Well, now he's become an international player, with the Washington Post reporting that he claims that President Hussein Obama is a Shiite Muslim and that Israel (Israel!?!) was behind Obama's election.
أوباما الذي يعود لأصول شيعية انتخب لتقريب وجهات النظر بين إيران وأمريكا لإيقاف برنامج إيران النووي العسكري.نجحت الخطة .
This week, as the Obama administration announced that it was lifting
sanctions on Iran as a result of a U.S.-led nuclear deal with Tehran
reached in July, Dhahi Khalfan
Tamim, the head of general security for the emirate of Dubai, suggested
that Obama's "Shiite roots" had helped him get elected in a bid to bring
the United States and Iran closer.
"Mission accomplished," he added.
In follow-up tweets, Tamim suggested that Israel was actually behind
the election of Obama and that the U.S. president would probably visit a
number of Shiite religious sites in Iran soon.
It's worth noting
that Tamim isn't an obscure figure. He is a former police chief of
Dubai. His Twitter account has more than 1.2 million followers, and his
tweets about Obama were retweeted hundreds of times. And neither is
this the first time that this rumor has found voice.
No, I don't believe Obama is a Muslim. But I do believe that he's an Islamophile with a disproportionate love for and trust of Islam. And yes, I believe he's an anti-semite.
Dubai's Deputy Police Commissioner Dahi Halfan on Monday demanded that Bishara leave the Persian Gulf and return to Israel, reports Yedioth Ahronoth. The former MK has been living in oil-rich Qatar, and working as a commentator for Al Jazeera.
Halfan accused Bishara of being involved in an "Israeli plot" to
control the Gulf states, writing on Twitter, "Azmi Bishara. I'm a member
of the security forces, and people in the Gulf don't want you anymore.
Go back to the Israeli Knesset and tell them that their plot failed."
Last week, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates made an
unprecedented decision to remove their ambassadors from Qatar, in a
protest of perceived Qatari meddling in their internal affairs.
The countries charged Bishara's employer Al Jazeera, which is run by Qatar, of leading the meddling. Qatar has also been distanced from its Gulf neighbors in its support of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Once upon a time, Azmi Bishara was a Knesset member representing an 'Israeli Arab party.' In 2007, Bishara fled Israel (and resigned from the Knesset) when it was discovered that during the 2006 Second Lebanon War he was helping Hezbullah to target missiles. That's called treason.
For a while thereafter, Bishara continued to receive his pension and other benefits from the Knesset! The Knesset finally revoked those benefits in 2010. Bishara now lives in Qatar, where he is close to the ruling family.
Inspector Tamim was formerly the police chief of Dubai. He made himself famous during the uproar that followed the liquidation of Hamas arms dealer Mahmoud al-Mabhouh.
Tamim has gone a little off the wall lately, and Israel Radio reported in its 9:00 am newscast that Tamim has accused Bishara of being an Israeli agent, and calling for Bishara to be expelled from the Persian Gulf. Here's hoping they get to duel it out over those charges really soon.
I'm sure that many of you remember Inspector Tamim from Dubai. Tamim regularly warns about the Muslim Brotherhood trying to undermine the governments of the Gulf state countries. Now, his warnings are becoming increasingly urgent.
"The
Brotherhood as a ruling party in Egypt has no right to interfere with
other countries. They are no longer a political party and should respect
the independence of other countries," Khalfan told Reuters in an
interview this week.
He reiterated charges that Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood was linked to an
alleged plot to topple the UAE government, saying the group's ultimate
goal was Islamist rule in all Gulf states.
Khalfan, who
has often railed against the Brotherhood on his Twitter account, is one
of only a few UAE officials to speak publicly about politics.
While
he says his tweets are personal views, diplomats say they reflect
concerns among the UAE ruling elite about the regional popularity of
Islamists and the possibility that the West will engage with them.
Khalfan complained that the West "sympathies, adopts and supports" the Brotherhood, saying he did not understand why.
Inspector Tamim: Muslim Brotherhood plotting to overthrow Gulf Arab governments
I'm sure that many of you remember Inspector Tamim, the Dubai police inspector who accused the Mossad of liquidating Hamas terrorist Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in a Dubai hotel in January 2010.
It's been a while, but Inspector Tamim (that's the last name of the man described in this article) is back with a theory that might not be quite so wild. Inspector Tamim claims that the Muslim Brotherhood is seeking the overthrow of the Gulf Arab governments.
"There's an international plot against Gulf states in particular and Arab countries in general...This is preplanned to take over our fortunes," Khalfan told reporters at a gathering late on Wednesday marking the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.
"The bigger our sovereign wealth funds and the more money we put in the banks of Western countries, the bigger the plot to take over our countries...The brothers and their governments in Damascus and North Africa have to know that the Gulf is a red line, not only for Iran but also for the Brothers as well."
Remember my old friend Inspector Tamim, the police chief of Dubai? Well, he's gotten it right this time. The inspector says that US policy is the number one threat to the Gulf States; the US is not an ally.
Rumor has it that President Obumbler started crying when he heard this.
In a January 19, 2012 address at the GCC national and regional security conference in Bahrain, Dubai's longtime chief of police Dahi Khalfan Tamim gave an assessment of security threats to the Gulf states. He said that the U.S. was the main security threat, had realized Iran's dreams in Iraq, was "embracing" the Muslim Brotherhood, and was no longer an ally. His remarks prompted U.S. Ambassador to Bahrain Thomas Krajeski, who was attending the conference, to walk out.
The day following the address, he defended his statements, saying, "The U.S. has granted Iran many of its dreams in the region, including the toppling of Saddam [Hussein], active presence of Iran in Iraq and the exporting of the revolution into the Arab world." He added, "I was not solely targeting the U.S. policies but was giving my reading to the security threats to the Gulf, and they included several factors. I talked about corruption and abuse of power, especially in law enforcement apparatus, on Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood as well."
Dubai police beat British tourist to death... for cursing
Some of you may recall that I recently posted that this blog is banned in Dubai.
The report about that came from a reader who lives in the US and spends a lot of time in Israel. We're supposed to get together... one of these days....
I hope that reader will now consider avoiding Dubai for the sake of his own safety. These people are nuts.
A British tourist was beaten to death by officers in a Dubai police station after being arrested for swearing, it was claimed yesterday.
Lee Bradley Brown, 39, was on holiday at a £1,000-a-night hotel in the Arab state when he was thrown into a filthy cell.
Police sources say he was ‘badly beaten up’ by a group of police officers, leaving him unconscious on the floor.
Inmates told how they watched officers bundle him into a body-bag and drag him out of the building.
During Mr Brown’s six days in Bur Dubai police station, guards refused to give him enough food and water and did not let him see a lawyer, it is alleged.
His sister learned about the attack when she received a phone call from an inmate on Sunday, claiming her brother had been beaten.
The prisoner found her phone number on a photocopy of her brother’s passport which had been left behind in the cell.
She contacted the British Embassy in Dubai, and on Monday an official was sent to visit Mr Brown at the police station.
But the official was turned away by an officer who claimed Mr Brown did not want to see him and had ‘declined consular assistance’.
His sister, who did not want to be named, received another phone call from the inmate saying he had seen her brother’s body being taken out in a body-bag.
A source told the Daily Mail last night: ‘He suffered a really bad beating which must have caused some terrible internal injuries.
‘The poor bloke stood no chance at all. At one stage he was thrown against the concrete wall of a cell and landed badly.
‘Then the guards tried to hush it up and pretend nothing had happened.’
Please avoid Arab countries in general and Dubai in particular as much as possible. These people are not civilized. You have no rights there.
I trust you all remember Inspector Tamim, the Dubai police chief who is still looking for the real killers of Hamas terrorist Mahmoud al-Mabhouh.
Inspector Tamim apparently isn't too angry at Israel. But he's quite angry at Israel Matzav. Reader SN is currently visiting Dubai and reports (via email) that Israel Matzav cannot be accessed from that country.
Hey Carl..I went to Dubai on my honeymoon ten years ago, so I decided to go back for my ten year anniversary...naturally, I can't go a day without your blog...and guess what....you are blocked in the united arab emirates! All the other blogs and israeli sites worked. U must have really pisssed somebody off!
Israeli tennis player Shahar Pe'er advanced to the quarterfinal round in Dubai on Thursday, with a 3-6, 6-4, 6-1 victory over Yanina Wickmayer of Belgium. Pe'er - who is only seeded ninth in the tournament - will face the winner of the match between top-seeded Caroline Wozniacki and Ayumi Morita.
Two years ago, she was banned from playing in Duabi. Last year, she reached the semifinals. On Wednesday, Israeli tennis pro Shahar Pe'er tore through her second round match in an hour and a half (according to Israel Radio) while living in quarantine.
Peer was granted entry in 2010 and reached the semi-finals before losing to Venus Williams. The security conditions she encountered last year exist again this week but she said that was not the reason she felt extra pressure to perform.
"It's because I want to do well," the ninth seed told a group of reporters allowed into her compound after a 6-4 6-1 first-round win over Spain's Maria Jose Martinez Sanchez on Tuesday.
"I played good here last year so always when you go back to a tournament where you played good, you want to repeat it."
Peer has some familiar faces taking care of her again this year in the compound inside the tournament grounds, providing VIP treatment with her own private locker room, lounge and food.
"It's the same people around me ... really nice people ... taking good care of me," she said. "It kind of feels like home so you can get the same inspiration because you feel very comfortable.
"I feel great here and will try to be here as long as possible."
Peer said the isolation helped her focus more on her tennis commitments.
"You're very concentrated. Last year I learned a lot for my future career, to try and not hang around at the tennis, to be there as less as possible and to really finish, do my matches, win, and go back," she explained.
"I have my dad here with me. We watch some movies and are really trying to have some fun together."
While many believe that politics and sport should not be mixed, Peer takes the opposite view.
"They should be connected, I think," said the Israeli. "They respect me coming here and really appreciate me coming.
"I think we're all trying to make one thing together, to be human beings and to respect each other."
If Pe'er wins, this country will explode in happiness like nothing we have experienced since we won our first Olympic gold medal. Who knows: Maybe they can even get Inspector Tamim to do the presentation. Heh.
One year ago next week, Hamas terrorist Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was liquidated in a luxury hotel room in Dubai. Although the 'crime' has never been solved, most of the world believes that Mabhouh was killed by the Mossad. Ronen Bergman, one of Israel's best known political and military analysts, has a blow-by-blow description of the entire operation here (Hat Tip: Andrew Sullivan). Here are a few highlights.
It was at that point, approximately a week after his death, that the Hamas leadership in Damascus contacted Lieutenant General Dhahi Khalfan Tamim, chief of the Dubai Police, and informed him that they believed Al-Mabhouh had been killed by the Mossad. According to European intelligence sources, Tamim's initial reaction was to rage at them on the phone, verbally abusing senior Hamas officials for using Dubai as a battleground for espionage and terrorism. "Take yourselves and your bank accounts and your weapons and your forged fucking passports and get out of my country," he reportedly shouted. Once he calmed down, though, a cursory review of the hotel-security footage from the cameras outside room 230 at the time of Al-Mabhouh's death convinced Tamim that he needed to open an investigation immediately.
So it may well be that the authorities first arrived at the conclusion that Al-Mabhouh was assassinated and only then revisited and adjusted their pathology findings so as to avoid admitting to the world that, despite their massive investment in the state-of-the-art security systems that blanket the country, they were unable to say with any certainty how Al-Mabhouh had died. In a press conference held on February 15, Tamim announced that Al-Mabhouh had been killed by a hit squad and announced that their forensic tests indicated that he'd been suffocated. Lab tests, he said, were still under way. Nearly two weeks later, on February 28, he announced the discovery of the exact cause of death. That Al-Mabhouh's body was reportedly sent back to Syria on January 28, however, and buried after a big funeral procession on January 29, calls into question these findings.
The rest of the investigation that Tamim conducted, however, was meticulous and efficient in a way that no one, least of all the Mossad, had expected. A source close to the investigation said that the moment Tamim concluded that Al-Mabhouh had not died of natural causes, he ordered his people to search Dubai's extensive databases and identify everyone who had arrived in the emirate shortly before the killing and left soon after. This list was then cross-referenced against the names of visitors who had been in Dubai back in February, March, June, and November of 2009, all the times of Al-Mabhouh's previous visits. The short list that emerged was then checked against hotel registers, and footage from hotel security cameras at the times these individuals checked in made it possible to put a face to each name. Tamim then compared these visual identifications to the footage from the Al Bustan Hotel at the time of Al-Mabhouh's death, which gave him the names of the assassins. And searching databases of financial transactions gave him the identities of the rest of the team, all of which Dubai authorities posted online for the world to see.
Tamim also turned out to be extremely media-savvy. He presided over well-planned press conferences, carefully doling out information in a manner guaranteed to keep viewers—especially in the Arab world—coming back for more. He publicly called for the arrest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and of Meir Dagan, whom he challenged to "be a man" and take responsibility for the assassination. More realistically, perhaps, he called for international arrest warrants for all members of the hit squad, which caused considerable diplomatic embarrassment for Israel. When asked by an interviewer what the hit team's biggest mistake was, Tamim answered that the presence of two men waiting for hours in the lobby in tennis gear with uncovered rackets was so bizarre that it instantly raised suspicion.
The laughable attempts of the Mossad operatives to disguise their appearance made for good television coverage, but the more fundamental errors committed by the team had less to do with cloak-and-dagger disguises than with a kind of arrogance that seems to have pervaded the planning and execution of the mission.
Despite the fact that Dubai is a hostile environment—a distant Arab state with ties to Iran—many details of the mission suggest the Mossad treated it as if they were operating inside a base country. The use of Payoneer cards is one obvious example. For the most part, prepaid debit cards are only used domestically within the United States, and while Payoneer does issue debit cards that are valid internationally, these are relatively rare. That several of the team members were using the same type of unusual card issued by the same company—one whose CEO, Yuval Tal, is a veteran of an elite Israeli Defense Force commando unit—gave the Dubai police a common denominator to connect the various members of the team.
It has also become apparent that in order to avoid calling one another's cell phones directly, the operatives used a dedicated private switchboard in Austria. Any operative trying to reach a colleague—whether in the hotel down the street or at the command post in Israel—dialed one of a handful of numbers in Austria, from which the call was then rerouted to its destination. But since dozens of calls were made to and from this short list of Austrian numbers over a period of less than two days, the moment that the cover of a single operative was blown and his cell phone records became available to the authorities, all others who called or received calls from the same numbers were at risk of being identified.
It gets worse. One of the most serious mistakes made by the planners of the operation—certainly the one that caused the greatest embarrassment to the Mossad and to Israel—involved the use of forged foreign identities.
When it comes to false identities and false passports, the Mossad has a unique problem, one that most Western intelligence services do not face. When the CIA or the British SIS (or MI6, as it is commonly known) send an operative into the field, they can usually provide him or her with a valid U.S. or U.K. passport issued in whatever false name and identity the individual will be using. But an Israeli spy cannot use an Israeli passport, since the most important targets for Israeli espionage are in countries that do not maintain diplomatic relations with Israel. For this reason, the need for foreign documentation has always been an acute one in the Mossad, which has historically resolved this problem by forging what it needed. Naturally, this is done without the authorization of the countries involved.
Whenever the Mossad is found out, as has happened from time to time, a major diplomatic scandal erupts.
...
What the blown identities of the operatives illustrate more than anything is the now seemingly insurmountable problem posed by twenty-first-century counterespionage systems. False identities and cover stories are no longer any match for well-placed security cameras, effective passport control, and computer software that can almost instantly track communications and financial transactions.
Why did the Mossad permit things to go so wrong in Dubai? In a word, the answer is leadership. Because Dagan refashioned the Mossad in his own image, and because he drove out anyone who was willing to question his decisions, there was no one in the agency to tell him that the Dubai operation was badly conceived and badly planned. They simply did not believe that a minnow in the world of intelligence services such as Dubai would be any match for Israel's Caesarea fighters. As one very senior German intelligence expert told me: "The Israelis' problem has always been that they underestimate everyone—the Arabs, the Iranians, Hamas. They are always the smartest and think they can hoodwink everyone all the time. A little more respect for the other side—even if you think he is a dumb Arab or a German without imagination—and a little more modesty would have saved us all from this embarrassing entanglement."
They'd have been better off keeping their mouths shut
Wikileaks reveals that the government of Dubai debated keeping quiet when they learned the details of the liquidation of Hamas terrorist Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in January. They decided not to remain silent because 'it would be seen as siding with Israel.'
"The two options discussed were to say nothing at all, or to reveal more or less the full extent of the UAE's investigations," U.S. Ambassador Richard Olson wrote in a diplomatic cable, based on a conversation he had with a UAE government media adviser.
The first option "would have been perceived as protecting the Israelis," the ambassador wrote.
The cables show the al-Mabhouh hit was discussed for nine days at the UAE government's highest levels before being released to the public.
"The statement was carefully drafted not to point any fingers, but the reference ... to a gang with Western passports will be read locally as referring to the Mossad," Olson wrote.
Dubai officials were not immediately available for comment on the leaked cables.
They'd have been better off remaining silent. First, if they'd remained silent, everyone would have assumed that the liquidators were geniuses who managed to pull off the liquidation without leaving a trace (of course, we would now know otherwise thanks to Wikileaks, but no one knew that at the time). No one would have seen them as siding with Israel.
Second, given that the only people arrested so far were the 'Palestinians' who betrayed Mabhouh, all the Dubai police really accomplished was to make fools of themselves.
I am an Orthodox Jew - some would even call me 'ultra-Orthodox.' Born in Boston, I was a corporate and securities attorney in New York City for seven years before making aliya to Israel in 1991 (I don't look it but I really am that old :-). I have been happily married to the same woman for thirty-five years, and we have eight children (bli ayin hara) ranging in age from 13 to 33 years and nine grandchildren. Four of our children are married! Before I started blogging I was a heavy contributor on a number of email lists and ran an email list called the Matzav from 2000-2004. You can contact me at: IsraelMatzav at gmail dot com
