Peres praises the ‘Egyptian war’ against Hamas
MEMO | January 6, 2014
Israeli President Shimon Peres has praised what he describes as “the war” being waged by the Egyptian authorities against the Islamic resistance movement Hamas.
Peres also celebrated, in statements during a meeting held on 5 January with foreign ministry representatives, the incitement campaigns being waged by some of the Egyptian authorities against the Palestinian resistance factions, particularly Hamas.
In the same context, Peres noted, “We may be in isolation, but we are not alone”, adding that: “the Arabs wanted to uproot Israel during its establishment; however, they have become convinced that Israel is not the problem, and they are utterly aware that terrorism is their first enemy.”
Last week, Egypt’s Interior Minister Mohammad Ibrahim claimed that Hamas had provided military training in the Gaza Strip for members of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, which the Egyptian authorities have now designated a terrorist organisation.
Former Mossad Chief Meir Dagan also praised Egypt’s campaign against Hamas ever since the military coup that deposed the former Egyptian president, Mohamed Morsi. He remarked that: “We don’t need to destroy Hamas, as Egypt is playing that role already.”
Attending the Majdi Forum in Kfar Saba, Dagan explained: “Israel has no interest in destroying Hamas, and the reason is the important efforts made by Egypt to dwarf Hamas’s power. And I also see a similar effort exerted by the Gulf countries. The State of Israel is not involved in these efforts.”
The Not-So-Imminent Iranian Nuke: A Year Away for a Decade
By Nima Shirazi | Wide Asleep in America | March 18, 2013
According to official estimates, the Islamic Republic of Iran is now roughly a year away from acquiring a nuclear bomb. Well, that is, if it were actually building a nuclear bomb. Which it’s not.
“Right now, we think it would take over a year or so for Iran to actually develop a nuclear weapon, but obviously we don’t want to cut it too close,” President Barack Obama told an Israeli television station on March 14, 2013. In order to stop Iran, Obama vowed to “continue to keep all options on the table,” a euphemism for engaging in an unprovoked military attack, thus initiating a war of aggression, the “supreme international crime.”
Obama’s statement came just two days after his own Director of National Intelligence told a Senate committee that the Iranian government had not made a decision to weaponize its legal, safeguarded civilian nuclear energy program. “We do not know if Iran will eventually decide to build nuclear weapons,” DNI James Clapper said. Even if it did, he added, Iran wouldn’t be able to secretly divert any of its stockpiled and safeguarded enrichment uranium to a weapons program.
The American president failed to make this distinction in his interview, instead saying only that a nuclear-armed Iran would be “dangerous for the world. It would be dangerous for U.S. national security interests.”
Repeating his administration’s main talking point, Obama told his Israeli interviewer, “What I have also said is that there is a window, not an infinite period of time, but a window of time where we can resolve this diplomatically and it is in all of our interests.”
But this window has already been open for decades and Iran has supposedly been only a year away from a bomb for the past ten years.
In November 2003, then Mossad chief Meir Dagan told the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee that Iran’s nuclear program would be at a “point of no return” within the next year and would then “have the potential to produce 10 nuclear bombs a year.” Israeli Defense Minster Shaul Mofaz repeated the one year “point of no return” timeline in early 2005, a claim reinforced by other Israeli officials throughout that year.
Similar estimates were made in 2006, 2007 and 2008. Oh, and 2009.
In April 2010, Ronald Burgess, director of the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the “general consensus” was that Iran could develop a single nuclear bomb within a year if the leadership decided to do so, despite maintaining that Iran didn’t have an active nuclear weapons program.
As the years have passed, this assessment has held fast.
In late January 2011, Aviv Kochavi, director of Israeli Military Intelligence, admitted Iran was not actively working on a nuclear weapon, but claimed it could build one in “a year or two” once “the leader decides to begin enriching at 90 percent.”
A year later, in January 2012, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta told 60 Minutes, “The consensus is that, if they decided to do it, it would probably take them about a year to be able to produce a bomb.”
Just few days later, Kochavi told a panel at the Herzliya security conference that “Iran has enough nuclear material for four bombs,” adding, “We have conclusive evidence that they are after nuclear weapons. When Khamenei gives the order to produce the first nuclear weapon – it will be done, we believe, within one year.”
Last week, addressing the very same conference, Kochavi was back with a new prediction – actually, it was the same one as before. He claimed that, in the coming year, the Iranian “leadership would like to find itself in the position of being able to break out to an atomic weapon stage in a short period of time, according to the IDF’s intelligence assessments. However, he said that Iran has not yet decided to build the bomb.”
Greg Thielmann, a former U.S. intelligence analyst now with the Arms Control Association, recently explained that “calculating such a time line involves a complicated set of likely and unlikely assumptions,” telling journalist Laura Rozen, “If Iran decided today to build nuclear weapons, it would require years, not weeks or months, to deploy a credible nuclear arsenal.”
Meanwhile, with Obama set to visit Israel this week, Reuters now notes that “Netanyahu has not publicly revised the spring-to-summer 2013 dating for his ‘red line’,” the stated point at which the Iranian nuclear program advances far enough to automatically trigger an Israeli attack, a threat laid down by the Israeli Prime Minister last September. “But several Israeli officials privately acknowledged it had been deferred, maybe indefinitely,” Reuters adds before quoting an anonymous official: “The red line was never a deadline,” he said.
Clearly, when it comes to propagandistic prognostications about the imminence of an Iranian bomb, they never really are.
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The Fiction of the Jewish History in Palestine
By Hasan Afif El-Hasan | The Palestine Chronicle | April 8, 2011
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told NNC Pierce Morgan on March 18, 2011 that he might agree to a Palestinian state through negotiations. And he added, “We will make territorial concessions although it is very painful to do that in our ancestral land.” Netanyahu was not talking about Poland where his ancestors lived. He was talking about Palestine where generations of its indigenous population ancestors lived, cultivated the land and are buried.
By the end of the nineteenth century, Zionism created a new Jewish identity of blood and soil. To mobilize their followers and supporters and appeal to their emotions, the Zionists created myths. Zionism started as a tribal religion without god, but in order to fulfill its function as a unifying force, Zionism required external religious and race symbols, not inner content. Its leaders regarded metaphysical religious belief and purity of race as having value in itself. They created a divine paradisiacal state of merger with the gods. Despite his non-religious ideology, Herzl’s writings were replete with religious references. The Jews should settle in Palestine because, in his words, “the Temple will be visible from long distance, for it is only our ancient faith that has kept us together”.
The Zionists and their supporters have invested tremendous financial and scholarly resources to work within the Hebrew Bible historical narratives to affirm the links between the intrusive Zionist population and the ancient Israelite past, and by doing so assert the right of that population to the land. The political end-game shaped the investigation and the outcome. Tracing the roots of Israel’s ethnic state in biblical antiquity is effectively to silence the indigenous Palestinian claim to the past and therefore to the land. The Biblical scholarship employs a bewildering array of terms for the region: “the Holy Land”, “the Land of the Bible”, “Eretz Israel”, “the Land of Israel”, or “Judah and Samaria.” To the casual reader these names appear interchangeable, but they all imply connection to ancient Israel.
Biblical narratives or poems that cannot be supported by archeology and common sense are treated by the Zionists and their supporters as historical language. … continue
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