Police in Dubai are to issue arrest warrants for 11 "agents with European passports" suspected of assassinating a top Hamas official last month.
Mahmoud al-Mabhouh was murdered in his hotel room in Dubai on 20 January.

Reports have suggested that he was in Dubai to buy weapons for Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas. It has accused Israeli agents of killing him.

Dubai's police chief said six of the suspects had British passports, three were Irish, one French and one German.

The Britons were named as James Leonard Clarke, Stephen Daniel Hodes, Paul John Keeley, Michael Lawrence Barney, Jonathan Lewis Graham and Melvyn Adam Mildiner.

One of the group was a woman with Irish papers in the name of Gail Folliard. The other Irish suspects were named as Kevin Daveron and Evan Dennings.

The Foreign and Commonwealth Office and their Irish counterparts have said they are investigating.

Officials in Dubai said the team appeared to be a professional hit-squad, most likely sponsored by a foreign power, suggesting the team were operating on false documents.

He showed CCTV footage of the group entering the hotel where Mr Mabhouh was staying.

At one point the men appear to don wigs and false beards.

"We do not rule out the involvement of Mossad (the Israeli secret service), but when we arrest those suspects we will know who masterminded it," Lt Gen Dhafi Khalfan Tamim said.

"We have no doubts that it was 11 people holding these passports, and we regret that they used the travel documents of friendly countries," Lt Gen Tamim said.

'Suffocated'

Lt Gen Tamim said the identities had been passed on to Interpol, as part of an official request for international arrest warrants to be issued.

Mr Mabhouh was electrocuted and suffocated, according to reports last month.

Lt Gen Tamim said the suspects had followed Mr Mabhouh into Dubai from Syria, where he lived since 1989, before fanning out to stay at different hotels to avoid detection.

Two Palestinians who aided the team have been arrested, the police said.

Mr Mabhouh was a founder member of the Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades, and was thought to be behind the kidnap and murder of two Israeli soldiers in 1989 during the first Palestinian Intifada.

The Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades have been responsible for suicide bombings and rocket attacks across Israel.

Israel has refused to comment on the accusations its security forces were behind the killing.

Mahmoud al-Mabhouh took no notice of the two men who joined him in the lift of his hotel in Dubai during the short ride to the second floor on the afternoon of January 20.

One was short and portly with a moustache, the other tall. Dressed in sports gear and carrying tennis rackets, they looked like any other European tourists visiting the Gulf state for some winter sun.

He did not realise that the two men were part of an 11-strong team that had come to kill him. In just over five hours he would be dead.

Stepping out of the lift, al-Mabhouh was escorted to room 230 by a member of staff at the Al Bustan Rotana hotel, near Dubai airport. Unnoticed, the taller man followed him down the corridor, clocking his room number and that of the room opposite, 237. In the hours that followed, room 237 became the staging post for the audacious murder of the senior Hamas official.

Within an hour of al-Mabhouh checking in his killers had established that room 237 was unoccupied and moved in across the hall. By that evening seven of the team were gathered in the room, waiting for their opportunity.

The killers had lain in wait for al-Mabhouh, whom Hamas admits was involved in the killing of two Israeli soldiers in 1989, since the previous night. Flying in from Paris, Frankfurt, Rome and Zurich, the team of ten men and one woman arrived within three hours of each other. The alleged mastermind of the operation, a Frenchman using the name Peter Elvinger, was the last to arrive at 2.30am on January 19. The team dispersed for the night to hotels near the airport and to the Al Bustan Rotana.

The following morning, several members of the team including Elvinger and the Irish woman, whose passport bore the name Gail Folliard, met at a shopping centre to discuss final preparations for the murder. Nothing was left to chance.

Security footage of the killers’ movements during the afternoon, released by police in Dubai yesterday, underlines the professionalism of the operation. The group switched hotels several times and wore disguises including false beards and wigs, while surveillance teams rotated in pairs through the hotel lobby, never hanging around for too long and paying for everything in cash.

Folliard and another member of the party carrying an Irish passport in the name of Kevin Daveron were operating as spotters on the second floor of the hotel when the murder was committed. Both switched hotels that afternoon and dressed smartly to pose as hotel staff. The bald Daveron donned a dark wig and glasses, while Folliard appears to have removed a blonde wig to reveal dark hair.

Throughout the operation, none of the suspects made a direct call to any another. However, Dubai police traced a high volume of calls and text messages between three phones carried by the assassins and four numbers in Austria where a command centre had apparently been established.

To co-ordinate their movements on the ground, the team used discreet, sophisticated short-range communication devices as they tracked their victim.

Al-Mabhouh touched down in Dubai at around 3pm from Damascus to arrange a shipment of weapons to Gaza. Hamas has not explained why one of its senior commanders, a marked man with several assassination attempts against him already, should have arrived alone without any security.

Clearly, though, his mission was compromised long before his arrival in Dubai. The assassination team were waiting for him at the terminal. CCTV footage shows al-Mabhouh passing within metres of one of his killers. As the Hamas commander approaches the taxi rank outside the terminal, a spotter from the team can be seen sidling into shot behind him, speaking on a mobile phone to confirm the Palestinian’s arrival.

Al-Mabhouh checked into the Al Bustan Rotana at 3.25pm with the surveillance team in close attendance. After they followed him to his room, a call was made and Elsinger booked room 237 from the business suite of another hotel. With the trap set, he then booked a flight to Munich via Qatar at 7.30pm that evening, an hour before the killing.

Security footage gives a macabre inevitability to the hours that followed. When al-Mabhouh made a short visit out of the hotel, apparently to meet a contact, the killers moved swiftly into place. Four burly men arrived at room 237.

Whether through good fortune or design, no security camera covered the door to al-Mabhouh’s room and there is no footage of how the team gained entry to the room. Hotel records show that at 8pm an attempt was made to re-programme the lock to his door and Daveron, waiting in the second floor lobby, is seen to distract a hotel guest who appears from the second floor lifts for a few vital seconds to give the killers time to gain access.

When al-Mabhouh returned to the hotel at 8.24pm his killers were in place. Police believe that he was asphyxiated. By 8.46pm, less than 20 minutes after their victim entered the hotel, the four killers are shown leaving the second floor, followed closely by their spotters in room 237. The surveillance team in the hotel lobby also disbands.

Less than two hours later Daveron and Folliard are shown boarding a flight to Paris. Others took flights to Hong Kong and South Africa before doubling back to Europe.

Al-Mabhouh’s body was not found until 1.30pm the following afternoon. His room showed no signs of forced entry. The cause of death was initially believed to be an increase of blood pressure in the brain.

The murder was only uncovered days later, when local security services were told who the victim was. Al-Mabhouh had also been travelling on a false passport.

As an international manhunt began for the 11 suspects yesterday, one particular anomaly in the case remained. Folliard is the only woman named so far, but footage of the final surveillance shows a second woman arriving at the hotel accompanied by a man in a Panama hat and a beard. It is not known whether this woman is one of two Palestinians arrested in Dubai last week in connection with the murder.

As the hunt for the killers begins in earnest and the finger is pointed at Mossad, room 230 remains empty. “Closed for emergency repairs”.

The real people behind those names have all been rather surprised this week!

Death in Dubai: the plot thickens

Brown calls in police to investigate alleged identity theft by Mossad as Israeli envoy asked to explain how passports were in killers' hands. Assassination team now thought to number 18, including two women

The international furore over the assassination of a senior Hamas official sharply escalated yesterday with claims that he had been lured to Dubai by the Israeli intelligence services.

Security sources say that Mahmoud al-Mabhouh had changed his travel plans, leaving behind his bodyguards, for a "meeting" which may have been organised by Mossad, who had been tracking him for days before his death.

The killers' use of European passports has led to widespread calls for investigation, and the repercussions for Israel over its alleged involvement in the murder began yesterday, with Gordon Brown announcing an inquiry to be held by the Serious Organised Crime Agency (Soca).

And in a sign of the increasing pressure on the Israeli authorities, the country's ambassador to the UK will appear at the Foreign Office today to face questions over how the passports of six Britons living in Israel were used by a team of killers to travel to Dubai.

It is believed that British investigators will be flying to Dubai in the next 24 hours to co-ordinate with the UAE authorities. No decision has been made, however, on whether they will be going to Israel and no approach had been made so far to the Israeli government. Neither the French nor the German government has yet indicated whether it will launch similar inquiries, although officials in Paris and Berlin said they would be liaising with British authorities and "expected" the Israeli government to furnish them with any relevant information.

It also emerged yesterday that there were as many as 18 people, including two women, involved in the murder of Mr Mabhouh, who was said to have been electrocuted and tortured before being suffocated. One line of speculation was that the reason for the relatively prolonged attack, after he was overpowered by four men, was an attempt to seek information.

The Israeli government meanwhile broke its silence over the assassination to insist that there was no reason to assume that Mossad was responsible for the death. Its Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman did not actually deny Israeli involvement but said: "There is no reason to think that it was the Israeli Mossad, and not some other intelligence service or country up to some mischief."

Mr Lieberman said that Israel maintains a "policy of ambiguity" on detailed intelligence matters, adding: "Israel never responds, never confirms, never denies."

And he denied that what happened could lead to diplomatic problems with the UK, insisting that "Britain recognises that Israel is a responsible country and that our security activity is conducted according to very clear, cautious and responsible rules of the game".

But not everyone in Israel is as supportive of the security services. There have been some calls for the Mossad head Meir Dagan's resignation over the affair. "If we did the identity theft then it was the most idiotic thing imaginable," said Zahava Galon, a former MP from the liberal Meretz party. "It's getting innocent people with no connection to the [assassination] act into trouble. These are people who woke up in the morning and didn't know what hit them. These people have a problem."

But Rafi Eitan, a former cabinet minister who as a Mossad agent took part in the 1960 capture of the Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, suggested a foreign power "wanted to taint Israel". "The Mossad was not behind the assassination of Mahmoud al- Mabhouh, but rather a foreign organisation that is trying to frame Israel," he said. "It took the names of Israeli citizens, doctored the passports... and thus tainted us."

Mr Brown said: "We have got to carry out a full investigation into this. The British passport is an important document that has got to be held with care. The evidence has got to be assembled about what actually happened and how it happened and why it happened, and it is necessary for us to conclude that before we can make statements."

The Israeli government declined to comment on the British decision, and it remained unclear how effective such an inquiry is likely to be. Israeli officials in the UK can refuse to meet detectives with the claim of diplomatic immunity, and there was no sign yesterday whether investigators would get any official cooperation in Israel.

William Hague, the shadow Foreign Secretary, has sent a series of questions to the Foreign Secretary David Miliband, saying: "The reports that the identities of real British citizens have been 'cloned' to produce forged passports is a matter of great concern, since it raises the possibility that this could happen in other cases, including acts of terrorism. We need to know if the Home Secretary and the Foreign Secretary are confident that existing mechanisms are sufficient to prevent further such abuses from happening."

Questions and answers: What do we know so far about the Dubai assassination?

Q. What exactly happened to Mahmoud al-Mabhouh?

A. When the Hamas militant arrived in Dubai, he may have believed he was there to meet an Iranian arms dealer. Six hours later, he was dead, assassinated after a sophisticated operation involving 18 people. The hit squad had arrived in Dubai the previous day. After tailing Mabhouh from the airport, CCTV footage shows two of the group entering a hotel lift with him; one then followed him to find out in which room he was staying. Shortly afterwards, another operative booked the room opposite for that night. When the target left his room, four men crossed the corridor to break in, while others stood guard in the lobby. Mabhouh returned at 8.24pm; police say he was asphyxiated soon after. His killers left the hotel about 20 minutes later.

Q. Who were the people behind the operation, and why were there so many?

A. One theory suggests that having lured Mabhouh to Dubai on the pretext of an arms sale, the hit squad had expected him to be accompanied by a security team, who would also need to be eliminated. The identities of the assassins remain a mystery. All the passports of the initial batch of 11 suspects have been declared fake. So far seven people living in Israel, including Britons, have said that their identities were stolen, adding fuel to theories that Mossad was behind the assassination. Yesterday the existence of seven more suspects emerged: of those, two are believed to be Palestinian and are in custody; the other five, one of them a woman, used EU passports.

Q. Why would Israel want Mabhouh dead?

A. The Palestinian had admitted to a role in the deaths of two Israeli soldiers in 1989 during the first Intifada, and still played a senior role in Hamas. There has been speculation that he was at the top of a "hit list" of militants believed to be dangerous to Israel. And while the Netanyahu government yesterday said there was no proof that Mossad was behind the assassination, it refused to refute the accusation, citing a "policy of ambiguity". Some commentators in Israel have called for the head of Mossad to resign. The counter-argument is that the Dubai operation appeared too ham-fisted to be the work of Mossad, and that it is instead the work of Israel's enemies seeking to discredit the Netanyahu government.

Q. If firm evidence emerges implicating Israel, what will the consequences be?

A. The potential for diplomatic fall-out is clear, with Gordon Brown demanding an inquiry yesterday into how British passports came to be used. There have been similar concerns voiced in Dublin and Paris. The Dubai authorities are inevitably furious at the idea of the country being used as a staging ground for assassinations. Even Vienna has been dragged in, with the hit squad using pre-paid Austrian mobile phone numbers. Israel is already feeling the international heat after the critical Goldstone report into its conduct during the Gaza war, and will not want its critics to have more ammunition.

Archie Bland

Interpol puts 11 people on its 'most wanted' list over Dubai Hamas killing.

Interpol puts 11 people on its 'most wanted' list over Dubai Hamas killing.

They have stopped radical islam, PLO/PA & al-Qaeda at nearly every point. Also halting Iran/Iraq nuclear development when nobody (absolutely nobody) has even the smallest sack of balls to do so.

Ha! Okay... Whatever you say.

But, I'll play along, who has done this better than Mossad?

Or, perhaps you disapprove of the concept of a Pro-Mossad post?

I'm not trying to be argumentative but, can you explain your point?

I think Arthur got a little caught up when he said every point, but Israel has done a lot of good things for the world and that includes Mossad operations.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/feb/1...ck-mossad-dubai


The truth about the Mossad

The recent, outlandish assassination in Dubai may prove the most damaging yet in the Mossad's history of high-profile, bungled operations. How did it squander its reputation for ruthless brilliance?

Last November, a sharp-eyed Israeli woman named Niva Ben-Harush was alarmed to notice a young man attaching something that looked suspiciously like a bomb to the underside of a car in a quiet street near Tel Aviv port. When police arrested him, he claimed to be an agent of the Mossad secret service taking part in a training exercise: his story turned out to be true – though the bomb was a fake.

No comment was forthcoming from the Israeli prime minister's office, which formally speaks for – but invariably says nothing about – the country's world-famous espionage organisation. The bungling bomber was just a brief item on that evening's local TV news.

There was, however, a far bigger story – one that echoed across the globe – two years ago this week, when a bomb in a Pajero jeep in Damascus decapitated a man named Imad Mughniyeh. Mughniyeh was the military leader of Lebanon's Shia movement Hizbullah, an ally of Iran, and was wanted by the US, France and half a dozen other countries. Israel never went beyond cryptic nodding and winking about that killing in the heart of the Syrian capital, but it is widely believed to have been one of its most daring and sophisticated clandestine operations.

The Mossad, like other intelligence services, tends to attract attention only when something goes wrong, or when it boasts a spectacular success and wants to send a warning signal to its enemies. Last month's assassination of a senior Hamas official in Dubai, now at the centre of a white-hot diplomatic row between Israel and Britain, is a curious mixture of both.

With its cloned foreign passports, multiple disguises, state-of-the-art communications and the murder of alleged arms smuggler Mahmoud al-Mabhouh – one of the few elements of the plot that was not captured on the emirate's CCTV cameras – it is a riveting tale of professional chutzpah, violence and cold calculation. And with the Palestinian Islamist movement now vowing to take revenge, it seems grimly certain that it will bring more bloodshed in its wake.

The images from Dubai follow the biblical injunction (and the Mossad's old motto):"By way of deception thou shalt make war." The agency's job, its website explains more prosaically, is to "collect information, analyse intelligence and perform special covert operations beyond [Israel's] borders."

Founded in 1948 along with the new Jewish state, the Mossad largely stayed in the shadows in its early years. Yitzhak Shamir, a former Stern Gang terrorist and future prime minister, ran operations targeting German scientists who were helping Nasser's Egypt build rockets – foreshadowing later Israeli campaigns to disrupt Iraqi and (continuing) Iranian attempts to acquire nuclear and other weapons.

The Mossad's most celebrated exploits included the abduction of the fugitive Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann, who was later tried and hanged in Israel. Others were organising the defection of an Iraqi pilot who flew his MiG-21 to Israel, and support for Iraqi Kurdish rebels against Baghdad. Military secrets acquired by Elie Cohen, the infamous spy who penetrated the Syrian leadership, helped Israel conquer the Golan Heights in the 1967 Middle East war.

It was after that that the service's role expanded to fight the Palestinians, who had been galvanised under Yasser Arafat into resisting Israel in the newly occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip. The 1970s saw the so-called "war of the spooks" with Mossad officers, operating under diplomatic cover abroad, recruiting and running informants in Fatah and other Palestinian groups. Baruch Cohen, an Arabic speaker on loan to the Mossad from the Shin Bet internal security service, was shot in a Madrid cafe by his own agent. Bassam Abu Sharif, of the Marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, was badly disfigured by a Mossad parcel bomb sent to him in Beirut.

Steven Spielberg's 2006 film Munich helped mythologise the Mossad's hunt for the Black September terrorists who massacred 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympics. Eleven of them were eliminated in killings across Europe, culminating in the small Norwegian town of Lillehammer, where a Moroccan waiter was mistaken for Ali Hassan Salameh, the Munich plot's mastermind. Salameh was eventually killed by a car bomb in Beirut in 1979 – the sort of incident that made Lebanese and Palestinians sit up and notice last year's botched training episode in Tel Aviv.

Some details of the assassination of Mabhouh last month echo elements of the campaign against Black September – which ended with the catastrophic arrest of five Mossad agents. Sylvia Raphael, a South African-born Christian with a Jewish father, spent five years in a Norwegian prison; she may have been among the young Europeans in Israel who were discreetly asked, in nondescript offices in Tel Aviv, if they wished to volunteer for sensitive work involving Israel's security. Other agents who had been exposed had to be recalled, safe houses abandoned, phone numbers changed and operational methods modified.

Over the years, the Mossad's image has been badly tarnished at home as well as abroad. It was blamed in part for failing to get wind of Egyptian-Syrian plans for the devastating attack that launched the 1973 Yom Kippur war. Critics wondered whether the spies had got their priorities right by focusing on hunting down Palestinian gunmen in the back alleys of European cities, when they should have been stealing secrets in Cairo and Damascus. The Mossad also played a significant, though still little-known, role in the covert supply of arms to Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran to help fight Saddam Hussein's Iraq, as part of the Iran-Contra scandal during Ronald Reagan's presidency.

It has, in addition, suffered occasional blows from its own disgruntled employees. In 1990, a Canadian-born former officer called Victor Ostrovsky blew the whistle on its internal organisation, training and methods, revealing codenames including "Kidon" (bayonet), the unit in charge of assassinations. An official smear campaign failed to stop Ostrovsky's book, so the agency kept quiet when another ostensibly inside account came out in 2007. It described the use of shortwave radios for sending encoded transmissions, operations in Iran for collecting soil samples, and joint operations with the CIA against Hezbollah.

But the worst own goal came in 1997, during Binyamin Netanyahu's first term as prime minister. Mossad agents tried but failed to assassinate Khaled Mash'al – the same Hamas leader who is now warning of retaliation for Mabhouh's murder – by injecting poison into his ear in Amman, Jordan. Using forged Canadian passports, they fled to the Israeli embassy, triggering outrage and a huge diplomatic crisis with Jordan. Danny Yatom, the then Mossad chief, was forced to quit. Ephraim Halevy, a quietly spoken former Londoner, was brought back from retirement to clear up the mess.

The Dubai assassination, however, may yet turn out to be far more damaging – not least because the political and diplomatic context has changed in the last decade. Israel's reputation has suffered an unprecedented battering, reaching a new low during last year's Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip. "In the current climate, the traces left behind in Dubai are likely to lead to very serious harm to Israel's international standing," the former diplomat Alon Liel commented yesterday.

Even though Israel is maintaining its traditional policy of "ambiguity" about clandestine operations, refusing to confirm or deny any involvement in Dubai, nobody in the world seems to seriously question it. That includes almost all Israeli commentators, who are bound by the rules of military censorship in a small and talkative country where secrets are often quite widely known.

It would be surprising if a key part of this extraordinary story did not turn out to be the role played by Palestinians. It is still Mossad practice to recruit double agents, just as it was with the PLO back in the 1970s. News of the arrest in Damascus of another senior Hamas operative – though denied by Mash'al – seems to point in this direction. Two other Palestinians extradited from Jordan to Dubai are members of the Hamas armed wing, the Izzedine al-Qassam brigades, suggesting treachery may indeed have been involved. Previous assassinations have involved a Palestinian agent identifying the target.

Yossi Melman, the expert on intelligence for Israel's Haaretz newspaper, worries that, as before the 1973 war, the Israeli government may be getting it wrong by focusing on the wrong enemy – the Palestinians – instead of prioritising Iran and Hizbullah.

"The Mossad is not Murder Inc, like the Mafia; its goal is not to take vengeance on its enemies," he wrote this week. "'Special operations' like the assassination in Dubai – if this indeed was a Mossad operation – have always accounted for a relatively small proportion of its overall activity. Nevertheless, these are the operations that give the organisation its halo, its shining image. This is ultimately liable to blind its own ranks, cause them to become intoxicated by their own success, and thus divert their attention from their primary mission."

From an official Israeli point of view, the Mossad has an important job to do. Its reputation for ruthlessness and cunning remains a powerful asset, prompting what sometimes sounds like grudging admiration as well as loathing in the Arab world – where a predisposition for conspiracy theories boosts the effect of the disinformation and psychological warfare at which the Israelis are said to excel.

The government's official narrative, of course, is that Hamas is a terrorist organisation that pioneered horrific suicide bombings, fired thousands of rockets at Israeli civilian targets and – despite occasional signs of pragmatism or readiness for a temporary truce or prisoner swap – remains dedicated to the destruction of the Jewish state. It refuses to admit that its ever-expanding West Bank settlements remains a significant barrier to peace.

In western countries, including Britain, there was widespread anger at the 1,400 Palestinian casualties of the Gaza war. Barack Obama has declared the occupation "intolerable". Netanyahu heads the most rightwing coalition in Israel's history; his famous quip that the Middle East is a "tough neighbourhood" no longer seems to justify playing dirty.

Yet Israelis, and not just those on the right, worry that their very existence as an independent state is being de-legitimised. And, judging by the jobs section of the Mossad website, there are still plenty of opportunities for Israel's wannabe spies: challenging positions are available for researchers, analysts, security officers, codebreakers and other technical work. Speakers of Arabic and Persian are invited to apply to be intelligence officers.The work involves travel abroad and a "young and unconventional" environment.

It is a novelty of this episode that ordinary Israeli citizens are angry that their identities appear to have been stolen by their own government's secret servants – one reason why the Mossad chief Meir Dagan may find his days are numbered. But it is hard not to detect an undercurrent of popular admiration for the killers of Mabhouh. The day after the sensational CCTV images and passport photos were shown, the Israeli tennis champion Shahar Pe'er reached the quarter-finals of a major international competition in the emirate. "Another successful operation in Dubai," the Ynet website headlined its story.

Ofer Kasti, Haaretz's education correspondent, did not have his passport cloned, but he does bear a striking resemblance to the hit-squad member named as Kevin Daveron. "My mum rang and asked gently if I'd been abroad recently," he wrote. "Friends asked me why I hadn't brought back any cigarettes from the duty free shop in Dubai. I thought I sensed admiring glances in the street. 'Well done,' said an elderly woman who came up to me in the supermarket and clapped me the shoulder. 'You showed those Arabs.'"

"In the current climate, the traces left behind in Dubai are likely to lead to very serious harm to Israel's international standing," the former diplomat Alon Liel commented yesterday.

fact:

1. the "widespread anger" in Britain were primarily Palistinian / Arab immigrants

fact:

1. the "widespread anger" in Britain were primarily Palistinian / Arab immigrants

2. since when did the middle east no longer become a tough neighborhood for a Jewish state?


good article, my ass.


I remember you having concern over quoting the Guardian, Mitch.

But, let's not make any mistake about it, Mossad, CIA and your secret service are all fighting a common enemy.

that's a great idea! Yes, why don't we? Let's take a peek, shall we?

"The world will soon learn that Iran will deliver telling blow to global powers in 2010"
"If the Islamic Revolution had not occurred, liberalism and Marxism would have crushed all human dignity in their power-seeking and money-grubbing claws. Nothing would have remained of human and spiritual principles,"

Ahmadinejad said that in the three decades of its history, the Islamic Revolution had inspired some great developments in the world.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahmoud_Ahmadinejad_and_Israel

At the fabulously hip & trendy "World Without Zionism" conference in Asia:
Ahmadinejad was quoted as saying:

"Our dear Imam (referring to Ayatollah Khomeini) said that the occupying regime must be wiped off the map and this was a very wise statement. We cannot compromise over the issue of Palestine. Is it possible to create a new front in the heart of an old front. This would be a defeat and whoever accepts the legitimacy of this regime has in fact, signed the defeat of the Islamic world. Our dear Imam targeted the heart of the world oppressor in his struggle, meaning the occupying regime. I have no doubt that the new wave that has started in Palestine, and we witness it in the Islamic world too, will eliminate this disgraceful stain from the Islamic world."


FEBRUARY 19th 2010...
http://www.defencetalk.com/russia-delays-s...-to-iran-24292/

Perhaps this is all brand new and fresh for you but.... big picture, this all began way way way before Bush sent troops into Iraq. But, you probably knew all about this, right?


Yep.

Disagreeable actions by the State of Israel are small potatoes compared to the deep-seated antisemitism that composes so-called "anti-Zionism." They could've been the world's best neighbors and these people would still want them dead and their country erased. It doesn't have all that much to do with geopolitics at all.

Small potatoes? Hmmm.

I think its highly reductive to suggest that it doesn't have anything to do with geopolitics. It condenses the whole idea into too simpler a thing, i.e. arab racism.

Ahhhhhh... Now we can see what the clear intent of this thread is... The great invisible ghost known as "Arab racism."

well, if you actually had a point to make you should create a thread to share with us the dangers of racism. You're silly!

Perhaps you and Janet Napolitano can lecture us on racism, neat!

*see also- Sasquach, Loch Ness Monster, Easter Bunny & Mr Clean.




JK, I drop from the same cloth & have also spent time on the soil, I simply agree more with your family. Again, Mossad... As mentioned before, is it perfect? No. Errors have been made, indeed. But wholesale condemnation with an eye of antisemitism will never get my support. The purpose of Mossad is legitimate & correct. And correct me if I'm wrong but, the purpose of Mossad is going to be more important in the near future too.

I'm on my iPhone (and dark) so I apologize in advance if spelling / grammar take the backseat.

I don't even know what to say about today.

But then Israel didn't care when London and Canberra expelled Israeli diplomats after British and Australian passports were forged and then provided to the assassins of Hamas commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. It didn't care when it announced new Jewish settlements on occupied land in East Jerusalem while Joe Biden, the Vice-President of its erstwhile ally, the United States, was in town. Why should Israel care now?

The level of hubris that Israel has shown over the past six months has been truly staggering.

Fuck Israel. Forever.

They're the spoiled little kid who does whatever they want because their big brother will always beat up anyone who gives them so much as a dirty look.