03-Jul-16: Friday night rocket attacks from Gaza

Two rockets were fired into southern Israel during Friday night causing serious anxiety to thousands of families across the region, most of them in their homes for the Sabbath.

One, according to Times of Israel, exploded just outside a preschool in Sderot, the Israeli city that has borne the brunt of the unfettered terror emanating from the rocket-infested Gazan vipers' nest. Fortunately, though this was certainly not the rocket men's intention, no serious injuries were caused to humans.

But there are slightly conflicting testimonies. Ynet, evidently working from different witnesses, says a Sderot kindergarten building was in fact hit and damage caused to the building, but that no one was physically hurt. It does say one person suffered from panic and was taken for treatment. Note that the Jerusalem Post has a photo of the damage, which does not appear to be insignificant, and it reports that two persons needed medical care.

Anyone out there among our readers with connections at Associated Press? Its syndicated report, carried at the Christian Science Monitor for example, is headline "Israeli airstrikes on Hamas after rocket hits empty Sderot kindergarten", as if to suggest that the terrorists decided to go after an empty building. Is this a sign of editorial silliness, or malevolence? (Ask yourself how relevant to the attack the nature of the building that was struck is.)

Another rocket exploded in an open area of the Sha’ar HaNegev region a little earlier in the evening, also fortunately causing no damage.

At the BBC, neither rocket attack was mentioned in any of its news bulletins, consistent with a pattern being tracked by the indispensable BBC Watch which notes that 

"Audiences continue to be systematically deprived of information vital to their understanding of this particular “international issue”, in clear breach of the pledges to its funding public laid out in the BBC’s public purposes." 

18-Nov-12: Contemplating rockets

Rockets in Gaza City: Iran's government controlled news media carried this picture on November 14, 2012 prior to the Israeli attack on Gaza in a news report praising what it calls 'Palestinian resistance fighters"

The EU-funded GANSO website continues, as it has for a long time, to refer to those deadly Gazan missiles as HMRs. This peculiar choice of acronym evidently stands for "home made rockets" even though it's likely some proportion of them are actually imported to the Gaza Strip from Iran. 

Whatever the real motivation of the GANSO people when they call them HMRs, these things are very different from home-made cookies and home-made soup. 

Consider what the reaction would be if the Israeli side took the Brussels-funded 'activists' and their terminology and motivations at face value. Meaning if these deadly missiles really are home-made, and if GANSO's statistics are right and they're fired into Israel by the hundreds, perhaps the right response to the home-made weapons is to focus the IDF's massive fire power on the homes that make them. 

Imagine the devastation if that were Israel's strategy. Plainly it's not, as the relatively small number of casualties so far attests. 

We have commented here several times about the revelations that appear almost daily in the GANSO bulletins about rockets that are fired by the Gazans and fall short. In simple terms, these are rockets that fail to cross the border and end up crashing onto the heads and homes of the Palestinian Arabs who live in the areas adjacent to the border. Some have been killed, many have been injured, and it's all self-inflicted. This has been happening since the Gazan rocket campaign against Israeli civilians began in 2005.

Now here's the interesting thing. 

Though the numbers of rockets being flung (it's the right word) at Israelis by the terrorist gangs of Gaza has risen exponentially since Wednesday, the GANSO bulletins don't seem to have noted even a single "fall short" since then. Suddenly, all the missiles are successfully getting over the border and hitting their Israeli targets.

That's very likely nonsense. If the Gazans have one fall-short for every 3, 4, 8 or 9 (and there is some fresh indication, but whatever the actual number is) of the rockets they fire at Israel, then there must have been many dozens such fall-shorts in the past four days: dozens of rockets falling onto the homes and heads of Palestinian Arab subjects of the jihadist Hamas regime. 

Keep the thought in mind when casualty figures for dead and injured Palestinians are next published. 

Also bear in mind the proven history of cruel contempt that the Hamas elite have demonstrated over the years for their brothers and sisters. This video, not new but timely and still accurate, conveys some of that.

The Christian Science Monitor reminds us of how different the Hamas rocket strategy is from Israel's:

Israel insists its targeting is precise and focused on militants. Hamas makes no such claim, and, in fact, can't; the rockets fired from Gaza are the very definition of indiscriminate, hugely imprecise and more likely to kill civilians than anyone else.

We offer some strategic insights now into those Gazan Palestinian Arab rockets, drawn from a fresh Stratfor Global Intelligence analysis report:

• Gaza may be manufacturing long-range rockets locally. If this is the case, a significant ground force offers the Israelis the best chance of finding and neutralizing the factories making these weapons. The Israeli Cabinet on November 16 approved Defense Minister Ehud Barak's request to call up 75,000 reservists, significantly more than during Operation Cast Lead in 2008-2009. 
• The Israeli army meanwhile is strengthening its presence on the borders with Gaza. Primary roads leading to Gaza and running parallel to Sinai have been declared closed military zones. 
• Tanks, armored personnel carriers, self-propelled artillery and troops continue to stream to the border, and many units already appear to be in position.
• The Israeli air force remained active throughout the night of Nov. 16-17, striking at targets across the Gaza Strip including key Hamas ministries, police stations and tunnels near the border crossing with Egypt. 
• The IAF reportedly carried out strikes in Rafah's al-Sulan and al-Zahour neighborhoods, as well as east of the al-Maghazi refugee camp. According to IDF reports, the air force carried out a rapid and coordinated military strike, targeting approximately 70 underground medium-range rocket-launching sites in the less than an hour. The IDF claims direct hits were confirmed. 
• The IAF will increasingly target Hamas militant defenses ahead of any ground invasion. Already the IAF has bombed militant defensive positions, particularly in the northern part of the Gaza Strip.
• Startfor's figures show that Gazan rockets launched AT Israel on Saturday were about 80. About 57 actually landed in Israel. It quotes the IDF saying 640 rockets were launched against us since November 14, with 410 actually landing. Those that did not are (we presume - Stratfor does not say this) either intercepted in mid-air or - as we noted above - fell short. 
• It quotes an IDF statement that Iron Dome interceptors have so far successfully stopped 90 percent of the rockets "though this may be an exaggeration". Or not.

On the subject of made-in-Gaza rockets versus the imported kind, Stratfor explains why this will affect Israel's decision to execute a land-based attack, which so far has not happened:

"Beyond rocket launch sites and caches, which Israel is currently targeting with its airstrikes, it would need to target production sites and those who would be responsible for manufacturing the rockets. Furthermore, it will be significantly harder for Israeli intelligence to form an accurate picture of the number of these rockets locally constructed in Gaza... Israeli intelligence likely did not anticipate how many long-range rockets had escaped its first wave of strikes, and the fact that Hamas may have been producing these weapons could explain Israel's lack of complete information. Hamas recognizes that these long-range rocket attacks have only increased the likelihood and intensity of an Israeli ground incursion. A significant ground force offers the Israelis the best chance of finding and neutralizing the factories making these long-range rockets as well as the shorter-range Qassams. Hamas and the other militants therefore are actively preparing their defenses for the anticipated incursion and are likely laying improvised explosive devices, setting up road blocks and defensive emplacements and sorting out their ranks and tasks."

On Saturday afternoon, the propaganda apparatus of Hamas put out a Twitter tweet that reflects both its leadership's malevolently messianic mindset and its undiminished appetite for inventing realities for consumption by (we assume) its fans:

"Al Qassam's operation #ShaleStones is going well in achieving historic goals, Liberation of occupied #Palestine started...we are coming #IDF

We have reason to believe the IDF leadership will be waiting and watching.

28-Dec-10: How the militants, fighters, insurgents and freedom fighters turn into terrorists

The Guardian, one of the world's towering superpowers of political correctness, carried a little-noticed story this past Sunday about a disturbing turn of events emanating from our neighbourhood:

"Intelligence services throughout the Middle East and Europe are scrambling to track down more than two dozen fighters linked to al-Qaida who have recently left their base in southern Lebanon. The missing men are thought to have gone to Europe by a newly established route through Syria, Turkey and the Balkans, and multiple intelligence sources in Lebanon warn that the group appears to be operational and could be planning attacks in Europe in the holiday season... "We have received warnings of a significant militant plot in Europe during the holidays and we have been warned about these missing fighters from Lebanon"...

If you follow the link and view the article as published, you may notice that the word terror appears exactly once - in the headline: European terror attack feared as al-Qaeda fighters disappear from base in Lebanon.

In the body of the article, these Al Qaeda individuals are called "fighters", "missing men", "group", "militants" and even "a disparate group of freelance fighters and jihadists" which comes close to the heart of the matter. Not once are they called terrorists.

So what is it about the jihadists that causes this odd metamorphosis? So long as they remain in the Middle East - in Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Iran, Syria, and especially in the towns and villages controlled by the Palestinian Authority, by Hamas and by Hezbollah - these men, women and children are routinely described by the kind of circumlocution that is on display in the Guardian.

But once they execute their satanic plans in Europe, North America and elsewhere, or even do no more than threaten, they undergo reclassification - as terrorists.

What is it about otherwise intelligent and sober editors and journalists that prevents them from applying to the executors of acts of terror - the jihadists and the child-killers and the murderous Islamicists and the homicidal/suicidal/genocidal human-bombs - the simple English-language name that most fits them: terrorists?

Could it be that it depends on the religion or nationality of the intended victims?

We are the parents of a fifteen year-old daughter murdered by the terrorists, and we are sickened and alarmed by the repeated use in various news media of circumlocutions and double-speak about the practitioners of terror. Terrorist acts are too often called "revenge bombings" and  "revenge attacks", which is half-way towards explaining and justifying acts of unfathomable hatred. Innocent people murdered by the terrorists are too often said to have been "caught in the crossfire". [This month alone, you can see examples in the Financial Times,  Business Week, NPR, Washington Post and many other places.] But the reality is terrorists fully intend to harm, maim, terrorize and kill - indiscriminately. There is no crossfire with terrorists. There are no innocent victims. The more casualties the better. We are all in their crosshairs.

Not everyone sees it our way. Speaking at a conference in Washington in May 2010, the head of the US National Security Council’s Counterterrorism and Homeland Security adviser said [according to this Arab News report] the Obama Administration will no longer tolerate use of the terms “Islamist” and “jihadist”. “Jihad" he explained, "is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam, meaning to purity oneself or one’s community." His chief executive, President Obama, says he knows America is "at war" but it's a war against "terrorism" and not against any particular religious segment. He feels it is

"absolutely important now for the overwhelming majority of the American people to hang on to that thing that is best in us – a belief in religious tolerance, clarity about who our enemies are... We have to make sure that we don't start turning on each other... If we’re going to successfully reduce the terrorist threat, then we need all the allies we can get."

Not surprising, then, that much of the world is still struggling to understand what motivates "homegrown Muslim plotters who are European citizens" like those arrested this week in the UK (London, Cardiff, Stoke-on-Trent and Birmingham - at least five of them of Bangladeshi origin) and accused of "plotting to carry out a terrorist attack" [to quote the Christian Science Monitor].

There are sane voices in the world of ideas - like the Washington Institute for Near East Policy - who argue that, rather than avoid mention of the religious motivation behind the terrorism of al-Qaeda et al, the Obama administration should sharpen the distinction between Islam and the political ideology they call radical Islamism. But they're not being heard.

The religious motivations of Islamic terrorists are clear. To ignore them is not only self-deluding but likely to produce bad outcomes where it counts - in law enforcement, in the courts, in government.

This has real and practical life-and-death importance. There has been a wave of warnings from intelligence agencies since October 2010 about terror attacks that are coming to European cities. A British university graduate called Taimur Abdulwahab al-Abdaly carried out a mostly-ineffective bombing in Stockholm this month - so the Swedes at least know there is some basis to the stories. The Italians too: in Rome, a bomb was found on a train last week. In the Netherlands, the authorities arrested 12 Somali men two days ago on suspicion of preparing a terrorist attack on the port of Rotterdam, Europe's largest. The list goes on. It will surely get longer.

Simple good sense dictates that it's time to draw a tight connection between the terrorists and the terrorism. It can't be that these people are militants, fighters and insurgents so long as they operate in the Middle East, but then turn into perpetrators of terror only when they arrive in London or Mumbai. When civilized societies fight them by putting police onto the streets and in the airports and train stations and shopping precincts, it's nice to have "all the allies we can get", as the US president says. But it's even more important to have a clear-eyed, concrete sense of who these terrorists are and what makes them tick, tick, tick.