Retaliation outside the temple walls (Revelation 11:2)

Israeli Soldier Wounded by Gaza Sniper; Three Palestinians Said Killed in Retaliatory Strike

Military strikes in Gaza after snipers fire at Israeli troops who tried to turn away Palestinian children from border ■ Three Gazans said killed

Yaniv KubovichJack Khoury

08:01

Fighting ramped up between Israel and Gaza Wednesday evening after an Israeli offcer was moderately wounded by Palestinian snipers at the border.

The Israeli army said its troops were trying to turn away Palestinian children who had approached the border fence in southern Gaza when Palestinian snipers shot at the soldiers. One officer was moderately wounded.The miltiary responded by attacking a number of Hamas positions in Gaza, killing three and wounding one, according to Gaza’s Health Ministry. Hamas’ military wing said the three were part of a unit that patrols the border fence.

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On Thursday morning, nine projectiles were fired from Gaza at Israel, most of them falling in open areas near the border fence, the military said. One projectile was intercepted by an Iron Dome anti-missile battery.

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To really understand Israel and the Palestinians – subscribe to Haaretz

Following the exchange on the border Wednesday, Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman convened an emergency security meeting at the military headquarters in Tel Aviv.

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The IDF spokesman commented, “the IDF will act against any attempt to harm the sovereignty of the State of Israel and the security of its residents.”

Gaza’s Health Ministry identified the three killed by the Israeli strikes as Ahmed Albasus, 28, Abada Alfarona, 29 and Mohammad Alariar, 27. One Palestinian is said to be in serious condition.

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Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum said “the scope of the deliberate Israeli attack on the fighters reveals that Israel has the intention of killing, it is impossible to sit idly by in the face of Israel’s crimes. The resistance forces will not give up their duty to respond to this aggression and defend the Palestinian people.”

The Al-Quds Brigade, Islamic Jihad’s military wing, also responded saying, “the abominable crime committed by Israel will not pass quietly and without punishment. The resistance forces will defend the Palestinian people and avenge the blood of those killed.”

Minutes after the exchange started, rocket alerts sounded in Gaza-border communities. Residents in the Ashkelon Coast Regional Council near the Gaza border reported hearing blasts.

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Massive Israeli tank and artillery fire was reported east of Gaza City, according to Palestinian sources.

On Tuesday, the Israeli military fired at a group of Palestinians who hurled incendiary balloons towards Israel. The Palestinian Health Ministry in Gaza said that three Palestinians were injured in the attack, one of them gravely.

A senior political source said over the weekend that Hamas has asked for a cease-fire and guaranteed that it would stop firing airborne firebombs. However, Hamas activists have told Haaretz that Hamas leadership will not be able to act publicly against the balloon-launchers as long as it does not manage to obtain an Israeli easing of restrictions on the Strip. The IDF has attacked three times since the ceasefire was declared, the last time yesterday when an IDF aircraft attacked a group of Palestinians who fired Molotov cocktails in the Gaza Strip.

Last Friday an Israeli soldier was killed by sniper fire in the southern Gaza Strip. The IDF retaliated striking 68 Hamas targets, and killed four Gazans, three of them Hamas operatives.

Following the escalation, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held two security meetings with Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman, the military chief Gadi Eisenkot, Shin Bet director Nadav Argaman and other senior defense officials. “If Hamas continues launching rockets, the result will be a lot worse than they think,” Lieberman told the United Nations’ Middle East ambassador, Nickolay Mladenov.

History Expects the Sixth Seal in NYC (Revelation 6:12)

If the past is any indication, New York can be hit by an earthquake, claims John Armbruster, a seismologist at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory.

Based on historical precedent, Armbruster says the New York City metro area is susceptible to an earthquake of at least a magnitude of 5.0 once a century.

According to the New York Daily News, Lynn Skyes, lead author of a recent study by seismologists at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory adds that a magnitude-6 quake hits the area about every 670 years, and magnitude-7 every 3,400 years.

A 5.2-magnitude quake shook New York City in 1737 and another of the same severity hit in 1884.

Tremors were felt from Maine to Virginia.

There are several fault lines in the metro area, including one along Manhattan’s 125th St. – which may have generated two small tremors in 1981 and may have been the source of the major 1737 earthquake, says Armbruster.

There’s another fault line on Dyckman St. and one in Dobbs Ferry in nearby Westchester County.

“The problem here comes from many subtle faults,” explained Skyes after the study was published.

He adds: “We now see there is earthquake activity on them. Each one is small, but when you add them up, they are probably more dangerous than we thought.”

“Considering population density and the condition of the region’s infrastructure and building stock, it is clear that even a moderate earthquake would have considerable consequences in terms of public safety and economic impact,” says the New York City Area Consortium for Earthquake Loss Mitigation on its website.

Armbruster says a 5.0-magnitude earthquake today likely would result in casualties and hundreds of millions of dollars in damage.

“I would expect some people to be killed,” he notes.

The scope and scale of damage would multiply exponentially with each additional tick on the Richter scale. (ANI)

Trump “Thinks” He’ll Make a Deal With Iran

After Threats, Trump Says Ready To Negotiate ‘Real’ Nuclear Deal With Iran

Two days after exchanging harsh warnings with Iranian leaders, U.S. President Donald Trump says he is still eager to negotiate a new nuclear deal with Tehran.

“We’ll see what happens, but we’re ready to make a real deal, not the deal that was done by the previous administration, which was a disaster,” Trump said on July 24 in a speech to veterans in the U.S. state of Missouri.

Trump over the weekend had threatened Tehran with “consequences the likes of which few throughout history have ever suffered before” after Iranian President Hassan Rohani had warned Trump not to “play with the lion’s tail.”

The exchange of harsh rhetoric was reminiscent of the threats that volleyed back and forth between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un last year — exchanges that disappeared after the two adversaries agreed to negotiate a nuclear deal at a summit this spring.

U.S. Defense Secretary Jim Mattis on July 24 declined to comment directly on Trump’s threats against Iran, but he voiced his own concerns about Iranian actions in the Middle East, including Tehran’s support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and for Huthi rebels fighting the government in Yemen.

“I think the president was making very clear that they’re on the wrong track,” Mattis said on a visit to California.

“It’s time for Iran to shape up and show responsibility as a responsible nation. It cannot continue to show irresponsibility as a revolutionary organization that is intent on exporting terrorism, exporting disruption, across the region.”

Based on reporting by AP, dpa, and Reuters

How the Antichrist Will Unify Iraq

Confronting sectarianism in Iraq

Sam Hamad

It ought to be of some consternation then, that Iraq in 2018 is one where the issues and protests that comprised the mostly Sunni-led Iraqi Spring are now gripping the Shia south, while IS is making an ominous return in the North.

In post-war Iraq, the Sunni population was the most immediately oppressed group – they comprised a ‘weak link’, in that their relation to the state was weaker than that of their Shia compatriots.

Sunnis faced direct state discrimination; unemployment among Sunni populations was more ingrained, while their political self-determination was curtailed, and they remained locked out of civil society and government jobs, including within the security forces.

However, as the current protests demonstrate, life for Shia Iraqis has not only remained dismal in the post-Saddam and post-occupation period, but it has actively deteriorated. Corruption is rampant and deeply ingrained, with the Iraqi elites enriching themselves out of the county’s resources, particularly oil, while unemployment remains high, especially among young people. And even among many of those in employment, jobs are often underpaid and precarious.

One-quarter of Iraqis live in poverty. Basic social services have been decimated by the siphoning of public funds by corrupt elites. Iraq has become a kleptocrat’s dream. The process of this corruption can best be summed up by the fact that though Iraq is producing a record amount of oil, the living standards of its people are hitting new lows.

It cannot be stressed enough that this status quo of sectarian kleptocracy was no inevitability for Iraqis freed from the fascist-like regime of Saddam.

In fact, though there were obvious differences between Baathist Iraq and its current state, under the US occupation many of the systems of the former were simply transferred to the latter, particularly the dynamic of sectarianism and corruption.

Saddam justified his rule on sectarian grounds, claiming the alternative to his fascism would be an Iranian-style Islamic revolution among the Shia majority.

The economic conditions for Sunnis under Saddam were scarcely any better than for Shias, but they were effectively scared into accepting such a dismal status quo by the fear of ascendant Shia influence.

Under the current system, a similar dynamic exists but with a simple switch in the demography – ruling elites expect the majority Shia population to acquiesce to their bleak conditions due to the threat of resurgent Baathism and/or Salafi-jihadism among Sunnis.

In this sense, IS was a dream come true for the Iraqi elites. And without plundering the depths of conspiracy theories, the condition of sectarianism and its relation to poverty and hopelessness, both directly and indirectly led to the rise of IS.

This gets to the fundamental contradiction at the heart of Iraqi society: It is country that currently serves the interests of a small domestic elite and foreign groups. At the time of the US intervention in Iraq to battle IS, its military might was accompanied by superficial rhetoric about ending the sectarian dynamic that had birthed IS. But this was not matched on the ground in any concrete or plausible way.Indeed, the US could all but watch as Iran, the other great foreign power that holds sway in Iraq, expanded its hegemony over the country via Shia Islamist militias swearing primary allegiance to Ayatollah Khamenei before the Iraqi state.

But the US’ short-lived anti-sectarian rhetoric belied one of the original sins of its occupation of that country. Though the Bush administration loved to talk about ‘exporting democracy’ – holding up Iraq as the keystone example of this aspect of the ‘Bush doctrine’ – the reality was that its political system was rigged to encourage instability and a sectarian dichotomisation.

This might seem like a counterintuitive policy by the US, but it’s driven by the very same logic behind the British Empire’s infamous ‘divide and conquer’ strategy.

A fragmented Iraq is an Iraq that can best fulfil the interests of the US, relating specifically to its oil production and so-called ‘energy security’. A unified Iraq – one ruled in the interests of Iraqis – might well find that US interests do not necessarily always align with the interests of its people.

I describe the system in Iraq as ‘functional disunity’, wherein the Iraqi electoral system has been crafted to ensure that sectarian blocs reign supreme, conforming not only to US interests in the country, but also Iranian ones.

Contrary to the popular discourse of the US and Iran as irreconcilable enemies, the reality is that each must accept the presence of the other as part of the balance in post-war Iraq, even if the balance is now tipped in favour of Iran.

Again, this is no kind of conspiracy – it’s an informal collusion that has occurred in plain sight, such as during the 2010 Iraqi election when Iraqis had the audacity to vote for the non-sectarian al-Iraqiya movement, and the US and Iran both supported their man Nouri al-Maliki and his Islamic Dawa Party to subvert democracy and retain control.

It’s of no surprise then, today that the forces crushing Iraqi protesters, 14 of which have been murdered so far, are the US-supported Iraqi Security Forces and Iranian-backed militias that, since the IS insurgency, have been given a free reign over Iraq, with Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi merging them ever-more with Iraq’s formal security forces.

Given the hegemony of Iran on the ground, it’s also of little surprise that protesters have targeted these Tehran-controlled militias. They’ve also attacked the offices of pro-Iran groups such as the Islamic Dawa Party, Kataib Hizballah – and the notorious sectarian serial killers of Asayib Ahl al-Haq, who also ply their vicious trade against Syrians on behalf of Iran.

At protests, it’s common for pictures of Khamenei to be burned, accompanied by the now usual chant of ‘Iran out’.

The first signs of something big stirring among Iraqis was the victory of Muqtada al-Sadr’s Sairoun coalition, an anti-sectarian Iraqi nationalist alliance between Sadrists and Iraqi Communists, as well as other smaller secular Shia and Sunni groups, and it’s no surprise that these protests have exploded during negotiations between Sadr and Abadi.

In the past, Iraqi politicians and movements have emerged on the scene, promising reforms against corruption, sectarianism and unemployment, only for them to be swallowed by the system, as happened to Ayad Allawi’s al-Iraqiya after 2010.

The gulf between what a significant number of Iraqis want and what the political elite are willing to give them has never been wider. This is precisely why Iraqis have been forced to take to the streets and partake in widespread civil disobedience against those parties, foreign and domestic, who clearly do not have their interests at heart.

The protests are dangerous because they challenge the logic not just of the post-war Iraqi state, but of the regional order of sectarian stratification and kleptocracy.

But herein lies the danger for Iraqis. With Syria in mind, we’ve seen just how far Iran is willing to go to defend its interests, with it support for Assad’s rump state.

We’ve also seen in the past that the Iraqi establishment is not only willing to use extreme force to crush peaceful protests, such as the

Hawija massacre in 2013, but also that it has no care about its citizens – at least Sunni ones – being murdered en mass as ‘collateral damage’ in the fight against IS. The population of Iraq, which contains militias of its own, has the capacity to strike back.

Iraq is now at a precipice. Its elites and foreign backers must realise that the status quo of ‘functional disunity’ will continue to lead to permanent instability. This may take the form of opportunistic fascist groups like IS, or of progressive protests sweeping the country.

IS’ nihilism was just as much a product of Iraq’s sectarian kleptocracy, as those who are currently protesting for lives worthy of living.

Sam Hamad is an independent Scottish-Egyptian activist and writer.

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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.

NO, We Can’t Trust Our Intelligence

Can we trust our national intelligence services? – The Fergus Falls Daily Journal

By Other Views

 

We have a very serious problem in the U.S. Do we trust our national intelligence services or don’t we? The president repeatedly has favored Vladimir Putin (a known liar) over our national intelligence services. He has openly questioned the performance of our national intelligence services. He has openly questioned the performance of our national intelligence services during the run-up to the Iraq War. In fact, he has used this as the basis for his case against our national intelligence services. Is he correct? Did our intelligence services completely botch intelligence during the run-up to the Iraq War or was it the fact that the George W. Bush administration was given mostly good intelligence but misused it in its desire to go to war.

Consider the following…

First. In an August 2002 speech, Vice President Dick Cheney asserted, “Simply stated, there’s no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction. There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us.” But earlier this year, Vice Adm. Thomas Wilson, the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, had told Congress that Iraq possessed only “residual” amounts of WMDs.

Second. In September 2002, Cheney insisted there was “very clear evidence” Saddam was developing nuclear weapons: Iraq’s acquisition of aluminum tubes that were to be used to enrich uranium for bombs. But Cheney and the Bush White House did not tell the public that there was a heated debate within the intelligence community about this supposed evidence. The top scientific experts in the government had concluded these tubes were not suitable for a nuclear weapons program. But one CIA analyst-who was not a scientific expert-contended the tubes were smoking-gun proof that Saddam was working to produce nuclear weapons. The Bush- Cheney White House embraced this faulty piece of evidence and ignored the more informed analysis. Bush and Cheney were cherry-picking-choosing bad intelligence over good-and not paying attention to better information that cut the other way.

There are many more examples. We will run out of room.

Finally, consider the following article in the March/April edition of the magazine “Foreign Affairs” by Paul R. Pillar titled “Policy and the War in Iraq.” I will only present the summary. “Summary: During the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, writes the former senior analyst for the Middle East, the Bush administration disregarded the communities expertise, politicized the intelligence process, and selected unrepresentative raw intelligence to make it’s public case.

The conclusion is that it was not faulty intelligence from our intelligence services that got us into the Iraq War. We can trust our national intelligence services. But, we have to worry about our politicians misusing the intelligence they are given.

Robert Peterson