harmonicminer

Jerusalem Post, via Yoni

Israel is likely to face advanced Iranian weaponry, long-range rockets, large missile silos and dozens of kilometers of underground tunnels connecting open fields with urban centers in the event of a future conflict with Hamas in the Gaza Strip, according to the latest Israeli assessments.

Since Operation Cast Lead ended almost a year ago, Hamas has increased its weapons smuggling and today operates hundreds of tunnels along the Philadelphi Corridor. It has smuggled in dozens of long-range Iranian-made rockets that can reach Tel Aviv as well as advanced anti-aircraft missiles and anti-tank missiles.

Hamas is believed to have a significant number of shoulder-launched anti-tank missiles and 9M113 Konkurs, which have a range of four kilometers and are capable of penetrating heavy armor.

In addition, Hamas is believed to have today a few thousand rockets, including several hundred with a range of 40 kilometers and several dozen with a range of between 60 and 80 km. Intelligence assessments are that Hamas smuggled the missiles into the Gaza Strip through tunnels, possibly in several components.

Iran already supplies Hamas with 122mm Katyusha rockets that are smuggled into Gaza in several pieces and then assembled by Hamas engineers.

One of the main lessons Hamas learned from Cast Lead was the need to reinforce its defenses and as a result has invested efforts in digging additional tunnels, which connect open fields with homes belonging to key operatives as well as command centers.

The idea is to enable freedom of movement for the operatives between different battlefields, which it found difficult during Israel’s ground offensive in Gaza earlier this year.

Hamas has also increased its use of civilian infrastructure, particularly mosques, which the terror group already used quite extensively for storage and launching rockets during the operation. Hamas is believed to have taken control of almost 80 percent of the mosques in Gaza, using them to store weapons and set up command-and-control centers.

Hamas, is “padding” itself as well by setting up its command centers in large apartment buildings. This way, it believes, the IDF will not attack them by air, and will need to send ground forces deep into the population centers, where it will lose its technological advantage.

In addition, Hamas is hoping to increase the effectiveness of its rocket capability during a future conflict and has created large missile silos.

Hamas has also recently increased its efforts to dig what the IDF calls “offensive tunnels” close to the border with Israel, which the terror group could use to infiltrate into Israel and kidnap soldiers.

These tunnels are believed to be of strategic value for Hamas, which would only use them for large-scale attacks and high-value targets.

Abbas accuses Obama of doing ‘nothing’ for peace in the Middle East

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas on Tuesday accused US President Barack Obama of doing “nothing” to achieve peace in the Middle East. Speaking to Argentinian newspaper Clarin, Abbas said he hoped that Obama would “take a more important role in the future.”

He went on to say that the Palestinian people were awaiting US pressure on Israel, “so that it respects international law and takes up the Road Map,” stressing that the peace process could not be restarted without a halt to settlement construction.

When asked what he was willing to concede for peace, Abbas told Clarin that the Palestinian people had “already made concessions.”

He opined that the current government, with Binyamin Netanyahu as prime minister and Avigdor Lieberman as foreign minister, “is not seeking peace,” though he said that 73 percent of Israelis were in favor of peace.

What Abbas wants, of course, is for Obama to be tougher on his (putatively) only friend in the Middle East, Israel, than he is on actual opponents, like Iran, Syria or Hisbullah.

If we needed any reminder of the fact, this illustrates the basic dynamic of all Middle East peace negotiations.  Israel, which has always been the attacked party, must give up land and options that were legitimately earned in acts of national self-defense from Arab aggression, self-defense against incredible odds.  In the meantime, Palestine doesn’t have to give up anything, including the intent to see the end of Israel as a Jewish nation.

Prediction:  Obama will be no more successful than any of his predecessors at convincing Palestinians that their best interests lie in normalizing relations with Israel, with reporting and fighting against the terrorists in their number, and with going about the business of building a functioning economy, without the ridiculous and unachievable destruction of Israel.  Palestinians have exactly the same opportunity now that Israel had 60 years ago, to build something out of nothing in the desert.  Further, they have a potential partner, Israel, which would help, if Palestinians could control their hatred of the Jews.  I’m not holding my breath.

In the meantime, Obama brings a student council president level of understanding to a negotiation where world class diplomats have tried and failed.  I won’t blame him for failing.  I will blame him if he manages to cripple Israel while he is busy failing to engineer an unlikely peace.

IN the Jerusalem Post, there is a review of Jimmy Carter’s latest screed unveiling his “peace plan” for the region, and the ignorance or duplicity that underlies it. Jimmy Carter: we can have peace (without you) in the Holy Land

COULD IT be that Jimmy Carter’s ideals are formulated by the number of zeros before the decimal on the contributions to the Carter Center by oil-rich Gulf States? These same states do not now, nor will they ever, allow Jews to worship freely within their borders no matter how much land Israel relinquishes. It is then surprising and hypocritical to call Israel an “apartheid state” and to infer that the region’s only democratic country is an obstacle to peace – thus the only solution to the Middle East conflict is through intervention.Carter’s final plea is for President Barack Obama to “shape a comprehensive peace effort between Israel and the Palestinians…then use persuasion and enticements to reach these reasonable goals with the full backing of other members of the International Quartet and the Arab nations.”

It is likely he would call on The Elders for their expertise. The best thing President Obama could do is completely ignore Jimmy Carter and his plan.

Read the whole thing. It details Carter’s falsehoods in describing the facts on the ground and his relationship with the players.  The man is a buffoon and a liar, and a useful idiot for the Saudis, who bankroll him.

I wonder if Obama will condemn Carter for “bearing false witness.”

NAH.

The sentences for so called “honor killings” in Islamic nations are so light, when they are imposed at all, as to be an insult to the value of human life. In this case, a Gazan father killed his 27 yr old daughter by beating her to death with a chain over 40 minutes,  for using a cell phone to talk to a man.

In such killings, a woman’s life is taken by male relatives who suspect her of inappropriate conduct. Such killings are still widespread in the Middle East, where a woman’s perceived misconduct can hurt the standing of a family and where tradition says the “stain” can only be removed by shedding her blood.

Traditionally, assailants have received light sentences, but the killing of Najjar shocked even activists used to detailing such crimes.

Mezan and the PCHR said that Najjar’s father used an iron chain to beat her, while also kicking and punching her for about 40 minutes until she died of a fatal blow to the head, said Mezan and the PCHR.

“It’s shocking,” said Samir Zakout of Mezan. “But it’s not surprising because killers know they won’t be punished harshly.”

In the West Bank and Gaza, “honor killing” assailants serve between six months and three years in prison, said Mona Shawa of PCHR.

In Jordan, officials said Wednesday they have set up special tribunals to deal with honor killings, hoping to speed up trials.

The New York-based Human Rights Watch reported Wednesday that the Syrian government abolished a law that waived punishment for some honor killings and now allows judges to sentence perpetrators to at least two years jail.

This is simply beyond sad and horrifying. And it is a measure of how very far the world view of Islam is from that of the West.

However, do not expect “justice week” at your local university to have “honor killing” as a topic.  They’ll be too busy bashing Israel for defending itself.  Or maybe being concerned about global warming or something really important like that. 

One of our very best reporters, Michael Totten, reports that Culture War Replaces Missile War

Hezbollah launched thousands of Katyusha rockets into Northern Israel and forced hundreds of thousands of civilians to flee south toward Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. South Lebanon was punished much more thoroughly than Northern Israel, but the Palestinians in Gaza nevertheless took Hezbollah’s Baghdad Bob–style boasts of “divine victory” seriously. Hamas ramped up its own rocket war until fed-up Israelis gave Gaza the South Lebanon treatment this past December and January.

Hamas is a bit slower to learn than was Hezbollah, but seven long months after the conclusion of Operation Cast Lead, the rockets out of Gaza have finally stopped. Israelis will no longer put up with indiscriminate attacks on their houses and schools. Many Palestinians in Gaza have likewise had their fill of Hamas’s self-destructive campaign of “resistance.”

The New York Times reports that Hamas has decided to wage a “culture war” instead of a rocket war because, as one leader put it, “the fighters needed a break and the people needed a break.”

Movies, plays, art exhibitions, and poems are Hamas’s new weapons. Hamas supporters, though, aren’t the only Palestinians in Gaza using art as a weapon. Said al-Bettar skewers Hamas every night at Gaza City’s Shawa cultural center in his popular play The Women of Gaza and the Patience of Job. “We were the victims of a big lie,” he says about the doctrine of armed “resistance.”

The Israeli intelligence official I spoke to deserves some credit for predicting the replacement of terrorist war with missile war. Hamas and Islamic Jihad had already fired rockets at Israel, but they hadn’t fired many, and neither the recent Gaza war nor the Second Lebanon War had yet started.

Since then a pattern has emerged that should be obvious to anybody with eyes to see, whether they’re an intelligence official or not. After Israeli soldiers withdraw from occupied territory, Israeli civilians are shot at with rockets from inside that territory. Another pattern has just been made clear. After Israelis shoot back, the rockets stop flying.

It has been years since Hezbollah has dared to fire rockets at Israel or start anything else on the border. Hamas no longer dares to fire rockets at Israel either.

Israelis remain under pressure to withdraw from the West Bank. They almost certainly will withdraw from most of the West Bank eventually. Few, though, are in the mood to do so right now since they were shot at from Gaza and Lebanon after they withdrew from those places. They see the pattern even if others don’t.

It’s possible, of course, that West Bank Palestinians will never fire a significant number of rockets, if any, at Israel. They seem more sensible in general than Gazans. Hamas leaders in Gaza also talk to Hamas leaders in Ramallah, Nablus, and Hebron. I think it’s safe to say that the West Bank isn’t hearing any “divine victory” nonsense from Gaza right now.

Then again, Gazans proved themselves incapable of learning from Hezbollah’s mistakes. And the New York Times says Hamas wants to acquire longer-range missiles. So who knows?

This much, though, is all but certain: if a rocket war erupts between Israel and the West Bank, Israelis will respond as they did in Gaza and Lebanon. The jury is still out on whether the Arab world has learned the recent relevant lessons, but there shouldn’t be any doubt that Israelis have. Rocket war doesn’t work, but the military solution to rocket war does.

This phrase, “The jury is still out on whether the Arab world has learned the recent relevant lessons,” is the core of the matter. Islamic warriors have always had the notion that somehow they were blessed by Allah and absolutely guaranteed to win at some point, as long as they just didn’t give up.  Islamic military teaching allows for “peace treaties,” of a sort, but makes it clear that, when fighting the infidel, they are to be used only to rest, rearm, and get ready to go at it again.

For my part, I am glad that Hamas is making bad plays instead of bombs, if indeed that is the case.  But what I know is that Islamic war fighters have a LONG memory.  They take the long view.  They are willing to wait a generation or more for the right time to strike.

And there’s this:  “Gazans proved themselves incapable of learning from Hezbollah’s mistakes.”  In Islamic understanding, proof of whether Allah was with you in war is simple, and has nothing whatsoever to do with some kind of Augustinian-style concept of just war.  The proof is if you win.  If you don’t win, Allah was not with you.  Simple.  So Gazans could not learn from Hezbollah’s mistakes for a simple reason: they assumed that Allah was not with Hezbollah (Iranian proxies) but would be with the Gazans.  Think of Sunnis figuring that, of course, Allah would not bless the efforts of those misguided Shiites.

So the Gazans had to find out for themselves, the hard way, that Allah wasn’t blessing their war either.  Not this year, at least.

But two things to remember:

1)  Neither Hezbollah nor Hamas have given up forever.   Their entire world view simply does not make room for permanent peace and adjustment to new conditions.  Jihad is forever.  It’s just delayed, sometimes.  Jihad interrupted.

2)  Iran and other Islamic powers, by virtue of their continued existence, will learn nothing from the defeat of any OTHER Islamic power.  I’m not talking about “secular” Islamic states, which use Islam to mollify a believing populace, but are themselves essentially cynical in their pursuit of power, such as Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, or even Syria.  Syria and Libya can both be seen to have pulled back from the brink of what they perceived as their own possible destruction.  And even Syria is still trying to make trouble occasionally….  but carefully, carefully.  The big problems are Iran, and possibly Pakistan (if the extremists succeed in a takeover…  Pakistan is a really hard one to figure out), as well as Saudi Arabia (which funds more terrorism-at-a-distance than anyone, directly and indirectly).

Do you get from this that the immediate threat is Iran?  If you do, you’re probably right.  And the point:  Iran’s ruling mullahs will learn nothing from the defeat of any other Islamic entity.

The longer term threat, even if we deal successfully with Iran (or Israel does it for us) has to be Pakistan, or, worse yet, an alliance of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.  An axis like that, controlled by Wahabist fundamentalists, would have money and LOTS of nukes.  That means that we MUST win in Afghanistan, defined as removing the pressure on Pakistan from Islamic extremists.  If Pakistan stays controlled by cynical, relatively secular powers, we win.  If Pakistan is taken over by a wave of Islamic extremism (as opposed to the expanding middle class now growing in the cities), we’ll have a huge problem, in the form of as many as 70 nuclear weapons in the hands of whackos with direct terrorist ties.

So stabilizing Afghanistan is our goal, and will be our contribution to Pakistani stability.

Given that Obama has abdicated any responsibility to deal with iran, we’d better hope that Israel does, and soon.  There are, of course, people who disagree.  (Being anti-Israel creates strange bedfellows, doesn’t it?)  I find it likely, however, that Israel’s intelligence estimates on the real state of the Iranian nuclear bomb program are better than anyone else’s.  And they have a stake in the accuracy of those estimates that is shared by no one else.

Officials say that Hamas is tunneling near UN facilities

Hamas is digging tunnels next to United Nations facilities under the assumption that the IDF will not target them during a future conflict, defense officials warned on Sunday.

The idea of tunneling near the UN school, the official said, was a lesson Hamas had learned from Operation Cast Lead earlier this year, during which the IDF did its utmost to avoid targeting UN facilities.

“Hamas uses civilian infrastructure to hide behind,” explained the official. “This is another example of Hamas’s cynical use of a school.”

This is not the first time Palestinian terrorists have used the Beit Hanun school. In October 2007, an IAF drone videotaped three terrorists preparing and then launching mortars from within the UN school compound in Beit Hanun.

Clearly, the Palestinians need to choose between supporting Hamas and having a UN presence in Gaza. And the UN needs to force that choice, by simply leaving until Hamas is gone. It is unconscionable for the UN to allow itself to be used as a shield for Hamas terrorists.

Will the UN force the choice? You’re kidding, right?

Writing in the Jerusalem Post, Caroline Glick says that Obama’s statements on Israel/Palestine, North Korea and Iran are irrational because they ignore facts on the gound:

Netanyahu’s speech was an eloquent, rational and at times impassioned defense of Israel. For Israeli ears, after years of former prime minister Ehud Olmert’s and former foreign minister Tzipi Livni’s continuous assaults on Israeli rights, and their strident defenses of capitulation to the Palestinians and the Syrians, Netanyahu’s address was a breath of fresh air. But it is hard to see how it could have possibly had any lasting impact on Obama or his advisers.

To be moved by rational argument, a person has to be open to rational discourse. And what we have witnessed over the past week with the Obama administration’s reactions to both North Korea’s nuclear brinksmanship and Iran’s sham elections is that its foreign policy is not informed by rationality but by the president’s morally relative, post-modern ideology. In this anti-intellectual and anti-rational climate, Netanyahu’s speech has little chance of making a lasting impact on the White House.

Of course, there is hardly such a thing as a “fact” to the more extreme post-modern moral relativists, and certainly no such thing as “right and wrong,” except when it comes to carbon cap and trade, of course.

Read the whole thing, where Ms. Glick very clearly makes her case.

Learning to understand Obama. Lesson ONE

Obama said he told Abbas the Palestinians must find a way to halt the incitement of anti-Israeli sentiments that are sometimes expressed in schools, mosques and public arenas. “All those things are impediments to peace,” Obama said.

Translation: please don’t be so public about your hatred of Israel, because you’re making it really, really hard for me to convince anyone that you have any interest in peace whatsoever, let alone a desire to live peacefully with Israel in a separate Palestinian state.

 
Obama, like predecessor George W. Bush, embraces a multifaceted Mideast peace plan that calls for a Palestinian state alongside Israel.
The president refused to set a timetable for such a nation but also noted he has not been slow to get involved in meeting with both sides and pushing the international community for help.

“We can’t continue with the drift, with the increased fear and resentment on both sides, the sense of hopelessness around the situation that we’ve seen for many years now,” Obama said. “We need to get this thing back on track.”

Translation: we have to work really, really hard to get Israel to give land back to the people who want them dead, because those same people promise to be nice after that. (Except, of course, that they never made such a promise, and never will.)

Abbas is working to repackage a 2002 Saudi Arabian plan that called for Israel to give up land it has occupied since the 1967 war in exchange for normalized relations with Arab countries. Abbas gave Obama a document that would keep intact that requirement and also offer a way to monitor a required Israeli freeze on all settlement activity, a timetable for Israeli withdrawal and a realization of a two-state solution.

In other words, if it weren’t for those nasty Israeli settlements, all would be peace and joy in Palestine.

Sure.

After describing US aid planned to “rebuild” Gaza, Yoni asks very simple questions:

Yoni the Blogger

Why are the American tax payers being forced to pay almost 1 billion dollars to help the Palestinians rebuild?

Is it because the Palestinians have seen the error of supporting terrorism and have entered into a path of peace?

No, it is clear from multiple rocket attacks coming out of Gaza once again on an almost daily basis and daily rock and molotov cocktail attacks in Judea and Samaria that the Palestinians are still supporting terrorism.

So the question remains why give them any money?

The fact is that Hamas and Fatah are both terrorist organizations at their root, though Fatah has been more circumspect lately. Any US aid that is given is certain to prop up Hamas and Fatah in power, and will not buy ANY goodwill to the USA from Islamic radicals in control of Gaza (Hamas).

What benefit is there in giving Hamas any help of any kind, when Hamas has not withdrawn its stated intent to destroy Israel?

Indirect aid to Gaza, if that is even possible, will still allow Hamas breathing room to hatch further terror. The people of Gaza must throw Hamas out of power. They are less motivated to do that when the consequences of Hamas policy are not fully felt by them.

The AP’s earlier report on the Israeli attack near a U.N. school alleged that the UN school had not been a location from which attacks on Israel were launched.  Now it admits the truth, but without referring to the failure of it’s earlier reporting, though others certain knew the facts at the time.

Earlier this week, an Israeli attack outside a U.N. school killed nearly 40 people. Both Israel and Palestinian witnesses said militants carried out an attack from the area moments earlier.

Some may say that the AP is “correcting the record”. But you can’t correct the record unless you specifically mention your previous failures, and then make the correction in a prominent place sure to get some attention, as opposed to burying it in paragraph thirteen of another story.

Mark Steyn’s take on the rocket scientists of Gaza, and the double standard of expectations between Israel and Hamas:

After all, when French President Sarkozy and other European critics bemoan Israel’s “disproportionate” response, what really are they saying? That they expect better from the despised Jews than from Hamas. That they regard Israel as a Western society bound by civilized norms, whereas any old barbarism issuing forth from Gaza is to be excused on grounds of “desperation.”

Hence, this slightly surreal headline from The New York Times: “Israel Rejects Cease-Fire, But Offers Gaza Aid.” For whatever that’s worth. Wafa Samir Ibrahim al-Biss, a young Palestinian woman who received considerate and exemplary treatment at an Israeli hospital in Beersheba, returned to that same hospital packed with explosives in order to blow herself up and kill the doctors and nurses who restored her to health. Well, what do you expect? It’s “desperation” born of “poverty” and “occupation.”

If it was, it would be easy to fix. But what if it’s not? What if it’s about something more primal than land borders and economic aid?

A couple of days after Hamas voted to restore crucifixion to the Holy Land, their patron in Tehran (and their primary source of “aid”) put in an appearance on British TV. As multicultural “balance” to Her Majesty The Queen’s traditional Christmas message, the TV network Channel 4 invited President Ahmadinejad to give an alternative Yuletide address on the grounds that it was a valuable public service to let viewers hear him “speak for himself, which people in the West don’t often get the chance to see.”

In fact, as Caroline Glick pointed out in The Jerusalem Post, the great man “speaks for himself” all the time – when he’s at the United Nations, calling on all countries to submit to Islam; when he’s presiding over his international conference of Holocaust deniers; when he’s calling for Israel to be “wiped off the map” – or (in his more “moderate” moments) relocated to a couple of provinces of Germany and Austria. Caroline Glick forbore to mention that, according to President Ahmadinejad’s chief adviser, Hassan Abbassi, his geopolitical strategy is based on the premise that “Britain is the mother of all evils” – the evils being America, Australia, Israel, the Gulf states, Canada and New Zealand, all the malign progeny of the British Empire. “We have established a department that will take care of England,” Mr. Abbassi said in 2005. “England’s demise is on our agenda.”

So when Britain’s Channel 4 says that we don’t get the chance to see these fellows speak for themselves, it would be more accurate to say that they speak for themselves incessantly but the louder they speak the more we put our hands over our ears and go “Nya nya, can’t hear you.” We do this in part because, if you’re as invested as most Western elites are in the idea that all anyone wants is to go to university, get a steady job and settle down in a nice house in the suburbs, a statement such as “England’s demise is on our agenda” becomes almost literally untranslatable. When President Ahmadinejad threatens to wipe Israel off the face of the map, we deplore him as a genocidal fantasist. But maybe he’s a genocidal realist, and we’re the fantasists.

The civilizational clashes of professor Huntington’s book are not inevitable. Culture is not immutable. But changing culture is tough and thankless and something the West no longer has the stomach for. Unfortunately, the Saudis do, and so do the Iranians. And not just in Gaza but elsewhere the trend is away from “moderation” and toward something fiercer and ever more implacable.

If you haven’t yet read America Alone, it’s not too late, and the paperback edition has a nice forward.

Here is what faux reporting actually looks like: Israel, Hamas briefly hold fire to allow Gaza aid – Yahoo! News

The United Nations called for an inquiry into Israel’s deadly shelling of the U.N. school in Jabalya refugee camp on Tuesday. Israel said Hamas militants at the school had fired rockets. The U.N. said there were no gunmen on the premises.

Here is what actual reporting looks like.  Don’t you wonder why it is that Michelle Malkin is able to get information and background on Israel’s “attack on a UN school”, but the AP is not.  It’s pretty simple.  She just looked for it.

And does anyone believe anything the U.N. official spokesdweebs say?

AP has done worse in its reporting, though this report has some of the usual weasel wording, calling Hamas terrorists “security forces” and so on. And the AP report puts this very interesting bit in paragraph ELEVEN, after reporting on the carnage.

Militants often operate against Israel from civilian areas. Late Saturday, thousands of Gazans received Arabic-language cell-phone messages from the Israeli military, urging them to leave homes where militants might have stashed weapons.

I would have thought such an interesting paragraph might have been, say, paragraph two, because that would have made the story more sequential.  Instead, we hear a great deal about the attack and its consequences, and only then do we hear about Israel’s attempt to reduce civilian casualties with warnings before the attacks.  But at least the AP mentioned it.  It usually does not, though this is common Israeli practice.

Once again, the lie of any moral equivalence between Israel and terrorist Palestinians is made very clear.  I’m actually surprised that the AP admitted that Hamas terrorists (called “militants” by the AP) operate from civilian areas.  At least the AP saw fit to include Israel’s warning messages to civilians who were perhaps not directly involved in Hamas’ terrorist activities.

Can anyone recall ANY similar warning ever given to ANY population, Jewish, Islamic, European, American, whatever, when Islamist terrorists are preparing an attack?  Of course, the whole point of such attacks is usually to kill civilians.  And when they attack American military targets, they wouldn’t need to warn civilians anyway, because American forces do not use civilians as “human shields.”

Israel’s major aims are two-fold: to kill Hamas leaders and terrorist personnel, and also to destroy weapons, bomb, and missile caches.  Israel has no designs on Palestinian civilians who are not attacking it.

Yoni is a former special forces officer for the IDF.  He reports on yet another humiliating search at a humiliating checkpoint, a favorite trope of apologists for Palestinian terrorism, but this one found a pipe bomb.

If people were coming into my community from an area where known thugs were constantly recruiting suicide/homicide bombers to kill people in my community, I’d institute checkpoints and searches, too.  So would you.

More at the link above.

I’ve discussed the interest Egypt has in Palestinian peace and stability. And Egypt may cancel Palestinian talks because Hamas doesn’t want to play nice.
Continue reading “If Egypt can’t get the Palestinians together, who can?”