile, some 10,000 demonstrators rallied in support of the king in a parallel protest.
The violence was followed by the resignations of 21 of the 53 members of the National Dialogue Committee established by King Abdullah II to sooth tensions in the kingdom. Reformist protesters also blamed the government for allowing the king's supporters to beat them.
Three Islamist members who were appointed to the new committee refused to participate in deliberations over amendments to the Elections Law and Political Parties Law, unless constitutional amendments were on the agenda as well.
The committee did not bend to the will of the Islamists, and in general, the government has thus far ignored most demands for reforms with the exception of reshuffling the cabinet, and creating the new committee.
However, Jordanian journalists are reporting that tensions are rising in the Hashemite Kingdom.
“Concern is no longer the correct description for the situation we are going through over the past days. There is a sense that the situation may explode at any moment,” wrote Fahed Al-Khitan, political columnist in the Al-Arab Al-Yawm.
Jordan, located on Israel's eastern-most border, was the second Arab nation to sign a peace treaty with the Jewish State and has long been a partner with Israel in numerous business, scientific and other regional projects.
Abbas prefers Hamas to the US
From JPOST.COM, 28 March 2011, by STAFF*:
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is willing to give up hundreds of millions of dollars of US aid if that is what is necessary to forge a reconciliation deal with Hamas, the Associated Press quoted his adviser as saying on Monday.
...According to official Palestinian Authority news agency WAFA, Abbas also requested that the Palestinian Liberation Organization's (PLO) Executive Committee convene the body's Constitution Committee as quickly as possible, either in Amman or Cairo, in order to begin drafting amendments to the organization's charter.
...Since 2005, the committee has not successfully drafted amendments to the PLO charter, and has not convened since Hamas was elected to power in 2006.
Over the weekend, Abbas met with a Hamas delegation from the West Bank in Ramallah to discuss ways of ending the dispute between his Fatah faction and the Islamist movement. It was the first such meeting in more than a year.
... While some [Hamas leaders] have welcomed it, others have announced that Abbas was unwelcome in the Gaza Strip.
Abbas briefed the Hamas officials on his initiative, saying it was aimed at discussing the formation of a new government that consists of independent figures to prepare for presidential and legislative elections, and rebuild the Gaza Strip.
Hours after the meeting, a senior government official said that Israel will stop dealing with the Palestinian Authority if it brings Hamas into the government.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is willing to give up hundreds of millions of dollars of US aid if that is what is necessary to forge a reconciliation deal with Hamas, the Associated Press quoted his adviser as saying on Monday.
...According to official Palestinian Authority news agency WAFA, Abbas also requested that the Palestinian Liberation Organization's (PLO) Executive Committee convene the body's Constitution Committee as quickly as possible, either in Amman or Cairo, in order to begin drafting amendments to the organization's charter.
...Since 2005, the committee has not successfully drafted amendments to the PLO charter, and has not convened since Hamas was elected to power in 2006.
Over the weekend, Abbas met with a Hamas delegation from the West Bank in Ramallah to discuss ways of ending the dispute between his Fatah faction and the Islamist movement. It was the first such meeting in more than a year.
... While some [Hamas leaders] have welcomed it, others have announced that Abbas was unwelcome in the Gaza Strip.
Abbas briefed the Hamas officials on his initiative, saying it was aimed at discussing the formation of a new government that consists of independent figures to prepare for presidential and legislative elections, and rebuild the Gaza Strip.
Hours after the meeting, a senior government official said that Israel will stop dealing with the Palestinian Authority if it brings Hamas into the government.
*Khaled Abu Toameh and Herb Keinon contributed to this report.
“Abbas has to choose whether he wants peace with Israel, or peace with Hamas,” the official said. “He can’t have both. If he chooses peace with Hamas it will bury the peace process.”
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