Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, May 03, 2006

Good news: Israel builds underwater museum in Caesarea

Time for good news for a change...

It was the largest, most impressive port in the Roman Empire when it was inaugurated in 10 BCE. And some 2,016 years later, the ancient port of Caesarea - along the Mediterranean coast of Israel - was inaugurated again last week, this time as the world's first underwater museum.

Divers can now don their wet suits and tour the sign-posted remains of the magnificent harbor built by King Herod to honor his Roman patron, Caesar Augustus. The site has been excavated over the last three decades by a team led by the late Prof. Avner Raban of the University of Haifa's Recanati Institute for Maritime Studies.

It's not your ordinary museum tour. Visitors float from one 'exhibit' to the next, marveling in silence at the untouched remains of a once-glorious harbor: a Roman shipwreck, a ruined lighthouse, an ancient breakwater, the port's original foundations, anchors, pedestals.

"It's a truly unique site," said Sarah Arenson, a University of Haifa maritime historian and participant in the project. "This port was built as the state-of-the-art port of the Roman Empire, and made the other ports of the time, including those of Rome, Alexandria and Piraeus, look small and out-of-date by comparison."

Arenson notes that the port is also unique today: "There are no other ancient ports in the world that are accessible to ordinary divers," she told ISRAEL21c. Some such ports are restricted to authorized scientists. Others may be open to any diver, but would be meaningless to such visitors "because," explains Arenson ,"all you would see is a bunch of stones."

At Caesarea, divers view some 36 different sign-posted sites along four marked trails in the sunken harbor covering an area of 87,000 sq. yards They are given a water-proof map which describes in detail each of the numbered sites along the way (currently maps are in English and Hebrew; within a few months they will be available in six additional languages.) One trail is also accessible to snorkelers. The others, ranging from 7 to 29 feet below the surface, close to the beach, are appropriate for any beginner diver.

And what does the visitor see?

In a sense, an abrogated history of this once prominent port town - from its entrance at sea (about 350 feet from the current shoreline) to the Roman shipwreck that signaled the demise of the port, probably due to an earthquake, about a century after its construction, researchers believe. And, in between, divers can view the remnants of the original foundations that made this harbor one of the wonders of the Roman Empire.

Time for a new look

I think it needs some tweaking but I was getting sick of the old layout.

Any feedback is appreciated.

UPDATE: Back to the drawing board! It looks like I had optimized it for something like 1280x1024 :) So I went back to the old layout, changed to a sans-serif font, and put up a different masthead for now.

The poor, starving and cash-strapped Palestinian Arabs know where their priorities are.

You can almost hear their conversations....

"Do we buy food for our people? Do we pay their 'salaries'? Do we put money into venture capital, or our universities, or R&D?

"No, in a time of severely limited budget problems, we need to buy telescopic sights with infrared markers for our M-16s first."

Hundreds of combat support items were found Tuesday morning in a shipping container sent from China to the Gaza Strip. Customs officers at the Ashdod Port made the discovery while scanning the container.

The container's importers said their shipment includes sewing notions, hats and clocks. Customs officers however confiscated 300 telescopes, some of which have sights and infrared markers for long-range targets.

"We are speaking of a quantity that could upgrade the fighting capability of a whole brigade in the Palestinian Authority security forces. A telescope of this kind, fitted on an M-16 rifle, for example, improves the death ability of the weapon," customs officials said.

(Previous "Humanitarian Crisis" articles here, here and here.)

The Iranian earthquake threat

This is one hell of a scary picture.

This picture shows where and when earthquakes have hit various parts of iran. At the web page it comes from, you can zoom in and see more detail.

Iranian nuclear activities are worrisome not only for their military dimension, but also because of a simple fact: Iran sits on one of the most geologically active places on the planet. Deadly earthquakes happen quite often there, and 97% of Iran has been hit by earthquakes historically.

Even if Iran's nuclear program was entirely peaceful, the idea of building nuclear plants in such a seismically unstable area is just stupid. A single Chernobyl in Iran, triggered by an earthquake, could contaminate the entire Persian Gulf and then we won't have to worry about Gulf oil - there won't be any.

A quick glance at Iran's IRNA news shows minor earthquakes hitting various parts of Iran last Friday.
And Saturday.
And Sunday.
And Monday.

Almost no one is talking about this threat besides Amir Taheri, the excellent Iranian columnist and writer. Here is one of his recent articles on the matter:

IRAN'S NUKE SITES SIT ON FAULT LINE
by Amir Taheri
Gulf News
April 5, 2006

Where will the "Next Big One" strike? This is the question that seismologists across the globe have always on their mind. The latest issue of National Geographic Magazine poses it in its cover story and tries to provide answers with the help of a map depicting earthquake prone zones.

Possibly the most active of these zones is the arc of uplands spanning from Southern Asia to the Middle East. At the centre of that arc is located the Iranian Plateau which, over the past century or so, has experienced more earthquakes than any other part of the globe. Last week's earthquake in the south-central province of Luristan is the latest reminder of that fact.

Since Iran started properly recording earthquakes in the late 1940s it has suffered at least one "big one" every decade. According to official estimates these earthquakes claimed the lives of 126,000 people, injured a further 800,000 and made 1.8 million people homeless. Seen against such a background, it is surprising the safety aspect of Iran's nuclear programme has received little attention inside and outside the country.

As far as I am aware the safety issue has not been seriously raised either at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) or at the United Nations Security Council where the Iranian programme was debated last month. As for Iran's neighbours the only expression of concern has come from the Secretary-General of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Abdul Rahman Al Attiyah.

The problem, however, is that while the security risks that the Iranian nuclear programme might entail cannot be conclusively demonstrated, the threat that it poses for the safety of the region is readily manifest.

Even supposing Iran's nuclear programme has no military dimensions, it would still be prudent to demand that it be put under a moratorium until the whole issue is publicly debated inside and outside the country.

There was no public enquiry on how and why the Bushehr Peninsula, one of the most dangerous areas of Iran as far as earthquake frequencies are concerned, was chosen as the location of the first nuclear power station.

The spot chosen for the nuclear power station is known as Hellieh and was once the site of half a dozen villages. It was abandoned in the 1940s when the villages were wiped off the map in a major earthquake. The place is not far from the remains of Siraf, which had been the region's most important port until it was destroyed in an earthquake in 978 AD.

An official Iranian government report presented to an international conference in Kobe, Japan, in January 2005, puts the area where the nuclear power station is located at the centre of the country's most active earthquake zone.

The safety issue becomes even more pressing when a number of other facts are considered. The first is that no proper assessment was ever made of the damage done to the half-built plant before building was resumed in the year 2000.

The second fact is that there is, as yet, no agreement on how and where to treat the waste water produced by the Hellieh plant. The initial idea was to just let it flow into the waters of the Gulf. But that could pose a major ecological threat and wipe out the region's fishing industry. It could also threaten the desalination plants used by many Gulf states to produce up to 80 per cent of the water they use.

No agreement

There is also the fact that there is, as yet, no agreement on what to do with the nuclear waste produced by the plant. The German consortium had proposed burying the waste under the great Iranian desert of Kavir Lut. But that idea had to be abandoned because the desert in question is itself on an active earthquake zone.

Both under the Shah and during the reign of the mullahs, Iranian decision-makers have been fully aware of the risks involved in building nuclear power stations. This is why they decided to locate them in sparsely populated areas. None of the 22 nuclear power plants that the Shah wanted to build was to be close to major population centres in Iran itself.

That strategy, however, did not take into account Iran's neighbours in the western coast of the Gulf and the Gulf of Oman. There, between 40 and 100 per cent of the total population live close to the perimeter of danger.

The Islamic republic has decided to build seven of those nuclear stations. The second will be located at Dar-Khwain, on the River Karun which flows into the Gulf via the Shatt Al Arab. The third will be built in the Jas Peninsula almost opposite the Mussandam Peninsula in the Sultanate of Oman.

The world needs to give at least as much importance to the safety aspect of the Iranian nuclear programme, which is readily manifest, than to its security aspect which the IAEA is yet to reveal in clear terms.

Building nuclear power stations, especially when designed by Russians and Chinese firms that are subject to no international scrutiny, on the world's most active earthquake zone might not be the best of ideas either for Iran or its neighbours.

While I admit to fantasizing about chances for "the mother of all work accidents", the practical upshot is that here is a topic all can agree on - from tree-hugging liberals to hawkish conservatives. Nuclear power plants in Iran pose an extreme environmental threat beyond the obvious military threat, and even the most dhimmified dove in Europe can understand this.

"Most Arabs tired of Palestinian Arab whining"

An interesting article in the New York Sun by Youssef Ibrahim:

A stark reality is coursing through Arab consciousness: No one cares about Palestine. It has been the case for at least a decade. What's new is that even reasonable Palestinian Arabs now acknowledge the truth of their lost state.
Those 300 million Arabs face far more existential concerns. Bad governance, Iraq's potentially infectious sectarian violence, and economic headaches - collapsing stock markets in rich countries and collapsing living standards in poor ones - threaten their survival.
Meanwhile, the image of a Palestinian Arab state fades like an old family photo, a yellowish tint deepening around its edges, a nostalgic snapshot rather than a call to arms.
The Palestinian Arab spin machine is alive and well, fed mostly by the oil-rich Gulf region's press and broadcast outlets, including satellite networks Al-Jazeera, of Qatar, and Al-Arabiya, of Saudi Arabia. Yet reality creeps in.
"Should someone ask who is really busy with the Palestinian cause, he shall not find a precise answer. In fact, he might be surprised that no one is," a militant Islamist commentator, Fahmy Howeidi, wrote yesterday in a fundamentalist Saudi newspaper, Asharq Al-Awsat (the front page of which is tinted with the green of Islam).
"It is not a secret that practically everyone outside Palestine have [sic] cleansed their hands. As for those on the inside, the struggle underway between the Palestinian Authority and the Hamas government provides an answer to the question that could not have crossed the mind of those asserting that Palestine is the central issue for the Arab and Muslim worlds," Mr. Howeidi, who serves as an intellectual facilitator for the Muslim Brotherhood, added.
The Arab world has "cleansed" its hands? Sounds like the Romans washing their hands of a persecuted Jewish prophet, Jesus Christ. The metaphor is replete with Judeo-Christian religious hang-ups of treason and guilt, coming from a man who, by any measure, ranks as an Islamist fanatic.
But thank you, Mr. Howeidi, for your frankness. It must have hurt. It turns out that his is hardly the sole smoldering ember of resentment against Palestinian Arabs. The outside world has underestimated the degree to which most Arabs have tired of Palestinian Arabs' whining, corruption, abuse of each other and outsiders, and their unique talent for what Israelis describe as "never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity."
Arabs outside the Palestinian Arab territories also harbor pent-up revenge fantasies, dreaming of retaliation for the abandonment of Kuwait to Saddam Hussein in 1990-91. About 400,000 Palestinian Arabs living in Kuwait sided with the invader, biting the hand that fed them so well, and for so long.
In Asharq Al-Awsat's April 26 edition, Kazem Mustapha described an "opportunistic" pattern of betrayal on the part of Palestinian Arabs:
"When the Palestine Liberation Organization aligned itself with Saddam even though Palestinians had lived in Kuwait for over a half a century, and had their children born there, they aligned themselves with the occupier against their host; when Hamas rushed to kiss Russia immediately after it came to power, betraying their Muslim brothers in Chechnya, and then rushed to kiss Iran, forgetting its occupation since 1971 of three Arab islands in the Gulf and its ongoing persecution of its Arab ethnic minority in the Ahwaz (southern) province for well over 70 years, which ranks as the worst occupation by any Muslims or non-Muslims."
So the cup is full of recrimination. And there are more spoonfuls of reality.
Egypt and Jordan, two key countries in the Israeli conflict, have made peace with the Jewish state.
And due to Syria's behavior in Lebanon and its alliance with Iran, President al-Assad's regime has come to represent a greater threat to many Arab countries than Israel.
Here once again the Hamas government is seen as aligning itself with an unpopular loser whose only desire is to drag everyone else into its bloody trenches.

Once Hamas fails in its governance - as it surely will - the circle will close. Palestinian Arabs will simply have to settle as well as they can. That is the greater Arab view.

This has been clear from the lukewarm Arab support given after the Hamas election victory. Arabs spent so much time and energy to help their Palestinian brothers and they have nothing to show for it - Palestinian Arabs are further away from a state than at any time since before Oslo.

And the reasons are even clearer than the article says. The Palestinian Arab leadership never had the slightest desire for independence for their people, but only for the destruction of another people. This was highlighted today by a quote by the Islamic Jihad leader:

"The priorities are to end the occupation, stop Zionist violence and crimes ... then we can talk about domestic problems."

Followup on Google News

A week ago I mentioned that an Arab joke group blog, KABOBfest, was being indexed by Google News as a legitimate news site. The posting got picked up in a number of blogs and Google decided to act.

Of course, Google News could not bring itself to take away the site itself - bowing to Zionist pressure and all sets a bad precedent - so now when Google News references KABOBfest it adds (satire) to its name.

Which of course begs the question: Where on Google News are Scrappleface or The Onion?

If a bunch of Arabs who think the Holocaust is a hoot , who make up Jewish sounding names for their "reporters" and who don't even know how to get their own domain name separate from Blogspot can be considered something worthy of being indexed by Google, why not Infidel Bloggers Alliance? Why not Jihad Watch or Little Green Footballs?

Emailing Google does not usually get an answer, but the history of Google News choices almost invariably show that their editors have quite a leftist slant on what is considered legitimate.

Hamas outsourcing terror

Here is the pattern that we all knew would occur: Hamas pretending to adhere to a "hudna", the world believing them, and in the end they are outsourcing their terror operations to others - along with training and materials.

A Popular Resistance Committees cell is behind the attempted terror attack at the Karni crossing in Gaza last week.

According to a Shin Bet investigation into the incident, the attack was masterminded by senior Hamas members, including Ahmed Anzur, the group’s leader in north Gaza, as well as by Ahmed Jabriya, a senior member of Hamas’ military wing.

During last Wednesday’s incident, Palestinians tried to drive a car bomb into the Karni crossing, but were intercepted by Palestinian security officers who opened fire at the vehicle.

The terrorists had apparently planned to blow up the car, creating an opening in the wall separating the Israeli and Palestinian sides of the crossing, and then open fire at crossing employees from two other vehicles.
A similar attack took place in Karni a year and-a-half ago; six employees were killed.
Security establishment officials have mentioned the cooperation between Hamas and the Resistance Committees as an opportunity for the ruling terror group to use the Committees as a “quiet executive wing” for attacking Israel. Hamas is supplying the Committees with weapons and training, officials said.

As Backspin points out, there are ironies here: the Palestinian Arabs tell the world that Israel is blocking their economic growth through multiple closures at Karni, and Hamas planned to blow it up (so much for caring about their people.) Of course, the terror attempt proves once again that Israel was right, but don't expect any mainstream media source to mention that.

Haveil Havalim #67 is up

The Hashmonean has just published the latest Haveil Havalim, featuring the best of the Jewish and Israel-related blogs for the past week. It is a relatively new blog and worth looking at.

As usual, it is an excellent collection, including articles about Yom HaShoah. I am honored that one of my postings was chosen (even before I was asked to nominate it myself!)

Check it out!

The "Naqba" no one talks about

Hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs expelled from their homes. Expulsions, summary executions of civilians by the brutal soldiers, horrendous torture, and mass detentions under the cover of war. None of them able to return to the homes they lived in all their lives.

This is not Israel in 1948, but Kuwait in 1992.

350,000 Palestinian Arabs were driven from their homes in Kuwait - and no one talks about it.

By almost any measure, Arabs have treated their Palestinian brethren worse than the Jews ever dreamed about. But this is not a story that you will hear Palestinian Arabs mention. They would prefer that the world pressue Jews, and not think about documented abuses from the first Gulf War (not to mention abuses of Palestinian Arabs in Libya, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Lebanon and elsewhere in the Arab world.)

Now, why are these "naqbas" ignored? Could it be that the point of Palestinian Arab victimhood is really about destroying Israel, and not at all about Arab "survivors" of 1948 and 1967?

I only found this article fully quoted in one place on the Internet, although bits and pieces of the story can be found in many places, including most on-line encyclopedias and histories fo the Gulf War.

Here is how the San Francisco Bay Guardian reported the situation of the Palestinian Arabs of Kuwait in the aftermath of the first Gulf War (September 9, 1992):

DEMOCRATS, REPUBLICANS, and pundits alike have described the "liberation of Kuwait" as an apex in U.S. foreign policy since the end of World War II. With great fanfare and pronouncements of new openness and democracy for the oil-rich kingdom, the emir returned to his palace, rebuilt complete with gold toilet seats courtesy of the U.S. Army.

But those promises of freedom lasted only as long as television news teams stayed in Kuwait City. Reports from human rights monitors detail an ongoing Kuwaiti campaign to punish and expel the 350,000 Palestinians living in Kuwait before the war. Today, all but 60,000 Palestinians have been driven out by a combination of summary executions, torture, detention, forced expulsions, and a variety of other pressures. And according to human rights workers, Kuwait is trying to squeeze those last few out quickly.
...

More than 50 percent of Kuwait's prewar population was Palestinian. Many had lived their whole lives in Kuwait, holding positions from banking and business to laborers. Many were members of the professional classes that helped build Kuwait into a relatively modern society.

Roughly half of Kuwait's Palestinians, some 180,000, left during Iraq's occupation. But the real horror began with liberation.

The Kuwaitis launched a brutal campaign of punishment and expulsion against the Palestinians for the PLO's opposition to the Gulf War, ostensibly for their "collaboration" with the Iraqi invaders, despite the fact that many Palestinians had fought and died with the Kuwaiti resistance.

In April 1991, Amnesty International reported that "scores of victims had been killed and hundreds more had been arbitrarily arrested, many brutally tortured by Kuwaiti armed forces and members of the resistance." The report found that "teams of torturers often appeared to work in relays, maintaining the torture for hours."

Amnesty International has documented that 40 Palestinians were summarily executed, and another 120 disappeared. Five thousand were detained, most of whom were beaten and/or tortured. Another 7,000 Palestinians were formally expelled.

Kuwaiti officials have admitted that some excesses happened, but claimed these occurred without their knowledge and were committed by citizens who had endured great hardships by Iraqi invaders and their alleged collaborators.

But the implicit Kuwaiti government approval for these atrocities is underscored by the fact that no one has been brought to justice for crimes committed against Palestinians. Aziz Abu-Hamad, a senior researcher at Middle East Watch, said the Kuwaiti government has not made any serious effort to locate the 120 vanished Palestinians. Mass graves have been discovered, but Kuwaiti authorities have made no attempt to exhume these graves and identify the bodies.

An agency was created, called State Security Intelligence Police, Abu-Hamad said, which made a practice of telling Palestinians that if they didn't leave, "we'll come after you."

And the government has made it all but financially impossible for Palestinians to remain in Kuwait. All foreigners who worked for the Kuwaiti government were fired immediately after the Iraqi invasion. After the war, most foreign workers were rehired, but no Palestinians. Private employers followed suit. The oil and banking industries were forbidden to rehire Palestinians.

Besides throwing all Palestinians out of work, the Kuwaiti rulers are refusing to give them back wages, severance pay (one month's salary for each year of service under Kuwaiti law), or pension funds they are owed until they have their passport stamped with an exit visa (which gives them one week to leave).

By June 1992, another 110,000 Palestinians had left Kuwait, and a deadline of Sept. 30 will soon be announced for the remaining 60,000 Palestinians, Abu-Hamad said.

That Hamas "truce"

The Arab media has been mentioning a number of times that Hamas now has a "truce" with Israel, since at least February 2005. For example, the WRMEA quotes the editor of Lebanon's Daily Star:

Describing Hamas as a grandchild of Sharon and Israel’s policies, Khouri reminded the audience that Hamas nevertheless has kept a year-long truce with Israel.

An American editorialist at Al-Jazeerah.info goes one better:

Israel has violated the truce that the so-called terrorist organization Hamas has upheld for 15 months..."

Even the mainstream media has picked up on this, led by the resident Palestinian apologist at Reuters, Nidal al-Mughrabi:

While it has largely abided by a year-old truce, the government defended a suicide bombing carried out by the Islamic Jihad militant group in Tel Aviv on April 17 that killed nine people...

So, has Hamas really been staying away from terror since February 2005?

It turns out that the US National Counterterrorism Center keeps a database of worldwide terror attacks over the past couple of years. And while Hamas seems to have "officially" kept relatively quiet since the elections, the database shows quite a few attacks that came way after the supposed "truce" (stats through the end of 2005):

04/10/2005 Gaza Strip Residence damaged in mortar attack by HAMAS in Nezer Hazzani, Gaza Strip

05/19/2005 Israel Israeli settlement and military post targeted in mortar attacks by HAMAS in Nahal Oz, HaDarom, Israel

05/19/2005 Gaza Strip Checkpoint point targeted in rocket and mortar attacks by HAMAS in Bayt Hanun, Gaza Strip 05/19/2005 Gaza Strip Israeli settlement damaged in mortar attacks by HAMAS in Morag, Gaza Strip

05/19/2005 Gaza Strip Israeli settlement targeted in mortar attack by HAMAS in Morag, Gaza Strip

05/19/2005 Gaza Strip Israeli settlement targeted in mortar attacks by HAMAS in Atzmona, Gaza Strip

05/19/2005 Gaza Strip Israeli settlement targeted in rocket attack by HAMAS in Nisanit, Gaza Strip

06/18/2005 Israel Israeli community damaged in rocket attacks by HAMAS in Sederot, HaDarom, Israel

07/16/2005 Israel 7 children, 9 civilians injured in rocket attacks by HAMAS in Sederot, HaDarom, Israel

07/16/2005 Israel Israeli settlement targeted in rocket attack by HAMAS in Nahal Oz, Gaza Strip

06/29/2005 Gaza Strip 1 civilian wounded in rocket attack targeting Israeli settlement by HAMAS in Gadid, Gaza Strip

06/29/2005 Gaza Strip 1 civilian wounded, 1 residence, Israeli settlement damaged in rocket attack by HAMAS in Newe Deqalim, Gaza Strip

07/14/2005 Gaza Strip 2 police officers wounded in armed attack by suspected HAMAS in Gaza, Gaza Strip

07/15/2005 Gaza Strip 1 child, 1 civilian wounded in mortar attack on Israeli settlement by HAMAS in Newe Deqalim,

07/15/2005 Gaza Strip Israeli settlement damaged in rocket and mortar attack by HAMAS in Nezer Hazzani, Gaza Strip

07/15/2005 Gaza Strip Israeli settlement targeted in rocket attacks by suspected HAMAS in Atzmona, Gaza Strip

07/16/2005 Gaza Strip 20 civilians, 7 children wounded in mortar attack on Israeli settlement by HAMAS in Nisanit, Gaza Strip

07/16/2005 Gaza Strip Crossing Point targeted in rocket attack by HAMAS at Sufa Crossing, Gaza Strip

07/16/2005 Gaza Strip Crossing point targeted in rocket and mortar attack by HAMAS at the Erez Crossing Point, Gaza Strip

07/16/2005 Gaza Strip Israeli settlement targeted in mortar and rocket attacks by HAMAS in Nezarim, Gaza Strip

07/16/2005 Gaza Strip Israeli settlement targeted in mortar attack by HAMAS in Kfar Darom, Gaza Strip

07/16/2005 Gaza Strip Israeli settlement targeted in rocket attack by HAMAS in Newe Deqalim, Gaza Strip

07/16/2005 Israel 7 children, 9 civilians injured in rocket attacks by HAMAS in Sederot, HaDarom, Israel

07/16/2005 Israel Israeli settlement targeted in rocket attack by HAMAS in Nahal Oz, Gaza Strip

07/17/2005 Gaza Strip Several civilians wounded in armed attack by HAMAS in Kfar Darom, Gaza Strip

07/17/2005 Gaza Strip Several civilians wounded in mortar and rocket attacks by HAMAS on Nezarim, Gaza Strip

07/17/2005 Gaza Strip Israeli settlement targeted in mortar and rocket attacks by HAMAS in Newe Deqalim, Gaza Strip

07/17/2005 Gaza Strip Israeli settlement targeted in mortar attack by HAMAS in Atzmona, Gaza Strip

07/17/2005 Gaza Strip Israeli settlement targeted in mortar attack by HAMAS in Gadid, Gaza Strip

07/17/2005 Gaza Strip Israeli settlement targeted in mortar attack by HAMAS in Nisanit, Gaza Strip

07/17/2005 Gaza Strip Israeli settlement targeted in rocket attack by HAMAS in Dugit, Gaza Strip

07/19/2005 Gaza Strip Israeli settlement targeted in mortar attack by HAMAS in Atzmona, Gaza Strip

07/19/2005 Gaza Strip Israeli settlement targeted in mortar attack by HAMAS in Morag, Gaza Strip

09/21/2005 West Bank 1 civilian kidnapped and killed by HAMAS in Jerusalem, West Bank

09/24/2005 Israel 11 civilians wounded in rocket attack by HAMAS on Sederot, HaDarom, Israel

There are also literally dozens of rocket attacks that no group claimed responsibility for. And, of course, the fact that so many historical terror attacks have been claimed jointly by supposedly "competing" Palestinian Arab terror groups makes it pretty clear that Hamas is still involved in terror attacks even if they are no longer taking credit.

But even the official statistics show that those who claim that Hamas has been quiet for over a year are purposefully misstating the facts.

UPDATE: Keren Malki's list of terror attacks includes a failed Hamas attack from December:
2005-12-19

Intercepted: Israeli security personnel catch 2 armed Palestinian Arab men near the neighborhood of Har Homa, en route to doing a terror attack in Jerusalem. They have two firebombs, two knives, a Hamas flag and material for two pipe bombs. This is so insignificant that it goes unreported except for some Israelis newspapers.

Iran's nuclear "transparency"

Over the past week, a number of Iranian leaders said curiously similar statements:

Ahmadenijad: "Iran is the sole country whose nuclear activities are completely transparent. We are ready to hold talks to prove there has been no diversion in our peaceful nuclear activities," he added.

Chairman of Expediency Council Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani: "Since the victory of the Islamic Revolution, Iran has adopted transparency on nuclear program and met all requirements of NPT.
"We decided not to hide anything and proved our goodwill to UN nuclear agency," Rafsanjani said.

Deputy Secretary of Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) for international affairs Javad Vaeedi: He said that Iranian nuclear program is transparent and Iran has observed Additional Protocol to NPT for the past three years.

Apparently, the IAEA disagrees about Iran's transparency. In the report released today, they write:

After more than three years of Agency efforts to seek clarity about all aspects of Iran’s nuclear programme, the existing gaps in knowledge continue to be a matter of concern. Any progress in that regard requires full transparency and active cooperation by Iran — transparency that goes beyond the measures prescribed in the Safeguards Agreement and Additional Protocol — if the Agency is to be able to understand fully the twenty years of undeclared nuclear activities by Iran. Iran continues to facilitate the implementation of the Safeguards Agreement and had, until February 2006, acted on a voluntary basis as if the Additional Protocol were in force. Until February 2006, Iran had also agreed to some transparency measures requested by the Agency, including access to certain military sites. Additional transparency measures, including access to documentation, dual use equipment and
relevant individuals, are, however, still needed for the Agency to be able to verify the scope and nature of Iran’s enrichment programme, the purpose and use of the dual use equipment and materials purchased by the PHRC, and the alleged studies which could have a military nuclear dimension.

Regrettably, these transparency measures are not yet forthcoming.

But, not to worry: Helmut Schmidt says that Iran's nuclear program is just hunky-dory, and he brings as proof a supposed fatwa (unpublished, of course) that was supposedly made by Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei forbidding the creation of nuclear weapons. Everything's great! We can trust Iran's statements - why would they lie?

Unfortunately, Schmidt seems to ignore another little fatwa from this past February:

Iran's hardline spiritual leaders have issued an unprecedented new fatwa, or holy order, sanctioning the use of atomic weapons against its enemies.
One senior mullah has now said it is "only natural" to have nuclear bombs as a "countermeasure" against other nuclear powers, thought to be a reference to America and Israel.

The pronouncement is particularly worrying because it has come from Mohsen Gharavian, a disciple of the ultra-conservative Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Mesbah-Yazdi, who is widely regarded as the cleric closest to Iran's new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

It's official. I'm an infidel.

I am happy to say that I have joined the Infidel Bloggers Alliance . I'll be posting some of my articles there as well as here.

Thanks to Pastorius of Cuanas and Someguy at Mystery Achievement (whose blog seems to have been hijacked) for inviting me.

(Ahmadinejad) said Iran is the center of peace and tranquility, stressing, "We call for peace and tranquility for all states. We have not attacked any country and are not regarded as a threat to the world. The Iranian nation is independent."
He stated that all Iranians are duty-bound to take steps towards development of Iran, adding, "Iran should become the most advanced and powerful country in the world."

And thanks to an Arab newspaper in London, we can see exactly how peaceful Iran is:

Eight fundamentalist Islamist organizations have received large sums of money in the last month from the Iranian intelligence services, as part of a project to strike U.S military and economic installations across the Middle East Asharq Al-Awsat has learned.
The plan, which also includes the carrying out of suicide operations targeting US and British interests in the region, as well as their Arab and Muslim allies, in case Iran is attacked, was drawn up by a number of experts guerilla warfare and terrorist operations, and was revealed by a senior source in the Iranian armed forces' joint chief of staff headed by the veterinary doctor Hassan Firouzabadi,
The source added that the forces of the Revolutionary Guards’ al Quds Brigades, under Brigadier General Qassim Suleimani is responsible for coordinating and providing logistical support for the groups taking part in the execution of the plan, codenamed al Qiyamah the Islamic word for "Judgment Day".
The plan includes three steps, which Asharq al Awsat has examined in earlier reports. The source gave more details about how the plan will be implemented. He said, “Most of Iran’s visitors in the last four months, including the leaders of revolutionary groups in Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon, as well as the heads of Hezbollah cells in the Persian Gulf and Europe and North America were asked, when they met with the Iranian intelligence minister Gholamhossein Mohseni Ezhei and his aides: are you ready to defend the Islamic revolution and vilayat e faqih? If you agree to take part in the great jihad, what would you need to be ready for the great fight?
Amongst the leaders who visited were the head of one of the Iraqi armed group who was very clear and honest. He said his men would transform Iraq into a hell for the Americans if Iran were attacked.
The source also said that the military training camps of the Guards were opened for the fighters of the Mehdi army in Iran to receive the necessary training. Iran had also increased its financial assistance to Moqtada al Sadr to more than 20 million dollars.
The same applied to Islamic Jihad in Palestine which has received large sums of money, large quantities of arms and military training for its cadres in Isfahan, including street fighting methods.
As for the Lebanese Hezbollah, several loads of arms have been sent to; they include rockets, explosives, and guided missiles. Hezbollah's arsenal includes more than 10 thousand rockets short-range rockets and missiles including Fajr, Nour, Arash, Hadid.

An estimated 80 members underwent private training last year on how to carry out suicide operations from the air (through the use of kite planes) and undersea operations using submarines.
While denying that Hamas had joined the list of organizations ready to help Iran in its likely war with the U.S, the source indicated that the external success of the movement, which enjoys considerable Iranian support both financial and military, was strengthened following the latest visit by its leaders to Tehran. This was translated in the Palestinian masses’ support for Iran, against Israel and the United States .
According to Iran, the latest military plan includes:
1- A missile strike directly targeting the US bases in the Persian Gulf and Iraq , as soon as nuclear installations are hit.
2- Suicide operations in a number of Arab and Muslim countries against US embassies and missions and US military bases and economic and oil installations related to US and British companies. The campaign might also target the economic and military installations of countries allied with the United States .
3- Launch attacks by the Basij and the Revolutionary Guards and Iraqi fighters loyal to Iran against US and British forces in Iraq , from border regions in central and southern Iraq .
4- Hezbollah to launch hundreds of rockets against military and economic targets in Israel .
According to the source, in case the US military attacks continue, more than 50 Shehab-3 missiles will be targeted against Israel and the al Quads Brigades will give the go-ahead for more than 50 terrorists cells in Canada, the US and Europe to attack civil and industrial targets in these countries.
What about the last stage in the plan?
Here, the Iranian source hesitated before saying with worry; this stage might represent the beginning of a world war, given that extremists will seek to maximize civilian casualties by exploding germ and chemical bombs as well as dirty nuclear bombs across western and Arab cities.

Here is a textbook case where waiting for the inevitable conflict will end up increasing the number of dead.

Sometimes war is moral, and Iran is turning into a textbook case. The longer we wait the more it will hurt us. Time is squarely on Iran's side, unless its president should happen to have an unfortunate accident.

Gaza institutions of higher learning

H/T: OpinionJournal's Best of the Web Today

Several people have been hurt in Gaza City in clashes between rival groups of students supporting ruling Palestinian party Hamas or their opponents, Fatah.
The two sides fought around their campuses, throwing stones and homemade explosives and exchanging gunfire.
At least 15 people were wounded in the fighting in Gaza City, which involved students from two of the city's universities.
Al-Azhar University is dominated by Fatah and the Islamic University - by Hamas.

It is nice to see the best and the brightest young minds in the nascent Palestinian state take such interest in political matters. The leaders of tomorrow somehow manage to find time between their sociology classes and their bio midterms to build explosives and shoot each other.

It must take enormous maturity to balance their rich social lives, their backbreaking workloads and their responsibilities to acquire scarce ammunition. But these students know that they are the leaders of tomorrow, ready to guide the great Palestinian nation as it continues to transform itself from a backwards third-world group of ignorant bigots into an even more backwards group of well-educated murderers, terrorists, thieves and thugs.

Iran freaks over Israeli visit

A few days ago, Yediot Aharonot reported that a group of Israeli geological experts visited Iran to give technical advice and had been greeted warmly:

In recent weeks the Muslim republic has been enjoying the skills of Israeli experts recruited to help with rehabilitating the country after recent earthquakes have caused massive damages and devastation.

Three Israeli infrastructure consultants who returned to Israel at the end of the week from a secret visit in Iran on the invitation of a Tehran official, told Israel's leading daily Yedioth Ahronoth they were stunned by their stay in the country.

"We were amazed to discover the gap between Israel's public conflict with Iran, and the depth of the commercial cooperation between the countries, estimated at dozens of millions of dollars a year. We were greeted warmly and felt no hostility on the part of our hosts," one of the Israeli experts said.

The Israeli consultants were sent to Iran on behalf of a Dutch company that is partly owned by an Israeli. The company recruited the Israeli engineers and advisors, who specialize in infrastructure rehabilitation works, and flew them to Iran with special travel passes, after leaving their Israeli passports behind in Holland.

The head of the mission, a 47-year-old Israeli who visited Iran five times in the last 15 years, recounted the visit. "Upon arriving at the airport in Tehran we were greeted by a government employee… from there we were taken to a luxurious hotel located near the Jewish district. We were escorted by a security guard during our entire stay."

"In recent years trade relations between Israel and Iran have blossomed in certain fields, mainly agriculture. The Iranians indirectly buy from Israel spare parts for machines, vegetable seeds, and water filtering systems," he stated.

Well, this is too much for Iran. The Iranian press agency, IRNA, reported that Iranian diplomats hotly denied any such event ever took place:

Iranian Embassy in Syria in a statement issued on Thursday denied the claim made by the Zionist daily, Yedioth Ahronoth, about the visit of Israeli experts to Iran describing the report as baseless.

The document, a copy of which was faxed to IRNA representative office in Damascus, quoting an Iranian diplomat said that the report has been released while the degree of hostility of the Zionist regime with Iran, on account of Iran's will to seek justice, is clear to everyone and the Zionist politicians admit giving priority to measures against Iran.

The Iranian diplomat pointed to Iran's constant stance in not recognizing Israel and severing complete relations with his regime in all fields including economical, agricultural and technical since the victory of the Islamic Revolution and said, "The Zionist regime tries to mislead public opinion through hypocrisy and propaganda, while pretending that its ties with Islamic countries are normal." He referred to Iran's announced material and spiritual support for the Palestinian government-elect as the reason for Israel's failed blockade of this government and said that in retaliation, Israel disseminated false news to disrupt brotherly ties between the governments of Iran and Palestine.

According to him, the world public opinion, in particular that of the world of Islam, are well aware of Iran's stance and its principled and enduring policies towards the Palestinian issue as well as the Zionists' attempt to create discord among the Islamic Umma, adding that such false and instigating news have no impact on them.

Well, it sounds like it made an impact on them to me!

You can now add "hypocrites" and "liars" to the ever growing list of words to accurately describe the Iranian leadership.