The Pakistani Nuclear Horn (Daniel 8:8)

U.S. should worry more about Pakistan than North Korea, says former senator

ANI | Washington D.C. [U.S.A.] Sep 18, 2017 09:28 PM IST

North Korea’s brazen and defiant nuclear tests last week have been keeping the leadership in United States up at night, but, a former senator, Larry Pressler, in an opinion piece for The Hill, has said that Pakistan’s unsecured nuclear weapons programme is even more dangerous and should keep all of us up at night.

“A small group of terrorists buys a nuclear weapon from Pakistani generals with dark money and transports it to the port of Karachi in a pickup truck. From there, the weapon is hidden in a crate, cushioned amongst textiles and agricultural products, and loaded onto a container ship bound for the United States, where it could very easily destroy one of our cities. This operation could be carried out by a fairly small number of terrorists. This scenario is a disaster waiting to happen because Pakistan continues to harbor some of the most hardened Islamic militants and terrorists within its borders and because the security of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons is suspect, even though Pakistani leaders insist their program is safeguarded. The dangers of their nuclear weapons program are many: they are routinely moved around the country over dangerous and treacherous roads in unmarked vehicles with few defenses,” Pressler writes.

The former senate then goes ahead to castigate Pakistan and says, “Pakistan’s leaders have essentially blackmailed us into providing aid for the War on Terror with threats to cease assistance in rooting out terrorists in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, we know full well that Pakistan allows terrorists to operate unfettered in large swaths of its southwestern province of Baluchistan and their potential access to Pakistan’s nuclear weapons should keep us all up at night.”

Larry Pressler has served three terms as U.S. senator from South Dakota and is the author of the newly published book – ‘Neighbours in Arms: An American Senator’s Quest for Disarmament in a Nuclear Subcontinent.’

He reiterates what he has written in his book, citing, “Pakistan should be treated like North Korea, like a rogue state. The only reason Pakistan is not a totally failed state is that countries like China and the United States continue to prop it up with massive amounts of foreign aid. Unless Pakistan changes its ways with respect to terrorism, it should be declared a terrorist state. Indeed, the first Bush administration seriously considered doing so in 1992.’

The former senate asserts that “Pakistan’s leaders have essentially blackmailed us into providing aid for the War on Terror with threats to cease assistance in rooting out terrorists in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, we know full well that Pakistan allows terrorists to operate unfettered in large swaths of its southwestern province of Baluchistan and their potential access to Pakistan’s nuclear weapons should keep us all up at night.”

Pressler further says that the “fundamental shift in foreign policy towards Pakistan that appears to be underway” is necessary because “Pakistan will only respond to punitive action that hits where it hurts: in their pocketbooks.”

“I agree with Trump, but I would press for an even closer relationship with India. We must not equivocate. We must decisively choose India as our nation’s most favored ally in the world, on a par with the special relationships we have with Israel and the United Kingdom. Oddly enough, the election of Trump as president might be the best thing for the relationship between the world’s two largest democracies,” he concludes.

New York Quake Overdue (The Sixth Seal) (Rev 6:12)

New York City Is Overdue For Large Earthquake: Seismologist

New York City could start shaking any minute now.

Won-Young Kim, who runs the seismographic network for the Northeast at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, said the city is well overdue for a big earthquake.

From Metro New York:

The last big quake to hit New York City was a 5.3-magnitude tremor in 1884 that happened at sea in between Brooklyn and Sandy Hook. While no one was killed, buildings were damaged.

Kim said the city is likely to experience a big earthquake every 100 years or so.

“It can happen anytime soon,” Kim said. “We can expect it any minute, we just don’t know when and where.”

New York has never experienced a magnitude 6 or 7 earthquake, which are the most dangerous. But magnitude 5 quakes could topple brick buildings and chimneys.

Seismologist John Armbruster said a magnitude 5 quake that happened now would be more devastating than the one that happened in 1884.

“Today, with so many more buildings and people … we’d see billions in damage,” Armbruster said. “People would probably be killed.”

It Is Already Too Late For Israel (Daniel 8:3)

Iran: The one issue Netanyahu wants to discuss with Trump

By Oren Liebermann, CNN

Updated 6:58 AM ET, Mon September 18, 2017

Source: CNN

Trump, Netanyahu meeting to focus on Iran

Jerusalem (CNN)When US President Donald Trump meets with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday ahead of the United Nations General Assembly, the conversation itself will be private, but Netanyahu has made it very clear what he wants to discuss: Iran.

Netanyahu’s first dire warning about Iran came more than two decades ago. In 1996, Netanyahu, then in his first term as Prime Minister, delivered his maiden speech before Congress. In it, he warned that Iran “has wed a cruel despotism to a fanatic militancy. If this regime, or its despotic neighbor Iraq, were to acquire nuclear weapons, this could presage catastrophic consequences, not only for my country, and not only for the Middle East, but for all mankind.”

In the intervening years, his language has barely changed.

In 2011, again speaking before Congress, Netanyahu said, “The tyranny in Tehran brutalizes its own people.” In 2015 — his most recent speech before Congress in which he lobbied against the Iran nuclear accord — the Israeli Prime Minister said, “Iran’s founding document pledges death, tyranny, and the pursuit of jihad.”

What has changed is Netanyahu’s singular focus on Iran. He mentioned it only once in 1996. In 2011, he said it 12 times. In 2015, he said “Iran” a staggering 107 times in his speech.

Once the most vocal critic of the Iran nuclear deal, officially called the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), Netanyahu went largely quiet after the signing of the accord in July 2015, realizing he could do little to change it, especially as relations deteriorated between Netanyahu and former President Barack Obama.

In Trump, Netanyahu sees a new window of opportunity.

Trump has blasted the Iran deal since his days on the campaign trail, calling it “the worst deal ever” and vowing to “rip it up.” Since taking office, his tone has softened, but only slightly.

Trump has still voiced strong criticism, leaving open the possibility that the United States will leave the deal, despite the International Atomic Energy Agency finding at the end of August that Iran was complying with the terms of the accord. Earlier this month, US Ambassador to the UN Nikki Haley laid out a case for the US to abandon the deal, saying Iran’s technical compliance wasn’t enough.

US to extend sanctions waivers on Iran as Trump signals frustration with nuclear deal

Netanyahu has urged Trump to do so, saying in an exclusive interview with CNN this week, “This agreement should be changed. It should be changed so that the removal of restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program should be not a matter of [a] change [in] the calendar, but a change in Iran’s aggressive behavior. They must stop their aggression. They must stop their terror in the Middle East and everywhere else.”

Israel’s concern about the nuclear deal isn’t the only Iran issue Trump and Netanyahu will discuss. In fact, it may not even be the primary one, since even Netanyahu acknowledges that the current accord will keep Tehran from developing a nuclear weapon within the next decade.

Hezbollah’s evolution

Hezbollah’s secretary general Hasan Nasrallah delivers a televised speech to Lebanese supporters in August.

Across Israel’s northern border among the rolling hills of southern Lebanon, Iranian-proxy Hezbollah has built a stronghold. A few feet away from the border, near the Israeli town of Malkiya, a Hezbollah flag marks the territory. On a nearby hill, another flag waves in the breeze, near a UN outpost.

Since Israel and Lebanon fought a month-long war in the summer of 2006, this border has been Israel’s quietest, despite the war ending with no clear winner or loser. But the tranquility masks a simple truth — the border is perpetually tense.

Last week, Israel ran its biggest military exercise in twenty years along the northern border, including its army, air force, and navy, simulating a conflict with Hezbollah. And for years, Hezbollah’s arsenal has been growing — now with 100,000 short range rockets and several thousand more missiles in its cache, according to state-run Iranian news agency Tasnim and Israeli officials. Once a guerilla militia, Hezbollah is now an experienced army, learning from the conflict in Syria, where it has fought alongside the Syrian regime.

“In the last five years, there is a huge, dramatic change in the tactical, but also operational capabilities of this organization as a fighting organization. You find yourself with an organization that is working with military formations – battalions, brigades – that has a command and control structure that has dramatically changed,” General (Res.) Eli Ben-Meir, the former Chief Intelligence Officer of Israel’s military said.

Even so, over the last decade, Israel and Hezbollah have preferred to shoot rhetoric back and forth across the border instead of live fire. But increasingly it is Iran’s deployment of Hezbollah in neighboring Syria that is alarming Israel.

Having seen Iran establish a foothold in Iraq, Israel is desperate to prevent Iran from setting up another in Syria.

Last year, Netanyahu acknowledged that Israel struck Syria dozens of times to prevent advanced weaponry from reaching Hezbollah, also saying Israel would work to prevent Iran from digging in along Israel’s borders.

The Russia connection

To push back against Iran’s growing influence, Israel has turned not to the US, but to Russia. Netanyahu has made regular trips to Russia to meet with President Vladimir Putin ever since Russian forces moved into Syria in 2015, touting the Israeli and Russian military coordination over Syria. But Israeli politicians are acutely aware that Russia’s primary concern in the region is its own interests, not Israel’s security.

This is where Israel feels the lack of US presence in the region most sharply — starting in the Obama administration. Despite Trump’s tough talk on the Iran nuclear deal and the possibility of harsher measures against Iran, he now presides over what many Israelis regard as the absence of the US in the Syria conflict. In multiple conversations with Israeli politicians, this fear is often repeated.

“The United States can prevent a permanent Iranian military presence in Syria,” Minister of Intelligence and security cabinet member Israel Katz told CNN, urging the US to get more involved. “I think the lesson both in the nuclear sphere and the conventional sphere is that the US cannot ignore the fact that she is the leader of the free world and everything that comes from that.”

Sebastian Gorka, who until recently served as a counter-terrorism adviser to President Trump, tried to allay Israeli fears. “Key individuals inside the National Security Council understand we are at war with Sunni Jihadis – al-Qaeda, ISIS – and they also understand that any action we take against groups like ISIS should not occur in ways that profit Iran in ways that are strategic and long-term,” Gorka said in an interview with CNN, on the sidelines of a counter-terrorism conference in Herzliya.

“I hope those voices maintain their positions and their influence. Again, this is about the long game.

But without a concrete plan, Gorka’s statements do little to ease Israeli fears.

Another full-blown conflict between Israel and Hezbollah would be devastating for both sides. Hezbollah has the rockets and missiles to hit deep within Israel. Israel has the firepower to level southern Lebanon.

Israel Won’t Be Here In 25 Years (Revelation 11)

‘Israel may not exist in 25 years’

News DeskThe International News Desk reports on issues and events world wide.

Iranian revolutionary guard soldiers march during the annual military parade marking the Iraqi invasion in 1980, which led to an eight-year-long war (1980-1988) in Tehran, Iran, 22 September 2013. Iranian president Hasan Rowhani said that Iran only wants to end the civil war in Syria for avoiding a new escalation of violence in the Middle East. EPA/ABEDIN TAHERKENAREH

Iran’s newly-appointed army chief, General Abdolrahim Mousavi, said on Monday there is no guarantee Israel will exist in the next 25 years, adding that its slightest wrong move may result in the Israeli cities of Haifa and Tel Aviv being “razed down to the ground”.

Mousavi was appointed in August as the commander of the Iranian army, an entity separate from the country’s Revolutionary Guard corps.

Speaking at an event in the holy city of Qom, he elaborated on the remarks he made last month about Israel not surviving 25 years, explaining that he never meant to say the regime would necessarily last that long.

“That we say that the Zionist regime will not see 25 years later doesn’t mean that it will certainly survive for 25 years,” he said according to the semi-official Fars News Agency.

“There is a prerequisite for this famous sentence, that is if the Zionist regime makes any wrong move, Haifa and Tel Aviv will be razed down to the ground.”

Mousavi’s comments alluded to the September 2015 warning by Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in which he said “the Zionists” who often raised concerns over Iran’s nuclear program shouldn’t naively feel relieved for 25 years just because the comprehensive nuclear deal was agreed between Iran and the P5+1 group of world powers.

Key points of the historic nuclear deal include a “long-term” International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) presence in Iran that includes the monitoring of uranium ore concentrate produced by Iran for 25 years.

“You will not see next 25 years (…) With God’s grace, nothing under the name of the Zionist regime will exist in the region by then,” Khamenei said on Twitter.

Khamenei also previously warned of the United States’ unswerving hostility towards the Iranian nation, saying that even after the nuclear deal was inked the Americans have been hatching plots and approved a bill in the Congress against Iran.

On Monday, US President Donald Trump warned that Washington will walk away from the deal if it concludes that IAEA is not tough enough in monitoring it. Iranian nuclear chief Ali Akbar Salehi responded that the greatest threat to its survival was “the American administration’s hostile attitude.”

Source: Sputnik