IRIS Blog

Five days ago, IRIS was out front* in speculating that there may have been a connection between the air strike on Syria and the mention of nuclear activity in Syria in the New York Times.

Here is a story in the Times Online speculating on the same hypothesis, but irresponsibly exaggerating the factual basis for the theory:

Israelis 'Blew Apart Syrian Nuclear Cache'

IT was just after midnight when the 69th Squadron of Israeli F15Is crossed the Syrian coast-line. On the ground, Syria’s formidable air defences went dead. An audacious raid on a Syrian target 50 miles from the Iraqi border was under way.

At a rendezvous point on the ground, a Shaldag air force commando team was waiting to direct their laser beams at the target for the approaching jets. The team had arrived a day earlier, taking up position near a large underground depot. Soon the bunkers were in flames.

Ten days after the jets reached home, their mission was the focus of intense speculation this weekend amid claims that Israel believed it had destroyed a cache of nuclear materials from North Korea.

The Israeli government was not saying. “The security sources and IDF [Israeli Defence Forces] soldiers are demonstrating unusual courage,” said Ehud Olmert, the prime minister. “We naturally cannot always show the public our cards.”

Pajamas Media has more details.

One massive caveat is useful to keep in mind, however, in the form of the Olmert government's massive American ace in the hole. The Olmert government, like previous Leftist regimes, has made a deal with foreign powers to sell Israel's security interests in exchange for help staying in power. This explains:

-Olmert's ridiculously implausible raid on the Jericho 'jail' on the eve of the election. The official version was that the IDF coincidentally managed to attack the facility just minutes after the American and British 'jailors' independently decided to flee. The military success boosted Olmert's popularity just prior to the vote.

-Clinton's open campaigning and support in a variety of ways for Ehud Barak.

-Teddy Kollek's pre-State collaboration with the British in turning over Zionist fighters from the Right, as part of a general Mapai deal with the British enemy.

*To be fair, Little Green Footballs made the same observation around the time I did.

A sweet, happy new year to all of IRIS' readers.

Here are some riveting audio classes by Rabbi David Aaron about the holiday (here's another link, but it requires registration).

Speculation is swirling regarding Israel's air attack on Syria this week.

According to the New York Times, Israel has identified a nuclear installation in Syria backed by North Korea. An Arab newspaper in Israel reported that the site of the attack was a missile station financed by Iran, and that it was completely destroyed.

In any case, Israel is not talking, with the Prime Minister's Office claiming that it is looking into reports of the attack.

Israeli insiders, however, have reported that this was something definitely something big:

The Airstrike in Syria Is a Secret that Cannot Be Kept

It is now a matter of time before the main elements of the story are released to the media. Both the Syrian and the Israeli leadership have been extraordinarily silent about this. According to European diplomats, the Syrians have made it clear that Israeli silence over the incident is "worthy." The Syrians are not talking about the "strategic" target that was bombed in their territory - according to the Lebanese press.

This is not a surprise, but the final line below is priceless:

Hamas forces in Gaza are using heavy weaponry provided to the Palestinians by the Bush Administration to combat Israeli counter-terrorism operations.

Israeli military sources confirmed to Middle East Newsline that Israel Defense Forces Apache helicopter gunships operating against Hamas rocket crews in Gaza have come under fire from U.S.-made heavy machineguns.

The weapons were originally given to Palestinian security forces loyal to Mahmoud Abbas.

Hamas last June took possession of a vast arsenal of weapons and equipment that had either been donated by the U.S. and Western nations or bought with foreign financial aid.

In repeated assurances to Congress over the past two years, the Bush Administration insisted its security aid to Abbas was of a non-lethal nature.

There is a deperate need for an ideological counterweight to the constant media propaganda on the war in Iraq. Here it is, an excellent synopsis of Norman Podhoretz's tour de force World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism.

In 1983, Norman Podhoretz published "Why We Were in Vietnam" -- a review of the arguments surrounding a war that had by then become a symbol of strategic overreach and moral failure.

In the conventional wisdom, our defeat had been well-deserved: we had acted as imperialists and counter-revolutionaries, had engaged in an ideological foreign policy (an anti-Communist "crusade"), and had an "inordinate fear" of Communism.

The elite consensus was thus that the Vietnam War had been both strategically unnecessary and morally degrading -- reflecting American arrogance and an abuse of power typified by the war crime at My Lai, with a military that had allegedly regularly acted in a manner reminiscent of Genghis Kahn.

Podhoretz wrote his 1983 book to reopen the debate, to investigate whether the Vietnam War had in fact reflected "the intellectual and moral poverty" charged by Jimmy Carter, or had been the "noble cause" that Ronald Reagan had called it (in a comment widely reported in the media as a "gaffe") -- an effort to protect millions of people from a totalitarian society and to maintain America's strategy of containing Communist expansion.

The book was written with the courage and clarity that has always been Podhoretz's literary trademark, and it contributed to a restored confidence in America's national purpose and a renewed belief in the morality of its cause -- two essential elements in the ultimate victory in the Cold War.

Podhoretz now refers to the Cold War as "World War III," because it was a global ideological conflict, with hot wars in Korea and Vietnam and a nuclear confrontation in Cuba, proxy contests in Angola and elsewhere, and continuous tests of will from Berlin to Taiwan -- all pitting the forces of freedom against an armed totalitarian ideology whose global intentions had been made clear.

The current conflict, in Podhoretz's view, is thus "World War IV" -- a similar worldwide conflict with ideological roots that, like World War III, will take three or four decades to win, and which likewise cannot be won absent domestic confidence in America's purpose and the morality of its cause. He defends the Iraq War against all comers (and there are a lot of comers -- Democrats, realists, paleoconservatives, former liberal hawks, and others), but the goal of his book is not simply a defense of that battle. Instead, it is a more ambitious attempt to place that conflict in the framework of what he believes will be a multi-decade world war.

Read the whole thing.

This poor woman witnessed her murdered mother's body being taken away by police. Then she was forced to to live with the murderer in an abusive home. Now she has to worry she might be next after going public:

Britain's most controversial Muslim playwright tells the extraordinary story of her mother's murder and growing up as the daughter of an honour killing.

I was six-years-old when my mother, Shakeela Begum Khan, a beautiful, sassy, educated young Muslim woman, was murdered.

Returning home from school one day in 1976 to the one-room bedsit in East London where we both lived, I found police officers and an ambulance crew removing her body.

I remember that scene now as if it were a vague dream.

Did it really happen, or did I just imagine it?

I have no memory of how I felt, only of what I witnessed.

As I grew up, older relatives had to reassure me that my memories weren't delusional.

Many years later, I also discovered the killer had set up the room to make it look as though it were a brothel, and my mother a prostitute.

As anyone from a Muslim background would instantly recognise, it was the ultimate way to dishonour a woman in the eyes of her family and community.

Soon after my mother's death, her estranged husband, Rasib - my father - was accused of the murder, charged and tried, but he was acquitted.

Taken by Rasib to live with his new wife and a half-brother, both of whom were cruel and abusive to me when my father was not around, I was never allowed to utter a word about my mother.

For the next eight years, I lived in an atmosphere of secrets, lies and crippling fear, reluctantly protecting my vicious stepmother and half-brother from the fury my father would have unleashed on them if he'd known what they did to me.

I lived in constant dread that if I told anybody, the ultimate punishment for them would be death.

Now, three decades later, I have attained a form of poetic justice.

As a playwright, I challenge the forces that try to impose silence and censorship on me.

Having been silenced for so many years of my life, I am now determined to say the unsayable whenever necessary.

Here is a jaw-dropping graph from CAMERA that shows an almost-perfect correlation between the amount of money given to the Palestinian Authority (now Fatah) and the number of Israelis killed in terror attacks the following year. Given the large amount of evidence implicating Fatah in terror, the explanation shouldn't be much of a mystery, however:

I have been intrigued by the statistic that 90% of newspaper readers look at political cartoons. Bloggers could distill their best points and convert them into cartoons, which would multiply their reach.

Here, Dry Bones wrote up my suggested 9/11 cartoon:

A Hamas spokesman praised Tuesday's rocket attack on an Israeli army base, calling it a "victory from God."...."We consider this a victory from God for the resistance," Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum said on Hamas radio.

That is exactly what it appears like to a Muslim believer. When jihadis lose, their approach seems rejected by God. Western restraint, a euphemism for defeatism, fuels the jihad.

The rocket strike, which wounded 69 IDF soldiers, was followed by a mortar barrage on the Gaza border. The Islamic Jihad and the Popular Resistance Committees claimed responsibility for the attacks, and the Islamic Jihad later posted a video on its website purportedly showing the Kassam rocket launch.

Although Hamas was not directly involved, Israel has said it holds the group responsible for attacks out of Gaza because it rules the area.

Although nobody was wounded in the mortar attack, the incident will undoubtedly add to the calls for action, which reached a fever pitch following the earlier Kassam strike.

Yet despite these calls, predictions are that the IDF will still hold back from launching a large-scale operation in the Gaza Strip. According to reports, the hesitancy is in large part due to the upcoming peace summit in Washington, mounting tensions along the northern border, and the fact that Sderot remains largely unprotected.

Defense officials are, however, calling on the political echelon to allow the IDF to deepen their operations in Gaza. At the moment the army is allowed to penetrate up to 2 km into Palestinian territory from the security fence....

Tuesday's Kassam attack was not the first in Zikim. Already in December of 2005, parents voiced protest over the level of safety of the base after it was hit by a Kassam.

Israel's leaders have other concerns than the safety of soldiers and citizens. After all there is so much to do. It will have to wait until after the peace summit.

While Ehud Olmert offers the West Bank and half of Jerusalem to Fatah, Fatah is attempting to kidnap more Israeli soldiers. This is despite the recent Israeli transfer of $400 million to Fatah, the release of hundreds of Fatah terrorists and the granting of amnesty to many more on Israel's wanted list:

A joint Fatah-Islamic Jihad attack against an IDF outpost, apparently an attempted kidnapping, ended with six terrorists dead. No Israelis were wounded.

"I estimate that the terrorists attempted to capture the army position, and possibly to kidnap soldiers and carry out an attack in Kibbutz Kissufim as well." So said IDF Southern Brigade Commander Col. Shlomi Dahan, speaking with Arutz-7's Haggai Huberman.

Dahan spoke after IDF troops succeeded, based on intelligence information procured by the General Security Service, in thwarting a major terrorist offensive in Gaza Thursday afternoon.

The incident occurred around 3 PM, when two Arab vehicles, a truck and a jeep, were seen speeding towards an IDF outpost alongside the border fence near Kissufim. The Kissufim Crossing was where the Jews of Gush Katif entered and left Gaza up until the Disengagement just over two years ago. Kibbutz Kissufim, inside Israel's pre-'67 borders, is now the westernmost Jewish civilian presence in the area.

IDF forces identified the vehicles some 300 meters from the fence. Israel Air Force aircraft, which were in the air based on an early warning, attacked the vehicles, causing a great explosion. Several additional explosions then occurred in the jeep, indicating the presence of hundreds of kilograms of explosives.

Two terrorists were killed on the spot, and two others who began to escape were killed from the air. Golani Brigade fighters then entered and began combing the area. Two surviving terrorists opened fire, but the soldiers stormed and killed them.

The IDF later reported that some of the dead terrorists were wearing explosives vests, and others had hand grenades and rocket-propelled grenades.

The Al-Quds Brigades (Islamic Jihad) and the Al-Aksa Brigades (Fatah) announced afterwards that the objective was to carry out an attack in the IDF outpost.

Astute readers may notice that the attack was carried out by the "militant wing" of Fatah, the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, and not "mainstream" Fatah. The problem with that spin is that:

-All of the recently released Fatah terrorists are members of the al-Aqsa Martyrs
-All of the Fatah terrorists given amnesty are part of the al-Aqsa Martyrs
-The al-Aqsa Martyrs are on the Fatah payroll, funded by Israel and the US

While the West sleeps:

Almost half of Britain's mosques are under the control of a hardline Islamic sect whose leading preacher loathes Western values and has called on Muslims to "shed blood" for Allah, an investigation by The Times has found.

Riyadh ul-Haq, who supports armed jihad and preaches contempt for Jews, Christians and Hindus, is in line to become the spiritual leader of the Deobandi sect in Britain.

The ultra-conservative movement, which gave birth to the Taliban in Afghanistan, now runs more than 600 of Britain's 1,350 mosques, according to a police report.

Ul-Haq, 36, was educated and trained at an Islamic seminary in Britain and is part of a new generation of British imams who share a similar radical agenda.

17 of Britain's 26 Islamic seminaries are run by Deobandis and they produce 80% of home-trained Muslim clerics.

Here is a jaw-dropping poll in which only 51% of Democratic voters believe the US government did not cause 9/11 or knowingly let it happen.

Interestingly, Jews split from Democrats this once. No Jewish respondents believed the government pulled off the attacks and only 15.6% believed the government let them happen.

On a positive note, the anti-Semitic accusation that Jews caused 9/11 did not figure into this poll. Here is a video produced by the Muslim Students Association at the University of Texas (San Antonio) in which the Islamist interviewer confronts a Jewish student with the question:

What would you think is the biggest accomplishment of the Jews in America? 9/11?

The 9/11 survey is flawed, incidentally. Of course it is a blogger who has dissected it.

Joel Mowbray takes the time to dispel a myth in which the West has invested billions of dollars: that Fatah is working to prevent Islamism. Rather it is funding it and actually prepared the ground for the Hamas takeover:

The tidy Western view of Palestinian politics coming down to Islamists vs. secularists faces yet another reality check. Both Hamas and the supposedly secular Fatah are engaging in a new propaganda war, each portraying itself as the defender of the faith, while accusing the other party of defiling Islam, according to a report by Palestinian Media Watch. The struggle is indicative of the increasingly Islamic tenor of the culture in which each group is attempting to stake out the Islamic high ground. It is Fatah, at the original direction of Arafat, that is most responsible for Islamicizing Palestinian society.

Upon taking the reins of Palestinian society following the 1993 Oslo accords, Arafat implemented an aggressive platform of Islamic indoctrination, beefing up Islamic education in the schools and giving new prominence on television to fire-breathing imams, including many who called for Islam to topple the West. Arafat used his newfound power to create a new generation of terrorists superior to the old PLO thugs in one key respect: These brainwashed Palestinian kids were not only not afraid of death, but they actually wanted to die.

Arafat carefully cultivated a cult of martyrdom that permeated Palestinian society. In addition to the hero worship of successful suicide bombers, almost as important was the glorification of their parents. Umm Nidal, or "Mother of the Struggle," who bursts with pride that three of her six children died as Islamic terrorists, is now a Hamas member of the Palestinian legislature.

With expectations high for a war between Syria and Israel, this is potentially big news:

Syrian air defenses opened fire on Israeli aircraft that violated Syrian airspace overnight Thursday, a Syrian military spokesman said.

The Israelis broke the sound barrier and "dropped ammunition" over deserted areas of northern Syria overnight, the spokesman was quoted by the official Syrian Arab News Agency.

There are more credible sources than the official Syrian News Agency. Tawana Brawley is one that springs to mind. Another is Matilda Who Told Lies, and was Burned to Death. The event itself was confirmed by recordings from international satellites, however.

"We warn the Israeli enemy government against this flagrant aggressive act, and retain the right to respond in an appropriate way," the Syrian spokesman said.

It was not clear if Syria was accusing the Israelis of using warplanes or some type of other aircraft like drones.

"The Israeli enemy aircraft infiltrated into the Arab Syrian territory through the northern border, coming from the Mediterranean heading toward the eastern region, breaking the sound barrier," the spokesman said. "Air defense units confronted them and forced them to leave after they dropped some ammunition in deserted areas without causing any human or material damage."

The IDF said that it was "not accustomed to responding to such reports."

Israel acknowledges flying over Lebanon routinely, but it is unclear how often its aircraft fly over Syria.

Reader Sam wants to know if Israel responded yet, say, by giving back the Golan. Interestingly, Israel is actually playing dumb:

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's office said it was looking into the report.

Update: YNetNews has this useful clarification:

it was not clear what the [Syrian] spokesman meant by dropping ammunition. Warplanes sometimes drop extra fuel tanks to make the aircraft lighter and easier to maneuver.

Despite this, Ehud Olmert announced that no large-scale Gaza incursion was warranted and instead called to "reduce rocket fire on Sderot as much as possible." Call me old-fashioned, but I agree with comedian Steven Wright's assessment of the US government's "acceptable number of rat hairs" food quality standard. He and I both agree that it should be set to zero.

On a summer morning, the hubbub and bustle of the central market place in Sderot is interrupted by the wailing of sirens and the urgent voice of a woman repeating "Tzeva Adom" (Red Alert) over the public address system. Another Kassam rocket has been launched by Palestinian militants in Gaza and is heading towards the town. Residents of Sderot are only too well aware that the warning gives them a maximum of 15 seconds to take cover. Some shoppers respond instantly, scurrying for the freestanding steel-and-concrete shelters, known as "life shields," dotted around public places. Others panic, running in one direction then another, spilling fruit and vegetables from their shopping bags.

Sderot is a town of 24,000, a little more than a mile away from the Palestinian city of Beit Hanoun. In the past five years, more than 2,000 rockets have struck homes, schools, offices, factories and a local synagogue. Eight people have been killed (three of them small children) and dozens more wounded. At Sderot's center for the treatment of shock victims, Dr. Adriana Katz talks about the invisible wounds inflicted on the hundreds of patients in her care by the relentless barrages. She says the Palestinian rockets "have largely destroyed the normal fabric of life in the town. Everyone exists in a state of permanent alert, which is physically and psychologically very destructive....We do our best to prevent people lapsing into full-blown post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)."

The most tragic victims of the rockets are Sderot's children, one in three of whom suffers from PTSD, according to a survey published last year. Like their parents, they spend much of their lives "on alert," dreading the next attack, unable to concentrate at school or enjoy the normal pleasures of childhood at home.

The problem with Olmert's regime is that it is composed of the protexia class. They inherently sell the national interest, not defend it.