Israel Matzav

This Admiral has Obama pegged

Labels: Ayatollah Khomeni, Barack Hussein Obama, Caspar Weinberger, Iran, Islam, Ronald Reagan

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 9:19 PM 2 comments

Iranian ex-spy: Khomeni ordered Pan Am 103 attack as revenge

The Lockerbie bombing was ordered by Iran and carried out by a Syrian-based terrorist group, a former Iranian intelligence officer has admitted.

Abolghassem Mesbahi, a defector to Germany, said Pan Am flight 103 was downed in 1988 in retaliation for a US Navy strike on an Iranian commercial jet six months earlier, in which 290 people died.

He claims the Ayatollah Khomeini, who was Iran’s Supreme Leader, ordered the bombing “to copy exactly what happened to the Iranian Airbus”.

Previously unseen evidence gathered for the aborted appeal hearing of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi, the former Libyan intelligence officer convicted of the bombing, supports Mr Mesbahi’s claim and suggests that the bombers belonged to the extremist group the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine – General Command (PFLP-GC).

Documents obtained by Al Jazeera television for a documentary called Lockerbie: What Really Happened? name key individuals said to be involved in the bombing, including the alleged bomb-maker, the alleged mastermind and the man who may have put the bomb on the doomed Boeing 747.

Labels: Ahmed Jibril, Ayatollah Khomeni, Iran, Iran Air, Islamic terrorism, Libya, Pan Am 103, PFLP-GC

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 3:54 PM 0 comments

Joined at the hip: New Iranian Defense Minister was behind Hezbullah's Beirut Marine baracks bombing

Thirty years ago last month, Hezbollah blew up the barracks of the U.S Marines and French paratroopers stationed at the Beirut airport, killing 241 U.S. servicemen and 58 Frenchmen. It wasn’t Hezbollah’s first terrorist operation, but this attack, the most memorable in Lebanon’s vicious and chaotic 15-year-long civil war, marked the Party of God’s entry onto the world stage.

Three decades later, thanks to the efforts of Israeli Hezbollah expert Shimon Shapira, we now know that one of the men responsible for the attack was an Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commander named Hossein Dehghan​—​the man Iranian president Hassan Rouhani recently tapped to be his defense minister. In other words, Hezbollah and the Islamic Republic of Iran have been joined at the hip from the very beginning, even before the 1979 Iranian revolution.

The big bang theory of Hezbollah that puts the Israeli occupation at the alpha point is based not in fact but in legend​—​it’s an Israel-centric myth that makes the Jewish state Hezbollah’s motivation and prime mover. In reality, the story of Hezbollah’s origins is a story about Iran, featuring the anti-shah revolutionaries active in Lebanon in the 1970s, years before Israel’s intervention. Thus, to uncover Hezbollah’s roots, it is necessary to mine the accounts of Iranian cadres operating in Lebanon a decade before Israel invaded. 

There we find that, contrary to the common wisdom, Hezbollah didn’t arise as a resistance movement to the Israeli occupation. Rather, it was born from the struggle between Iranian revolutionary factions opposed to the shah. Lebanon was a critical front for this rivalry between Hezbollah’s Iranian progenitors and their domestic adversaries. Accordingly, an accurate understanding of this history gives us not only the true story of Hezbollah’s beginnings, but also an insight into the origins of Iran’s Islamic Revolution. Those early internal conflicts and impulses, played out in Lebanon as well as Iran, also provide a roadmap for reading the nature of the current regime in Tehran, its motivations and concerns, its strategies and gambits as it moves toward acquiring a nuclear weapon and challenging the American order in the Middle East.

Labels: Ayatollah Khomeni, Hezbullah, Imad Mughniyah, Iranian revolution, PLO, Yasser Arafat

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 10:43 AM 1 comments

Advice from Hassan Rohani on dealing with Iran

Iran was then trying to obtain missiles from the U.S. (with Israel acting as an intermediary) in exchange for the release of Americans held hostage by Iranian-backed proxies in Lebanon.

The missiles were provided but the hostages were not—a victim, by some accounts, of hard-line opposition within Iran to the more pliable course advocated by Mr. Rouhani. So it goes with Western outreach to Iranian moderates: It always fails, though whether it's on account of the moderates being duplicitous or powerless is a matter of debate. Maybe Mr. Rouhani isn't "a wolf in sheep's clothing," as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu says. Maybe he's a sheep among wolves.

If so, he's a very canny sheep. "If you don't bare sharp teeth before [Ayatollah] Khomeini," he advised Nir, "you're going to have troubles all over the world. If you threaten him with military force, he'll kiss your hand and run."

Elsewhere in the conversation, Mr. Rouhani suggested a strategy for getting the hostages released. "If for instance, you said to [Khomeini], 'You must release all of the hostages in Lebanon within five days. If not—we'll deal you a military blow and you will be responsible for the results,' do it, show that you are strong, and you will see results."

And there was this: "If we analyze Khomeini's character, we will see that if someone strong stands opposite him, he will retreat 100 steps; and if he is strong and someone weak faces him, he will advance 100 steps. Unfortunately, you have taken a mistaken approach. You have been soft to him. Had you been tougher, your hand would be on top."

Mr. Rouhani's analysis of Khomeini's mind-set would soon find tragic confirmation. On July 3, 1988, the USS Vincennes mistook an Iranian jetliner for a fighter jet and shot it down, killing nearly 300 people. Khomeini, who was sure the incident was no accident, thought Washington intended to enter the Iran-Iraq war on Saddam Hussein's side. Just 17 days later, on July 20, Khomeini accepted a humiliating cease-fire with Iraq: "Unhappy am I that I still survive and have drunk the poisoned chalice," he said in a radio address.

Khomeini is long dead, but the regime's mentality of yielding only to intense pressure and credible threats of force remains the same.

Labels: Ayatollah Ali Khameni, Ayatollah Khomeni, Barack Hussein Obama, Hassan Rohani, Iranian nuclear threat, John Kerry

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 5:26 PM 2 comments

Iran builds a terror network in Africa

Iran’s experiences in Sudan demonstrate how traditional diplomacy is subordinated to the Islamic Republic’s boarder, asymmetrical goals. Sudan’s Islamist National Congress Party (NCP)-led government signed a military cooperation agreement with Iran in 2008; according to The Telegraph, the IRGC maintained a base in Al Fashr, Darfur, as recently as September of 2011. The Conflict Armaments Research report strongly suggests that Iranian ammunition was used in at least some of the atrocities committed by Khartoum-allied militias during the conflict in Darfur, and that Sudan was a transit point for Iranian ammunition that eventually made its way to Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, on the other side of Africa.

This relationship is widely resented within Sudan itself. A significant faction within Sudan’s notoriously divided regime is set against a continued relationship with Iran, and in November of last year, foreign minister Ali Karti spoke out against the docking of Iranian warships in the Red Sea city of Port Sudan. According to one East Africa-based analyst who works frequently in Khartoum, the Sudanese government views its alliance with Iran as purely opportunistic. “It’s a very self-interested relationship,” he says. “In its propaganda, the NCP will talk about the infidel west, the Zionists, the communists, the atheists — and they will put the Shia in that list as well.”

For many Sudanese, the Yarmouk incident only demonstrated the cost of Sudan’s conscription into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by its Iranian allies—a conflict which has nothing to do with Sudan’s own already-shaky internal affairs. “A lot of Sudanese are very upset, but not at the actual Israeli strike,” the analyst said. “They’re upset about the fact that the government is involving themselves in something that’s a lot bigger than what Sudan can handle.” Amongst some of Sudan’s leaders, and a significant part of its populace, Iran is an unwelcome ally. Even a fellow pariah state — truly an ally of last resort—harbors little real enthusiasm for the Islamic Republic and its policies.

But Iran has gotten exactly what it needs out of Sudan, regardless of how facile and opportunistic the ties between the two countries really are. Sudan is a beachhead for the IRGC — a transit point for weaponry that allows Hezbollah to aid in the Assad regime’s survival, and Hamas to rain Fajr 5s on the majority of Israel’s civilian population. It doesn’t matter that Sudanese resent the bombing of their capital city, or that Sudan is under international sanctions, or that Iran’s relationship with such a problematic country is liable to deepen perceptions of the Islamic Republic’s international isolation. All across the continent, Iran’s expansionist foreign policy is in direct conflict with its economic and soft power outreach—and Iran has succeeded is using Africa to advance its interests anyway.

South Africa, for instance, seems at first glance like a signal Iranian failure. Africa’s largest economy has totally caved to American and E.U. pressure on Iranian oil purchases, even despite the traditionally left-leaning foreign policy of the ruling African National Congress. In early June, the country’s Department of Energy announced that it had totally cut off its oil trade with Iran, and Trevor Houser of the Rhodium Group, which tracks the effects of sanctions on Iran’s oil sales, confirmed by email that “South African customs has not recorded any oil imports from Iran for several months now.”

Iran’s oil trade with South Africa has evaporated, but the Islamic Republic scored a crucial consolation prize: a major investment from South African cell phone giant MTN, along with a raft of favors from the South African government. According to a civil complaint filed in District of Columbia federal court, MTN elbowed Turkcell, a Turkish competitor, out of a 49% stake in an Iranian joint venture called Irancell by “promising Iran that MTN could deliver South Africa’s vote at the International Atomic Energy Agency, promising Iran defense equipment otherwise prohibited by national and international laws, and the outright bribery of high-level government officials in both Iran and South Africa.”

The suit alleges that between 2003 and 2005, MTN won its Iranian license through a series of lucrative kickbacks. These consisted of straightforward bribes paid to Iranian officials, although the suit presents strong evidence that South Africa’s pro-Iran votes at the IAEA between 2005 and 2008 were a quid pro quo for the Islamic Republic’s approval of MTN’s Irancell investment. The complaint boasted over 60 pages of documentation, including damning internal emails leaked by an employee at MTN’s Tehran offices. It goes into specific detail about vehicles and military equipment the South Africans would provide to Iran if MTN were awarded the Irancell stake, a list which included “Rooivalk helicopters (based on the U.S. Apache platform), frequency hopping encrypted military radios, sniper rifles, G5 howitzers, canons…and other defense articles.” (The weapons were never delivered, and the Turkcell case was withdrawn in May of 2013–but only because the U.S. Supreme Court ruled a month earlier that international corporate civil suits could no longer be tried in U.S. court).

The scandal has resulted in no criminal prosecutions in South Africa. MTN still owns nearly half of Irancell, an arrangement that nets the company over $117 million a year. Irancell’s Iranian owner is a holding company whose investors include Iran Electronics Industries, a government-connected electronics and defense company that has been under U.S. sanctions since September of 2008. Iran and the IRGC are still leveraging their relationship with South Africa, even after the collapse of the companies’ oil trade. And according to Mark Dubowitz of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, the country is “a very hospitable place for Iranian sanctions-busting.” In early June, the U.S. Treasury Department added 37 Iranian front companies to its sanctions list. Three were based in South Africa.

This pattern—in which Iran scrapes for asymmetrical gains within a challenging diplomatic environment, and in spite of its own internally divided conventional diplomacy—repeated itself in Nigeria. In October of 2010, Nigerian authorities scored the largest seizure of an Iranian weapons shipment in African history, when a container ship carrying crates of rocket launchers and heavy mortars was impounded in the port of Lagos. This embarrassment hardly ended Iran’s efforts in the country. In June of 2013, a Hezbollah cell was uncovered in the northern Nigerian city of Kano. And Iran has an asset in Nigeria that’s arguably more valuable than a foothold for its Lebanese proxies: Sheikh Ibrahim Zakzaky, a radical Iranian-trained Shi’ite cleric and a promoter of Iranian state ideology in Sub-Saharan Africa’s most populous country.

...

But perhaps the most startling Iranian success in Africa has to do with its pursuit of the ultimate asymmetrical objective: a nuclear weapons capability. Robert Mugabe’s regime in Zimbabwe inked a uranium agreement with Iran in 2011, and Ahmadinejad visited Niger, the world’s fourth-largest uranium producer, late in his second term as the Islamic Republic’s president. A 2006 Wikileaks cable asserts that Iran had smuggled Congolese uranium through ports in Tanzania. As for Tanzania—its government has proven remarkably tolerant of Iranian tankers operating under Tanzanian registration in order to evade the oil sanctions regime. Tanzania is a close enough U.S. ally to warrant a visit from Barack Obama during his July, 2013 trip to Africa. Iran can get what it needs even from African countries with established, pro-western bona fides—and despite an almost total absence of real friends in the continent.

As with its nuclear program, Iran has found its way around the obstructions that diplomacy and statecraft are constantly throwing in its path. Despite the pinch of international sanctions, and setbacks like the Stuxnet computer virus, Iran has increased the number of its operating uranium centrifuges, along with its stockpile of fissile material. Thanks to diplomatic stalling tactics, like the ones perfected by Iranian president-elect and former nuclear negotiator Hassan Rowhani, and its patient, decades-long accumulation of nuclear components, Iran has steadily progressed towards a nuclear weapons capability —even in the face of a nearly-global effort at derailing them.

Labels: African, Ayatollah Khomeni, Hezbullah, Iran, Iranian nuclear threat, Islam, Nigeria, South Africa, Sudan, Tanzania, weapons smuggling

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 11:25 AM 0 comments

White House advisor honors Ayatollah Khomeini

It has come to our attention that in December 2004, Mr. Elibiary spoke at a tribute to Ayatollah Khomeini titled “A Tribute To The Great Islamic Visionary” sponsored by the Metroplex Organization of Muslims in North Texas in Irving, TX. When the event was criticized in an editorial carried by a local newspaper, Mr. Elibiary offered the following explanation claiming that he hadn’t realized that “the event honored Imam Khomeini”:

I have been asked whether, if I had realized before I spoke that the event honored Imam Khomeini, I would have left immediately. I don’t know. My activism, which is designed to bring Muslims into the mainstream, calls upon me not to cede any territory to radical views without presenting a moderating counterpoint. I have learned that, to his supporters, Imam Khomeini is not the hostage crisis, or the one who hated America as the “Great Satan,” but a liberator from the shah’s hated dictatorship. As Natan Sharansky correctly points out in his book The Case for Democracy, people flock to promises of freedom, because all human beings desire to be free. I have been asked what I would say to someone who believes that there is no good reason to attend a tribute to Imam Khomeini. If their concerns revolved around the American experience of him, I would say that I echo their feelings. But if anyone wishes to learn about their opponent, they must listen, or they’ll remain ignorant and make mistakes that cost them in their struggle to defend their values and views. Just because I listen to Osama bin Laden’s tapes and agree that the West routinely insults Muslim dignity, that doesn’t make me al-Qaeda. By listening I gain a better understanding of a philosophy I wish to counter. Just because I agree with Che Guevara that nonregulated capitalism is exploitive of the poorest in a society, that doesn’t make me a communist – just one who sees the benefit of Teddy Roosevelt’s crusade against business monopolies.

It is to at all clear to the GMBDR how Mr. Elibiary could have failed to recognize that the event was a tribute to Khomeini given the name of the event and the associated flyer. It is also not clear why Mr. Elibiary agreed to share a podium with Mohammad Asi given what his own characterization of Mr. Asi:

Imam Mohammad Asi, who also spoke at the MOMIN event, is more troubling than Khomeini, in my opinion, because his views are a direct threat, not just a historical one, to our American way of life. He does believe that America is the “Great Satan” and opposes the reformers in Iran who are calling for a dialogue between Islam and the West. He sees “Zionist Jews” as controlling the entire world (outside Iran, of course) and strongly ridicules full political participation by Western Muslims. I don’t know what to say about all this other than that it’s diametrically opposed to the views of the invited speakers – Imam Kavakci, Iyas Maleh and myself. Mohammad Asi’s beliefs run counter to the very existence of our organizations, decades of activism, everything we said and saw from the leadership at the MOMIN Center.

Labels: Ayatollah Khomeni, Barack Hussein Obama, Iranian revolution, militant Islam, Muslim Brotherhood

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 12:44 PM 0 comments

In Erdogan's Turkey, homage to Imam Khomeni

Labels: Ayatollah Khomeni, Barack Hussein Obama, Recep Tayyip Erdogan

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 7:16 AM 0 comments

More eerie similarities between Iran 1979 and Egypt 2011

MJT: So why, when you published a piece in The New Republic a few days ago, did you compare the upheaval in Egypt to the Iranian Revolution 31 years ago rather than to Tunisia’s Jasmine Revolution that toppled Ben Ali less than 31 days ago?

Abbas Milani: Iran and Egypt are very similar. They have been, along with Turkey, the key bellwether states in the region. What happens in these three places has shaped what happens in the Middle East for a hundred years.

Tunisia—in terms of size, history, and trajectory—is far less like Iran than Egypt is. Egypt is the most important center of Sunni learning while Iran is the most important center of Shia learning. And the two countries have been very much in competition with each other for hegemony over the Islamic world. The Shah spent his last days in Egypt. There is a fifty year connection between the Pahlavi dynasty and Egypt.

Look also at the events themselves and the way the United States has tried to position itself. What’s going on right now in Egypt is eerily reminiscent of the events in Iran in 1979. The United States supported Pahlavi and Mubarak overtly. In both cases there was behind-the-scenes pressure to democratize and open the system. The Shah resisted, claiming a communist threat. Mubarak resisted, claiming a Muslim Brotherhood threat.

After a while the Shah became impervious to American pressure because he had oil money. He had more money than he knew what to do with. During those very crucial years the Iranian middle class mushroomed. The educated class was increasing. These were the years when pressure for democracy was most urgent, but the Shah was impervious to it.

MJT: How big was the middle class in 1979?

Abbas Milani: It depends on how you define it. If you look at the income, the amount of urbanization, the number of educated people, the number of people who lived in their own domicile, the number of people who could travel outside the country—all these grew rapidly in the 1960s and 1970s thanks to the push for industrialization that began in the early 1960s. It began before the oil money came in.

We had a class of brilliant Iranian technocrats, many of them educated in the United States, including right here at Stanford. They put into effect a remarkable process of industrialization that by 1970 was bearing fruit. These people demanded political rights, and the Shah, instead of opening the country, clamped down with the one-party system.

I am absolutely convinced that in 1975, when he was at the height of his power, if the Shah had made just a third of the concessions he later made in 1978, we would be looking at a very different Iran today.

MJT: It was too late in 1978.

Abbas Milani: What Mubarak and the Shah both failed to understand is that if you make concessions when you’re weak it just increases the appetite for more concessions. If they would have made concessions when they were in a position of power, they could have negotiated a smooth transition to a less authoritarian government.

In Egypt, when the US pressured Mubarak to announce that he would not run again, that he should come out publicly and say he has cancer and that there will be a free election soon, he instead tried to create a monarchy.

Labels: Ayatollah Khomeni, Egyptian regime change, Hosni Mubarak, Iranian revolution, Muslim Brotherhood, Shah Reza Pahlavi

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 10:17 AM 1 comments