Archived news and commentary: July 10 - 16, 2006

2006/07/10 - 2006/07/16
2006/07/03 - 2006/07/09
2006/06/26 - 2006/07/02
2006/06/19 - 2006/06/25
2006/06/12 - 2006/06/18
2006/06/05 - 2006/06/11

› From 2001/09/11 -

Sunday, July 16, 2006

News and commentary:

"Smoke rises from the headquarters of Hezbollah..."
(Hussein Malla, AP, 2006/07/16)
"Smoke rises from the headquarters of Hezbollah, in the suburbs of Beirut, Lebanon, Sunday, July 16, 2006, following Israeli air airstrikes."

"The Hand That Feeds the Fire" (Christopher Dickey et al., Newsweek, 2006/07/24)
"Behind The Crisis: How Iran is wielding its influence to wage a stealthy war against Israel and America.":
"But battles—and battle lines—are rarely if ever simple in the Middle East. Nasrallah knows that. So do the Israelis, who saw hidden hands behind the Lebanese and Palestinian militants. They accused Syria, which harbors the Hamas leadership in exile and has a longstanding alliance with Hizbullah in Lebanon, of complicity. But they also saw the long arm of their ultimate enemy, Iran—the creator of Hizbullah, a patron of Hamas, the ally of Syria, the provider of rockets that struck 22 miles deep into Israel last week and a missile that crippled an Israeli warship. Iran, developer of nuclear technology and eventually, perhaps, nuclear weapons. ...
According to terrorism analyst Magnus Ranstorp, an expert on Hizbullah who is now at the Swedish National Defence College, Hizbullah's decision-making council normally includes two Iranians. "Hizbullah is not a Lebanese organization, it's a proxy for Iran," says Ephraim Sneh, a former Israeli general and Labor Party member of the Knesset. 'Nasrallah has never carried out an operation on this scale without his masters.'"

"Israel tightens noose around Lebanon" (Sam F. Ghattas, AP/Yahoo! News, 2006/07/16)
"BEIRUT, Lebanon - Waves of warplanes thundering through the darkness bombed Beirut's southern suburbs for hours early Sunday, and Hezbollah rocket attacks killed at least nine people in Israel's third largest city.
A barrage of rockets pounded the northern Israeli city of Haifa in the worst strike on Israel since violence broke out along the border with Lebanon last week. One of the rockets hit a storage room at the train station, killing nine people, Israeli police said. Many more people were wounded. ...
The death toll in the four-day-old conflict rose above 100 in Lebanon, and stood at 24 in Israel. Hezbollah denied Israeli media reports that its leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, was hurt in an airstrike Sunday, the Al-Jazeera television said. ...
Choking back tears, Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Saniora went on television to plead with the United Nations to broker a cease-fire for his "disaster-stricken nation."
The Western-backed prime minister, criticizing both Israel and Hezbollah, also pledged to reassert government authority over all Lebanese territory, suggesting his government might deploy the Lebanese army in the south, which Hezbollah effectively controls."

"Iran warns Israel of 'unimaginable losses' if Syria hit" (AFP/Breitbart.com, 2006/07/16)
"Iran warned its arch-enemy Israel of "unimaginable losses" if it attacks Syria and vowed that it was standing by the Syrian people.
"We hope the Zionist regime does not make the mistake of attacking Syria, because extending the front would definitely make the Zionist regime face unimaginable losses," foreign ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi told reporters. ...
The hardline president, who has calling for Israel to be "wiped off the map" or moved as far away as Alaska, has also compared Israel's military strikes on Gaza and Lebanon to tactics used by Nazi Germany's leader Adolf Hitler.
"Their methods resemble Hitler's. When Hitler wanted to launch an attack, he came up with a pretext," Ahmadinejad said Saturday.
"Zionists say they are Hitler's victims, but they have the same nature as Hitler," said Ahmadinejad, who has previously described the Holocaust of six million Jews in wartime Europe as 'a myth.'"

"Spirits Are High in Syria’s Capital as Leaders Openly Show Support for Hezbollah" (Katherine Zoepf, The New York Times, 2006/07/16)
"DAMASCUS, Syria, July 15 — The mood here in Syria’s capital was defiant, even gleeful, on Saturday as Hezbollah continued its rocket attacks on northern Israel.
Pop radio stations played jingoistic military marches, and the state-run daily newspaper, Tishreen, reported on a meeting of the ruling Syrian Baath Party by saying, “participants expressed Syria’s firm stance in support of the Lebanese national resistance.”
A Damascus businessman who would give only his first name, Mustafa, said: “I am 100 percent very happy. All of the Syrian people are happy, because we consider Hezbollah as being one of us.” ...
“I am laughing because I am so happy to see that in Israel there are these very stupid leaders,” Dr. Fauzi Shueibi said. “Israel has nothing to gain by changing the balance of power in the region. To fight on two fronts at the same time is stupid; if they try to open three fronts, that will be madness.”
“No one can believe that this will stop without a huge victory for Hezbollah and for Syria,” he added. 'I haven’t felt so optimistic since 1973. I think we are closing the noose on Israel. This may be the last battle, and we may be able to redraw the map of the Middle East, but not on the schedule of America’s plan for the greater Middle East.'"

"Fear and defiance in the battered city" (Marie Colvin, The Sunday Times, 2006/07/16)
"The drama she watched from her back garden in the Galilee border village of Shtulah last Wednesday, as Hezbollah gunmen ambushed an Israeli patrol on the road running along the frontier with Lebanon, was the trigger for the worst crisis in the region for two decades.
Sources in Hezbollah, the radical Islamic organisation that runs a state-within-a-state in Lebanon, say the attack was five months in the planning. The purpose was to seize hostages and hold them to ransom for prisoners in Israel.
The Hezbollah assault unit had clearly done their reconnaissance. After infiltrating overnight they smashed Israeli CCTV cameras that monitor the border and hid in a peach orchard to wait for two Israeli armoured “Hummers” to begin a daily 9am patrol. ...
The two Hummers were hit by rocket-propelled grenades and went up in flames. Three soldiers were killed outright and two taken prisoner by the Hezbollah unit, which crossed back into Lebanon before a nearby Israeli base even knew what was happening. ...
By the end of the fight, eight Israelis were dead including the tank crew, killed as they came to the rescue.
In the chaos it was 10.30am before the Israeli military realised that two soldiers — Ehud Goldwasser, 31, and Eldad Regev, 26 — had been captured."

Saturday, July 15, 2006

News and commentary:

"Israel official: Iran helping Hezbollah" (AP/Yahoo! News, 2006/07/15)
"A missile fired by Hezbollah, not an unmanned drone laden with explosives, damaged an Israeli warship off Lebanon, the army said Saturday. Iranian troops helped fire the missile, a senior intelligence official said.
One sailor was killed and three were missing.
The intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the information, said about 100 Iranian soldiers are in Lebanon and helped fire the Iranian-made, radar-guided C-102 at the ship late Friday.
Israel because initial information indicated the guerrillas had used a drone for the first time to attack Israeli forces.
But the army's investigation showed that Hezbollah had fired an Iranian-made missile at the vessel from the shores of Lebanon, said Brig. Gen. Ido Nehushtan.
"We can confirm that it was hit by an Iranian-made missile launched by Hezbollah. We see this as very profound fingerprint of Iranian involvement in Hezbollah," Nehushtan said in an interview with The Associated Press."

"Israel Vowing to Rout Hezbollah" (Steven Erlanger, The New York Times, 2006/07/15)
"Israeli officials said a defeat of Hezbollah, a radical Shiite militia with strong ties to Syria and Iran, would send an important message to the region and would help Israel in its efforts to undermine the power of Hamas in the Palestinian Authority. They argued it would also help the weak Lebanese government assert control over the entire country. ...
Israeli officials said their strategy was to diminish or destroy the power of Hezbollah, which has created “a state within a state” in southern Lebanon, and to ensure that the Lebanese Army replaced Hezbollah on the border with Israel, as demanded by the United Nations. “We’ve decided to put an end to this saga and to change the rules of the game whereby a terrorist organization that is part of the Lebanese government can push the region to the abyss,” said Isaac Herzog, a member of the Israeli security cabinet."

Added today:
"The War Comes to Us" (Robert Tracinski, RealClearPolitics, 2006/07/14)
"War on Iran Has Begun" (David Twersky, New York Sun, 2006/07/13)

Note: I'm late on this because I haven't checked referrals for a while, but I really appreciate Nelson Ascher's comments about Watch over at EuroPundits:

"Now, one of the best “linker” blogs in the whole anti-idiotarian blogosphere is WATCH - covering the war on terror. Day in, day out, throughout all these years, this blog has done superb work in providing us with the most important links and, what’s at least as important, kept an excellent and excellently organized archive that is intelligently selected, thorough and extremely easy to access."

Thanks for your thanks, Nelson! As I said, it's truly appreciated.

Friday, July 14, 2006

News and commentary:

"Nasrallah vows to strike south of Haifa; Hezbollah HQ in Beirut hit" (Haaretz, 2006/07/14)
"Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah vowed Friday to strike Israeli targets south of Haifa, after an Israel Air Force attack left the group's headquarters in Beirut in ruins.
The group was quick to announce that Nasrallah had been unhurt in the strike.
"Hezbollah's secretary-general, family and bodyguards are safe and sound," a Hezbollah statement said. Nasrallah's residence and office were destroyed in the attack. ...
In a speech aired live shortly after the attack, Nasrallah said the group would strike deeper inside Israel, which it charged with launching the operation in Lebanon to avenge its failure in preventing the abduction and killing of its soldiers by Hezbollah earlier in the week.
Hezbollah would also strike "beyond Haifa and what is beyond, beyond Haifa," Nasrallah said.
"You wanted an open war and we are ready for an open war," the Hezbollah leader said."

"The War Comes to Us" (Robert Tracinski, RealClearPolitics, 2006/07/14)
"If, in the face of repeated threats and provocation by an aggressive dictatorship, you refuse to go to war, the war will eventually come to you.
That's the meaning of Iran's de facto declaration of war against Israel--which is, ultimately, a new war Iran is waging against the US. Iran is so desperate for war with the West that it is bringing the war to us, openly and willfully initiating a regional conflict that may soon involve three of Iran's proxies--Hamas, Hezbollah, and Syria--fighting against America's proxy, Israel.
The danger for us is that, in seeking to avoid an unavoidable war with Iran, we have allowed Iran to start the conflict on terms that it believes will be most favorable to it. ...
It is important to grasp that Iran is deliberately, intentionally drawing Israel into a war with its proxies. Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been making increasingly ominous statements warning about a "conflagration" involving Israel, then two Iranian-funded organizations run out of Syria, a close Iranian ally, launched incursion into Israel to kidnap Israeli soliders--a provocation that cannot merely be shrugged off, but which demands extended Israeli military action. Neither Hamas nor Hezbollah would have launched these attacks without Iranian permission and support."

"Behind the Crisis, A Push Toward War" (David Ignatius, The Washington Post, 2006/07/14)
"Israeli and American doctrine is premised on the idea that military force will deter adversaries. But as more force has been used in recent years, the deterrent value has inevitably gone down. That's the inner spring of this crisis: The Iranians (and their clients in Hezbollah and Hamas) watch the American military mired in Iraq and see weakness. They are emboldened rather than intimidated. The same is true for the Israelis in Gaza. Rather than reinforcing the image of strength, the use of force (short of outright, pulverizing invasion and occupation) has encouraged contempt. ...
In the Lebanon crisis we have a terrifying glimpse of the future: Iran and its radical allies are pushing toward war. That's the chilling reality behind this week's events. On Tuesday the Iranians spurned an American offer of talks on their nuclear program; on Wednesday their Hezbollah proxy committed what Israel rightly called "an act of war." The radicals want to lure America and Israel deeper into the killing ground, confident that they have the staying power to prevail. We should not play their game."

"Israeli crisis is a smoke screen for Iran's nuclear ambitions" (Con Coughlin, The Daily Telegraph, 2006/07/14)
"However much the Hizbollah leadership might claim to be a legitimate, democratically elected political party, the reality is that it is, and always has been, a proxy of Iran's Revolutionary Guards, who finance, train and equip the militia as a means of maintaining a permanent security challenge to Israel's northern border. ...
As a consequence, Hizbollah has been allowed to develop what in effect amounts to a state within a state, with its own well-equipped private army - all of it funded by the Iranians. It was rockets provided by the Iranians that were used in the initial diversionary attack that preceded the kidnapping raid. And senior Israeli military officers are convinced the anti-tank weapon used to destroy their Merkava tank, with the loss of its four-man crew, originated from Iran, not Lebanon. ...
It is also well known in both Beirut and Jerusalem that Hizbollah does not act without first consulting its paymasters in Teheran, whether it is to seize British hostages such as Terry Waite and John McCarthy, as it did in the mid-1980s, or Israeli soldiers today.
Nor can it be coincidence that the Israelis' abduction in southern Lebanon happened to occur the day after a meeting between Ali Larijani, Iran's chief nuclear negotiator, and the EU over Iran's nuclear programme broke up in Brussels without agreement."

"Ahmadinejad warns against Syria strike" (AP/The Jerusalem Post, 2006/07/14)
"Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad warned Israel against extending its offensive in Lebanon to neighboring Syria and said such a move would equate to an attack against the Islamic world, the official Iranian news agency reported Friday.
Syria and Shiite Muslim Iran are the top backers of the Shiite Hezbollah guerrilla in Lebanon.
"If the occupying regime of Jerusalem attacks Syria, it will be equivalent to an attack on the whole Islamic world and the regime (Israel) will face a crushing response" Ahmadinejad was quoted as saying by the official IRNA news agency.
Ahmadinejad made the comments in a telephone conversation with Syrian President Bashar Assad to assure him of his support."

"Israel strikes Beirut suburb" (Lin Noueihed, Reuters/Yahoo! News, 2006/07/14)
"BEIRUT (Reuters) - Israeli jets destroyed roads and junctions in Hizbollah's southern Beirut stronghold on Friday hours after Prime Minister Ehud Olmert ordered a more intense response to the group's capture of two Israeli soldiers.
Three people were killed and 20 wounded in the pre-dawn raids on the Shi'ite Muslim suburb, security sources said. Shops and buildings were damaged and dozens of cars wrecked in the district, home to hundreds of thousands of people.
A series of similar strikes forced the closure of a highway linking Beirut to Damascus and set a fuel storage facility at the Jiyyeh power plant outside the city ablaze.
Israel's decision to ramp up the attacks came at a meeting of security chiefs after a day in which Israel blockaded Lebanese ports, struck Beirut airport and two military airbases near
Syria, and attacked bridges and houses in the south.
The attacks virtually isolated Lebanon by air, sea and land."

"My friends live in fear as a savage civil war rips apart their home" (James Hider, The Times, 2006/07/14)
"West Baghdad is no stranger to bombings and killings, but in the past few days all restraint has vanished in an orgy of ethnic cleansing. Shia gunmen are seeking to drive out the once-dominant Sunni minority and the Sunnis are forming neighbourhood posses to retaliate. Mosques are being attacked. Scores of innocent civilians have been killed, their bodies left lying in the streets.
Hundreds — Sunni and Shia — are abandoning their homes. My driver said that all his neighbours had fled, their houses pockmarked with bullet holes and locked up. Sunni and Shia graffiti had been scrawled on the walls of a nearby mosque. ...
Those that can are leaving the country. At Baghdad airport throngs of Iraqis jostle for places on the flights out — testimony to the breakdown in Iraqi society. ...
A neurologist, who was heading to Jordan with his wife, said that he would seek work abroad and hoped that he would never have to return. “We were so happy on April 9, 2003 when the Americans came. But I’ve given up. Iraq isn’t ready for democracy,” he said, sitting in a chair with a view of the airport runway." (See also: "Guns galore as anarchy stalks Baghdad" (Mariam Karouny, Reuters/Yahoo! News, 2006/07/13))

"Islamist hardliner heads for Britain" (Richard Ford et al., The Times, 2006/07/14)
"A HARDLINE Islamist cleric who government advisers wanted banned from Britain is scheduled to fly to London this weekend to attend events alongside Muslim community leaders.
The Home Office and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office considered excluding Delwar Hossain Sayeedi, an MP in Bangladesh who preaches violent hatred against the West and is accused of war crimes, last year. But despite a series of e-mail exchanges in September, his visa was never revoked and the Home Office issued no exclusion order.
The Foreign Office’s Islamic issues adviser accused Mr Sayeedi’s detractors of being politically biased and said that his exclusion could jeopardise support from mainstream Muslims for the Government’s anti-terrorism agenda. ...
The report quotes Mr Sayeedi as saying that Britain and the US “deserve all that is coming to them” for overturning the Taleban in Afghanistan.
The e-mail from one adviser, Eric Taylor, continues: “He [Mr Sayeedi] has made a particularly offensive comment about Bangladeshi Hindus, comparing them to excrement. He also appears to defend attacks against the Ahmadiya (Islamist) community.
“. . . Previous visits to the UK have been reportedly marred by violence caused by his supporters. In 2000, during one of his talks in Oldham, his supporters reportedly attacked and beat up five Bengali elders.
'A rally in Banglatown was also attacked and three people, including a 65-year-old, were injured. A Bangladeshi community group wrote to the Prince of Wales in June 2004 appealing for Sayeedi to be banned from the UK.'"

Added today:
"Alms and Arms" (Benny Morris, The New Republic/Powell's Books, 2006/07/13)

Thursday, July 13, 2006

News and commentary:

"An Israeli soldier..."
(Gil Cohen Magen, Reuters, 2006/07/13)
"An Israeli soldier stands behind a mobile artillery piece firing from the Zaura area across the Lebanese frontier July 13, 2006."

"Alms and Arms" (Benny Morris, The New Republic/Powell's Books, 2006/07/13)
A review of "Hamas: Politics, Charity, and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad" by Matthew Levitt:
"But in public, in the West, when they speak to journalists, the Islamists prefer to speak only of "Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine."
In this thicket of deceit, Islamists present Muslims always as victims, never as perpetrators. (When has there ever been a community with such a litany of grievances?) And they have read the West well, especially Western Europe, with its gnawing discontents, its guilty conscience over a colonial past, its burgeoning Muslim populations, its thirst for oil, its distaste for war, and, yes, its anti-Semitism. The Islamists, perhaps accurately, see the West as weak -- and they exploit every fissure and crevice, every greed and appetite, every self-flagellating impulse. And as they privately snicker in their back rooms, they are busy taking the West for a ride: they laugh as the West beats itself over every dead Iraqi (the vast majority of the killings in Iraq are committed by Muslims against fellow Muslims, not by Westerners), and over every impoverished Afghan or Palestinian child (impoverished because their societies and economies have failed to develop, largely for internal reasons, beyond opium production and living on U.N. handouts), and over every human rights abuse to which some Muslims are subject in Guantánamo and Britain and the United States (when these pale in comparison with those perpetrated in every hour of every day in Sudan, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Iran, and Saudi Arabia)."

"War on Iran Has Begun" (David Twersky, New York Sun, 2006/07/13)
"Years from now, the kidnapping of Corporal Gilad Shalit will be regarded like the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. Against the backdrop of Kassam rocket fire on Israelis living within range of the Gaza Strip, it was the fate of Corporal Shalit that triggered the Israeli return to Gaza, which in turn brought the Hezbollah forces into the game.
Israel is fighting two Iranian proxies on two fronts. It may, or may not, open a third front against a third Iranian proxy, Syria. It is from the Syrian capital that Khaled Meshaal, the exiled leader of Hamas, has been laying down Palestinian Arab negotiating conditions. Why listen to Mr. Meshaal? Because the Hamas troops are loyal to him, rather than to their erstwhile leader, Prime Minister Ismail Haniyah, let alone the increasingly (as if that were possible) hapless Palestinian Arab leader, Mahmoud Abbas. ...
Each one of these players — Hamas inside Gaza and in Damascus, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and the Assad dictatorship in Syria — are chess pieces on the Iranian board. The pawn moves, drawing in the Israeli bishop; the Lebanese rook challenges; the Syrian queen is in reserve. ...
Ephraim Sneh, a former general and Labor Party leader who is the Israeli longest drawing attention to the approaching conflict with Iran, is saying that the current moment reminds him of the Spanish Civil War. The broader global forces are aligned; local actors are committed. It is a bloody test, a macabre dress rehearsal, for what lies over the horizon.
The war with Iran has begun."

"Syria and Iran wage war on Israel" (Melanie Phillips, melaniephillips.com, 2006/07/13)
"Thanks for the pusillanimity of the world, Iran is on a roll. It has repeatedly threatened to destroy Israel and wage war against the west and yet the free world has done nothing except wring its hands. Iran has watched with scarcely concealed contempt as Europe and the UN pursue their farcical attempts to pressure it into abandoning its nuclear weapons programme while America, the wounded behemoth, licks its wounds over Iraq.
In light of this fact, the reaction of the British and western media and chattering classes to Israel’s current behaviour is beyond farce. So blinded are they by their fixation that Israel is the aggressor and regional bully that even when Israel is plainly attacked in acts of unprovoked aggression they still blame Israel for causing the crisis. ...
BBC News Online described Israel’s actions as a ‘major offensive’. On the Today programme this morning (0810) it blamed Israel for ‘upping the ante’. The assumption is — fantastically —that it is Israel, rather than Iran, which is the danger to peace. Israel, it seems, must therefore not be allowed to defend itself when rockets are fired at its towns and cities. When it does so it is called ‘collective punishment’ or a ‘disproportionate response’ involving ‘massive collateral damage’, as was said on BBC Radio Four’s Moral Maze last night."

"Hizbullah wants soldiers moved to Iran" (Yaakov Katz, The Jerusalem Post, 2006/07/13)
"Israel has information that Hizbullah guerrillas who captured two Israeli soldiers are trying to transfer them to Iran, Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev said.
Regev did not disclose the source of his information.
The IDF released the names of the two soldiers on Thursday. According to the IDF Spokesperson, the two reserve are Ehud Goldwasser, 31, from Nahariya, and Eldad Regev, 26, from Kiryat Motzkin.
Hizbullah guerrillas, who are backed by Iran, seized the soldiers Wednesday in a cross-border raid.
OC Northern Command Lt.-Gen. Udi Adam said Thursday evening that the army has hit hundreds of targets in Lebanon since Wednesday night."

"Israel imposes blockade on Lebanon" (Philippe Naughton, The Times, 2006/07/13)
"Israel said today that it was imposing an air, sea and land blockade on Lebanon as its fighter bombers carried out their biggest offensive in Lebanon since Israel’s 1982 invasion. ...
Retaliating to a Hezbollah attack in which eight Israeli soldiers were killed and two others captured yesterday, Israel also sent warships into Lebanese waters. The Israeli Defence Force said the move was to stop Lebanese ports being used for the movement of terrorists and arms.
"Israel is imposing an air, maritime and land blockade on Lebanon until further orders as part of operations to retrieve its two soldiers abducted by Hezbollah on Wednesday," army radio announced.
Lebanon has said that it had no knowledge of the Hezbollah raid, and did not condone it, but Shalom Simchon, the Israeli Agriculture Minister, added: 'The Government wants to change the rules of the game in Lebanon and make the Lebanese Government understand that it is responsible for what happens in Lebanon.'"

"Hezbollah Raid Opens 2nd Front for Israel" (Anthony Shadid and Scott Wilson, The Washington Post, 2006/07/13)
"The capture of the soldiers and the fighting effectively opened a second front for Israel, whose troops entered the Gaza Strip last month in search of a soldier seized June 25. Within hours, reverberations rolled across an already tense region. The United States blamed Syria and Iran for the abduction, and Israeli tanks and troops moved toward the Lebanese border throughout the day. In Lebanon and elsewhere, the attack emboldened Hezbollah's supporters, who greeted the news by handing out sweets and setting off fireworks.
The fighting took a dramatic turn early Thursday with Israeli attacks on the Beirut airport and Hezbollah's television station in the capital's predominantly Shiite Muslim southern suburbs. Lebanese television reported that Israeli aircraft attacked two runways, forcing the facility to close and sending flights to airports elsewhere in the Middle East. Footage showed a column of black smoke drifting over the modern facility, considered an emblem of Lebanon's post-civil war reconstruction."

"Guns galore as anarchy stalks Baghdad" (Mariam Karouny, Reuters/Yahoo! News, 2006/07/13)
"The U.S. ambassador to Iraq said this week that sectarian bloodletting between Shi'ites and the formerly dominant Sunni minority of Saddam Hussein was now a greater threat to Iraq than the three-year-old Sunni insurgency against the security forces.
The top U.S. military commander shed some of Washington's usual reticence about sectarian labeling on Wednesday by saying Shi'ite militia "death squads" were behind much of the violence in the capital that has left scores dead this past week.
Some observers fear that a third, even more intractable, phase of the conflict has been reached, beyond insurgency and beyond even combat between organized armed groups: "What we're now seeing has no shape whatever," a Western diplomat said.
"It's just everyone fighting everyone. Anarchy."

"Plan may have been to spark bloody riots" (Amrit Dhillon, Sydney Morning Herald, 2006/07/13)
"COMMUTERS in Mumbai returned warily to its bomb-shattered train network yesterday as the city tried to recover from Tuesday night's co-ordinated terrorist attacks, which killed 200 people and wounded almost 700. ...
Yesterday, investigators were combing through the wreckage of mangled trains amid suggestions the Pakistan-based terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba was behind the blasts. The group has denied any involvement.
But police believe it is the only organisation able to organise co-ordinated blasts on this scale. They arrested a suspected Lashkar-e-Taiba member who was carrying explosives and money the day before the blasts. ...
Mumbai residents displayed their resilient spirit by returning to work yesterday. But many questioned India's approach to terrorism. "We keep priding ourselves on how we bounce back after these blasts and Mumbai's 'spirit', but haven't we got it wrong?" asked Anshuman Datta, a vegetable seller. 'Shouldn't we be priding ourselves on our ability to hit back at those responsible?'"

Added today:
"Anti-Semite of the Year" (Tim Blair, timblair.net, 2006/07/10)
"Iran's Ahmadinejad attacks Israel at Iraq conference" (Farhad Pouladi, AFP/Yahoo! News, 2006/07/08)

Wednesday, July 12, 2006

News and commentary:

"Guns in the air"
(Anwar Amro, AFP, 2006/07/12)
"Guns in the air: A Lebanese woman, brandishing guns, celebrates in Beirut's southern suburbs after pro-Iranian Hezbollah fighters captured two Israeli soldiers in south Lebanon."

"Gunfire and candy as Lebanese hail Hezbollah" (Jihad Siqlawi, AFP/Yahoo! News, 2006/07/12)
"TYRE, Lebanon (AFP) - Many Lebanese celebrated with gunfire and candy after Hezbollah militiamen captured two Israeli soldiers and killed another seven in attacks, but the country was bracing for a harsh response from its southern neighbour. ...
As soon as news of the capture was announced on Hezbollah's Al-Manar television, celebratory gunfire filled the air in Beirut's southern suburbs where cheerful residents distributed sweets to motorists across the crowded streets of the Hezbollah stronghold.
Cars roamed the streets of Beirut and the suburbs, waving yellow Hezbollah flags and announcing on loud speakers the "heroic" capture of the soldiers.
"Long live Hezbollah, death to Israel," chanted youths.
Palestinians from Beirut's refugee camp of Burj Barajneh also drove on nearby main roads, honking and cheering in sign of celebration.
"The Israelis do not want to exchange the soldier kidnapped (by Palestinian militants) in Gaza against Palestinian prisoners. Now, Hezbollah has helped the negotiating position of our mujahedeen (fighters)," Palestinian student Hussam Jibril said.
Youths also distributed candies at the entrances of the main southern coastal cities of Sidon and Tyre while celebratory gunfire was also heard in towns in the Bekaa valley where Hezbollah maintains strongholds.
Some mosques in Tyre also announced the capture of the soldiers on loud speakers."

"Battle Plans" (Yossi Klein Halevi, The New Republic, 2006/07/12)
"The next Middle East war -- Israel against genocidal Islamism -- has begun. The first stage of the war started two weeks ago, with the Israeli incursion into Gaza in response to the kidnapping of an Israeli soldier and the ongoing shelling of Israeli towns and kibbutzim; now, with Hezbollah's latest attack, the war has spread to southern Lebanon. Ultimately, though, Israel's antagonists won't be Hamas and Hezbollah but their patrons, Iran and Syria. The war will go on for months, perhaps several years. There may be lulls in the fighting, perhaps even temporary agreements and prisoner exchanges. But those periods of calm will be mere respites. ...
For the Israeli right, this is the moment of "We told you so." The fact that the kidnappings and missile attacks have come from southern Lebanon and Gaza -- precisely the areas from which Israel has unilaterally withdrawn -- is proof, for right-wingers, of the bankruptcy of unilateralism. Yet the right has always misunderstood the meaning of unilateral withdrawal. Those of us who have supported unilateralism didn't expect a quiet border in return for our withdrawal but simply the creation of a border from which we could more vigorously defend ourselves, with greater domestic consensus and international understanding. The anticipated outcome, then, wasn't an illusory peace but a more effective way to fight the war. The question wasn't whether Hamas or Hezbollah would forswear aggression but whether Israel would act with appropriate vigor to their continued aggression."

"Beheading Nations - The Islamization of Europe's Cities" (Fjordman, Dhimmi Watch, 2006/07/12)
"We have seen videos on TV of Muslim Jihadis beheading infidel hostages. Less attention has been paid to the fact that Muslims are beheading entire nation states. Although this is happening in slow motion, it is no less dramatic. Historically, the major cities have constituted a country's "head," the seat of most of its political institutions and the largest concentration of its cultural brainpower. What happens when this "head" is cut off from the rest of the body? In many countries across Western Europe, Muslim immigrants tend to settle in major cities, with the native population retreating to minor cities or into the countryside. Previously, Europeans or non-Europeans could travel between countries and visit new cities, each with its own, distinctive character and peculiarities. Soon, you will travel from London to Paris, Amsterdam or Stockholm and find that you have left one city dominated by burkas and sharia to find……yet another city dominated by burkas and sharia. ...
More white families are moving from London to the regions while many immigrants arrive in the capital from overseas. Migrationwatch said that the change in 10 years had been "extraordinarily rapid'" and "unprecedented." Whites will soon become a minority in Birmingham and other major British cities, posing a "critical" challenge to social stability, ...
In the Netherlands, Muslims will soon make up the majority in all major cities. "Today, we have 1 million Muslims out of 16 million Dutch," according to Frits Bolkestein, Dutch politician. 'Within 10 years, they will have an absolute majority in both Amsterdam and Rotterdam. We are staring into the face of a shortly to be divided community. Muslims have the right to their own schools, so there is no teaching of evolution, gay teachers are not tolerated but anti-Semitism is.'" (See also, for example:"Never have we seen immigration on this scale: we just can't cope" (Robert Rowthorn, The Sunday Telegraph, 2006/07/02) and "What Does Muslim Immigration Cost Europe?" (Fjordman, Dhimmi Watch, 2006/06/23))

"Hezbollah captures 2 Israeli soldiers" (Joseph Panossian, AP/Yahoo! News, 2006/07/12)
"BEIRUT, Lebanon - The Hezbollah militant group captured two Israeli soldiers during clashes along the Lebanese border on Wednesday, triggering an Israeli assault with warplanes, tanks and gunboats as Israeli troops crossed the frontier to hunt for the captives. ...
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert called the guerrilla attack "an act of war" and warned that Hezbollah would pay a "heavy price" for its actions.
Israeli warplanes struck two bridges over the Litani River deep in southern Lebanon, killing two civilians on the main north-south highway between the port cities of Tyre and Sidon, Lebanese security officials said. The pan-Arab satellite TV al-Arabiya station said that at least seven Israeli soldiers were killed in the fighting, and that several more were wounded.
The Israeli army confirmed casualties among the soldiers, but did not comment on the reports of possible deaths.
Israeli troops crossed into a southwestern sector of Lebanon, near where the soldiers were seized, trying to keep their captors from moving them deeper into Lebanon, Israeli security officials said. Hezbollah said it destroyed an Israeli tank as it tried to cross the frontier."

"7 bombs, 10 minutes, 160 dead" (Dan McDougall, The Times, 2006/07/12)
"THE Indian Prime Minister vowed last night to “defeat the cowardly and evil designs of terrorists” after seven bomb blasts ripped through the carriages of packed commuter trains and two stations in Bombay, killing at least 160 people and leaving more than 400 injured.
The rush-hour attacks on one of the world’s most populous and chaotic cities sent hundreds of thousands of commuters fleeing from suburban stations, most on to the streets and even motorways in panic, as mobile phone lines jammed after the blasts that targeted stations along the city’s busy western rail line.
The first attack took place at 6.24pm (11.54am GMT) with the others following in quick succession. Although there were no immediate claims of responsibility, the most likely suspects were considered to be Islamic extremists opposed to Indian control of Kashmir. Heavy monsoon rains gripped Bombay late last night, flooding streets and even the entrances to big hospitals as, in the absence of ambulances and a co-ordinated rescue effort, members of the public carried the dying and wounded to police stations and clinics in a desperate search for help."

Added today:
"Trouble in Londonistan" (Daniel Pipes, New York Sun/danielpipes.org, 2006/07/11)

Tuesday, July 11, 2006

News and commentary:

"Victims of a train blast..."
(Adeel Halim, Reuters, 2006/07/11)
"Victims of a train blast are treated at a hospital in Mumbai, formerly known as Bombay, July 11, 2006."

"Death toll in India train bombings now 131" (Ramola Talwar Badam, AP/Yahoo! News, 2006/07/11)
"BOMBAY, India - Seven bombs hit Bombay's commuter rail network during rush hour Tuesday evening, killing at least 131 people and wounding more than 300 in what authorities called a well-coordinated attack. India's major cities were put on high alert after the blasts, and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called an emergency Cabinet meeting.
Chaos engulfed the crowded rail network in India's financial capital following the blasts that ripped apart train compartments as authorities struggled to treat the wounded amid heavy monsoon downpours. Doors and windows were blown off the train cars, and luggage and debris were strewn across the tracks.
An Indian news agency report put the death toll at 131.
"We are busy in the rescue operation. Our first priority is to rescue the injured people," he said.
There was no immediate claim of responsibility in the bombings, which came in quick succession — a common tactic employed by Kashmiri militants that have repeatedly targeted India's cities."

"Somali Islamists vow to crush resistance as last warlord flees" (AFP/Yahoo! News, 2006/07/11)
"MOGADISHU (AFP) - Islamists now in full control of the Somali capital vowed to "destroy" all resistance to their religious rule as the city's last secular warlord fled after surrendering in fierce battles.
Islamic militia scoured southern Mogadishu for weapons still outside their hands following the defeat late Monday of warlord Abdi Hassan Awale Qeydiid in bloody clashes that left at least 100 dead since the weekend. ...
The Islamists now control all of Mogadishu and have been tightening their religious grip on the capital since seizing most of it on June 5 from the warlords.
An exact death toll was impossible to obtain but officials at the capital's four main hospitals said at least 100 people had been killed and more than 200 injured in two days of clashes that ended late Monday with the warlord's surrender."

"Trouble in Londonistan" (Daniel Pipes, New York Sun/danielpipes.org, 2006/07/11)
Londonistan II: "The London transport bombings of July 2005 prompted no less than eight surveys of Muslim opinion in the United Kingdom within the year. When added to two surveys from 2004, they provide in the aggregate a unique insight into the thinking of the nearly 2 million Muslims in "Londonistan." The hostile mentality they portray is especially alarming when one recalls that London's police commissioner, Sir Ian Blair, recently said that the threat of terrorism "is very grim" because there are, "as we speak, people in the United Kingdom planning further atrocities."
The July 7 attacks: About one in 20 British Muslims has voiced overt sympathy for the bombings a year ago. Separate polls find that between 2% and 6% endorse the attacks, 4% refuse to condemn them, 5% believe the Koran justifies them, and 6% say the suicide bombers were acting in accord with the principles of Islam.
Without endorsing the attacks, far larger numbers show an understanding for them: Thirteen percent say the July 7 suicide bombers should be regarded as "martyrs," 16% say the attacks were wrong but the cause was right, while 20% feel sympathy for the "feelings and motives" of the attackers. A whopping 56% can see "why some people behave in that way. ...
Implementing Islamic law: Muslims widely state that Shariah should reign in Britain. Forty percent approve of Shariah being applied in predominantly Muslim areas, and 61% want Shariah courts to settle civil cases among Muslims. All of 58% want those who criticize or insult Islam to face criminal prosecution.
In sum, more than half of British Muslims want Islamic law and 5% endorse violence to achieve that end. These results demonstrate that Britain's potential terrorists live in a highly nurturing community."

"After Londonistan" (Caroline Glick, The Jerusalem Post, 2006/07/11)
Londonistan I. "One year after the London bombings, with Britain slouching towards dhimmitude and the Bush Doctrine in shambles, it is hard to keep from wondering what it will take for the free nations of the world to abandon appeasement and fight for victory.":
"Yet, as Melanie Phillips points out in painstaking and hair-raising detail in her book Londonistan, Blair's efforts to curb the influence of radical jihadists and undermine their operations were quickly stymied. The multiculturalists who have taken hold of Britain's cultural, intellectual, judicial, ecclesiastical and political life attacked, blocked or watered down every single one of his anti-terror initiatives. In the end, far from winning over his seemingly endless critics, Blair backed down. ...
One of the chief demands of Britain's radical Muslims is for Britain to change its foreign policy regarding Israel and the US. The view that Britain should take a pro-Islamic stance on issues such as Hamas, the US-led campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan and the Iranian nuclear weapons program in order to placate British Muslims has gained currency in British foreign policy circles.
Labor MP John Denhan, chairman of the Commons Home Affairs Select Committee said in September 2005, 'We need to recognize that some foreign policy has now a very direct impact on domestic policy. We may well need to …be prepared to change the emphasis of our foreign policy in order to safeguard our security…It is no exaggeration to say that Israeli policy in the occupied territories is not simply a matter of foreign policy - it is a matter of British domestic security as well.'"

"Al-Aksa announce female bomber unit" (Khaled Abu Toameh, The Jerusalem Post, 2006/07/11)
"A group belonging to Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas's Fatah party announced on Monday that it had recruited 100 Palestinian women to launch suicide attacks against Israel.
A woman who identified herself as Um al-Abed told reporters in Gaza City that so far about 100 women had expressed their desire to carry out suicide attacks against Israel. She claimed she was a spokeswoman for the Aksa Martyrs Brigades, the armed wing of Fatah.
The brigades, she added, recently established a secret military unit for female suicide bombers from the West Bank, Gaza Strip and Jerusalem. "We have so far recruited 100 women for the new unit," Abed said as she sat next to several masked women who identified themselves as members of Fatah. "We are expecting more female suicide bombers. The new unit is now preparing to launch attacks against Israel in response to the Israeli aggression and crimes against our people in the Gaza Strip."
Since September 2000, Palestinian women have carried out seven suicide bombings inside Israel, in which 37 people were killed and more than 250 were wounded."

Added today:
"Palestinian suicide strategy" (Barry Rubin, The Jerusalem Post, 2006/07/10)
"Landmark al Qaeda trial collapses" (CNN.com, 2006/07/08)

Monday, July 10, 2006

News and commentary:

"Anti-Semite of the Year" (Tim Blair, timblair.net, 2006/07/10)
"Fairfax columnist Alex Mitchell in yesterday’s Sun-Herald (no link available):

Sixty years ago, if David Hicks was a POW in a Japanese or German concentration camp, we’d consider him a war hero.

Given Hicks’ hatred of Jews, it’s easier to imagine him running a German concentration camp than being imprisoned in one. It gets worse:

For his refusal to grovel to his jailers at Guantanamo and his unbreakable spirit, Hicks should receive nominations from all over the country to become this year’s Australian of the Year.

“Unbreakable spirit”, eh? The worthless punk has already quit his religion and renounced his former opposition to the West; a pillowcase is more fold-resistant.
Which is largely beside the point. What we have here is a senior journalist at a mainstream newspaper announcing that his choice as the finest Australian of the year is a maniac who joined an armed mission to end “Western-Jewish domination”. And still Mitchell isn’t finished:

Let’s hope that servicemen and women and people of goodwill send in entries to bring him home in glory from the illegal gulag of the fanatical idiocy of the Bush Administration.

Here’s another line from the chap whom Mitchell would bring home in glory:

If I do meet fate this is called martyrdom . . . the highest position in heaven is to go fighting in the way of God against the friends of Satan.

What was that about “fanatical idiocy”, Alex?"

"Chechen rebel leader dies in truck blast" (Judith Ingram, AP/Yahoo! News, 2006/07/10)
"MOSCOW - Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev, responsible for modern Russia's worst terrorist attacks, was killed Monday when a dynamite-laden truck exploded in his convoy, Russian officials said.
Federal Security Service head Nikolai Patrushev told President Vladimir Putin that Basayev had been killed overnight in a special operation conducted by Russian forces in Ingushetia, the area of southern Russia that borders Chechnya. Patrushev's meeting with Putin was shown on Russian state television.
Basayev, 41, was behind some of Russia's worst terror attacks, including the seizure of a Moscow theater in 2002 in which dozens of hostages and militants died, the 2004 school hostage taking in Beslan that killed 331, and the seizure of about 1,000 hostages at a hospital in Budyonnovsk that killed about 100.
Patrushev gave no details of Basayev's death in his televised remarks, but an Ingush regional Interior Ministry official, speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the media, said he had been killed while accompanying a truck filled with 220 pounds of dynamite that blew up in the Ingush village of Ekazhevo early Monday.
Basayev was among four militants killed in the blast.
The Kavkaz-Center Web site, which is considered a voice for Basayev, confirmed that he died "as a martyr." Citing a member of the rebel parliament, Abu Umar, it said Basayev had died in an accidental explosion of a truck Monday."

"Palestinian suicide strategy" (Barry Rubin, The Jerusalem Post, 2006/07/10)
"HERE ARE the basic points for understanding Palestinian politics: ...

• Whatever the common people think privately, the vast majority of activists believe everything must be subsumed to the struggle.

Democracy, living standards, women's rights and so on have no value outside contributing to the battle against Israel. This is why the idea of appealing to Palestinian material interests or finding some leader who puts the priority on achieving peace and plenty fails.

• The interim goal is to be able to claim phony victories, which are actually costly defeats. If after 40 years of armed struggle the movement's great triumphs are destroying one Israeli outpost a year or kidnapping a single soldier, this shows its remarkable weakness on the battlefield. Inflicting damage on Israel via rocket attacks serves no Palestinian strategic objective except to make people feel good about damaging Israel (even while they suffer far more damage themselves).

Celebrating martyrs simply means bragging about your own casualties. ...
Such a suicide strategy, like suicide bombing, can inflict losses on the enemy but cannot defeat it. Indeed, by sacrificing so many possible benefits it ensures that the gap steadily widens in favor of the other side.
Far from any sign of resistance to this disastrous approach it seems capable of providing decades more of glorious defeat and martyrdom. Maybe it will even go on long enough for those in the West who keep expecting something different to understand what's going on."

 

See the archive for earlier news and commentary.

 

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"When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent. The term is not a slur; it is a technical label."

Jacques Barzun

Articles of the week

"Losing the Enlightenment" (Victor Davis Hanson, OpinionJournal, 2006/11/29)

"Allah’s England?" (Daniel Johnson, Commentary. November 2006)

"'Sex in the Park': The latest doings of the Danish imams" (Henrik Bering, The Weekly Standard, 2006/11/18)

"Narcissism on Stilts" (Harold Evans, New York Sun, 2006/11/16)

"Terrorists are recruiting in our schools, says MI5 boss" (Philip Johnston, The Daily Telegraph, 2006/11/10)

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From the archives

Oriana Fallaci, R.I.P.

"The Rage, the Pride and the Doubt" (Oriana Fallaci, The Wall Street Journal, 2003/03/13)

"How the West Was Won and How It Will Be Lost" (Oriana Fallaci, The American Enterprise, from the January/February 2003 issue)

"On Jew-hatred in Europe" (Oriana Fallaci, dennisprager.com, 2002/04/13)

"Anger and Pride" (Oriana Fallaci, dennisprager.com, 2001/12/19)

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