Israel: Daily Alert

Dennis Ross: Saudi King Vowed to Obtain Nuclear Bomb after Iran

dailyalert — Wed, 30 May 2012 17:40:57 +0000

Former senior U.S. diplomat Dennis Ross confirmed Tuesday that Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah has explicitly warned the U.S. that if Iran obtains nuclear weapons, Saudi Arabia will do so as well. “If they get nuclear weapons, we will get nuclear weapons,” Abdullah told Ross in April 2009. Ross said he responded to the king’s assertion with a lengthy appeal against nuclear proliferation, but after hearing him out, the king responded by repeating the same line.
In February, the London Times quoted a “senior Saudi official” as saying that Riyadh would launch a “twin-track nuclear weapons program” should Tehran realize its ambition of obtaining a nuclear weapon. The Saudi threat is one of the prime factors motivating Washington’s campaign to stop Tehran’s nuclear program.
Ross said that while it would be “unrealistic” to expect serious progress in the nuclear talks with Iran after only two rounds, the U.S. should set a deadline for the conclusion of diplomatic contacts – and make Tehran aware of it. (Chemi Shalev – Ha’aretz)

Tagged: Dennis Ross, Nuclear Bomb, Saudi King

Iran’s Bid for Hegemony

dailyalert — Wed, 30 May 2012 17:15:19 +0000

Quite simply, the Iranian nuclear program is proceeding as the leadership in Tehran wishes. It is based on the dream of reviving the Persian Empire and reinstating its control over the region. This agenda is based on territorial/confessional [Shiite] expansionism, digging up the past from its grave in the service of this expansionist policy.
The Iranian project in the region is no longer a secret. Even if it assumes different forms and adopts various guises, such as “backing the resistance against Israel,” it ultimately aims at ensuring Tehran’s control over the so-called “Shiite Crescent.” This is the prelude to taking over the rest of the region – something that the region’s states and nations should be wary of. (Editorial – Al-Watan-Saudi Arabia, Middle East Mirror, 29 May12)

Tagged: Hegemony, iran

Houla Massacre: U.S. Accuses Iran of “Bragging” about its Military Aid to Syria

dailyalert — Wed, 30 May 2012 16:40:04 +0000

The U.S. has accused Iran of “aiding and abetting” the massacre of women and children in Houla by providing support for the Syrian militia accused of carrying out the slaughter. Victoria Nuland, the State Department spokeswoman, said that Iran’s hand is clearly visible in the killing of more than 100 people, including scores of young children, by the Syrian Shabiha militia group, which closely resembles an Iranian militia, the Basij.
“The Iranians have clearly supplied support and training and advice to the Syrian army, but this Shabiha thug force mirrors the same force that the Iranians use. The Basij and the Shabiha are the same type of thing and clearly reflect the tactics and the techniques that the Iranians use for their own suppression of civil rights,” she said. (Chris McGreal – Guardian-UK)

Tagged: Houla Massacre, iran, U.S.

Time for More Pressure on Syria

dailyalert — Wed, 30 May 2012 16:20:28 +0000

There are two possible outcomes in Syria’s civil war: Assad wins, by killing enough people to crush the rebellion, in which case Iran and Syria (and the regime’s armorers in Russia) have a great victory. From this, dictators everywhere would learn that Ben Ali and Mubarak had it all wrong and simply failed to kill enough protesters. Or, Assad loses, and with him Iran, Hizbullah, and Russia lose.
This latter result does not require American troops or planes, but does require American leadership. American leadership means the coordinated supply of arms, ammunition, training, and non-lethal goods like radios and uniforms to the opposition forces. World opinion won’t scare Assad any more than Kofi Annan does. It is time to end the charades and give the concrete help that will bring down this murderous anti-American regime. (Elliott Abrams – National Review)

Tagged: More Pressure, Syria

What Bashar Assad Knows

dailyalert — Wed, 30 May 2012 15:56:14 +0000

It is now more than a year since Assad began using his security forces in a full-scale assault against the people of the country he treats as family property. As the tragedy escalates for the Syrian people, a new reality of power is emerging.
What everybody else knows and does not want to admit is that though we may talk somewhat tough, there is nothing at all that we are going to do. The Western allies’ forces are still recovering from the engagement in Libya – and we never want to have to do anything like that again.
What we are now see unfolding around Syria is the result of a gap between what our politicians pretend to be able to do and what they are actually able to do, in an era in which everything, from financial resources to political will, is in short supply.
Iran is now boasting of sending arms and troops to Syria. And nobody is going to do anything to stop them.
Some years ago, the tide of American leadership started to go out. That fact may be felt in America last, but it is being felt in Syria first.
The writer is associate director of the Henry Jackson Society in London. (Douglas Murray – Wall Street Journal Europe)

Tagged: bashar assad

Syria’s Srebrenica: The UN Again Plays Accomplice to a Massacre

dailyalert — Tue, 29 May 2012 21:15:35 +0000

The UN Security Council on Sunday condemned Syria’s government for the killing of 108 people, mostly women and children, in Houla on Friday. But the condemnation was incomplete: It should have included the Security Council itself for providing the diplomatic cover that has let the Assad government continue its killing.
In April the UN turned to aiding and abetting the regime with its mission to send Kofi Annan to Damascus as a special “peace” envoy. Annan, who as a former UN Secretary-General is perfectly trained for the role of accommodating dictators, brokered a cease-fire that he said Syria’s Bashar Assad promised to obey. The UN is every bit as complicit in the Houla murders as it was when Dutch peacekeepers stood by and did nothing as the Serbs massacred thousands of Bosnians in Srebrenica in 1995. (Editorial – Wall Street Journal)

Tagged: Accomplice to a Massacre, UN

Al-Qaeda and the Jihadists Join the Battle Against the Syrian Regime

dailyalert — Tue, 29 May 2012 20:50:32 +0000

The battle over Syria has descended into sectarian strife led by extreme Salafists and other Islamic splinter organizations in a carefully orchestrated uprising coordinated and fueled by al-Qaeda operatives. The Free Syrian Army (FSA) is no longer the sole force in the fight against Assad. As in Egypt, in Syria the Muslim Brothers have succeeded in appropriating (some would call it hijacking) the revolt and ultimately becoming its backbone. Moreover, Muslim fighters from around the globe are coming to join the ranks in the battle against Assad. Yet the majority of Syrians do not identify with these radicals. (Jacques Neriah – Institute for Contemporary Affairs-Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs)

Tagged: al-qaeda, jihadists, Syrian Regime

Israeli Analyst: The Iranians Are Laughing at the West

dailyalert — Tue, 29 May 2012 20:25:11 +0000

Prior to the talks on Tehran’s nuclear program, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu expressed skepticism that Iran would be willing to give up its nuclear program. Israel has in the past accused Iran of exploiting the negotiations to buy time to continue advancing its nuclear program. Prof. Ze’ev Maghen, Chair of the Department of Middle Eastern History at Bar-Ilan University, said the international community “continue to believe that they can talk the Iranians down, or that they can bribe them down, or that they can threaten them down – but they can’t do any of those things.”
“Looking at the history of these negotiations that goes back to the 1990s, it has been one long laughingstock. Basically, the ones who are laughing are the Iranians,” Maghen said. He pointed out that, prior to every meeting, Iran’s representatives state that, while they will be happy to meet with the international representatives, they have no intention of ending the enrichment of uranium. (Xinhua-China)

Tagged: Analyst, iran, israel

On Iran, We’ll Probably Get Fooled Again

dailyalert — Tue, 29 May 2012 20:07:49 +0000

Last week, the U.S. and its partners arrived in Baghdad for another round of talks with Tehran, confident they were at last about to turn the diplomatic corner.
But this time, Iran did more than just reject demands to shut down its underground enrichment facility at Fordo and ship its near-bomb-grade uranium abroad. It also announced it would do precisely the opposite: install more centrifuges at Fordo, increase the rate of enrichment, and forbid any UN inspections of suspected military sites.
The West’s response? It has agreed to another round of talks next month in Moscow, thereby giving the Iranians the one thing they wanted from the negotiations, which is time.
You can root around Google and find similar sequences of headlines from other years: high hopes for a negotiated breakthrough, followed by Iran’s rejection of a deal, followed by the agreement to meet again, followed by – you get the point. How many times can the West allow itself to be fleeced in this bazaar?
The larger question is why the U.S. continues to believe that there’s a grand bargain to be struck with the mullahs, and that it lies just inches out of reach.
As New York Times reporter John Kifner noted in 1981 about the U.S. Embassy seizure in Tehran: The mullahs believe they have a cause worth fighting for. They take our concessions as evidence of weakness, and our pragmatism as proof of corruption. They’re not entirely mistaken.
(Bret Stephens – Wall Street Journal)

Tagged: iran

Meet “Flame,” The Massive Spy Malware Infiltrating Iranian Computers

dailyalert — Mon, 28 May 2012 21:40:13 +0000

A highly sophisticated piece of malware has been newly found infecting systems in Iran and elsewhere and is believed to be part of a well-coordinated, ongoing, state-run cyberespionage operation.
Dubbed “Flame” by Russia-based anti-virus firm Kaspersky Lab, the malicious code is designed primarily to spy on the users of infected computers and steal data from them.
“It’s quite interesting that it stayed undetected for at least two years,” said Alexander Gostev, chief security expert at Kaspersky Lab.
Kaspersky discovered the malware about two weeks ago after looking into reports in April that computers belonging to the Iranian Oil Ministry and the Iranian National Oil Company had been hit with malware that was stealing and deleting information from the systems.
Among Flame’s many modules is one that turns on the internal microphone of an infected machine to secretly record conversations that occur either over Skype or in the computer’s near vicinity; a module that turns Bluetooth-enabled computers into a Bluetooth beacon, which scans for other Bluetooth-enabled devices in the vicinity to siphon names and phone numbers from their contacts folder; and a module that grabs and stores frequent screenshots of activity on the machine, such as instant-messaging and email communications, and sends them via a covert SSL channel to the attackers’ command-and-control servers. (Kim Zetter – Wired)

Tagged: Flame, iran, Malware