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Israel Strengthens Attack Capabilities

Israel, being a nation of primarily Jews whos history has been filled with racial hatred and attempts at complete extermination have begun a large build up of its ability to strike adversaries and defend itself.

Israel is building up its strike capabilities amid growing anxiety over Iran’s nuclear ambitions and appears confident that a military attack would cripple Tehran’s atomic program, even if it can’t destroy it.” The country has also “purchased 90 F-16I fighter planes that can carry enough fuel to reach Iran, and will receive 11 more by the end of next year.” According to the Times of London, President Bush has given an “‘amber light‘ to an Israeli plan to attack Iran’s main nuclear sites with long-range bombing sorties.”

The proposed and expected recipient of this military fury would undoubtedly be Iran, the Iranian President has in recent months and also in the past proclaimed that Israel should be wiped off the map.

Israel, as you could imagine would do anything to avoid history repeating itself at ANY cost and just because we hear about a military build up of its air force hardware, you can bet with confidence that they have the most horribly imaginable contingency plans up their determined sleeves, such as all out, no holds barred nuclear strike aimed at anyone who might threaten their nation or its peoples existence, and because of their history and the attitude of “NEVER AGAIN” they assuredly have many more tricks up their sleeves waiting to be unleashed under the right situation of threat.

The world should pray that NO ONE ever threatens Israel to a high enough degree to unleash their wrath.

Tags: attack, Iran, Israel, military buildup, nuclear, Weapons

Olmert Ready to Attack Gaza

Tel Aviv - Prime Minister Ehud Olmert warned Friday that Israel might soon launch a large-scale military operation in the Gaza Strip.

Decision day was drawing closer, the premier said at Tel Aviv airport on his return from a visit to the United States.

The pendulum was swinging more towards military action than to a ceasefire agreement, he said, echoing remarks by Defence Minister Ehud Barak, who threatened such action again Palestinian militants in Gaza.

Israel’s so-called security cabinet raised objections to a ceasefire plan worked out by Egypt because it did not require the fundamentalist Hamas movement to release Gilad Shalit, an Israeli soldier kidnapped in a cross-border raid two years ago.

Israel is also opposed to Hamas demands it open all border crossing points with Gaza. Media reports said some ministers fear such a move could be used by Hamas as propaganda to claim that rocket attacks on Israeli territory had paid dividends.

Hamas seized control of the Gaza Strip in June last year after a bitter armed struggle against the Fatah movement of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

Israel responded to the rocket attacks on its territory from Gaza by sealing of the Strip and imposing economic and trade sanctions.

Tags: attack, gaza, Israel, olmert, palestine, war

Joschka Fischer says Israel is planning to attack Iran

Former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer says Israel is planning to attack Iran in the near future over its nuclear program.

He wrote a piece that appeared in today’s Daily Star, an English-language Lebanese newspaper, arguing that President Bush’s recent visit to the Middle East was a precursor to a war against Iran.

“The Middle East is drifting toward a new great confrontation in 2008. Iran must understand that without a diplomatic solution in the coming months, a dangerous military conflict is very likely to erupt. It is high time for serious negotiations to begin,” he said.

Fischer said Bush’s speech during his address to the Israeli Knesset, or parliament, this month indicated a coming Israeli-US attack on Iran’s nuclear program.

“He (Bush) seemed to be planning, together with Israel, to end the Iranian nuclear program — and to do so by military, rather than by diplomatic, means…. Although it is acknowledged in Israel that an attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities would involve grave and hard-to-assess risks, the choice between acceptance of a nuclear Iran and an attempt at its military destruction, with all the attendant consequences, is clear. Israel won’t stand by and wait for matters to take their course,” Fischer said.

Fischer was German’s top diplomat from 1998 to 2005 and is a visiting scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C.

Tags: Bush, Iran, Israel, Joschka Fischer, nuclear, nuke, war, Weapons

Israeli Nuclear Capability Disclosed

Former President Jimmy Carter caused a stir over the weekend when he claimed that Israel possesses a nuclear arsenal of 150 weapons.

While experts have long maintained Israel has a nuclear arsenal, the Jewish state has refused to confirm or deny it.

Most estimates, many based on evidence leaked in 1986 by Israeli nuclear technician Mordechai Vanunu, put the number of Israeli nuclear weapons at between 100 and 200. But other experts have said the number is as low as 60 or as high as 400.

It was unclear from a report of Carter’s comments — made on Sunday and reported Monday in the Times of London — whether the former Democratic president was citing those estimates, offering his own independent assessment or drawing on U.S. intelligence he would have had access to as president.

U.S. officials have generally avoided the issue of Israel’s nuclear status, although during a 2006 Senate confirmation hearing Secretary of Defense Robert Gates confirmed that Israel was a nuclear power.

The Times said Carter made the comment Sunday while at the Hay-on-Wye literary festival on the border between England and Wales. He was discussing Iran, and the difficulty it would have in building a secret nuclear arsenal, when he mentioned the Israeli weapons, the paper said.

Former Israeli military Intelligence chief retired Maj. Gen. Aharon Ze’evi Farkash warned that Carter’s comments could be used by Iran to push its nuclear development.

“[Carter] is not the first and he won’t be the last to talk about this,” Farkash said in an interview Monday with Israel Radio. “It would seem that in [Carter's] latest visit to the region, he was so hurt [by the political establishment shunning him] that he saw fit to say things which I think weren’t that responsible.

“He was a president a long time ago, and these kinds of things could do damage, but on the other hand, it could enhance the deterrent,” Farkash said, adding that “some of our ‘less good’ friends, could use these claims against us.”

Tags: carter, disclosure, Iran, Israel, nuclear, president, war, weapon

Rachel Corrie, in Case You Didn’t Know

By all rights, Let Me Stand Alone should not be an easy book to read. Doom hangs over this collection of the journal writings of Rachel Corrie, who was a 23-year-old American peace activist when she was crushed to death by an Israel Defense Forces bulldozer in Gaza five years ago. And yet most of this book whizzes by in a series of delights: in descriptions of autumn football games in Washington state, and ice in the winter mornings, of war seen on television, of the wind, of Corrie’s grandparents’ house in Des Moines, the used-book store in Aitkin, Minn., her mother tending to her dying grandmother, her own face. And this is all before the age of 14. When she was 2 years old, she looked at Capitol Lake in Olympia, Wash., her hometown, and said (famously, in her family): “This is the wide world, and I’m coming to it.”
It turns out that Rachel Corrie was first of all a miraculous child; then, an amazing changeling of a girl; later, a difficult, challenging, brilliant teenager, and finally a demanding, charismatic young adult. Most important, she was a very able writer from a remarkably early age — about 10 years old, or 11 — an immediate, sensory observer, a good thinker, a rebel eventually. Above all, she was always human, never caustic (though she could be casually cruel to her parents, like all adolescents), and almost painfully alive to the give and take within families, among friends, between lovers, between siblings. She would go on to carry this feeling of connectedness to its logical extreme, because among the many things she was, Rachel Corrie was above all a natural extremist. She felt other people’s pain really and truly. As a grown-up, she feels connected not only to her parents, her sister, her unpredictable boyfriend and to others around her, but also to the mentally ill people with whom she worked in Olympia (”Don’t we all hear voices?” she asks her journal), and to the world. She also felt responsible for mankind’s lapses in humanity. That natural extremism and dedication to goodness took her into activism, and that’s how she ended up in Gaza — her shoulder blades, face, six ribs and spinal cord broken under the blade of that bulldozer.
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Tags: activist, Israel, palestine, rachel corrie, war