24-Feb-10: A further word about systematic murderers

Michael Totten, an American who has written extensively from many of the Middle East's battlefields as a freelance reporter and who describes himself as "weird combination of liberal, libertarian, and neocon", makes some points that seem to have gotten overlooked in the Dubai assassination jamboree.

"Even as European Union officials perfunctorily squawk about the use of forged passports by the assassins, few others have grounds to complain. Al-Mabhouh was a terrorist commander on a mission to acquire Iranian weapons for use against civilians. He was a combatant. Unlike his victims, he was fair game. He would have been fair game for even an air strike if he were in Gaza. As he was, instead, in Dubai, he was taken out quietly without even alerting, let alone harming, any of the civilians around him. If only Israel could fight all its battles this way. It would be the cleanest and least-deadly war in the history of warfare. Even some of Israel’s harshest critics should understand that... Hamas and Hezbollah use civilians as human shields. Hezbollah uses an entire country as a vast human shield... If the Arab-Israeli conflict will continue — and it will continue — civilians on both sides should prefer combatants be taken off the board quietly while everyone else goes about their daily business in peace."

This is from "More Like This Please", published yesterday on Commentary's website. The whole article is here.

24-Feb-10: Dealing with systematic murderers in an era of systematic bias

For those of us aware from up-close of the grotesque distortions and hypocrisy that characterize much of the international discourse about all things Israeli, the double-talk that accompanies discussions about what to do with terrorists is especially galling.

As parents of a child murdered by terrorists, we know too well where this leads.

Gerald Steinberg heads NGO Monitor. Uniquely, it focuses on "the practice used by certain self-declared 'humanitarian NGOs' of exploiting the label 'universal human rights values' to promote politically and ideologically motivated anti-Israel agendas". Not an easy role to fill, but NGO does it honorably and with more honesty and intellectual rigor than anyone else we know. Today his op ed in the Wall Street Journal makes some telling points about how the slogans and knee-jerks of those who invoke 'international law' and 'human rights' have left us exposed, quite incredibly, to the depraved hate-driven incitement, threats and actual murders, of forces of jihad and its many, many supporters.

Israel's Right to Self-Defense

The Dubai hit exposes the failure of international law to fight jihadi terror, forcing the Jewish state to act independently
Gerald M. Steinberg, Wall Street Journal Feb 23, 2010

The headlines and video images allegedly showing Israeli spies in Dubai are titillating, but they mask the serious issues involved in the death of Hamas terrorist Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. Along with predictable European hand-wringing over forged passports, this case is the latest example of the failure of the international legal system and the United Nations to provide a remedy to mass terror.

Al-Mabhouh was a cold-blooded murderer—in an interview just last year on Al Jazeera he boasted about kidnapping and then killing two Israeli soldiers. He was also a major figure in arranging arms shipments from Iran to Gaza. Al-Mabhouh shared responsibility for the thousands of rocket attacks fired at civilians in Sderot and other Israeli towns, which resulted in last year's war in Gaza. In his travels, the Hamas terrorist was probably making arrangements for the next round of attacks.

But international law provides no means for stopping terrorists like Al-Mabhouh, or for his Hezbollah counterpart, Imad Moughniyeh, whose life ended with an explosion in Damascus in 2008. (In addition to numerous attacks against Israelis, Moughniyeh has been blamed for the 1983 Beirut bombings that killed hundreds of American and French peacekeepers and the murder of Lebanese President Rafik Hariri.) Cases involving Muslim terrorists, supported by Iran, would never be pursued by the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, or raised in the framework of the United Nations. Al-Mabhouh violated the human rights of untold Israeli civilians, but the U.N.'s Human Rights Council—which is dominated by such moral stalwarts as Libya, Algeria, and Iran—has no interest in Israeli complaints.

It is equally hard to imagine Interpol issuing arrest warrants in response to Israeli requests. And if warrants were issued, history shows that German, French, Belgian, and other European governments would not risk the consequences of acting on them. Little effort was ever made to apprehend the perpetrators of the Munich Olympic massacre, or of the deadly bombing attacks against synagogues in Istanbul and Athens. It's a widely known secret that European governments had ungentlemanly agreements with the PLO that allowed the Palestinians to operate from their territories, provided the terror attacks occurred elsewhere. Not until 2003 did the EU even put Hamas on its terror list. Hezbollah is currently free to operate in Europe.

The bitter reality is that for Israel, international legal frameworks provide no protection and no hope of justice. Instead, these frameworks are used to exploit the rhetoric of human rights and morality to attack Israel. In European courts, universal jurisdiction statutes, initially created to apprehend and try dictators and genocidal leaders, are now exploited as weapons in the service of the Palestinian cause. In this way, Israeli defense officials are branded as "war criminals."

Similarly, Richard Goldstone's predetermined "fact finding inquiry" into the Gaza war makes no mention of Al-Mabhouh or Iran, which supplied Hamas with over 10,000 rockets for attacks against Israelis. Mr. Goldstone and his team have remained silent about what would be the "legal" way to bring jihadi murderers to justice. In their efforts to demonize Israel, Palestinian terror actually doesn't really exist. The Goldstone team simply refused to accept conclusive Israeli video evidence of Hamas war crimes.

The same legal distortions are found among the organizations that claim to be the world's moral guardians, such as Human Rights Watch. HRW's systematic bias is reflected in a Middle East division that sees no problem in holding fund-raising dinners in Saudi Arabia—one of the world's worst human rights violators and a country officially still at war with Israel—to help finance their campaigns against the Jewish state.

In the absence of any legal remedies or Western solidarity, Israel's only option to protect its citizens from terror has always been to act independently and with force. When in 1976 a group of Palestinian and German terrorists hijacked an Israel-bound Air France plane to Uganda and separated the Jewish passengers, Israel decided to act. In a daring mission, it rescued all but three passengers while killing all terrorists and several Ugandan soldiers who had been protecting the terrorists. Back then, Israel's detractors also fretted about the "violation of Ugandan sovereignty" even though dictator Idi Amin was in cahoots with the terrorists. Entebbe, though, quickly became the gold standard for successful counter-terror operations. Only a year later, Israeli-trained German special forces freed in Mogadishu, Somalia a Lufthansa plane hijacked by Palestinian terrorists. Similarly, when after years of horrific suicide bombings Israel pioneered the targeted killings of Hamas terrorists—often with the help of unmanned drones—Israel's Western adversaries complained about "extrajudicial assassinations." Today, though, U.S. forces have copied Israel's technique with their own drone killings of jihadi terrorists in the Afghan-Pakistan border region.

Unlike those Predator strikes, though, which hardly raise an eyebrow in the West these days, there was no "collateral damage" in the mysterious Dubai hit. No innocent civilians were hurt, no buildings were damaged. Justice was done, and al-Mabhouh's preparations for the next war ended quietly.

All this is lost on those diplomats, "legal experts," and pundits who blame Israel for Dubai, and angrily denounce the passport infractions. In the absence of viable alternatives, and a refusal to share any of the risks, they are in no position to condemn actions aimed at preventing more terror.

Prof. Gerald Steinberg teaches political science at Bar Ilan University and heads NGO Monitor.

19-Feb-10: Iranian migraine - finally recognized for what it is

Finally, after years of double-talk and wink-wink-nod-nod looking the other way, the International Atomic Energy Agency now - when it's basically too late to do anything about it - announces, in effect, that the Israelis were right all along and the Iranians are cooking up a doomsday plot with their eyes wide open.

Why now? Perhaps because the unlovely and certainly unlamented Mohammed Mustaffa El Baradei who ran the IAEA for years has left and gone back to Egypt to run for the presidency.

Four months ago, speaking (of all places) in Tehran, this Nobel Peace Prize laureate said "Israel is the number one threat to Middle East". He was in Iran, as the newsagencies like to put things, "for talks with Iranian officials over Teheran's nuclear program"...but those talks somehow never lead this highly ideological individual to say what Blind Freddie could see: that the Mullahs and the Ayatollahs are in a headlong rush to become a nuclear force.

A month before his visit to Teheran, El Baradei was quoted by the BBC saying that there was "no credible evidence" about an Iranian weapons attempt. He said: "I do not think based on what we see that Iran has an ongoing nuclear weapons programme."

Thank heavens he's gone. If only it had been much sooner. 

UN watchdog raises fears over Iran's nuclear aims
By Daniel Dombey and Anna Fifield in Washington
Published: February 19 2010 02:00 | Last updated: February 19 2010 02:00

The United Nations nuclear watchdog said it was worried Iran could be working on "a nuclear payload for a missile", in its most hard-hitting report on Tehran's atomic programme. It also highlighted the possibility that Iran might shift almost its entire stock of low enriched uranium closer to weapons grade.

In a report that seemed set to increase tension in the nuclear dispute and bolster the US's push for UN sanctions, the International Atomic Energy Agency said it had "broadly consistent and credible" information about activities that could help Tehran develop atomic weapons. These included work with high explosives, designs that could help a missile carry fissile material and attempts by people linked to Iran's military to obtain nuclear technology and equipment.

"This raises concerns about the possible existence in Iran of past or current undisclosed activities related to the development of a nuclear payload for a missile," the IAEA said. It added that it sought discussions with Iran about "alleged activities related to nuclear explosives".

In a contradiction of Bush administration-era US intelligence - that Iran had suspended work on nuclear weaponisation in 2003 - the report said the activities it described "seem to have continued beyond 2004"...

Iran says it wants to enrich uranium to 20 per cent to fuel a medical research reactor and has declined an international offer for its low-enriched uranium to be processed in other countries instead. But analysts said that Iran would need far less than the 1,950kg to meet the research reactor's needs and that the current stockpile would provide comfortably more than enough fissile material for a bomb, if further processed. The report indicated that Iran's activity at its enrichment plant in Natanz was still operating at far less than capacity, with only 3,772 centrifuges being fed with nuclear feedstock out of 8,610 installed.

More here

17-Feb-10: A growing Iranian migraine

An analytic piece entitled "Iran's Brinkmanship Is Paying Off", published by the Institute for National Security Studies at Tel Aviv University connects the dots over there in our near-neighbour Iran's very nasty labs and bunkers.It's a deeply worrying picture.

Iran has begun enriching uranium from 3.5 to 20% uranium-235. This demonstrates Iran's complete defiance of the international position regarding its nuclear development program.

The report points out what we did not want to know: if Iran amasses a stock of 20% enriched uranium, then the time to produce nuclear weapons has become quite short. Iran can no longer be considered a threshold state, but a full-fledged nuclear power.

On Tuesday, February 8, 2010, Ali Akbar Salehi, the head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization, announced that Iran began enriching uranium from 3.5 to 20% uranium-235. Iran claims that it needs this uranium for its Tehran Nuclear Research Reactor (TNRR)... This statement has serious ramifications.

By way of illustration, assume that approximately 3,000 units of work are needed to produce 25 kilograms of uranium enriched to 90%, the amount and purity needed for a nuclear explosive device. Of these, some 2,350 units are needed to enrich the uranium to 3.5%. Five hundred units are needed to further enrich the uranium to 20%, and only 150 units of work are needed to enrich the uranium from 20 to 90 percent. If the enrichment facility is ready, this last step can be accomplished in a matter of a few weeks. And this is what could happen if Iran builds up a stock of 20% enriched uranium.

Recent announcements that the US is strengthening its missile defenses in the Gulf region could be taken as a sign that the US is preparing for such an eventuality. Even worse, this could be taken as a sign that the US has almost given up hope that Iran can be persuaded, either diplomatically or through severe sanctions, to at least suspend, if not dismantle its uranium enrichment operations.

If Iran has a stock of 20% enriched uranium it can no longer be considered a threshold state, but a full-fledged nuclear power. This approach is essential, if preparations are to be made to deal with such a situation.

As if we did not have enough security headaches already.