IRIS Blog

ACLU Sues US on Behalf of Tariq Ramadan
The leftist-Islamist link grows

Al-Qaeda Sees Resurgence in Pakistani Tribal Areas

Credit Swiss Joins UBS in Ending Business With Iran and Iranians

Hamas Claims Victory in Elections
Hamas reportly wins at least 70 of 132 parliament seats, Qureia, cabinet resign

Abbas as Lincoln

From the New York Sun:

The man who served as the no. 2 official in Saddam Hussein's air force says Iraq moved weapons of mass destruction into Syria before the war by loading the weapons into civilian aircraft in which the passenger seats were removed....

Mr. Sada's comments come just more than a month after Israel's top general during Operation Iraqi Freedom, Moshe Yaalon, told the Sun that Saddam "transferred the chemical agents from Iraq to Syria."

See also this IRIS must-read.

by Walid Phares:

What the public ignores about the "cease-fire" offered by bin Laden is that the international community, and the U.S., will have to recognize al-Qaeda as the representative of the Muslim world, that all Muslim governments would elevate bin Laden as the world caliph. Also, he will be able to "resume" the jihad after the "cease-fire," since it is only a truce after all. The world, thus, would be divided in two spheres, with Osama as emperor from Morocco to China, with his full sovereign control of the resources - that is, oil - and the nuclear toys of Pakistan.

Update: Based on a reader comment (see below) I need to clarify something. Yes, it is widely understood that bin Laden's truce offer is not being seriously considered. But no, it is not being reported properly by the mainstream media (MSM). If it were, it would increase the desire in Western popular opinion to sacrifice and fight. The reaction to the watered-down version is for many people to consider instead that we have arrived at John Kerry's ideal a "nuisance" terror level. This depresses the overall low level of Americans' support for resisting the aggression of the Global Jihad, which is the MSM's goal.

Additionally, there is a direct parallel between al-Qaeda and Hamas. The MSM has convinced Israelis to accept Hamas' "truce" agreement through deceit in the guise of reporting.

From the Telegraph:

Iran is racing to dig a network of tunnels and upgrade its air defenses to protect its nuclear facilities from possible attacks by America or Israel, Jane's Defence Weekly reported.

Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has issued orders for the underground complexes to be completed by the beginning of July.

The network of facilities deep underground or in the sides of mountains has been built with help from North Korean designers.

While the West dithers, Iran continues to prepare for war of a different kind than anyone has ever faced before.

Palestinian Politician Slain on Eve of Vote
See this post and this one for Palestinian election context

Israeli Journalists Barred from Palestinian Elections
That is so they can cover up what is really occurring

31 Palestinian Prisoners Running for PA Legislature

Olmert's Speech: We'll Have to Part With Most of Yesha (the West Bank)
MK Eldad: "By that logic, we'll have to soon leave the Galilee"

Israel to UN: "Iran May be Preparing Another Holocaust"

Rocket Fire from Gaza Continues

PA Deputy Prime Minister: Fatah Unable to Dismantle Militias

IDF Rescue Units Save Lives in Kenya

Sigh of Relief as Israeli, U.S. Rescuers Take Over in Kenya

Iran Official: We Can Put Israel in 'Eternal Coma Like Sharon'

The New Mujahideen? by Daniel Pipes
"bin Laden is counting on a [leftist] fifth column in the US to undermine the war on terrorism and hand him a victory on the battlefield."

Woman Murdered for 'Family Honor'

From Haaretz:

Meretz MKs have called for a government investigation into the concealment by doctors of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's medical condition.

Meretz party leader MK Zehava Gal-On said that if a Haaretz inquiry into Sharon's health and the concealment of his condition from the public proves to be accurate, the affair would be "one of the largest political scandals ever in Israel."

The decision to set up a government panel to investigate the affair would require the approval of the Knesset. Meretz will move to push for a probe following the coming Knesset elections.

"The published report revealed that the Kadima gang concealed Sharon's health status from the public in order to advance their own political careers and to win additional seats [in the coming Knesset election]," Gal-On said. "If the report is correct, we are not just talking here about egoism but about dangerous cruelty."

Hadassah Hospital spokeswoman Yael Bossem-Levy dismissed the Haaretz report as containing nothing new. "Everything that appears in the item was discussed at the news conference" where the hole in the septum was disclosed, she said.

While the Meretz charges are hyperbole from a jealous competitor (note the reference to the "Kadima gang"), the spokeswoman's response is chutzpa given the insistence of previous spokesmen that they refused to comment based on the fact that they needed to focus on saving his life.

Specifically, there was nothing reported about CAA or a ventricular aneurysm at the time. It is, of course theoretically possible that she is technically accurate, but no one reported it. It could have been mentioned in such an obfuscated way that no one understood it, particularly since reporters with medical backgrounds were barred from the closed news conference. More likely this is more of the amateurish coverup that has exacerbated the scandal.

Click here for all of IRIS's Sharon coverage.

Free trade is working: NAFTA has helped economies to prosper in U.S. and Mexico
"In fact, NAFTA, and all good economic policies, prove this point: that the best, most effective responses to our social problems can and should be found outside the government."

Conservative Party Ousts Liberals in Canada, Ending Long Reign
Here's the lowdown: The new Prime Minister (Harper) is about as good as it gets, i.e. he is a free-market economist. While today's spin is focusing on the The campaign

Yesterday, I challenged the headline U.S. to Shun PA if Hamas is in Coalition as untrue. Today there is news that US Won't Cut PA Ties if Hamas in Cabinet. Of course there is the usual meaningless weasel comment to save face: "However, US will not deal with Hamas officials in any capacity."

This is an explosive addition to the confirmation of the coverup charge I made the day after Sharon's first stroke, disputing the "clean bill of health" diagnosis:

After First Stroke PM's Doctors Concealed his Condition

The general medical condition of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was more critical than his doctors and advisers have reported since his first stroke on December 18, 2005. In addition to the heart problem they disclosed, Sharon was suffering from cardiac and cerebral diseases that the doctors kept from the public....Haaretz's inquiry shows that Sharon also suffered from more serious, life-threatening heart problems, including a large aneurysm in the septum. This is known to be a source of cerebral blood embolisms, and indeed led to the blood clot that caused Sharon's first stroke, senior doctors at Hadassah University Hospital, Ein Karem believe.

However, Sharon also suffered from other heart diseases. These include a shunt that causes blood to flow spontaneously through the hole in the septum from right to left - the wrong direction - which is dangerous. Sharon also had other conditions in the cardiac septum that created further risks of blood clots that could wind up in the brain.

Senior doctors said this usually requires early treatment with blood-thinners and cardiac catheterization, as the cardiologists and neurologists at Hadassah had recommended.

But they said it also required closer surveillance, because the blood thinner Sharon had received could have been extremely dangerous, due to the additional disease discovered, cerebral amyloid angiopathy (CAA), which is liable to make cerebral hemorrhaging extremely hard to treat - as was the case.

The CAA diagnosis, which Haaretz revealed some two weeks ago, was also concealed from the public.

Senior doctors said the dangerous heart disease Sharon had raises several other questions about the partial and vague information that his doctors gave the media and the public under the guise of "full disclosure."

Another senior doctor said the doctors were stuck between a rock and a hard place. The cardiac disease created the danger of an embolism, but the medicine to prevent this increased chances of cerebral hemorrhaging.

There had to be a reason they treated with anticoagulants and nothing we'd seen earlier provided such a reason. This does provide a justification. This is an unusual heart problem and assuming it is true that CAA was detected after the first stroke--it is still not clear how that was done--there was indeed a hard decision. Keeping the problems secret was misleading; letting him go to the Negev and not operating soon were needless risks. This latest revelation underscores what I stated immediately after the second stroke. The lack of preparedness for what to do in the event of the likely risk of a hemorrhage was negligence on the part of Sharon's inner circle. As Haaretz emphasizes:

If Sharon had arrived even half an hour earlier at Hadassah he would have been saved, or at least the brain damage would have been a lot less significant.

Incidentally, some may mistakenly claim that my neurologist source overemphasized the poor judgement aspect of the story. As I have emphasized all along, major questions still cannot be answered because the actual medical records have been withheld and at times misrepresented. What my neurologist source has done is an analysis of the existing data while emphasizing where the holes are. For example:

Since they have not released information to suggest a substantial clot risk requiring aggressive (heparin) anticoagulation it remains questionable why they chose such a course of action that at least in retrospect clearly contributed significantly to his deterioration.

Much of the information that has been released is only in response to precisely the kind of medical detective work that IRIS has been in front of. We have emphasized all along that:

There is one way to stop the controversy: come clean and release the medical information as promised. Stop releasing sufficient information only about the attempt to keep him alive in a debilitated state and explain the treatment leading up to his massive brain hemmorrage.

Click here for all of IRIS's Sharon coverage.

Here is a must-read editorial about the latest leftist sophistry designed to convince Israelis to trust mass-murderers:

Sometimes, however, our ability to deny and self-abnegate reaches absurd proportions, to the extent that we humiliate ourselves. How else can a decision to allow a convicted terrorist, Marwan Barghouti, to justify his own crimes from prison be interpreted?

The US reportedly pressured Israel to allow Barghouti to be interviewed, but it is not clear that much pressure was necessary, given that the jailed Fatah leader seems to have become the latest Israeli candidate - after Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas - for the position of the Palestinian leader with whom we can "do business."

According to this persistent way of thinking, Israel should be on the lookout for Palestinians who are radical enough to maintain the support of the Palestinian "street," and yet secretly harbor desires to cut a reasonable deal with us. Policy makers in Israel and the US are widely convinced that they can identify such closet moderates, who must be cultivated in place of the true radicals, in Hamas for instance, who seek Israel's destruction.

This is not to say that true Palestinian moderates do not exist, or that they should not be supported or recognized in some way. On the contrary, it is those on a never-ending quest for "moderate" radicals who tend to shun true moderates, by dismissing them as unauthentic and having no hope of achieving influence.

Barghouti, in his spate of prison interviews, left no doubt as to his authentic support for terrorism....According to the prevalent Israeli-American form of realpolitik, it is even good that he did, because if he were to unmask his true moderation, he would no longer be "authentic" and then where would we be?....

There is an alternative, however, to wishful thinking on one hand and giving up hope on the other. The alternative is to stop placing bets on individual Palestinian leaders and to instead repeatedly insist on core principles: that true peace can ultimately be founded only on true democracy and the rule of law, and on Palestinian acceptance of the national Jewish right to sovereignty in Israel.

Unfortunately, the presumed victor of the upcoming election is the party with a principled stand against "core principles."

Earlier I brought news of the PCHR (Palestinian Centre for Human Rights) and its fictional reporting. The PCHR is funded by the European Union and a number of left-wing groups such as Oxfam and the Ford Foundation and is regularly quoted by the mainstream media (MSM) as authoritative.

Today I noticed another egregious contradiction in PCHR reporting on the death of Bilal/Bassel al-Sha'er:

Nov. 16:

In the Gaza Strip, on 12 November 2005, IOF shot dead Bilal al-Sha'er, 22, when he attempted to enter Israel to search for a job.

Jan. 22:

The latest victim of such shootings during electoral rallies and gatherings was Bilal al-Sha'er, who was accidentally killed by a bullet, when gunmen opened fire into the air during an electoral gathering in Rafah.

Of course, to complicate matters even further, there is this additional seeming contradiction from Jan. 19:

On Wednesday evening, 18 January 2006, Bassel Kamel al-Sha'er, 20, from Rafah, was killed accidentally by a live bullet to the head during an electoral gathering.

U.S. to Shun PA if Hamas is in Coalition
Don't believe everything you read

Iran Extends Nuclear Plant in Secret

Pentagon Analyst Gets 12 Years for Disclosing Data

Hoenlein: Franklin Sentence "Disturbing"
"Two patriotic American citizens who are working for Jewish organizations who did nothing to violate American security will have to stand trial"

Palestinian Rocket Fire Continues

Palestinians from Gaza Shoot at IDF Troops

PA Election Economics
"No one will be surprised if the Palestinian treasury cannot pay the January salaries next week." Don't believe this--they inherited billions from Arafat, but are constantly claiming poverty as a shakedown technique

Inside Palestinian Elections
Key quote: "One visiting U.S. official speculated to me that if you simply took the number of all those on the PA payroll or benefiting from Fatah, you would get the numbers that polls are giving them"

Rafah Crossing: Safe Passage for Terrorists
Senior Islamic Jihad leaders responsible for Tel Aviv suicide bombing talk openly to an Arab newspaper about how easy it was to come and go from Gaza. See this absolute must-read for context.

Former Chief of Staff: PA Won't Recognize Any Borders
Yaalon: "territories for peace" has no practical relevance for the Palestinian Authority

Ideologues at the Lectern, by David Horowitz
Ward "Little Eichmanns" Churchill still on faculty in Colorado

U.S. Navy Seizes Pirate Ship Off Somalia

Hamas TV Station Shut Down

Islamist Women Redraw Palestinian Debate on Rights