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| Is Netanyahu manuevering to attack Iran? (Photo: Globalhood news) |
JERUSALEM — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to execute a 1,000-for-1 prisoner exchange last week despite his frequently voiced opposition to such lopsided deals is seen by several Israeli military commentators as an effort to “clear the deck” before possibly undertaking an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Amir Oren, the veteran military analyst for Ha'aretz newspaper, took note of Israel’s exchanging 1,027 Palestinian convicts for army Staff Sgt. Gilad Schalit, who had been captured by Hamas in 2006. Mr. Oren wrote that the price paid by Mr. Netanyahu and Defense Minister Ehud Barak “can be interpreted only in a context that goes beyond that of the Gilad Schalit deal.”
He noted that Israeli leaders in the past have shown a readiness to absorb “a small loss” in order to attain a greater success, generally involving “some sort of military adventure.”
Mr. Oren offered another insight that he says may point Mr. Netanyahu toward military action against Iran.
Although the prime minister failed to make any enduring mark on history during his previous term or so far during his present term, Mr. Netanyahu may see Iran as an opportunity to achieve his Churchillian moment, Mr. Oren wrote. “The day is not far off, Netanyahu believes, when Churchill will emerge from him.”
Palestinian "armed-struggle" shows no sign of relenting against Israel's moral code.An obscene moral equivalence has been established by this deal between the innocent and the guilty.
This equivalence is being played out in the coverage which describes the deal as a ‘prisoner swap’ or ‘prisoner exchange’ – more than 1000 Palestinian prisoners held in Israeli jails for one Israeli prisoner held by Hamas. But Shalit was a hostage, kidnapped in an act of illegal aggression by an organisation whose aim is the destruction of Israel and which allowed him not one visit by the Red Cross during his five year incarceration.
By contrast, the released Palestinians have not just been tried and punished according to due process of law, but include among their number not just those who have committed some of the worst terrorist atrocities in Israel’s history – such as the blowing up of Sbarro’s pizza restaurant in Jerusalem, where 16 people were murdered including five members of the Schijveschuurder family -- but even worse, some of the masterminds behind such atrocities.
The equivalence being drawn in the coverage of this deal reflects in turn the morally bankrupt ‘tit-for-tat’ analysis of the Arab war against Israel employed by so many in Britain and the west. For whenever Israel points out that any military action against the Palestinians is only in response to Palestinian attacks, many in Britain claim that those Palestinian attacks were only in response to previous Israeli attacks. Thus Israel is always painted as the ultimate aggressor.
Gilad reunited with father Noam Shalit at Tel Nof Air Base
This is entirely false. From the moment Israel was re-established in 1948, it has only ever launched military operations against the Arabs in response to actual or imminent Arab attacks. Yet many in Britain refuse to acknowledge the difference between murderous aggression and the defence against it.
They refuse to acknowledge that Hamas sets out to murder as many young Israelis as possible, whereas Israel goes to great lengths (not always successfully) to avoid civilian casualties. They refuse to acknowledge that the aim of every single military operation by Israel in Gaza is to defend and protect itself against attack by a fanatically Jew-hating enemy pledged not only to destroy Israel but to wipe out every single Jew on earth.
The refusal to acknowledge this crucial moral difference has meant that many in Britain and the west view Israel as the aggressor in the conflict, and the victimisation of Israelis is largely glossed over. So just as the anguish of Israeli terror victims’ families over the Shalit deal has been minimised by the media coverage – particularly in Israel itself, which reflects the malign nature of its own left-wing media class -- so the anguish of Israel itself as a state under permanent existential siege is routinely ignored, and Israel instead grotesquely portrayed as the aggressor in the region. . . .
What too many in Britain and the west still don’t understand is that what Israel is up against is what Britain and the west are now up against – not a violent campaign by people fighting for a state of their own but an Islamist cult of death, in which the murder of innocents is a cause for exultation and mass killers are lionised as heroes and religious martyrs, not just by Hamas but by the Fatah leadership in the West Bank too.
The five-year Shalit drama and its disturbing resolution have therefore come to symbolise the toxic cocktail of ignorance, misunderstanding, naivety, malice, cowardice, cynicism, incompetence and moral muddle by the so-called civilised world – including Israel itself -- that has actually served to perpetuate the Middle East impasse.
No decent person can fail to be moved by the return of Gilad Shalit to Israel. Few eyes will have been dry at his reunion with his family. Yet it has to be said that ultimately, this deal represents a triumph of heart over head and sentimentality over realism. . . .
Israel is now trapped between Hamas, Fatah, Hezbollah, Iran, Syria, Egypt and the Mediterranean Sea – and yet is blamed for preventing peace by building apartments in the suburbs of Jerusalem. The infernal choice it was forced to make over Gilad Shalit was thus but the latest and most dramatic example of how the West has abandoned Israel to swing in the wind. Read it all
Since Israel allowed the PLO and its terror armies to move their bases from Tunis to Judea, Samaria, and Gaza in 1994, nearly 2,000 Israeli families have involuntarily paid the ultimate price in the “peace process.” The Shalit deal is a moral defeat- most especially for these families of the victims of terrorism: Israel just cancelled more than 900 life sentences to embrace again one soldier. Meir Schijveschuurder, who lost his parents and three of his siblings in the suicide bombing in the Sbarro restaurant in Jerusalem in 2001, yesterday declared against the deal: “We feel like a man who woke up in Germany a day after World War II.”
Israelis rallied to leaders to free kidnapped Gilad Shalit
(Photo courtesy: San Francisco Sentinel 12/21/09)
Terrorism is now sanctified throughout all the Palestinian areas. The streets are plastered with posters glorifying terrorists and suicide bombers. Children trade “martyr cards” the way Western children trade baseball cards. Necklaces with pictures of terrorists, many released today by Israel, are very popular. Signs on the walls of Palestinian kindergartens currently proclaim their pupils as “the martyrs of tomorrow.” Elementary-school principals commend their students for wanting to “tear their [Zionists’] bodies into little pieces and cause them more pain than they will ever know.” Unlike terrorists in other parts of the world, the Palestinian movement aspires to immortality and its violence is always “sacred.” That’s why the freed terrorists will return to kill the Jews.
(Photo: Salon.com)
The Almagor association revealed that 177 Israelis have been killed by prisoners released by Israel in previous deals. The Jews living in the settlements are afraid of a new round of killings. “Many terrorists have been allowed to return to live near our homes, it’s a shock and a disaster,” Hillel Weiss, professor of literature at Bar-Ilan University and a leader in the settlement community, tells me. The deal is a victory for terrorism, since Hamas can now justly demonstrate that killing Jews is infinitely more effective than negotiations in achieving their objectives. It will also be much easier to recruit terrorists when they are encouraged to believe that no matter how many Israelis they kill, there is every likelihood that, if apprehended, they will be released.
Releasing the terrorists meant saving Gilad’s life, but it also means that more Jews will die and more soldiers will be kidnapped. Now many Israelis ask: How many more lives are to be sacrificed before the rest of the released men — and those to be released in future exchanges — are put behind bars again? Appeasement breeds only death and destruction. Capitulating will culminate in greater disasters.
Gilad Schalit is home. And that is wonderful. The terrorists Israel released in exchange for the IDF soldier held hostage by Hamas for more than five years are running around Judea, Samaria and Gaza promising to return to terror. And that is a nightmare.
. . . Given the media’s unchecked power to repeatedly manipulate public opinion to adhere to its radical ideological agenda, it is essential that the government and Knesset step in and reform the media market. Broadcast licensing procedures for television and radio must be deregulated. Television and radio must be open to competition. Broadcasters should be allowed to broadcast whatever they want whenever they want, and the market should dictate who rises and who falls. This is the only way to protect the public against manipulation, and the government from blackmail.
After being caught out, Iran is behaving as though it is under threat of war, its fury fueled by the US-Egyptian-Israeli-Hamas prisoner deal which threatens to cut the Islamic Republic out of Palestinian affairs and curtail its influence in the Gaza Strip, an important outpost. DEBKAfile Exclusive Report October 12, 2011, As Israelis joyously celebrated news of the forthcoming release of their soldier from five years in Hamas captivity, US officials in Washington released details of the plot instigated by Iran to murder Saudi ambassador Al-Jubeir, one of King Abdullah's closest advisers.
US Attorney General Holder and FBI Director Robert Mueller named Iranian-American Mansour Arbabsiar, 56,and a second man, Gohlam Shakuri, an Iranian official, in a five-count criminal complaint filed Tuesday afternoon in the federal court in New York. It included counts of conspiracy to kill a foreign official and conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction, a bomb. Shakuri is still at large in Iran. Holder identified him as an Iran-based member of the Al Qods force.
US Atty Gen Eric Holder & FBI Dir Robert Mueller (AP)
US officials are deeply concerned that Tehran may not take lying down Washington's charge that the Revolutionary Guards' Al Qods Brigades were complicit in the assassination plot or the success of a prisoner exchange deal releasing the Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit from Hamas captivity.
After being caught out, Iran is behaving as though it is under threat of war, its fury fueled by the US-Egyptian-Israeli-Hamas prisoner deal which threatens to cut the Islamic Republic out of Palestinian affairs and curtail its influence in the Gaza Strip, an important outpost.
With a valuable Middle East holding about to be lost, Iran is capable of unleashing terrorists for acts that would force the hands of the United States and Israel. By drawing Hamas into such operations, Tehran would seek to torpedo the Shalit deal a moment before its consummation.
Sources in Washington therefore criticized Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu for jumping the gun by his announcing the deal Tuesday for domestic political kudos. "Prisoner swaps are counted successful only after or during the fact," said one official.
Other Western intelligence sources commented that by letting the cat out of the bag a week in advance, Israel gave Iran and Hizballah time to sabotage it. Both maintain a strong presence of undercover agents in the Gaza Strip who are fully capable of blowing away the deal Hamas political leader Khaled Meshaal struck with Israel in the framework of an accord with the United States for packing up his Hamas bureau and command centers and moving them out of Damascus.
