IRIS Blog

Caroline Glick has an incisive point about the death of terror master Imad Mughniyeh (who the BBC called a "great national leader"). The fact that terror groups are universally mourning him as a martyred hero exposes that they are all connected as a Global Jihad.

It is quite possible that terror master Imad Mughniyeh was not killed Tuesday night in Damascus for his past crimes, but to prevent him from carrying out additional attacks in the future.

On January 30, French security services raided a Paris apartment and arrested six Arab men. Three of the men - two Lebanese and one Syrian - were travelling on diplomatic passports. According to the Italian Libero newspaper, the six were members of a Hizbullah cell. Documents seized included tourist maps of Paris, London, Madrid, Berlin and Rome marked up with red highlighter to indicate routes, addresses, parking lots and "truck stopping points." The maps pointed to several routes to Vatican back entrances.

Libero's report explained that the "truck stopping points" aligned with information the French had received the week before from Beirut. There, Hizbullah chief Hassan Nasrallah had convened a conference of his senior terror leaders where he ordered them to activate Hizbullah cells throughout Europe to kidnap senior European leaders.

The day of the arrests, French Defense Minister Herve Morin was meeting with his American counterpart, Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in Washington on a previously unannounced visit. During his public appearances, Morin criticized US National Intelligence Estimate on Iran's nuclear program from November. Morin said, "Coordinated information from a number of intelligence services leads us to believe that Iran has not given up its wish to pursue its [nuclear] program," and is "continuing to develop" it.

Other recent reports relayed French concern that their embassy in Beirut is being targeted for attack by Hizbullah. On January 15 terrorists attacked a US Embassy car in Beirut, killing four and wounding 16. This week, French President Nicholas Sarkozy's chief of staff told L'Express newsweekly that the threat of terror against France "remains quite high."

All of the feared terror attacks against French and European targets have the classic earmarkings of Hizbullah operations chief and Iranian Revolutionary Guards officer Imad Mughniyeh. Mughniyeh was the pioneer of embassy bombings and high-profile kidnappings.

Most of the reports of his death treated Mughniyeh as a has-been. Coverage was devoted to his attacks against American, Israeli and Jewish targets in the 1980s and early 1990s. Yet at the time of his death, Mughniyeh remained one of the most dangerous and prolific terror operatives in the world.

Mughniyeh's broad-based leadership role in the global terror nexus was made clear by the reaction of seemingly unrelated terror groups to his death. Representatives of the reputedly nationalist, secularist Fatah terror group expressed their pride in his life's work. "We're very proud to have had a Palestinian holding such a high position in Hizbullah," a Fatah official who worked with Mughniyeh in the 1970s and 1980s told The Jerusalem Post. Every Palestinian terror group - from Fatah to Hamas to Islamic Jihad, to the Popular Resistance Committees, the PFLP and DFLP - mourned Mughniyeh as a hero and martyr and called for revenge against Israel and the US.

Read the whole thing...

More evidence that Mahmoud Abbas has always been a fervent advocate of terrorism in Arabic, while spouting platitudes of peace in English. Like his mentor Yassir Arafat, he crosses his fingers when speaking to international reporters:

Newspapers of the Palestinian Authority, controlled by Mahmoud Abbas, say the Dimona murderers were "holy martyrs."

A 73-year-old new immigrant from the former Soviet Union, Lyubov Razdolskaya, was murdered in the Dimona suicide attack this Monday, and her husband was critically wounded and is still fighting for his life. The two of them were theoretical physicists who made a significant contribution to particle physics in Ben Gurion University. Over 40 other people were also wounded in the attack.

The descriptions by the PA's official newspapers starkly contrast with official statements by PA leaders that condemned the Dimona attack. Hours after the Monday afternoon attack, Abbas condemned it and added that he also condemns IDF counter-terrorism actions.

However, Palestinian Media Watch reports on a number of quotes in official PA organs showing that in actuality, the terrorists are glorified in PA culture and government. The official news report in Al-Hayat al-Jadeeda read, "The executors of the operation died as martyrs... An Israeli was killed and 11 were wounded in the operation in the Dimona commercial center."

The headline in another PA newspaper Al-Ayam read, "Dimona: An Israeli Woman was Killed in a Bomb Operation in the Commercial Center; the Two Perpetrators Died as Martyrs." Similarly, the PA newspaper Al-Quds ran the story as, "Two Martyrs and a Killed Israeli Woman in a Bomb Operation in Dimona."

PMW notes that the term "martyr" places the terrorists on the highest level in Islam - a far cry from the formal criticism expressed by Abbas. A "martyr" is also looked upon as a hero and a model to imitate, especially among the youth.

PMW concludes, "It is true that terrorists have always been called martyrs, but the significance of the latest reports is that in the midst of the renewal of a peace process, the terrorists continue to receive the supreme badge of honor by the Palestinian Authority itself."

The American woman who was brutally treated for sitting in a Starbuck's Cafe with a business colleague, had been a frequent, fervent denouncer of the "myth" of Saudi intolerance:

Two weeks before Yara, an American businesswoman, was arrested by Saudi Arabia’s religious police for sitting with a male colleague at Starbucks, she said she strolled past the very same cafe with another businessman: Neil Bush.

Bush, President George W. Bush’s younger brother and CEO of the education software company Ignite!, was in the Saudi capital, Riyadh, speaking at an economic forum hosted by King Abdullah for hundreds of influential business leaders.

Yara, who does not want her last name revealed because of safety concerns, is a managing partner at a Saudi financial company. She went to hear Bush speak, and she said she invited him later to tour her company’s offices, to give him a sense of what life was really like for women living in the capital.

“I was boasting about Riyadh, telling him it doesn’t deserve its bad reputation,” she said. “I told him I never experienced any harassment. I’d had no trouble as a woman. It was business as usual.”

But on Monday, Yara learned that she had been wrong. She was thrown in jail, strip-searched, threatened and forced to sign false confessions by the kingdom’s “Mutaween” police. “When I was arrested, it was like going through an avalanche,” she said. “All of my beliefs were completely destroyed.”

Caroline Glick has a must-read argument to bolster her fantasy that the Israeli public will rise up to demand the resignation of the Olmert administration. Israelis know that this is a pointless exercise in the face of an utterly brazen clique who cares only for its hold on power. Democracies have a no-refund policy on election mistakes.

In March 2006, the Israeli people elected incompetents to lead us. It only took four months for Hizbullah to make us pay a price for our mistake. In the July and August 2006 war, Israelis came to understand that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, then defense minister Amir Peretz and then IDF chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Dan Halutz were together and separately the worst leaders that Israel had ever seen.

Almost from the war's outset it was evident that Israel's leaders were in over their heads. They acted as though there was no difference between running a war and running a political campaign against their political rivals. Hizbullah chief Hassan Nasrallah and his Syrian and Iranian overlords could, they assumed, simply be insulted out of fighting.

The brutal reality of war confounded them.

They had decided to respond harshly to Hizbullah's cross-border attack which left eight soldiers dead and two soldiers - Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser - missing in action. But they never actually realized that they were leading the nation to war. Indeed, through to the bitter end, they insisted that we weren't at war at all. We were simply involved in a "campaign."

They sent up fighter jets to bomb Hizbullah to Kingdom Come. But when the bombing failed to affect Hizbullah's ability to attack Israel with missiles, and when the televised footage of the bombs' destructive force squandered international support for Israel, Olmert and his colleagues lost their stomach for the fight they had never understood. They sent ground forces in willy nilly, to conduct operations with no operational logic. Then they begged America to pull their fat from the fire by negotiating a cease-fire without victory.

Read the whole thing...

Exactly as I predicted, the Palestinians have used Israel's unilateral withdrawal from Gaza to pursue a dual strategy: turn Gaza into a terror hub capable of striking Israel directly, while simultaneously transfering those capabilities to the West Bank.

The breach of the fence with Egypt has facilitated the acceleration of both:

Hamas's breach of the security fence along the Egypt-Gaza border has resulted in the smuggling of a large amount of advanced weaponry, including long-range rockets, anti-tank missiles, and anti-aircraft missiles, Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency) head Yuval Diskin said in his briefing to ministers during Sunday's cabinet meeting.

In a sobering assessment of the situation, Diskin said that the breach also allowed dozens of operatives from all of the different terror organizations in Syria, Iran, and Egypt to infiltrate into Gaza. He said that these operatives were likely trained in Iran, and crossed the border with the aim of upgrading terror attacks against Israel.

Carl in Jerusalem documents how this could have been avoided with 3 helicopters. But Olmert denied the IDF request.

Arguably the most humiliating incident in the Palestinian/Israeli peace accords has been Joseph's Tomb and the yeshiva that was housed on the site. The Oslo Accords placed the site under Israeli control, but Ehud Barak unilaterally withdrew after securing a Palestinian agreement to defend the site and insure freedom of access and Jewish worship. Instead, as the IDF was withdrawing from the site, Palestinian forces opened fire and one Israeli border policemen bled to death as IDF commanders fruitlessly negotiated with Palestinian security for an extended period to permit Israel to return to gather its wounded.

Later a Palestinian mob engaged in an orgy of destruction of the site, accompanied by Palestinian security forces. Multiple desecrations of the site ensued, and finally the Palestinian Authority turned the site into a mosque, as is traditional in the Muslim World regarding captured holy sites.

Minister Natan Sharansky was aptly quoted at the time, fruitlessly attempting to lobby Israel's Foreign Ministry to simply publish the photos of the atrocity:

If we would have razed the gravesite of one of the founders of Islam, billions of Muslims would have taken to the streets. It's inconceivable that the world should not know about this travesty.

Years later, Ehud Olmert has today asked the Palestinian Authority to restore the site:

Israel will ask the Palestinian Authority to repair Joseph's Tomb in Nablus, it was announced Sunday.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said that he had instructed Defense Minister Ehud Barak to act toward the reconstruction and restoration of the tomb and that the issue would be brought up in an upcoming meeting between Olmert and PA Prime Minister Salaam Fayad.

Olmert made the announcement in a letter to a Samaria residents' committee that asked the prime minister to act on the issue in light of the poor conditions of the tomb and its compound.

Olmert wrote that "Joseph the Righteous symbolizes coping with crises out of faith and the ability to turn every situation into a tool which enables us to progress."

Olmert has a different conception of progress than most.