Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Tuesday, December 04, 2007

The NIE Iranian nuke report

The left-leaning media is having a field day touting a National Intelligence Estimate that Iran has no current nuclear weapons program.

The Israeli defense minister disputes the findings.

What no one is emphasizing is that the report also says:

We assess with high confidence that until fall 2003, Iranian military entities were working under government direction to develop nuclear weapons....we also assess with moderate-to-high confidence that Tehran at a minimum is keeping open the option to develop nuclear weapons.

....We assess with high confidence that Iran has the scientific, technical and industrial capacity eventually to produce nuclear weapons if it decides to do so.

So this report states pretty unequivocally that Iran had a nuclear weapons program until 2003; that it kept it secret and was lying to the world about it; that it is ready to restart the program at any time; and that it certainly has the capability to build nuclear weapons.

The major disagreement with Israeli intelligence is whether Iran had already re-started the program after 2003.

It appears that what this report proves is that the West had really poor intelligence capabilities in Iran. The report proves that Iran is duplicitous; how hard would it be for the Iranians to start a separate secret nuclear weapons program, while they was misdirecting the IAEA and other inspectors with the shenanigans at their known nuclear power plants?

Obviously I don't know any intelligence that the US doesn't, but the NIE did make two possibly very flawed assumptions:

This NIE does not assume that Iran intends to acquire nuclear weapons. Rather, it examines the intelligence to assess Iran’s capability and intent (or lack thereof) to acquire nuclear weapons, taking full account of Iran’s dual-use uranium fuel cycle and those nuclear activities that are at least partly civil in nature.

This Estimate does assume that the strategic goals and basic structure of Iran’s senior leadership and government will remain similar to those that have endured since the death of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989. We acknowledge the potential for these to change during the time frame of the Estimate, but are unable to confidently predict such changes or their implications.

If these two assumptions are wrong, and I believe that they are, then the chances of a current, secret nuclear program in Iran is significantly higher than the NIE is saying.

The first assumption, that Iran does not intend to acquire nuclear weapons, is very suspect because the NIE itself acknowledges that Iran did indeed have a real, clandestine nuclear weapons program. And the second assumption - that Iran's strategic goals are the same as they were in 1989 - is also shaky, as only in recent years has Iran publicly voiced its goal of being a global Islamist superpower and the major counterweight to the US.

Nowhere does the NIE try to explain why Iran was interested in building nuclear weapons once, and why it would have abandoned its program strategically (it does explain why it would have done so tactically.) Given a known track record of desiring nuclear weapons, the capability to do so and the proclivity to lie about it, this report is hardly something to celebrate. And if the report was written under questionable assumptions then the seemingly optimistic results must also be called into question.

December 1947: 75 Jews murdered - in Aden (Yemen)

In the wake of the partition vote, Arabs started rioting throughout the Middle East. The worst attacks in the early weeks came from Aden, a British colony that is now a part of Yemen, where 75 Jews were brutally murdered by Arab mobs:

The final death toll was 82 Jews.

It is ironic that the best arguments for a Jewish state at the time came from the Arabs themselves, as their vaunted tolerance for Jews disappeared in an instant and it was clear that only a Jewish state could protect the "dhimmis."

Day two: Gaza refuses fuel; complains of "humanitarian crisis"

Ma'an reports:

Fuel companies in the Gaza Strip refused to accept deliveries from Israel for the second day in a row in protest against drastic cuts in supplies on Monday.

On the very same page, Ma'an also reports:

Hospitals in the Gaza Strip have been forced to shut down their emergency power generators, resulting in a looming “humanitarian disaster” due to Israel’s severe reductions in fuel supplies, said Muawiya Hassanein, the director of ambulance and emergency services in the Palestinian Health Ministry.

One gets the impression that if the Gazans could convincingly bomb the hospitals from the air, they would, just to blame Israel. Such is their hatred of Israel that they are willing to let their sick people die - just so they can blame the Zionists.

But when Hamas can blame Fatah, they will, even if the reasons contradict those of the fuel companies:

A petrol organization of the Hamas-run finance ministry on Saturday blamed the acting Palestinian government led by Salam Fayyad on fuel shortages in the Hamas-run Gaza Strip.
The Ramallah-based Fayyad government doesn't pay for Israeli Dor Company which delivers the fuel to Gaza while it pays for Baz Company which provides the West Bank with fuel, the organization said in a statement.

So is it that the fuel companies won't accept Zionist fuel because the amounts are an insult, or is it that the Israeli company is not being paid?

Dor already mentioned the real reason last Thursday:

Dor Alon officials said Thursday they were cutting back because the Palestinians have not paid their bills.

So now the truth becomes clearer - but that will never stop the PalArabs from going out of their way to blame Israel for the fact that even with the hundreds of millions of dollars that they manage to smuggle into Gaza, they can't pay for fuel.

A video, some pictures and a link

From The Jawa Report - Happy Chanukah!

Also check out The CAIR Bears at The Rude News (h/t Jihad Watch)

Scare bear

Sharia Bear

And many more!

NancyKay Shapiro brings us another Chanukah treat: (h/t Eye on the World)

On a more serious note, see Augean Stables on Humiliation and Apartheid.

How stupid can the Israeli leadership be?

From YNet:

It is regretful that the Arab nations had formerly rejected the idea of a bi-national state. I can only pray that they now realize that in lieu of fighting we can build a brighter future in two separate, independent states," Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said Monday at a Knesset ceremony marking the 60th anniversary of the UN vote to partition British-mandate Palestine

So now Tzipi is saying that the ideal solution in the past would be a bi-national state - something rejected by most Zionists as well as the Arabs? Is she now more wise than Israel's founders? What is she smoking?

"The state of Palestine will serve as a homeland for the Palestinian people; providing the single comprehensive answer to their national aspirations."

This must be a continuation of her prayer, because there is nothing concrete to support such a position. If a Palestinian Arab state would solve the problems, why exactly must it encompass every square millimeter of the territories? Livni is making it sound like the existence of a state is the important thing, but hasn't she yet realized that the PalArabs are far more hung up on getting 100% of their demands and not a state they can have tomorrow? Hasn't she been listening to their rejection of Israel as a Jewish state and their insistence on the bogus "right" to "return"?

Here was the Peel Commission proposal for two states back in 1937. This plan was accepted (albeit reluctantly) by the Jews and rejected by the Arabs. The Jews accepted it even though it included essentially no sites holy to Jews, even though it was far less than had been promised by the Balfour Declaration, even though it was just a tiny sliver of a state, indefensible and non-contiguous.

So why did the Jews accept such a flawed solution? As Chaim Weizmann put it, the Jews would be foolish not to accept partition even if the Jewish state was the size of a tablecloth. Their goal then was to gain a state in any way possible.

The Palestinian Arabs, on the other hand, have shown no desire to gain a state, despite what Tzipi fervently prays for. They desire to gain an end to the Jewish state. Once that goal is reached, their own independence is far less important, and it seems more likely that they would immediately become absorbed into Jordan and Syria (or, as Hamas wants, into a Islamic caliphate.)

To even imagine that a Palestinian Arab state alone would make Arabs happy and peaceful is the apex of replacing facts with fantasy.

Similarly:

Labor Chairman and Defense Minister Ehud Barak said Monday that creating two states for two people in Israel is inevitable: "We have to admit that there is no way around it… it is the only reality possible."

What exactly makes it "the only reality possible?" Because he, with his amazingly stupid Taba offer, made it so! If the Israeli leadership had stuck to its guns and made it clear that the entire West Bank would always remain under Israeli sovereignty with some other accommodation for PalArabs, whether it is self-rule or a confederation with Jordan or whatever, then that would become the reality - not the "inevitable" creation of a hostile, terror-supporting state that juts into Israeli territory.

It is mind-blowing how the current Israeli leadership has so little faith in the righteousness of its own cause; not only are they in deep personal despair but they have turned this despair into a national policy. How can the leaders of a great state lead when they don't believe in their own cause, in their own people, in their own nation?

Sometimes, there is no solution, and the best you can do is do the best you can do. Creating "solutions" out of exhaustion or despair is not what leaders are supposed to do.

And leading their people into a suicidal "solution" is not leadership.

EU helps Hamas score political victory

Over the past couple of weeks Hamas has been insisting that Hajj pilgrims go to Egypt via the Rafah crossing, while Abbas' government arranged for safe passage through Israel. Hamas' intentions is to assert authority over the Rafah border, only negotiate with Egypt concerning its operations, and bypass the EU and Israel as per the Rafah agreement brokered Apparently, Hamas has won:

The Egyptian authorities on Monday allowed the passage of 700 Hajj pilgrims from the Gaza Strip into the Egyptian territories en route to Mecca in Saudi Arabia.

... Now, the Gazan pilgrims will head to Saudi Arabia in tandem with the West Bank pilgrims.

The first group of pilgrims crossed the Rafah crossing on foot, standing in line up as the Egyptian security called them by name individually as they crossed.

Hamas leader, Sheikh Salim Salamah, says he hopes the rest of the pilgrims will be permitted to cross through the Egyptian border.

Over the past few days, there has been disagreement between the Gaza-based de facto government, and the West Bank-based caretaker government over which crossing the Gaza pilgrims should leave through. The caretaker government was insisting that the pilgrims leave through the Erez and Al-Uja crossings.

As I have mentioned in the past, the Rafah crossing is supposed to be closed. Only the EU-BAM observers in Rafah are supposed to be able to facilitate opening that border, and it must be operated by the PA, not Hamas. Egypt knows this and so does Hamas. Most importantly, so does the EU.

They are once again complicit in strengthening Hamas politically and weakening Abbas.

Fatah moves closer to Hamas, away from Fayyad

A little-noticed political fight in the PA is the one between supporters of "prime minister" Salaam Fayyad and the Fatah leadership:

The Palestinian Authority security forces here have launched an investigation to determine who is behind leaflets that were distributed over the weekend and which describe PA Prime Minister Salaam Fayad and his cabinet ministers as "traitors."

Many of the leaflets, which were distributed on the streets of several West Bank cities, were collected by Palestinian policemen loyal to PA President Mahmoud Abbas.
Despite the fact that the Aksa Martyrs Brigades denied any connection to the leaflets, PA officials here told The Jerusalem Post that they have no doubt that some members of the group were behind the latest threat.
The officials added that they also did not rule out the possibility that top Fatah operatives who were strongly opposed to Fayad's government and Abbas's policies were also linked to the leaflets.
The threats against Fayad have prompted the PA to beef up security around him and other senior members of his cabinet. "We are taking these threats very seriously," a PA security official told the Post. "We have launched an investigation and soon we will discover who's behind the leaflets."

The leaflets accused the Fayad government of collaboration with the Israelis and Americans against armed Palestinian groups that are operating against Israel. They also lashed out at Fayad for allegedly ordering the PA security forces to use force to disperse demonstrations in protest against last week's peace conference in Annapolis, Maryland.
Abbas, who still hasn't returned to Ramallah after the Annapolis conference, is expected to meet with senior Fatah officials later this week to discuss their demands regarding the Fayad government.
Some of the officials, including a number of Abbas's closest aides, have expressed concern over Fayad's growing influence and the possibility that he might challenge Abbas's authority. Fayad has also come under fire for refusing to channel funds to many Fatah supporters.

Meanwhile...

...PA officials confirmed that Hamas and Fatah representatives were scheduled to meet in Cairo soon for talks on ways of ending their differences.

So Hamas and Fatah are trying again to unify even while Fatah is breaking with Abbas, their leader, over Fayyad who actually sometimes tries to reduce the support that the PA gives to Fatah terrorists (who are usually PA policemen anyway.)

Sounds like these guys are perfectly ready to implement their roadmap obligations!

Joseph Massad thinks the gay movement is colonialist

This article by James Kirchick is too funny:

Of all the absurd claims expressed by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in his recent address at Columbia University, his assertion that homosexuality does not exist in his country is the most ridiculous....

Yet while the audience in the Roone Arledge Auditorium and millions of television viewers laughed and booed at the Islamist rube, there was one man--ensconced at Columbia University, no less--who was likely nodding along in agreement. His name is Joseph Massad, Associate Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History, and he legitimizes, with a complex academic posture, the deservedly reviled views on homosexuality espoused by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

According to Massad, a Palestinian Christian and disciple of the late Columbia professor Edward Said, the case for gay rights in the Middle East is an elaborate scheme hatched by activists in the West. Massad posited this thesis in a 2002 article, "Re-Orienting Desire: The Gay International and the Arab World," for the academic journal Public Culture, and he has expanded it into a book, Desiring Arabs, published this year by the University of Chicago Press. In it, he writes that such activists constitute the "Gay International" whose "discourse ... produces homosexuals as well as gays and lesbians, where they do not exist." The "missionary tasks" of this worldwide conspiracy are part of a broader attempt to legitimize American and Israeli global conquest by undermining the very moral basis of Muslim societies, as the "Orientalist impulse ... continues to guide all branches of the human rights community." Massad's intellectual project is a not-so-tacit apology for the oppression of people who identify openly as homosexual. In so doing, he sides with Islamist regimes over Islamic liberals.

...Massad's thesis rests largely on Queer Theory, a voguish academic theory from the 1990s that stipulates that homosexuality is merely a "social construction" and not an inherent state of being. Massad writes that, "The categories gay and lesbian are not universal at all and can only be universalized by the epistemic, ethical, and political violence unleashed on the rest of the world by the very international human rights advocates whose aim is to defend the very people their intervention is creating (emphasis mine)." Thus, not only are gay rights activists unleashing "epistemic... violence" on Arabs and Muslims who have same-sex relations by claiming them to be homosexual, they are responsible for the "political violence" of the regimes that oppress them. As one illustration of his thesis, Massad chooses the "Queen Boat" incident of May 11, 2001, when a horde of truncheon-wielding Egyptian police officers boarded a Nile River cruise known as the Queen Boat, a floating disco for gay men. Fifty-two men were arrested, and many of them were tortured and sexually humiliated in prison.
...Massad claims that those Arabs who do accept a Western-style homosexual identity "remain a miniscule minority among those men who engage in same-sex relations and who do not identify as 'gay' nor express a need for gay politics." He makes this sweeping assertion--upon which his entire, 418-page book is predicated--without any statistical evidence. Furthermore, he does not consider that the reason why Arab homosexuals may not "express a need for gay politics" might be because they would be killed if they did.

Yes, the academic Left's darling misozionistic Joseph Massad has opinions about gays that are decidedly anti-liberal, so much so that he's written an entire book denying that homosexual Arabs are...gay. They are just another Western imperialistic tool, you see.

The author of the piece above goes further today:

[The phrase “Muslim fags don’t exist”] is attributed to a neighbor of Azedine Berkane, a Muslim immigrant who, in 2002, stabbed Bertrand Delanoe, the gay mayor of Paris. The neighbor justified the attack on the grounds that because Islam is perfect, impure things --- like gays --- don't exist within it. Therefore, by this logic, it is appropriate to kill those who mock Allah's law.

The above quote could also be attributed to Joseph Massad, the very learned, very cosmopolitan, very scholarly professor of Arab politics at Columbia University. He was a hero of that campus's "progressive" community, who championed him as a victim of the right-wing Zionist campaign to "silence" criticism of Israel, during the controversies several years ago about the school's department of Middle Eastern and Asian Languages and Cultures (MEALAC). As I've explained before, his latest opus -- the book that he hopes will get him tenure -- purports to expose gay rights activists as part of a dreaded, imperialist "Gay International," and, to my knowledge, might just be the most pernicious book ever published by a respectable academic press. The writer and political activist Wayne Besen aptly states that Massad is "mainstreaming murder" with his overwrought, cynical theories. One wonders if the ostensibly "progressive" students who rushed to Massad's defense several years ago when the evil Zionists attacked him will warm up to him now that he's written a volume attacking and justifying the oppression of one of the Left's protected victim classes: gays.

It appears that Massad's "scholarship" is not only suspect when talking about Israel.

Massad's tenure review is becoming much more interesting....

Cycle of "peace-process" violence

Israel and the US support the PA buying more weapons and hiring more policemen for Nablus.

Three Nablus policemen murder an Israeli.

Even after this is known, Israel goes ahead and frees 429 more PalArab terror prisoners.

Prisoner terror leader Marwan Barghouti says "thanks!" by calling this release "a joke." (He's right - some 177 Israelis have been murdered since Oslo by terrorists released from Israeli prisons.)

Once again, the "peace process" is bearing fruit.

If you agree with the Arabs that the goal of the process is to destroy Israel.

More oppressive checkpoints stopping Muslim freedom of worship

69 checkpoints are being constructed right now, specifically to stop religious Muslims from "illegally" visiting their holy shrine.

Of course, this is being done by Saudi Arabia:

Makkah police have set up 69 checkpoints on various roads leading to the holy city with the aim of closing every likely entry routes used by the unlicensed and illegally arriving pilgrims.
The Ministry of Haj has discovered 20 dirt roads that provide cover for the illegal and unlicensed pilgrims to sneak into Makkah unnoticed.
The Saudi Geological Survey helped the Haj Ministry and Public Security supplying them with detailed maps to locate the secret entry points and the dirt roads so that the police may set up checkpoints there as well.

Gaza fuel companies refuse Israeli shipments!

From Xinhua (identical item in Arabic in Palestine Press Agency):

Palestinian petrol distribution companies refused to receive the amount of fuel from Israel's Dor company as a form of protesting the Israeli reduced its fuel supplies to Gaza.
Palestinian said on Sunday that most of the service stations in Gaza Strip have run out of fuel, especially the diesel as Israel started to reduce Gaza fuel deliveries.
The Union of petrol stations owners said in a statement that the Gaza Strip needs 350 thousand liters of diesel everyday while Israel wants to allow only 90 thousand liters in.
As for the gasoline, the coastal Strip, where 1.5 million lives, needs 120 thousand liters and Israel wants to send 20 thousand liters. The 350 tons of gas were reduced to 80 tons, the statement added.
"The reduction of fuel is unjustifiable and irresponsible," the union said. "It causes negative effects on all sectors of life, especially on the health and education systems."
The union said the local petrol companies have refused to receive what Israel is sending "in order not to be partners in punishing the Palestinian people because these quantities are insufficient."

A small fact that Xinhua doesn't mention is that the fuel reduction from Israel amounts to only 15% less than usual, not the 75% implied by the Gaza union.

So rather than direct all the fuel they can get to, say, hospitals, the Gaza fuel companies would prefer to see patients die!

Ya think it might be because dead Gaza hospital patients are a potential embarrassment to Israel? Is it even remotely possible that Gaza Arabs prefer to see their own people die rather than pass up a great PR opportunity?

Nah...there must be come other explanation.

Israel's latest "land grab" against Syria - Rothschild bought 15K acres!

Maariv (Hebrew only) reports that Baron Rothschild purchased thousands of acres of Syrian land in the 1920s that may today legally belong to the Jewish National Fund.

Rothschild's real estate company, named Pika or Pekka, bought the lands and the ownership of most of that land was transfered in 1957 to the JNF. About 59,000 dunams (15,000 acres) were purchased - 6,000 in the Golan Heights and 53,000 in the plains of Haran, 35 kilometers from Damascus and near Bashir Assad's palace (according to Palestine Today's report.) Taxes were paid on the land at least until 1942. If I am reading the article correctly, the Syrian Waqf in the 1940s tried to claim that this was Islamic land that was not legally allowed to be sold, and now Israeli lawyers are studying the matter to see if they still have any legal claim on the land.

It's great knowing that Nablus is secure

The centerpiece of the Palestinian Authority's facade of bringing law and order to the West Bank was it's much heralded crackdown on crime in Nablus. A measure of how successful it was came two weeks ago:

US consul general Jacob Wallace on Wednesday praised the Palestinians for restoring security to the streets of Nablus, and announced a 1.3-million-dollar aid package to the West Bank city.
"The recent actions by the Palestinian Authority have resulted in significant improvements on the streets of Nablus," the consulate in Jerusalem quoted Wallace as saying during a visit to the flashpoint city.

It is no exaggeration to say that Nablus was one of the reasons that the meeting in Annapolis managed to occur, as it appeared that the PA was following the Roadmap in its responsibilities to dismantle all terror organizations (which was an Oslo requirement way before it was on the roadmap.)

Now that Annapolis is over, what does Nablus look like today?

Palestinian children peer at militants from the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades during a rally, commemorating killed comrades in the West Bank city of Nablus, November 30, 2007.

The militants were allowed to hold the demonstration by the security forces loyal to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on the condition they did not fire their weapons.

You see- Abbas did put his foot down!

And don't worry...it's safe enough for a baby!

So have no fear - Nablus is as safe as it ever was, and now it is up to the Israelis to happily give up strategic land to the courageous leaders of the PA who cannot even dismantle the terror organization that they nominally lead - and who tolerate a rally of terrorists in their showpiece town only two weeks after pretending they had cleaned it up.