harmonicminer

Here’s a roundup on the release by Israel of more than 1000 terrorists for one kidnapped Israeli soldier who had been held by Hamas for several years.

Powerline

Daniel Pipes at NRO

Jihadwatch

Redstate

Sometimes, inhuman as it sounds, the numbers do matter, and you can and should put a price on a single human life, a lesson that I fear Israel is going to learn the hard way, when it pays 100-fold for retrieving a single soldier.

UPDATE:  A friend emailed and suggested that the Israeli Defense Force is having trouble filling its ranks, and so the IDF felt that getting this solider back, even at the cost of more terrorist killings of civilians, was worth it to encourage people to serve in the IDF.  I don’t know…  but thought it an interesting idea to pass along.

Watch it.  It will be time well spent.

It is clear that Obama’s foreign policy regarding Iran is failing, as a new report showing that Iran is on the brink of nuclear weapons is the headline du jour.

Experts estimate that 20 kgs of uranium is a significant step toward arming a warhead. The uranium would still need to have its purity raised to 90 per cent, but that is a relatively easy process.

The agency’s report comes in spite of the recent imposition at the United Nations of a fresh round of sanctions against Iran and will heighten fears of an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear plants. The prospect of an attack had receded only recently with American assurances that Tehran was more than a year away from acquiring a bomb.

The Vienna-based nuclear watchdog indicated Tehran had maintained its absolute defiance of international pressure to curb its programme despite the imposition of harsh sanctions in May. The IAEA has grown increasingly alarmed at Iran’s behaviour and the latest report, which will be presented to the agency’s governors at a meeting next week, lambasted Tehran on a series of fronts.

The country’s refusal to answer questions on its attempts to make a nuclear warhead that could be fitted on to its most advanced missiles was denounced as a violation of sanctions.

The agency also rebuked the regime for its repeated failure to co-operate with weapons inspections designed to ensure that material was held securely at Iranian plants.

Iran barred two weapons inspectors from the country in June after they reported undeclared nuclear activity by scientists. It has also systematically objected to other scientists on spurious grounds.

“The agency is … concerned that the repeated objection to the designation of experienced inspectors hampers the inspection process and detracts from the agency’s ability to implement safeguards in Iran,” the report said.

The acquisition of uranium will cause the most alarm however. Until February the Iranians were enriching uranium to levels of no more than 5 per cent at its plant in Natanz.

The government-funded Verification Research, Training and Information Centre, an expert body, has estimated that a weapons expert would have done much of the separative work to make a nuclear device from 20 kgs of 20 per cent enriched material with relatively few further obstacles.

The IAEA under Yukiya Amano, its new Japanese director general, has taken a much tougher line with Iran’s obstruction of international inspections. But the agency’s reports demonstrate that, while the Iranian economy has suffered from sanctions, the nuclear programme has not been impeded. Iran’s stockpile of low-enriched uranium, the feedstock of both civilian and military nuclear programmes, has risen by around 15 per cent since May to reach 2.8 tonnes.

Not having anything brilliant to say today (why should today be different than any other day?), I defer to George Will, in his piece titled Israel’s Netanyahu Poised to Take Out Iran’s Nuclear Sites

When Israel declared independence in 1948, it had to use mostly small arms to repel attacks by six Arab armies. Today, however, Israel feels, and is, more menaced than it was then, or has been since. Hence the potentially world-shaking decision that will be made here, probably within two years.

To understand the man who will make it, begin with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s belief that stopping Iran’s nuclear weapons program is integral to stopping the worldwide campaign to reverse 1948. It is, he says, a campaign to “put the Jew back to the status of a being that couldn’t defend himself — a perfect victim.”

Today’s Middle East, he says, reflects two developments. One is the rise of Iran and militant Islam since the 1979 revolution, which led to al-Qaida, Hamas, and Hezbollah. The other development is the multiplying threat of missile warfare.

Now Israel faces a third threat, the campaign to delegitimize it in order to extinguish its capacity for self-defense.

After two uniquely perilous millennia for Jews, the creation of Israel meant, Netanyahu says, “the capacity for self-defense restored to the Jewish people.” But note, he says, the reflexive worldwide chorus of condemnation when Israel responded with force to rocket barrages from Gaza and from southern Lebanon. There is, he believes, a crystallizing consensus that “Israel is not allowed to exercise self-defense.”

From 1948 through 1973, he says, enemies tried to “eliminate Israel by conventional warfare.” Having failed, they tried to demoralize and paralyze Israel with suicide bombers and other terrorism. “We put up a fence,” Netanyahu says. “Now they have rockets that go over the fence.” Israel’s military, which has stressed offense as a solution to the nation’s lack of strategic depth, now stresses missile defense.

That, however, cannot cope with Hamas’ tens of thousands of rockets in Gaza and Hezbollah’s 60,000 in southern Lebanon. There, U.N. resolution 1701, promulgated after the 2006 war, has been predictably farcical. This was supposed to inhibit the arming of Hezbollah and prevent its operations south of the Litani River.

Since 2006, Hezbollah’s rocket arsenal has tripled and its operations mock resolution 1701. Hezbollah, learning from Hamas, now places rockets near schools and hospitals, certain that Israel’s next response to indiscriminate aggression will turn the world media into a force multiplier for the aggressors.

Any Israeli self-defense anywhere is automatically judged “disproportionate.” Israel knows this as it watches Iran.

Last year was Barack Obama’s wasted year of “engaging” Iran. This led to sanctions that are unlikely to ever become sufficiently potent. With Russia, China, and Turkey being uncooperative, Iran is hardly “isolated.” The Iranian democracy movement probably cannot quickly achieve regime change. It took Solidarity 10 years to do so against a Polish regime less brutally repressive than Iran’s.

Hillary Clinton’s words about extending a “defense umbrella over the region” imply, to Israelis, fatalism about a nuclear Iran. As for deterrence working against a nuclear-armed regime steeped in an ideology of martyrdom, remember: In 1980, Ayatollah Khomeini said: “We do not worship Iran, we worship Allah. For patriotism is another name for paganism. I say let this land burn. I say let this land go up in smoke, provided Islam emerges triumphant in the rest of the world.”

You say, that was long ago? Israel says, this is now:

Iran’s supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, says Israel is the “enemy of God.” Tehran, proclaiming that the Holocaust never happened and vowing to complete it, sent an ambassador to Poland who in 2006 wanted to measure the ovens at Auschwitz to prove them inadequate for genocide. Iran’s former president, Hashemi Rafsanjani, who is considered a “moderate” by people for whom believing is seeing, calls Israel a “one-bomb country.”

If Iran were to “wipe the Zionist entity off the map,” as it vows to do, it would, Netanyahu believes, achieve a regional “dominance not seen since Alexander.” Netanyahu does not say Israel will, if necessary, act alone to prevent this. Or does he?

He says CIA Director Leon Panetta is “about right” in saying Iran can be a nuclear power in two years. He says 1948 meant this: “For the first time in 2,000 years, a sovereign Jewish people could defend itself against attack.” And he says: “The tragic history of the powerlessness of our people explains why the Jewish people need a sovereign power of self-defense.” If Israel strikes Iran, the world will not be able to say it was not warned.

German website Der Spiegel says examination of photographs of eight scorched Kurdish rebels shows Turkey used chemical weapons

Is Turkey using chemical weapons against Kurdish rebels? German weekly Der Spiegel reported on its website Thursday that it had obtained photographs showing the bodies of fighters from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) that had been killed by chemical weapons. The report, which is based on a report published over the weekend, claims German experts have examined and confirmed the photographs’ authenticity.

According to the report, the horrifying images show burned, maimed and scorched body parts. Kurdish human rights activists believe the people in the photos are eight members of the PKK underground, who were killed in clashes with the Turkish military in September 2009.

The photographs were transferred to a human rights delegation including German activists, journalists, and far-Left Turkish politicians.

A “far left Turkish politician” just has to be an interesting beast.  From what I can gather, they are modeled after “social democrats” everywhere, which means that socialism is more important to them than freedom.  This group seems to descend from pro-Soviet roots.

The report said the photographs were transferred to a forensics lab and were examined by experts from Hamburg University Hospital. Expert Hans Baumann confirmed the initial suspicion that it is highly probable the eight Kurds died “due to the use of chemical substances.”

This is not the first time Turkey is suspected of using chemical weapons, in violation of the international treaty to which it is a signatory. Such suspicions have led German politicians to call for an independent international probe into the matter.

It would be spectacular if those same German politicians were more serious in stopping Iran from going nuclear.  How many German banks and German industrialists are doing business with Iran (maybe through appropriate cutouts to maintain semi-plausible deniability)?  But only semi-plausible.

Gisela Penteker, a Turkey expert with the international medical organization International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, noted that Turkey has been suspected of using chemical weapons for years. “Local people have said that again and again,” she explained. Finding proof is difficult, however, she said, because bodies were often released so late that it was hardly possible to carry out a thorough autopsy.

Meanwhile, Berlin daily newspaper Die Tageszeitung, also reported that it has obtained additional, shocking pictures, supposedly autopsy photographs of six other killed Kurds.

The paper also reported that the Turkish Foreign Ministry rejected the claims, saying, “Turkey is a signatory to the Chemical Weapons Convention, and its armed forces do not possess any biological or chemical weapons.”

Well, that’s comforting.  Turkey, of course, is the newest addition to the international blame-Israel-first coalition, made up of the Arab league, most European nations, Russia and China….  and, of course, the American Left, including American academia and American media.

Good luck finding any significant American media outlet covering this, or an American academic calling for an international investigation….  of the sort they called for when Israel defended its Gaza blockade from Turkish ships.  Now, THAT really deserved an “impartial” international investigation by that neutral arbiter of peace and truth, the United Nations.

But a few Turkish Kurds killed with banned chemical weapons?  That doesn’t even make the radar screen, let alone the news.

It would seem that the Turkish government’s zone of protection from such investigation has widened, in exact proportion to its recent hostility to Israel.  After all: the enemy of my enemy is my friend. 

And to most of these people, Israel is surely the enemy.

Ha’aretz reports on a soon-to-be-released documentary by an Israeli reporter, Shlomi Eldar, about a Palestinian Arab baby with a rare disease being treated in Israel.

In Sheba’s pediatric hemato-oncology department was Mohammed Abu Mustafa, a four-and-a-half-month-old Palestinian infant. Protruding from his tiny body were pipes attached to big machines. His breathing was labored.

“His days may be numbered. He is suffering from a genetic defect that is causing the failure of his immune system,” said the baby’s mother, Raida, from the Gaza Strip, when she emerged from the isolation room. “I had two daughters in Gaza,” she continued, her black eyes shimmering. “Both died because of immune deficiency. In Gaza I was told all the time that there is no treatment for this and that he is doomed to die. The problem now is how to pay for the [bone marrow] transplant. There is no funding.”

“I got to her after all the attempts to find a donation for the transplant had failed,” [Eldar] relates. “I understood that I was the baby’s last hope, but I didn’t give it much of a chance. At the time, Qassam rockets falling on Sderot opened every newscast. In that situation, I didn’t believe that anyone would be willing to give a shekel for a Palestinian infant.”

He was wrong. Hours after the news item about Mohammed was broadcast, the hospital switchboard was jammed with callers. An Israeli Jew whose son died during his military service donated $55,000, and for the first time the Abu Mustafa family began to feel hopeful. Only then did Eldar grasp the full dramatic potential of the story. He told his editor, Tali Ben Ovadia, that he wanted to continue accompanying the family.

…Nevertheless, this idyllic situation developed into a deep crisis that led to the severance of the relations and what appeared to be the end of the filming. From an innocent conversation about religious holidays, Raida Abu Mustafa launched into a painful monologue about the culture of the shahids – the martyrs – and admitted, during the complex transplant process, that she would like to see her son perpetrate a suicide bombing attack in Jerusalem.

“Jerusalem is ours,” she declared. “We are all for Jerusalem, the whole nation, not just a million, all of us. Do you understand what that means – all of us?”

She also explained to Eldar exactly what she had in mind. “For us, death is a natural thing. We are not frightened of death. From the smallest infant, even smaller than Mohammed, to the oldest person, we will all sacrifice ourselves for the sake of Jerusalem. We feel we have the right to it. You’re free to be angry, so be angry.”

And Eldar was angry. “Then why are you fighting to save your son’s life, if you say that death is a usual thing for your people?” he lashes out in one of the most dramatic moments in the film.

“It is a regular thing,” she smiles at him. “Life is not precious. Life is precious, but not for us. For us, life is nothing, not worth a thing. That is why we have so many suicide bombers. They are not afraid of death. None of us, not even the children, are afraid of death. It is natural for us. After Mohammed gets well, I will certainly want him to be a shahid. If it’s for Jerusalem, then there’s no problem. For you it is hard, I know; with us, there are cries of rejoicing and happiness when someone falls as a shahid. For us a shahid is a tremendous thing.”

That was enough to drain Eldar’s motivation and dissolve all the compassion he had felt for Raida and Mohammed.

“It was an absolutely terrible rift,” he recalls. “After I saw how intensely she fought for her son’s life, I could not accept what she said. I had seen her standing for hours, caressing him, warming him up, kissing him. At the time I also had an infant of Mohammed’s age at home. I couldn’t understand where it came from in her. I was devastated. It was all so paradoxical, too, because just as she was talking about the shahids, two Jewish women entered the room and brought her toys and a stroller as presents.”

Raida’s confession was totally at odds with Eldar’s perception of her until then: “The whole time I accompanied her, I saw a caring mother who was at her baby’s bedside night and day. She didn’t eat, she lost weight and she cried. I myself saw to it that she ate. I saw her faint when she was informed there was a small chance her son would get well. I saw her when she was told there was no longer a chance, and she stood there and caressed Mohammed, with tears, as though parting from him.

“So I was unable to explain how on the one hand, she fought for her child’s life, but at the same time told me that his life is not precious. I never believed I would hear that from her. That’s why I decided to stop shooting. I had come to tell a lovely story, not a story about a mother who destines her son to be a shahid.”

What did you feel when she said that to you?

“That I had been betrayed, that it was a knife in the back. I didn’t want to see Raida any more. It also drove me to greater despair. I asked myself, ‘Well, is that the conclusion that comes from this story?’ But in the end I started filming again. Why? I don’t have a good answer; I think it was from curiosity. I wanted to solve the mystery for myself.”

Golda Meir once said, “We will have peace with the Arabs when they love their children more than they hate us.”  She was right.  But will that day ever come?

Just in case you never heard what was actually on the “humanitarian aid ship” Mavi Marmara, the one you’ve seen in videos of “peace activists” clubbing Israeli inspectors with metal rods, It’s Official: There was No Humanitarian Aid on Mavi Marmara

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has informed Israel’s representatives the world over that there were never any humanitarian supplies or equipment aboard the Mavi Marmara, where Israeli commandos were ambushed by armed mercenaries posing as peace activists. The commandos opened fire and killed nine of the attackers after three soldiers had been brutalized and temporarily captured.

Of the seven flotilla ships that were intercepted by Israel on May 31 and afterward, only four were freight ships, the MFA reported to its embassies and consulates: The Challenger 1 (a small yacht), the Sfendonh (a small passenger boat) and the Mavi Marmara (a passenger ship) did not carry any humanitarian aid, and had only the passengers’ personal belongings.

The four freight ships are the Gaza, the Sofia, the Defeny and the Rachel Corrie. As of June 7, Israel had only offloaded equipment from the Defeny. The equipment offloaded was loaded onto 26 trucks, and an additional eight trucks are waiting at the Kerem Shalom crossing to enter Gaza.

The equipment includes:

1. 300 wheelchairs
2. 300 new mobility scooters
3. 100 special mobility scooters for the disabled
4. Hundreds of crutches
5. 250 hospital beds
6. 50 sofas
7. Four tons of medicine
8. 20 tons of clothing, carpets, school bags, cloth and shoes
9. Various hospital equipment – closets and cabinets, operating theater equipment, etc.
10. Playground equipment
11. Mattresses

The equipment remaining at Ashdod Port on the three cargo ships which have not been offloaded include some 2000 tons of construction equipment – building materials and tools, and construction waste (rubble, toilets, sinks and cement) for re-use.

The MFA noted that:

The equipment does not constitute humanitarian aid in the accepted sense (basic foodstuffs, new and functional equipment, fresh medicines).

The humanitarian aid on the four cargo ships was scattered in the ships’ holds and thrown onto piles and not packed properly for transport. The equipment was not packaged and not properly placed on wooden bases. Because of the improper packing, some of the equipment was crushed by the weight in transit.

The medicines and sensitive equipment (operating theater equipment, new clothing, etc.) are being kept in cool storage at the Defense Ministry base. Some of the medicines had already expired, and some will expire soon. The operating theater equipment, which should be kept sterile, was carelessly wrapped. A large part of the equipment, particularly shoes and clothing, was used and worn.

In other words, this whole thing exists as a proxy for Iran, working through intermediary Turkey (with which it is friendlier and friendlier), to break the blockade into Gaza, which is part of the reason Israel hasn’t been on the wrong end of missile attacks for awhile.

No one is starving in Gaza, other than maybe the political prisoners that Hamas has locked in basements.

You really need to check out this Powerline post, and watch the videos they linked here (don’t be impatient, the ad is short) and here.

Entertaining.  And educational.

How religion made Jews genetically distinct

Jewish populations around the world share more than traditions and laws – they also have a common genetic background. That is the conclusion of the most comprehensive genetic study yet aimed at tracing the ancestry of Jewish people.

In a study of over 200 Jews from cities in three different countries, researchers found that all of them descended from a founding community that lived 2500 years ago in Mesopotamia.

What a surprise.

Click the link and read the whole story….  and try not to laugh.

The Bible just keeps looking better and better.

Fareed Sakaria thinks he knows why Turkey is siding against Israel in the Gaza blockade. You guessed it: it’s Bush’s fault.

On the other hand, people who actually understand a bit more about the facts on the ground in Turkey see that the shift in Turkish foreign policy is a matter of demographics, as pointed out by Mark Steyn in Israel, Turkey, and the End of Stability

Foreign policy “realists,” back in the saddle since the Texan cowboy left town, are extremely fond of the concept of “stability”: America needs a stable Middle East, so we should learn to live with Mubarak and the mullahs and the House of Saud, etc. You can see the appeal of “stability” to your big-time geopolitical analyst: You don’t have to update your Rolodex too often, never mind rethink your assumptions. “Stability” is a fancy term to upgrade inertia and complacency into strategy. No wonder the fetishization of stability is one of the most stable features of foreign-policy analysis.

Unfortunately, back in what passes for the real world, there is no stability. History is always on the march, and, if it’s not moving in your direction, it’s generally moving in the other fellow’s. Take this “humanitarian” “aid” flotilla. Much of what went on — the dissembling of the Palestinian propagandists, the hysteria of the U.N. and the Euro-ninnies — was just business as usual. But what was most striking was the behavior of the Turks. In the wake of the Israeli raid, Ankara promised to provide Turkish naval protection for the next “aid” convoy to Gaza. This would be, in effect, an act of war — more to the point, an act of war by a NATO member against the State of Israel.

Ten years ago, Turkey’s behavior would have been unthinkable. Ankara was Israel’s best friend in a region where every other neighbor wishes, to one degree or another, the Jewish state’s destruction. Even when Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s AKP was elected to power eight years ago, the experts assured us there was no need to worry. I remember sitting in a plush bar late one night with a former Turkish foreign minister, who told me, in between passing round the cigars and chugging back the Scotch, that, yes, the new crowd weren’t quite so convivial in the wee small hours but, other than that, they knew where their interests lay. Like many Turkish movers and shakers of his generation, my drinking companion loved the Israelis. “They’re tough hombres,” he said admiringly. “You have to be in this part of the world.” If you had suggested to him that in six years’ time the Turkish prime minister would be telling the Israeli president to his face that “I know well how you kill children on beaches,” he would have dismissed it as a fantasy concoction for some alternative universe.

Yet it happened. Erdogan said those words to Shimon Peres at Davos last year and then flounced off stage. Day by day what was formerly the Zionist entity’s staunchest pal talks more and more like just another cookie-cutter death-to-the-Great-Satan stan-of-the-month.

As the think-tankers like to say: “Who lost Turkey?” In a nutshell: Kemal Ataturk. Since he founded post-Ottoman Turkey in his own image nearly nine decades ago, the population has increased from 14 million to over 70 million. But that five-fold increase is not evenly distributed. The short version of Turkish demographics in the 20th century is that Rumelian Turkey — i.e., western, European, secular, Kemalist Turkey — has been outbred by Anatolian Turkey — i.e., eastern, rural, traditionalist, Islamic Turkey. Ataturk and most of his supporters were from Rumelia, and they imposed the modern Turkish republic on a reluctant Anatolia, where Ataturk’s distinction between the state and Islam was never accepted. Now they don’t have to accept it. The swelling population has spilled out of its rural hinterland and into the once solidly Kemalist cities.

As is often the case, Mark Steyn makes an elegant argument from demographics that the days of a western looking Turkey are probably over. We should have known when Turkey would not allow us to stage troops into Iraq in 2003. But it is now clear that Turkey is rapidly become just another Islamist state, and the demographic forces at work seem likely to continue its motion in that direction.

Don’t get me wrong:  I don’t think Fareed Zakaria is ignorant of the demographic changes in Turkey.  He surely knows.   Your speculations are as good as mine about why he doesn’t find that knowledge worthy of mention in his conjectures about what has led to changes in the Turkish political situation.

Click the link above and read Steyn’s article.