Israel in the News Mar/Apr 2007
Abbas: Use Rifles Against Israel
American rifles supplied to the Palestinian Authority (PA) may be used against Israel if PA President Mahmoud Abbas has his way.
WorldNetDaily’s Aaron Klein reported that Abbas has called on Arab factions to stop their infighting and fight Israel, which he said is “corrupting humanity on earth.”
“Shooting at your brother is forbidden….We should put our internal fighting aside and raise our rifles only against the Israeli occupation,” Abbas declared.
News services like the Associated Press apparently sanitized the speech by omitting the call to fight Israel. Ironically, the rifles Abbas spoke of probably came from the United States, which shipped more than 1 million rounds of ammunition and 7,000 assault rifles to Fatah, an organization birthed by the late terrorist Yasser Arafat. Hoping to deter Hamas, the United States has agreed to provide $86.4 million in aid to strengthen Fatah, which is loyal to Abbas.
A Fatah terrorist told WorldNetDaily the bulk of the American arms will be used to “hit the Zionists….It’s unnatural to think these American weapons won’t be used against the Israelis,” he said.
Arabs Steal Israeli Cattle
ARUTZ-7—The Israeli Cattle Breeders Association (ICBA) says that cattle theft in southern Israel is up 236 percent compared to last year. The stolen cattle are taken to Palestinian Authority areas, the Breeders Association reports, where competing milk and meat markets are being developed at the expense of the knowledge, experience, and investments of the Israeli breeders.
More than 1,030 head of cattle were reported stolen from southern farms last year, and another 350 are suspected to have been stolen but were not reported. The nonreporting breeders apparently feel that police will continue to be powerless to help them.
Cattle breeders in the north also suffer. Damages are estimated at 30 million shekels a year, including the loss of some 20 million liters of milk.
ICBA official Chaim Dayan said, “The cattle owners are forced to pay from their own pockets for protection devices, such as closed-circuit cameras, watchdogs, and alarm systems. But the thieves are getting better and more clever, and they are able to get in to the farms and steal cattle despite the means that have been implemented…The thefts have become a national plague of shocking proportions,” Dayan said.
Arab Joins Israeli Cabinet
In a country that former U.S. President Jimmy Carter called “apartheid,” Arab Raleb Majadele has taken a Cabinet post.
Israel installed its first Arab Cabinet member, replacing Ophir Pines who resigned last fall because he didn’t want to sit in the same government as Avigdor Lieberman, whom, ironically, he felt was too anti-Arab. Labor’s Majadele replaces Pines as minister of science.
Wrote Arutz-7’s Hillel Fendel: “The decision to appoint an Arab to the Cabinet was received cynically within the political establishment.” Pines declared, “This is…a new record in cynicism and insult to the voters’ intelligence.”
“The Arab parties were not impressed either,” reported Fendel, who quoted Arab MK Muhammad Barakeh as saying, “The whole purpose is merely to increase [Defense Minister Amir] Peretz’s diminishing chances in the upcoming primaries.”
Pipeline to Unite Red, Black Seas
ARUTZ-7—Turkey and Israel have agreed in principle to build a water and gas pipeline system connecting the Black Sea to the port of Eilat on the Red Sea. It might even carry water to help back up the Kinneret (Sea of Galilee).
The ambitious project involves building oil, gas, and water pipelines, as well as electricity and fiber optic cables, as part of a seabed pipeline system in the Eastern Mediterranean.
Passing through Turkey and bypassing Syria and Lebanon—countries hostile to Israel—the pipeline will reach the Israeli port of Ashdod, from where an existing pipeline reaches the port of Eilat in the Red Sea.
The system could be used to bring Turkish water to parched Israel. Recent rains have raised the Kinneret, Israel’s largest reservoir, 9.5 centimeters. The lake now stands at just over 212.1 meters below sea level—2.3 meters (7.5 feet)—below the optimal level.
Iran’s Jews Won’t Budge
ARUTZ-7—Iran’s 15,000 Jews are ignoring urgent warnings by American Jewish community leaders and the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) to flee for their lives.
According to statistics compiled by HIAS, only 152 Jews left the Islamic Republic between October 2005 and September 2006, down 40 percent from the same period in 2004–5. Earlier, only 183 Jews left. Sources said those who left cited economic and family concerns as their primary reasons for leaving, not political considerations.
Other minority groups in Iran are not wasting time, however. HIAS workers in Vienna have noted a substantial increase in the number of Iranian refugees of other faiths, including the Baha’i.
Netanyahu Gives U.S. Five Years at Most
Unless the United States stops Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, America has only two to five years left, former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said recently.
Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad leads an extremist core of Islam whose primary goal is to take down the United States, not Israel. “We’re just the first way station en route to you,” Netanyahu told CNN’s Glenn Beck during an hour-long interview program before Christmas.
“They’re out to get you; they’re not out to get us. We’re simply standing in their way. They’re not interested in Israel, per se. They’re interested in bringing down Western civilization, led by the United States. That’s why you’re the ‘great Satan’ and we’re just the ‘little Satan.’”
Unless he is stopped, Ahmadinejad will have nuclear capability within two to five years at most, Netanyahu said, and America will find itself embroiled in a nuclear holocaust. With nuclear weapons, Iran will be able to hit large American cities.
He said the world must strike now before it is too late. You can deter them, he said, by creating despair. When Muslims achieve victory, they believe Allah is with them, which spurs them on to further extremism. “You want to create despair that nothing will succeed, you will never defeat the West.” The West must thwart the threat in a way that will make Muslims believe they will never win because the West is stronger than they think.
Netanyahu has preached this message for years, and his predictions have been accurate. In a July 10, 2005, article in The Sunday (London) Times, one month after Ahmadinejad rose to power, he warned the world to rein in Iran and stop the shipment of Russian nuclear equipment to a plant under construction at Bushehr. “I think the regime will go as fast as it can to develop nuclear weapons,” he said then.
Ahmadinejad believes he was put on Earth to usher in the Mahdi, a Muslim messiah, by creating a great, apocalyptic religious war that will subdue non-Muslims in an enormous, worldwide conflict in which millions will die but Muslims will go to heaven. Their suicidal fanaticism makes Muslims more dangerous than Nazis or Communists, Netanyahu said.
If millions have to die “in order for their particular Islamic messiah to come, millions have to die; and the sooner the better, in their view,” he said.
