Facts About the Beirut Explosion

Video Of The Week-UNRWA; Incitement at its Best - https://tinyurl.com/y26eqtq9

Report from - Shurat HaDin - Israel Law Center

As the Lebanese people struggle to recover from the catastrophic deaths and destruction wrought by the Beirut explosion, more questions than answers continue to arise. The official story, that in 2013, Lebanese port officials impounded a Moldovan flagged ship bound for Mozambique, laden with explosive chemicals, does not address other facts which have emerged and must be investigated:

1.         Sections of the Beirut port are under the control of the Hezbollah terrorist organization. Israeli officials have long complained that the Beirut port, “the Hezbollah Port” was being utilized by the terrorists to smuggle contraband and weapons into Lebanon. As UN Ambassador Danny Danon recently stated: “Israel discovered that Iran and its Quds Force have been exploiting civilian maritime channels, and specifically the Port of Beirut.”

2.         Hezbollah has a long history of illegally acquiring and stockpiling ammonium nitrate in civilian areas. In 2015, Britain’s M15 and Metro Police carried out a raid on a secret Hezbollah warehouse in London that contained 3 tons of ammonium nitrate. The British government shamefully covered-up the raid in order not to damage relations with Iran shortly after signing the dangerous Nuclear Deal. It is believed Hezbollah was planning on using the chemicals for an attack in the UK. Click here

3.         The same year, police in Cyprus discovered a Hezbollah warehouse storing 8.3 tons of ammonium nitrate. A Hezbollah operative was arrested and charged with planning a terror attack. “A state prosecutor said Lebanese-Canadian Hussein Bassam Abdallah admitted that Hezbollah aimed to mount terrorist attacks against Israeli interests in Cyprus using the ammonium nitrate that he had been ordered to guard at the Larnaca home of another official of the Iranian-backed group.” Click here

4.         Israeli intelligence gave German police information, earlier this year, of the location of a Hezbollah stockpile of ammonium nitrate in southern Germany. The fact that the Iranian terror group was warehousing the explosives on German soil helped to push Berlin to outlaw all wings of the Hezbollah organization.  “Mossad reportedly gave Germany information about warehouses in the south of the country where Hezbollah stashed hundreds of kilograms of ammonium nitrate, a material used to make explosives.” Click here

5.         Hezbollah has a long history and deliberate strategy of stockpiling rockets, weapons and explosives in civilian areas. Hezbollah intentionally utilizes civilian neighborhoods including the basements of schools, mosques, residential buildings and hospitals as missile depots. The terrorists understand that the Israeli air force would be hindered in responding to rockets launched from civilian centers during the next war with Lebanon. And if Israel does attack the launchers and kills civilians, Hezbollah is counting on the UN, the Europeans and the ICC to immediately accuse Israel of war crimes. Hezbollah calls it this “Human Shield” program. Click here

6.         In 2016, Hezbollah’s chief terrorist Hassan Nasrallah had threatened to fire rockets at an ammonia storage facility in Haifa. He vowed that the explosion would be like a nuclear bomb striking Israel. He repeated this threat on several occasions causing Israeli officials to remove the storage tanks. “Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah threatened in the past to destroy Israel by causing a massive explosion in the port of Haifa using ammonia tanks that he said would be like a “nuclear” explosion. In addition Hezbollah allegedly sought to acquire ammonium nitrate via Syria since 2009 and tried to infiltrate the agriculture ministry in Lebanon to do so, according to leaked diplomatic cables.” Click here

7.         On Valentine’s Day in 2005, a team of Hezbollah terrorists murdered then Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri with a powerful bomb in Beirut. 21 people were killed in the massive explosion. Hariri was a strong opponent of the Hezbollah group and the regime of  Syrian leader Bashar al-Assad that was attempting to control Lebanon. Four Hezbollah assassins are being tried in absentia by a UN court for the murder. Ironically, after 15 years of stalling, the UN’s Special Tribunal for Lebanon, hearing the Hariri case will deliver its decision on Friday. It’s believed the Special Tribunal will declare Hezbollah as responsible for the bombing attack. Click here

Hezbollah’s long involvement in attempting to procure and stockpile ammonium nitrate perpetuates the growing suspicions that the Iranian terrorist organization, which rules Lebanon, was directly involved in the warehousing of the chemicals at the Beirut port. When the Lebanese population will finish dealing with the devastation and mourning its dead and wounded the finger-pointing at Hezbollah’s role in the tragedy will begin in earnest. The Special Tribunal for Lebanon whose verdict in the Hariri assassination trial will further emphasize Hezbollah’s guilt. Hezbollah and its Iranian masters, the key source of Middle East instability, must be driven out of Lebanon.

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The Accidental Zionist

Video of the week -  Africa: Through the Eyes of an Israeli 8 year old http://tinyurl.com/y7nffp4m

by Gary C. Gambill

The Jerusalem Post http://tinyurl.com/y7jsxw3m

4-9-2017

I was staunchly pro-Palestinian when I arrived at Georgetown University to begin studying for an MA in Arab Studies in the fall of 1995, or at least I thought so.

I had read Thomas Friedman's From Beirut to Jerusalem in college a few years earlier and accepted the basic conclusion that Israel's unwillingness to compromise had become the primary obstacle to Middle East peace.

If any place might have been expected to shepherd this eager young mind into accepting "progressive" orthodoxy on Israel, it would have been Georgetown's Center for Contemporary Arab Studies (CCAS).

There I received a solid grounding in post-colonial theory, revisionist historiography of Israel, and so forth.

Radical though their views may have been, I don't recall many CCAS faculty caring much what I thought of the Arab-Israeli conflict, and few were involved in the kind of campus activism that is de rigueur among academics today. The roster of guest lecturers hosted at CCAS's spacious, elegantly appointed boardroom was another story, however, and notices for anti-Israel events throughout the Washington, DC, area were routinely advertised on the center's bulletin board. Going to them was the cool thing to do, and I attended more than I care to admit.

However, while I remained sympathetic to the Palestinian experience, I found interacting with other sympathizers increasingly intolerable. My immersion into the anti-Israeli movement brought me face to face with peer antisemitism for the first time, primarily among European and American students who shared much the same liberal outlook as myself.

Oddly enough, I don't recall any disparaging talk about Jews (albeit plenty about Israel) from Arab students at Georgetown, some of whom went out of their way to befriend Jewish students and faculty. It was Western students who said the darndest things.

The final straw came when I arrived with friends at an Israeli embassy protest during the September 1996 Western Wall Tunnel riots, when organizers led the crowd in chanting "Bibi, Hitler, just the same / Only difference is the name." I left in disgust, then sent an email to CCAS students and faculty inviting anyone who felt Hitler was no worse than then (and current) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to join me on a visit to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum on the other side of town. There were no takers, though several students – including two who had enthusiastically participated in the rally – privately applauded the letter.

Truth be told, though, the biggest problem with the pro-Palestinian movement wasn't so much the antisemitism as it was the varying degrees of willful blindness displayed by its foremost advocates both to the suffering of other ethno-sectarian groups in the region (particularly Kurds and Christians) and to Palestinian suffering at the hands of villains other than Israel, particularly those seen as leading the fight against the Jewish state. There was more than antisemitism at work here.

This blindness owed much to the fact that CCAS and other Middle East studies departments were becoming increasingly inundated with lavish grants from Arab governments.

Having fed their own citizens a steady diet of propaganda blaming all the region's ills on Israel, Mideast autocrats now promoted this narrative abroad very effectively.

This was painfully evident when Lebanese human rights attorney Muhammad Mugraby traveled to the United States in November 1997 for a short lecture tour at the invitation of Human Rights Watch. As it often does when hosting guests from the Middle East, HRW asked if CCAS would be interested in hearing Mugraby speak.

Yes, the answer came back from a CCAS administrator failing to see why a Muslim discussing Lebanon in the wake of Israel's devastating Grapes of Wrath campaign the year before would be a problem, so Mugraby was scheduled to speak at the center.

That was, until the day of the talk, when (I'm guessing) CCAS faculty learned that Mugraby was speaking about the abduction and incommunicado detention of Lebanese and Palestinians by Syrian forces then occupying all but a sliver of Lebanon (with the blessing of most Arab and Western governments). The location was abruptly changed from the CCAS boardroom to on ordinary classroom outside the center. No faculty were in attendance.

At that time, I was doing freelance web development work (a little html knowledge went a long way back then) for, among others, an NGO stridently critical of Israeli policy vis-à-vis the Palestinians, and got to know its Jewish-American director.

When I mentioned the Mugraby story, he confided in me that a longtime Palestinian friend of his had been imprisoned incommunicado for many years in Hafez Assad's Syria, which then held far more Palestinians in its prisons than Israel, and under far worse conditions.

Then why focus on Israel, I asked. "I can't do anything for him," he explained.

Alongside the antisemitism and the money, this idea of Israel as the low-hanging fruit for do-gooders wanting to improve the Middle East was the third foundation stone in what became a vast conspiracy of silence about how the region works during the 1990s.

The well-intentioned flocked in droves to the belief that Israeli-Palestinian peace was achievable provided Israel made the requisite concessions, and that this would liberate the Arab-Islamic world from a host of other problems allegedly arising from it: bloated military budgets, intolerance of dissent, Islamic extremism, you name it.

Why tackle each of these problems head on when they can be alleviated all at once when Israel is brought to heel? Twenty years later, the Middle East is suffering the consequences of this conspiracy of silence.

I don't have a particularly rose-colored view of Israel's history (or that of any other nation-state, including my own), nor do I put much stock in the religio-cultural attachments that make many Israelis resistant to sweeping concessions.

I just don't buy into the "theory of everything" where Israel is concerned. The particulars of when and how Israelis and Palestinians work out their differences don't matter that much, and insofar as they do Netanyahu is among the least of the complications getting there.

That makes me a hardline Zionist, liberal friends tell me.

All right, I guess.