Showing posts with label Ehud Yaari. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Ehud Yaari. Show all posts

Wednesday, December 2, 2015

With All Eyes on ISIS, Iran ‘Drills’ Israel’s Destruction By P. David Hornik - BIN


With All Eyes on ISIS, Iran ‘Drills’ Israel’s Destruction

“Paramilitary forces from Iran’s powerful Revolutionary Guard have held a war game simulating the capture of Jerusalem’s Al-Aqsa Mosque from Israeli control,” the Associated Press reports.
…thousands of members of the Basij, the paramilitary unit of the Guard, participated in Friday’s exercise outside the holy city of Qom in central Iran.
The symbolic operations were backed up by Guard helicopters, drones and Tucano planes that bombed hypothetical enemy positions before ground troops captured the replica of the mosque set up at the top of a mountain….
Gen. Amir Ali Hajizadeh, who heads the Guard’s aerospace division, said his force deployed Shahed-129, or Witness-129, drones during the war games. The drone, unveiled in 2013, has a range of 1,700 kilometers (1,050 miles), a 24-hour nonstop flight capability and can carry eight bombs or missiles.
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AP then informs us that it’s not really anything to worry about:
Even so, the exercise appeared to be largely for show. Iranian commanders have not said how they would be able to deploy large numbers of forces against Israel, located 1,600 kilometers (1,000 miles) away, or overcome Israel’s powerful and technologically advanced military.
Actually, there are ways that they can do that. One is to use the immense windfall they stand to reap from last July’s nuclear deal, in the form of lifted sanctions and boosted trade and oil sales, to build up their capabilities. Another is to create a land bridge westward to the Mediterranean, something they’re striving to do at all times.
And another is to rely on the Western preoccupation with the Islamic State, and increasing tendency to treat Iran as a strategic ally and stabilizing force, to keep pursuing their plans relatively untrammeled.
Ehud Yaari, a veteran Israeli Middle East analyst, takes Iran’s aims seriously enough that he devoted a long analysis to them called “How Iran Plans to Destroy Israel.” “The Islamic Republic of Iran,” Yaari notes, “has been committed for the past 36 years to a doctrine aimed at wiping Israel off the map. Statements to this effect still pour out of Tehran almost daily.”
For one thing,
Iran is relying on its rapidly growing arsenal of long-range missiles…. [T]he leaders have long emphasized to Iranian military commanders the need to develop missiles that can reach Israel in particular. This began with [Supreme Leader] Khamenei’s order for missiles with a 1,000-kilometer range that, if launched from Iran’s western border, could hit Israel. Still later, Khamenei instructed his commanders to acquire missiles with a 2,000-kilometer range, allowing for a successful hit on Israel from most of Iran’s territory. And later still Khamenei personally ordered that the accuracy of the missiles should be dramatically improved.
What about Iranian forces reaching Israel itself, as in the Revolutionary Guard’s Al-Aqsa drill? Yaari acknowledges that, apart from its missile arsenal, at present Iran’s air force, navy, and ground forces have only limited capabilities. But “all this may change if Iran decides to allocate resources, derived from [the] nuclear deal, to a major effort to project military power beyond its borders.”
As Yaari notes, Iran already sponsors terror militias on Israel’s Gaza and Lebanon borders and has been striving to create a similar threat—based in part on its own forces—on Israel’s Golan border with Syria. Beyond all that,
Some Iranians imagine the creation of a land corridor from Iran through Shi‘a regions in Iraq to its desert al-Anbar province and from there to Syria and Lebanon. Establishing such a corridor would require at least the tacit cooperation of the authorities in Bagdad (where Iran already enjoys predominance) or the power brokers in Iraq’s southern provinces. It would definitely require [overcoming] the Islamic State’s current control over key sectors of western Iraq…. Some militiamen have made it all the way to Damascus to protect that capital from a Sunni onslaught, so anything is possible.
The Islamic State is, of course, a murderous threat in itself that should ideally be decimated and destroyed. But it should not be at the cost of further empowering Iran—which, with its ever-advancing (despite the deal) nuclear program and its missiles that can already reach most of Europe, constitutes a far greater threat.
Since the Vienna deal Iran has further boosted uranium enrichmenttested a nuclear-capable missile in breach of a UN Security Council ban, arrested yet another American citizen and an American resident, and continued its “Death to America, Death to Israel” rallies to Khamenei’s approval. Also, Khamenei has published a 416-page book called Palestine that mandates both Israel’s and America’s destruction.
Yes, the Islamic State has lately mounted deadly attacks in Beirut, Baghdad, Sinai, and Paris, and there is talk of it developing chemical or biological weapons. Iran has a much longer history of such attacks, is a country of 80 million people with exponentially greater power than the Islamic State, and is on the way to—or may already have reached—nuclear weapons.
The West is, unfortunately, all too capable of pretending Iran is its ally against a more graphic but, meanwhile, much smaller threat. It’s a potentially catastrophic mistake.
Reprinted with author’s permission from PJ Media

Thursday, June 4, 2015

Obama Blames Netanyahu, Jihadists Attack Jews

Obama Blames Netanyahu, Jihadists Attack Jews



JERUSALEM, Israel -- Days after President Obama said Israel is losing "credibility" because of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's intransigence on the creation of a Palestinian state, jihadists in the Gaza Strip fired two rockets on southern Israel, the second attack in 10 days.

The rockets exploded in open areas near the cities of Ashkelon and Netivot. There were no injuries or property damage, but air raid sirens blared in Gaza-perimeter communities just after 11 p.m. Wednesday.

IDF Spokesman Lt. Col. Peter Lerner said more than 140,000 Israel citizens were potentially at risk when the air raid sirens sounded.

The IDF responded by targeting three terrorist training camps in Gaza, confirming direct hits.

An ISIS-affiliated group in the Gaza Strip, calling itself Sheikh Amar Hadid Brigades, claimed responsibility for the attack, calling it retaliation for the death of one its members by Hamas.

According to Channel 2 Middle East commentator Ehud Yaari, the man Hamas executed was a former officer in one of its own brigades.

Yaari said Hamas is trying to curb these activities by arresting some Salafist activists and trying to discipline Islamic Jihad, the group responsible for the rocket attack 10 days ago.

"Salafists are trying to undermine Hamas policy, coordinating with ISIS-affiliated Salafists in the Sinai," Yaari told journalists Thursday morning.

Yaari said Hamas is weakening because the perception of Operation Protective Edge, the IDF'S military incursion against Hamas rocket fire last summer, is different in Gaza than the way it's been presented to the outside world.

Gaza residents see it as a failed offensive because Hamas didn't achieve any of its demands.

There's one point, however, on which they all seem to agree, articulated in a statement by the Sheikh Amar Hadid Brigades.

"We have repeated that we will continue in the way of jihad ["holy" war] against the Jews, the enemies of Allah," its statement read. "No one will stop us from filling our obligation and attacking the Jews."

Meanwhile, Israel holds Hamas responsible.

"Even if the shooters last night were jihadist groups rebelling against Hamas by firing at us, we view Hamas as being responsible for everything that occurs in the territory of Gaza," Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon said in a statement.

"We will not tolerate any attempts to harm our civilians or allow the return of a reality where rockets are trickling into the state," he added. "We will act decisively and firmly to ensure the security of the residents of the South and the citizens of Israel."