FOXNEWS
Vessel purportedly carrying aid for Palestinians sets a new course after Israel’s navy warned it away from the blockaded Gaza Strip.
[Editor's Commentary: Classic example of the "iron fist in the velvet glove. All you have to do is to explain to these thugs that you will blow their ship out of the water and lo, and behold, they finally get the message. Now that their third attempt at running the Israeli blockade has failed, I wonder what the next publicity stunt will be?]
Iris Twito, the mother of two sons injured by Qassam rockets in the city of Sderot, decided to grant an exclusive interview with Sderot Media Center, following the Gaza aid flotilla fiasco. “The entire world hates us,” said Iris, “but they don’t know what we’ve been through.”
The Twito family is a living testament for why there is a naval blockade on Gaza. “It’s not just Sderot that is under threat today, but the whole country,” said Iris. “It is vital that we stop these flotilla boats because we cannot allow Hamas to terrorize our Israeli children.”
Sitting on her patio in Ashdod, with a cigarette in hand, Iris recalls the most horrifying experience a mother can go through. Three years ago, Iris’s sons Osher and Rami, then eight and 19 respectively, were walking to an ATM in Sderot, when the rocket alarm went off. As the two brothers frantically attempted to locate a shelter in the middle of one of Sderot’s main streets, the Qassam rocket struck meters away from the two.
The exploded shrapnel sliced through the boys’ legs. Residents poured out to the street to help, but another rocket alert went off, forcing everyone to flee to shelter again. Moments later, the ambulances arrived to transport the boys to the closest hospital, Ashkelon’s Barzilai Hospital, located 20 minutes away from Sderot.
Amidst the flashing cameras at what was one of Sderot’s goriest scenes resulting from a rocket attack, Iris collapsed from the shock of seeing of her two sons lying next to each other, surrounded by a pool of their own blood. The entire city of 19,000 were subsequently shocked by the developments to follow.
The rocket attack left Osher in a coma for two weeks. The young boy had to go through intensive surgeries; his left leg had to be amputated, and doctors had to operate on a hole in his chest and his injured lungs. The older brother Rami’s legs were also badly damaged and operated on.
After a year in the hospital, Osher was released in a bright red wheelchair. His right leg was still badly damaged, but a new artificial limb was fitted on his left.
“Osher goes to intensive therapy every week to this day to help adjust to walking again,” said Iris. Osher, with big brown eyes and a freckled face, walks over to sit by his mother, slowly limping and murmurs hello.
Iris and her husband decided that it would be best to move the family from the heart of Hamas’s target city, Sderot, to Ashdod, Israel’s fifth largest city that is located 40 kilometers (24 miles) away from the Gaza Strip and was not under missile threat at that time.
Read more at frontpagemag.com……
[Editor's Commentary: I said in a recent post that if I were the Prime Minister of Israel that the next ship that tried to be a Gaza blockade-buster would get a torpedo right below the waterline. I have no idea what went on in diplomatic back channels this past week, but somebody must have delivered a message to the Mad Mullahs in Iran that it would not be in their best interests to send another phoney "relief ship" to attempt to challenge Israel's sovereignty over it's territorial waters.
As many leaders have said over the years, weakness invites aggression. Standing up to the lunatics in charge of Iran works wonders and as a result, the world is a little safer this weekend and no one will lose their life in cynical, staged propaganda event.]
TEHRAN, Iran – Iran will not be sending a blockade-busting ship to Gaza in defiance of Israeli warnings, an Iranian lawmaker said Saturday, citing Israeli “restrictions.”
Mahmoud Ahmadi Bighash told the semiofficial ISNA news agency that instead of sending a ship, an Iranian delegation of lawmakers would travel to Lebanon and sail on one of the aid ships expected to head to Gaza from there.
The Iranian ship called “Infants of Gaza” had been expected to sail Sunday for Gaza carrying 1,100 tons of relief supplies and 10 pro-Palestinian activists but plans were canceled “due to restrictions imposed by the occupying Zionist regime,” Bighash said.
Iran made the announcement Tuesday prompting Israel to warn its archenemy to drop the plan.
Israel considers Iran a threat because of its suspect nuclear program, its long-range missiles and its support for Lebanese and Gaza militants.
Israeli security officials said the prospect of an Iranian boat headed for Gaza had Israel deeply worried, and that naval commandos were training for the possibility of taking on a vessel with a suicide bomber on board.
After an international outcry over the killing of nine Turkish activists in a May 31 raid on another aid ship, Israel eased its land blockade of Gaza but insisted on maintaining a naval blockade it says is necessary to keep weapons shipments out of the hands of Gaza’s Hamas rulers.
Israel imposed the blockade after Hamas overran the Palestinian territory in June 2007.
In Lebanon, organizers of the ship, “Julia,” said they plan to sail in the next few days but said they had nothing to with Iran. A second ship will only be transporting women, while a third ship will include parliamentarians from the Middle East and Europe. It is not clear when that ship will sail.
Read more at news.yahoo.com……
Saudi Arabia has conducted tests to stand down its air defences to enable Israeli jets to make a bombing raid on Iran’s nuclear facilities, The Times can reveal.
In the week that the UN Security Council imposed a new round of sanctions on Tehran, defence sources in the Gulf say that Riyadh has agreed to allow Israel to use a narrow corridor of its airspace in the north of the country to shorten the distance for a bombing run on Iran.
To ensure the Israeli bombers pass unmolested, Riyadh has carried out tests to make certain its own jets are not scrambled and missile defence systems not activated. Once the Israelis are through, the kingdom’s air defences will return to full alert.
“The Saudis have given their permission for the Israelis to pass over and they will look the other way,” said a US defence source in the area. “They have already done tests to make sure their own jets aren’t scrambled and no one gets shot down. This has all been done with the agreement of the [US] State Department.”
Sources in Saudi Arabia say it is common knowledge within defence circles in the kingdom that an arrangement is in place if Israel decides to launch the raid. Despite the tension between the two governments, they share a mutual loathing of the regime in Tehran and a common fear of Iran’s nuclear ambitions. “We all know this. We will let them [the Israelis] through and see nothing,” said one.
The four main targets for any raid on Iran would be the uranium enrichment facilities at Natanz and Qom, the gas storage development at Isfahan and the heavy-water reactor at Arak. Secondary targets include the lightwater reactor at Bushehr, which could produce weapons-grade plutonium when complete.
The targets lie as far as 1,400 miles (2,250km) from Israel; the outer limits of their bombers’ range, even with aerial refuelling. An open corridor across northern Saudi Arabia would significantly shorten the distance. An airstrike would involve multiple waves of bombers, possibly crossing Jordan, northern Saudi Arabia and Iraq. Aircraft attacking Bushehr, on the Gulf coast, could swing beneath Kuwait to strike from the southwest.
Passing over Iraq would require at least tacit agreement to the raid from Washington. So far, the Obama Administration has refused to give its approval as it pursues a diplomatic solution to curbing Iran’s nuclear ambitions. Military analysts say Israel has held back only because of this failure to secure consensus from America and Arab states. Military analysts doubt that an airstrike alone would be sufficient to knock out the key nuclear facilities, which are heavily fortified and deep underground or within mountains. However, if the latest sanctions prove ineffective the pressure from the Israelis on Washington to approve military action will intensify. Iran vowed to continue enriching uranium after the UN Security Council imposed its toughest sanctions yet in an effort to halt the Islamic Republic’s nuclear programme, which Tehran claims is intended for civil energy purposes only. President Ahmadinejad has described the UN resolution as “a used handkerchief, which should be thrown in the dustbin”.
Israeli officials refused to comment yesterday on details for a raid on Iran, which the Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, has refused to rule out. Questioned on the option of a Saudi flight path for Israeli bombers, Aharaon Zeevi Farkash, who headed military intelligence until 2006 and has been involved in war games simulating a strike on Iran, said: “I know that Saudi Arabia is even more afraid than Israel of an Iranian nuclear capacity.”
Read more at thetimesonline.com……
The hilarious spoof of the song “We Are the World” that was produced by Caroline Glick, “We Con the World,” has been pulled by YouTube due to a copyright claim.
Check out this comedy video on the same Gaza Flotilla story that shows one of the “peace activists” telling his story about the “enormous gun” the Israeli commando was firing at him. Since it was dark, he couldn’t tell what kind of a gun it was, but he thought it was “either an RPG (rocket propelled grenade) or a flamethrower.”
Wait, what did they call it again?…………a paintball gun?
Peaceful takeover occurs days after bloody raid
msnbc.com news services
JERUSALEM – Israeli forces seized a Gaza-bound aid vessel without meeting resistance Saturday, preventing it from breaking an Israeli maritime blockade of the Hamas-ruled territory days after a similar effort turned bloody.
The IDF said they informed the crew of the MV Rachel Corrie that the Gaza Strip was under blockade and that the ship should put to port in the southern coastal city of Ashdod.
However, officials said the Irish ship continued steaming toward Gaza despite the presence of three Israeli warships sent to shadow the vessel.
The ship — named for an American college student who was crushed to death by a bulldozer in 2003 while protesting Israeli house demolitions in Gaza — was carrying hundreds of tons of aid, including wheelchairs, medical supplies and cement.
The Rachel Corrie had got to roughly 40 miles off the coast of Gaza at about 8 a.m. local time (1 a.m. ET) Saturday when officials asked the crew by radio to identify themselves, Israeli officials told NBC news.
“You are approaching an area of hostilities which is under a naval blockade,” the military said in a transcript of excerpts of its communication with the ship.
Read more at msnbc.com…..
Hat Tip to Jayde at MittRomneyCentral and PowerlineBlog.com for this great YouTube that uses music and humor to convey an underlying truth: The State of Israel was right to use it’s military to defend it’s sovereign right to use force against armed terrorists who were illegally attempting to enter it’s territorial waters and to defy Israel’s legitimate desire to safeguard it’s people from continued rocket attacks.
The terrorists aboard the ships on that flotilla ought to be glad I’m not the Prime Minister of Israel. If I was I would use a torpedo right beneath the water line on the next ship that tried to run my blockade.
The repeated abdication of responsibility by the Obama administration from preventing nuclear non-proliferation leaves it on Israel’s shoulders.
So much for US President Barack Obama’s famed powers of persuasion. At the UN’s Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty review conference that opened this week, the Obama administration managed to lose control over the agenda before the conference even started.
Obama administration officials said they intended to use the conference as a platform to mount international pressure on Iran to stop its illicit nuclear proliferation activities. But even before the conference began, with a little prodding from Egypt, the administration agreed that instead of focusing on Iran, the conference would adopt Iran’s chosen agenda: attacking Israel for its alleged nuclear arsenal.
Last week, The Wall Street Journal reported that US officials were conducting negotiations with Egypt about Egypt’s demand that the NPT review conference call for sanctions against Israel for refusing to join the NPT as a non-nuclear state. The Journal quoted a senior administration official involved in the discussions saying, “We’ve made a proposal to them [Egypt] that goes beyond what the US has been willing to do before.”
Among other possibilities, that proposal may have included a US agreement to appoint a UN envoy responsible for organizing a UN conference calling for the greater Middle East to become a nuclear-free zone. In diplomatese, “Middle East nuclear-free zone” is a well-accepted euphemism for stripping Israel of its purported nuclear capability while turning a blind eye to Iranian, Syrian and other Islamic nuclear weapons programs. Egypt’s demand, which it convinced more than 100 members of the Non-Aligned Bloc to sign onto, is for Israel to open its nuclear installations to international inspectors as a first step towards unilateral nuclear disarmament.
On Wednesday, the US joined the other four permanent members of the Security Council in signing a statement calling for a nuclear-free Middle East and urging Israel, Pakistan and India to accede to the NPT as non-nuclear states. Following the US’s lead, on Thursday Yukiya Amano, the new director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency, wrote a letter to IAEA member states asking for their suggestions for how to convince Israel to sign the NPT.
So as Iran – an NPT signatory – makes a mockery of the treaty by building nuclear weapons in contempt of its treaty obligations, the US has actively supported Iran’s bid to use the NPT review conference as yet another UN forum for bashing Israel.
It bears recalling that the primary goal of the NPT is to prevent nuclear proliferation. From the amount of attention Israel is receiving at the NPT review conference, you could easily get the impression that Israel’s purported nuclear arsenal is the gravest proliferation threat in the world today. But history shows that this is nonsense.
Read more @ The Jerusalem Post.com……
JERUSALEM (AFP) – Syria’s government routinely ships weapons to Lebanon’s Shiite militia Hezbollah in an operation that goes well beyond sporadic smuggling, a top Israeli intelligence officer said on Tuesday.
The head of the military intelligence research department, Brigadier General Yossi Baidatz, told a parliamentary committee that Hezbollah’s arsenal included thousands of rockets of all ranges and types, some solid-fuelled.
Baidatz did not specifically name the long-range Scud missiles which Israeli President Shimon Peres has accused Hezbollah of stockpiling, but appeared to allude to Peres’ warnings.
“The shipments of long-range missiles which have been reported recently are only the tip of the iceberg,” Baidatz told the Foreign Affairs and Defence Committee.
“Syria has a significant role in the growing strength of Hezbollah’s rocket arsenal,” he said. “Weapons are sent to Hezbollah from Syria on a regular basis under the direction of the Syrian and Iranian regimes.”
Read more at yahoo.com
Very interesting video about Israel and the success that country enjoys out of all proportion to it’s size.
~~John Cronin~~
By: Ben Smith
New York Senator Chuck Schumer harshly criticized the Obama Administration’s attempts to exert pressure on Israel today, making him the highest-ranking Democrat to object to Obama’s policies in such blunt terms.
Schumer, along with a majority of members of the House and Senate, signed on to letters politely suggesting the U.S. keep its disagreements with Israel private, a tacit objection to the administration’s very public rebuke of the Jewish State over construction in Jerusalem last month.
But Schumer dramatically sharpened his tone on the politically conservative Jewish Nachum Segal Show today, calling the White House stance to date “counter-productive” and describing his own threat to “blast” the Administration had the State Department not backed down from its “terrible” tough talk toward Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Schumer, a hawkish ally of Israel since his days as a Brooklyn Congressman, described “a battle going on inside the administration” over Middle East policy.
“This has to stop,” he said of the administration’s policy of publicly pressuring Israel to end construction in Jerusalem.
“I told the President, I told Rahm Emanuel and others in the administration that I thought the policy they took to try to bring about negotiations is counter-productive, because when you give the Palestinians hope that the United States will do its negotiating for them, they are not going to sit down and talk,” Schumer told Segal. “Palestinians don’t really believe in a state of Israel. They, unlike a majority of Israelis, who have come to the conclusion that they can live with a two-state solution to be determined by the parties, the majority of Palestinians are still very reluctant, and they need to be pushed to get there.
“If the U.S. says certain things and takes certain stands the Palestinians say, ‘Why should we negotiate?’” Schumer said.
Read more at……
http://www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0410/Schumer_Obamas_
Counterproductive_Israel_policy_has_to_stop.html
Charles Krauthammer has his usual excellent article in the NRO in which he talks about Obama’s slight of one of our most reliable allies in the world, Great Britain. This “island race of people” as Winston Churchill used to refer to them, has been our ally in both World Wars and through other regional brush wars too numerous to name here. Dr. Krauthammer wonders aloud, as I do, as to why this President has such a dismissive attitude to a country that has spilled so much blood in the past and continues to do so alongside the USA.
To compound the offense, Obama is said to have embarrassed Benjamin Netanyahu when he was at the White House recently, by walking away from a Head of State and leaving the Israeli delegation to shift for themsleves. But in reality, Obama embarrassed the United States with his snub. I hope American Jewish voters will remember this in November. I know I will.
This inexperienced President has perplexed our traditional allies by ignoring those countries that look to America as their hoped for pattern and embracing those countries that hate us and what we stand for. North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, Russia and China.
I hope our allies, especially Great Britain, know that Obama only expresses the view of the hard Left. The bond between America and England lives on in the hearts of the citizens of this country. Hopefully, Obama and crew will soon be gone and we can officially re-establish the “special relationship” that has existed for more than a century.
To quote Churchill once more: “We shall not only endure, we shall prevail.”
~~John Cronin~~
Slapping Friends
By: Charles Krauthammer
The disrespect this administration has shown traditional allies makes no strategic or moral sense.
What is it like to be a foreign ally of Barack Obama’s America?
If you’re a Brit, your head is spinning. It’s not just the personal slights to Prime Minister Gordon Brown — the ridiculous 25-DVD gift, the five refusals before Brown was granted a one-on-one with The One.
Nor is it just the symbolism of Obama’s returning the Churchill bust that was in the Oval Office. Query: If it absolutely had to be out of Obama’s sight, could it not have been housed somewhere else on U.S. soil rather than ostentatiously repatriated?
Perhaps it was the State Department official who last year denied there even was a special relationship between the U.S. and Britain, a relationship cultivated by every U.S. president since Franklin Roosevelt.
And then there was Hillary Clinton’s astonishing, nearly unreported (in the U.S.) performance in Argentina last month. She called for Britain to negotiate with Argentina over the Falklands.
For those who know no history — or who believe that it began on Jan. 20, 2009 — and therefore don’t know why this was an out-of-the-blue slap at Britain, here’s the backstory:
In 1982, Argentina’s military junta invaded the (British) Falkland Islands. The generals thought the British, having long lost their taste for foreign lands, would let it pass. Besides, the Falklands have uncountably more sheep than people. They underestimated Margaret Thatcher (the Argentines, that is, not the sheep). She was not about to permit the conquest of a people whose political allegiance and ethnic ties are to Britain. She dispatched the navy. Britannia took it back.
Since then, neither Thatcher nor her successors have countenanced negotiations. Britain doesn’t covet foreign dominion and has no shortage of sheep. But it does believe in self-determination, and will negotiate nothing until and unless the Falkland Islanders indicate their desire to be ruled by a chronically unstable, endemically corrupt polity with a rich history of dictatorship, economic mismanagement, and occasional political lunacy (see: the Evita cult).
Not surprisingly, the Falkland Islanders have given no such indication. Yet inexplicably, Clinton sought to reopen a question that had been settled for almost 30 years, not just pointlessly stirring the embers but even taking the Argentine side (re: negotiations) against Britain — a nation that has fought and bled with us for the last decade and that today has about 10,000 troops, far more than any other ally, fighting alongside America in Afghanistan.
Of course, given how the administration has treated other allies, perhaps we shouldn’t be so surprised.
Read more @…..
http://article.nationalreview.com/430137/slapping-friends/charles-krauthammer
By: Giles Whittell, Washington, and James Hider, Jerusalem
For a head of government to visit the White House and not pose for photographers is rare. For a key ally to be left to his own devices while the President withdraws to have dinner in private was, until this week, unheard of. Yet that is how Binyamin Netanyahu was treated by President Obama on Tuesday night, according to Israeli reports on a trip viewed in Jerusalem as a humiliation.
After failing to extract a written promise of concessions on settlements, Mr Obama walked out of his meeting with Mr. Netanyahu but invited him to stay at the White House, consult with advisers and “let me know if there is anything new”, a US congressman, who spoke to the Prime Minister, said.
“It was awful,” the congressman said. One Israeli newspaper called the meeting “a hazing in stages”, poisoned by such mistrust that the Israeli delegation eventually left rather than risk being eavesdropped on a White House telephone line. Another said that the Prime Minister had received “the treatment reserved for the President of Equatorial Guinea”.
Left to talk among themselves Mr Netanyahu and his aides retreated to the Roosevelt Room. He spent a further half-hour with Mr Obama and extended his stay for a day of emergency talks to try to restart peace negotiations. However, he left last night with no official statement from either side. He returned to Israel yesterday isolated after what Israeli media have called a White House ambush for which he is largely to blame.
Sources said that Mr. Netanyahu failed to impress Mr Obama with a flow chart purporting to show that he was not responsible for the timing of announcements of new settlement projects in east Jerusalem. Mr Obama was said to be livid when such an announcement derailed the visit to Israel by Joe Biden, the Vice-President, this month and his anger towards Israel does not appear to have cooled.
Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, cast doubt on minor details in Israeli accounts of the meeting but did not deny claims that it amounted to a dressing down for the Prime Minister, whose refusal to freeze settlements is seen in Washington as the main barrier to resuming peace talks.
The Likud leader has to try to square the rigorous demands of the Obama Administration with his nationalist, ultra-Orthodox coalition partners, who want him to stand up to Washington even though Israel needs US backing in confronting the threat of a nuclear Iran.
Read More at timesonline.co.uk
By Larry Greenfield
On the Palestinian front, many now believe that the idea of a small PLO state within the 1967 borders, to include Gaza, major parts of the West Bank and east Jerusalem, has lost its appeal within Araby.
Radical Islamism, unrealistic expectations, and daily incitement against Israel in mosques, the media, and madrassas, have all added up to another era of Palestinian intransigence and irredentism.
Unfortunately, the drive for Palestinian independence has not been equated with responsible state building leading to the kind of sovereignty that would help the Palestinian people themselves.
Palestinians universally wish to cast Israel off their shoulders, but this does not mean they support a fair division of land, or a desire to live in peaceful coexistence with a Jewish state in the middle east.
Israeli journalist and commentator Ehud Ya’ari stated that the Palestinians have now fully collapsed into the unwilling arms of the Israelis, and that Israel must urgently solve the seemingly unsolvable.
Israel is today faced with a reverse annexation: It is the Palestinians who have decided to annex Israel, because Israel did not annex them first.
Complete Article at Big Government
Larry Greenfield is fellow in American studies at the Claremont Institute for the Study of Statesmanship & Political Philosophy. Larry will also be appearing on an upcoming edition of the Solid Principles Report.
By: Michelle Malkin
Republican Tom Campbell, who served in the House of Representatives for ten years between 1989 and 2001, is currently running for the U.S. Senate seat occupied by California Democrat Barbara Boxer. While the incumbent has acted as little more than a rubber stamp for the Obama agenda, it is by no means clear that Campbell would represent much of an improvement.
His credentials as a self-anointed “fiscal conservative” are tainted by several unsavory elements: an apparent hostility toward America’s staunch ally, Israel; an inability to comprehend the aggressive and hateful nature of radical Islam; an eagerness to appease Islamists who have intimate ties to known terrorists; and a propensity to repeatedly massage the truth until such time as his prevarications are publicly discredited with clear and compelling evidence – at which point Campbell typically concedes that he may have inadvertently goofed. These are hardly the qualities of a man who could be depended upon to help advance a conservative resurgence in America.
Consider, to start, Campbell’s most recent falsehood. In a February 24th interview, the candidate was asked whether there was any truth to an allegation that in 2000 he had accepted a campaign donation from Sami Al-Arian, the University of South Florida professor who was, at that time, the North American leader of Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) – a terrorist organization whose objectives include the destruction of Israel.
Campbell replied emphatically, “I received no contribution from Sami Al-Arian,” though he did concede it was possible that Al-Arian’s wife had given him some money that year. When a Federal Election Commission report subsequently showed that Al-Arian had in fact made a $1,000 donation to Campbell on May 2, 2000 – and that Al-Arian’s wife, Nahla, had given an additional $300 – Campbell reluctantly let the truth drip out:
“I apologize, but I made a mistake. I was aware that Sami Al-Arian had asked others to contribute to me … I did not realize that [he] had contributed himself. It was an honest mistake, with no attempt to mislead.”
Read more at Front Page Mag
Vice President Biden Says Palestinians Deserve ‘Viable’ State
Ramallah, West Bank (AP) – Vice President Joe Biden said Wednesday the Palestinians deserve a “viable” independent state with contiguous territory, seeking to reassure them of U.S. support after Israel announced plans to expand a Jewish neighborhood in disputed east Jerusalem.
The Israeli move has overshadowed Biden’s visit, meant to promote a new round of U.S.-led negotiations, and drawn Palestinian accusations that Israel is not serious about peace. Israel apologized for embarrassing Biden with the timing of its announcement, but made clear it has no intention of reversing its plan.
Read Complete Article at CNSNEWS.com
