25-Feb-16: The martyrs of Indonesia

Outside the coffee shop where the January 2016 Islamist terror attacks were

launched in Jakarta, Indonesia [Image Source]

According to a Reuters report today, the Australian government published a travel advisory yesterday. Here's the text of the warning:

Advice levels | Indonesia overall, exercise a high degree of caution | Central Sulawesi, Papua and West Papua provinces , reconsider your need to travel | Conditions can change suddenly... Latest advice, 25 Feb 2016 | Recent indications suggest that terrorists may be in the advanced stages of preparing attacks in Indonesia (see Safety and Security). The overall level of advice has not changed... We advise you to exercise a high degree of caution in Indonesia, including Bali, at this time due to the high threat of terrorist attack... The Indonesian Government has recently increased security across Indonesia, which underscores the ongoing high threat of a terrorist attack.

Reuters adds that the Australian foreign ministry (the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade) "did not respond to a request for more details".

It also notes that a similar statement was issued from the same Australian source this past Sunday, warning of the possibility of attacks in and around Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. That advisory was followed soon after by warnings of a similar nature from the diplomatic missions of the UK, New Zealand and Canada, among others.

As the Australian warning notes, Indonesia mounted an ongoing counter-attack on what Reuters terms "suspected militants" in the wake of a major terror attack in Jakarta, Indonesia, last month. We reported on that here ["14-Jan-16: In Indonesia's capital, a mall and a Starbucks now under terror attack"]

Australian tourism to Indonesia is a big deal:

Last year, 1.1 million Aussies travelled to Indonesia, and predominantly Bali, generating over $53 million in visa fees alone. As the biggest source of visitors to Bali... [Source]

With a total Australian population of 23.1 million, those 1.1 million Aussie visitors to Indonesia in 2015 alone amount to nearly 5% of the country's population in a single year. A serious warning about terrorism is clearly going to make serious waves.

It is also likely to fall on receptive ears: Indonesia's deadliest terror attack far happened in 2002 when more than 200 people including some 88 Australians were killed in three terrorist bomb attacks in Bali. Members of an Islamist terror group, Jemaah Islamiyeh, were subsequently convicted. We posted about it here and published an open letter to the Australian victims in several newspapers at the time and in later years [link]. Australians are well-prepared to know about the dangers.

Perhaps because of the sensitivity that comes from our Australian background, we have posted in this blog a number of times in the past decade about terrorism in Indonesia [click "Indonesia"], and not always with the greatest of admiration. Indonesian Islamists have notably escaped punishment from the country's legal authorities ["17-Nov-06: Indonesia Shows the Way in Fearlessly Combatting Religion-Based Terror"], for instance, a matter largely ignored in the current political environment.

Indonesia is challenged by terror in ways that many other countries are not. To start with, it's home to the world’s largest population of Muslims. And as a survey last month in Time Magazine shows, this has consequences:

Indonesia finds itself facing a new threat. There are 22 local groups who have pledged allegiance to ISIS’s leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Even though the state officially banned ISIS in 2014, the groups have yet to face any legal challenge to their dissemination of propaganda, gathering of funds or recruitment of Indonesians... After the 2002 attacks in Bali, Indonesia’s government formed Detachment 88, a U.S.-trained counterterrorism unit, which became the country’s greatest asset in dismantling and deradicalizing the JI and al-Qaeda-affiliated networks between 2002 till now.
“Detachment 88 hunted terrorists, then killed or rehabilitated them,” says Rohan Gunaratna, head of the International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore... Today, ISIS has taken over the space in Indonesia once dominated by [Jemaah Islamiyeh] and al-Qaeda affiliates, says Gunaratna. Many of their followers have defected to ISIS... Gunaratna attributes ISIS’s online propaganda as a powerful recruitment tool, saying that out of the 3,000 pro-ISIS social media sites in Southeast Asia, over 70% of them originate from Indonesia. Furthermore, in the past two years, over 600 Indonesians are believed to have traveled to ISIS-held territories in the Middle East, compared with the 400 JI militants who trained with al-Qaeda in the space of 10 years. That’s still only 600 in a country of 200 million, and support for the group is limited “to a fringe of a radical fringe” of Indonesian Muslims, says a report on ISIS in the country by the Institute of Policy Analysis of Conflict. But even a handful of militants can still stage significant atrocities, as Indonesians saw once again this week... To fight the rapidly growing threat of ISIS, [Gunaratna] says Indonesia will have to double the numbers of Detachment 88, criminalize ISIS-affiliated groups and counter the propaganda on the web. Both it, and the world, are facing a truly global threat... ["Indonesia’s Long Battle With Islamic Extremism Could Be About to Get Tougher", Tara John, TIME, January 14, 2016]

To our Israeli ears, the understanding and anti-terror solidarity in that TIME report are a dream. The non-stop efforts made by the authorities here in Israel where, to borrow TIME's description of Indonesia, we face threats with numbers inflicting significant atrocities and so on, attract a very different media tone. Imagine a report praising Israel for hunting and then killing/rehabilitating the terrorists.

Regular readers who saw the post we published here yesterday ["24-Feb-16: Incitement and its harvest: What the numbers do and don't tell"] don't need reminding that the malevolent and growing role played by the Islamists of Hamas gets downplayed, even ignored, by outsiders looking in. This ought to be surprising given the very open way the Hamas insiders have articulated their plans for Israelis and Jews over the years.

Yet even today, knowing what we know about the savagery they practice against their own people and that they endlessly threaten and try against ours, there remain relatively respectable voices out there calling for a different, more open approach to the barbarians:

Former British prime minister and former Middle East Quartet envoy Tony Blair said that dialogue with Hamas was "worth trying" in the hope of unifying the Palestinian leadership and stressed that the terror group's stance on Israel could be changed... ["Tony Blair: Dialogue with Hamas 'worth trying'", i24news, December 11, 2015] 

for instance, and

This morning, Carter demanded recognition of Hamas’ “legitimacy as a political actor”. He did so on the grounds that Hamas “represents a substantial portion of the Palestinian people”. He did not suggest that Hamas should lay down its weapons or indicate any interest in peace before being granted such recognition. Rather, recognition would “begin to provide the right incentives for Hamas to lay down its weapons.” ["Jimmy Carter Calls For Recognizing Hamas "Legitimacy"", Forbes, August 6, 2014]

If there are people calling for greater understanding of the Indonesian jihadists, of how it's "worth trying" to dialogue with them, of their being "legitimate actors", of how the murder-and-mayhem strategy behind these latest travel advisories can be changed, we're not hearing them. We wonder if anyone else is.

The Australian news media often give Israel's robust response to jihadist terror, particularly the kind emanating from Hamas and Fatah, hostile coverage. How fair are they when we compare that coverage with how they depict Indonesia, their huge and hulking northern neighbour?

Consider the following report from Australia's government-owned ABC a week ago ["Jakarta mosques, schools linked to Islamist terror group as Indonesia struggles to contain radicals", ABC News, January 18, 2016]. It starts this way:

A number of Indonesian mosques and schools, including in the capital Jakarta, are being used to preach the hardline Islamic State doctrine and recruit new supporters. 7.30 [an astute and very watchable ABC Television current affairs program] has been told of five Jakarta mosques where Islamic State dogma is preached and where fighters are recruited. The Indonesian Government has banned dozens of IS websites, and promised to crack down on extremist teachings at schools. But anti-terrorism laws remain weak, and authorities are losing the battle against Islamic State recruitment.
Down a winding dirt road in Subang, West Java, sits a simple, no-frills Islamic boarding school with a deeply disturbing history. At least three of the terrorists involved in last month's attack in central Jakarta can be linked to the school...

And on it goes, describing the quiet growth of murderous extremism in the villages of the world's largest Moslem state. And clearly taking a stand: the terror needs to be blunted while the overtaxed right-minded Indonesian government "struggles" to "contain" the threat. The word "martyr", to describe the Islamists, appears exactly zero times.

Now imagine that instead of Indonesia, they were describing Gaza and the areas occupied by the PA/Fatah.

A report like that, if it ever went to air, would have to acknowledge that, unlike the authorities in Jakarta, the people who rule Gaza don't pretend to be against educating children to become killers and jihadists. Instead, they run huge programs to achieve just that.

And unlike in Indonesia, there is no need for investigative reporters to lurk around Gaza and try to dig up evidence of a handful of mosques and prayer halls where preachers issuing blood-curdling cries for knifings, shootings and rammings, because these, unlike in Indonesia, are a daily event in Gaza. Fresh video clips testify to this all over the web. And many of the Gaza and PA clerics doing the incitement are not outlaws but salaried government officials. Indonesia has "anti-terrorism laws [that] remain weak". But in Gaza, the laws (consider the Hamas constitution) call for terrorism; they justify it and elaborate on the different ways it ought to be done. And in the PA, if you are convicted on terrorism charges by the Israelis, you get a pension under their laws and become entitled as a matter of law to extremely generous rewards when you get out of prison.

The facts on the ground in terrorism-rich Indonesia are similar to those in terrorism-addicted Gaza and the PA-ruled West Bank except that (a) there is much more of it here compared with Indonesia, and (b) most reporters and their editors make bones about not viewing the Israelis, engaged daily in efforts to suppress a wave of daily murders and maimings, as being in a struggle.

As far as we can tell, no one in any part of the respectable news-reporting media ever calls the Indonesian bombers "martyrs".

Sitting here in Jerusalem, the lack of sympathy and the patent hypocrisy in major parts of the mainstream media are elements of a daily, obvious and painful reality.

24-Jul-15: Terror here? 'Ridiculous' say Kenyans, deploying their largest ever security blanket

CNN as depicted on a Kenyan tweeter's stream

As the Nobel Prize-winning leader of the free world gets started with a visit to East Africa (check out the Twitter hashtag #ObamaHomecoming) today, aspects of the media messaging are getting up some Kenyan noses.

Kenyans ridicule CNN for calling the country a “hotbed of terror” |  Quartz Africa | July 23, 2015 | Kenyans are demanding an apology from CNN after the news network described Kenya as “a hotbed of terror” in a report on US president Barack Obama’s visit this week. “If CNN is civilized enough, they should apologize,” interior minister Joseph Nkaisserry said today, in response to anger on social media. Under the hashtag #SomeoneTellCNN, Kenyans have been voicing both impatience with being branded as a country rife with violence as well as pride in their country...

A Nairobi, shopping mall after a random event September 2013
[Image Source]

No reason to especially blame the Kenyans, who are looking beyond the idea of an Islamist terror war against unbelievers to make a case of a more nuanced kind.

They are doing pretty much the same as many Americans did after 9/11; as many Brits did after 7/7; as many Spanish did after 11-M; and as President Obama himself did when he called the people behind an attack on a French kosher food store in January 2015

"a bunch of violent, vicious zealots who behead people or randomly shoot a bunch of folks in a deli in Paris... But we also have to attend to a lot of other issues, and we've got to make sure we're right-sizing our approach so that what we do isn't counterproductive." [Obama speaking to Matthew Yglesias in a VOX interview]

Obama has never publicly commented on the post-massacre disclosures about the passions of Amedy Coulibaly, who did the killing, for ISIS and the lethal savagery for which it stands. Perhaps, like the Kenyans, he or his advisers would ridicule those claims too, and carry with them a large slice of American public opinion. Or call them "random" as his spokesperson did in front of the media right after the killing of those French Jews.

Today's Kenyan state of excitement [Image Source]

Calling what has been happening in Kenya something other than terror or imagining that the violence upending thousands of East African lives during the past two decades (and especially the past two years) has been routine and unworthy of any special attention is tragic if it leads to paralysis of the security authorities.

Fortunately for the traveling US president, the authorities in Kenya don't play that foolish game:

Parts of the Kenyan capital Nairobi have been locked down and airspace will be closed during the president's arrival late Friday and his departure late Sunday... At least 10,000 police officers, roughly a quarter of the entire national force, have been deployed to the capital. Top of the list of security concerns is Somalia's Shebab militants, who have staged a string of suicide attacks, massacres and bombings on Kenyan soil, including the bloody attack on the Westgate shopping mall in the heart of the capital nearly two years ago that left 67 dead. ["Kenya lockdown as Obama comes to talk security, trade", Reuters, today]

It's not only the Kenyans who are (rightly) concerned:

Hundreds of US security personnel have arrived in Kenya in recent weeks and three hotels have been examined by the secret service, according to local media... Kenya is treating the visit as a chance to shine, akin to an Olympics or a football World Cup, and is all too aware how catastrophic another terrorist attack would be for its image. Three months ago Islamist militants murdered 148 people at a university in Garissa, while an attack on Nairobi’s Westgate shopping mall left at least 67 people dead less than two years ago... ["Kenya kicks off biggest ever security operation for Barack Obama welcome", The Guardian, today]

For short-of-memory readers, a random selection of some of our recent Kenya-focused posts:

• 3-May-13: Kenya discovers it is hosting a "vast network" of terrorists; convicts two Iranians and hopes for the best
• 23-Sep-13: Root cause of terrorism? Shopping malls, says Guardian columnist
• 27-Sep-13: Freeing terrorists and the Nairobi massacre
• 23-Sep-13: The fog of Nairobi
• 9-Oct-13: A very bad month, says New Yorker mag, with worse probably ahead
• 16-May-14: More jihadist killings in East Africa today
• 20-Sep-14: Iran is not commenting but Kenya may have just thwarted another Iranian terror attack

President Obama on the right, with father [Image Source]

How likely is it that the mainstream media will give attention during the Obama Kenya visit to his brother?

The extended Obama family is not small (here's an overview). We specifically mean Abon'go Malik Obama (known as Abongo or Roy), a University of Nairobi graduate who spent a decade and a half in the US working in the back-offices of Lockheed, Fannie Mae, and the American Red Cross [source]. He served as best man at Barack and Michelle Obama's wedding, and BHO did the same at several of the brother's weddings (there have been twelve). He runs a charitable foundation whose website calls him "founder" and which is

committed to a wide array of development and humanitarian projects which will help mitigate social-shortcomings in areas of education and literacy, health and well-being, poverty, and lack of community infrastructure in such basic needs such as water, electricity, shelter and sustenance... [source]

The Barack H. Obama Foundation (entirely unrelated to the Barack Obama Foundation) earned US tax-exempt status in 2011 in record-breaking time - about a week when for most applicants it takes many months, and for some, year. (Why this happened has been the subject of speculation.) It had claimed to be tax-exempt years earlier; fortunately once its approval came through [source], it was made retrospective for several years back. Talk about lucky.

Barack H. Obama, president of the United States, on the left of
a family snapshot held by his brother Malik (and other names),
a leader in a deeply troubling, terror-friendly organization
[Image Source]

But there are some puzzling aspects. Its US address is located in a UPS store. The address given in its IRS filings, namely 4201 Wilson Blvd., Suite 110-152, Arlington, Virginia, turns out to be the location of a marketing center for a drug-and-alcohol treatment organization, A Better Today Recovery Services.

When questioned about BHOF in May 2013, not a single employee in A Better Today's office had ever heard of the foundation... [source]

Most likely because of a misunderstanding.

As for Abon'go-Abongo-Roy-Malik Obama himself, the president's best man and an invited guest at the presidential inauguration, the allegations appearing across the web are considerably less benign.

He, it appears, serves as executive secretary of the Sudan-based Islamic Da’wa Organization (IDO), an arm of the jihad-friendly government of Sudan, whose ruler since 1989, president Omar al-Bashir, has for years been the subject of an International Criminal Court arrest warrant, as yet not executed. IDO, under the president of the United States' brother, is said to stand for the expansion of Wahhabist Islam throughout Africa.

Though his political activities have been almost totally ignored by the global mainstream media, Haaretz ran a piece ["Obama's half brother photographed wearing Hamas kaffiyeh"] in January 2014 that focus on the Presidential Brother wearing an item of Arabic clothing on which are inscribed the random words "Jerusalem is ours – we are coming" and "From the river to the sea".

But the most troubling? That for the most part, the disturbing ties between the president of the US and a brother with serious question marks over his head are, along with the photos, almost totally ignored and unpublished by the mainstream media. (Parts of the conspiracy-friendly web and especially some parts of it conventionally labeled right-wing in outlook, seem to be the sole exceptions. Why?)

Troubled and troublesome brothers are nothing new for incumbents of the White House (Carter, Clinton), but we can't think of another instance where the sibling benefited from so extensive a media blackout. Makes a person wonder.

29-Oct-12: File away for use when Haniyeh is next depicted as partner for peace

Man of principle shakes hand of religious ideologue

Ignore the confusing English. The source is a Persian-language news channel translated from the source Arabic and then rendered into English by a team of salaried propagandists.

But there's no mistaking the intent of Ismail Haniyeh, the man who heads the Hamas regime that dominates the Gaza Strip and "one of two disputed Prime Ministers of the Palestinian National Authority". Source: This past Saturday night's edition of the Iranian news channel, FARS [online]

Hamas Leader: Palestinian Stance against Israel Unchangeable   

20:40 | 2012-10-27
TEHRAN (FNA)- Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh underlined his nation's irrevocable stance against Israel, stressing that Palestinians will never ignore even a single span of their land. "We (Palestinians) will never overlook even one span of Palestine's soil because Palestine is an endowed land and no person, leader, organization or group is entitled to the right to ignore this land," Haniyeh said in a meeting on Saturday with the members of 'Miles of Smiles 17' aid convoy and an Indonesian delegation visiting Gaza. "Israel has no future in the Palestinian lands and our motto is that we will never recognize the Zionist regime," he said. 

A man of principle.

In the interests of throwing some modest light on how far the arch-terrorist's principles take him: Many Israelis are aware that earlier this year, the man who instructs the forces under his command to fire off rockets and mortars into anything Israeli and within reach, made arrangements for his brother-in-law to be saved by Zionist doctors at an "Occupation" medical facility in one of the Zionist Entity's major cities.

In early 2012, Haniyeh allowed his sister, Suhila Abd el-Salam Ahmed Haniyeh, to accompany her critically ill husband to Beilinson Hospital in Petah Tikva, Israel, for emergency heart treatment. After successful treatment and care, the couple returned to Gaza without incident. Word of the unusual visit was released only four months later. It remains to be seen how this special treatment for the leader's relatives will be regarded by Gazans. [Wikipedia]

22-Oct-12: Let's take a moment to review what we know about Hezbollah

Happy days: Syrians in Damascus admired picture showing Hezbollah leader, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, left,
and President Bashar Assad [NY Times, July 16, 2006]

To understand the complex conflicts in the Middle East was always a challenge. You needed, for instance, to know how the various factions inside the world of Islam interacted. And you had to resist the exaggerated, ideology-driven simplifications of people like the former US president, Jimmy Carter (on his way back to this area this week) who pontificated in his notorious 2006 book "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid" that "Israel's continued control and colonization of Palestinian land have been the primary obstacles to a comprehensive peace agreement in the Middle East."

Treating a multidimensional problem as simple is generally easier than analyzing it in all its complexity. Thus, Carter is hardly alone in boiling the turbulence of our neighbourhood down into a problem with a single cause. But reality, as always, has a way of creeping up behind and whacking us across the head. We're at such a moment now.

Hezbollah, by most calculations, is the military force that has the largest deployment of weapons pointed at Israel today. It's Iran's proxy, and is funded and armed by Iran and also by Syria. In much of the Arab and Moslem world, it has long been called a resistance movement [see this Asia Times analysis from 2006]. Among Western countries like the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Australia, Canada and of course Israel, it's been classified as a terrorist organization for years and remains so.

Very recent events have caused a significant review of what people think and say - even, and perhaps mainly, in the Arab and Moslem world. A good example:

Hizbollah's naked aggression strips away resistance facade

Hussain Abdul Hussain [The National, published in the United Arab Emirates]. 
The writer is Washington bureau chief for a Kuwaiti newspaper

Oct 22, 2012 [Excerpts]

The praise that Hezbollah wins from its supporters for fighting Sunni groups makes it easier for the party to commit crimes like the recent assassination of General Wissam Al Hassan, Lebanon's intelligence chief ["20-Oct-12: Do the Lebanese comprehend what they're up against?"] Hizbollah denies any role in Friday's car-bomb attack, but its record makes it exceedingly likely that the "Party of God" was somehow involved in this recent murder... If Gen Al Hassan was killed by Hezbollah, as many have argued, he was not their first Sunni victim. Before him, former prime minister Rafiq Hariri, a bigger-than-life figure, was also assassinated, in 2005 by four Hezbollah operatives, according to the indictment issued by the UN-created Special Tribunal for Lebanon.

Between the two murders, much has changed in Lebanon, and so has Hezbollah's style. In 2005, Hezbollah took painstaking measures to hide its involvement in the crime: a cover-up video showing a purported suicide attack was produced and delivered to satellite TV stations. The party sent its most senior figures - including Hassan Nasrallah's wife - to offer condolences to the Hariri family. The Hezbollah propaganda machine made sure that Hariri would be always described as a martyr. 

Hezbollah treated [Friday's] bombing in Beirut's historic Ashrafiyeh district with nonchalance. Hezbollah's ally, the Christian MP Michel Aoun, went on TV to counsel Lebanese (read: Sunnis) against taking on Hizbollah's Shiites. He argued that civil strife should be avoided in what sounded like an implicit threat... 

Whatever the cost, Hezbollah now calculates that an open conflict with Lebanon's Sunnis justifies turning its arms inward and away from Israel. And if Shiites are at war with Sunnis, that would rationalise the killing of Gen Al Hassan and the Hezbollah members fighting alongside Assad forces inside Syria. 

Meanwhile, wiping Israel off the map can wait. Conflict with Sunnis gives Hezbollah and its patrons in Damascus and Tehran a regional role; war with Israel is costly and unrewarding, a lesson that Hafez Al Assad learnt some 40 years ago... Hezbollah militants - hardened by the 2006 war - fight in Homs pretending it is part of their war for the "liberation of Jerusalem"... 

Hezbollah turning its guns away from Israel and against the predominantly Sunni Free Syrian Army... sounds about right to many Shiites. After all, that conflict goes back 14 centuries; the one with Israel is only a few decades old.

Next, from Asharq Al-Awsat, "the world's premier pan-Arab daily newspaper", an article headlined "Hezbollah firing hundreds of rockets into Syria on daily basis" which quotes a Syrian opposition leader, Mohamed al-Homsi. Hezbollah, he says, is

“intervening in the fighting alongside the Syrian regime with all of its power... firing its rockets – the same rockets that it claims are to fight Israel – into Syrian territory to kill Syrian people... Between 100 and 150 rockets and mortar shells are being fired by Hezbollah into the Syrian town of al-Qaseer and the surrounding villages on a daily basis... It has become clear that Hezbollah is taking part, with all of its strength, in this battle, which it considers itself to be a part of. Hezbollah has sent thousands of its troops, along with military equipment and arms, into Syria, deploying them throughout Homs and the surrounding areas, in addition to Hama, Aleppo, Zabadani and Damascus. They are engaging in fierce clashes with rebel forces”.

Asharq Al-Awsat extends Hezbollah a right of reply. One of its Lebanese parliamentarians, Walid Sakaria, denies Hezbollah is firing rockets into Syria with this claim:

“it would be impossible to fire such rockets without people in the surrounding area hearing or seeing this... The accusations being leveled against us clearly demonstrate that Hezbollah is being targeted simply because it is an enemy of Israel and the US project in the region, and so we are not surprised to be facing such accusations.”

As brazen as his claims are, there are others (inevitably) who toe the same Hezbollah-uber-alles line. Take for instance this item published yesterday under the heading "Hezbollah condemns Beirut bombing: Effort to destabilize Lebanon underway" by Mick Kelly [online]:

"Hezbollah, the largest anti-imperialist political party in Lebanon, condemned the Oct. 19 Beirut bombing that took the life of Brigadier General Wissam Al-Hasan and others. In a statement, Hezbollah declared, “This hideous crime is a vicious attempt to target stability and national unity,” and urged the “security and judicial apparatuses to use all efforts to control the crime, uncover its committers, and bring them to justice.” Much of the western media is implying that supporters of Syria are behind the blast. There is no evidence that this is the case... Hezbollah and other progressive political forces, including Lebanese communists, have worked hard to build a powerful national resistance project that is capable of standing up to imperialism and Zionism."

Well done, Comrade Mick, whose passion for peace and annihilation of imperialism most likely puts him in the same tin box as the people who publish the following progressive cant:

Hezbollah and Lebanon’s Baath Party have called for the annihilation of Israel, blaming the Jewish state for spearheading a "conspiracy" against the Syria-Iran-Hezbollah axis, Daily Star reports. In a joint statement, the two sides emphasized the need “to unify ranks in the face of the big conspiracy hatched against the resistance-rejectionist axis." “The main enemy in Lebanon and the region is the Zionist entity and we must exert every effort and our energy to eradicate this arrogant entity,” they said.

Southen Lebanese village/arsenal, called al-Khiam [IDF Image]
Some 90 Hezbollah terrorist operatives are now based here 

Now back to reality. The IDF has an operational understanding of Hezbollah considerably beyond that of almost anyone else. It went public with this reminder today of what the Hezbollah hordes actually do in the villages of southern Lebanon, including a video visualization [here at YouTube] of what it means to embed your fighters and munitions behind a human shield of Lebanese villagers:

• IDF intelligence maps show Hezbollah weapons stored near schools, hospitals and residential buildings, marking a trend of using civilian villages as militant centers. [They have] turned over 100 Southern Lebanese villages into military bases. 
• These maps and the 3D clip show how Hezbollah stores weapons near schools, hospitals, and residential buildings in the village of al-Khiam, which had been used as a rocket launching site during the Second Lebanon War. This same tactic of storing weapons near civilian buildings is being carried out by Hezbollah in villages all across southern Lebanon, essentially using the residents as human shields, in gross violation of UN Resolution 1701. 
• Aerial photos of the al-Khiam village show that Hezbollah’s weapons have been stored near schools, hospitals, and residential buildings. 
• During the Second Lebanon war, Hezbollah generally stored its weapons in open areas, enabling the IDF to locate and destroy these stores. In the four years since, Hezbollah has pursued a tactic of moving its weapons into civilian villages, essentially institutionalizing the tactic of using human shields on a large scale.
• IDF intelligence indicates that this village, with a current population of approximately 23,000 people, is one of several Hezbollah centers currently undergoing preparation for confrontation with the IDF. Today, about 90 Hezbollah militants, some of whom are part of the Special Forces prepared to confront IDF soldiers with explosive devices, mines and various types of antitank missiles, are operating in the village. According to intelligence, there are hundreds of rockets and mortar shells, with different ranges, already stored within the village.
• Four years after the Second Lebanon War, Hezbollah has strengthened its capabilities and resources. It currently has an arsenal of some 40,000 rockets. 
• Under the present condition, if war were to break out, Hezbollah could launch between 500 to 600 rockets a day towards Israel. 
• Col. Ronen Marley, Commander of the Western Division on the northern border, explained that Hezbollah has been collecting information on IDF activities and events in Israel.... [He] estimated that a renewed conflagration between Israel and Hezbollah could happen anytime between today and next year.

18-Apr-08: Removing the leaven

Passover is upon us. Saturday night, Jewish families throughout the world will sit down to a formal dinner laden with ceremonial elements that have been part of Jewish life for nearly three thousand years. That meal is preceded by the reading of the Haggadah, the narrative that traces the emergence of a Jewish nation out of Egyptian slavery, and by days - sometimes weeks - of clearing the leaven from our homes.

Leaven. It's a word that few people use if they're not getting ready for this Jewish festival. In Hebrew, Chametz, the word conveys not only a sense of the difference between bread (that rises in the course of being baked) and matza (the perfectly flat bread we eat for the next week). It's also the symbolic expression of arrogance, hubris - like yeast, something that causes a puffing up in dough.

An excellent time therefore to review the visit to this part of the world of James E. Carter, a former president of the United States and the noted author of a book entitled Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. Michael Kinsley's review in Slate ("Jimmy Carter's moronic new book about Israel") provides a good overview.

Carter's visit was marked by his laying a wreath on the tomb of an arch-terrorist and master Palestinian-Arab embezzler and physically embracing and conferring with several leading active Hamas terrorists (quite possibly breaching several US Federal laws in the process). He also visited beleagured Sderot (looking strikingly bored according to eyewitnesses) and pronounced the endless missile and rocket attacks on southern Israel "criminal". The word must have slipped past Carter's pursed lips because the last thing he meant, it appears, was that Israelis need to respond as one responds to a criminal attack by degenerate thugs on your home, family and future.

Sadly, the man gets considerably more mileage in the circles in which he moves by pronouncing Israelis as practitioners of apartheid than as victims of an ongoing mugging and conspiracy to murder.

Here are a couple of the more cogent published observations stimulated by the former peanut farmer's visit to one of the world's most complex war-zones.

• Jimmy Carter and Hamas - Washington Times Editorial
  Jimmy Carter's decision to meet with the terrorist organization Hamas is turning the former president into something of a political pariah. During a visit to the West Bank town of Ramallah Tuesday, Carter hugged and kissed a leading Hamas official at a reception. He is scheduled to meet later this week with Hamas' Damascus-based leader, Khaled Meshaal. After Iranian President Ahmadinejad called the Holocaust a "myth" and said Israel should be "wiped off the map," Meshaal congratulated Iranian leaders. Hamas has been behind scores of suicide attacks against Israel, and following that nation's August 2005 withdrawal from Gaza, Hamas has stepped up its firing of rockets and missiles at Israel.
  
• Carter's Confusion - Clifford D. May National Review
  When Neville Chamberlain met with Hitler in Munich, he no doubt believed he could reason with him because he also no doubt believed that the Fuhrer was a reasonable man like himself. Offer Hitler a good deal - land, power, prestige - and surely he'd take it rather than plunge his nation into a terrible war. What this leaves out is ideology. Hitler's ideas inspired millions to fight and die for the glory of the Third Reich. And Marxist/ Leninist/ Stalinist/ Maoist ideology inspired millions to fight and die for the illusion of a Communist utopia.
  Hamas proudly proclaims that "the Koran is our constitution, Jihad is our way, and death for the sake of God is our highest aspiration." Hamas leaders promise their followers not just rewards here on Earth but in the next world as well - a selling point neither Nazism nor Communism could offer. As a matter of religious conviction, Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal cannot accept Israel's existence. Hamas believes every inch of Israel and, indeed, of any land ever ruled by Muslims is "an Islamic Waqf consecrated for future Muslim generations until Judgment Day." A Muslim can fight to reclaim this endowment or he can fail to fulfill the obligations his faith imposes. To Hamas, there is no third way.

Removing a little of the hubris and the self-serving political narcissism from our midst at this time of year means not only ceremonially burning the bread with the crumbs but also recognizing puffed-up spent political leaders and placing their well-dressed hypocrisy on the garbage pile for immediate disposal.