Bismillahirrahmanirrahim
Hujjatul Islam Muhammadi Ghulpaghani:
 Asas Persatuan adalah Mengenal Musuh Bersama |
Menurut Kantor Berita ABNA, Hujjatul
Islam wa Muslimin Muhammadi Ghulpaghani pada hari selasa [13/1] dalam pembukaan
seminar yang bertemakan “Pewaris Cahaya” khusus Rohaniawan Sunni-Syiah di
Ghalestan Iran mengatakan, “Kondisi kekinian sangat memprihatinkan, antar
sesama muslim dan sesama ummat beragama saling bermusuhan dan memendam rasa
nifak satu sama lain. Lebih disayangkan lagi, seruan untuk saling membunuh
tersebut lahir dari ulama dan kaum cerdik pandai yang mengklaim diri sebagai
pengikut Nabi Saw dan ahli Al-Qur’an juga menyebut mereka sebagai ahli agama
dan ahli kitab.”
Islam wa Muslimin Muhammadi Ghulpaghani pada hari selasa [13/1] dalam pembukaan
seminar yang bertemakan “Pewaris Cahaya” khusus Rohaniawan Sunni-Syiah di
Ghalestan Iran mengatakan, “Kondisi kekinian sangat memprihatinkan, antar
sesama muslim dan sesama ummat beragama saling bermusuhan dan memendam rasa
nifak satu sama lain. Lebih disayangkan lagi, seruan untuk saling membunuh
tersebut lahir dari ulama dan kaum cerdik pandai yang mengklaim diri sebagai
pengikut Nabi Saw dan ahli Al-Qur’an juga menyebut mereka sebagai ahli agama
dan ahli kitab.”
Menyinggung kehadiran pejabat
tinggi AS pada acara pemakaman Ariel Sharon, ulama Iran tersebut mengatakan,
“Barang siapa yang mengklaim diri sebagai pejuang kemanusiaan dan pembela
hak-hak manusia harus bisa membuktikan dan menunjukkan aksi-aksi yang nyata.
Apa kita bisa menerima klaim mereka kalau ternyata mereka menunjukkan pujian
dan pengagungan pada tokoh kerusakan dan kezaliman?. AS yang menyebut agresi
militernya untuk membebaskan rakyat Afghanistan dari penguasaan Taliban dan
menjajikan kemerdekaan dan kedaulatan itu justru menyeret Afghanistan ke arah
yang lebih buruk. Mereka menerapkan sistem kapitalisme di Afghanistan,
mengambil seluruh kebijakan dan mengontrol sepenuhnya pemerintahan. Bahkan menerapkan
hokum rimba di Negara tersebut.”
tinggi AS pada acara pemakaman Ariel Sharon, ulama Iran tersebut mengatakan,
“Barang siapa yang mengklaim diri sebagai pejuang kemanusiaan dan pembela
hak-hak manusia harus bisa membuktikan dan menunjukkan aksi-aksi yang nyata.
Apa kita bisa menerima klaim mereka kalau ternyata mereka menunjukkan pujian
dan pengagungan pada tokoh kerusakan dan kezaliman?. AS yang menyebut agresi
militernya untuk membebaskan rakyat Afghanistan dari penguasaan Taliban dan
menjajikan kemerdekaan dan kedaulatan itu justru menyeret Afghanistan ke arah
yang lebih buruk. Mereka menerapkan sistem kapitalisme di Afghanistan,
mengambil seluruh kebijakan dan mengontrol sepenuhnya pemerintahan. Bahkan menerapkan
hokum rimba di Negara tersebut.”
Ghulpaghani menambahkan, “Mereka
bukanlah sahabat bagi kaum muslimin. Kaum muslimin harus waspada kedatangan
mereka dengan menawarkan persahabatan dan perdamaian hanyalah tipu muslihat
belaka.”
bukanlah sahabat bagi kaum muslimin. Kaum muslimin harus waspada kedatangan
mereka dengan menawarkan persahabatan dan perdamaian hanyalah tipu muslihat
belaka.”
“Negera kita pun [Iran] tidak luput
dari fitnah dan konspirasi mereka. Dari dalam maupun luar mereka terus berusaha
menyulut api perpecahan dan konflik, namun berkat sistem pemerintahan Islam di
Negara ini dan dengan keberkahan Wilayatul Faqih kita tetap mampu menjaga
keamanan, tetap mampu menjaga kestabilan dan ketenangan secara menyeluruh di
Negara ini.”
dari fitnah dan konspirasi mereka. Dari dalam maupun luar mereka terus berusaha
menyulut api perpecahan dan konflik, namun berkat sistem pemerintahan Islam di
Negara ini dan dengan keberkahan Wilayatul Faqih kita tetap mampu menjaga
keamanan, tetap mampu menjaga kestabilan dan ketenangan secara menyeluruh di
Negara ini.”
Pada bagian lain sambutannya,
Hujjatul Islam Ghulpaghani menyatakan, “Jika pada fitnah yang terjadi pada
tahun 1388 HS rakyat tidak sedang berada pada kondisi penuh kesadaran dan
kewaspadaan dan tidak pada ketaatan pada Wali Faqih, kita tidak tahu musibah
apa yang akan menimpa Negara ini. Karena itu hari ini, kewajiban segenap
ruhaniawan untuk tetap menjaga kondisi masyarakat agar tetap waspada pada semua
ancaman dan bahaya yang mengintai.”
Hujjatul Islam Ghulpaghani menyatakan, “Jika pada fitnah yang terjadi pada
tahun 1388 HS rakyat tidak sedang berada pada kondisi penuh kesadaran dan
kewaspadaan dan tidak pada ketaatan pada Wali Faqih, kita tidak tahu musibah
apa yang akan menimpa Negara ini. Karena itu hari ini, kewajiban segenap
ruhaniawan untuk tetap menjaga kondisi masyarakat agar tetap waspada pada semua
ancaman dan bahaya yang mengintai.”
“Kecintaan dan kesetiaan rakyat
pada Pemimpin Revolusi Islam harus terus dipupuk dan ditingkatkan seiring
dengan aktivitas musuh yang semakin menggila dan menguat untuk menghancurkan
dan merusak sistem pemerintahan Islami ini. Para ruhaniawan harus berperan
sebagai penyambung penyampaian Rahbar ke telinga masyarakat. Tidak ada malam
dan siang bagi Rahbar kecuali memikirkan mereka yang membutuhkan dan masih
berada pada kondisi yang memprihatinkan. Karenanya dengan adanya Wali Faqih
yang telah kita rasakan manfaatnya, kita harus mensyukuri nikmat dan anugerah
Ilahi ini”
pada Pemimpin Revolusi Islam harus terus dipupuk dan ditingkatkan seiring
dengan aktivitas musuh yang semakin menggila dan menguat untuk menghancurkan
dan merusak sistem pemerintahan Islami ini. Para ruhaniawan harus berperan
sebagai penyambung penyampaian Rahbar ke telinga masyarakat. Tidak ada malam
dan siang bagi Rahbar kecuali memikirkan mereka yang membutuhkan dan masih
berada pada kondisi yang memprihatinkan. Karenanya dengan adanya Wali Faqih
yang telah kita rasakan manfaatnya, kita harus mensyukuri nikmat dan anugerah
Ilahi ini”
“Dengan adanya Wali Faqih, kita
bisa tetap menjaga semangat kebersamaan dan persatuan kaum muslimin di Negara
ini. Kepatuhan kepada Wali Faqih membuat kita tetap terjaga akan adanya musuh
bersama yang dengan itu kita tidak mudah tertipun dan terpedaya. Mengenal musuh
bersama sangat penting dalam merumuskan sikap untuk terus menjaga persatuan
ummat.”
bisa tetap menjaga semangat kebersamaan dan persatuan kaum muslimin di Negara
ini. Kepatuhan kepada Wali Faqih membuat kita tetap terjaga akan adanya musuh
bersama yang dengan itu kita tidak mudah tertipun dan terpedaya. Mengenal musuh
bersama sangat penting dalam merumuskan sikap untuk terus menjaga persatuan
ummat.”
Pertemuan ulama-ulama Sunni-Syiah
yang terselenggara di provinsi Ghalestan Iran tersebut merupakan rangkaian
agenda tahunan untuk menyemarakkan Pekan Persatuan ummat Islam yang berlangsung
setiap tanggal 12-17 Rabiul Awal setiap tahunnya.
yang terselenggara di provinsi Ghalestan Iran tersebut merupakan rangkaian
agenda tahunan untuk menyemarakkan Pekan Persatuan ummat Islam yang berlangsung
setiap tanggal 12-17 Rabiul Awal setiap tahunnya.
Kenyataan Majma' Jahani Ahlul Bait (a.s) terhadap pengharaman Majlis Syura Ulama Bahrain
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Agensi Berita Ahlul Bait (ABNA.co) - Berikutan keputusan mahkamah kerajaan Al Khalifah yang menetapkan pembubaran Majlis Syura Ulama Bahrain dan penyitaan seluruh asetnya, dengan ini Majma' Jahani Ahlul Bait mengeluarkan sebuah kenyataan penting tentang perkara tersebut.
Dalam kenyataan ini, tindakan kerajaan Bahrain dikecam dan seluruh umat Islam dan pejuang kebebasan global diminta membela rakyat negara tersebut.
Terjemah kenyataan tersebut adalah seperti berikut:
Dengan nama Allah Yang Maha Pemurah lagi Maha Penyayang.Mereka hendak memadamkan cahaya Allah dengan mulut mereka, sedang Allah menyempurnakan cahayaNya, meskipun dibenci orang yang kafir. (Surah Al-Saf, ayat 8)Rejim Bahrain, yang melakukan jenayah-jenayah kejam dan bersifat perkauman tidak hanya memancing emosi umat Islam, bahkan jenayah yang tidak memperdulikan simbol-simbol suci, mereka ingin menghapuskan cahaya Allah dengan berbagai tindakan seperti meruntuhkan masjid-masjid Syiah, memenjarakan ulama dan cendiakawan hauzah ilmiyah, mengongkong sambutan agama, menutup mulut mereka yang berucap demi meninggikan kalimah Allah, dan mereka yang berusaha ke arah perpaduan.Tindakan terbaru bersifat perkauman dan tidak bertanggung jawab kerajaan ini ialah membubarkan Majlis Syura Ulama Bahrain dan menyita harta bendanya dengan keputusan salah satu mahkamah yang berkaitan dengan rejim ini.Secara realistik, Syura Ulama Bahrain merupakan sebuah institusi yang terkenal dengan kegiatan-kegiatan agama berwawasan dan ia merupakan tempat bagi elit-elit, ulama, cendiakawan, pemikir hauzah ilmiyah Bahrain yang dipimpin Ayatullah Syeikh Isa Qasim. Ianya merupakan suria yang menerangi di langit Bahrain.Majma' Jahani Ahlul Bait (a.s) mengecam tindakan tidak waras dan bersifat perkauman ini dan meminta seluruh umat Islam yang gigih, ulama, cendiakawan, para peguam, ahli politik, pejuang kebebasan global agar segera mempertahan dan membela rakyat Bahrain. Mereka merupakan rakyat yang bersabar dalam bayang-bayang diamnya kecurigaan dan kospirasi terang media-media:Pertama: Permintaan kepada para marja' besar, ulama dan mereka yang hadir di lapangan ilmu agar menyatakan pendirian tegas dalam mengutuk tindakan zalim ini.Kedua: Mengeluarkan kenyataan bagi mengutuk dan menentang pembubaran Syura Ulama Bahrain.Ketiga: Demonstrasi dan mogok di hadapan kedutaan Bahrain di negara-negara lain.Akhir sekali, kami mohon kepada Allah (s.w.t) agar kaum yang zalim mendapat pembalasan, golongan yang tertindas dibantu dan Islam serta kaum muslimin dilindungi.Orang yang melakukan penganiayaan akan tahu ketempat mana mereka akan kembali kelak (Surah Syu'ara ayat 227)Majma' Jahani Ahlul Bait (a.s)Khamis 27 Rabi'ul Awwal 143529 Januari 2014
Khutbah Jumaat Tehran;
Gara-gara membubarkan Majlis Syura Ulama, kerajaan Bahrain bermasalah dengan Islam |
Agensi Berita Ahlul Bait (ABNA.co) - Anggota Syura Tertinggi Majma' Jahani Ahlul Bait dalam khutbah Jumaat berkata, "Kita tahu kerajaan Bahrain telah membubarkan Majlis Syura Ulama Bahrain. Majlis ini bangkit berasaskan kehendak rakyat dan perlembagaan syura ini menyatakan bahawa ianya akan mempertahankan identiti Islam. Oleh itu seolah-olah kerajaan Bahrain mempunyai masalah dengan Allah, Islam murni Muhammadi."
Mengenai pemerintah Bahrain, Ayatullah Khatami berkata, "Al Khalifah tahu 35 tahun dulu pemerintah negara ini adalah raja yang menjalankan pemerintahan seperti mereka. Oleh itu semua diktator hendaklah mengambil teladan dari penggulingan keturunan Pahlavi dan Shah supaya kezaliman ini dapat diteruskan."
Khatib ini turut menyentuh tentang kenyataan Amerika terhadap Iran, "Minggu lalu, dua pegawai Amerika memberikan ucapan dengan nada biadab dan angkuh tentang Iran, dan ucapan ini penuh dengan pembohongan, ancaman dan gertakan."
Berasaskan ucapan tahunan Obama yang mengungkit tentang persenjataan Nuklear yang sedang dibahaskan dalam rundingan Geneva, Ayatullah Khatami mengulas, "Betapa rancaknya mereka dengan pembohongan ini sedangkan pemimpin tertinggi kita sentiasa berkata bahawa kita tidak mengejar bom nuklear. Sehingga beliau mengeluarkan fatwa mengenainya, namun mereka berkata Iran berbahaya terhadap seluruh insan. Kita pun menonjol di seluruh dunia gara-gara perkara tersebut."
Beliau berkata kepada para pegawai Amerika, "Sekiranya mereka ingin menunjukkan sesuatu yang bahaya untuk masyarakat dunia, maka kerajaan Amerika ini dan rejim Zionis sebenarnya yang sedang mencipta bahaya untuk masyarakat manusia. Bu Ali Sina pernah berkata "Aku takut pada lembu kerana ia mempunyai tanduk, tapi tidak mempunyai akal."
"Kamu, bangsa Amerika telah menggugurkan dua bom atom di Hiroshima and Nagasaki setelah perang berakhir, iaitu setelah Hitler membunuh diri, Mussolini terbunuh dan kerajaan Jepun sedang berunding dengan Amerika. Ratusan orang terbunuh dalam satu tempoh, dalam wawancara kamu berkata, pertama kami ingin menguji bom, kedua kami ingin memberitahu bahawa Amerika gagah perkasa. Kematian untuk kamu!.
Mengenai ugutan Amerika Syarikat yang ingin mengambil tindakan ketenteraan terhadap Iran beberapa minggu lalu melalui mulut beberapa pegawainya, Khatami berkata, "Obama sentiasa mengulangi kata-kata usang ini "Semua pilihan ada di atas meja". Namun adalah lebih baik mereka mengetahui bahawa bangsa mereka mempunyai semua pilihan di atas meja untuk mempertahankan apa jua sebagaimana dalam peperangan lapan tahun (dengan Saddam), sekiranya mereka inginkan kegilaan, kita akan masukkan mereka ke dalam hari-hari kegelapan."
"Obama berkata, Iran yang membela organisasi-organisasi seperti Hizbullah telah mengancam kami, kami yakin, tanpa kepercayaan kami terhadap negara-negara seperti ini akan menyebabkan kekuatannya berkekalan. Obama hendaklah mengetahui bahawa Hizbullah bukanlah sebuah organisasi pengganas, bahkan sebuah petubuhan mulia yang dibela tanah airnya sendiri. Sedangkan Lubnan adalah rumah mereka.
"Kami juga tahu bahawa kamu, orang Amerika adalah talibarut rejim pengganas Zionis. Sekiranya rejim ini mendapatkan kekuasaannya, Islam dan umatnya akan menjadi sasaran. Kerana itu tidak ada, bahkan tidak akan ada sedikitpun kepercayaan kami terhadap kamu dan sekutu kamu." Tutur beliau.
Mengenai persidangan Geneva 2 tentang isu Syria yang tidak menjemput Iran, beliau berkata, "Persidangan Geneva 2, telah sampai ke penghujung dengan muka-muka kepura-puraan politik dan kecundangannya, setelah 9 hari ianya mengakui persidangan ini telah kecundang."
Khatami menegaskan bahawa penyokong persidangan Syria terdiri daripada golongan Takfiri yang membunuh insan tidak berdosa dan berkata, "Kumpulan-kumpulan kecil Takfiri -pembunuh ini, tidak hanya berbahaya kepada rakyat Syria, bahkan juga kepada seluruh manusia. Saudara-saudara, setelah persidangan Geneva 2, mereka mengabarkan pengiriman sejata dan kelengkapan Amerika sekali lagi kepada kelompok pengganas Syria, oleh itu masyarakat antarabangsa dan pejuang perdamaian palsu perlu memberikan jawapan. Keganasan ini bergerak aktif atas nama kedamaian, ini juga dikategorikan sebagai bahaya yang serius untuk masyarakat yang merujuk kepada produk Arab terutamanya Arab Saudi dan Tel Aviv yang aktif menjalankan kegiatan pengganas di Iraq, Lubnan, Syria sehinggalah ke Russia."
Ayatullah Khatami menegaskan, isu Syria bukanlah masalah yang rumit, beliau berkata kepada orang asing yang masuk campur dalam urusan Syria, "Syria tidak perlu persidangan mahupun rundingan, sekiranya kamu tidak membekalkan senjata kepada para pengganas, rakyat Syria sendiri akan pergi membuang undi dan menentukan nasib mereka sendiri, sebahagiannya hanya mencari permainan dan periuk nasi dalam isu-isu ini."
Menyentuh tentang situasi di Mesir, beliau berkata, "Hakikatnya, Mesir ingin menjadi negara rejim dan mereka inginkan zaman kegelapan 30 tahun Mesir yang tidak 'Mubarak' kembali sekali lagi, Mesir sebelum ini menjadi kehidupan aman bagi regim Zionis."
Mengenai sikap Iran yang tidak menyokong kerajaan Mesir sebelum ini, beliau menjelaskan, "Di zaman pemerintahan non- 'Mubarak" (tidak berkat), terdapat Iranfobia, Syiahfobia dan kepercayaan terhadap Amerika, namun kita juga tidak mempunyai tempat untuk menghadapi prosedur negara ini. Oleh itu kita juga mengecam pembunuhan dan penangkapan (di Mesir)."
Presiden Parti Islam Semalaysia;
Arab Saudi menetas untuk cetus konflik di kalangan umat |
Agensi Berita Ahlul Bait (ABNA.co) - Presiden Parti Islam Semalaysia (PAS), Haji Abdul Hadi Awang berkata, "Arab Saudi telah dipengaruhi oleh Amerika dan Eropah untuk permainan politik".
Beliau berkata demikian ketika diwawancara oleh wartawan Presstv ketika menghadiri Persidangan Perpaduan Islam ke-27, di Tehran semalam.
Menurut beliau lagi, "Saudi dan negara-negara Arab lain telah bertukar menjadi pengkalan Barat. Mereka melakukan begini bukan untuk mendukung Islam, tetapi untuk meraih kuasa.
"Ini menyebabkan kita merasa kesal apabila negara Arab Saudi menjadi hamba Israel dan kepentingan Barat."
Beliau turut mengingatkan tentang komplot yang cuba melaga-lagakan negara-negara serantau dengan tujuan menjamin keselamatan Israel.
Awang menegaskan, mereka yang berada di belakang projek ini berang terhadap kemajuan yang dicapai dunia Islam terutamanya Iran.
Ulama Malaysia ini menambah, persidangan ini penting untuk mengeluarkan kenyataan rasmi supaya umat Islam sedar dengannya.
Persidangan Antarabangsa Perpaduan Islam ke-27;
Ulama lebih 50 negara ikrar hadapi Takfiri (Wahabi) |
Agensi Berita Ahlul Bait (ABNA.co) - Persidangan Antarabangsa Perpaduan Islam ke-27 yang dilangsungkan selama beberapa hari di Tehran beakhir pada malam Ahad lalu dengan pembacaan resolusi bagi menyatakan ijma' ulama Islam yang berasal lebih dari 50 negara.
Resolusi tersebut lebih menekankan kesedaran terhadap ancaman gerakan Takfiri (Wahabi) yang mengancam keselamatan dan kesejahteraan umat.
Para peserta persidangan turut bersetuju bahawa Islam merupakan agama yang mengajar toleransi dan perpaduan sesama penganutnya. Selain itu penganjuran perpaduan seperti ini adalah langkah yang berkesan dalam menggerakkan umat dalam semua bidang.
Mereka turut membidas pencerohan dan keganasan rejim Zionis dalam kawasan penduduk Palestin. Kenyataan turut menyatakan rasa kesal mereka terhadap pemusnahan sistematik masjid al-Aqsa dan rumah-rumah penduduk Palestin.
Selain itu, resolusi juga mengecam sebarang bentuk keganasan yang hakikatnya telah diperalatkan oleh kuasa besar dunia dengan berpura-pura memperjuangkan demokrasi.
Selain itu, demi mengekalkan perpaduan para peserta turut menekankan betapa pentingnya memupuk perasaan saling menghormati antara penganut agama Islam dari mazhab lain. Selain itu sensitiviti simbol-simbol dan tempat-tempat suci Islam perlu dijaga.
Resolusi tersebut lebih menekankan kesedaran terhadap ancaman gerakan Takfiri (Wahabi) yang mengancam keselamatan dan kesejahteraan umat.
Para peserta persidangan turut bersetuju bahawa Islam merupakan agama yang mengajar toleransi dan perpaduan sesama penganutnya. Selain itu penganjuran perpaduan seperti ini adalah langkah yang berkesan dalam menggerakkan umat dalam semua bidang.
Mereka turut membidas pencerohan dan keganasan rejim Zionis dalam kawasan penduduk Palestin. Kenyataan turut menyatakan rasa kesal mereka terhadap pemusnahan sistematik masjid al-Aqsa dan rumah-rumah penduduk Palestin.
Selain itu, resolusi juga mengecam sebarang bentuk keganasan yang hakikatnya telah diperalatkan oleh kuasa besar dunia dengan berpura-pura memperjuangkan demokrasi.
Selain itu, demi mengekalkan perpaduan para peserta turut menekankan betapa pentingnya memupuk perasaan saling menghormati antara penganut agama Islam dari mazhab lain. Selain itu sensitiviti simbol-simbol dan tempat-tempat suci Islam perlu dijaga.
Militant Groups Eliminated in Aleppo
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(Ahlul Bayt News Agency) - In Aleppo province, a military source told the state-run news agency that units of the armed forces killed numbers of militants and destroyed their weapons and ammunition in the neighborhoods of Qadi Askar, Karam Mayssar and Karam al-Jazmati in the city of Aleppo.
Scores of militants were killed and others were wounded in the neighborhoods of al-Jandoul, Hanano, al-Marjeh, al-Jaoouz and Karm al-Daman in the city.
Army units eliminated several militant groups in the villages and towns of al-Jadideh, Kweiris, Erbid, on al-Shweikheh-Maaret Artiq axis and in the surrounding of Aleppo Central Prison.
Cars carrying militants and their weapons were destroyed in Azzan and the Industrial City.
Scores of militants were killed and others were wounded in the neighborhoods of al-Jandoul, Hanano, al-Marjeh, al-Jaoouz and Karm al-Daman in the city.
Army units eliminated several militant groups in the villages and towns of al-Jadideh, Kweiris, Erbid, on al-Shweikheh-Maaret Artiq axis and in the surrounding of Aleppo Central Prison.
Cars carrying militants and their weapons were destroyed in Azzan and the Industrial City.
Iraqi Forces Make Steady Progress against Militants in Anbar
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(Ahlul Bayt News Agency) - Security forces took control on Tuesday of several Ramadi neighborhoods after days of heavy clashes in the city, army chief Staff General Ali Ghaidan Majeed said.
The defense ministry announced on Saturday that warplanes and artillery had hit a neighborhood of northern Fallujah, a rare military operation inside the city itself.
A security official told media outlets that an assault on the city was imminent, but a journalist in Fallujah said it was mostly calm on Monday.
The army has largely stayed out of Fallujah, a short drive from Baghdad, fearing major incursions could ignite a drawn-out campaign with high civilian casualties and heavy damage to property.
US battles in the city, a bastion of militants following the 2003 US-led invasion, were among their bloodiest since the Vietnam War.
Along with the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) terrorist group, other militant groups and anti-government tribes have fought forces loyal to the central government.
The stand-off has prompted more than 140,000 people to flee their homes, the UN refugee agency said, describing it as the worst displacement in Iraq since the peak of the sectarian conflict.
The defense ministry announced on Saturday that warplanes and artillery had hit a neighborhood of northern Fallujah, a rare military operation inside the city itself.
A security official told media outlets that an assault on the city was imminent, but a journalist in Fallujah said it was mostly calm on Monday.
The army has largely stayed out of Fallujah, a short drive from Baghdad, fearing major incursions could ignite a drawn-out campaign with high civilian casualties and heavy damage to property.
US battles in the city, a bastion of militants following the 2003 US-led invasion, were among their bloodiest since the Vietnam War.
Along with the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) terrorist group, other militant groups and anti-government tribes have fought forces loyal to the central government.
The stand-off has prompted more than 140,000 people to flee their homes, the UN refugee agency said, describing it as the worst displacement in Iraq since the peak of the sectarian conflict.
Lebanese hold rally to protest Saudi terrorism
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(Ahlul Bayt News Agency) - Lebanese protesters have gathered outside the Saudi Embassy in Beirut to slam what they called the negative role of Saudi Arabia in the region, reports say.
Chanting slogans against the Saudi policies in the region, protesters on Saturday accused Riyadh of fueling unrest and sectarianism in Syria, Iraq and Lebanon.
We consider Saudi Arabia to be the number one exporter of terrorism in the Arab world, because it is funding all Takfiri organizations that are killing our people from Tripoli to Beirut to Sidon,a protester said.
The demonstrators say the Al Saud regime has been using its petrodollars to finance al-Qaeda-linked and Takfiri groups with the sole aim of destabilizing the region.
The demonstrators also chanted slogans against Saudi spy chief Bandar bin Sultan, calling him a warlord.
Recently, Lebanon has witnessed a wave of deadly bombings claimed by al-Qaeda-linked terrorists.
In the latest incident of fatal attacks, a car bomb went off in the border city of Hermel on Saturday. Four people died and over a dozen others were wounded in the bombing.
Wanted by the US, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Iran, Saudi terrorist Majed al-Majed was the head of the Abdullah Azzam Brigades, an al-Qaeda-affiliated group which claimed responsibility for the Nov. 19 twin suicide bombings outside the Iranian Embassy in Beirut. The attack killed 25 people, including Iran’s cultural attaché.
Chanting slogans against the Saudi policies in the region, protesters on Saturday accused Riyadh of fueling unrest and sectarianism in Syria, Iraq and Lebanon.
We consider Saudi Arabia to be the number one exporter of terrorism in the Arab world, because it is funding all Takfiri organizations that are killing our people from Tripoli to Beirut to Sidon,a protester said.
The demonstrators say the Al Saud regime has been using its petrodollars to finance al-Qaeda-linked and Takfiri groups with the sole aim of destabilizing the region.
The demonstrators also chanted slogans against Saudi spy chief Bandar bin Sultan, calling him a warlord.
Recently, Lebanon has witnessed a wave of deadly bombings claimed by al-Qaeda-linked terrorists.
In the latest incident of fatal attacks, a car bomb went off in the border city of Hermel on Saturday. Four people died and over a dozen others were wounded in the bombing.
Wanted by the US, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and Iran, Saudi terrorist Majed al-Majed was the head of the Abdullah Azzam Brigades, an al-Qaeda-affiliated group which claimed responsibility for the Nov. 19 twin suicide bombings outside the Iranian Embassy in Beirut. The attack killed 25 people, including Iran’s cultural attaché.
10,000 Foreign Terrorists Killed in Syria
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(Ahlul Bayt News Agency) - News sources say more than 9900 foreign terrorists affiliated to Al-Qaeda have been killed in Syria by the army.
The United Press news agency has published a report about the presence of foreign militants in Syria, putting the number of Al-Qaeda-linked terrorists killed in Syria so far at 9936.
The report said the majority of these armed elements belonged to the two groups Al-Nusra Front and the Islamic Government of Iraq and the Levant.
It said 1807 Libyans, 1432 Iraqis, 828 Lebanese, 821 Egyptians, 800 Palestinians, 714 Saudis, 571 Yemenis, 412 Moroccans, 274 Algerians, 202 Jordanians, 71 Kuwaitis, 21 Bahrainis, 19 Emiratis, 8 Qataris, 3 Sudanese and one from Mauritania were among those killed in clashes with the Syrian forces.
According to the report, there were also 30 terrorists from the Caucasus and Albania.
Syria has been the scene of unrest for nearly two years. Many people, including large numbers of army and security personnel, have been killed in the turmoil that began in March 2011.
King Abdullah orders punishing Saudis fighting in Syria
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(Ahlul Bayt News Agency) - Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah has issued a royal decree that punishes citizens who fight in conflicts outside the kingdom, with prison sentences ranging from three to 20 years in jail.
The statement issued by the Saudi Royal Court on Monday also says that any Saudi citizen who joins extremist terrorist groups or supports them materially or through incitement would face an even harsher punishment ranging from five to 30 years in jail.
The decree appeared aimed at stemming the flow of Saudi militants going to Syria. The region's war is believed to have drawn hundreds of young Saudis, worrying some in the kingdom that militants could return radicalized and turn their weapons on the monarchy.
The statement said it is the Saudi government's duty to block actions and language that harm public security and stability by exposing the nation to danger and "damaging the status of the kingdom" internationally and among Arabs. Saudi Arabia is home to two of Islam's holiest sites.
Many young Saudi men appear to have been encouraged to join the fight in Syria by influential Saudi clerics who follow the kingdom's ultraconservative religious Wahhabi doctrine.
Foreign militants and extremists have infiltrated the Syrian opposition, triggering infighting that has undermined the rebellion.
Saudi officials and key high-level clerics have largely spoken out against young Saudis joining the fight. While the Saudi government backs some terrorist groups in Syria with weapons and aid, officials say Riyadh does not fund al-Qaeda-linked groups.
A key Saudi opposition group, Saudi Association for Civil and Political Rights, known in Arabic by its acronym HASEM, said in a statement last week that Saudi rulers are responsible for encouraging extremist ideology in the kingdom in exchange for retaining power and support from the religious establishment. The group said the kingdom secretly tolerates citizens fighting abroad to keep them from carrying out attacks in Saudi Arabia.
The decree comes after a sweeping new counterterrorism law came into effect in the kingdom Sunday that activists say targets virtually any criticism of the government.
The statement issued by the Saudi Royal Court on Monday also says that any Saudi citizen who joins extremist terrorist groups or supports them materially or through incitement would face an even harsher punishment ranging from five to 30 years in jail.
The decree appeared aimed at stemming the flow of Saudi militants going to Syria. The region's war is believed to have drawn hundreds of young Saudis, worrying some in the kingdom that militants could return radicalized and turn their weapons on the monarchy.
The statement said it is the Saudi government's duty to block actions and language that harm public security and stability by exposing the nation to danger and "damaging the status of the kingdom" internationally and among Arabs. Saudi Arabia is home to two of Islam's holiest sites.
Many young Saudi men appear to have been encouraged to join the fight in Syria by influential Saudi clerics who follow the kingdom's ultraconservative religious Wahhabi doctrine.
Foreign militants and extremists have infiltrated the Syrian opposition, triggering infighting that has undermined the rebellion.
Saudi officials and key high-level clerics have largely spoken out against young Saudis joining the fight. While the Saudi government backs some terrorist groups in Syria with weapons and aid, officials say Riyadh does not fund al-Qaeda-linked groups.
A key Saudi opposition group, Saudi Association for Civil and Political Rights, known in Arabic by its acronym HASEM, said in a statement last week that Saudi rulers are responsible for encouraging extremist ideology in the kingdom in exchange for retaining power and support from the religious establishment. The group said the kingdom secretly tolerates citizens fighting abroad to keep them from carrying out attacks in Saudi Arabia.
The decree comes after a sweeping new counterterrorism law came into effect in the kingdom Sunday that activists say targets virtually any criticism of the government.
Mass Murder in Middle East Is Funded by Our Friends "the Saudis"
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Patrick Cockburn
(Ahlul Bayt News Agency) Donors in Saudi Arabia have notoriously played a pivotal role in creating and maintaining Sunni jihadist groups over the past 30 years. But, for all the supposed determination of the United States and its allies since 9/11 to fight "the war on terror", they have showed astonishing restraint when it comes to pressuring Saudi Arabia and the Gulf monarchies to turn off the financial tap that keeps the jihadists in business.
Compare two US pronouncements stressing the significance of these donations and basing their conclusions on the best intelligence available to the US government. The first is in the 9/11 Commission Report which found that Osama bin Laden did not fund al-Qa'ida because from 1994 he had little money of his own but relied on his ties to wealthy Saudi individuals established during the Afghan war in the 1980s. Quoting, among other sources, a CIA analytic report dated 14 November 2002, the commission concluded that "al-Qa'ida appears to have relied on a core group of financial facilitators who raised money from a variety of donors and other fund-raisers primarily in the Gulf countries and particularly in Saudi Arabia".
Seven years pass after the CIA report was written during which the US invades Iraq fighting, among others, the newly established Iraq franchise of al-Qa'ida, and becomes engaged in a bloody war in Afghanistan with the resurgent Taliban. American drones are fired at supposed al-Qa'ida-linked targets located everywhere from Waziristan in north-west Pakistan to the hill villages of Yemen.
But during this time Washington can manage no more than a few gentle reproofs to Saudi Arabia on its promotion of fanatical and sectarian Sunni militancy outside its own borders.
Evidence for this is a fascinating telegram on "terrorist finance" from US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to US embassies, dated 30 December 2009 and released by WikiLeaks the following year. She says firmly that "donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide". Eight years after 9/11, when 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis, Mrs Clinton reiterates in the same message that "Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support for al-Qa'ida, the Taliban, LeT [Lashkar-e-Taiba in Pakistan] and other terrorist groups". Saudi Arabia was most important in sustaining these groups, but it was not quite alone since "al-Qa'ida and other groups continue to exploit Kuwait both as a source of funds and as a key transit point".
Why did the US and its European allies treat Saudi Arabia with such restraint when the kingdom was so central to al-Qa'ida and other even more sectarian Sunni jihadist organisations? An obvious explanation is that the US, Britain and others did not want to offend a close ally and that the Saudi royal family had judiciously used its money to buy its way into the international ruling class.
Unconvincing attempts were made to link Iran and Iraq to al-Qa'ida when the real culprits were in plain sight.
But there is another compelling reason why the Western powers have been so laggard in denouncing Saudi Arabia and the Sunni rulers of the Gulf for spreading bigotry and religious hate. Al-Qa'ida members or al-Qa'ida-influenced groups have always held two very different views about who is their main opponent. For Osama bin Laden the chief enemy was the Americans, but for the great majority of Sunni jihadists, including the al-Qa'ida franchises in Iraq and Syria, the target is the Shia. It is the Shia who have been dying in their thousands in Iraq, Syria, Pakistan and even in countries where there are few of them to kill, such as Egypt.
Pakistani papers no longer pay much attention to hundreds of Shia butchered from Quetta to Lahore. In Iraq, most of the 7,000 or more people killed this year are Shia civilians killed by the bombs of al-Qa'ida in Iraq, part of an umbrella organisation called the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil), which also encompasses Syria. In overwhelmingly Sunni Libya, militants in the eastern town of Derna killed an Iraqi professor who admitted on video to being a Shia before being executed by his captors.
Suppose a hundredth part of this merciless onslaught had been directed against Western targets rather than against Shia Muslims, would the Americans and the British be so accommodating to the Saudis, Kuwaitis and Emiratis? It is this that gives a sense of phoniness to boasts by the vastly expanded security bureaucracies in Washington and London about their success in combating terror justifying vast budgets for themselves and restricted civil liberties for everybody else. All the drones in the world fired into Pashtun villages in Pakistan or their counterparts in Yemen or Somalia are not going to make much difference if the Sunni jihadists in Iraq and Syria ever decide – as Osama bin Laden did before them – that their main enemies are to be found not among the Shia but in the United States and Britain.
Instead of the fumbling amateur efforts of the shoe and underpants bombers, security services would have to face jihadist movements in Iraq, Syria and Libya fielding hundreds of bomb-makers and suicide bombers. Only gradually this year, videos from Syria of non-Sunnis being decapitated for sectarian motives alone have begun to shake the basic indifference of the Western powers to Sunni jihadism so long as it is not directed against themselves.
Saudi Arabia as a government for a long time took a back seat to Qatar in funding rebels in Syria, and it is only since this summer that they have taken over the file. They wish to marginalise the al-Qa'ida franchisees such as Isil and the al-Nusra Front while buying up and arming enough Sunni war-bands to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad.
The directors of Saudi policy in Syria – the Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal, the head of the Saudi intelligence agency Prince Bandar bin Sultan and the Deputy Defence Minister Prince Salman bin Sultan – plan to spend billions raising a militant Sunni army some 40,000 to 50,000 strong. Already local warlords are uniting to share in Saudi largesse for which their enthusiasm is probably greater than their willingness to fight.
The Saudi initiative is partly fuelled by rage in Riyadh at President Obama's decision not to go to war with Syria after Assad used chemical weapons on 21 August. Nothing but an all-out air attack by the US similar to that of Nato in Libya in 2011 would overthrow Assad, so the US has essentially decided he will stay for the moment. Saudi anger has been further exacerbated by the successful US-led negotiations on an interim deal with Iran over its nuclear programme.
By stepping out of the shadows in Syria, the Saudis are probably making a mistake. Their money will only buy them so much. The artificial unity of rebel groups with their hands out for Saudi money is not going to last. They will be discredited in the eyes of more fanatical jihadis as well as Syrians in general as pawns of Saudi and other intelligence services.
A divided opposition will be even more fragmented. Jordan may accommodate the Saudis and a multitude of foreign intelligence services, but it will not want to be the rallying point for an anti-Assad army.
The Saudi plan looks doomed from the start, though it could get a lot more Syrians killed before it fails. Yazid Sayegh of the Carnegie Middle East Centre highlights succinctly the risks involved in the venture: "Saudi Arabia could find itself replicating its experience in Afghanistan, where it built up disparate mujahedin groups that lacked a unifying political framework. The forces were left unable to govern Kabul once they took it, paving the way for the Taliban to take over. Al-Qa'ida followed, and the blowback subsequently reached Saudi Arabia."
Compare two US pronouncements stressing the significance of these donations and basing their conclusions on the best intelligence available to the US government. The first is in the 9/11 Commission Report which found that Osama bin Laden did not fund al-Qa'ida because from 1994 he had little money of his own but relied on his ties to wealthy Saudi individuals established during the Afghan war in the 1980s. Quoting, among other sources, a CIA analytic report dated 14 November 2002, the commission concluded that "al-Qa'ida appears to have relied on a core group of financial facilitators who raised money from a variety of donors and other fund-raisers primarily in the Gulf countries and particularly in Saudi Arabia".
Seven years pass after the CIA report was written during which the US invades Iraq fighting, among others, the newly established Iraq franchise of al-Qa'ida, and becomes engaged in a bloody war in Afghanistan with the resurgent Taliban. American drones are fired at supposed al-Qa'ida-linked targets located everywhere from Waziristan in north-west Pakistan to the hill villages of Yemen.
But during this time Washington can manage no more than a few gentle reproofs to Saudi Arabia on its promotion of fanatical and sectarian Sunni militancy outside its own borders.
Evidence for this is a fascinating telegram on "terrorist finance" from US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to US embassies, dated 30 December 2009 and released by WikiLeaks the following year. She says firmly that "donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide". Eight years after 9/11, when 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis, Mrs Clinton reiterates in the same message that "Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support for al-Qa'ida, the Taliban, LeT [Lashkar-e-Taiba in Pakistan] and other terrorist groups". Saudi Arabia was most important in sustaining these groups, but it was not quite alone since "al-Qa'ida and other groups continue to exploit Kuwait both as a source of funds and as a key transit point".
Why did the US and its European allies treat Saudi Arabia with such restraint when the kingdom was so central to al-Qa'ida and other even more sectarian Sunni jihadist organisations? An obvious explanation is that the US, Britain and others did not want to offend a close ally and that the Saudi royal family had judiciously used its money to buy its way into the international ruling class.
Unconvincing attempts were made to link Iran and Iraq to al-Qa'ida when the real culprits were in plain sight.
But there is another compelling reason why the Western powers have been so laggard in denouncing Saudi Arabia and the Sunni rulers of the Gulf for spreading bigotry and religious hate. Al-Qa'ida members or al-Qa'ida-influenced groups have always held two very different views about who is their main opponent. For Osama bin Laden the chief enemy was the Americans, but for the great majority of Sunni jihadists, including the al-Qa'ida franchises in Iraq and Syria, the target is the Shia. It is the Shia who have been dying in their thousands in Iraq, Syria, Pakistan and even in countries where there are few of them to kill, such as Egypt.
Pakistani papers no longer pay much attention to hundreds of Shia butchered from Quetta to Lahore. In Iraq, most of the 7,000 or more people killed this year are Shia civilians killed by the bombs of al-Qa'ida in Iraq, part of an umbrella organisation called the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (Isil), which also encompasses Syria. In overwhelmingly Sunni Libya, militants in the eastern town of Derna killed an Iraqi professor who admitted on video to being a Shia before being executed by his captors.
Suppose a hundredth part of this merciless onslaught had been directed against Western targets rather than against Shia Muslims, would the Americans and the British be so accommodating to the Saudis, Kuwaitis and Emiratis? It is this that gives a sense of phoniness to boasts by the vastly expanded security bureaucracies in Washington and London about their success in combating terror justifying vast budgets for themselves and restricted civil liberties for everybody else. All the drones in the world fired into Pashtun villages in Pakistan or their counterparts in Yemen or Somalia are not going to make much difference if the Sunni jihadists in Iraq and Syria ever decide – as Osama bin Laden did before them – that their main enemies are to be found not among the Shia but in the United States and Britain.
Instead of the fumbling amateur efforts of the shoe and underpants bombers, security services would have to face jihadist movements in Iraq, Syria and Libya fielding hundreds of bomb-makers and suicide bombers. Only gradually this year, videos from Syria of non-Sunnis being decapitated for sectarian motives alone have begun to shake the basic indifference of the Western powers to Sunni jihadism so long as it is not directed against themselves.
Saudi Arabia as a government for a long time took a back seat to Qatar in funding rebels in Syria, and it is only since this summer that they have taken over the file. They wish to marginalise the al-Qa'ida franchisees such as Isil and the al-Nusra Front while buying up and arming enough Sunni war-bands to overthrow President Bashar al-Assad.
The directors of Saudi policy in Syria – the Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal, the head of the Saudi intelligence agency Prince Bandar bin Sultan and the Deputy Defence Minister Prince Salman bin Sultan – plan to spend billions raising a militant Sunni army some 40,000 to 50,000 strong. Already local warlords are uniting to share in Saudi largesse for which their enthusiasm is probably greater than their willingness to fight.
The Saudi initiative is partly fuelled by rage in Riyadh at President Obama's decision not to go to war with Syria after Assad used chemical weapons on 21 August. Nothing but an all-out air attack by the US similar to that of Nato in Libya in 2011 would overthrow Assad, so the US has essentially decided he will stay for the moment. Saudi anger has been further exacerbated by the successful US-led negotiations on an interim deal with Iran over its nuclear programme.
By stepping out of the shadows in Syria, the Saudis are probably making a mistake. Their money will only buy them so much. The artificial unity of rebel groups with their hands out for Saudi money is not going to last. They will be discredited in the eyes of more fanatical jihadis as well as Syrians in general as pawns of Saudi and other intelligence services.
A divided opposition will be even more fragmented. Jordan may accommodate the Saudis and a multitude of foreign intelligence services, but it will not want to be the rallying point for an anti-Assad army.
The Saudi plan looks doomed from the start, though it could get a lot more Syrians killed before it fails. Yazid Sayegh of the Carnegie Middle East Centre highlights succinctly the risks involved in the venture: "Saudi Arabia could find itself replicating its experience in Afghanistan, where it built up disparate mujahedin groups that lacked a unifying political framework. The forces were left unable to govern Kabul once they took it, paving the way for the Taliban to take over. Al-Qa'ida followed, and the blowback subsequently reached Saudi Arabia."
Saudi devil or Iranian superpower: US options in
Mideast
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(Ahlul Bayt News Agency) - Baer is currently TIME.com’s intelligence columnist and has contributed to Vanity Fair, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. He is a frequent commentator writing on issues related to international relations, espionage and US foreign policy.
His books, “Sleeping With the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude” and “The Devil We Know: Dealing With the New Iranian Superpower” are brilliant pieces of fair analysis of US foreign policy.
Both the books delve into the US foreign policy blunders in dealing with Saudi Arabia and Iran and offer some solutions to the US problems in the Middle East.
In “Sleeping With the Devil” which was published in 2004, the former CIA officer highlights the troubled relationship between the US and Saudi Arabia. He also reveals how Washington policies undermined CIA’s efforts to fight global terrorism.
Turning his attention to Saudi Arabia, Baer explains how US government’s cynical relationship with its Middle Eastern ally and US dependence on Saudi oil have rendered Washington economically vulnerable and in its fight against terrorism ineffective.
For decades, the United States and Saudi Arabia have been locked in a ‘harmony of interests’. The US counted on the Saudis for cheap oil, political stability in the Middle East and lucrative market, while somehow guaranteeing the flow of petrodollars to the coffers of the kingdom.
With money and oil flowing freely between Washington and Riyadh, the United States has felt secure in its relationship with the Saudis and the ruling Al Saud dynasty.
But the core of its friendship with Saudi Arabia was dramatically shocked when it became clear that fifteen out of the nineteen September 11 hijackers were Saudi citizens. In “Sleeping With the Devil”, Baer documents with chilling clarity how US addiction to cheap oil and Saudi petrodollars caused American officials to turn a blind eye to the Al Saud’s abysmal human rights record and its financial support for fundamentalist groups such as Al-Qaeda and Taliban that have been directly linked to international acts of terror, including those against the United States.
“The money and arms that we send to Saudi Arabia are, in effect, being used to cut our own throat,” Baer writes.
But, in “The Devil We Know”, published in 2008, the former CIA officer criticizes Bush era policy of treating Iran as a country that must be weakened, punished and even its political system overthrown.
Baer suggests the US should respect, recognize and deal with Iran “as the increasingly powerful nation that it is”.
The former CIA officer, who is fluent in Arabic and says has rusty Persian, depicts Iran as a disciplined and strategic state driven by global goals.
“At the bottom of Iran’s soul is a newfound taste for empire,” he states.
“At the bottom of Iran’s soul is a newfound taste for empire,” he states.
Baer calls Iran “the only stable, enduring state in the (Persian) Gulf” and “a rational actor with fixed reasonable demands”.
He also calls on the US to sit down together at the negotiating table, treat Iran as the power it has become and see what it has to offer.
He maintains: the United States should also guarantee Iran’s international security, conduct joint patrols in the Persian Gulf, establish direct military-to-military communications there, ease sanctions and give Iran “a defined security role in Iraq and Afghanistan”.
“The sooner we understand the Iranian paradox—who they are, what they want, how they want to both humble us and work with us—the sooner we’ll understand how to come to terms with the new Iranian superpower,” writes Baer.
Many of Baer’s ideas sound reasonable and came true only this year. Today, Saudi Arabia threatens to reappraise its entire foreign policy after a November nuclear deal was clinched between Iran and P5+1. Also, the US has started direct talks with Iran as a powerful state in the Middle East.
Indeed, Iran is the most powerful and stable country in the Persian Gulf and Middle East. Hence, the United States should and cannot ignore it.
Today, President Hassan Rouhani’s administration is ready for a meaningful cooperation with all countries as part of its opening to the world.
Henry Kissinger, the former US secretary of state and national security advisor, has said: there was “no reason for the United States to resist a strong Iran”.
Kissinger argues the old regional balance of power with inclusion of Iran in the permutation of forces should be restored.
Who was Ariel Sharon? "hero of Israel" or "butcher of Palestine"
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(Ahlul Bayt News Agency) - Ariel Sharon, the former Prime Minister of the Israeli regime, was widely known in the Arab and Islam world for his war crimes against Palestinians during deadly years of occupation of Palestine.
Sharon is referred to have been responsible for two massacres that occurred 20 years apart: the September 1982 massacre of Palestinian civilians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon, and the April 2002 Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) mass killings in the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank.
However for Israelis Sharon was a hero and all the killings were merely considered as being necessary steps on the path toward Sharon’s objective of a "Final Solution" to the "Palestinian problem," through the mass expulsion and/or extermination of the more than 3 million Palestinians and Arabs now living in the occupied lands, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights.
EIR has "written the book" on Sharon's blood-soaked career for over 30 years.
The following summary is parts of what was written by Jeffrey Steinberg and published in the Executive Intelligence Review, “As a service to the current worldwide debate on Israel’s fascist actions”. This summary is linked to a compendium of earlier exposés of Sharon and his partners in crime.
The Sharon File
Sharon was born in Kfar Malal in 1928. At the age of 14, he joined the Haganah, and at 20, headed an infantry company in the Alexandroni Brigade during the 1948 War of Independence, during which the Israeli forces drove an estimated 300,000 Palestinians from their land, using some of the same genocidal methods against unarmed civilian populations that were used in the recent IDF invasion of the Palestinian Authority's Area A territory.
In 1953, Sharon founded "Unit 101," a secret death squad within the IDF that committed several mass murders of civilians. In October 1953, Sharon's "Unit 101" massacred 66 innocent civilians during a cross-border raid into the Jordanian West Bank village of Qibya. Under intense machine-gun fire, local residents were driven into their homes, which were then blown up around them, killing the occupants by burying them alive in piles of rubble. The April 2002 IDF massacre at the Palestinian refugee camp in Jenin was, in fact, modeled on Sharon's "Unit 101" operations at Qibya.
On Oct. 18, 1953, the U.S. State Department issued a bulletin denouncing the Qibya massacre, demanding that those responsible be "brought to account." Instead, Sharon was rewarded for his war crimes by having his "Unit 101" absorbed into the Israeli paratroop corps. By 1956, Sharon had been appointed paratroop brigade commander.
Between Feb. 28, 1955 and Oct. 10, 1956, a Sharon-led paratrooper brigade conducted similar cross-border invasions into Gaza, Egypt, and the West Bank in Jordan. At the West Bank village of Qalqilya, Sharon's death squad killed 83 people.
During the 1956 joint British, Israeli, and French invasion of the Suez Canal, Sharon and his lifelong collaborator in mass murder, Rafael Eytan, carried out another horrific war crime: In three separate incidents, Sharon- and Eytan-led units murdered Egyptian prisoners of war, as well as civilian Sudanese workers who had been captured. All told, 273 unarmed prisoners were executed and dumped into mass graves. When the story broke, nearly 40 years later, in the Aug. 16, 1995 London Daily Telegraph, it nearly ruptured Israeli-Egyptian relations. This was less than three months before Sharon would bloody his hands once again, by orchestrating the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Rabin, in Sharon's eyes, had committed the mistake of signing a peace treaty with Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat.
During the 1960s, Sharon's military career advanced. In 1964, he was appointed to head the IDF's Northern Command; in 1966, he took charge of the Army Training Department; in 1969, he was named commander of the IDF's Southern Command.
In 1972, at the urging of American organized crime figure and leading right-wing Zionist Meshulam Riklis, Sharon resigned from the IDF (he was recalled, briefly, to active duty during the 1973 Yom Kippur War) to run for the Knesset (parliament). Henceforth, Sharon would be wedded to leading international organized crime figures associated with the Meyer Lansky National Crime Syndicate in the United States, and allied Jewish mafia figures from Israel and Russia.
Even at the end of his career, Sharon was still running death squads. On Sept. 25, 1997, Israeli Television Channel One interviewed Benny Golan, a veteran of the Rimon Unit, which Sharon had created and deployed in the early 1970s in the Gaza Strip to carry out targetted assassinations of Palestinian "militants." Golan described the assassination program, and reported that members of the unit frequently "disguised themselves as Arabs" for "special operations."Other sources reported, at the time, that the "special operations" included terrorist attacks on Israeli Jewish targets to justify "retaliatory strikes" against pre-selected Palestinian and Arab targets.
Far from ending his career of mass butchery, Sharon's resignation from the IDF coincided with the launching of an even more ambitious criminal enterprise that would see thousands of Palestinians killed and wounded as part of the "Eretz Israel," or "Greater Israel" drive to permanently annex all of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights—and resettle these areas with Russian and other Jewish immigrants, after the Palestinians have been eliminated.
'Landscam'
Sharon entered the Knesset in December 1973, at the very moment that the Israeli regime lifted the ban on private sales of West Bank land to Israelis. The Knesset decision was brought about by a heavy lobbying effort by Sharon colleague and former Police Minister Yehezkel Sahar. The very first "private" purchase was for the construction of a residential community for retired IDF officers. The partners in the deal included Sahar, Gen. Reshavam Ze'evi, Sharon publicist Eli Landau, and Avraham Mintz, a founder of the fanatical settlers movement Gush Emunim.
In June 1974, Sharon personally led a group of settlers to establish an illegal outpost near the West Bank town of Nablus. It was the first of many such ventures that Sharon would sponsor, under the rhubric of the drive to "Judaize the territories."
Sharon's political career continued to advance. In 1975, Prime Minister Rabin appointed Sharon as his personal security adviser. Then, the Likud was swept into power in the 1977 elections, and Prime Minister Menachim Begin named Sharon as Minister of Agriculture. In that capacity, Sharon launched a massive expansion of Jewish "agricultural settlements" throughout the West Bank and Gaza. During 1977-81, more than 25,000 new settlers—mostly members of the Gush Emunim—moved into the occupied territories. The Gush Emunim settlers formed into death squads explicitly modelled on Sharon's old "Unit 101." They would play a pivotal role in a filthy Anglo-American Zionist criminal enterprise known as "Landscam."
In 1979, the Israeli Supreme Court ratified the private land purchases in the occupied territories, and immediately, Sharon's mafia cronies set up several real estate ventures, under such names as Jumbo, Samarea and Judea, and Meteor. In 1980, Sharon and Yuval Ne'eman formed an organization, Prevention of Emergence of Another Arab Country in Eretz Israel (PEACE), to press the issue of permanent Israeli annexation of the occupied territories. The group included a number of notables from Israel and the United States, who would remain part of the extended Sharon mafia family for years to come: Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, Jewish Defense League (JDL) founder Joseph Churba, Young Israel director Harold Jacobs, Anti-Defamation League of B'nai Brith general counsel Arnold Forster, right-wing Knesset member and Rabbi Meir Kahane patron Geula Cohen, and Roni Milo.
Sharon toured the United States in 1980, lining up financing for a massive real estate grab. But first, Sharon launched a campaign of terror against the Palestinians in the West Bank, to literally scare them into leaving their land. In the Spring of 1982, Sharon hosted a planning meeting at his Negev desert ranch, which had been purchased for him by Riklis. Riklis, Henry Kissinger, Louis Mortimer Bloomfield, Rafi Eytan, General Ze'evi, Arieh Genger, Herbert Brin, and Eli Landau attended the session, according to an eyewitness account. Within days of the meeting, Gush Emunim and JDL terrorists began attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank. "Landscam" was under way.
"Landscam" coincided with Sharon's invasion of Lebanon, which began on June 4, 1982, and was aimed at wiping out the Palestine Liberation Organization, which had established its base in several camps near Beirut. Between June 4 and Aug. 31, 1982, the IDF, under Sharon's direction (Begin had named him Minister of Defense the previous year), killed a total of 19,025 Palestinians and wounded 30,032 in a military campaign that Sharon called "Operation Peace in Galilee." Under immense pressure from the Reagan Administration, Sharon abandoned plans to assassinate Arafat, and, on Aug. 21, 1982, he allowed the PLO to evacuate 15,600 fighters from Lebanon, under an American-brokered cease-fire.
On Sept. 15, Sharon broke the cease-fire agreement, and the next day, launched a "purification" campaign against the refugee camps of Sabra, Shatila, and Burj El Barajneh. Falangist death squads—protected by the IDF, which encircled the camps—massacred unarmed women, children, and elderly.
On Sept. 19, 1982, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 521, harshly condemning the massacres at the camps. In a distant mirror of the current genocide in Jenin, Ramallah, and Bethlehem, Sharon ignored the international condemnations. Today, Sharon faces war crimes prosecution in court in Belgium for his role in the Sabra and Shatila massacres, as the result of a lawsuit filed on June 18, 2001 by 23 survivors of the attacks.
On Oct. 15, 1982, a month after the 1982 massacres, Sharon held meetings—in the Chouf Mountains of Lebanon and at his Negev ranch—with Falange leader Camille Chamoun, Uri Dan, Rupert Murdoch, Charles Douglas-Home, and others, to move the "Landscam" West Bank real estate grab forward. On Nov. 15, 1982, a final meeting took place on several real estate purchases, mostly through Arab middle-men, to push the massive expansion of Jewish settlements throughout the West Bank—at a handsome profit. Attending the meeting at Sharon's ranch were: Kissinger, Lord Harlech (Sir David Ormsby-Gore), Johannes von Thurn und Taxis, Tory Parliamentarian Julian Amery, Sir Edmund Peck, and MI-6 Mideast mandarin Nicholas Elliot.
The Kahane Commission, an Israeli body convened to investigate the Sabra and Shatila mass murders, found Sharon to be complicit in the crimes, and he was fired by Prime Minister Begin as Defense Minister shortly after the report's release. But Sharon landed on his feet. In 1984, after the fall of the Begin government and the establishment of a Likud-Labor national unity government, Sharon was appointed Minister of Trade and Industry, a position he held until 1990, when he was named Minister of Construction and Housing, a post that enabled him to continue as the leading sponsor of the massive expansion of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories. During Sharon's tenure in various government ministries, the number of Jewish settlers soared to more than 110,000.
In January 1986, Edgar Bronfman, the Jewish mafia don and president of the World Jewish Congress, admitted, in a New York Post interview, that he was negotiating on behalf of the Israeli regime with Moscow, to secure Soviet permission for 400,000 Jews to emigrate to Israel—in return for massive shipments of grain to the Soviet Union. The deal was cynically dubbed "Jews for wheat," in recognition that this scheme was leading to the annexation of the occupied lands by Israel. A year earlier, in another sop to the American- and British-based Jewish criminal interests bankrolling Sharon's "Judiazation" scheme, the Knesset had passed laws dropping all restrictions on cash flows into Israeli banks—so long as the money was invested in Israel.
Killing the 'Peace of the Brave'
When Rabin was elected Prime Minister of Israel in 1992, the former Sharon ally in the war on the Palestinians had the courage to admit that his underlying assumptions were wrong, and would lead to the destruction of Israel. He entered into secret peace talks with Arafat, which culminated in the August 1993 signing of the Oslo Peace Accords, in the presence of U.S. President William Clinton at the White House.
Instantly, Sharon declared war on the Oslo Accords and on Prime Minister Rabin. The entire "Landscam" gang joined Sharon in assailing the peace initiative. On Sept. 11, 1993, Kissinger told CBS News interviewers that Oslo was "unworkable." Several weeks later, Kissinger told the Institute for Jewish Affairs in London that Jordan would soon fall into the hands of Islamic fundamentalists and Olso would be crushed—a not-so-veiled reference to Sharon's Hamas assets, which would soon launch a terror wave against Oslo in tandem with Sharon's Jewish underground.
On Oct. 11, 1993, Bertram and Herbert Zweibon, co-founders of Americans for a Safe Israel, a Sharonist front, held a conference in Crystal City, Virginia to launch a campaign to destroy Oslo—and its sponsors. Five days later, Sharon delivered a speech calling for the settlers to launch a resistance to the sellout.
Sharon rushed to the United States and embarked on a nationwide tour on Nov. 14, 1993, in which he declared that the 150,000 Jewish settlers were the "only barrier to a Palestinian state." Sharon was accompanied, throughout the tour, by Yechial Leiter, a leader of the JDL in the West Bank settlement of Kiryat Arba. While in the United States, Sharon raised millions of dollars for the Kiryat Arba "resistance" from such right-wing Zionist patrons as Florida and California bingo parlor magnate Irving Moscowitz and former Reagan Administration Ambassador to Austria and perfume heir, Ronald Lauder.
Sharon's fundraising paid off. On Feb. 25, 1994, Baruch Goldstein, an IDF reservist and leader of Kiryat Arba, massacred 50 Palestinian worshipers at the Cave of the Patriarch holy site. Goldstein had been Rabbi Meir Kahane's Knesset campaign manager at Kiryat Arba.
In March 1994, some 200 rabbis, led by Avraham Shapira, staged a rally at Kiryat Arba and issued a religious edict, ordering resistance against any attempt by the Rabin government to dismantle any settlements. On March 31, 1994, Sharon and Yitzhak Shamir, the former Likud Prime Minister and Stern Gang terrorist, led a rally of 10,000 people attacking Oslo. ADL National Chairman Abe Foxman told the Jerusalem Post on April 2, 1994 that Rabin was "undermining organized Jewish clout" in America, through his peace antics.
Rabin was assassinated on Nov. 4, 1995 by a West Bank settler, Yigal Amir, who came from Sharon's terror hub, Kiryat Arba.
On Jan. 26, 1997, Sharon returned, triumphal, to Kiryat Arba, to deliver new marching orders to the heirs of "Unit 101." If Arafat declared a unilateral Palestinian state in the territory of the West Bank and Gaza under Palestinian Authority control, the settlers should join in the drive to annex all of Judea and Samaria. At the time, Sharon was Minister of National Infrastructure, a super-ministerial post that had been created for him by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Sharon's sometimes ally and sometimes rival for power in the Likud. During 1996-99, Sharon's tenure as Minister of National Infrastructure, the settlers population in the occupied territories soared to more than 200,000.
Netanyahu's fall from power in 1999, and his replacement by a Labor government headed by former IDF chief Ehud Barak, signalled that the Oslo peace process that Sharon was dedicated to destroying, was back on the table.
After the failure of the July 2000 Camp David II negotiations to reach a final settlement, more intense private negotiations between the Barak government and the Palestinian Authority began under a number of venues. Talks took place in New York City, and later, at the resort of Taba, Egypt, producing a final accord, in draft, that would have formed a just and viable basis for two sovereign states, Israel and Palestine. The thorny issues of the right of return of Palestinian refugees, the status of the holy sites in Jerusalem, and of creating two capitals within the extended city limits of Jerusalem, were, according to several Arab and Israeli diplomatic sources, worked out in principle by January 2001. These final points, memorialized in the talking points brought to the final sessions by President Clinton, could be revived today as a basis for reaching a just solution, in the view of many Mideast diplomats familiar with the document.
But Sharon and his backers would have nothing of this.
In September 2000, Sharon visited New York City, where he met with Lauder and other supporters and financiers. He returned to Israel, reportedly with a large amount of cash to be disbursed to settlers' terrorist cells. Sharon personally staged the decisive provocation, by visiting the Islamic holy sites on al-Haram al-Sharif, what the Israelis call the Temple Mount, on Sept. 26, 2000. Sharon was accompanied by more than 1,000 Israeli troops and paramilitary police. It was a flagrant provocation, an assertion of Israeli permanent control over the sacred sites of Islam, the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
With that visit, Sharon provoked the "Al Aqsa Intifada," and within days, the entire Holy Land was again awash in the blood of Palestinian protesters. By January 2001, the Barak government would fall, and, on Feb. 6, 2001, Sharon, who had taken over the Likud party in September 1999, was elected Prime Minister of Israel, ready to launch his final drive for "Greater Israel."
Sharon is referred to have been responsible for two massacres that occurred 20 years apart: the September 1982 massacre of Palestinian civilians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon, and the April 2002 Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) mass killings in the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank.
However for Israelis Sharon was a hero and all the killings were merely considered as being necessary steps on the path toward Sharon’s objective of a "Final Solution" to the "Palestinian problem," through the mass expulsion and/or extermination of the more than 3 million Palestinians and Arabs now living in the occupied lands, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights.
EIR has "written the book" on Sharon's blood-soaked career for over 30 years.
The following summary is parts of what was written by Jeffrey Steinberg and published in the Executive Intelligence Review, “As a service to the current worldwide debate on Israel’s fascist actions”. This summary is linked to a compendium of earlier exposés of Sharon and his partners in crime.
The Sharon File
Sharon was born in Kfar Malal in 1928. At the age of 14, he joined the Haganah, and at 20, headed an infantry company in the Alexandroni Brigade during the 1948 War of Independence, during which the Israeli forces drove an estimated 300,000 Palestinians from their land, using some of the same genocidal methods against unarmed civilian populations that were used in the recent IDF invasion of the Palestinian Authority's Area A territory.
In 1953, Sharon founded "Unit 101," a secret death squad within the IDF that committed several mass murders of civilians. In October 1953, Sharon's "Unit 101" massacred 66 innocent civilians during a cross-border raid into the Jordanian West Bank village of Qibya. Under intense machine-gun fire, local residents were driven into their homes, which were then blown up around them, killing the occupants by burying them alive in piles of rubble. The April 2002 IDF massacre at the Palestinian refugee camp in Jenin was, in fact, modeled on Sharon's "Unit 101" operations at Qibya.
On Oct. 18, 1953, the U.S. State Department issued a bulletin denouncing the Qibya massacre, demanding that those responsible be "brought to account." Instead, Sharon was rewarded for his war crimes by having his "Unit 101" absorbed into the Israeli paratroop corps. By 1956, Sharon had been appointed paratroop brigade commander.
Between Feb. 28, 1955 and Oct. 10, 1956, a Sharon-led paratrooper brigade conducted similar cross-border invasions into Gaza, Egypt, and the West Bank in Jordan. At the West Bank village of Qalqilya, Sharon's death squad killed 83 people.
During the 1956 joint British, Israeli, and French invasion of the Suez Canal, Sharon and his lifelong collaborator in mass murder, Rafael Eytan, carried out another horrific war crime: In three separate incidents, Sharon- and Eytan-led units murdered Egyptian prisoners of war, as well as civilian Sudanese workers who had been captured. All told, 273 unarmed prisoners were executed and dumped into mass graves. When the story broke, nearly 40 years later, in the Aug. 16, 1995 London Daily Telegraph, it nearly ruptured Israeli-Egyptian relations. This was less than three months before Sharon would bloody his hands once again, by orchestrating the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. Rabin, in Sharon's eyes, had committed the mistake of signing a peace treaty with Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat.
During the 1960s, Sharon's military career advanced. In 1964, he was appointed to head the IDF's Northern Command; in 1966, he took charge of the Army Training Department; in 1969, he was named commander of the IDF's Southern Command.
In 1972, at the urging of American organized crime figure and leading right-wing Zionist Meshulam Riklis, Sharon resigned from the IDF (he was recalled, briefly, to active duty during the 1973 Yom Kippur War) to run for the Knesset (parliament). Henceforth, Sharon would be wedded to leading international organized crime figures associated with the Meyer Lansky National Crime Syndicate in the United States, and allied Jewish mafia figures from Israel and Russia.
Even at the end of his career, Sharon was still running death squads. On Sept. 25, 1997, Israeli Television Channel One interviewed Benny Golan, a veteran of the Rimon Unit, which Sharon had created and deployed in the early 1970s in the Gaza Strip to carry out targetted assassinations of Palestinian "militants." Golan described the assassination program, and reported that members of the unit frequently "disguised themselves as Arabs" for "special operations."Other sources reported, at the time, that the "special operations" included terrorist attacks on Israeli Jewish targets to justify "retaliatory strikes" against pre-selected Palestinian and Arab targets.
Far from ending his career of mass butchery, Sharon's resignation from the IDF coincided with the launching of an even more ambitious criminal enterprise that would see thousands of Palestinians killed and wounded as part of the "Eretz Israel," or "Greater Israel" drive to permanently annex all of the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and the Golan Heights—and resettle these areas with Russian and other Jewish immigrants, after the Palestinians have been eliminated.
'Landscam'
Sharon entered the Knesset in December 1973, at the very moment that the Israeli regime lifted the ban on private sales of West Bank land to Israelis. The Knesset decision was brought about by a heavy lobbying effort by Sharon colleague and former Police Minister Yehezkel Sahar. The very first "private" purchase was for the construction of a residential community for retired IDF officers. The partners in the deal included Sahar, Gen. Reshavam Ze'evi, Sharon publicist Eli Landau, and Avraham Mintz, a founder of the fanatical settlers movement Gush Emunim.
In June 1974, Sharon personally led a group of settlers to establish an illegal outpost near the West Bank town of Nablus. It was the first of many such ventures that Sharon would sponsor, under the rhubric of the drive to "Judaize the territories."
Sharon's political career continued to advance. In 1975, Prime Minister Rabin appointed Sharon as his personal security adviser. Then, the Likud was swept into power in the 1977 elections, and Prime Minister Menachim Begin named Sharon as Minister of Agriculture. In that capacity, Sharon launched a massive expansion of Jewish "agricultural settlements" throughout the West Bank and Gaza. During 1977-81, more than 25,000 new settlers—mostly members of the Gush Emunim—moved into the occupied territories. The Gush Emunim settlers formed into death squads explicitly modelled on Sharon's old "Unit 101." They would play a pivotal role in a filthy Anglo-American Zionist criminal enterprise known as "Landscam."
In 1979, the Israeli Supreme Court ratified the private land purchases in the occupied territories, and immediately, Sharon's mafia cronies set up several real estate ventures, under such names as Jumbo, Samarea and Judea, and Meteor. In 1980, Sharon and Yuval Ne'eman formed an organization, Prevention of Emergence of Another Arab Country in Eretz Israel (PEACE), to press the issue of permanent Israeli annexation of the occupied territories. The group included a number of notables from Israel and the United States, who would remain part of the extended Sharon mafia family for years to come: Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, Jewish Defense League (JDL) founder Joseph Churba, Young Israel director Harold Jacobs, Anti-Defamation League of B'nai Brith general counsel Arnold Forster, right-wing Knesset member and Rabbi Meir Kahane patron Geula Cohen, and Roni Milo.
Sharon toured the United States in 1980, lining up financing for a massive real estate grab. But first, Sharon launched a campaign of terror against the Palestinians in the West Bank, to literally scare them into leaving their land. In the Spring of 1982, Sharon hosted a planning meeting at his Negev desert ranch, which had been purchased for him by Riklis. Riklis, Henry Kissinger, Louis Mortimer Bloomfield, Rafi Eytan, General Ze'evi, Arieh Genger, Herbert Brin, and Eli Landau attended the session, according to an eyewitness account. Within days of the meeting, Gush Emunim and JDL terrorists began attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank. "Landscam" was under way.
"Landscam" coincided with Sharon's invasion of Lebanon, which began on June 4, 1982, and was aimed at wiping out the Palestine Liberation Organization, which had established its base in several camps near Beirut. Between June 4 and Aug. 31, 1982, the IDF, under Sharon's direction (Begin had named him Minister of Defense the previous year), killed a total of 19,025 Palestinians and wounded 30,032 in a military campaign that Sharon called "Operation Peace in Galilee." Under immense pressure from the Reagan Administration, Sharon abandoned plans to assassinate Arafat, and, on Aug. 21, 1982, he allowed the PLO to evacuate 15,600 fighters from Lebanon, under an American-brokered cease-fire.
On Sept. 15, Sharon broke the cease-fire agreement, and the next day, launched a "purification" campaign against the refugee camps of Sabra, Shatila, and Burj El Barajneh. Falangist death squads—protected by the IDF, which encircled the camps—massacred unarmed women, children, and elderly.
On Sept. 19, 1982, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 521, harshly condemning the massacres at the camps. In a distant mirror of the current genocide in Jenin, Ramallah, and Bethlehem, Sharon ignored the international condemnations. Today, Sharon faces war crimes prosecution in court in Belgium for his role in the Sabra and Shatila massacres, as the result of a lawsuit filed on June 18, 2001 by 23 survivors of the attacks.
On Oct. 15, 1982, a month after the 1982 massacres, Sharon held meetings—in the Chouf Mountains of Lebanon and at his Negev ranch—with Falange leader Camille Chamoun, Uri Dan, Rupert Murdoch, Charles Douglas-Home, and others, to move the "Landscam" West Bank real estate grab forward. On Nov. 15, 1982, a final meeting took place on several real estate purchases, mostly through Arab middle-men, to push the massive expansion of Jewish settlements throughout the West Bank—at a handsome profit. Attending the meeting at Sharon's ranch were: Kissinger, Lord Harlech (Sir David Ormsby-Gore), Johannes von Thurn und Taxis, Tory Parliamentarian Julian Amery, Sir Edmund Peck, and MI-6 Mideast mandarin Nicholas Elliot.
The Kahane Commission, an Israeli body convened to investigate the Sabra and Shatila mass murders, found Sharon to be complicit in the crimes, and he was fired by Prime Minister Begin as Defense Minister shortly after the report's release. But Sharon landed on his feet. In 1984, after the fall of the Begin government and the establishment of a Likud-Labor national unity government, Sharon was appointed Minister of Trade and Industry, a position he held until 1990, when he was named Minister of Construction and Housing, a post that enabled him to continue as the leading sponsor of the massive expansion of Jewish settlements in the occupied territories. During Sharon's tenure in various government ministries, the number of Jewish settlers soared to more than 110,000.
In January 1986, Edgar Bronfman, the Jewish mafia don and president of the World Jewish Congress, admitted, in a New York Post interview, that he was negotiating on behalf of the Israeli regime with Moscow, to secure Soviet permission for 400,000 Jews to emigrate to Israel—in return for massive shipments of grain to the Soviet Union. The deal was cynically dubbed "Jews for wheat," in recognition that this scheme was leading to the annexation of the occupied lands by Israel. A year earlier, in another sop to the American- and British-based Jewish criminal interests bankrolling Sharon's "Judiazation" scheme, the Knesset had passed laws dropping all restrictions on cash flows into Israeli banks—so long as the money was invested in Israel.
Killing the 'Peace of the Brave'
When Rabin was elected Prime Minister of Israel in 1992, the former Sharon ally in the war on the Palestinians had the courage to admit that his underlying assumptions were wrong, and would lead to the destruction of Israel. He entered into secret peace talks with Arafat, which culminated in the August 1993 signing of the Oslo Peace Accords, in the presence of U.S. President William Clinton at the White House.
Instantly, Sharon declared war on the Oslo Accords and on Prime Minister Rabin. The entire "Landscam" gang joined Sharon in assailing the peace initiative. On Sept. 11, 1993, Kissinger told CBS News interviewers that Oslo was "unworkable." Several weeks later, Kissinger told the Institute for Jewish Affairs in London that Jordan would soon fall into the hands of Islamic fundamentalists and Olso would be crushed—a not-so-veiled reference to Sharon's Hamas assets, which would soon launch a terror wave against Oslo in tandem with Sharon's Jewish underground.
On Oct. 11, 1993, Bertram and Herbert Zweibon, co-founders of Americans for a Safe Israel, a Sharonist front, held a conference in Crystal City, Virginia to launch a campaign to destroy Oslo—and its sponsors. Five days later, Sharon delivered a speech calling for the settlers to launch a resistance to the sellout.
Sharon rushed to the United States and embarked on a nationwide tour on Nov. 14, 1993, in which he declared that the 150,000 Jewish settlers were the "only barrier to a Palestinian state." Sharon was accompanied, throughout the tour, by Yechial Leiter, a leader of the JDL in the West Bank settlement of Kiryat Arba. While in the United States, Sharon raised millions of dollars for the Kiryat Arba "resistance" from such right-wing Zionist patrons as Florida and California bingo parlor magnate Irving Moscowitz and former Reagan Administration Ambassador to Austria and perfume heir, Ronald Lauder.
Sharon's fundraising paid off. On Feb. 25, 1994, Baruch Goldstein, an IDF reservist and leader of Kiryat Arba, massacred 50 Palestinian worshipers at the Cave of the Patriarch holy site. Goldstein had been Rabbi Meir Kahane's Knesset campaign manager at Kiryat Arba.
In March 1994, some 200 rabbis, led by Avraham Shapira, staged a rally at Kiryat Arba and issued a religious edict, ordering resistance against any attempt by the Rabin government to dismantle any settlements. On March 31, 1994, Sharon and Yitzhak Shamir, the former Likud Prime Minister and Stern Gang terrorist, led a rally of 10,000 people attacking Oslo. ADL National Chairman Abe Foxman told the Jerusalem Post on April 2, 1994 that Rabin was "undermining organized Jewish clout" in America, through his peace antics.
Rabin was assassinated on Nov. 4, 1995 by a West Bank settler, Yigal Amir, who came from Sharon's terror hub, Kiryat Arba.
On Jan. 26, 1997, Sharon returned, triumphal, to Kiryat Arba, to deliver new marching orders to the heirs of "Unit 101." If Arafat declared a unilateral Palestinian state in the territory of the West Bank and Gaza under Palestinian Authority control, the settlers should join in the drive to annex all of Judea and Samaria. At the time, Sharon was Minister of National Infrastructure, a super-ministerial post that had been created for him by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Sharon's sometimes ally and sometimes rival for power in the Likud. During 1996-99, Sharon's tenure as Minister of National Infrastructure, the settlers population in the occupied territories soared to more than 200,000.
Netanyahu's fall from power in 1999, and his replacement by a Labor government headed by former IDF chief Ehud Barak, signalled that the Oslo peace process that Sharon was dedicated to destroying, was back on the table.
After the failure of the July 2000 Camp David II negotiations to reach a final settlement, more intense private negotiations between the Barak government and the Palestinian Authority began under a number of venues. Talks took place in New York City, and later, at the resort of Taba, Egypt, producing a final accord, in draft, that would have formed a just and viable basis for two sovereign states, Israel and Palestine. The thorny issues of the right of return of Palestinian refugees, the status of the holy sites in Jerusalem, and of creating two capitals within the extended city limits of Jerusalem, were, according to several Arab and Israeli diplomatic sources, worked out in principle by January 2001. These final points, memorialized in the talking points brought to the final sessions by President Clinton, could be revived today as a basis for reaching a just solution, in the view of many Mideast diplomats familiar with the document.
But Sharon and his backers would have nothing of this.
In September 2000, Sharon visited New York City, where he met with Lauder and other supporters and financiers. He returned to Israel, reportedly with a large amount of cash to be disbursed to settlers' terrorist cells. Sharon personally staged the decisive provocation, by visiting the Islamic holy sites on al-Haram al-Sharif, what the Israelis call the Temple Mount, on Sept. 26, 2000. Sharon was accompanied by more than 1,000 Israeli troops and paramilitary police. It was a flagrant provocation, an assertion of Israeli permanent control over the sacred sites of Islam, the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
With that visit, Sharon provoked the "Al Aqsa Intifada," and within days, the entire Holy Land was again awash in the blood of Palestinian protesters. By January 2001, the Barak government would fall, and, on Feb. 6, 2001, Sharon, who had taken over the Likud party in September 1999, was elected Prime Minister of Israel, ready to launch his final drive for "Greater Israel."
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