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Friday, February 05, 2021

02/05 Links Pt1: Yisrael Medad: Palestinians are back on the State Department docket; UAE massively cut aid to Palestinians after normalization with Israel

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: Obama's third term
The Biden administration has resumed funding UNRWA, reopened the Palestinian mission to Washington and recommitted itself to the “two-state solution.” It has thus re-empowered the Palestinians’ agenda of demonising and blackmailing Israel in order to destroy it, and afforded the Palestinians status while they do so.

It has also said it wants to return to the disastrous 2015 Iran nuclear agreement, brokered by former President Barack Obama, whose terms allowed the regime to obtain nuclear weapons with only a short delay while enabling money to pour in to fund its war against Israel and the west.

Although the administration is currently saying that Iran must first return to “full compliance,” the regime’s continuing breach of that deal by increasing its number of advanced centrifuges to enrich uranium suggests it believes that America will soon cave in.

This is doubtless due to Biden’s instant moves against Iran’s foes in the Gulf. These moves include America’s “temporary” pause on the sale of F-35s to the United Arab Emirates and its “re-examination” of the Trump administration’s designation of the Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen, against whom Saudi Arabia is fighting, as a terrorist organisation.

Even more telling are some of Biden’s appointments. The new American envoy to Iran, Robert Malley, whitewashed Yasser Arafat’s duplicity at Camp David and, as Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) has observed, “has a long track record of sympathy for the Iranian regime and animus towards Israel”.

More sinister yet is the appointment of Maher Bitar as senior director of intelligence at the National Security Council. A long-standing anti-Israel activist, he spent years promoting the BDS movement and its campaigns. As a student in 2006, he was on the executive board of the poisonous Muslim Brotherhood-linked Students for Justice in Palestine, which hounds Jewish students on campus and disseminates antisemitic propaganda.

As Daniel Greenfield pointed out on FrontPage.org, while studying in Britain at Oxford’s Refugee Studies Centre Bitar wrote in a paper that Israel’s “political existence as a state is the cause for Palestinian  dispossession and statelessness”.

In other words, far from advocating a two-state solution, Bitar thinks that Israel —America’s key ally in the Middle East — should not exist at all.

Yet this individual will now handle some of the most heavily classified intelligence available to the United States. He will decide what information America’s intelligence community shares with foreign intelligence services.
Yisrael Medad: Palestinians are back on the State Department docket
At the U.S. State Department press conference on Feb. 2, a question was posed by Said Arikat of the Al-Quds daily newspaper. Incidentally, if you do not know, among other things this particular journal carries some very anti-Semitic caricatures, as well as other images not favorable to the United States.

His question:
… last Tuesday, U.S. envoy to the United Nations told the Security Council that the United States is going to restore aid to UNRWA, the work and relief agency, and will probably open the consulate in East Jerusalem as well as reopening the office here in Washington for the Palestinians. My question to you: Is there a timetable, one? And on UNRWA aid, considering that the United States was the largest contributor, so will that be retroactive? I mean, that’s close to like $900 million since 2018.

Retroactive? Those funds were withheld because of bad management, anti-Semitic promotion and terror-support that was confirmed in reports. Subscribe to The JNS Daily Syndicate by email and never miss our top stories

State Department spokesman Ned Price’s answer was:
The United States does intend to restore humanitarian assistance to the Palestinian people. We’re not doing that as a favor, but because it’s in the interest of the United States to do so … the suspension of aid to the Palestinian people has neither produced political progress nor secured concessions from the Palestinian leadership. Of course, it has only harmed innocent Palestinians.

He added:
The United States will reinvigorate our humanitarian leadership and work to galvanize the international community to meet its humanitarian obligations, including to the Palestinian people.

Interestingly, Erikat’s own report on that exchange (here in Arabic) is headlined “US State Department Spokesman: Resuming support for the Palestinians is in our strategic interest.” Erikat added “strategic” for good measure, highlighting it in his tweet. A proper academic study of his reporting, perhaps, would be an interesting project for the future.

As for Price’s “innocent,” let’s leave that to the Hamas recruitment agencies, and those of the Islamic Jihad and additional terror groups in Gaza, which fire rockets at Israeli civilian targets, dig tunnels to facilitate the invasion of Israel, and send incendiary kites and balloon bombs aloft. But indeed, what interest is it to for the United States to continue a fiction (millions of refugees) so as to enable a non-productive economy (relying on aid handouts instead) and to ignore the Palestinian Authority’s continued policies of anti-normalization, diplomatic rejectionism, denouncing the Abraham Accords (see next question) and continuing terror incitement?
Caroline Glick: Biden's drive to war in the Middle East
This policy is irrational even when assessed from within the closed cognitive circle of the Biden/Obama team. They intend to make an irrevocable concession to Iran – billions of dollars of revenue which will flow into its coffers once the sanctions are removed. And in exchange they are asking Iran to make a revocable gesture. Iran reinstated its nuclear enrichment at Fordo and raised its enrichment level to 20% at the drop of a hat. If it turns the switches off to get the sanctions relief, it can turn them right back on after the money starts to flow.

This will almost certainly happen in June at the latest. On June 18, Iran will hold presidential elections. President Hassan Rouhani and Foreign Minister Javad Zarif will both leave office. All of the current viable candidates hail from the Revolutionary Guards Corps and they can all be guaranteed to abandon the JCPOA. So at best, the JCPOA's remaining shelf life is four months.

Biden, Blinken, Sullivan, Malley and their colleagues all must be aware that this is the case. The fact that they are moving ahead with their failed strategy all the same indicates that they are ideologically committed to their plan and will stay with it even as it drives the region to war.

This brings us to Israel. During the Trump years, Israel and the US were fully coordinated in their joint and separate actions to undermine Iran's nuclear program and its operations in Syria and Iraq. As a senior official in Trump's National Security Council explained recently, "Working together the intelligence agencies of both countries were able to accomplish more than they could on their own."

Obviously, those days are over now. And as Biden's team makes its presence felt fully, Israel's options for blocking Iran from becoming a nuclear power are diminishing.

When IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Aviv Kochavi announced last month that he had ordered the relevant IDF commanders to prepare operational plans to strike Iran's nuclear installations, most commentators assumed his target audience was the Iranian regime. Others argued he was issuing a warning to the Biden administration. The former claimed he sought to force Iran back from the nuclear brink. The latter argued he was demanding the Biden administration take Israel's positions seriously before it moves ahead with abrogating the sanctions.

But in the face of the Biden team's strategic fanaticism and Iran's race to the nuclear finishing line, it's at least equally likely that Kochavi's intended audiences were neither the Iranians nor the Americans. Instead, he may well have been telling the Israeli public to be prepared for what is coming. And he may also have been telling Israel's regional partners that the time for joint action is now.


New Israeli drug cured 29 of 30 moderate and serious COVID cases in days — hospital
A new coronavirus treatment being developed at Tel Aviv’s Ichilov Medical Center has successfully completed phase 1 trials and appears to have helped numerous moderate-to-serious cases of COVID-19 quickly recover from the disease, the hospital said Friday.

Hailing a “huge breakthrough,” the hospital said Prof. Nadir Arber’s EXO-CD24 substance had been administered to 30 patients whose conditions were moderate or worse, and all 30 recovered — 29 of them within three to five days.

The medicine fights the cytokine storm — a potentially lethal immune overreaction to the coronavirus infection that is believed to be responsible for much of the deaths associated with the disease.

It uses exosomes — tiny carrier sacs that shuttle materials between cells — to deliver a protein called CD24 to the lungs, which Arber has spent decades researching.

“This protein is located on the surface of cells and has a well known and important role in regulating the immune system,” said researcher Shiran Shapira of Arber’s lab.

The protein helps calm down the immune system and curb the storm.
For 5,000 Israelis killed by COVID, a digital tapestry of stories ended too soon
Exactly one year to the day after then-health minister Yaakov Litzman toured Sheba Hospital and said “we are prepared to deal with the virus,” Israel on Thursday night registered its 5,000th death from the coronavirus.

Mourning those who died from COVID-19 is a ritual laden with complications. Funerals are limited during lockdowns. The week-long shiva, rather than being a time when people can visit and comfort the mourning, is curbed or forced to take place via Zoom.

At the start of the pandemic, articles were written daily about each person who succumbed to the disease. But as the deaths have piled up, and up and up, the obituaries slowed, and then disappeared.

“Slowly, there were fewer stories and more data,” said Amit Yizraeli, a teacher who helped create Rikma, a website dedicated to remembering Israelis who died from the virus. “We felt we had to mourn with the families, for the victims themselves. In Jewish tradition, no one’s just a number, they’re an entire world.”

Rikma, We Are All One Human Tapestry, is an online project created by a group of socially-minded friends from Dror Israel — an organization of 1,300 trained educators promoting social activism in Israel — in order to help Israelis properly mourn those who have died from COVID-19. The site is modeled on the Defense Ministry’s Izkor website, which displays bios and stories of all of Israel’s war dead.

The Rikma website works simply; mourners are invited to add the name and details of a departed loved one, or can search for the name of a departed loved one. The name and details of each departed person are listed on blue tiles decorated with the image of a memorial candle. The hundreds of tiles float on the homepage, until a user clicks on one of the squares to read it.
Cabinet extends near total shutdown of Ben Gurion Airport for two more weeks
The government announced Friday that Ben Gurion Airport would remain closed until at least February 20 as Israel seeks to prevent the entry of new coronavirus variants that have contributed to the latest, unrelenting spike in case numbers.

Israel’s main international airport has been almost entirely shuttered since January 25, except for cargo planes and emergency aircraft.

Departing flights during this time have been limited to those traveling for medical treatment, essential work, legal proceedings, a funeral of a relative, non-citizens leaving the country and those traveling from one residence to another. Those needing to travel for other circumstances have been allowed to file their case to an inter-ministerial committee for review.

For the next two weeks all requests for entry and exit will need to receive approval from that panel, which will be headed by Settlement Affairs Minister Tzachi Hanegbi.

Entry will also be granted to Israeli residents in the third trimester of pregnancy. Non-citizens, including candidates for pending immigration and professional athletes, who require entry for extenuating circumstances can also appeal to Hanegbi’s committee.
Israel flies in diplomats from UK for vaccinations; envoys elsewhere to follow
The Foreign Ministry was flying 11 of its diplomats and support staff from the embassy in London to Israel to receive their COVID-19 vaccines.

The group were due to land at Ben Gurion Airport late Thursday night, and will receive their vaccinations through their HMOs like other Israelis, the ministry said.

They will then quarantine for two days in a hotel in Israel before flying back to the UK to continue working. The diplomats will make the trip again in three weeks in order to receive their second doses.

A spokesman for the Foreign Ministry told the Times of Israel that it was “logistically impossible” to fly the vaccines to the UK, and would not have saved money in any case.

He said Israeli diplomats in other countries are expected to make similar trips for their vaccinations in the near future, but the details are not yet finalized.

Health Ministry data Thursday showed that 3,344,629 people have had the first dose of the vaccine in Israel, of whom 1,953,026 have also had the second shot.

Figures from the ministry released Thursday showed there were 7,433 cases confirmed the day before, with the positive test rate at 8.9%.
UKLFI Charitable Trust: Palestinian Healthcare - Whose Responsibility?
Palestinian Healthcare - Whose Responsibility? Recording of a webinar with Professor Eugene Kontorovich and Natasha Hausdorff, who investigate who is responsible for the healthcare of Palestinians under the Oslo Accords and International Law.




President Biden: Please don’t derail Abraham Accords’ momentum - opinion
The Abraham Accords, which has been a real boom to regional peace and economic cooperation between Israel and its Gulf neighbors, is under threat from the new Biden Administration. In an attempt to reenter the nuclear pact with Iran and open the door for the Palestinians to come back to the negotiating table, there is the real possibility of a disruption of all the progress that has been made over the past few months – the biggest step forward that Middle East peace has seen in decades.

The Middle East has undergone unprecedented change in the four years since US President Joe Biden rode shotgun at the White House as former president Barack Obama’s vice president. Chief among them is the fact that Israel is no longer the rogue nation in the Middle East – Iran is.

If there is one issue that binds Israel with other Middle Eastern countries, it is an understanding that Iran has no interest in limiting its nuclear ambition and that the Iranian leadership is a robust supporter of destabilization in fellow Muslim countries. Middle Eastern leaders have no faith in Iran’s desire – nor in its commitments – to change its practices in either of these areas.

It is important that Biden realize that the priorities in the Middle East have changed. Right now, the top priority is the Iranian threat. If the Biden Administration replicates what happened during the Obama Administration, it will risk dialing everything back, signaling a tone deafness to where the region – and world – is right now. While the Palestinian issue has been sidelined, it is still an important issue that needs to be solved, but not at the broader expense of all the other progress that has been made in the region.
Guterres calls for UN and Quartet-led Israeli-Palestinian peace process
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres threw his support behind the call for an international peace conference under the auspices of his organization and the Quartet, which would resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict based on the pre-1967 lines.

"The long-agreed goal is clear: To end the occupation and realize a two-state solution on the basis of the pre-1967 borders, in line with international law, relevant United Nations resolutions, and bilateral agreements, with Jerusalem as the capital of both states," Guterres said in New York.

He spoke at the start of the opening 2021 session of the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People. "The United Nations remains committed to supporting Palestinians and Israelis to resolve the conflict and bring an end to the suffering," Guterres said.

The Israeli-Palestinian peace process has been frozen since 2014. Former US President Donald Trump's peace plan never led to the resumption of direct Israeli-Palestinian talks and US President Joe Biden is not expected to launch a peace process.

The Palestinian Authority wants to replace a US led peace process model with a multilateral one and PA President Mahmoud Abbas has called for an international peace conference.

Guterres said that "Abbas’s call for an international peace conference under the auspices of the United Nations – and an expanded Middle East Quartet – with considered preparation and involvement by the key parties – provide a positive opportunity to advance peace in the region."


House Republicans Urge Biden to Keep Embassy in Jerusalem
More than 90 House Republicans urged the Biden administration in a letter Wednesday to keep Israel's U.S. embassy in Jerusalem.

In the letter, which was addressed to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the lawmakers promised opposition to any attempts to move the embassy back to Tel Aviv. The Trump administration moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem in 2018, a move the lawmakers described as "long overdue."

"Over the [last] two decades, the option of moving the embassy would come before the president every six months, and each time it would be delayed until the Trump administration finally ended the stalling," the letter reads. "By continuing to honor our commitment to keep the embassy in Israel's ‘eternal capital,' we ensure continued goodwill as our two nations confront the challenges of the future."

Congress granted the president the authority to move the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in 1995, although the U.S. embassy remained in Tel Aviv until the Trump administration. Some foreign policy analysts have argued the embassy move paved the way for the historic Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and two prominent Gulf countries—Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates.

Although President Joe Biden says he will not overturn the decision, the president has said the 2018 move was "short-sighted and frivolous." While on the campaign trail, Biden also said he would open a U.S. consulate in East Jerusalem to work with the Palestinian Authority.
US Senate okays keeping embassy in Jerusalem permanently, in vote of 97 to 3
The US Senate voted overwhelmingly Thursday to keep the United States Embassy in Jerusalem, with only three senators voting against establishing funding to maintain the diplomatic mission.

In a move welcomed by Israel and bitterly opposed by the Palestinians, the Trump administration recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital in late 2017 and moved its embassy from Tel Aviv to the holy city in 2018. It was one of a string of diplomatic gifts delivered by former US president Donald Trump to Israel.

President Joe Biden is expected to take a more balanced approach toward Israel and the Palestinians, but he has said he does not plan on moving the embassy back to Tel Aviv.

The amendment approved by 97 senators effectively makes the embassy relocation permanent.

Only Senators Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Tom Carper voted against the move.


Biden Ends US Support for Saudi Arabia in Yemen, Says War ‘Has to End’
President Joe Biden on Thursday declared a halt to US support for a Saudi Arabia-led military campaign in Yemen, demanding that the more than six-year war, widely seen as a proxy conflict between Saudi Arabia and Iran, “has to end.”

Biden also named veteran US diplomat Timothy Lenderking as the US special envoy for Yemen in a bid to step up American diplomacy “to end the war in Yemen, a war which has created humanitarian and strategic catastrophe.”

The United Nations describes Yemen as the world’s biggest humanitarian crisis, with 80% of its people in need and millions on the verge of a large-scale famine.

“This war has to end,” the Democratic president said during a visit to the US State Department in Washington. “And to underscore our commitment, we’re ending all American support for offensive operations in the war in Yemen, including relevant arms sales.”

The move is a reversal of a policy of both the Democratic Obama and Republican Trump administrations. Biden was vice president in the Obama administration.

“At the same time,” he said on Thursday, “Saudi Arabia faces missile attacks, UAV (drone) strikes and other threats from Iranian-supplied forces in multiple countries. We’re going to continue to support and help Saudi Arabia defend its sovereignty and its territorial integrity and its people.”
Report: Anti-Israel Activist Heading to Biden State Dept
The State Department is reportedly set to hire a top aide for Sen. Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) who has a lengthy history of anti-Israel activism and played a key role at the left-wing blog ThinkProgress when an anti-Semitism scandal rocked the publication.

Matt Duss, Sanders’s top foreign policy hand, is expected to move to the State Department, though it is not clear yet what his role will be, according to Politico. Duss will join a growing roster of Biden administration hires who have displayed a deep animus toward Israel, promoted boycotts of the Jewish state, and advocated for a Palestinian "right of return" that would destroy the country’s Jewish composition.

Duss's elevation is likely to serve as a bright line for pro-Israel groups that threatens to undermine their support for the Biden administration. While the Biden campaign took pains to distance itself from anti-Israel activists, including the anti-Semite Linda Sarsour, Duss's inclusion in the administration would be a further signal that the new president intends to govern differently.

Duss, whose writings have been described by a watchdog group, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, as "infected with Jew-hatred," has been a leading voice in the anti-Israel movement for the better part of the last decade. His criticisms of Israel were too much even for the Obama White House, which said it was "troubled" by blog posts penned by Duss and his colleagues at the now-defunct ThinkProgress.

His elevation would mark a key win for the Democratic Party’s far-left flank, which presented the Biden transition team a list of nearly 100 people—many of them, including Duss, fringe figures—whom it wants to see in the administration. When Sanders tapped Duss as an adviser to his 2020 presidential campaign, Jewish and pro-Israel officials expressed outrage, with one accusing the senator of "building a campaign team filled with people who have devoted their careers to running anti-Semitic campaigns and calling them anti-Israel."


IDF: Palestinian tries to break into settlement home, is shot dead during tussle
An unarmed Palestinian man was shot and killed after entering into a West Bank settlement outpost in the predawn hours of Friday morning and attempting to break into a home, the Israel Defense Forces said, calling the infiltrator a terrorist.

A military spokesperson said the decision to label the incident an attempted terror attack and its description of the event were based almost solely on the testimonies of the settlers involved in the incident. This included details that they likely could not have known.

According to the army, the man, who was unarmed, drove past the gates and through the illegally constructed Sadeh Ephraim Farm outpost in the northern West Bank to the home of the owner at 3:45 a.m.

The military said the suspect — Khaled Maher Nofal, a 34-year-old resident of the village next door, Ras Karkar, according to Palestinian media — “ran toward the house” from his car. However, at this stage no one else was present at the scene nor were there security cameras to capture the moment, so it was not clear how the IDF determined how he approached the home.
In first, Saudi paper prints op-ed by Israelis — on Erdogan’s private militias
In the latest sign of changes rippling across the Middle East, Saudi Arabia’s most widely read English newspaper on Thursday published an op-ed by Israelis for the first time in its history.

What’s more, the analysis on Arab News was the product of joint research between Israeli and Emirati think tanks.

Written by Dr. Hay Eytan Cohen Yanarocak and Dr. Jonathan Spyer, the op-ed examines Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s establishment of a private militia network made up of fighters from the Syrian civil war.

Both authors are fellows at the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security, which has recently partnered with the TRENDS research center in the United Arab Emirates in the wake of the Abraham Accords normalization agreement between the nations.

Israel established diplomatic ties with the UAE and Bahrain in September as part of the accords and has also reached normalization agreements with Sudan and Morocco.

“Erdogan has quietly established a network of private militias manned entirely by fighters imported from Syria in a remarkably brazen and cynical move,” the authors say. “Their role is to advance his grand plan of re-establishing influence over a region roughly overlapping the former Ottoman Empire — from the Palestinian territories to Syria and the Caucasus to as far away as Kashmir, according to some reports.”
UAE massively cut aid to Palestinians after normalization with Israel
The United Arab Emirates and Bahrain have substantially cut back funding for the UN agency for Palestinian refugees following their normalization with Israel, in possible “revenge” for the Palestinians’ bitter condemnation of the move, Channel 12 news reported Friday.

Citing the Center for Near East Policy Research, an Israeli NGO, the network said that while the UAE sent the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) $53 million in 2018 and $51 million in 2019, it provided the agency a mere $1 million in 2020.

UNRWA confirmed the data to Channel 12.

The report said Bahrain too had cut funds, but did not provide any figures.

The normalization accords signed last fall infuriated the Palestinians, who condemned them as a “stab in the back” and a “betrayal.”

The Palestinian ambassadors to the Emirates and Bahrain were recalled in August and September, respectively, in the immediate aftermath of the Gulf states’ announcement that they were normalizing ties with Israel, only to quietly return them in November.

Under former president Donald Trump, the United States also halted its support for UNRWA, leaving it with an expected annual deficit of $200 million.
Khaled Abu Toameh: Human Rights Violations No One Talks About
Last year, the Palestinian Authority (PA) in the West Bank revealed that Hamas was planning to confiscate large areas of privately-owned lands in the Gaza Strip. According to the PA, Hamas formed the Palestinian Land Authority in the Gaza Strip to facilitate "land-theft."

A recent report by the Al Mezan Center for Human Rights documented the death in 2020 of at least 30 Palestinians in various "internal violence" incidents in the Gaza Strip, including six children and four women. Another 155 Palestinians were injured, including 17 children and 19 women.

The ongoing human rights violations by Hamas show that the Islamist movement does not care about reports issued by Palestinian human rights groups such as the Al Mezan Center. The Hamas rulers of the Gaza Strip know that they can continue doing anything they want there because the international community only pays attention when there is way to blame Israel.

In 2006, the US and European Union made a mistake by allowing Hamas, whose charter openly calls for the annihilation of Israel, to participate in the parliamentary election. If the Americans and Europeans repeat the same mistake, Palestinians in the West Bank will join their brothers in the Gaza Strip and find themselves also living under Hamas's repressive Islamist regime, which has no respect for human rights.
The IDF Could Be Making a Horrible Mistake if It Doesn’t Confront Hezbollah
After a Hezbollah anti-aircraft missile was fired at an IDF drone on a reconnaissance mission over Lebanon on Wednesday, Israel has found itself facing a dilemma. On the one hand, not retaliating will undermine its deterrence on the northern border. On the other hand, this might escalate tensions in a region already on edge.

Wednesday’s incident was not the first time Hezbollah has targeted Israeli drones operating over Lebanon. In the past, however, it has acted within a clear context and for an understandable reason, which was not the case on Wednesday. Although the Israeli Air Force (IAF) has been operating intensively in Lebanese airspace in recent days, it was known in Lebanon to be routine rather than hostile activity.

It seems that Hezbollah was trying to deter Israel and fulfill leader Hassan Nasrallah’s promise to target Israeli aircraft operating in the Lebanese airspace. It might also have been an attempt at payback for Israel’s attack on the Damascus airport last summer, which resulted in months-long tensions on the border.

Claims that Hezbollah’s actions were meant as a signal to the Biden administration to make haste in lifting sanctions on the group’s patron, Iran, are less plausible. The exact opposite might be true: Iran is interested in Lebanon remaining under the radar at the moment, as Israel links Hezbollah “tourism” to the Iranian nuclear deal, which the Biden administration has expressed a desire to rejoin.
Hezbollah and Other Non-State Actors Acquire Asymmetric Tools in Cyberspace
Hezbollah’s cyber operatives are back in the game, according to a new report by Israeli firm ClearSky Cyber Security. After years of apparent inactivity, the group’s reappearance is part of a larger trend in which non-state actors increasingly acquire sophisticated cyber tools that exploit insufficient investments in cyber defense.

ClearSky identified suspicious network activity in early 2020 and discovered an updated version of custom-built remote access malware previously used only by an Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) group known as Lebanese Cedar or Volatile Cedar. Another Israeli cybersecurity firm, Check Point, uncovered the group in 2012 and concluded that it originated in Lebanon. At the time, other researchers linked the group to Hezbollah, although Check Point itself did not make a positive attribution.

Yaniv Balmas, the head of cyber research at Check Point, said that the new report’s findings are consistent with his company’s assessment of Lebanese Cedar. While Balmas reiterated that Check Point has not identified the organization within Lebanon responsible for this APT, he noted that the victim profile “could match the motives of Hezbollah.”

ClearSky noted that Lebanese Cedar also used a piece of malware built by Iranian hackers responsible for the 2011–13 distributed denial of service attacks against the U.S. financial system. ClearSky caveated the finding by noting that its researchers are “unable to determine the nature of the relationship” between Lebanese Cedar and the Iranian hackers. However, ClearSky said, the existence of Iranian code “may point to a connection” with the regime in Iran.
GOP Legislative Push Seeks to Stop Biden Admin from Unraveling Iran Sanctions
A legislative push by congressional Republicans seeks to tie the Biden administration’s hands as it pursues diplomacy with Iran and would codify in law a range of tough economic sanctions on Tehran’s global terrorism enterprise.

The three new bills put forward by the Republican Study Committee, the largest conservative caucus in Congress, would make it difficult for the Biden administration to unilaterally lift sanctions on Iran as part of any effort to entice Tehran back to the negotiating table over its growing nuclear program, according to a copy of the legislative package obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. The bills represent the opening salvo in the GOP’s efforts to stop Biden from rejoining the nuclear deal and providing Tehran with potentially billions in cash windfalls. The Biden administration says it will only rejoin the agreement if Tehran agrees to scale back its nuclear work.

The RSC’s 160 members says they will stand against sanctions relief for Iran until it ends its support for regional terror groups and rolls back its nuclear program, which Secretary of State Antony Blinken recently disclosed is potentially just "a matter of weeks" away from producing an atomic weapon. While the bills are not guaranteed to pass in the Democrat-controlled House, Republicans say they intend to force their Democratic colleagues to publicly vote in favor of sanctions relief for Iran.

"Rejoining the failed Iran deal means funding terrorists that will do us harm, period," Rep. Jim Banks (R., Ind.), a member of the House Armed Services Committee and the RSC’s chairman, told the Washington Free Beacon. "It also means lifting President Trump’s sanctions preventing China and Russia from selling arms to Iran. It’s not only a dangerous idea, but also against common sense."

Biden and Blinken "have promised to go down this path and fast," necessitating that Republican leaders stand up for the former administration’s "successful maximum pressure campaign" on Iran, Banks said.
Cruz Moves to Take Taxpayer Money from Iran Nuclear Deal and Give to Military Dogs
Sen. Ted Cruz (R., Texas) introduced on Thursday evening an amendment to a massive budget bill being debated by the Senate that would divert U.S. taxpayer funds meant to implement the Iran nuclear deal and, instead, give it to the Defense Department for the training and medical care of military dogs, including dogs who are deployed to war zones.

Cruz’s amendment, a copy of which was obtained by the Washington Free Beacon, was filed as Amendment 838 and would divert around $10 million allocated to the State and Treasury Departments for implementing the 2015 nuclear accord—specifically money that would be spent by the Biden administration granting sanctions waivers—and give it to the Pentagon’s military dogs. The amendment is meant to proactively prevent the Biden administration from spending American taxpayer funds on its expected push to reenter the deal, which former President Donald Trump abandoned in 2018.

The Senate is debating the budget bill overnight, with a vote expected to carry on late into the evening and early morning. Once passed, it will move to the House.

The dogs, which play a vital support role in active wars, are primarily trained and rehabilitated after injuries by the 341st Training Squadron of the U.S. Air Force, based in Lackland, Texas.

A source familiar with Cruz’s thinking described several links between the topics: Many of the dogs injured and being cared for in Texas saw service in Iraq. They were instrumental in locating explosives provided to terrorist militia groups by the Iranian regime.
Jewish Group ‘Disturbed’ by Canada’s Refusal to Designate Iran’s IRGC as Terror Group
While Canadian Jewish groups welcomed the move by Canada’s government to designate several Islamic extremist, neo-Nazi and white-supremacist groups as terror groups on Wednesday, some expressed disappointment that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps was not included.

“B’nai Brith Canada welcomes today’s listing of new far-right, mostly neo-Nazi groups & ISIS/Al-Qaeda affiliates as part of Canada’s ongoing fight against terrorism. That being said, we remain disturbed by the govt’s longstanding failure to list the IRGC,” the group tweeted.

“Ultimately, the IRGC is much more dangerous than any of the groups listed, and constitutes a real and present danger to Iranian dissidents, the Jewish community and Canadians in general,” it emphasized.

Among entities that the Canadian government added to its list of terror groups include the Proud Boys, Atomwaffen Division, the Base and the Russian Imperial Movement. Five affiliates of ISIS, three Al-Qaeda affiliates and Hizbul Mujahedin were also listed.

“Violent acts of terrorism have no place in Canadian society or abroad. [These] additions to the Criminal Code list of terrorist entities are an important step in our effort to combat violent extremism in all forms,” said Bill Blair, Canada’s Public Safety Minister in a statement.



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