In secret note, Olmert says Bush has deserted Israel against Iran

 

Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert this week shot off a strong secret note to US President George W. Bush, DEBKAfile’s sources reveal, protesting the administration’s strategic steps toward rapprochement with Iran.

Instead of taking action, Ol-merde blames Bush:

Israel was not forewarned, Olmert wrote bitterly, although these steps directly violated US-Israel understandings on Iran of the past year. Bush, he said, had broken the promises he gave in face-to-face meetings with the prime minister earlier this year. If nothing is done to arrest Iran’s progress towards a nuclear bomb, Olmert warned, Iran will have all the components ready for assembly by early 2009, that is, in 6-8 months.

This time line is tighter than the one the prime minister gave the Democratic Senator Barack Obama when he visited Jerusalem Wednesday, July 23.

DEBKAfile’s Washington sources add that Bush has not replied to the letter, although the prime minister wrote in a spirit of extreme alarm over the threat to Israel’s security and indeed survival building up in Tehran.

Continued

 

As weapons stream into Gaza, Olmert says of truce: “I fear that a reality is being created in the south, which, in five years we’ll be asking ourselves – How could we let this happen?”

Would an aide kindly lean over to Olmert and whisper in his ear: “Mr. Olmert, you’re the head of this government”?

“‘Large amount of weapons and explosives flowing into Gaza’,” from the Jerusalem Post 

The US response apparently came in the way American military chiefs brushed off Israeli chief of staff Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, when he presented intelligence updates on the state of Iran’s military nuclear program. He was received with great honor during his week’s working visit, but his hosts declined to address the working theories guiding the IDF with regard to that program.

Res. Maj-Gen Yizhak Ben-Israel, former head of IDF Weapons Authority, strongly refuted Saturday, July 26, the estimate published by Time Magazine quoting former Mossad chief Ephraim Halevi (up until 2002) as speaking out against an Israeli attack on Iran, because it “could have an impact on us [Israel] for the next 100 years.”

Ben-Israel, a world-class expert on Iran’s nuclear and missile programs, countered that Israel’s failure to attack Iran’s nuclear sites would “jeopardize its security.” Time is working against the Jewish state,” he said.

As he spoke, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced his country’s nuclear program had managed to double the uranium-enriching centrifuges operating in Natanz to 6,000.

*

Who caused the Arab “refugee” problem?

Refugee:

Arab leaders told us to flee Israel in 1948

By Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook, May 30, 2006

PMW has documented yet another corroboration by an Arab “refugee” that it was Arab leaders who were responsible for the flight of Arabs from the new State of Israel in 1948. A backbone of Palestinian Authority (PA) ideology, and indeed of anti-Israel propagandists worldwide, is the myth that Israel expelled hundreds of thousands of Arabs from Israel and created the Palestinian “refugee” situation.

However, an elderly woman who left Israel during Israel’s War of Independence, and is today still considered a “refugee,” confirmed in a PA newspaper last week that it was Arab leaders and not Israel who told her and her neighbors to flee, for tactical military reasons. This corroborates Israel’s contention of the last 58 years that Arab leaders were responsible for telling their own people to leave Israel, and for the subsequent “refugee” problem.

Following is this most recent testimonial, as well as two earlier statements by other “refugees” that have appeared in the PA press, all of which corroborate Israel’s historical narrative. The latter two are significant because they were corroborated by still other more public Palestinians, indicating that the responsibility of the Arab leaders is known in the Palestinian world. One was confirmed by Arab Member of Knesset, Ibraham Sarsur, who was then Head of the Islamic Movement in Israel, and the other by a Palestinian journalist, Fuad Abu Higla, in the official PA daily.

The following are three statements corroborating that Arabs fled Israel, under instructions of the Arab leaders:

1. Woman who fled Israel in 1948

“We heard sounds of explosions and of gunfire at the beginning of the summer in the year of the Nakbah [1948]. They told us: The Jews attacked our region and it is better to evacuate the village and return, after the battle is over. And indeed there were among us [who fled Israel] those who left a fire burning under the pot, those who left their flock [of sheep] and those who left their money and gold behind, based on the assumption that we would return after a few hours.”
[Asmaa Jabir Balasimah Um Hasan, Woman who fled Israel, Al-Ayyam, May 16, 2006]

2. Son and grandson of those who fled in 1948

An Arab viewer called Palestinian Authority TV and quoted his father and grandfather, complaining that in 1948 the Arab District Officer ordered all Arabs to leave Palestine or be labeled traitors. In response, Arab MK Ibrahim Sarsur, then Head of the Islamic Movement in Israel, cursed the leaders who ordered Arabs to leave, thus, acknowledging Israel’s assertion.

Statement of son and grandson of man who fled:

“Mr. Ibrahim [Sarsur]. I address you as a Muslim. My father and grandfather told me that during the “Catastrophe” [establishment of Israel in 1948], our district officer issued an order that whoever stays in Palestine and in Majdel [near Ashkelon- Southern Israel] is a traitor, he is a traitor.”

Response from Ibrahim Sarsur, Head of the Islamic Movement in Israel:

“The one who gave the order forbidding them to stay there bears guilt for this, in this life and the Afterlife throughout history until Resurrection Day.”
[PA TV April 30, 1999].

3. Article by senior PA journalist

Fuad Abu Higla, then a regular columnist in the official PA daily Al Hayat Al Jadida, wrote an article before an Arab Summit, which criticized the Arab leaders for a series of failures. One of the failures he cited, in the name of a prisoner, was that an earlier generation of Arab leaders “forced” them to leave Israel in 1948, again placing the blame for the flight on the Arab leaders.

“I have received a letter from a prisoner in Acre prison, to the Arab summit:
To the [Arab and Muslim] Kings and Presidents, Poverty is killing us, the symptoms are exhausting us and the souls are leaving our body, yet you are still searching for the way to provide aid, like one who is looking for a needle in a haystack or like the armies of your predecessors in the year of 1948, who forced us to leave [Israel], on the pretext of clearing the battlefields of civilians… So what will your summit do now?” 
[Al-Hayat Al-Jadidah, March 19, 2001]

Conclusion

It is clear from these statements that there is general acknowledgement among Palestinians that Arab leaders bear responsibility for the mass flight of Arabs from Israel in 1948, and were the cause of the “refugee” problem. Furthermore, the fact that this information has been validated by public figures and the media in the Palestinian Authority confirms that this responsibility is well-known – even though, for propaganda purposes, its leaders continue to blame Israel publicly for “the expulsion.”

 

Israel braces for jihad terror attacks by recently freed Hamas prisoners

This is what gestures of good will get you. “Prisons ‘schools’ for Hamas, say security sources,” by Amos Harel in Haaretz, July 27:

Comment by Hugh Fitzgerald

And why were those members of Hamas released by the terminally-confused government of Olmert, which is, by the way, merely an extreme case, an almost parodic case, of the last few Israeli governments, each one insistent on doing things to win over the “Palestinians” with whom they wanted so desperately to peace-process, to peace-process with until the cows came home?

Oh, the release of those terrorists waa undertaken as part of “confidence-building measures” by the government of Israel. And whose “confidence” in peace-processing, or in “taking risks for peace” (put in whatever dreary and phony phrase you wish, right here) were the Israelis concerned with? With the “confidence” of the likes of Arafat’s henchman, henchman who knew all about, for example, Arafat’s order to have two American diplomats killed in Khartoum, an order captured on audiotape, and one the Americans know all about but choose to ignore, Mr. Mahmoud Abbas, whose Moscow doctoral thesis — you can get the summary of it on-line now — was one long effort to deny the Nazi murders of Jews, has re-ermged for the Americans and Europeans as no-one-here-but-us-accountants Mahmoud Abbas, the colorless technocrat, who wouldn’t know what a gun or a bomb is if you presented them to him on a platter.

And why does Israel have to build his “confidence” or that of other local Arabs, whether Gazan Arabs or Arabs in the “West Bank,” whom Shimon Peres perhaps still likes to describe as “our partner for peace”? Well, because you see, if it doesn’t free all those hundreds or thousands of prisoners, then it would not win “the confidence” of Mahmoud Abbas to “take risks for peace”? What “risk”? It is Israel trhat is giving up, by not standing firm on, its legal, mortal, and historic rights, rights that are becoming, after several decades of Arab progaganda, again clearer, to the clear- headed, in the Western world because those clear-headed people are now seeing Islam for what it is, and beginning to realise — it’s slow going — that the war against Israel is not about the “legitimate rights” of these recently-invented “Palestinian people” (that’s all propaganda and blague, and is vitiated by so many statements coming from the Arabs themselves), but is, rather, a classic Jihad, and always has been, against the Infidel nation-state of Israel. And a Jihad does not accept the existence of a defiant Infidel nation-state, even in the tiniest sliver of land (Israel is already that tiniest of slivers), but demands its removal. For the two metaphors that the Arab Muslims use in describing of Israel is that the country is either a “cancer” or “a knife plunged into the heart of the Arab world.” You don’t “partly” remove a cancwerous tumor, for fear it may again metastasize; you don’t “partly” pull out a knife stuck in you, but pull it out altogether.

And Mahmoud Abbas is not one whit different, in his attitudes, nor are his henchman and lesser warlords of Fatah, from the goals of Hamas or for that matter, any other terrorist group — including the redundantly-named “Islamic Jihad” that is merely the “terrorist wing” of the “armed wing” — Fatah — of the “Palestinian” Authority, with its “technocrats” and its “accountants,” eager to grasp in their grasping hands the latest installment of apparently inexhastible Western aid which, when it goes to the “Palestinians” — as it has for so many decades, does not go to others, to the truly deserving and poor Infidel wretched of this earth.

And how maddening it must be for these poor –in sub-Saharan Africa, in parts of Asia, in Latin America — to see Western countries spend hundreds of billions of dollars, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, in Egypt, in Jordan, in the “Palestinian” “territories,” (that is, those parts of the land allocated for the Jewish National Home that the Arabs seized in the 1948 War, and that Israel finally took rightful possession of in the 1967 war), when the Arab Muslim oil countries have been the recipients, since 1973, of about 11-12 trillion dollars — none of it the result of any effort on their part — but somehow have gotten away with, have managed to inveigle the Western Infidel lands, into thinking that they, the Infidels, owe Muslims a living, and a permanent living to boot, because inshallah-fatalism encouraged by Islam ensures economic underdevelopment. At the very least, it is Saudi Arabia, it is the U.A.E., it is Kuwait, Qatar, Libya, and the others, that should have attention focussed on them for their fantastic wealth, their fantastic greed, and, what’s more, their fantastic selfishness in refusing to share, save for a few tiny highly-visible public-relations bits, their unmerited wealth with all those fellow members of the Umma, the Community of Believers.

That “confidence-building” through release of murderers and would-be murderers is one more example of the nonchalance, the essential unseriousness, the nearly criminal negligence, of the Olmert government, and of previous Israeli governments, toward its own citizens. It appears that it is more important to build “confidence” (a comical notion when it comes to the cunning Slow Jihadists around malevolent “technocrat” Mahmoud Abbas, and his grasping and lying warlords and minions, his crew, his meynie, his retinue)among the enemy, instead of in protecting the citizens of Israel. No other Western country would free people who are a certain threat to its citizens, the way the government of Israel not once, but repeatedly, has done. No other country would be so cavalier with the lives of its citizens, in order to behave with superhuman solicitousness — those 23 Israeli Reservists who died so unnecessarily in Jenin because the Israeli government doesn’t allow the Israeli army to flatten enemy redoubts — compare how the American army has been known to use its air power in Iraq and Afghanistan — thereby forcing soldiers (Reservists, and not professional soldiers) to risk their own lives in the warren of Arab towns like Jenin. One’s fury at this is as nothing, of course, as must be the fury of the relatives of the Israeli soldiers who are killed because of this fear of using power correctly. And one’s fury at the government, because of the future victims of the Hamas people set free, in a 
“confidence-building” measure that should, were the Israeli state rightly run, lead to a motion of “no confidence” in the Knesset, is even greater.

Meanwhile, Western governments, still avoiding Islam, and thus still clinging to the dreamy belief in a “two-state solution” for what is a matter unsuscetible of solution, but merely a situation to be permanently endured, with the peace kept by the power — the perception of its overwhelming power that must be backed up to the hilt, and always reinforced, and not only by Israel itself — of the IDF, which is the only true peace-keeping force, or keeper of the peace, between Israel and the Muslim Arabs who would, if they could, at a moment’s notice, wipe that supreme offense to their sense of themselves, and to what is right, what is just, off the face of the earth.

Mahmoud Abbas and his men are very interested in power and money, but they are also Muslims; they believe in Islam, they take Islam seriously. They will use, now and again, though not quite as Arafat used them, the odd islamochristians who can be so useful with Western audiences, such as Naim Ateek and Hanan Ashrawi and Michel Sabbag, perfect emodiments of the islamochristian phenomenon. The men of Fatah want dough, and they can only get it from the Infidels — no one suggests that fellow Arabs start sharing their oil wealth — and so they want, they need, Western governments to turn on the tap of aid, letting the billions flow to them (despite all the fabulous corruption that has been reported, and despite the billions that simply disappeared — poof! — when Arafat died).

But Abbas and those who follow Abbas, all the Slow Jihadists of Fatah, share exactly the same goals as Hamas, and their real quarrel is over power and loot (two rival criminal gangs, essentially, but criminal gangs that reflect the 
beliefs of those they rule over). The Slow Jihadists of Fatah differ only in tactics and timing (and in the main question: Who Gets To Grab The Biggest Share Of The Infidel Jizyah-Aid) from the Fast Jihadists of Hamas.

If this is understood, whose “confidence” needs ”
building”? Surely it is the Israeli side that needs its confidence to be built. And the American government, showing it does not understand Islam, prating about how wonderful Islam is, telling Muslims everywhere — as part of “outreach” — that Muslims thrive in the United States, and are welcome, and that Islam itself is wonderful, is just what Muslim propagandists tell us it is, and all we need worry about are those “extremists” (“extreme” about what? using what texts? misinterpreting those texts of Islam in what “extremist” way? Please tell us– we keep waiting to hear, but somehow we never do hear) whom Bush, Rice, McCain, and of course Barack Obama (who judiciously estimates that there are about “40,000 hard-core Jihadists” in the entire world), all equally deplore, and all appear to believe, or at least pretend publicly to believe (and both are intolerable — it’s hard to say which is worse) that Islam itself is swell.

Here’s the “confidence-building” measure that Israelis need. They need an American govnement willing to use its power to destroy, or severely damage, and soon, within a few months, Iran’s nuclear project. They need, and now, an American government that, if it won’t assume its responsibilities as the most powerful Infidel nation, to deal with Iran, at the very least, to help the Israelis in every way, and not stand in their way, not attemp[t to prevent them — as hideously appears to be the case — from doing the job, with far less resources, and far less chance of the kind of success one would like — that the Americans should rightly be doing.

All those trillions for the military . All those Stealth bombers, and un-stealth bombers, and fighter jets. All those missiles, short-range, mid-range, Intercontinental and able to go ballistic. All those spy satellites. All those aircraft carriers. All those thisses and those thats. And for what? In order to keep unified, and then, build up Muslim Iraq? In order to build up Muslim Afghanistan, a hopeless case (see Rory Stewart’s excellent cover article on Afghanistan in, of all unlikely places, this week’s Time). But when it comes to a clear threat to all Infidels, not only does the American government show no signs of dealing, after five years of talk and “negotiation” with an evil (and islamically chiliastic regime, and therefore willing to suffer, willing to sacrifice, for the greater good of Islam, as long as certain goals can be achieved, and those who smooothly assure us that the “Iranians are rational and deterrence will work” are simply not paying attention to the specific people, and doctrines, and worldview, of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Communist rulers were rational. Muslim rulers, or those maddened by the Total Belief-System of Islam, are more akin to Hitler, when he attacked the Soviet Union, and did other things that someone less mad would never have done, or not done at the time he chose to do it), a man sometimes quite calculating, but at other times dangerously drunk on his own dreams, his own world-conquering ideology. Churchill understood this; Chamberlain, and all the many supporters of Chamberlain, did not.

Oh, and one other “confidence-building” measure for the Israelis is necessary. It is necessary for the Arabs, the Arabs of Gaza and of the “West Bank,” and the Arabs outside of the area, the other Arabs, to publicly address a question that the Israelis must raise:

“Why should we, the people and government of Israel, ever trust in treaties with you, if you take as your model the Treaty of Al Hudaibiyyah, as scholars of Islam, Muslim and non-Muslim, all inform us that you do, and that in Islam, it is not only permissible, but laudable, to break whenever possible any treaty with an Infidel enemy?

Please explain. In writing, if you wish, or in speeches.

We really can’t continue to peace-process with you unless you tell us clearly whether or not the model of Muhammad’s treaty-making with the Meccans in 628 A.D. still stands as a model for all subsequent treaty-making by Muslims with non-Muslims. We refer you to Majid Khadduri’s “Law of War and Peace in Islam.” Sorry, the exact page numbers escape us, but you should not have any trouble finding them.

And once you have answered that question, there is just one other little one. Could you explain to us, the people and government of Israel, whether or not those who deeply believe in Islam can permanently acquiesce in the existence of an Infidel nation-state, on land once possessed, however short or long the duration of that possession, by Muslims? This is not a theoretical question. We need to know. So please — do let us know.

You see, after all the “confidence-building” measures on our side, we need a “confidence-building” measure — or two — from you.

Posted by: Hugh  at July 27, 2008 11:42 AM