Israel Matzav: Iran unveils cell phone game targeting Israel (and why the nuke deal is 10 years)

Sunday, July 12, 2015

Iran unveils cell phone game targeting Israel (and why the nuke deal is 10 years)

Shavua tov, a good week to everyone.

Iran has unveiled a cell phone game that simulates a missile strike against Israel.

"The anti-Zionist game displays Iran's missile power and the Zelzal, Zolfaqar and Sejjil missiles (all built in Iran) are used by the players in the game's first stage," game production project manager Mehdi Atash Jaam told FNA on Saturday.

"In this game, users break into the Zionist regime's air defense and target Israel," he added.

Elaborating on the reason for developing a game in which the Iranian missiles destroy targets in Israel, Atash Jaam said that it was a move in retaliation for the console game, 'Battlefield', that includes scenes simulating attacks on Tehran and its Milad Tower.

'Missile Strike' was unveiled on Friday on the occasion of the International Quds Day.

No, the game was not privately produced. It was released by the Iranian army. Read the whole thing.

But it's okay. Once they sign this 'agreement' in Vienna, they will agree not to attack Israel for at least ten years. What could go wrong? Consider this:

On its editorial page this morning, the New York Times permits Ahmed Yousef, "a senior adviser to the Palestinian prime minister, Ismail Haniya," to use its soapbox to call for a hudna between Israel and Hamas.

A truce is referred to in Arabic as a “hudna.” Typically covering 10 years, a hudna is recognized in Islamic jurisprudence as a legitimate and binding contract. A hudna extends beyond the Western concept of a cease-fire and obliges the parties to use the period to seek a permanent, nonviolent resolution to their differences. The Koran finds great merit in such efforts at promoting understanding among different people. Whereas war dehumanizes the enemy and makes it easier to kill, a hudna affords the opportunity to humanize one’s opponents and understand their position with the goal of resolving the intertribal or international dispute.

Such a concept — a period of nonwar but only partial resolution of a conflict — is foreign to the West and has been greeted with much suspicion. Many Westerners I speak to wonder how one can stop the violence without ending the conflict.
Actually what Yousef is describing is what's called a 'cease fire' or a 'truce' in western parlance. The problem is that he has mischaracterized the true nature of hudna. In a blog post in August, I cited an article by Tashbih Sayyed, the Editor in Chief of Pakistan Today and The Muslim World Today, President of Council for Democracy and Tolerance, an adjunct fellow of Hudson Institute, and a regular columnist for newspapers across the world (in other words - the elusive 'moderate Muslim') (which I can no longer find at the original site) which described how Islam uses a hudna:
Political Islam finds a number of examples in the life of Prophet Muhammad that sanction the use of treaties as a tactical necessity. In explaining why he signed the Oslo Accord, Yasser Arafat cited a truce signed by Prophet Muhammad with the Meccan tribe Quraish at Hudaybiyah in 628 C.E. According to the PLO leader, Prophet Muhammad had signed the truce when he was not strong enough to win a war and it was to last for ten years. But when, within two years of the signing, the Muslims felt that they have gained enough strength to defeat the Quraish, they broke the truce, attacked the Quraish and captured Mecca.

A prominent Saudi sheikh, 'Abd Al-Muhsin Al-'Obikan, also referred to the same treaty while condemning Hezbollah's actions in Lebanon. He issued the edict against Hezbollah's actions not because he considered them wrong but because in his view Muslims, at the moment, are not strong enough to defeat Israel. He said that since the Muslims have no chance of winning this campaign against the Jews, a temporary solution is necessary - a truce similar to the temporary truce of Hudaybiyya.

According to the Saudi Sheikh, Islamic laws (Shari'a) also "place preconditions and constraints on the declaring of jihad, which must be considered in order to ensure the greatest gain for the nation and spare it loss - [that is,] in order to ensure the minimum possible damage and avoid greater damage.

One of the preconditions regarding jihad [states] that the [the jihad fighters] must have [sufficient] capability to inflict harm on the enemy and to repulse its evil, so as to ensure the lives, the property, and the honor of the Muslims and to safeguard them from aggression or harm, that is, [from] destruction of property, from violation of honor, and from bloodshed."

Those who understand the Islamist ethos know that for political Islam, disengagement, a cease-fire, or a pull back on the part of the "enemy" is a sign of its weakness. No one has more experience with this treacherous mindset than the Israelis.