If Khamenei could, he would inflict great harm on Israel,’ Obama/Did Quds chief breach travel ban by visiting Russi/Turkey bows to US pressure, expels top Hamas operative

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 If Khamenei could, he would inflict great harm on Israel,’ Obama 
By JPOST.COM STAFF/08/07/2015

In his latest attempt to sell the public on the merits of the Iran nuclear agreement, US President Barack Obama told an American news magazine earlier this week that he was not naive about the threats against Israel made by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Islamic Republic’s supreme leader. “His ideology is steeped with anti-Semitism, and if he could, without catastrophic costs, inflict great harm on Israel, I’m confident that he would,” Obama told journalist Robin Wright of The New Yorker. Nonetheless, the president said that the Iranian government’s behavior was not as extreme as its rhetoric suggests. “It is possible for leaders or regimes to be cruel, bigoted, twisted in their world views and still make rational calculations with respect to their limits and their self-preservation,” Obama told The New Yorker. “And what we’ve seen, at least since 1979, is Iran making constant, calculated decisions that allow it to preserve the regime, to expand their influence where they can, to be opportunistic, to create what they view as hedges against potential Israeli attack, in the form of Hezbollah and other proxies in the region.”
In the interview, Obama denied that the nuclear agreement negotiated by his administration with Iran is a radical shift in US policy toward the Islamic Republic. “This does not represent a strategic rapprochement between the United States and Iran,” the president said. “This is a hardheaded, clear-eyed, calculated decision to take—to seize our best opportunity to lock down the possibility of Iran getting a nuclear weapon.” “There is nothing in this deal that is dependent on a transformation of the character of the Iranian regime.”
When asked how Obama could stomach negotiating with a country that regularly adheres to the mantra of “Death to America,” he said: “It’s not appealing to deal with countries that express hatred towards us. It wasn’t easy to negotiate arms agreements with a near military peer [like the Soviet Union] that could blow up every American city.”“But, when it comes to arms-control agreements, or nonproliferation agreements of any magnitude, by definition you’re generally dealing with those folks. I don’t have to negotiate an arms agreement with Great Britain or with France.”Obama said that the idea of using military force against Iran is akin to “smacking around the little guy who mouths off to you in the schoolyard.”“Part of the underlying premise of why people don’t feel we should have to put up with that stuff is we’re bigger; if we launch a military strike, we can wipe them out,” the president said. “There is a little bit of that schoolyard attitude of, it’s one thing for a guy your own size to mouth off to you. But if there’s a little guy, you should just smack him around. And it’s probably bad advice in the schoolyard. It’s certainly not a good way to run a foreign policy.”

Did Quds chief breach travel ban by visiting Russia?
Staff writer, Al Arabiya News/Friday, 7 August 2015éQassem Soleimani, the little-seen head of Iran’s elite overseas arm of the Revolutionary Guards who is subject to a United Nations travel ban, has visited Russia, two U.S. security sources said on Friday. The White House said that although it could not confirm reports that Soleimani, who heads up the Quds force, had traveled to Russia, but that the reports were an indication of ongoing concerns with Iran’s behavior. Soleimani has been subject to an international travel ban and asset freeze by the U.N. Security Council since 2007. However, this is not the first time he has reportedly breached his ban. In December last year, the elusive top commander was spotted in Iraq, a U.N. panel said at the time. Fox News reported on Thursday that Soleimani had arrived in Moscow on July 24 and met President Vladimir Putin and Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu before departing three days later. A Kremlin spokesman denied any meeting between Soleimani and Putin had taken place, RIA news agency reported. One U.S. security source told Reuters the Fox report was true but it was unclear what was discussed at the meeting. A senior administration official in Washington said U.S. sanctions on Soleimani would remain in place. “We will maintain sanctions on the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, the Qods Force, its leadership – including Qassem Soleimani – and its entire network,” the official said. Two officials at the Russian Foreign Ministry said they could neither confirm nor deny a Soleimani visit to Moscow. The Russian defence ministry was not available for comment. Washington designated Soleimani’s Quds Force as a supporter of terrorism in 2007. The European Union did the same in 2011. Western governments and Israel accuse it of arming various militant groups in the Middle East. U.N. member states are required to deny entry to blacklisted individuals.(With Reuters)

Report: Turkey bows to US pressure, expels top Hamas operative
JPOST.COM STAFF/08/07/2015éThe Turkish government has bowed to American pressure and ordered a senior Hamas official whom Israel accuses of organizing terrorist attacks in the West Bank to leave the country, Channel 10 is reporting on Friday. Salah Aruri, a top Hamas operative who was released from an Israeli prison a few years ago, is in charge of rebuilding the Hamas infrastructure in the West Bank a year after Israeli security forces dismantled it prior to the war in Gaza. According to Channel 10, the Ankara government, which has been sympathetic to Islamist organizations like Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, agreed to Aruri’s ouster, which was one of the prerequisites for Turkey’s entry into the Western coalition against the Islamic State. In recent months, Israeli officials approached Turkey and, despite the bitter relations between the two countries, asked Ankara to crack down on Hamas operatives there. The London-based Arab-language daily Al-Quds Al-Arabi quoted Hamas officials as denying an earlier Israeli report indicating that Aruri was asked to leave Turkey. Aruri first came into the Israeli public’s consciousness last year when he admitted that Hamas’ armed wing, the Kassam Brigades, was behind the kidnapping and murder of Israeli teens Nafatli Fraenkel, Gil-Ad Shaer and Eyal Yifrah in the West Bank.
He made the comments during a conference of Islamic clerics in Turkey. He praised the “heroic action of the Kassam Brigades who kidnapped three settlers in Hebron.”