Is Commander-in-Chief Obama aware that the US navy is intercepting arms shipments from Iran to Hamas? If he is, does it mean that he recognizes Hamas as Iran’s proxy,  wants to thwart the Iranians, and prevent the re-arming of Gaza? If not, will he stop the navy doing this useful task when it comes to his attention? 

US Coast Guard boarding team

DEBKAfile’s military sources report that a US Navy Coast Guard team this week boarded an Iranian arms ship flying a Cypriot flag in the Red Sea and found weapons in its hold.

This was the first time an America warship had ever intercepted an Iranian vessel in international water. The incident activated the Memo of Understanding the former US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice signed with Israeli foreign minister Tzipi Livni a week ago on actions to halt the flow of Iranian arms to Hamas as part of the Gaza ceasefire.

The Iranian ship’s captain showed the US boarding team documents recording the Syrian port of Latakia as its cargo’s destination. DEBKAfile reports that both US and Israeli intelligence are certain the arms were bound for Hamas. But according to international law, the US Navy’s Combined Task Force (CTF) 151, set up last week to combat piracy, was not authorized to confiscate the cargo or stop the ship because no enforcement mechanism was yet in place.

After a few hours, therefore, the US force released the Iranian vessel and two warships escorted it out of Red Sea waters. The ship and its escort are due to enter the Suez Canal heading north Saturday night, Jan. 23, after being prevented from unloading its arms freight on the coast of Sinai or Gaza.

Tehran has so far not reacted to the incident.

DEBKAfile revealed last week that the new US task force policing the waters of the Gulf of Aden, Arabian Sea, Indian Ocean and Red Sea, under the command of Rear Adm. Terry McKnight, had been additionally assigned with intercepting Iranian ships smuggling arms for Hamas, often in conjunction with Somali pirates and Sinai Bedouin militias.

Massed on the lead ship San Antonio is a helicopter detachment, a "surgical team" for dealing with small speedboats trying to hem the ship in and 14 Navy VBSS members, including two Navy boarding officers. The Coast Guard detachment is made up of eight members, all of them qualified as boarding officers.

From Zomblog:

On January 10, the war between Israel and Hamas became a global conflict. No longer confined to the Gaza Strip, the fighting spread to cities around the world: what were billed as “anti-war” demonstrations from Los Angeles to Copenhagen and beyond were in fact overtly pro-Hamas demonstrations, and on Saturday, January 10 there was an unprecedented eruption of violence and extremism in dozens of European and American cities, surpassing anything seen at anti-war rallies in recent years:

¤ In London, protesters physically attacked police officers with unrestrained abandon and no fear of arrest;
¤ In Copenhagen, Hamas supporters screamed in public that they want to kill all Jews;
¤ In Calgary, neo-Nazis marched alongside leftists and Muslim extremists, in a grand coalition of anti-Semites;
¤ In Los Angeles, a car full of Israel-supporters barely escaped serious harm when an enraged mob tried to attack them;
¤ In Duisberg (Germany), police broke into a private home and tore down a flag displaying a Star of David, to appease stone-throwing protesters;
¤ In Belfast, an Israel-owned mall kiosk was surrounded and menacingly harrassed;
…to name just a few, as you will see in the reports listed below.

One wonders: Why January 10? Was the aggression somehow coordinated among the various far-left and Islamic groups which organized the protests in each city — an attempt to “Globalize the Intifada“? Or did the simultaneous outbreak of violence and anger in several places occur naturally? We may never know. But for some reason, this particular moment in the seemingly endless battle between Israel and its neighbors has tipped the scales, and the fighting now happens not just in Gaza, but wherever in the world Hamas supporters come face to face with anyone they deem an opponent (whether those be Israel supporters or police officers). The Hamas supporters will claim that the reason for the fresh anger now is that Israel has gone too far this time, allowing too many civilian casualties and unleashing a disproportionately large response. But what seems disproportionate this time around is not the nature of the fighting in Gaza but the extent to which the media buys into the Hamas narrative, and the unchallenged propaganda coming out of the war zone.

In any case, this post is meant to be a comprehensive roundup of the many anti-Israel protests that happened on January 10, 2009. And what makes these reports especially noteworthy is that they were almost all produced by citizen journalists: In just about every city, the mainstream media failed to cover the incidents thoroughly or honestly: As protesters waved Hamas flags and screamed “Long Live Hitler,” bloggers stepped in to do the job the media wouldn’t do.

Below is a list of the outbreaks of protest violence and extremism in each location: A few videos and photos are posted here, but most of the documentation is to be found in the various links provided…

Read the rest here.

 From American Thinker:

In fact, it is the media themselves who are criminally complicit in the internment of Gaza’s civilians in the line of fire. They could stop the terrorists simply by headlining Hamas’ responsibility for the plight of the Arabs of Gaza, over and over again. That’s the real story — if only they could headline the facts right in front of their eyes.  But they don’t.

That shows us the real values of CNN and BBC; morally they are no better than the terrorists. The media are essential to the Kabuki play of terror, response, and renewed terror. They are constantly fanning the flames.

So when the media and the Left predictably demand Israeli appeasement of Hamas, let’s just ask them: where is your compassion for the Arab victims of a jihadist internment camp called Gaza? How much longer do you want civilians to be turned into the bloody victims of the terrorist publicity machine?

The next time you turn on CNN, remember that you are looking at smiling faces that knowingly collude in the deaths of civilians, both Jews and Arabs. Without the leftist media there is no payoff for terrorists. Shut off the oxygen of publicity and Hamas shrivels to a powerless gang of thugs.

The media-terrorist collusion is completely symbiotic – they are both essential for the drama to work. Separate the terrorists from the media, and you have heat without oxygen – no explosion.

The simple fact is that we are seeing repeated crimes against humanity, an endless collusion between the terror masters and the dominant media, resulting in a reign of terror that blights the lives of millions of people and kills unforgiveable numbers, both in Israel and its neighbors.

 Joe the Plumber reports from Israel on PJTV.

In our view, this modest, intelligent, independent, sensible, honest man – brave too, making sure others get into a rocket-shelter before himself, as the video shows – embodies much that is good about America. 

We’d also like to think of him as typical of Americans, but after the recent election we know that cannot, unfortunately, be the case.

 Hugh Hewitt interviews Michael Oren in Townhall – an extract: 

Hewitt: In response to all of these arguments that Israel is using disproportionate force, since it’s going to be condemned for it anyway, you wrote, why shouldn’t Israel smash Hamas promptly and massively, and reap the benefits in terms of self-respect, deterrence, and a respite for its embattled citizens? Is there a calculation, is Israel holding back right now?  Oren: Well, Israel is always holding back. We have a very, very large army. We have many hundreds, perhaps even thousands of tanks and cannons and aircraft, and we’re using only a small fraction of that tonight in Gaza. We often get accused of using disproportionate force here, and that D-word appeared on the first day of the war. Force is only disproportionate if the army had achieved its goals and was still bombing Gaza. We haven’t achieved our goals yet. We have to use the requisite amount of force to try to end the bombing of our cities. And Israel also has invested very, very heavily in civil defense. It’s one of the reasons our casualties are so low. The Palestinians have not invested a dime in civil defense. They have no bomb shelters. They have no air raid sirens. And Israel probably shouldn’t be penalized for having invested so heavily in the safety of its citizens. So there’s that feeling here. Hewitt: There’s an argument made … that, look at the slaughter—you’ve got of hundreds of Palestinians versus a handful of Israelis killed. It’s got to be disproportionate. That’s from his articles. What do you respond to that?  Oren: My response is if you used that argument in World War II, America would have lost it. America had to use a massive amount of force to win the war. If it hadn’t used that force, it wouldn’t have won the war—and it was overwhelming force. There was no complaint about it, I think, among the American people at the time. The same thing is true here. We will use the amount of force that is necessary to stop rocket fire on our civilians….

1

 ‘Green Helmet Guy’ is still – or yet again – lugging about that same little corpse he carried for ‘fauxtographs’ after the Israeli raid on Qana in July, 2006. 

The media, such as Reuters, who love the cold-blooded mass-murderers of Hamas – including the terrorists’ main TV propaganda outlet, the BBC – are showing those old pictures, claiming this time that the poor kid was killed in the present IDF ground assault on Gaza. 

Read the full report here.

 Reuters reports:

By day, Awad al-Qiq was a respected science teacher and headmaster at a United Nations school in the Gaza Strip. By night, Palestinian militants say, he built rockets for Islamic Jihad.

The Israeli air strike that killed the 33-year-old last week also laid bare his apparent double life and embarrassed a U.N. agency which has long had to rebuff Israeli accusations that it has aided and abetted guerrillas fighting the Jewish state.

In interviews with Reuters, students and colleagues, as well as U.N. officials, denied any knowledge of Qiq’s work with explosives. And his family denied he had any militant links at all, despite a profusion of Islamic Jihad posters at his home.

But militant leaders allied to the enclave’s ruling Hamas group hailed him as a martyr who led Islamic Jihad’s "engineering unit" – its bomb makers. They fired a salvo of improvised rockets into Israel in response to his death.

Qiq’s body was wrapped in an Islamic Jihad flag at his funeral, pictorial posters in his honour still bedeck his family home this week, and a handwritten notice posted on the metal gate at the entrance to the school declared that Qiq, "the chief leader of the engineering unit", would now find "paradise".

That poster was removed soon after Reuters visited the Rafah Prep Boys School, run by the U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian refugees. Staff there said on Monday that UNRWA officials had told them not to discuss Qiq’s activities.

No one from the United Nations attended the funeral or has paid their respects to the family, relatives said, adding that Qiq’s widow and five children had heard nothing about a pension.

Spokesman Christopher Gunness said UNRWA, which spelled its teacher’s surname al-Geeg, was looking into the matter.

"We have a zero-tolerance policy towards politics and militant activities in our schools. Obviously, we are not the thought police and we cannot police people’s minds," he said.

To my certain personal knowledge it is a blatant lie that UNWRA does not ‘tolerate’ political activity in its schools. The last time I entered an UNRWA school evidence of its support for anti-Israel activity could not have been more evident, in text books, exercise books, posters, and other instruction materials. 

The Arabs have deliberately kept generations of their fellow Arabs, the ‘Palestinians’, in a condition of dependency, without ‘human rights’  or civil rights as a reproach to the conscience of Israelis and Westerners – having no conscience whatsoever themselves. And the United Nations has assisted them in this, with the creation and perpetuation of UNRWA, and so have the Western powers. Of course the Gazans  could have done more for themselves. When they were left functioning greenhouses worth billions of dollars by the departing Israelis, they preferred to smash them rather than use them. And it is not to be forgotten that they voted for Hamas to govern them. 

 J.G.Thayer writes on Commentary’s ‘contentions’ website:

As Israel continues its systemic dismantling of Hamas’s implements of terror (missiles, rockets, and Hamas operatives), we are treated once again to the standard conventional wisdom: this will drive Hamas to new heights of fury, Israel is doing precisely what Hamas wants, and this will merely inflame the Arab street.

Let’s take a look at those charges.

1) This will drive Hamas to new heights of fury. Is this even possible? Hamas  is an avowed terrorist organization that has used suicide bombers, rockets, mortars, snipers, kidnapping, and torture. It has frequently turned those tactics against fellow Palestinians as well as against Israel. Can they get much more furious?

2) Israel is doing precisely what Hamas wants them to do. No, folks, that’s called “spin.”  Hamas is NOT going to come out and say “Israel is succesfully visiting upon us overwhelming punishment, achieving a good number of its aims and taking out our important leaders.” Just before the attacks, Hamas was crowing about Israel’s ineffectiveness and how they had paralyzed the Jewish state with their rocket attacks.

Quite frankly, Hamas’s stated opinion of Israel’s response is utterly irrelevant. The only thing that matters is how things play out in the aftermath. If Hamas is weakened to the point where further attacks are lessened or eliminated, and Hamas’s grip on power is eased or destroyed, then the operation will be a success for Israel. That is not how it will be spun, of course, but that’s the objective reality.

3)  This will merely inflame the Arab street. It very well might., but one has to ask, “so what?”

“Inflamed” is a good description of the Arab street as is. They were “inflamed” over the Mohammed cartoons, they were “inflamed” over the bogus “Koran in a toilet” story Newsweekpeddled, they were “inflamed” over Theo Van Gogh’s film, they were “inflamed” over the U.S. invasion of Iraq, they were “inflamed” by a whole host of  things. One time I distinctly remember the Arab street being happy instead of “inflamed” was on 9/11, when we saw images of people rejoicing and literally dancing in the streets.  So it seems that “inflaming the Arab street” might be a good indicator that you’re doing something right.

So far Israel has seriously degraded Hamas’s weapons, leadership, and infrastructure and trisected the Gaza Strip in its drive to cripple the terrorist group. Hamas has lost hundreds of fighters and tremendous stockpiles of weapons. Its ability to wage war against Israel is seriously impaired. That is the only result Israel need note.

 From Power Line:

As Yaacov Lozowick notes, the IDF has called the neighbors of targeted sites to give them a ten-minute warning. Lozowick comments:

Alongside the thousands of civilians whose lives have been spared there are hundreds, at least, of armed Hamas fighters, the people who put the explosives in the cellars in the first place: by warning their neighbors, Israel has warned them, too, thus giving them the chance to escape and fight another day: say, tonight, or tomorrow, when they’ll still be alive to fight the IDF troops, instead of lying dead under the rubble, as would have been possible had we hit their explosive stashes without prior warning, as any normal army wold have done.

But what about the IDF system which provides for the warnings? As a manager of complex IT systems, Lozowick reconstructs the efforts that have gone into its creation:

First, Israel clearly has created a sophisticated GIS (geographic information system). A system that records tens of thousands of buildings, their location, and their distance from each other. Then there’s a database with the names of the tens of thousands of families who live in the buildings, and the phone number of each family. The system has the ability to identify all the families and phone numbers that could be affected by an attack on any given building. Finally, given the numbers involved, there must be a system that automatically makes concurrent phone calls to dozens of families, since everybody has to have the same ten-minute warning.

Ah, and someone put tens of thousands of piece of information into that database.

Such a system costs real money, takes time to set up, and since it is obviously operating close to flawlessly, it was tested, fiddled with, tested, fiddled with, and tested again. The purpose, I remind you, is to save the lives of thousands of Palestinians who happen to have murderous neighbors.

Lozowick concludes that the IDF is the most moral army in the world: "This drives some people bonkers, and they often go ballistic. Alas for them, and fortunately for many Palestinians, it happens to be the simple truth."

The care taken by the IDF to avoid civilian casualties complicates the achievements of its military objectives and increases the hazards to its soldiers, and it doesn’t do much to win Israel friends outside the United States. It is nevertheless an essential component of Israel’s strategy in dealing with its terrorist enemies.

From the Jerusalem Post:

"Hundreds of terrorists have been killed and weapons and ammunition stocks have been destroyed, along with tunnels and rocket manufacturing facilities," Military Intelligence Chief Maj.-Gen. Amos Yadlin told the cabinet.

"The Hamas government isn’t functioning, and the group’s leaders aren’t serving the citizens but themselves alone. There is much criticism of Hamas amongst Palestinians for bringing on this situation," Yadlin said.

The MI chief also noted that throughout the operation, Hamas has continued to use citizens as human shields.

Yuval Diskin, head of the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency), assessed that Hamas leaders were now less determined to continue fighting, and that there were senior leaders among them who support moving towards a cease-fire.