News Comment

Military Threats to Israel continue to mount

Gaza

Israel goes in to Gaza after enduring 4500 rockets fired at Sderot and now larger Grad rockets, supplied by Iran, start falling on Ashkelon.

"Humanitarian" agencies that never cared about the daily rocket attacks on Israelis now queue up to condemn Israel for the casualties and a "humanitarian crisis." Earlier concern about a "humanitarian crisis" overlooked the Hamas stage management behind the "power cuts" stories and the documented proof that aid convoys were going in to Gaza.

Churches are being encouraged to mobilize on the wrong side as usual, but the truth remains ignored or obscured.

"Before the IDF attacks Qassam workshops or warehouses it distributes flyers asking the residents to evacuate the area. But Hamas exploits the flyers and places small children on the rooftops in order to foil the attacks. And thus because of this trick the IDF is forced to halt many such bombings at the last moment."
"We are working with our hands tied because of all these laws and because we are part of the free world and because this is part of our values," FM Livni said.
Yediot Ahronot reporting an Israeli Military Intelligence briefing for foreign ambassadors.

North

Hizballah have regrouped and re-armed under the noses of UNIFIL and are ready to have another go, confident that they won the Summer 2006 war.

The USA is sending warships to the Eastern Mediteranean in anticipation of trouble.

According to IsraelNN.com, there is a sound basis for this concern.

The Kuwaiti daily Al-Watan quoted "top Western sources" Monday saying that, "according to reliable intelligence information, Hizbullah has begun planning a large-scale attack on Israel in retaliation for its [alleged] assassination of senior Hizbullah commander Imad Mughniyah."

According to the report, translated by MEMRI, the attack is being planned in coordination with Syria and Iran, and is to take place before the Arab summit next month. It was also reported that there would be a simultaneous terrorist escalation by Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other PA groups in Gaza.

Iran's Nuclear capability

All chances of the Bush administration in the USA doing something about Iran's nuclear weapons programme came to nothing when the NIE report from the USA Intellegence community declared that Iran had ceased its weapons programme in 2005. After the available evidence of Iraq's WMDs was said to be non-existent President Bush could not risk another accusation of taking the USA into another costly conflict on false pretences.

Michael McConnell, the man responsible for the US National Intelligence Estimate that two months ago essentially cleared Iran of pursuing a nuclear bomb, backtracked a week ago. (David Horowitz - Jerusalem Post International Edition February 22-28 2008) He goes on to point out that McConnell has effectively said it was completely wrong, but the damage has been done - Nobody took any notice of the quiet backtracking so Bush and other western leaders will be unwilling or unable to do anything effective against Iran. This leaves Israel alone facing the decision about whether to do something and probably be accused by the world of starting WWIII.

Jerusalem Connection page by Caroline Glick on USA's Security community report - double crossing Israel.

And Israel's partner for Peace in negotiations?

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas said Wednesday that he doesn't rule out armed conflict against Israel. He also said that he was "honored" to have fired the first bullet of the Fatah terror organization in 1965, and to have taught terror tactics around the world, including to such groups as Hizbullah.
In an in-depth interview published today in the Jordanian daily Al-Dustur, Abbas said that the PA is "unable" to pursue armed conflict for now, but said that "in the future stages things may be different."
PMW

Annapolis and following !

The escalating developments in which the USA is pushing Israel towards a "Land For Peace" deal, with those who have proved every time that they have no Peace to offer, are becoming crucial. This Peace Initiative could have huge fallout! Every previous move of this type ( Land for Peace ) has resulted in renewed bloodshed for Israel, and punishment for the Nations responsible.

Death of the Bush Doctrine - By: Jeff Jacoby
Thursday, January 24, 2008 - Boston Globe

The Bush Doctrine -- born on Sept. 20, 2001, when President Bush bluntly warned the sponsors of violent jihad: "You are either with us, or you are with the terrorists" -- is dead. Its demise was announced by Condoleezza Rice last Friday.

The secretary of state was speaking to reporters aboard Air Force One en route with the president to Kuwait from Israel. She was explaining why the administration had abandoned the most fundamental condition of its support for Palestinian statehood - namely, an end to Palestinian terror. Rice's explanation, recounted here by The Washington Times, was as striking for its candor as for its moral blindness:

"The 'road map' for peace, conceived in 2002 by Mr. Bush, had become a hindrance to the peace process, because the first requirement was that the Palestinians stop terrorist attacks. As a result, every time there was a terrorist bombing, the peace process fell apart and went back to square one. Neither side ever began discussing the 'core issues': the freezing of Israeli settlements in the West Bank, the right of Palestinian refugees to return, the outline of Israel 's border, and the future of Jerusalem.

"'The reason that we haven't really been able to move forward on the peace process for a number of years is that we were stuck in the sequentiality of the road map. So you had to do the first phase of the road map before you moved on to the third phase of the road map, which was the actual negotiations of final status,' Rice said. . . . What the US-hosted November peace summit in Annapolis did was 'break that tight sequentiality. . . You don't want people to get hung up on settlement activity or the fact that the Palestinians haven't fully been able to deal with the terrorist infrastructure. . .'"

Thus the president who once insisted that a "Palestinian state will never be created by terror" now insists that a Palestinian state be created regardless of terror. Once the Bush administration championed a "road map" whose first and foremost requirement was that the Palestinians "declare an unequivocal end to violence and terrorism" and shut down "all official . . . incitement against Israel ." Now the administration says that Palestinian terrorism and incitement are nothing "to get hung up on."

Article continues - http://support.tjci.org/site/News2?page=NewsArticle&id=5291

Bush Promotes a Palestinian "Right of Return"

by Daniel Pipes
FrontPageMagazine.com
January 14, 2008

The Palestinian "right of return" entered the lexicon of American policymakers in December 2006, when the Iraq Study Group Report urged the U.S. government to support Israel-Palestinian negotiations that addresses what it termed a "key final status issue." That recommendation came as a mild shock, given that the "right of return" to Israel is transparently a code phrase to overwhelm Israel demographically, thereby undoing Zionism and the Jewish state, and so never before a goal of official Washington.

A year later, White House deputy press secretary Dana Perino adopted the term, though without much notice. Out of seemingly nowhere, she informed journalists at a press briefing on November 28, 2007 that "The right of return issue is a part of the road map and it's going to be one of the issues that the Israelis and the Palestinians have to talk about during … negotiations."

Continues - http://www.danielpipes.org/article/5373

Just a day after Israeli and Palestinian leaders at the Annapolis peace conference pledged to negotiate a peace treaty by the end of 2008, Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority continues to paint a picture for its people of a world without Israel.

There has been no reduction of attacks on Israel - an escalation if anything.

It became clear that Annapolis was only talks about talks about talks, so no immediate disasters have befallen anybody. However, the Bush administration remains committed to establishing a Palestinan state in Biblical Judea and Samaria by the end of his administration. There appear to be no conditions on this commitment, such as the Palestinains abandoning terror attacks, incitement of their children or their commitment to anihilating Israel. The seriousness remains but the timescale for disaster is longer than it first appeared.

See also Revised and updated The Roadmap and the Quartet