English LCCC Newsbulletin For
Lebanese, Lebanese Related, Global News & Editorials
For September 03/2022
Compiled & Prepared by: Elias Bejjani
#elias_bejjani_news
The Bulletin's Link on the lccc Site
http://eliasbejjaninews.com/aaaanewsfor2021/english.september03.22.htm
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Bible Quotations For today
If anyone comes to me, and doesn’t disregard† his own
father, mother, wife, children, brothers, and sisters, yes, and his own life
also, he can’t be my disciple
Luke 14/25-35/:"Now great multitudes were going with him. He turned and said to
them, “If anyone comes to me, and doesn’t disregard† his own father, mother,
wife, children, brothers, and sisters, yes, and his own life also, he can’t be
my disciple. Whoever doesn’t bear his own cross, and come after me, can’t be my
disciple. For which of you, desiring to build a tower, doesn’t first sit down
and count the cost, to see if he has enough to complete it? Or perhaps, when he
has laid a foundation, and is not able to finish, everyone who sees begins to
mock him, saying, ‘This man began to build, and wasn’t able to finish.’ Or what
king, as he goes to encounter another king in war, will not sit down first and
consider whether he is able with ten thousand to meet him who comes against him
with twenty thousand? Or else, while the other is yet a great way off, he sends
an envoy, and asks for conditions of peace. So therefore whoever of you who
doesn’t renounce all that he has, he can’t be my disciple. Salt is good, but if
the salt becomes flat and tasteless, with what do you season it? It is fit
neither for the soil nor for the manure pile. It is thrown out. He who has ears
to hear, let him hear.”
Titles For The Latest English LCCC Lebanese &
Lebanese Related News & Editorials published
on September 02-03/2022
Report: Hochstein seeking gas solution that gives impression Israel has
won
Lebanese currency crashes below 35,000 against dollar
Government deadlock: Latest developments
Qassem from Iran: Hezbollah helped change region's equations
UN appoints Imran Riza deputy special coordinator, resident coordinator for
Lebanon
Germany, Israel mark 50 years since Munich Olympics massacre
Assassinations in Beirut: Israel's response to 1972 Munich massacre
Web outages on cards as Lebanon telecom minister says talks still on to end
Ogero strike
IMF says 'key deficiencies' remain in Lebanon’s draft banking secrecy law
Forty years on, Hezbollah morphs from praised resistance to feared Iranian proxy
Will maritime-border settlement imply Lebanon’s indirect recognition of Israel?
Titles For The Latest English LCCC
Miscellaneous Reports And News published
on September 02-03/2022
Israeli airstrike halts Revolutionary Guard arms cargo to Syria
Iran sends nuclear talks response; US casts doubt on offer
US says Iran's nuclear deal response 'not constructive'
Iran navy says thwarted pirate attack on ship in Red Sea
Iran briefly seizes 2 US sea drones in Red Sea amid tensions
Russia's Gazprom shuts down gas to Europe indefinitely
Iraq: anti-Iran protesters take to the streets of Baghdad
Bloody test of wills between Sadr and pro-Iran Shia rivals moves south to Basra
Guterres nominates Senegalese diplomat as UN envoy to Libya, despite Dbeibah's
objections
Palestinian killed in West Bank after stabbing Israeli soldier
Extremist lawmaker surges ahead of elections in Israel
Argentina: Attempt to kill VP fails when handgun misfires
Question: “Did Jesus really exist?”/GotQuestions.org?/September 02/2022
Titles For The
Latest LCCC English analysis & editorials from miscellaneous sources published
on September 02-03/2022
U.S. says latest Iranian nuclear response is ‘not constructive’/Karen
DeYoung/The Washington Post/September 02/2022
The very real dangers of Biden’s pending Iran nuclear deal/Dr. Eric R.
Mandel/The Hill/September 02/2022
Why Did the FBI Raid Mar-a-Lago?/Lee Smith/The Tablet/September 02/2022
Syria is becoming the centre of an intensifying regional contest involving Iran/Hagai
M Segal/The National/September 02/2022
U.S. says latest Iranian nuclear response is ‘not constructive’/Karen DeYoung/The
Washington Post/September 02/2022
After the Baghdad Green Zone bloodshed/Ibrahim al-Zobeidi/The Arab
Weekly/September 02/2022
Iran is not the answer to Europe’s energy crisis/Luke Coffey/Arab News/September
02/2022
West should remind Iran of its vulnerabilities/Dr. Azeem Ibrahim/Arab
News/September 02/2022
The Latest English LCCC Lebanese &
Lebanese Related News & Editorials published
on September 02-03/2022
Report: Hochstein seeking gas solution that gives
impression Israel has won
Naharnet/September 02/2022
U.S. border demarcation mediator Amos Hochstein is studying with the French “a
solution format that would give the impression that Israel has won,” a Lebanese
media report said on Friday. Al-Akhbar newspaper added that such a solution
might come at the expense of the profits of the gas drilling companies, seeing
as “Lebanon will not accept to give up any part of the Qana field nor any
commercial or operational partnership at the level of the exploring and drilling
companies.”The daily added that Hochstein held a video meeting Thursday with the
Israeli negotiating team. He is also maintaining communication with Deputy
Speaker Elias Bou Saab seeing as he is a representative of President Michel Aoun
in this file. U.S. Ambassador to Lebanon Dorothy Shea is meanwhile communicating
with the advisers of the parliament speaker and the caretaker PM over the latest
developments.
Al-Akhbar added that U.S. President Joe Biden has called Israeli PM Yair Lapid
over the demarcation file to “send a message to Lebanon that Washington is
committed to exert strenuous efforts to finalize the agreement and that Biden is
personally interfering to help Hochstein complete his mission.”
Lebanese currency crashes below 35,000 against dollar
Naharnet/September 02/2022
The Lebanese pound hit a new low against the U.S. dollar on the black market
Friday, as it crashed below 35,000, reaching 35,500. For decades, the Lebanese
pound was pegged to the dollar at 1,500. A financial crisis widely blamed on
government corruption and mismanagement has caused the worst economic crisis in
Lebanon's history and the crash of its currency, which has lost around 90
percent of its black market value. The World Bank has branded the financial
crisis one of the worst since the 19th century while the United Nations now
considers four out of five Lebanese to be living under the poverty line.
Government deadlock: Latest developments
Naharnet/September 02/2022
President Michel Aoun and the Free Patriotic Movement's demands regarding the
new government are "heavy", sources said. The sources told al-Joumhouria
newspaper, in remarks published Friday, that Prime Minister-designate Najib
Mikati will not accept Aoun's demands, supported by what Speaker Nabih Berri
said on Wednesday, that "parliament is the only side entrusted with interpreting
the constitution.""The constitution's interpretations say that any government
can be in charge," the sources said, explaining that since Mikati has these
arguments, he will not give Aoun what he wants. Sources close to Baabda had
hinted to the daily that Aoun and Mikati had only discussed the line-up's form
and composition, and that the discussions did not evolve to the new ministers'
names. The sources said that Mikati had approved adding six ministers of sate to
the new government, and that Aoun justified this demand by the non-success of
the technocrat government in the past and the need to have ministers who
represent the political powers, especially in case of a Presidential vacuum.
"The government would then have the powers of the President, in this case
political representation becomes urgent and necessary," the sources said.
Media reports had previously said that the consultations between Aoun and Mikati
had made no progress at all in their last meeting on Wednesday.
Qassem from Iran: Hezbollah helped change region's equations
Naharnet/September 02/2022
Hezbollah deputy chief Sheikh Naim Qassem has announced from Tehran that
Hezbollah “has contributed to changing the equations of the region.” “The course
shifted from consolidating the usurper entity (Israel) to the course of
liberating Palestine, and from deep-rooting subordination to the West to
people’s independence, and from surrender to resistance and dignity,” Qassem
said at the Seventh Session of the General Assembly of AhlulBayt in the Iranian
capital. Qassem also stressed “the need for unity and cooperation of Muslims”
and “the role of the leadership of the Wali al-Faqih (Iran’s supreme guide Ali
Khamenei) as a compass for strengthening common denominators and drawing the
unified course.”
UN appoints Imran Riza deputy special coordinator, resident coordinator
for Lebanon
Naharnet/September 02/2022
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres has announced the appointment
of Imran Riza of Pakistan as his Deputy Special Coordinator and Resident
Coordinator for Lebanon. Riza will also serve as Humanitarian Coordinator, the
UN said in a statement. "Mr. Riza succeeds Najat Rochdi of Morocco, who recently
completed her assignment and to whom the Secretary-General is grateful for her
accomplishments and wishes her continued success in her new appointment as
Deputy Special Envoy for Syria," the statement said. It added that "Mr. Riza
brings over 35 years of international experience across the United Nations
System, mainly in field settings," and that "for the past three years, he was in
Syria as United Nations Resident Coordinator and Humanitarian Coordinator."
Prior to this, Riza served in Lebanon as Deputy Head of Mission and Director of
the Division of Political Affairs, Civil Affairs and Strategic Communications of
the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL). He previously served as
the Regional Representative to the Gulf Cooperation Council Countries for the
office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and the
UNHCR Representative for Jordan. With UNHCR, he has also served in Geneva,
Sudan, Hong Kong and Vietnam, and held positions with the World Food Program (WFP)
in Rome and as Senior Adviser to the Personal Representative of the
Secretary-General for Lebanon, as well as with UNSCOL. Riza, who speaks English,
French and Urdu, holds a master’s degree in Social-Cultural Anthropology from
Johns Hopkins University and a bachelor’s degree in History and Political
Science from McGill University.
Germany, Israel mark 50 years since Munich Olympics massacre
Agence France Presse/September 02/2022
Israel and Germany's presidents will jointly commemorate the 1972 Munich
Olympics attack that left 11 Israeli athletes dead, after a last-minute
compensation deal averted a feared boycott by bereaved relatives. Around 70
relatives of victims will join in next Monday's solemn 50th-anniversary
ceremony, Ankie Spitzer, whose husband Andre Spitzer counted among the dead,
told AFP. Separately, the Israel Olympic Committee confirmed a delegation at the
event. The long-planned ceremony had risked descending into a fiasco over a row
between relatives and the German state over financial compensation for their
suffering. But an 11th-hour deal on "historical clarification, recognition and
compensation" was announced on Wednesday, with Germany offering 28 million euros
(dollars) in reparations, six times the amount previously provided. With the
agreement, the German state acknowledges its "responsibility and recognises the
terrible suffering of those killed and their relatives," said Frank-Walter
Steinmeier and his Israeli counterpart Isaac Herzog in a statement. "The
agreement cannot heal all wounds. But it opens a door to each other," they
added. At the ceremony at the Fuerstenfeldbruck air base, west of Munich, where
the hostage-taking reached its tragic climax, bereaved relatives are also hoping
Steinmeier will become the first German head of state to publicly take
responsibility for the failings that led to the carnage. Germany's official in
charge of fighting anti-Semitism, Felix Klein, also said it was "time for an
apology". "And I think the president will find the right words at the
commemoration event on Monday," he told the Funke newspaper group.
'Incompetence'
Held almost three decades after the Holocaust, the Games in Munich were meant to
showcase a new Germany. But it instead opened a deep rift with Israel. On
September 5, 1972, eight gunmen from the Palestinian militant group Black
September stormed the Israeli team's flat at the Olympic village, shooting two
dead and taking nine others hostage. Former East German handballer Klaus
Langhoff saw the scenes unfold from the balcony opposite the Israeli team's
quarters. He described the terrifying moments when he saw the hostage-takers
bringing out the lifeless body of Israeli coach wrestling coach Moshe Weinberg
and leaving it on the street. "It was awful. Whenever we looked out of the
window or on the balcony, we saw this dead athlete there," he told AFP. West
German police responded with a botched rescue operation in which all nine
hostages were killed in a shootout, along with five of the eight hostage-takers
and a police officer.Then chancellor Willy Brandt spoke of the chain of events
as a "shocking document of German incompetence" and created the commando team
GSG9 within the month. But only weeks later, three hostage-takers who were
captured were also freed in an exchange when gunmen hijacked a Lufthansa plane
on October 29, 1972, and demanded their release. Incensed by the chain of
events, Israel subsequently launched the operation "Wrath of God" to hunt down
the leaders of Black September.
Four decades after the massacre, Israel released official documents on the
killings, including specially declassified material and an official account from
the former Israeli intelligence head, lambasting the performance of the West
German security services.
The police "didn't make even a minimal effort to save human lives", former
Mossad head Zvi Zamir said at the time after returning from Munich. For years
following the tragedy, relatives of victims battled to obtain an official
apology from Germany, access to official documents and appropriate compensation.
In the immediate aftermath, they were offered only a million deutschmarks
(510,000 euros) in what was described as a "humanitarian gesture" in order for
it not to be viewed as an admission of guilt. Further financial compensation was
provided in 2002 but still a fraction of what the victims' families were
seeking. "I came home with the coffins after the massacre," said Spitzer. "You
don't know what we've gone through for the past 50 years." German officials
acknowledged that Wednesday's deal was only the beginning of a long road to
laying to rest the wrongs of the last decades. "After 50 years, the conditions
have been created to finally come to terms with a painful chapter in our common
history, acknowledging it and laying the foundation for a new and lively culture
of remembrance," said government spokesman Steffen Hebestreit in a statement.
Assassinations in Beirut: Israel's response to 1972 Munich massacre
Agence France Presse/September 02/2022
The killing of 11 Israelis at the 1972 Munich Olympics prompted Israel to turn
to a strategy which endures to this day: deploying secret operatives abroad to
assassinate its enemies. Ever since the Mossad intelligence service embarked on
its Operation "Wrath of God" to hunt down senior militants it blamed for the
Munich bloodbath, it has covertly targeted Israel's enemies overseas.
Lipstick and bombs
Among those targeted were three Palestinians, who were killed in Beirut in April
1973 by a hit squad dressed in women's clothing. One of the operatives disguised
with make-up and fake breasts was Barak, then a commander of the Sayeret Matkal
unit deployed to kill Mohammed Youssef al-Najjar, Kamal Adwan and Kamal Nasser.
The hit squad travelled by naval vessel, then smaller speedboats to reach
Beirut, where they were met by Mossad agents with rental cars posing as
tourists. The team anticipated that more than a dozen young men walking through
an upmarket area of Beirut could arouse suspicion. "So we decided to 'make some
of us girls'," said Barak, now 80. "I was the commander of the unit, but I had a
baby face at the time, so I was one of the girls. "I was a brunette, not a
blonde, with lipstick and blue on the eye, and we took some military socks to
fill our breasts," he recalled. The four agents disguised as women wore wide
trousers, hiding weapons in jackets and bags, and were armed with hand grenades
and explosives. Splitting up into small groups, they headed toward the homes of
their targets but came under heavy fire. Two Israelis were killed, along with
several Lebanese civilians and the three Palestinians. Within hours, Barak was
back home in Israel, where his wife quizzed him on the eyeshadow and lipstick
smeared across his face. "I couldn't tell her," the ex-premier recalled, adding
that happily "she turned on the radio and there were discussions about what had
happened".
Hunting the 'Red Prince'
Such early successes may have made Israel overconfident, however, contributing
to subsequent failures. Three months after the Beirut operation, Mossad believed
they had located Ali Hassan Salameh, Black September's head of operations, known
as the "Red Prince". Israel dispatched assassins to the Norwegian town of
Lillehammer where, in a case of mistaken identity, they killed the Moroccan
waiter Ahmed Bouchikhi. The hit squad was "too sure of themselves", said
historian Michael Bar-Zohar, who has authored a series of books about Israeli
intelligence including the Norway operation. "They arrived in Lillehammer with
false information... They were already fairly certain that it was a routine
operation and they ignored all the evidence that proved it wasn't him," he said.
"For example, they saw that the man they were following lived in a run-down
neighborhood, that he rode a bicycle, that he went alone to the swimming pool. A
terrorist chief doesn't do that." After killing the wrong man, three Israeli
agents were arrested by Norwegian police and spent 22 months in prison.
Undeterred, Mossad pushed on with a years-long operation to ensnare Salameh.
Israel deployed an operative code-named "D" to Beirut, who befriended the
Palestinian and his beauty queen wife Georgina Rizk. D, in a 2019 documentary
aired by Israel's Channel 13, described his time undercover as "my real life" in
Beirut, where he frequented a sports club with Salameh and studied his habits
and movements. "I considered him at the same time a friend and a mortal enemy,"
D said. "It's not easy. You know, deep down inside, that he must die."In January
1979, nearly five years after the start of the operation, Salameh was killed by
a car bomb in Beirut.
Web outages on cards as Lebanon telecom minister says talks still on to
end Ogero strike
Jamie Prentis/The National/September 02/2022
A walkout by Ogero employees has caused widespread internet shortages
A days-long strike by employees of Lebanon's state-owned internet provider that
has led to service failures throughout the country is expected to continue. "We
agreed that it's going to take a little bit of time to get things sorted out,
meaning probably not before middle of next week," caretaker Telecommunications
Minister Johnny Corm told The National, after a three-and-a-half-hour meeting
with the syndicate representing Ogero's employees. The employees, who walked off
their jobs on Tuesday, are demanding higher salaries amid an economic meltdown
that has led the dollar value of wages to collapse. "I don't think the internet
will go out completely, Mr Corm said in a phone interview. "But there will be no
contact with customers." There are reports that the mobile phone networks
operated by providers Alfa and MTC Touch have been affected. "I think that we're
safe in a sense that we're not going to be disconnected from the rest of the
world," Mr Corm said. "And hopefully businesses will not suffer as a consequence
during this negotiation period. But I'm very hopeful that it should all be
settled."Internet outages are expected to affect more parts of the country as
Ogero's private electricity generators run out of fuel.
Ogero Chairman Imad Kreidieh told The National this week that the internet
blackouts would not have been as widespread if there had been more state
electricity on the grid. State utility Electicite Du Liban provides only a
couple of hours of power a day, if that.
Ogero in recent years has faced problems maintaining its infrastructure and
being able to afford fuel for its generators. Lebanon is in the middle of an
economic collapse, which first became apparent in 2019, that has been described
by the World Bank as one of the worst in modern history. Much of the population
has been plunged into poverty, the local currency has lost more than 90 per cent
of its value and there are widespread shortages of basic essentials. Inflation
is rampant and public sector employees — such as those at Ogero — have not had
their salaries adjusted to reflect the new reality. Many public sector workers
have been on strike for nearly two months as they seek better employment
conditions.
IMF says 'key deficiencies' remain in Lebanon’s draft banking secrecy law
Nada Homsi/The National/September 02/2022
The bill is one of the measures demanded by the international lender in order to
unlock about $3 billion in aid. The International Monetary Fund has said there
are still "key deficiencies” in the latest draft of Lebanon's banking secrecy
law, which was previously passed by Parliament but returned to the house for
revisions by President Michel Aoun. The assessment is the first time the IMF has
publicly commented on Lebanon's progress in passing reforms to unlock
international assistance, since a staff-level agreement was reached in April.
The deal, which would potentially unlock a $3 billion aid package for the
struggling country, is conditional upon an overhaul of Lebanon's banking secrecy
rules, the introduction of a robust capital control law and a strategy for
restructuring the banking sector, a forensic audit of the Central Bank, and the
passage of the 2022 national budget. To date, none of the reforms requested in
order to unlock the IMF aid package have been passed. Lebanon is in the throes
of an acute financial crisis that the World Bank says is one of the worst in the
modern world. The downturn has pushed more than 80 per cent of the country's
population into poverty. The nation’s currency has plunged in value by more than
95 per cent, while salaries have not kept up with the severe inflation. The
state is struggling to maintain subsidies or import enough fuel to power state
electricity. Most people with bank accounts are unable to withdraw the full
value of their savings due to informal capital controls imposed by commercial
banks. The IMF assessment sent to Lebanese officials said that despite the
deficiencies, the draft law represented a “substantial reform”. The assessment
called for the provision of banking data to additional government bodies,
particularly the Central Bank of Lebanon, the Banking Control Commission, and
the National Institute for the Guarantee of Deposits. It recommended giving
public prosecutors and investigative judges access to banking information,
calling such access a “critical part of banking secrecy reform.” The
establishment of a bank account registry would be strategic to financial sector
oversight, it said. The IMF assessment also called for the return of a
previously removed provision on the exchange of information between relevant
authorities, specifying that it would allow for the “effective detection and
investigation of illicit activity.”The draft law, returned to Parliament on
Wednesday by the president, will have to take the IMF’s evaluation into
consideration.
Forty years on, Hezbollah morphs from praised resistance
to feared Iranian proxy
The Arab Weekly/September 02/2022
One former senior figure in Hezbollah, Sobhi Tufaili, said of the party : “There
is a ship full of thieves,” he said, “and Hezbollah is its captain and
protector".
Forty years since Hezbollah was founded at the height of Israel’s 1982 invasion
of Lebanon, the group has morphed from a ragtag organisation to the largest and
most heavily-armed militant group in the Middle East.
The Iranian-armed and funded Hezbollah, which has marked the anniversary with
ceremonies in its strongholds in recent weeks, dominates Lebanon’s politics and
plays an instrumental role in spreading Tehran’s influence throughout the Arab
world.
But the Shia militant group, once praised around the Arab world for its
unrelentingly standing against Israel, faces deep criticism on multiple fronts.
At home in Lebanon, a significant part of the population opposes its grip on
power and accuses it of using the threat of force to prevent change. Across the
region, many resent its military interventions in Iraq and in Syria’s civil war,
where it helped tip the balance of power in favour of President Bashar Assad’s
forces. There is no specific date on when Hezbollah was founded, starting as a
small, shadowy group of fighters helped by Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary
Guard. But the group says it happened during the summer of 1982.
The 40th anniversary comes this year as Hezbollah officials have warned of a
possible new war with Israel over the disputed gas-rich maritime border between
Lebanon and Israel. Their warnings were denouned by many Lebanese politicians as
an unwanted interference.
Over the years, Hezbollah has boosted its military power. It boasts of having
100,000 well-trained fighters. And now its leader says they have
precision-guided missiles that can hit anywhere in Israel and prevent ships from
reaching Israel’s Mediterranean coast, as well as advanced drones that can
either strike or gather intelligence. “Hezbollah has evolved tremendously in the
past four decades in its organisational structure, global reach and regional
involvements,” Middle East analyst Joe Macaron told The Associated Press.
Hezbollah’s reputational boost over the past 40 years is credited to its
guerrilla war against Israeli forces occupying parts of southern Lebanon. When
Israel’s army was forced to withdraw in May 2000, without a peace deal like
those it reached with Egypt, Jordan and the Palestinians, the victory brought
Hezbollah praise from around the Middle East. “Who would have imagined that our
enemy could be defeated?” Hezbollah’s chief spokesman Mohammed Afif said at a
press conference held in July to mark the anniversary.
But since the withdrawal, the controversy over Hezbollah has steadily grown as
its role has changed.
Dangerous proxy
In 2005, Lebanon’s former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, the most powerful Sunni
politician in the country at the time, was killed in a massive truck bomb in
Beirut. A UN-backed tribunal accused three Hezbollah members of being behind the
assassination. Hezbollah denies the charges.
Hezbollah was blamed for other assassinations that followed, mostly targeting
Christians and Sunni Muslim politicians and intellectuals critical of the group.
Hezbollah denies the accusations.
Many Lebanese see it as a dangerous proxy of Iran. “Hezbollah’s danger to
Lebanon is huge,” says journalist and former cabinet minister May Chidiac who
lost an arm and a leg in a 2005 assassination attempt with explosives placed in
her car. She said Hezbollah has been expanding Iran’s influence in Lebanon, “and
this is a long-term plan that they have been working on for 40 years.”Asked if
Hezbollah is to blame for the attempt on her life, Chidiac said: “Of course.
There is no doubt about that. All these assassinations are linked.” Lebanese
have been sharply divided by Hezbollah’s determination to keep its weapons since
Israel’s withdrawal. Some call for its disarmament, saying only the state should
have the right to carry weapons. Others support the group’s argument that it
must continue to be able to defend against Israel. Hezbollah fought Israel to a
draw in a 34-day war in the summer of 2006. Israel today considers Hezbollah its
most serious immediate threat, estimating that the militant group has some
150,000 rockets and missiles aimed at it. In early July, the Israeli military
shot down three unmanned aircraft launched by Hezbollah heading toward an area
where an Israeli gas platform was recently installed in the Mediterranean Sea.
Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah warned that Israel will not be allowed to
benefit from its gas fields in the disputed maritime border area before a deal
is reached with Lebanon. Major General Ori Gordin, the incoming head of Israel’s
Northern Command, described Hezbollah as a “serious threat,” due to both its
proximity to Israel and its arsenal.
“This is a very strong terror army,” he told The Associated Press in Jerusalem.
“Not as strong as the Israeli military, not as strong as the Israeli air force.
We are in a completely different place when it comes to our military
capabilities. But it can do some significant damage. I have to say that.”
Afif, the Hezbollah spokesman, said that “as long as there is an aggression,
there will be resistance.”
In 2008, the government of Western-backed Prime Minister Fouad Saniora decided
to dismantle Hezbollah’s telecommunications network. Hezbollah responded by
capturing by force Sunni neighbourhoods in Beirut. It was the worst internal
fighting since the 1975-90 civil war ended and marked a breach in Hezbollah’s
pledge never to use its weapons at home. Perhaps the most controversial decision
Hezbollah has made was to send thousands of fighters to Syria since 2013 to back
Assad against opposition fighters, as well as against al-Qaeda-linked fighters
and the Islamic State (ISIS) extremist group.
The intervention in Syria “meant becoming entangled in the internal conflict of
a neighbouring Arab country rather than fulfilling Hezbollah’s claimed mandate
of resistance against Israel,” Macaron said.
Across the Arab world, it reinforced an image of Hezbollah as a sectarian Shia
force promoting Iran’s agenda and not refraining from subversive activity when
it serves its interests, leading at least six Arab countries to list the group
as a terrorist organisation. In Lebanon, it has consistently worked to undermine
the interests of Saudi Arabia and other Arab Gulf states. Saudi-Lebanese
relations have been mired in endless crises linked to Hezbollah. The latest is
the threat of a terrorist attack received by the Saudi embassy in Beirut from a
Saudi activist belived to be an Hezbollah protegé. Relations deteriorated last
year when Saudi Arabia banned imports of Lebanese goods over drug-smuggling
concerns and then recalled its ambassador after disparaging remarks about Saudi
policy in Yemen made by former minister of information, George Kordahi, a
pro-Hezbollah politician. The Lebanese minister has since left the cabinet and
the Saudi ambassador has returned to his post.
Some have accused Hezbollah of working to co-opt Saudi opposition activists to
its side in an endless showdown. Hezbollah is also accused of helping
Iranian-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen against the Saudi-led Arab coalition
supporting the internationally-recognised government.
Within Lebanon, Hezbollah has used its enduring support among the Shia community
and tough tactics to maintain a form of dominance which many see as smothering
political life. In 2016, it secured the election of its Christian ally Michel
Aoun as president, then it and its allies won a parliamentary majority in
subsequent elections. But that also sealed its role as part of a governing
system whose decades of corruption and mismanagement have been blamed for
Lebanon’s economic collapse, starting in late 2019. With the currency crumbling
and much of the population thrown into poverty, the political elite, which has
been running Lebanon since the 1975-90 civil war ended, has resisted reforms.
Massive protests demanding the removal of those politicians began in late 2019
and days afterward, hundreds of Hezbollah supporters attacked the protesters in
downtown Beirut, forcing them to flee. In October, Hezbollah supporters and a
rival militia had an armed clash in Beirut over investigations into the 2020
devastating explosion at Beirut’s port. The militant Shia group was accused of
hindering the investigation and many Lebanese suspected Hezbollah was trying to
cover its tracks over the circumstances that led to the blast. Voters punished
Hezbollah and its allies in this year’s elections, making them lose their
parliamentary majority. One former senior figure in Hezbollah, Sobhi Tufaili,
pointed to the new image of the group as part of the system in a recent
interview with a local TV station. “There is a ship full of thieves,” he said,
“and Hezbollah is its captain and protector.”
Will maritime-border settlement imply Lebanon’s indirect
recognition of Israel?
Arab News/September 02, 2022
Hezbollah complicit in US-brokered process despite its leader’s rejection of
talks with the ‘Zionist enemy’
Gap between Nasrallah’s rhetoric and reality calls into question his much
vaunted commitment to “resistance”
DUBAI: Comments recently made by a White House official to Al-Arabiya point to
progress in indirect negotiations between Lebanon and Israel to find a solution
to their maritime boundary dispute. But any progress raises a host of questions
that Hezbollah, the Iran-backed militia which holds sway over the Lebanese
government, will find deeply embarrassing.
Technically at war since 1948 and with no diplomatic relations, Lebanon and
Israel are at odds over an area of 860 sq km of the Mediterranean Sea believed
to contain rich deposits of natural gas. They have been engaged in intermittent
negotiations since October 2020 over the gas-rich waters they both claim to lie
in their exclusive economic zones. US President Joe Biden’s administration has
proposed a compromise solution, which would create an S-shaped maritime economic
boundary between the two countries. Amos Hochstein, the US senior adviser for
energy security, told Al-Hurra TV in June that a proposal Lebanese officials
presented to him will enable negotiations “to go forward.”In recent months,
Hochstein, in his capacity as the special presidential coordinator on the border
deal, has made multiple trips to Beirut and Tel Aviv.
“We continue to narrow the gaps between the parties and believe a lasting
compromise is possible,” the unnamed White House official told Al-Arabiya this
week. The official praised what he called the “consultative spirit” of both
parties.
The comments came against a backdrop of seemingly coordinated virtue signalling
by Lebanese government officials and their coalition allies, Hezbollah. Michel
Aoun, the Lebanese president, and his Free Patriotic Movement (FPM) have
maintained a strategic alliance with Hezbollah since 2006 that has enabled them
to fill public and administrative institutions with loyalists. The understanding
between the leading Lebanese Christian and Shiite parties has been tested at
times by Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah’s warlike rhetoric and broadsides
against Lebanon’s traditional Arab allies. But with the ongoing negotiations
with Israel, Hezbollah’s much vaunted commitment to “resistance,” its political
strength and even its relevance have been called into question.
“Hezbollah accuses all its opponents of being Zionist and imperialist agents.
So, any occasion to prove it wrong is welcome,” Nadim Shehadi, a Lebanese
economist and political commentator, told Arab News. “That said, this is one of
the rare instances where the presence of Hezbollah possibly strengthens the
Lebanese negotiation position.” Hezbollah has threatened to attack Israel if a
deal acceptable to Lebanon was not reached by a clear deadline. In early July,
it dispatched drones twice toward the Karish gas field — where Israel has a
drilling site — three of which were shot down by the Israeli military.
Although the drones were unarmed, they demonstrated Hezbollah’s ability to
strike the offshore facility and up the ante in the US-mediated negotiations
with Israel. In recent months, Israel has also repeatedly accused Hezbollah of
impeding UN peacekeepers stationed along the Lebanon-Israel border from
performing their duties.
Still, Hezbollah is said to privately want to avoid another conflict at a time
Lebanon is going through a crippling economic crisis that has plunged more than
three-quarters of its population into poverty. The last war it fought with
Israel, 16 years ago, left nearly 1,200 Lebanese — mostly civilians — dead,
pushing large swathes of the country into ruins. “To be sure, Hezbollah can
obstruct the negotiations any time and they hold the process hostage,” Shehadi
told Arab News. “The theatrics of sending drones to take photos of the Israeli
gas installations were in keeping with its approach.”
The Lebanese government officials whose histrionics too made headlines recently
were Walid Fayyad, the energy minister, and Hector Hajjar, the social affairs
minister, with their act of throwing rocks toward Israeli territory.
The duo, both linked to Aoun’s FPM, were part of a group of eight Lebanese
ministers who were on a border-area tour. In the video, which went viral after
it was broadcast by Al-Jadeed TV, Fayyad and Hajjar could be heard teasing each
other about their rock-throwing abilities.
Fayyad, who in the clip tells Hajjar to “step aside, so I won’t hit your head,”
is a frequent interlocutor for the Lebanese government during the discussions
with Hochstein on the boundary dispute with Israel. Michael Young, a senior
editor with Carnegie Middle East in Beirut, surmises that the two minister’s
actions may have something to do with the upcoming presidential election to find
a successor to Aoun. “I am not sure if it was planned that way, but the effect
was showing that they stood with the ‘resistance against Israel,’” he told Arab
News.
Shehadi concurred, saying that “everyone is playing along, including the cabinet
ministers”, adding: “The new independent MPs who visited the border danced the
(Levantine folk dance) dabke there. It’s all part of a subtle internal Lebanese
political dialogue.”
To Shehadi, the scenes on the border were reminiscent of the period immediately
after the Israeli withdrawal from Southern Lebanon in May 2000, when Lebanese
politicians joined in the theatrics of the “liberation by the resistance.”
“The circumstances of the withdrawal were well known. Israeli Prime Minister
Ehud Barak had promised in July 1999 to withdraw to the international border and
it was a fulfillment of that pledge,” Shehadi told Arab News. “The withdrawal
was coordinated between Israel and Hezbollah with the help of two Swedish
mediators.”
This time around, Lebanese analysts are watching closely for any political
fallout of the obvious gap between the rhetoric and actions of Nasrallah in the
context of the Lebanon-Israel negotiations.
Since the Islamic revolution of 1979, the regime in Tehran and its Shiite
proxies have relied on a formula of seeking to co-opt the Palestinian resistance
to increase their moral standing in the Arab world. They have intervened in
neighboring countries, and justified this as necessary to liberate Palestine
with such cross-sectarian slogans as “The path to Jerusalem passes through
Karbala.” As part of the same playbook, Hezbollah has constantly tried to
portray itself as a pan-Islamic force fighting, first and foremost, for the
Palestinian cause, determined to liberate Jerusalem from “Zionist occupation”
while accusing Arabs of abandoning the holy city. In a speech in Beirut’s
suburbs in 1998, Nasrallah reportedly called for the assassination of
Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat for signing peace treaties with Israel by
invoking the example of the killer of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981.
“Is there no Palestinian who can do what Khaled Islambouli did and say that
Arafat’s presence on the face of this Earth is shameful to Palestinians and
Muslims?” Nasrallah had thundered. As recently as in August 2020, he was
fulminating against the signing of the normalization agreement between Israel
and the UAE. “This is a betrayal of Islam and Arabism, it is a betrayal of
Jerusalem, of the Palestinian people,” he said during a speech commemorating the
anniversary of the end of Hezbollah’s 2006 conflict between Israel.
Fast forward to September 2022 and, as Michael Young, the Carnegie Middle East
editor, puts it, “Hezbollah today is engaged in indirection negotiations with
Israel.”
“To an extent, Hassan Nasrallah’s upping the ante is to show that they are not
negotiating indirectly with Israel, signing what may be a deal on offshore gas
sharing. But no one doubts that they are negotiating indirectly with Israel,” he
told Arab News. “At the same time, Hezbollah needs to show its domestic
supporters that it’s still anti-Israel, hence the escalation of threats and
criticism of Israel if Lebanon’s gas rights are not respected.” But if a deal
materializes, sooner or later, will Hezbollah tie its own hands by neutralizing
the “resistance” and saying that Israel has respected all its commitments to
Lebanon? “Hezbollah’s view is much wider than that,” Young said. “As long as
there’s an enemy, the resistance must continue. This is not the official view of
the Lebanese government but it is implied in all Hezbollah statements.”
Young believes that at this stage, Hezbollah does not want to negotiate the
entire sea and land border. “The focus now is on the maritime border. I don’t
believe there’s willingness to negotiate anything dealing with the contested
border, the Shebaa Farms,” he told Arab News, referring to a small strip of land
occupied by Israel since 1967. “(But) the UN says the occupation ended with the
Israelis’ withdrawal in 2000. The Lebanese position on Shebaa Farms is not the
same as that of the Israelis or the UN.” As for the negotiations over the
maritime dispute, Young says if media reports are any guide, the Biden
administration has been putting pressure on both Lebanon and Israel and there
are signs of progress. “I don’t think we can rule out an agreement,” he told
Arab News. “I think all sides have an interest in one and we are moving to a
potential agreement.”According to the White House official who spoke to Al-Arabiya,
Hochstein is in communication daily with both Israeli and Lebanese government
officials.
The Latest English LCCC
Miscellaneous Reports And News published
on September 02-03/2022
Israeli airstrike halts Revolutionary
Guard arms cargo to Syria
Arab News/September 02, 2022
JEDDAH: An Israeli airstrike on Aleppo airport in northern Syrian disabled the
runway just as a cargo plane linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps was
about to land, new satellite photos show. The images confirm that Israel has
intensified strikes on Syrian airports to disrupt Iran’s increasing use of
aerial supply lines to deliver arms to allies in Syria and Lebanon, including
Hezbollah. Just before Wednesday’s strike, a transponder signal on an Antonov
An-74 cargo plane flown by Yas Air indicated that it was about to land at the
airport. Yas Air is under US Treasury sanctions for transporting weapons on
behalf of the Revolutionary Guards. Israel also carried out a strike on Damascus
airport, damaging equipment, the second such attack since June when Israeli
airstrikes on the runway knocked it out of service for two weeks. A regional
diplomatic source said the strikes marked a shift in Israeli targeting. “They
started to hit infrastructure used by the Iranians for ammunition supplies to
Lebanon,” the source said. The strikes also provide clues to where Iran is
increasing its involvement, said Nawar Shaaban, an analyst at the Omran Centre
for Strategic Studies. “The dangerous thing is that when we look at these areas
that are being hit, it tells us that Iran has spread out more,” he said. “Every
time we see a strike hit a new area, the reaction is, ‘Whoah, Israel hit there.’
But what we should be saying is, ‘Whoah, Iran is there’.”
Iran sends nuclear talks response; US casts doubt on
offer
Associated Press/September 02/2022
Iran sent a written response early Friday in negotiations over a final draft of
a roadmap for parties to return to its tattered nuclear deal with world powers,
though the U.S. cast doubt on Tehran's offer. Iran's Foreign Ministry spokesman
Nasser Kanaani said in a statement that "the sent text has a constructive
approach with the aim of finalizing the negotiations." However, as in the last
round of written proposals and counters, Iran offered no public acknowledgment
of what it said. Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has final say
on all matters of state in the country's Shiite theocracy, largely has been
silent in recent weeks on the negotiations. In Washington, the State Department
confirmed it received Iran's response through the European Union, which has
served as an intermediary for the indirect talks after then-President Donald
Trump unilaterally withdrew America from the accord in 2018. "We are studying it
and will respond through the EU, but unfortunately it is not constructive," the
State Department said, similarly not elaborating on what the proposal contained.
The 2015 deal saw Iran greatly curtail its enrichment of uranium in exchange for
the lifting of economic sanctions. Under the deal, Iran could have only 300
kilograms (660 pounds) of uranium enriched up to 3.67% under constant scrutiny
of International Atomic Energy Agency surveillance cameras and inspectors. Now,
however, the last public IAEA count shows Iran has a stockpile of some 3,800
kilograms (8,370 pounds) of enriched uranium. More worrying for nonprofileration
experts, Iran now enriches uranium up to 60% purity — a level it never reached
before that is a short, technical step away from 90%. Those experts warn Iran
has enough 60%-enriched uranium to reprocess into fuel for at least one nuclear
bomb.
While Iran long has maintained its program is peaceful, officials now openly
discuss Tehran's ability to seek an atomic bomb if it wanted. Meanwhile, a
series of attacks across the wider Mideast since the deal's collapse have raised
tensions of a wider conflict breaking out. Both the U.S. and Iran have tried to
portray the ongoing negotiations as bending in their favor on issues like the
American sanctions targeting Tehran's paramilitary Revolutionary Guard. Earlier
this week, Iran's hard-line President Ebrahim Raisi maintained that an IAEA
investigation into traces of man-made uranium found at undeclared nuclear sites
in the country must be halted.
US says Iran's nuclear deal response 'not constructive'
The National/September 02/2022
State Department said American officials are still looking at the response,
which Iran submitted through the EU
Iran's response to the latest effort to revive the 2015 nuclear deal is “not
constructive”, the US has said. The assessment came after Iran Foreign Ministry
spokesman Nasser Kanaani was quoted by state broadcaster IRIB on Friday as
saying his country had sent a response, through the EU, that had a “constructive
approach aimed at finalising the negotiations”. The US disagreed, with State
Department spokesman Vedant Patel saying Washington was “studying it and will
respond through the EU but, unfortunately, it is not constructive”. The EU
drafted a proposal to rescue the agreement, which was abandoned in 2018 by
former US Donald Trump, and energy traders have been closely following the talks
to see whether there will be a breakthrough. White House National Security
Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson said some gaps had closed in recent weeks
but others remained. The IRIB report said Iran's response was sent to EU foreign
policy chief Josep Borrell, who has been co-ordinating the negotiations. It gave
no further details. Mr Borrell said on August 8 that the EU had made a final
offer after 16 months of indirect talks between Iran and the US. On Wednesday,
Iran's Foreign Ministry said it needed stronger guarantees from Washington, with
Mr Kanaani calling on the UN atomic watchdog to drop its “politically motivated
probes” of the country's nuclear work. Under the 2015 pact, Iran curbed its
nuclear programme in exchange for relief from US, EU and UN sanctions. Mr Trump
reneged on the deal, arguing that it was too generous to Tehran. He reimposed US
sanctions on Iran, leading the country to resume previously banned nuclear
activities and reviving US, European and Israeli fears that Iran could seek an
atom bomb. Iran denies any such ambition.
Iran navy says thwarted pirate attack on ship in Red Sea
AFP/September 02, 2022
TEHRAN: An Iranian naval flotilla foiled a pirate attack on an Iranian merchant
vessel in the Red Sea, the navy said, following a similar incident last month.
“A suspicious boat with 12 armed people on board approached the Iranian merchant
ship in Bab Al-Mandab” strait on Thursday, the state news agency IRNA said,
citing a statement by the navy. It said a squadron had come into confrontation
with the “pirates in the Red Sea,” adding that the invading boat “left the area”
after the escort flotilla, “headed by the Jamaran destroyer... opened fire” at
the vessel. The incident comes after the Pentagon said on Tuesday that an
Iranian ship seized an American military unmanned research vessel in the Gulf
but released it after a US Navy patrol boat and helicopter were deployed to the
location. On August 10, a senior Iranian navy commander said the same naval
flotilla thwarted an overnight attack on another vessel belonging to the Islamic
republic. Rear Admiral Mustafa Tajeddini said at the time that, following a help
request by an Iranian ship in the Red Sea, the flotilla was dispatched to the
scene and engaged fire with the attacking boats. “After heavy exchanges, the
attacking boats made off,” he added.
Like other countries dependent on the shipping lane through the Red Sea and Suez
Canal, Iran stepped up its naval presence in the Gulf of Aden after a wave of
attacks by Somalia-based pirates between 2000 and 2011.
Iran briefly seizes 2 US sea drones in Red Sea amid
tensions
AP/September 02, 2022
DUBAI: Iran’s navy seized two American sea drones in the Red Sea before letting
them go Friday, officials said, in the latest maritime incident involving the US
Navy’s new drone fleet in the Mideast. Iranian state television aired footage it
said came from the deck of the Iranian navy’s Jamaran destroyer, where
lifejacket-wearing sailors examined two Saildrone Explorers. They tossed one
overboard as another warship could be seen in the distance. State TV said the
Iranian navy found “several unmanned spying vessels abandoned in the
international maritime routes” on Thursday.
“After two warnings to an American destroyer to prevent possible incidents,
Jamaran seized the two vessels,” state TV said. “After securing the
international shipping waterway, the Naval Squadron No. 84 released the vessels
in a safe area.”It added: “The US Navy was warned to avoid repeating similar
incidents in future.”A US defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity
to discuss the incident before the military offered a formal statement,
identified the seized drones as Saildrone Explorers. Those drones are
commercially available and used by a variety of clients, including scientists,
to monitor open waters.
Two American destroyers in the Red Sea, as well as Navy helicopters, responded
to the incident, the official said. They called the Iranian destroyer over the
radio and followed the vessel until it released the drones Friday morning, the
official said. “We have them in our custody,” the official said. “We continue
our operations across the region.” This marks the second such incident in recent
days as negotiations over Tehran’s nuclear deal with world powers hang in the
balance. The earlier incident involved Iran’s paramilitary Revolutionary Guard,
not its regular navy, and occurred in the Arabian Gulf. The Guard towed a
Saildrone Explorer before releasing it as an American warship trailed it. Iran
had criticized the US Navy for releasing a “Hollywood” video of the incident,
only to do the same Friday in the Red Sea incident. The 5th Fleet launched its
unmanned Task Force 59 last year. Drones used by the Navy include
ultra-endurance aerial surveillance drones, surface ships like the Sea Hawk and
the Sea Hunter and smaller underwater drones that resemble torpedoes. The 5th
Fleet’s area of responsibility includes the crucial Strait of Hormuz, the narrow
mouth of the Arabian Gulf through which 20 percent of all oil passes. It also
stretches as far as the Red Sea reaches near the Suez Canal, the waterway in
Egypt leading to the Mediterranean, and the Bab el-Mandeb Strait off Yemen. The
region has seen a series of maritime attacks in recent years. Off Yemen in the
Red Sea, bomb-laden drone boats and mines set adrift by Yemen’s Houthi rebels
have damaged vessels amid that country’s yearslong war. Near the United Arab
Emirates and the Strait of Hormuz, oil tankers have been seized by Iranian
forces. Others have been attacked in incidents the Navy blames on Iran. Those
attacks came about a year after then-President Donald Trump’s 2018 decision to
unilaterally withdraw from Iran’s nuclear deal, in which sanctions on Tehran
were lifted in exchange for it drastically limiting its enrichment of uranium.
Negotiations to revive the accord now hang in the balance. The US cast doubt
Friday on Iran’s latest written response over the talks.
Iran now enriches uranium closer than ever to weapons-grade levels as officials
openly suggest Tehran could build a nuclear bomb if it wishes to. Iran has
maintained its program is peaceful, though Western nations and international
inspectors say Tehran had a military nuclear program up until 2003.
Russia's Gazprom shuts down gas to Europe
indefinitely
Tim Stickings/The National/September 02/2022
Russia's state-controlled gas supplier Gazprom said on Friday it would
indefinitely stop deliveries to Europe through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline after
discovering a fault. The announcement came after G7 member countries said they
would attempt to cap the price of Russian oil in a major intervention designed
to ease a growing energy crisis and starve the Kremlin of wartime revenue. The
wealthy allies will set a rate for Russian oil and freeze out suppliers who try
to sell it at a higher price by denying insurance or financing to their cargo
ships. Nord Stream, which runs under the Baltic Sea to supply Germany and
others, had been due to resume operating on Saturday after a three-day halt for
maintenance. But Gazprom claimed it could no longer provide a time frame for
restarting deliveries after finding an oil leak that meant a pipeline turbine
could not run safely. The G7 is attempting to use its economic clout to
stabilise the energy market and stop the runaway prices from funding Russia's
onslaught against Ukraine. G7 members Britain, France, Germany, Italy, the US,
Canada and Japan are imposing the price cap, while the EU will have to consult
its 27 members and third countries will be encouraged to join the buyers'
cartel. Diplomats intend for the ban to take effect on Russian crude oil in
December and refined products such as petrol and diesel in February. US Treasury
Secretary Janet Yellen said the plans would be finalised “in the weeks to
come”.“Russia is profiting economically from the uncertainty in energy markets
caused by the war,” said German Finance Minister Christian Lindner, who led
talks with his G7 counterparts and central bank chiefs on Friday, when the price
cap was signed off.
“We don’t want Russia to continue to profit.”
Ms Yellen said the announcement was a “critical step forward in achieving our
dual goals” of curbing prices and weakening Russian President Vladimir Putin, by
weakening Moscow's finances and “hastening the deterioration of the Russian
economy”.
Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer Nadhim Zahawi, who is expected to leave
office when Prime Minister Boris Johnson resigns on Tuesday, said the price cap
had been a “personal priority” during his short tenure. The G7 ministers said
they would “seek to establish a broad coalition” and urged third countries who
still import Russian oil, such as India, to adhere to the price cap. “The price
cap is specifically designed to reduce Russian revenue and Russia's ability to
fund its war of aggression while limiting the impact of Russia's war on global
energy prices,” they said. “The measure has the potential to be particularly
beneficial to countries, notably vulnerable low- and middle-income countries,
suffering from high energy and food prices, aggravated by Russia’s war of
aggression.” No price level was given in Friday's announcement, which said the
cap would be decided by the full coalition of buyers and revisited as necessary.
The club of rich democracies ignored a warning from Kremlin spokesman Dmitry
Peskov on Friday that Russia would stop selling any oil to countries that impose
a cap. “We simply will not co-operate with them on non-market principles,” Mr
Peskov said. Former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, a prominent Kremlin ally,
suggested gas supplies could also be switched off to G7 members, notably Germany
and its EU neighbours. “There will simply be no Russian gas in Europe,” he said.
G7 leaders agreed on the principle of a price cap at their summit in June, but
negotiations have continued since then on the details of carrying out such a
plan. US President Joe Biden was the leading advocate of the idea and has
expressed hope that it could bring down domestic prices at a time of
cost-of-living woes in the West. The inflation crisis has worsened since then,
as fuel prices rocket by 80 per cent in Britain, storm clouds gather over the
German economy and the EU weighs up a separate price cap on electricity. Western
officials believe the Russian price cap is feasible because the G7 powers
dominate global markets in finance and insurance, meaning suppliers would
struggle to ignore the cartel. This means third countries could keep buying
Russian oil, even as G7 states such as Britain and the US impose embargoes,
without the Kremlin collecting more money for fewer exports. Despite Russia's
falling oil export volumes, its oil export revenue in June increased by $700
million from May due to the higher prices, the International Energy Agency said
last month. The G7 has also discussed the possibility of imposing a price cap on
gas, for which countries would simply name their price to Russia, but this was
not part of Friday's announcement.
Iraq: anti-Iran protesters take to the streets of
Baghdad
Mina Aldroubi/The National/September 02/2022
Iraq's pro-reform protest movement made a comeback on Friday as hundreds of
peaceful protesters took to the streets of Baghdad demanding an end to
corruption and Iran's influence in the country. "Iraq will not be ruled by
Iran," chanted the demonstrators as they headed towards the capital's fortified
Green Zone, home to diplomatic quarters and government buildings. They were seen
carrying signs with anti-Iran slogans as well as pictures of protesters and
journalists who were shot during the mass 2019 protests. They called for an
overhaul of the government and the dissolution of the current parliament. The
country held early elections on October 10 in response to one of the core
demands of a nationwide, pro-reform protest movement that erupted in 2019 in
central and southern parts of the country. The protesters' demands are similar
to supporters of Shiite cleric Moqtada Al Sadr, who stage a sit-in outside
parliament for weeks before withdrawing last Tuesday. At least 30 people were
killed — mostly followers of Mr Al Sadr — in violence in Baghdad this week.
Clashes erupted in the capital's heavily fortified Green Zone on Monday, after
Mr Al Sadr announced that he was quitting politics. He had been frustrated in
attempts to form a government, after elections last October. His followers
clashed with security forces in the zone that houses government buildings and
foreign embassies, while Iran-backed militias aligned to Shiite political rivals
were also present. Violence also erupted in other parts of the country.
Mr Al Sadr later told his followers to disperse. It came as the UN Security
Council said political factions must engage in “constructive dialogue” to avoid
a repetition of deadly clashes this week between rival Shiite factions.
“The members of the Security Council strongly urged all parties and actors to
engage, without further delay, in a peaceful and constructive dialogue to
advance reforms and chart a constructive way forward,” said the council.
Its members called for calm and restraint following the violence that gripped
the country and brought fears of a potential outbreak of a civil war.
“They urge all parties to peacefully resolve their political differences, to
respect the rule of law, the right of peaceful assembly, and Iraqi institutions,
and to avoid violence,” the council said. It expressed “deep concern” over the
reported deaths and injuries in recent days. This plea came as four militia men
were killed in the southern city of Basra on Thursday, in clashes between rival
armed groups. The men were from arch foes, the Saraya Al Salam militia, which is
linked to Mr Al Sadr, and the Iran-backed Asaib Ahl Al Haq militia. AAH is led
by Qais Al Khazali, who is part of the Iran-backed Co-ordination Framework
political bloc — Mr Al Sadr's Shiite rival. A funeral was held in Basra late on
Thursday for Saraya Al Salam's fighters. Saraya Al Salam and AAH have been
engaged in revenge attacks for years.
The clashes in Baghdad on Monday led to the recent flare-up in the south, which
saw Saraya Al Salam attack AAH offices in Basra. In response, AAH attacked
Saraya Al Salam, resulting in a battle that lasted several hours through the
night. Further violence is expected in Iraq, as the political rivalry between Mr
Al Sadr and the Co-ordination Framework has yet to be settled. The two sides
have been in disagreement over forming a government. Mr Al Sadr had been
demanding the dissolution of parliament and new elections. His party received
the most seats of any party or group in the October poll, but was stymied in
efforts to form a coalition government. The Framework want a new head of
government to be appointed before any new elections are held.
Bloody test of wills between Sadr and pro-Iran Shia
rivals moves south to Basra
AFP/The Arab Weekly/September 02/2022
Iraqi political experts warned that the confrontation in Basra between the
Saraya al-Salam (Peace Brigades) militia affiliated with the leader of the
Sadrist movement Moqtada al-Sadr and the Asa'ib Ahl al-Haq militia headed by
Qais al-Khazali, who is affiliated with the pro-Iran Coordination Framework,
will not be short-lived. They see it instead as a test of wills between Sadr and
Khazali, who used to belong to the Sadrist movement before leaving it and
subsequently clashing with it violently on several occasions. Experts say that
if Sadr manages to control Basra, a goal he has failed to achieve in the past,
he will be in a stronger position in Baghdad. The showdown in Basra, they say,
is a battle for control and not just to test intentions, as was the case in the
Green Zone in Baghdad. The big picture, analysts say, is one of a continuing
power struggle between Sadrists and mostly Iran-aligned Shia parties and
paramilitary groups. Both sides have tried to exert their control over the
formation of a new government since an election in October. Basra is important
for Sadr to showcase his power and influence in Iraq’s major cities and send a
message to his opponents that no political solution in Iraq is possible if it
does not table in his weight and role. Sadr's representative who goes by the
Twitter moniker Salah Mohammed al-Iraqi hurled a personal attack against Khazali
following the altercations, calling his militias “mad dogs."Khazali later
instructed his followers not to be provoked by the comments and for AAH to close
their offices until further notice. Four militants were killed in reprisal
attacks between the two rival Shia militia groups in southern Iraq, two days
after violent clashes in Baghdad brought the country to the precipice of all out
Shia civil war. Iraqi security forces were swiftly deployed in the southern
oil-rich Basra to contain the violence that erupted overnight between armed
elements of Moqtada al-Sadr’s Saraya al-Salam and the Iran-backed Asaib Ahl al-Haq
(AAH) paramilitary group. "The security situation in Basra is really bad, and
could escalate," a security official said
On Thursday morning, gunmen attacked government buildings in Basra where
security forces and paramilitary groups with links to Iran are stationed. The
officials could not immediately identify the gunmen firing on the government
buildings, but said they believed they were Sadr supporters. Two militiamen from
Sadr's Saraya al-Salam and two from AAH were killed in tit-for-tat attacks,
officials said. The details of the attacks were not immediately clear and there
were conflicting reports. The attacks come after clashes in Baghdad's government
zone between Sadr loyalists, on one side, and Iraqi security forces and rival
militias, on the other. The Baghdad shootings left at least 30 people dead and
over 400 wounded. The armed hostilities ended on Tuesday when Sadr called on his
followers to withdraw. The threat of more clashes looms as the political rivalry
between Sadr and his Iran-backed rivals in the Coordination Framework bloc,
which includes the leader of AAH, Qais al-Khazali, have not been settled.
Both camps disagree over the appropriate mechanism to dissolve parliament and
hold early elections, key demands of Sadr. His party won the 2021 federal
election but was not able to form a majority coalition government that excluded
his pro-Iran rivals.
The UN Security Council condemned the recent violence, appealed for “calm and
restraint,” and urged all parties to peacefully resolve their difference and
respect the rule of law and the right to peaceful assembly.. A Supreme Court
session to decide on whether the judiciary can dissolve parliament, a demand of
Sadr, has been postponed until next Wednesday. A negative ruling is expected to
elicit a reaction from the cleric and could spark a new round of turmoil and
violence. For now, the tensions appear to have migrated from Baghdad to the
southern majority Shia provinces where the state's authority is frayed. Saraya
Salam and AAH have been engaged in revenge attacks for years. The clashes in
Baghdad led to the recent flare-up when Sadr's militiamen attacked AAH's Basra
offices. In retaliation, AAH attacked Sadr's militiamen and a battle ensued for
several hours throughout the night. By Thursday morning, Basra's governor, Asad
al-Eidani, said calm had been restored. Ongoing upheaval has left Iraq, which is
still reeling from years of war, sanctions, civil strife and corruption, without
a government for the longest period since the 2003 US invasion which toppled the
Saddam Hussein regime.
Guterres nominates Senegalese diplomat as UN envoy to Libya, despite Dbeibah's
objections
AFP/The Arab Weekly/September 02/2022
Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has nominated Abdoulaye Bathily to be the new
UN envoy to Libya. Before even starting on the uphill task of working for a
settlement to the crisis gripping the North-African country, Bathily will have
to overcome the hurdle posed by Interim Prime Minister Abdulhamid Dbeibah’s
opposition to his nomination. For now, the 15-member UN Security Council needs
to agree by consensus to the appointment of Abdoulaye Bathily as the UN special
envoy for Libya. If there are no objections, then Bathily's appointment will be
approved on Friday evening.
Bathily would replace Jan Kubis, who stepped down in December. Guterres had
informally proposed two other people to fill the role, but the Security Council
could not agree. Libya has had little peace since the 2011 NATO-backed uprising
that toppled the Gadhafi regime, splitting the nation in 2014 between rival
eastern and western factions and dragging in regional and international powers.
Libyan oil output, a prize for the warring groups, has repeatedly been shut off.
France’s UN ambassador said Thursday he thought the Security Council would
approve the former Senegalese minister and UN diplomat, which would end a
contentious nine-month search.
The last UN special representative, Jan Kubis, resigned last November 23 after
ten months on the job. In December, Guterres appointed veteran American diplomat
Stephanie Williams, a former UN deputy special representative in Libya, as his
special adviser, a job that did not require council approval. She left at the
end of July. Thus the mission has had no leader as Libyans grapple with a
constitutional and political crisis. For many reasons, including the
uncooperative attitude of Libyan protagonists and lack of international unity on
an endgame to the decade-old crisis, Williams failed to put a Libyan settlement
on track. UN political chief Rosemary DiCarlo warned Tuesday that failure to
resolve Libya’s political crisis and hold long-delayed elections poses a growing
threat in the country, pointing to violent clashes a few days ago that killed at
least 42 people and injured 159 others, according to Libyan authorities.
Libya has been in chaos since a NATO-backed uprising toppled and killed
long-time ruler Muammar Gadhafi in 2011. Western powers and their regional
allies left the country without an exit strategy pitching Libya into the throes
of endless chaos. The current stalemate grew out of the failure to hold
elections in December and the refusal of Prime Minister Abdulhamid Dbeibah, who
led a transitional government, to step down. In response, the country’s
east-based parliament appointed a rival prime minister, Fathi Bashagha, who has
for months sought to install his government in Tripoli. A message to
Dbeibah?Regional and political polarisation is set to reflect on the ability of
the nominated envoy to undertake his arduous mission. The Dbeibah camp opposes
the nomination of the Senegalese diplomat accusing him even before he starts of
bias in favour of rival Bashagha and the eastern-based camp. Dbeibah supporters
link their suspicions to Senegal’s traditionally close ties to France, a
presumed ally of Libya’s eastern powerful political figures. In the past, a
number of candidates proposed by Guterres was rejected by council members, Libya
or neighbouring countries. Analysts believe the UN secretary general was
eventually exasperated by the objections coming from Libya and from foreign
countries regarding many of the fielded candidates.
Some analysts wonder if by nominating Bathily, Guerres was sending a firm
message to Dbeibah not to interfere with the UN-endorsed political process and
that searching for a prior consensus between Libyan key players and their
backers may not be a prerequisite for the UN’s future steps forward. French
Ambassador Nicolas De Riviere was asked at a news conference whether Dbeibah’s
opposition to Bathily would be a problem in trying to end Libya’s political
crisis. “I don’t think so, no," he replied. The French diplomat did not mince
his words about the lack of vision and resolve on the part of Williams and other
UN senior officials. He said the leadership of the UN mission for Libya over the
last two years “has been chaotic” and it is time for the UN to have someone to
lead it “and to pick up the baton of the negotiations over Libya.” He said
France fully supports the secretary-general's appointment of Bathily, a former
UN special representative for Central Africa. “I think it will be accepted,” De
Riviere said. “What’s important now is to get to the next phase and I think that
all the parties in Libya will cooperate with him, and the sooner they do that
the better.”
Palestinian killed in West Bank after stabbing Israeli soldier
AFP/September 02, 2022
lestinian health ministry said it had been informed of the death of a young man
near Hebron
HEBRON: A Palestinian was shot dead Friday after stabbing an Israeli soldier at
an army post near Hebron in the occupied West Bank, the Israeli army and the
Palestinian health ministry said. “An assailant armed with a knife” approached a
military post and stabbed a soldier, the army said in a statement, adding that
another soldier opened fire and “neutralized” the assailant. It said the
“moderately” wounded soldier was “evacuated to a hospital for medical attention,
while fully conscious, and his family has been informed.” The Palestinian health
ministry said it had been informed of the death of a young man near Hebron, but
did not immediately identify him. Israel has occupied the West Bank since 1967,
when it captured the territory from Jordan. About 475,000 Jewish settlers
currently live in the West Bank in communities considered illegal by most of the
international community, alongside some 2.8 million Palestinians.
Extremist lawmaker surges ahead of elections in Israel
Associated Press/September 02/2022
Israeli lawmaker Itamar Ben-Gvir calls his Arab colleagues "terrorists." He
wants to deport his political opponents, and in his youth, his views were so
extreme that the army banned him from compulsory military service. Yet today,
the populist lawmaker who was once relegated to the margins of Israeli politics
is surging ahead in the polls ahead of November elections. He has received the
blessing of former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and is poised to emerge as
a major force that could propel the onetime premier back to power. Ben-Gvir's
stunning rise is the culmination of years of efforts by the media-savvy lawmaker
to gain legitimacy. But it also reflects a rightward shift in the Israeli
electorate that has brought his religious, ultranationalist ideology into the
mainstream and all but extinguished hopes for Palestinian independence. "Over
the last year I've been on a mission to save Israel," Ben-Gvir recently told
reporters. "Millions of citizens are waiting for a real right-wing government.
The time has come to give them one." Ben-Gvir, 46, has been a fixture of
Israel's extreme right for more than two decades, gaining notoriety in his youth
as a disciple of the late radical rabbi, Meir Kahane. He first became a national
figure when he famously broke a hood ornament off then-Prime Minister Yitzhak
Rabin's car in 1995. "We got to his car, and we'll get to him too," he said,
just weeks before Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish extremist opposed to his
peace efforts with the Palestinians.
Kahane's violent anti-Arab ideology -- which included calls to ban Jewish-Arab
intermarriage and for the mass expulsion of Palestinians -- was considered so
repugnant that Israel banned him from parliament and the U.S. listed his party
as a terrorist group. Kahane himself was assassinated by an Arab assailant in
New York in 1990. But in recent years, his followers and some of his ideas have
made their way to the Israeli mainstream — in large part thanks to Ben-Gvir. He
transitioned into politics last year after a career as a lawyer defending
radical Jewish West Bank settlers. His intimate knowledge of the law has helped
him test the boundaries of the country's incitement laws and avoid sanctions
that have prevented some of his closest associates from running in elections.
Ben-Gvir, for instance, calls Kahane "righteous and holy" but also says he
doesn't agree with everything his former mentor said. He's careful to limit his
own calls for expulsion to those who engage in violence and lawmakers — Jewish
or Arab — who he says undermine the state. Before entering politics, he removed
a photo of Baruch Goldstein -- a Jewish militant who gunned down 29 Palestinians
in a mosque in 1994 -- from his living room. He no longer allows his supporters
to chant "Death to Arabs" at political rallies. Instead, they are told to say,
"Death to terrorists!"
Supporters say Ben-Gvir has changed, been misunderstood, or wrongly painted an
extremist.
"People mature. People develop," said Nevo Cohen, Ben-Gvir's campaign manager.
"They stuck a label on Ben-Gvir that is totally wrong."Ben-Gvir's office turned
down an interview request. But he makes frequent appearances on Israeli TV and
radio, displaying a cheerful demeanor, quit wit and knack for deflecting
criticism as he banters with his hosts. He also has tapped into a wave of
anti-Arab and nationalist sentiment driven by years of violence, failed peace
efforts and demographic changes. Ben-Gvir's supporters are largely religious and
ultra-Orthodox Jews, who tend to have large families, and also come from the
influential West Bank settler movement. Ben-Gvir himself lives in a hard-line
settlement next to the West Bank city of Hebron, home to more than 200,000
Palestinians. "He is a populist demagogue. He plays on the sentiments of hate
and fear of Arabs," said Shuki Friedman, an expert on Israel's far right at the
Jewish People Policy Institute. "He interviews well, he is good on camera and he
has had plenty of screen time that has given him legitimacy."
In the opposition over the past year, Ben-Gvir has positioned himself as a
rabble rouser against the government -- the first ever to have an Arab party as
a member. He publicly quarreled with Arab lawmakers in scenes captured on camera
and widely broadcast.
In the tense run-up to last year's Gaza war, he staged provocative visits to
Arab neighborhoods, rallying ultranationalist supporters to confront
Palestinians and assert "Jewish Power" — the name of his party. He set up an
outdoor parliamentary "office" in an Arab neighborhood of east Jerusalem where
Jewish settlers are trying to expel Palestinians from their homes, setting off a
melee. He later called for police to use live fire against Palestinian
protesters at a flashpoint holy site. His surge in the polls has made him a
central figure in Netanyahu's comeback strategy. Netanyahu is on trial for
corruption, and the public is again torn over his fitness to rule. After four
consecutive inconclusive elections, Netanyahu and his Likud party hope to break
the logjam with Ben-Gvir's support.
"Yes, Ben-Gvir is someone very militant and yes, sometimes a little provocative,
but he is someone who cares about Israel," said Likud lawmaker and Netanyahu
confidant Miki Zohar, who insisted Ben-Gvir would fall in line under a
Netanyahu-led government. Last week, Netanyahu personally brokered a deal
between Ben-Gvir and a rival far-right leader, Bezalel Smotrich, to ensure they
run together. If they hadn't, Smotrich might not have made it into parliament,
depriving Netanyahu of a critical source of support. "Joining forces is the
order of the day," Netanyahu said.
One recent poll forecast Ben-Gvir's alliance with 12 seats, which would make it
parliament's fourth-largest. That means Netanyahu almost certainly would make
Ben-Gvir a Cabinet minister if he can form a government. Ben-Gvir has said his
first order of business would be to pass a law allowing deportations of those
who allegedly subvert the country and its security forces. He has proposed
imposing the death penalty for "terrorists" and granting immunity to soldiers
accused of committing violent crimes against Palestinians. Thabet Abu Rass, the
Arab co-director of the Abraham Initiatives, which promotes Jewish-Arab
coexistence, said the mainstreaming of figures like Ben-Gvir is not only a
threat to Israel's Arab citizens, but to the country as a whole. By branding
Arab members of parliament as traitors who should be expelled, Ben Gvir
delegitimizes the political participation of Arab citizens — who make up around
20% of Israel's population — and the possibility of Jewish-Arab partnerships,
Abu Rass said. "It's very dangerous for the whole Israeli society," he said.
"It's going to bring about the collapse of democracy."
Argentina: Attempt to kill VP fails when handgun misfires
Associated Press/September 02/2022
A man tried to kill Argentina's politically powerful Vice President Cristina
Fernández outside her home, but the handgun misfired, the country's president
said. The man was quickly overpowered by her security officers in the incident
Thursday night, officials said. President Alberto Fernández, who is not related
to the vice president, a former president herself, said the pistol did not
discharge when the man tried to fire it. "A man pointed a firearm at her head
and pulled the trigger," the president said in a national broadcast following
the incident. He said the firearm was loaded with five bullets but "didn't fire
even though the trigger was pulled."The vice president did not appear to have
suffered any injury, and the man was overpowered within seconds as he stood
among a crowd of her supporters. Gina De Bai, a witness who was near the vice
president during the incident, told The Associated Press she heard "the sound of
the trigger being pulled." She said she didn't realize it was a handgun until
the man was rushed by security personnel. President Fernández called it "the
most serious incident since we recovered democracy" in 1983 after a military
dictatorship and urged political leaders, and society at large, to repudiate the
attempted shooting.
The attack came as the vice president is facing a trial for alleged acts of
corruption during her 2007-2015 presidency — charges that she vehemently denies
and that have led her supporters to surround her home in the upscale Recoleta
neighborhood of Argentina's capital. Video broadcast on local television
channels showed Fernández exiting her vehicle surrounded by supporters when a
man is seen extending his hand with what looks like a pistol. The vice president
ducks as people around the apparent gunman appear shocked at what is happening.
Unverified video posted on social media shows the pistol almost touched
Fernández's face. The alleged gunman was identified as Fernando André Sabag
Montiel, a Brazilian citizen, said an official at the Security Ministry, who
spoke on condition of anonymity. He does not have a criminal record, the
official said. ading that the weapon was a .32-caliber Bersa. The president
declared Friday a holiday "so the Argentine people can, in peace and harmony,
express itself in defense of life, democracy and in solidarity with our vice
president."Supporters of the vice president have been gathering in the streets
surrounding her home since last week, when a prosecutor called for a 12-year
sentence for Fernández as well as a life-long prohibition in holding public
office in the corruption case. Shortly after the incident, government officials
were quick to decry what they called an assassination attempt. "When hate and
violence are imposed over the debate of ideas, societies are destroyed and
generate situations like the one seen today: an assassination attempt," Economy
Minister Sergio Massa said.
Cabinet ministers issued a news release saying they "energetically condemn the
attempted homicide" of the vice president. "What happened tonight is of extreme
gravity and threatens democracy, institutions and the rule of law."
Former President Mauricio Macri, a conservative who succeeded the left-of-center
Fernández in the presidency, also condemned the attack. "This very serious event
demands an immediate and profound clarification by the judiciary and security
forces," Macri wrote on Twitter.
Patricia Bullrich, president of the opposition Republican Proposal party,
criticized President Fernández's reaction to the attack, accusing him of
"playing with fire." She said that "instead of seriously investigating a serious
incident, he accuses the opposition and the press, decreeing a national holiday
to mobilize activists." Tensions have been running high in the Recoleta
neighborhood since the weekend, when the vice president's supporters clashed
with police in the streets surrounding her apartment amid an effort by law
enforcement officers to clear the area. Following the clashes, what had been a
strong police presence around the vice president's apartment was reduced. When
Fernández leaves her apartment every day at around noon, she greets supporters
and signs autographs before getting in her vehicle to go to the Senate. She
repeats the same routine every evening. Following the incident, allies of the
vice president quickly pointed the finger at the opposition for what they said
is hateful speech that promotes violence. In recent days, several key officials
have said opposition leaders were looking for a fatality. "This is a historic
event in Argentina that must be a before-and-after," Buenos Aires Gov. Axel
Kicillof said. Regional leaders also condemned the attack. "We send our
solidarity to the vice president in this attempt against her life," Venezuelan
President Nicolás Maduro said on Twitter. Former Brazilian President Luiz Inácio
Lula Da Silva, who is a candidate in that nation's presidential election next
month, also expressed solidarity with Fernández, calling her a "victim of a
fascist criminal who doesn't know how to respect differences and diversity."
Question: “Did Jesus really exist?”
GotQuestions.org?/September 02/2022
Answer: Typically, when this question is asked, the person asking qualifies the
question with “outside of the Bible.” We do not grant this idea that the Bible
cannot be considered a source of evidence for the existence of Jesus. The New
Testament contains hundreds of references to Jesus Christ. There are those who
date the writing of the Gospels to the second century A.D., more than 100 years
after Jesus’ death. Even if this were the case (which we strongly dispute), in
terms of ancient evidences, writings less than 200 years after events took place
are considered very reliable evidences. Further, the vast majority of scholars
(Christian and non-Christian) will grant that the Epistles of Paul (at least
some of them) were in fact written by Paul in the middle of the first century
A.D., less than 40 years after Jesus’ death. In terms of ancient manuscript
evidence, this is extraordinarily strong proof of the existence of a man named
Jesus in Israel in the early first century A.D.
It is also important to recognize that in A.D. 70, the Romans invaded and
destroyed Jerusalem and most of Israel, slaughtering its inhabitants. Entire
cities were literally burned to the ground. We should not be surprised, then, if
much evidence of Jesus’ existence was destroyed. Many of the eyewitnesses of
Jesus would have been killed. These facts likely limited the amount of surviving
eyewitness testimony of Jesus.
Considering that Jesus’ ministry was largely confined to a relatively
unimportant area in a small corner of the Roman Empire, a surprising amount of
information about Jesus can be drawn from secular historical sources. Some of
the more important historical evidences of Jesus include the following:
The first-century Roman Tacitus, who is considered one of the more accurate
historians of the ancient world, mentioned superstitious “Christians” (from
Christus, which is Latin for Christ), who suffered under Pontius Pilate during
the reign of Tiberius. Suetonius, chief secretary to Emperor Hadrian, wrote that
there was a man named Chrestus (or Christ) who lived during the first century
(Annals 15.44).
Flavius Josephus is the most famous Jewish historian. In his Antiquities he
refers to James, “the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ.” There is a
controversial verse (18:3) that says, “Now there was about this time Jesus, a
wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man. For he was one who wrought
surprising feats....He was [the] Christ...he appeared to them alive again the
third day, as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other
wonderful things concerning him.” One version reads, “At this time there was a
wise man named Jesus. His conduct was good and [he] was known to be virtuous.
And many people from among the Jews and the other nations became his disciples.
Pilate condemned him to be crucified and to die. But those who became his
disciples did not abandon his discipleship. They reported that he had appeared
to them three days after his crucifixion, and that he was alive; accordingly he
was perhaps the Messiah, concerning whom the prophets have recounted wonders.”
Julius Africanus quotes the historian Thallus in a discussion of the darkness
that followed the crucifixion of Christ (Extant Writings, 18).
Pliny the Younger, in Letters 10:96, recorded early Christian worship practices
including the fact that Christians worshiped Jesus as God and were very ethical,
and he includes a reference to the love feast and Lord’s Supper.
The Babylonian Talmud (Sanhedrin 43a) confirms Jesus’ crucifixion on the eve of
Passover and the accusations against Christ of practicing sorcery and
encouraging Jewish apostasy.
Lucian of Samosata was a second-century Greek writer who admits that Jesus was
worshiped by Christians, introduced new teachings, and was crucified for them.
He said that Jesus’ teachings included the brotherhood of believers, the
importance of conversion, and the importance of denying other gods. Christians
lived according to Jesus’ laws, believed themselves to be immortal, and were
characterized by contempt for death, and renunciation of material goods.
Mara Bar-Serapion confirms that Jesus was thought to be a wise and virtuous man,
was considered by many to be the king of Israel, was put to death by the Jews,
and lived on in the teachings of His followers.
Then we have all the Gnostic writings (The Gospel of Truth, The Apocryphon of
John, The Gospel of Thomas, The Treatise on Resurrection, etc.) that all mention
Jesus.
In fact, we can almost reconstruct the gospel just from early non-Christian
sources: Jesus was called the Christ (Josephus), did “magic,” led Israel into
new teachings, and was hanged on Passover for them (Babylonian Talmud) in Judea
(Tacitus), but claimed to be God and would return (Eliezar), which his followers
believed, worshiping Him as God (Pliny the Younger).
There is overwhelming evidence for the existence of Jesus Christ, both in
secular and biblical history. Perhaps the greatest evidence that Jesus did exist
is the fact that literally thousands of Christians in the first century AD,
including the twelve apostles, were willing to give their lives as martyrs for
Jesus Christ. People will die for what they believe to be true, but no one will
die for what they know to be a lie.
The Latest LCCC English analysis &
editorials from miscellaneous sources published
on September 02-03/2022
U.S. says latest Iranian nuclear response is ‘not
constructive’
Karen DeYoung/The Washington Post/September 02/2022
Prospects for reviving the Iran nuclear deal appeared to take a step backward
Thursday as the Biden administration said Tehran’s latest proposals, submitted
through the European Union, were “not constructive.”
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war in Ukraine.
“We can confirm that we have received Iran’s response,” State Department
spokesman Vedant Patel said in a statement. “We are studying it and will respond
… but unfortunately it is not constructive.”
For weeks, the United States and Iran have gone back and forth with replies and
counter-replies to a “final” text offered in July by the European Union, which
has coordinated nearly a year and a half of negotiations to restore the 2015
nuclear agreement signed between world powers and Iran. E.U. foreign policy
chief Josep Borrell deemed “reasonable” an initial Iranian response to the text
last month but said Iran had requested some “adjustments.”
Two weeks ago, the Biden administration sent its response to the text and to
Iran’s requests for changes. The U.S. statement came after Iran submitted its
latest response.
Neither Iran nor the United States has made public its submissions, but the
exchanges raised optimism that the negotiations had reached an endgame and there
was momentum for a settlement. Earlier this week, Borrell said he hoped a deal
could be reached “in the coming days.” In a speech to ambassadors Wednesday in
Paris, French President Emmanuel Macron said he hoped the agreement would be
concluded “in the next few days.”
Under the terms of the original deal, U.S. and international sanctions on Iran
were lifted in exchange for its submission to strict curbs on its nuclear
program and international monitoring. President Donald Trump withdrew the United
States from the agreement — signed by Britain, France, Germany, Russia and
China, along with the United States and Iran — in 2018, re-imposing lifted
sanctions and adding many more.
In response, Iran resumed its pre-deal nuclear program and speeded it up,
increasing the quantity and quality of its uranium enrichment far beyond the
prescribed limits, and blocked some inspection measures.
President Biden came to office pledging to restore the original agreement,
saying it was the best way to prevent Iran from building a nuclear weapon. Iran
has said its nuclear program is only for peaceful purposes.
The very real dangers of Biden’s pending Iran nuclear deal
Dr. Eric R. Mandel/The Hill/September 02/2022
With a renewed nuclear deal reportedly imminent, the Biden administration has
touted its hard-nosed negotiating tactics forcing Iran to accept that its
Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) will remain on the State Department’s
list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations. While that’s technically accurate, the
real question is what practical effect any new deal might have on IRGC finances
and whether they would benefit from the $100 billion a year in sanctions relief
likely to also be part of a renewed agreement.
Most people think of the IRGC as a military and terrorist organization, but in
reality, they control a significant percentage of Iran’s everyday economy. In
2010, Iran expert Meir Javedanfar said, “A conservative estimate would be to say
that the IRGC now controls at least half of [Iranian] government-owned
companies.” Alireza Nader of Rand Corporation has noted, “The Revolutionary
Guards is the key economic player in Iran and control(s) Iran’s official and
illicit economy.” Indeed, their investments include domestic construction and
infrastructure, energy production, medical surgeries, food, education,
transportation and, of course, military infrastructure.
There is little difference between the Iranian government under the control of
Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, his heir apparent, President Ebrahim Raisi, and the
Revolutionary Guards. They are intertwined. According to Reuters, the IRGC is a
more than 125,000-strong military force, “is also an industrial empire with
political clout, and is loyal to the supreme leader.” BBC reported that the
IRGC’s Khatam al-Anbia Construction Company “control(s) around a third of Iran’s
economy through a series of subsidiaries and trusts” worth an estimated $100
billion. Western distinctions in negotiations between the IRGC and the Iranian
government are artificial and misleading, undermining our strategic goals.
According to Mark Dubowitz, chief executive of the Foundation for Defense of
Democracies (FDD), “The Biden administration’s decision to keep the IRGC on the
Foreign Terrorist Organizations list now looks like a legal sleight of hand and
not like a principled defense of that designation. If reports are true, the
Biden team has agreed to gut IRGC sanctions and allow tens of billions of
dollars to flow to terrorists actively plotting to murder even more Americans.”
His colleague, Richard Goldberg, added, “Either President Biden believes the
IRGC is a terrorist organization, or he doesn’t. If this were ISIS or al Qaeda,
would anyone be offering sanctions relief to their top financiers or negotiating
how foreigners could do business with their affiliates?”
Secondary sanctions penalize countries and entities that deal with and profit
from trade with a sanctioned organization. The 2015 nuclear agreement known as
the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) bypassed restrictions on the IRGC
by removing sanctions on whole segments of the Iranian economy controlled by the
organization. According to the FDD experts, in a new agreement the “full
enforcement of U.S. secondary sanctions against IRGC affiliates will be lifted …
with additional terrorism-sanctions relief for the IRGC’s top financiers,
including the Central Bank of Iran and the National Iranian Oil Company.”
The Central Bank of Iran (CBI) has a history of subterfuge, hiding and
transferring funds for the IRGC to support its terrorist networks in Lebanon,
Syria, Iraq and Yemen. This has included circumventing sanctions on oil exports
and covering up the true source of transactions. With a new deal, sanctions
against the CBI reportedly will be lifted, allowing it to more easily cover the
financial tracks of the Revolutionary Guards.
If you expect the Biden administration to enforce secondary sanctions against
the IRGC after a new Iran deal comes about, then you also may believe that the
JCPOA will permanently end Iran’s ability to develop atomic weapons and that the
moon is made of green cheese. As it was with President Obama,
non-nuclear-related sanctions for terrorism, human rights abuses and missile
proliferation will be minimally enforced so as not to rock the boat, by
displaying Iran’s defiance.
The bottom line is that Iran’s hundreds of billions of dollars in sanctions
relief will benefit the IRGC and its malign activities. The Foreign Terrorist
Organizations designation is more for show than effect, since there will be no
secondary sanctions on businesses that have one degree of separation from the
IRGC. The organization’s prosperity provides the financial resources needed to
support proxies such as Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and
Iranian-controlled Popular Mobilization Units.
Can Congress do anything to stop the financial enrichment of the IRGC in the
Biden administration’s new nuclear deal? No. By law, the Iran Nuclear Agreement
Review Act of 2015, sanctions relief must be reviewed by Congress. There is
little doubt that all Republicans will vote against lifting sanctions and almost
all Democrats will support it. Even if a majority of Congress were to vote
against sanctions relief in a renewed deal, Biden would veto that decision.
What Gorbachev taught us about leadership
Biden’s student loan bailout and the death of skin in the game
Defenders of this deal claim it is better than no deal, because at least there
will be some temporary restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program. They point to
North Korea, noting there are no agreements or hope for reining in a fanatical
regime.
Unfortunately, this bad deal with Iran will not be better than having no deal.
Providing financial support for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps will feed
the regime’s appetite for expansionism and terrorism, increasing the potential
for a regional war. In a few years, any nuclear restrictions will expire, and a
Middle East nuclear arms race inevitably will follow. How would any of this
advance America’s national security interests?
Dr. Eric R. Mandel is the director of MEPIN, the Middle East Political
Information Network. He regularly briefs members of Congress and their foreign
policy aides. He is the senior security editor for the Jerusalem Report. Follow
him on Twitter @MepinOrg.
لي سميث من موقع ذي تابلت: لماذا قامت اف بي أي بغارتها على
مقر الرئيس ترامب مار اي لاغو
Why Did the FBI Raid Mar-a-Lago?
Lee Smith/The Tablet/September 02/2022
https://eliasbejjaninews.com/archives/111611/lee-smith-the-tablet-why-did-the-fbi-raid-mar-a-lago%d9%84%d9%8a-%d8%b3%d9%85%d9%8a%d8%ab-%d9%85%d9%86-%d9%85%d9%88%d9%82%d8%b9-%d8%b0%d9%8a-%d8%aa%d8%a7%d8%a8%d9%84%d8%aa-%d9%84%d9%85%d8%a7%d8%b0/
Trump’s ‘stash of nuclear secrets’ is this summer’s Kremlin collusion
conspiracy. But the latest chapter of Russiagate may end with a bang.
he FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago feels like peak Russiagate. There’s the synchronized
press hysteria, moving from one absurd end-of-America “bombshell” to the next,
accompanied by dark intonations regarding secrets about to be revealed and
blustering accusations of high treason. Donald Trump was said to be hoarding
“nuclear documents,” which he planned to peddle for billions to the Saudis.
Who’s buying the map of Fort Knox? Does Trump have access to Colonel Sanders’
secret fried chicken recipe, too?
It’s no laughing matter to the American press, or for the partisan operatives
and national security bureaucrats who feed them their cues. For them, the Mar-a-Lago
raid is Russiagate II: The Palm Beach Papers.
Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines’ proposed damage assessment of
the documents is a remake of the January 2017 intelligence community assessment
which claimed, without evidence, that Vladimir Putin wanted to put Trump in the
Oval Office. The extensive redactions on the affidavit the FBI used to get a
warrant to raid Trump’s home are akin to the excessive redactions on the
application that the FBI showed a secret court in 2016 to get a warrant to spy
on the Trump campaign. What was true for the original Russiagate holds here,
too: The redactions are designed to hide not state secrets, but government
corruption.
The Mar-a-Lago raid feels like Russiagate because, well, it is Russiagate: a
conspiracy theory weaponized by the country’s courtier class to serve the
interests of a delirious and deracinated oligarchy, spawning daily prophesies of
doom fed by an endless supply of national security “leaks” asserting that the
former commander-in-chief really was and is a secret Russian agent. And proof of
the president’s treachery, chant the priestly keepers of the “collusion”
mysteries, will soon be revealed to the public. It is their blanket
justification for every past crime and every new banana republic-style abuse of
power, accompanied by a drumbeat of ever more outlandish and violent threats.
It is in this context that the FBI’s raid on Mar-a-Lago should be understood:
Government records and reports from political and media operatives and
bureaucrats who previously starred in Russiagate I give evidence that the FBI
raided Trump’s home to seize documents exposing the crimes that the FBI and
Justice Department have been committing since 2016. The fact that Russiagate
shows no signs of ending anytime soon is bad news for the republic, betrayed
from within by a performative elite whose ability to project power outside its
gilded bubble requires a steady supply of paranoia, fear, and hysteria.
The story of the Mar-a-Lago raid begins at the end of Trump’s presidency, when
he declassified documents related to Russiagate. Those records contain evidence
of how the FBI spied on Trump’s campaign, presidential transition team, and
administration. The documents reportedly include transcripts of FBI intercepts
of Trump aides, a declassified copy of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act
(FISA) warrant to collect the electronic communications of Trump campaign
volunteer Carter Page, and reports regarding Christopher Steele and Stefan
Halper, the two main confidential human sources used by the FBI to spy on
Trump’s circle.
Kash Patel, who served in a variety of Pentagon roles and as a principal deputy
in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in the Trump
administration, has said that 60% of the documents related to Russiagate are
already in public view. As lead investigator for the House Intelligence
Committee’s probe of the FBI’s illegal investigation of the Trump campaign,
Patel helped get vital Russiagate records declassified. When Trump named Patel
to the ODNI post, he and acting Director Richard Grenell put more Russiagate
documents before the U.S. public in 2020. Patel has told the press that what
Trump declassified on Jan. 19, 2021, constitutes the remainder of the Russiagate
records—which is what the FBI was apparently after.
So, are the Russiagate documents secret? With hours left in Trump’s presidency,
the DOJ raised “privacy concerns” about Trump’s declassification, and White
House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows agreed to submit the documents for a final
review. “I am returning the bulk of the binder of declassified documents to the
Department of Justice,” Meadows wrote in a memo, “with the instruction that the
Department must expeditiously conduct a Privacy Act review under the standards
that the Department of Justice would normally apply, redact material
appropriately, and release the remaining material with redactions applied.”
The problem, however, is that Biden’s DOJ, which was tasked with conducting that
review, is staffed with key operatives who targeted Trump starting in 2016, like
Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco. As Barack Obama’s Homeland Security
adviser, Monaco met in the White House with Haines, then deputy national
security adviser (and former deputy CIA director), and National Security Adviser
Susan Rice, who is now director of Biden’s Domestic Policy Council, to push the
Trump-Russia narrative. As far as Monaco and her confederates were concerned,
once Meadows turned over the declassified documents, the national security
establishment was in the clear: The documents would never be seen again.
After Trump’s departure, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA)
demanded Trump hand over papers the former president claimed as his own.
Starting in the spring of 2021, Trump’s lawyers and NARA officials went back and
forth over certain items, like his correspondence with North Korean leader Kim
Jong-un and a letter from Obama. Eventually, the Trump team agreed to hand over
15 boxes’ worth of records. On Jan. 18, 2022, NARA retrieved the documents from
Mar-a-Lago, including the Kim letters. (Press reports concerning nuclear
“secrets” in Trump’s possession seem to be purposeful misrepresentations of his
correspondence with the North Korean dictator, with whom he sought to strike a
nuclear accord.)
The archives and DOJ tracks crossed on Feb. 9, when NARA told federal law
enforcement that the 15 boxes contained classified information. Rep. Carolyn
Maloney, D-N.Y., made this information public when she wrote a letter to the
archives the same day asking if the 15 boxes included classified information.
NARA officials responded that they did, and that they were in communication with
the Justice Department. The stage was thus set for the Russiagate revival, which
began three months later.
In a May 5 article, Breitbart News asked Patel to comment on reports that the
former president had been holding classified material at Mar-a-Lago. No, said
Patel. He explained that while president, “Trump declassified whole sets of
materials.” “The president has unilateral authority to declassify documents,”
said Patel. “He exercised it here in full.”Patel told Breitbart that he wouldn’t
get into
about the documents that Trump had officially made public. Despite the fact that
the material was no longer classified, the former federal prosecutor suspected
that the press would nonetheless accuse him of illegally disclosing government
secrets. So he vaguely indicated what the documents contained.
“It’s information that Trump felt spoke to matters regarding everything from
Russiagate to the Ukraine impeachment fiasco to major national security matters
of great public importance,” said Patel, “anything the president felt the
American people had a right to know is in there and more.”
It seems that the FBI and DOJ may have interpreted Patel to mean that he had
seen the declassified Russiagate documents at Mar-A-Lago. Maybe they thought
there were copies of the records. They’d demonized Trump for six years—after all
that time, they likely came to believe the image of him they’d pushed through
the media. He was capable of committing any outrage—even copying the documents
to protect himself, which, as seasoned bureaucrats, is precisely what they would
have done. And hadn’t Patel intimated that among the papers Trump kept at Mar-a-Lago
were the very records exposing their crimes?
On May 11, less than a week after the Breitbart story, the DOJ obtained a grand
jury subpoena to search Trump’s home. But before visiting Mar-a-Lago, they made
a “preliminary review” of the 15 boxes of NARA material that they’d ignored for
four months.
According to the affidavit, between May 16 and 18, a team of FBI agents poured
through the documents. But they couldn’t have found any of the Russiagate
documents Patel had referred to in the Breitbart article, because, according to
a July 2022 article by reporter John Solomon, the archives did not have the
declassified documents.
Did Trump have them? It seems the Justice Department was determined to find out.
On June 3, a DOJ official and three FBI agents visited Mar-a-Lago on official
business. Trump hailed them cheerfully. “I appreciate the job you’re doing,” he
said to the law enforcement officials. “Anything you need, let us know.”
The agents asked to see the storage locker where Trump kept mementos from his
term in office. Shortly after the visit, DOJ sent a letter to his aides
instructing them to further secure the facility. Trump’s staff complied by
adding a second lock. With DOJ trying to flush Trump out by showing up at his
door, they wanted to find out who went into the facility after they officially
warned that the facility wasn’t secure. It seems they were looking for someone
in particular.
On June 21, Patel announced that he and Solomon had been appointed by Trump to
obtain the declassified Russiagate documents from the archives: Patel said he
was going to post them on his website. DOJ, however, already knew what Patel and
Solomon would only discover a month later: The archives didn’t have the
declassified documents. So if Patel said he would post them, law enforcement may
have wondered, where would he get them from?
The answer must have seemed clear: Mar-a-Lago. On June 22, the Justice
Department subpoenaed surveillance video footage of the storage locker.
According to a New York Times story, sourced to “people familiar with the
tapes,” “video showed boxes being moved out of the storage room sometime around
the contact from the Justice Department.” Video “also showed boxes being slipped
into different containers.” With this, the FBI was ready to move on Trump’s
home.
Still, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland deliberated for weeks about whether
to raid a a former president’s home. It had never been done before. Was it his
destiny to be the man who ushered the United States into such dangerous
territory? But the pressure to get Trump was building. It likely came from below
(Monaco) and above: President Biden told aides he wanted his top law enforcement
officer to target Trump. Garland finally resolved to pull the trigger. On Aug.
5, the FBI got the warrant for the raid, which took place three days later.
Preserving the stability of the United States at present is something like a
Mexican standoff.
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/fbi-raid-mar-a-lago-trump-russiagate-lee-smith
So was the FBI after what they believed to be Trump’s secret stash of Russiagate
documents? The warrant was drawn so broadly that it allowed the agents to seize
any document from Trump’s term in the White House. But an Aug. 26 New York Times
story confirmed that the FBI was “spurred” to act after discovering Trump had
retained “documents related to the use of ‘clandestine human sources,’”and other
documents related to “foreign intercepts collected under the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act.”
Those at all familiar with Russiagate will recognize these keywords, employed by
the same media organization that won a 2018 Pulitzer Prize for partnering with
U.S. intelligence services to destabilize and delegitimize Trump’s presidency.
The descriptions in the article also line up with what Trump reportedly
declassified before he left the White House.
Yet if what the FBI was after were the Russiagate documents that it imagined
were hidden somewhere at Mar-a-Lago, it’s not clear if the agents found them.
According to the Times story, the safe in Trump’s closet “did not contain the
materials investigators sought.” Maybe the materials were somewhere else.
Perhaps Trump never had them. Trump allies I’ve spoken with don’t think he has
the documents.
Garland’s dilemma now is whether to risk finding out the truth. Press reports
suggest that he is undecided about indicting Trump. That makes sense—it would
likely sow chaos across the country and, Garland must worry, perhaps force
Trump’s hand. For if the former president does have the documents, in whatever
form, and posts them, it might bring the house down on the U.S. national
security apparatus and the Democratic administration that it shields.
The effect of the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago is therefore to obscure the real
scandal: U.S. spies committed a series of crimes in their effort to unseat a
U.S. president, and then ignored the lawful orders of that president in order to
keep their crimes hidden from the American public.
What is preserving the stability of the United States at present is therefore
something like a Mexican standoff. Does Trump actually have the documents? If
so, will he put them before the public? Will Garland indict him, and risk
finding out? Given the Biden administration’s tendency to instrumentalize the
violence of its rhetoric and turn federal bureaucracies loose on its political
opponents, it is likely that the standoff will not hold for long.
**Lee Smith is the author of The Permanent Coup: How Enemies Foreign and
Domestic Targeted the American President (2020).
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/fbi-raid-mar-a-lago-trump-russiagate-lee-smith
Syria is becoming the centre of an intensifying regional
contest involving Iran
Hagai M Segal/The National/September 02/2022
Aseries of US air strikes in Syria last week against Iranian targets there has
not just publicly highlighted a growing regional conflict between Iran and its
numerous adversaries, but also the increasing geographic and strategic
centrality of Syria to this conflict. It quite possibly signals a new phase –
and new dangers – in a contest that has been developing and growing for over a
decade, and that now threatens to boil over. Perceptions about the Iranian
regime's nefarious ambitions have persisted – in the US, the Arab states and
Israel – ever since the Islamic Revolution in 1979. But it was only with the
Arab uprisings starting in late 2010 – when a number of entrenched Arab
dictators across the Middle East fell, and the political reset button was
pressed on numerous countries – that an accelerated regional strategic contest
truly began.
Across the Middle East, states began precariously transitioning to new political
futures, and in some instances Iran was on one side and US-allied Arab states on
the other in a competition for influence. And it was the popular uprising in
Syria that brought the Iranians so fully into Syria, with Tehran and its
Lebanese proxy Hezbollah committing huge military resources from late-2011 to
keep the Assad regime in power. There is now a grand hegemonic contest from the
shores of the Mediterranean to the border of Afghanistan. It dominates the civil
wars in Syria and Yemen, looms over the domestic politics of Iraq and the
collapsing Lebanese state, and has also led to a complete redrawing of
traditional alliances in the Middle East.
The dynamic in next-door Lebanon is also key to the rise in tensions in Syria
Iranian-backed attacks on US forces in Iraq are nothing new. A regular
occurrence for nearly two decades, they have intensified over the past two
years, as Tehran has continued to seek "revenge" for the US killing of Qassem
Suleimani, then commander of Iran's Quds Force, in January 2020. But recent
attacks by Tehran-backed groups inside Syria represent a new front in the
hostilities.
The proactive American response to these Iranian attacks is highly significant.
US President Joe Biden has been keen to hold the Middle East at arm’s length,
desiring to keep alive the current nuclear talks with Iran. But the message from
his generals was that Iranian attacks on US assets in Syria – especially two
separate rocket attacks on August 15 – were so brazen that action had to be
taken and a clear message sent.
And this is not occurring in isolation. As Iranian capacity has continued to
grow in Syria, it has become the geography of direct military conflict between
Israel and Iran. Israel has now conducted several hundred raids on Syria, now
numbering over 200 each year. The vast majority of these have been against
Iranian, Hezbollah, or joint Iranian-Syrian targets. Israel is convinced that
Tehran is seeking to create a Shiite military front across Syria and Lebanon, a
threat that Israel believes it must avert before it takes hold.
The centrality of Syria is also being driven by Russia, itself deeply invested
in the country for the past seven years. Moscow’s 2015 intervention in Syria was
to secure its own interests – keep a friendly government in power so it didn’t
lose the small but symbolically important naval facility at Tartus – but it has
since developed an intimate military relationship with Damascus and Tehran. This
included assisting what has been characterised by western powers and
humanitarian organisations as a repression by the Assad regime.
For Syria and Iran, the Russian military operation in Ukraine has been both a
blessing and a curse. On the one hand, it is deepening its alliance – Moscow
needs all its allies right now – but on the other, it has forced significant
Russian military disengagement from Syria.
The Kremlin has just purchased several hundred Iranian military drones to
bolster its efforts in Ukraine. It was even reported in the western media that
the Assad regime would send "thousands" of Syrians to fight for Russia in
Ukraine, though this never came to pass for a combination of reasons. However,
reports over the weekend also claim that Russia has removed a sophisticated air
defence system from Syria – the S300 – returning it home to bolster capability
against Ukraine. This is noteworthy as this system was actually used in May – by
the Russians – to engage Israeli jets on bombing raids in Syria.
The dynamic in next-door Lebanon is also key to the rise in tensions in Syria.
The notion that the chaos in Syria might engulf Lebanon petrifies many a
regional leader, especially with Iran the likely beneficiary.
Lebanon is hanging on to the proverbial cliff by its last fingernail. The World
Bank has characterised its financial crisis as one of the worst in human
history, accusing its leaders of deliberately running the state as a "Ponzi
finance scheme". Things are so desperate that bank robbers are now hailed as
heroes by ordinary Lebanese.
Lebanon coming under Hezbollah control – and thus Iran’s – is a scenario that
many Arab governments fear deeply, but for Israel it would be intolerable. A
"second Iran" in Lebanon, directly bordering Israel and extending Iranian
influence from the Mediterranean to the Caspian Sea, is their ultimate nightmare
scenario. If this occurred, Israeli military intervention would be virtually
guaranteed, and probably lead to a protracted regional conflict.
None of which bodes well for long-suffering Syrians. Over a decade into a
devastating civil war, close to two-thirds of the population are already
internally or externally displaced and more than half the properties in the
country are damaged. With Syria now the key piece in the region’s most dominant
geopolitical chess match, and neighbouring Lebanon on the brink, their misery is
unlikely to be ending soon.
U.S. says latest Iranian nuclear response is ‘not
constructive’
Karen DeYoung/The Washington Post/September 02/2022
Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, right, and European Union foreign
policy chief Josep Borrell meet in Tehran in 2020. Borrell said this week that
he hoped a new nuclear deal with Iran could be reached “in the coming days,” but
the latest response from Tehran makes that doubtful. (Ebrahim Noroozi/AP)
Prospects for reviving the Iran nuclear deal appeared to take a step backward
Thursday as the Biden administration said Tehran’s latest proposals, submitted
through the European Union, were “not constructive.”
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“We can confirm that we have received Iran’s response,” State Department
spokesman Vedant Patel said in a statement. “We are studying it and will respond
… but unfortunately it is not constructive.”
For weeks, the United States and Iran have gone back and forth with replies and
counter-replies to a “final” text offered in July by the European Union, which
has coordinated nearly a year and a half of negotiations to restore the 2015
nuclear agreement signed between world powers and Iran. E.U. foreign policy
chief Josep Borrell deemed “reasonable” an initial Iranian response to the text
last month but said Iran had requested some “adjustments.”
Two weeks ago, the Biden administration sent its response to the text and to
Iran’s requests for changes. The U.S. statement came after Iran submitted its
latest response.
Neither Iran nor the United States has made public its submissions, but the
exchanges raised optimism that the negotiations had reached an endgame and there
was momentum for a settlement. Earlier this week, Borrell said he hoped a deal
could be reached “in the coming days.” In a speech to ambassadors Wednesday in
Paris, French President Emmanuel Macron said he hoped the agreement would be
concluded “in the next few days.”
Under the terms of the original deal, U.S. and international sanctions on Iran
were lifted in exchange for its submission to strict curbs on its nuclear
program and international monitoring. President Donald Trump withdrew the United
States from the agreement — signed by Britain, France, Germany, Russia and
China, along with the United States and Iran — in 2018, re-imposing lifted
sanctions and adding many more.
In response, Iran resumed its pre-deal nuclear program and speeded it up,
increasing the quantity and quality of its uranium enrichment far beyond the
prescribed limits, and blocked some inspection measures.
President Biden came to office pledging to restore the original agreement,
saying it was the best way to prevent Iran from building a nuclear weapon. Iran
has said its nuclear program is only for peaceful purposes.
After the Baghdad Green Zone bloodshed
Ibrahim al-Zobeidi/The Arab Weekly/September 02/2022
There are two categories of Arabs and Iraqis who supported the Sadrists’
demonstrations and sit-ins, their occupation of the House of Representatives,
their siege of the Supreme Judicial Council, their closure of public roads and
their obstruction of the work of institutions, especially public services.
The first category is made up of well-intentioned people who were deluded into
believing that replacing the Coordination Framework with the Sadrist Current, at
the helm of the state, could be achieved against Iran’s will. They thought
achieving that goal could fix wrongs, uproot corrupt practices that have no
redeeming value, ensure security, justice, integrity and independence for Iraq
and send the country back to a welcoming Arab fold.
The second category is composed of malicious and ill-intentioned people who
thrive on hypocrisy, deception, manipulation and the falsification of facts.
Even after Sadr announced his final withdrawal from politics and admitted that
his sympathisers are no different from the impudent militias, the two groups did
not notice that the Iraqi people, who are the only real owners of the cause,
remained cloistered in their homes, refusing to get involved in a personal
conflict pitting the Coordination Framework against the Sadrist Current. The
majority of Iraqis believes that neither of them is fit to rule the country and
that one should wait for the day of final deliverance from both. Both groups did
not realise that Sadr was not driven by the sort of Iraqi patriotism that
carried at its core a nationalist and sectarian hostility towards Iran, the kind
of hostility they thought or wished in fact motivated him.
Moqtada Sadr has been, for years, fidgeting and procrastinating. Sometimes he
revolted and on other days he calmed down. He would leave the Shia house, one
day, angry at his brothers and partners and then return the next. Then came last
elections which filled him with hubris. He thought he had become the new
undisputed leader and that he had already wrested power from his Framework
opponents.
Then there were the recent incidents in the Green Zone. Comrades-in-arms were
killed and the crisis was spinning out of control. Iran was compelled to
intervene forcefully with Sadr, after the visits by the commander of the Quds
Force, Ismail Qaani, and the secret messages conveyed by the Revolutionary
Guards to him failed to change his stubborn attitude. There was a risk he would
dissent from the authority of Iran’s vilayat-i faqih. As we said and have
repeated before, Iraq is Iranian turf, which it controls with US, European,
Russian and Chinese blessing and will continue to do so until further notice.
The statement made by the Sadrist movement’s supreme religious authority,
Ayatollah Kadhim al-Haeri, who told his Sadrist disciples to “obey the ruler,
the leader of the Islamic Revolution, His Eminence, the Great Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei” is nothing but a religious sectarian bullet fired by vilayat-i faqih
at Sadr. It gave him the choice between repentance and martyrdom, so he quickly
chose to irrevocably divorce from politics.
During his last press conference, Sadr not only broke his silence but cursed his
followers with the most vile insults. He ordered them to withdraw from the Green
Zone and instructed them not demonstrate, even peacefully, anymore.
In one hour, they rushed out in droves, carrying their weapons, pots and tents,
so life returned to normal and Nuri al-Maliki, Qais al-Khazali, Faleh al-Fayyad,
Hadi al-Amiri and Ammar al-Hakim went back to their old palaces crowned with
victory.
And from now on, the Iraqis will not hear any more the chants of the Sadrists
(“Iran out, Iran out”). They could start hearing, instead, (“Iran, please come
in”).
It is logical to ask who has lost with Sadr's retirement?
At the top of the list of losers is Sadr’s ally in the Save the Homeland
coalition, Massoud Barzani, who had made excessive and impossible demands that
disconcerted Sadr. Barzani insisted on installing his uncle Hoshyar Zebari as
president of the republic, out of personal calculations and not out of patriotic
opposition to President Barham Salih. Then, when the Federal Court rejected
Zebari’s nomination because of his past censure as minister of finance on
charges of corruption, he requested from Sadr, in return for continuing his
alliance with him, the appointment of Reber Barzani, Masrour Barzani’s
assistant, as president, in addition to further unacceptable demands regarding
Kirkuk, oil and ports, the border and other issues.
The second loser is the Iraqi people, who are full of resentment, anger and
resentful rejection of corruption and the corrupt. Their expected uprising was
aborted by Sadr, after what his followers did, as they entered the Green Zone
with cows, deer, fish and hookahs, tarnishing the reputation of the uprising.
The third losers are members of the Framework Coalition who had no grasp of the
situation. They proved their ignorance, idiocy and greed when they thought they
could just take advantage of the absence of the Sadrists.
No Iraqi believes the Framework’s call to “form a national service government
that will undertake reforms, fight corruption, reject the sectarian quota
system, and restore the prestige of the state, so that everyone can enjoy
security and stability, and speed up the realisation of the aspirations of our
honourable people.” There is no state, no dignity, no justice and no law in the
presence of al-Maliki and his other brothers.
One day, which may not be far off, the bell of anger will toll. The usurped,
plundered and pawned people of Iraq will break their silence to throw away the
hypocrites, the vassals and the counterfeiters and yank the chains of
guardianship and occupation. That day is not far off.
*Ibrahim al-Zobeidi is an Iraqi writer.
Iran is not the answer to Europe’s energy crisis
Luke Coffey/Arab News/September 02/2022
With winter just a few months away, policymakers in Europe are scrambling to
mitigate the impact of a looming energy crisis. Even before Russia’s invasion of
Ukraine in February, Europe was already facing high energy prices. Now they have
soared even higher.The cost per megawatt of electricity in Germany and France
was 10 times higher last week than at the same time last year. Globally, crude
oil prices are higher than they have been in several years. European gas prices
are also increasing year on year.
There are some plans to reduce European dependency on Russian energy. The EU
will implement an embargo on Russian oil at the end of this year. There are
plans to diversify away from Russian natural gas too. Recently the EU signed a
deal with Azerbaijan to import more natural gas from the Caspian region. Italy
and France are looking at options to import more gas from North Africa. However,
the process to diversify from Russian natural gas has moved at a snail’s pace.
Meanwhile, Europe still pays Russia billions of euros each week for natural gas.
This dwarfs the total amount of EU military and humanitarian aid given to
Ukraine, so ironically the EU is actually funding the Kremlin’s war effort.
As European policymakers become more desperate to find alternatives to Russian
energy, they are looking toward Iran. The desperation for new sources of oil and
gas explains the recent enthusiasm by some Europeans, and the Biden
administration, to secure a new deal with Iran over its nuclear program. Iran’s
Oil Minister, Javad Oji, said recently that Tehran was ready to help Europe with
its energy crisis, and many Europeans naively believe Iran has something to
offer.
Every barrel of oil and cubic meter of natural gas that Europeans obtain from
somewhere other than Russia and Iran will make the continent safer
But the hope that Iran can come to Europe’s rescue is not aligned with reality.
Iran produces a lot of natural gas, but most is for domestic consumption. What
little gas may be available for the EU lacks the required pipeline and other
infrastructure for export to Europe. In terms of oil, Iran is better placed to
help, but there are still challenges. Even if a new deal between the
international community and Iran were signed tomorrow, it could take months to
pick apart that vast economic sanctions regime currently in place. During this
time, no oil would be exported to Europe. On top of this, Iran lacks the proper
infrastructure to export significant amounts of oil to Europe because of years
of chronic under investment. So in the case of Iranian oil and gas to Europe,
whatever could be exported would probably be too little and too late for this
winter.
Then there is the moral question about shifting energy reliance away from Moscow
to Tehran. Europe’s Russian gas pipeline debacle — Nord Stream 1 suffers
frequent closures for what Moscow calls “maintenance,” and Nord Stream 2 is
unlikely ever to be operational — are a reminder that dealing with such regimes
is fraught with geopolitical risk. Also, Iran has been providing Russia with
armed drones to be used in Ukraine. Is it wise to buy energy from a country
enabling Russia’s war?
In the short term, EU policymakers are doing everything they can to prepare for
the coming winter. The good news is that natural gas storage facilities are on
average 80 percent full, largely thanks to an increase in LNG imports mainly
from the US and additional piped natural gas from places other than Russia. If
thiswinter is not unusually harsh and cold, the EU just might get by.
In the meantime, Europe needs to learn the lessons of how it got into this
crisis to begin with. The inconvenient truth is that an addiction to cheap gas
from Russia, a religious-like determination to implement a green agenda at all
costs, and a rejection of nuclear power based on emotion rather than science,
created this crisis. In the longer term, every barrel of oil and cubic meter of
natural gas that Europeans obtain from somewhere other than Russia and Iran will
make the continent safer. While the immediate priority for Europe is getting
through this winter, in the long term it must develop a new energy strategy.
The recent agreement between the EU and Azerbaijan to increase natural gas
exports from the Caspian Sea is a great first step, but Europe can do more. For
example, the EU can work with Turkmenistan to encourage the construction of a
trans-Caspian pipeline to bring natural gas from Central Asia to Europe while
bypassing Russia and Iran. Europe can also do more to explore energy
possibilities in the eastern Mediterranean and North Africa.
Meanwhile the Biden administration needs to remove the red tape that prevents
the US energy sector from reaching its full potential. The more American oil and
gas that can be exported to Europe, the better.
If steps are taken now, Europe can be on the path to energy sector for the first
time in decades. Now is the time for action.
• Luke Coffey is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute. Twitter: @LukeDCoffey
West should remind Iran of its vulnerabilities
Dr. Azeem Ibrahim/Arab News/September 02/2022
Once again, American and European negotiators gather to try to reach terms with
Iran. They hope to prevent the country from acquiring nuclear weapons, which it
has been on the threshold of doing for months, if not years.
Any optimism felt by the negotiators at the beginning of the process has long
since gone. Each week is called a vital one by all concerned and a deal is
always just out of reach. Hard work persists, but few conclusions are ever
reached.
Many negotiators privately conclude that Iran does not want a deal. It is almost
a nuclear power. It has an expanding and increasingly decisive proxy network
operating across the entire Middle East region. A new deal would be nice. It
would bring in sanctions relief, perhaps a route to newfound prosperity. But for
the Iranian leadership, a deal would only be an ornament to a system they like
very much as it is.
Iranian militias happily operate in at least four countries. In Lebanon,
Hezbollah dominates and paralyzes the state. In Syria, the Assad regime remains
in power at Iran’s word — a pliant part of its “axis of resistance” to Israel,
the US and the world at large. Yemen’s Houthis fire Iranian missiles at Saudi
Arabia and now the UAE; no one outside the region seems very interested in
stopping them. And in Iraq, a country increasingly pulled apart by civil
discord, Iranian allies sit atop key government ministries, with their heavily
armed supporters taking to the streets to crush or control any displays of
popular discontent.
If you had a revolution to spread, as the Iranian leaders surely believe they
do, could you ask for a more attractive environment in which to do it?
But the world still has some cards to play. Iran’s economy is poor and it is
heavily dominated by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The threat of
further sanctions would affect the wealth of the Guards, and its leaders. This
is something of an incentive to make terms.
With very little extra effort from the US and the European powers, Iran’s entire
imperial project could be destabilized
More widely, Iran’s networks may be wide-spanning and increasingly well
entrenched, but they are brittle. Bashar Assad is unsafe in Syria and the
militias that keep him there were unable to take the north of the country after
a brief show of force from Turkey in 2020. One NATO-standard military, standing
alone, decisively stopped the full force of Iran’s regional project from
capturing Syria’s north. There are lessons here for the US and Europe.
If America and its allies were serious, they could make credible threats against
the survival of Assad and these militias. If Iran wanted to keep them, they
would be prepared to seek better terms.
In Lebanon, there is real mileage in political reform. The country is poor and
badly governed and the politicians — including Hezbollah — are unpopular. When
French president Emmanuel Macron arrived after the Beirut explosion and promised
to rebuild Lebanese politics, he was briefly wildly popular. He failed to follow
through, but Europe as a whole, or the US, could show more willing. Very soon,
and with a little external support, true democrats could undermine Hezbollah’s
stranglehold on Lebanon at the ballot box.
In Iraq, the US faces a mutating and cynical patchwork of militias, which not
infrequently attack the American embassy and the international presence on Al-Asad
airbase. Washington has bared its teeth before, killing Qassem Soleimani and Abu
Mahdi Al-Muhandis in Baghdad in January 2020. Other militia leaders plot to kill
Americans every day. The US could easily show the Iranians that it knows where
they live. In Yemen, the world could return its eye to the ball. The Houthis
perpetually seem on the brink of taking Marib and ushering in a new episode of
retaliatory violence. It would only take a word from Joe Biden to say that his
country would not stand for this and can — furthermore — no longer tolerate the
ballistic missile campaign launched from Houthi territory to destabilize the
global oil economy.
With very little extra effort from the US and the European powers, Iran’s entire
imperial project could be destabilized and shaken. Rather than strong and
imperious, Iran could be made to feel overexposed and foolish. No doubt, this
would produce happy results at the nuclear negotiating table.
At a time of economic hardship, many in the US and Europe think they need the
Iranians all the more. This is untrue. Iran’s militia network is a destabilizing
force that has the global economy in its sights. Letting Iran know that this
network is, in fact, quite vulnerable to the disapproval of the democratic world
can have only positive effects.
• Dr. Azeem Ibrahim is the director of special initiatives at the Newlines
Institute for Strategy and Policy in Washington D.C. and author of “The
Rohingyas: Inside Myanmar’s Genocide” (Hurst, 2017). Twitter: @AzeemIbrahim