Israeli news and conflicts

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Here is an article from The International Herald Tribune. It states that definitive proof has been unearthed that proves what everyone else in the world except nationalistic, xenophobic Turks know is true: that the Ottoman Turks committed genocide against its native Armenian minority (in addition to the genocides against the Pontic Greeks and Assyrians).
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How did they ‘lose’ almost a million people? The Turkish explanation for what happened to the Armenians is not only insults the intelligence of any normally-thinking person, but is idiotic on the face of it. Perhaps a million Turks should be lost the same way (hint, hint Germany) and see what they think about it.
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This is almost as good as the Turks calling on Israel to stop occupying Palestinian territory while they are simultaneously illegally occupying northern Cyprus. But then again, hypocrisy is something Turks don’t seem to be afraid of.
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Are there any Turks out there who want to try to refute this?
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For Turkey, the number should have been a bombshell.
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According to a long-hidden document that belonged to the interior minister of the Ottoman Empire, 972,000 Ottoman Armenians disappeared from official population records from 1915 through 1916.
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In Turkey, any discussion of what happened to the Ottoman Armenians can bring a storm of public outrage. But since its publication in a book in January, the number - and its Ottoman source - has gone virtually unmentioned. Newspapers hardly wrote about it. Television shows have not discussed it.
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“Nothing,” said Murat Bardakci, the Turkish author and columnist who compiled the book.
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The silence can mean only one thing, he said: “My numbers are too high for ordinary people. Maybe people aren’t ready to talk about it yet.”
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Today in Europe
A ‘new’ Shakespeare comes to lightIn killing of policeman, memories of the TroublesThe factory’s closed, but the workers keep showing upFor generations, most Turks knew nothing of the details of the Armenian genocide from 1915 to 1918, when more than a million Armenians were killed as the Ottoman Turk government purged the population.
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Turkey locked the ugliest parts of its past out of sight, Soviet-style, keeping any mention of the events out of schoolbooks and official narratives in an aggressive campaign of forgetting.
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But in the past 10 years, as civil society has flourished here, some parts of Turkish society are now openly questioning the state’s version of events. In December, a group of intellectuals circulated a petition that apologized for the denial of the massacres. Some 29,000 people have signed it.
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With his book, “The Remaining Documents of Talat Pasha,” Bardakci (pronounced bard-AK-chuh) has become, rather unwillingly, part of this ferment. The book is a collection of documents and records that once belonged to Mehmed Talat, known as Talat Pasha, the primary architect of the Armenian deportations.
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The documents, given to Bardakci by Talat’s widow, Hayriye, before she died in 1983, include lists of population figures. Before 1915, 1,256,000 Armenians lived in the Ottoman Empire, according to the documents. The number plunged to 284,157 two years later, Bardakci said.
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To the untrained ear, it is simply a sad statistic. But anyone familiar with the issue knows the numbers are in fierce dispute.
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Turkey has never acknowledged a specific number of deportees or deaths. On Sunday, the Turkish foreign minister, Ali Babacan, warned that President Barack Obama might set back relations if he recognized the massacre of Armenians as genocide ahead of his visit to Turkey next month.
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The collapse of the Ottoman Empire was bloody, the Turkish argument goes, and those who died were victims of that chaos.
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Bardakci subscribes to that view. The figures, he said, do not indicate the number of dead, only the result of the decline in the Armenian population after deportation. He strongly disagrees that the massacres amounted to a genocide, and says that Turkey was obliged to take action against Armenians because they were openly supporting Russia in its war against the Ottoman Empire.
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“It was not a Nazi policy or a Holocaust,” he said. “These were very dark times. It was a very difficult decision. But deportation was the outcome of some very bloody events. It was necessary for the government to deport the Armenian population.”
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This argument is rejected by most scholars, who believe that the small number of Armenian rebels were not a serious threat to the Ottoman Empire, and that the policy was more the product of the perception that the Armenians, non-Muslims and therefore considered untrustworthy, were a problem population.
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Hilmar Kaiser, a historian and expert on the Armenian genocide, said the records published in the book were conclusive proof from the Ottoman authority itself that it had pursued a calculated policy to eliminate the Armenians. “You have suddenly on one page confirmation of the numbers,” he said. “It was like someone hit you over the head with a club.”
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Kaiser said the before-and-after figures amounted to “a death record.”
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“There is no other way of viewing this document,” he said. “You can’t just hide a million people.”
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Other scholars said that the number is a useful addition to the historical record but that it does not introduce a new version of events.
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“This corroborates what we already knew,” said Donald Bloxham, the author of “The Great Game of Genocide: Imperialism, Nationalism and the Destruction of the Ottoman Armenians.”
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Bardakci is a history buff who learned to read and write Ottoman script from his grandmother, allowing him to navigate Turkey’s written past, something that most Turks are unable to do. He plays the tanbur, a traditional string instrument. His grandfather was a member of the same political party as Talat, and his family knew many of the important political figures in Turkey’s founding.
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“We had a huge library at home,” he said. “They were always talking about history and the past.” Though Bardacki clearly wanted the numbers to be known, he stubbornly refuses to interpret them. He offers no analysis in the book, and aside from an interview with Talat’s widow, there is virtually no text beside the original documents.
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“I didn’t want to interpret,” he said. “I want the reader to decide.”
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The best way to do that, he argues, is by using cold, hard facts, which can cut through the layers of emotional rhetoric that have clouded the issue for years.
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“I believe we need documents in Turkey,” he said. “This is the most important.”
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But some of the keenest observers of Turkish society said the silence was a sign of just how taboo the topic still is. “The importance of the book is obvious from the fact that no paper except Milliyet has written a single line about it,” wrote Murat Belge, a Turkish academic, in a January column in the liberal daily newspaper Taraf.
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Still, it is a measure of Turkey’s democratic maturity that the book was published here at all. Bardakci said he had held the documents for so long - 27 years - because he was waiting for Turkey to reach the point when their publication would not cause a frenzy.
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Even now, the state feels the need to defend itself. Last summer, a propaganda film about the Armenians made by the Turkish military was distributed to primary schools. After a public outcry, it was stopped.
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“I could never have published this book 10 years ago,” Bardakci said. “I would have been called a traitor.”
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He added, “The mentality has changed.”

DEBKA reports that Israel has developed a new UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) called the Harop.  This is what is called a loiter drone which flies to a designated area and ‘loiters’ around looking for a target, in this case the formidable S-300.

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The S-300 is one of the most advanced anti-air defense systems in the world being able to track up to 100 targets at a time and having a radar unit that is supposedly immune to jamming.  It is generally regarded that going up against it will result in heavy casualties in aircraft and missiles.  Israel and the US are extremely worried that Russia will break its word not to sell the system to Iran and do so in the near future since Iran’s nuclear reactor is nearing completion and Tehran fears an Israeli air strike will take it out.  A lot of behind-the-scenes negotiating is going on right now to try and prevent such an event, but this new development seems to be Jerusalem’s ace in the hole.

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DEBKA states that Iran has 5 S-300 batteries on order in a deal worth $800 million.  So far, they have not been delivered.  However, Iran is now urgently pushing Moscow to hurry up because the news of the Harop has got them in a panic.  That is because it is designed to take out both radar installations and anti-air units.  It has a 1000 km range and can remain over its target area for several hours looking for its prey.

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One of the Harop’s best features is that it can detect enemy weapons’ systems even when they are in inert mode, on the move and when radar units are turned off to avoid detection.  This will give Israel the ability to clear out the S-300 and other defenses ahead of any potential Israeli and/or US air strikes.

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This new UAV is so powerful that both India and Turkey are currently interested in buying it.  The fact that Israel is already willing to sell it on the open market shows how much confidence they have in the system as well as sending another of many messages to Iran.

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The Harop couldn’t have been developed a minute too soon since today (25 February 2009) Iran is running the first test of its reactor.  Iran is hell-bent on continuing its nuclear program at any cost and that has got Israel and much of the world very worried.  Sanctions and embargoes have not helped much, leaving force as the only option.  Iran sought to cut off that possibility with the S-300 but now that too seems to be a pipe dream.

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Hopefully, the Harop is everything the Israelis say it is so that when the time comes, the IAF (Israeli Air Force) can do to Iran what it did to Syria and Iraq: turned their nuclear reactors into so much expensive dust.

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(The picture above shows Syria’s nuclear plant. Notice how the central building is totally gone in the right picture. That is more from the Syrian ‘clean-up’ than the Israeli bombing.)
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New traces of processed uranium were found from samples taken last year from the one-off visit to the Al-Kibar site.  This is the location where Israel bombed and destroyed Syria’s secret nuclear plant being built with help from North Korea.  Processed uranium particles were previously found late last year, but more were found recently.

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Of course, Syria denied everything and blamed Israel for the traces of uranium discovered by saying the IAF (Israeli Air Force) used depleted uranium munitions in their air strike.  Of course, the anti-Israel crowd was eager to go along with this laughable line, but other evidence has just arisen to prove Damascus to be the liars that they actually are.

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Graphite was also found in the same sample that the uranium particles came from.  This is significant because the North Korean model of nuclear reactor uses graphite.  This is a non-natural material that just can’t be found lying around in the desert, so Assad and his cronies will have to work overtime to create a lie to explain that away.

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Now that Syria has been caught yet again in a deception of such magnitude and international importance, I would like to see what the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) will do about it.  I won’t hold my breath over it though because the IAEA has shown little courage or will to tackle nuclear cheating anywhere in the world, but even more so with Muslim countries (Syria, Libya, Iran).

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People wonder why Israel takes violent, unilateral actions such as the air strike at Al-Kibar.  When the international agency tasked with pursuing and doing something about secret nuclear projects, especially involving rogue states, isn’t effectively doing its job, then something else needs to be done.  Once a nuclear plant is up and operating, it is too late to do much.  Ideally, everything has to be stopped in the planning stage, but if it comes down to it, then taking out a plant in mid-construction is the only other option.

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Israel won’t hesitate to protect itself from what it sees as a critical threat as it proved at Al-Kibar and more currently in Gaza.  Iran should pay strong attention.

MEMRI (The Middle East Media Research Institute) reports on an interview of Dr. Ibtihal Al-Qassam shown on Al-Quds TV on 7 January 2009. A quote is given below.
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Dr. Ibtihal Al-Qassam: ‘The Qassam missile means a great deal to me, as the granddaughter of the martyr Izz Al-Din Al-Qassam. Just as I am proud of my ancestry, I am humbled by the blood being spilled in Palestine. I am humbled by the true descendants of Al-Qassam, who are inscribing, with their pure blood, the victory of this nation, which will be achieved soon, Allah willing.’
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Izz Al-Din Al-Qassam (1882-1935) was a Sunni preacher who founded the Black Hand (Palestinian) military group. This was a terrorist organization that fought against the British in Palestine and as well as assaulting Jews there. He became a hero of the Palestinians for his anti-Jewish attacks and the way he died fighting British forces after being cornered in a cave.
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Dr. Ibtihal Al-Qassam is proud that the handmade missiles Hamas is making to fire at Israel have been named after her grandfather. It actually makes sense since both were/are murderous instruments of war. Of course, more perceptive observers will note the ineffectualness of both also, neither being capable of actually accomplishing very much.
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‘I consider the Qassam missile to be a fetus in the womb of the resistance. This fetus will soon be born in the form of a great victory for the resistance. This resistance is honed by the blood of the martyrs - the children, the women, the elderly, and the men.’
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This is where Dr. Ibtihal tries to get poetic but just manages to exhibit her sickness instead. Is this the kind of stuff that really turns Palestinians on? They keep talking about death, sacrifice and struggle all the time. You never hear anything about peace, prosperity and happiness. It is all killing, destruction and martyrdom.
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The final sentence of the quote is telling. Dr. Ibtihal considers the entire Palestinian population as warriors to be used against the Israelis, a Muslim form of total war. The outside world, especially those in the West who are so quick to criticize Israel for defending itself, needs to realize that if women, children and the elderly are going to be used in the struggle against Israel, then they are going to get killed and wounded as a result. That is what happens to combatants in war, they get hurt and killed. Why is that such a surprise to most people?
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The Palestinians are part of a Cult of Death in that they glorify death, want to inflict death on others, and want to die themselves. When death becomes the goal and epitome of life, then you have a seriously sick society. How can one make peace with such people? How can they be trusted when negotiating truces and treaties? Israel must consign itself to constant warfare with the Palestinians punctuated with periods of calm (mostly so the Palestinians can lick their wounds and rearm). It doesn’t bode well for the future.

The Tamil Tigers (the formal name is the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, the LTTE) are a terrorist organization trying to get their own Tamil state in the northern and eastern part of Sri Lanka. They started their struggle in the 1970s that continues to this day. They are unique in the terrorist world in that they invented suicide bombing, have their own merchant marine and are the only terrorist group with its own (albeit small) air force. In fact, they have committed more suicide bombings than Hamas, Islamic Jihad and Al Qaeda put together.
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The Sri Lankan government has finally gotten smart and brave enough to force a fight to the finish, but the bleeding-heart leftists of the world are trying to get a ceasefire before this 30+ year-old civil war can be put to rest. In the height of its power, the LTTE controlled 15,000 km of territory, but at the moment of writing, they have been reduced to a mere 115. Now that the Sri Lankans have the LTTE at their mercy, outside forces want the fighting to stop.
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The usual reasons are given for this ceasefire call: concern over civilian casualties and to allow humanitarian aid to get into the conflict zone. The one thing these do-gooders never seem to understand is that ceasefires mostly allow the combatants on both sides to rest, rearm and otherwise recuperate for more fighting a little later. The losing side tends to benefit more in these cases. Hill-Hill and Davie-Boy should think like criminals for a second and imagine what they would do if they were the LTTE and just got a ceasefire on the eve they were about to be snuffed out of existence.
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The Sri Lankan government needs to turn off their hearing aids, go for broke and finish this thing. Afterward, they can let in so much humanitarian aid that Clinton and Miliband choke on it. The rest of the world is always so ready to call for peace when it isn’t their people being attacked and doing the dying (Does the current situation in Israel/Gaza sound familiar?). Like usual hypocrites, if they were in the same situation that Sri Lanka is in now, they would be doing the same thing and wouldn’t pay any attention to such wussy groups like Human Rights Watch.
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The sooner this civil war ends, the better. This overly-long conflict may actually be over in a few days. When it does (if they ignore the calls for an immediate ceasefire), the Sri Lankans can throw the biggest party this side of Carnival. After so much effort, they will deserve it.

The Palestinian Authority (PA) is trying to get the International Criminal Court (ICC) to initiate a war-crimes investigation of the recent Gaza conflict. It seems like this is going to be a fruitless gesture as will be explained further down.
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The ICC can only launch an invitation if asked to by the UN Security Council or when a state involved in the issue at hand recognizes the court. There are two big problems here, neither of which is encouraging to the Palestinian cause.
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The first is the Security Council itself. The US has a veto and will almost certainly use it to block such an investigation before it can be started. Even with Obama now at the helm, America is unlikely to betray Israel in such an open and blatant way, plus the US also does not recognize the court because other countries want to prosecute American servicemen and politicians for various incidents relating to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The US and Israel are in the same boat on this one.
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Problem two is that the Palestinians don’t have an officially recognized state. Israel does not recognize the ICC and says the PA effort is certain to fail. Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor said, ‘The ICC charter is adhered to by sovereign states and the Palestinian Authority has not yet been recognized as one so it cannot be a member of the ICC.’
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The ICC says it is now analyzing the PA application to see if it falls within the law. However, Andre Nollkaemper, Head of Amsterdam University’s Center for International Law, said, ‘It is unlikely the Palestinian move will succeed. The Statute of the International Criminal Court is only open to states and the Palestinian Authority could not unilaterally recognize the (court’s) authority.’
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It is a bit rich of the Palestinians to be asking for a war-crimes investigation of a war that they started. It is like the Nazis are Nuremburg asking for a similar investigation against the Allies. In addition, Hamas and the PA should not forget that they have been firing missiles and rockets at civilian targets inside Israel for years, ratcheting up a total of 7000 launches. Bombarding civilians, even with crappy hand-made missiles, is also a war crime.
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The old say ‘Be careful what you wish for; you may actually get it’ comes to mind. This kind of action is a double-edged sword with a mind of its own that can cut both ways. The very Palestinians trying to get this action started may very well find themselves to be the target of the investigators. The Palestinians have many of their own sins to answer for.

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DEBKA reports than Hamas test fired a powerful missile last week under the watchful eyes of Iranian trainers. The Noor is an Iranian anti-ship missile based on the Chinese C-802. It has some formidable capabilities with a range of 200 kilometers (124 miles), a small radar signature, low attack flight path (5 to 7 meters about the surface of the sea) and advanced anti-jamming equipment. It carries a 165 kilogram (365 pound) semi-armor piercing warhead and has a reported 98% hit probability.
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Israel has tangled with this weapon before. Hezbollah fired one during the 2006 Lebanon War which hit the missile ship Hanit, seriously damaging it and killing four crewmen.
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The Noor is a serious piece of equipment and it gives Hamas a possible way of breaking Israel’s sea blockade on Gaza. The Israeli military has reacted strongly to this launch calling it a provocation and a violation of the ceasefire. What they didn’t say is that it is also an escalation. More advanced weapons in the hands of the terrorist government is going to force Israel to take greater and possibly more violent countermeasures. One can only imagine Jerusalem’s reaction if one of Israel’s warships gets sunk by one of this things.
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Another issue is when the missiles were smuggled into Gaza. Was it before or during the recent conflict? If it was done during the conflict, then it has serious implications because it means that it was done under the noses of the IDF (Israeli Defense Force) and IAF (Israeli Air Force). Now that the ceasefire is in effect, many more of these weapons can easily be brought in. DEBKA reports that Hezbollah is believed to have as many as 1000. That is an outstanding number which would put Israel’s entire surface fleet in extreme danger. Extremely tight coordination between the Israeli Navy, Air Force and intelligence services is the only real defense against this threat.
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One final question I have now is how is Hamas paying for these expensive toys when they are crying about not having enough food and medicine after the recent conflict with Israel? There never seems to be a financial shortage when it comes time to buying weapons, but they would have the world believe their people are starving and dying from a lack of medicines and other basic supplies. The world needs to wake up to this deception and take Hamas to task over its blatant lies and fraud.

Two unconfirmed reports have come out about the Gaza War that would make for a good Tom Clancy book. The first is that Syrian diplomats have said that at the beginning of hostilities with Hamas, Israel secretly notified Lebanon and Syria that if Hezbollah launched rocket attacks against the Jewish state, it would retaliate by destroying high-value targets in both countries. Both countries leaned hard on Hezbollah and the terrorist group sat this conflict out.
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Careful analysis of my last sentence will show that the implied threat was against more economic targets over military ones. This was a clever strategy by Jerusalem because such targets (power stations, dams, bridges, etc.) affect the civilian population and the countries’ economies, so their repair would be vital. Replacing some tanks or aircraft isn’t much of a problem but a blown-up dam is both costly and time-consuming to fix.
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The second report regards a Hamas missile assault against the X-Band Radar facility near Israel’s nuclear reactor outside the town of Dimona (see X-Band Radar Operational in Israel in December). Three of Hamas’ longest-ranged missiles were fired at it but all fell wide of their mark. The main reason why Hamas expended some of their precious and in short-supply long-range missiles was that knocking out the radar station would have taken away Israel’s best early defense warning of an Iranian missile attack.
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Though Iran almost certainly wouldn’t have attacked Israel at that time, losing the X-Band Radar would have been a severe political and morale loss for Jerusalem. At the same time, this radar site was feeding the Israeli military with vital information about missile, rocket and mortar attacks from Gaza that allowed for rapid and usually effective countermeasures. Thus, Hamas had two good reasons to try and knock out the radar site. Luckily for Israel, Hamas’ aim was as good as their soldiers’ ability to fight: one big nil.

In his first public appearance in over a month, senior Hamas official Khaili al-Haveh crawled out of his hidey-hole to address more than 5000 supporters of the terrorist regime today (30 January). He must have a secret desire to be a Hollywood-caliber comedian because he declared victory over Israel in their recent war, a statement on par with a George Carlin monologue in its amusement quotient.
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Looking out over the ruins of Gaza City he said, ‘We thank God when we see our houses bombed and our institutions destroyed, but our people say yes to the resistance and yes to martyrdom for the sake of God. We say proudly that Gaza has won the war, the resistance has won the war, and Hamas has won the war.’
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The most laughable part of this entire charade is that Hamas has been screaming in the international media about the disproportional amount of casualties they have suffered compared to the Israelis (1300 dead to 13), all the destruction Gaza has sustained and leveling genocide charges against Jerusalem. Does all this sound like the words of victors, the winning side?
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You can’t have it both ways, Mr. Haveh. You can’t see your territory pretty much leveled, take massive casualties without inflicting hardly any in return and then declare victory. This would be like Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan claiming victory in World War II. All those big words, bragging and taunts before the conflict started amounted to nothing. All those Hamas ‘soldiers’ hiding so their officers had to go out and get slaughtered isn’t the behavior of a victorious army.
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Let’s be honest. Hamas got its ass kicked up into its teeth and no amount of bombastic speeches is going to change that fact. I truly hope the Palestinian people of Gaza can see the Hamas putzes for what they really are: a big, bad bunch of gun-totting losers. For all the suffering and destruction the Palestinian people have had to endure, Hamas managed to kill only 9 Israelis (the other 4 died from a friendly-fire incident). Where is the victory in that? What kind of return on all that sacrifice has been realized? If this were a financial scenario, Hamas would be bankrupt, dissolved and put out to pasture.

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Here you have a Hamas member of the Religion of Peace showing how hard the Palestinians are trying to come to terms with Israel. Maybe the word ‘peace’ has a different meaning in Arabic. In any case, the Israelis paid him back in kind and now Ahmed or whatever his name is, is enjoying his 72 virgins (ooh, how so politically incorrect) in Paradise.