DEBKAfile: Al Qaeda's Fatah al-Islam claims two attacks on UN and Israel Tuesday, threatens Bush visit
January 8, 2008, 9:49 PM (GMT+02:00)
Shaker al-Abessi, leader of al Qaeda’s new operational arm in Iraq and the Gaza Strip, congratulated the teams which blew up a UN vehicle at Rumailah in South Lebanon, injuring two Irish peacekeepers, and which fired three Katyusha rockets at the northern Israeli town of Shlomi. The attacks, he said, were a message to the “Crusader Army” and “the Jews,” and he vowed to step them up during the Bush visit to the region.
The Fatah al-Islam chief's message appeared on al Qaeda’s main website.
US and Israeli security officers planning the US president’s stay starting Wednesday, Jan. 9, have taken terrorists threats seriously enough to rearrange his traveling program. To avoid potential al Qaeda-related or Palestinian anti-air missile attacks, most of his movements in Israel and Palestinian areas will not be by helicopter but by road.
Late last year, after Abessi’s terrorists were defeated in the northern Lebanese Nahr al Bard camp, al Qaeda bolstered Fatah al-Islam cells in the southern Lebanese Palestinian refugee camps, deployed a large force to the Gaza Strip and reassigned al Abessi to Iraq.
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GIULIANI - "DEUTERONOMY" - CHAPTER 22
ה לֹא-יִהְיֶה כְלִי-גֶבֶר עַל-אִשָּׁה, וְלֹא-יִלְבַּשׁ גֶּבֶר שִׂמְלַת אִשָּׁה: כִּי תוֹעֲבַת יְהוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ, כָּל-עֹשֵׂה אֵלֶּה. {פ} 5 A woman shall not wear that which pertaineth unto a man, neither shall a man put on a woman's garment; for whosoever doeth these things is an abomination unto the LORD thy God. {P}
Giuliani Time
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Betrayed: The Bush Conspiracy to Divide Jerusalem
By Dr. Mike Evans
President George Bush is moving full-speed ahead with his Annapolis Road Map plan to have a Palestinian state with east Jerusalem as its capital before he leaves office.
The president’s eight-day trip to the Middle East beginning on January 9th is to include stops in Israel, the Palestinian Authority, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Kuwait, Bahrain, and the United Arab Emirates to promote Arab-Israeli reconciliation.
It will be Mr. Bush’s first trip to Israel since becoming president. The Road Map to Peace plan was reincarnated at the U.S.-hosted peace conference in Annapolis on November 27, 2007, when Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas pledged to forge a peace deal by the end of 2008.
President Bush’s command and control center for Israel will be The King David Hotel in Jerusalem, from Wednesday, January 9, 2007 to Friday, January 11th.
In Israel, President Bush will attempt to persuade the Jewish people that the U.S. government and the American people fully support the Road Map to Peace, proposed by the so-called international Quartet: the United States, the European Union, Russia, and the United Nations. The plan for a Palestinian state living side by side with Israel in peace was first outlined by Bush in a speech on June 24, 2002, when he described it as a “framework for progress towards lasting peace and security in the Middle East.”
However, this plan has become corrupted by Saudi Arabia and other fundamentalist Islamic forces into a plan to divide Jerusalem and make east Jerusalem – the home of Christianity – the capital of a Palestinian state and force Israel to return all lands reclaimed in 1967. Former prime minister Ariel Sharon asked to include 14 amendments to the plan. Then-secretary of state Colon Powell refused to include any. On January 3, 2007 Bush urged Israel to honor its commitments under the Road Map to remove West Bank settlements.
In its final stage, the Road Map plan calls for vigorous, unceasing, aggressive negotiations that would end in the creation of a two-state solution. Bush is the first US president officially to commit to recognizing a Palestinian state, despite the fact he refuses to allow the U.S. Embassy to be moved to Israel’s eternal capital, Jerusalem, under the spurious claim of “national security.” The only security involved is upsetting Saudi Arabia and the Arab League, who refuse to recognize the existence of the only democracy in the Middle East, Israel.
Phase 1 of the original plan was to include the ending of all Palestinian violence and the dismantling of all terrorist organizations and their infrastructure. It never got to Phase 2. President Bush has indicated that Israel must make “painful compromises” for peace. In addition, the plan includes Israel’s ceding control of the Temple Mount to the PLO in an effort to reach a lasting peace agreement.
The Road Map supported by the U.S., Russia, the UN, and the EU has raised over $8 billion since the Annapolis summit to assist the PLO to implement its objectives.
Evangelical Christians consider the rebirth of Israel in 1948 a fulfillment of prophecy. When President Harry Truman recognized the State of Israel, the chief rabbi of Israel declared, “God put you in your mother’s womb to bring about the rebirth of Israel after 2000 years.” Evangelicals also believe that the reunification of Jerusalem in 1967 was also a fulfillment of prophecy.
A national Save Jerusalem Campaign has been launched in which more than 100,000 have signed an Internet petition in the last few weeks. The goal is for one million signers of the petition to present it to President Bush, whose plan to divide the City of David is the most aggressive of any US president.
You can add your name to the Presidential Petition by voting now.
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LEVITICUS CHAPTER 26
DEBKAfile: Feared missile attack on presidential helicopter prompts last-minute changes in Bush’s scheduled arrival in Israel
January 8, 2008, 1:55 PM (GMT+02:00)
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Our military sources disclose that concerns about a possible anti-air missile attack on US President George W. Bush’s aircraft and the helicopters carrying him to Jerusalem, brought his arrival forward by two hours. He will travel by road rather than helicopter.
According to the amended timetable, Air Force One lands at Ben Gurion Wednesday, Jan. 9, at 11:30 a.m. Israel Time, two hours before planned. Instead of flying by helicopter to Jerusalem, the president and his party will drive in convoy from the airport to the capital.
The last-minute changes were worked out by US and Israeli security officials - partly in consideration of the low-cloud, rainy and misty weather forecast for the president’s three-day stay. In such weather, helicopters have to fly low under the cloud cover. This would expose them to potential Palestinian anti-air attack.
Israeli police report the main Jerusalem-Tel Aviv highway will be closed to traffic one way from 12:15 to 13:30 p.m. during the presidential convoy's drive to Jerusalem. But disruptions before and after President Bush’s arrival are expected to last several hours. Motorists will be directed to Highway 443.
Sections of the Trans-Israel highway around Ben Shemen and Ben which connect with the Tel Aviv-Jerusalem highway will also be closed to traffic.
Our military sources report that the Israeli military has set up provisional positions manned with large-scale strength on the hills overlooking the international airport to secure Bush’s landing against terrorist attack.
Tuesday, as weather conditions worsened, the heavy US Marines helicopters, flying over Jerusalem with Israeli Air Force fighter escort since the beginning of the week, were grounded at the Hebrew University-Givat Ram pad they have been using.
That morning, the Jerusalem police raised its security alert to Gimel Grade – one short of emergency – until Friday morning. More than 7,000 Israeli police and security personnel were mobilized for the Bush visit.
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| Bush's Betrayal |
FrontPageMagazine.com | Tuesday, January 08, 2008
Saul Bellow once observed that a great deal of intelligence can be invested in ignorance when the need for illusion is deep. President Bush’s ill-advised trip to Jerusalem and the West Bank this week to promote a “two-state solution” would seem to underscore the wisdom of Bellow’s insight.
The presumed aim of Bush’s visit, the first of his presidency, is to revive the goals of November’s all-but-forgotten Annapolis summit. There the president imperiously decided that all that was needed for a final peace settlement to be reached between Israel and the Palestinians was for two leaders with no popular constituency on their respective sides to decide that it should be so. Bush duly met with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, and read from a statement in which the parties promised, not a little ambitiously, to resolve “all outstanding issues, including core issues, without exception” in 2008.
It all might have ended happily at that point, with both sides having savored their share of the international spotlight, were it not for Bush’s hopelessly naïve conviction that the grand promises of the summit had any foundation in reality.
That they do not is made tragically clear by the events of the past few weeks. In late December, two off-duty Israeli soldiers, Cpl. Ahikam Amihai and Sgt. David Rubin, were gunned down while hiking in the West Bank. At least of two of their murderers, Ali Hamid Dandanes and Amar Badad Khalim Taha, are Fatah operatives -- that is, employees of Abbas’ political organization. It is thus unsurprising that to avoid capture by Israeli security, both men turned themselves in to the PA’s intelligence service, where they received understanding treatment.
This is not news, exactly. The al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades, closely affiliated with Fatah, have continued to carry out terrorist attacks on Abbas’ “moderate” watch. But one is again left to wonder how the PA’s official tolerance for killers comports with President Bush’s professed view that Abbas “is a man devoted to peace” and that his faction is ready and willing to address Israeli security concerns.
For its part, the Bush administration has elected to look past the PA’s complicity in terrorism. Choosing hope over experience, the administration seems to have concluded that, for all their faults, Abbas and his organization are nonetheless the enemies of the Islamists in Hamas, and thus potential allies.
But this optimistic assessment is starkly at odds with Abbas’ pronouncement on January 1 that he is ready to “open a new page” by negotiating with the terrorists of Hamas. Showing an aptitude for the double talk in which his predecessor Yasir Arafat specialized, Abbas urged Hamas to accept the normalization of relations with Israel. At the same time, he called for a “partnership in the heart of the fatherland and around the struggle for its liberations,” stressing that “no party should supplant another.” Given that Hamas equates “liberation” with the annihilation of the Jewish state, Abbas’ appeal was more an inducement to terror than a condemnation of it.
No more propitious for the possibility of a final settlement is the history of the last sixty years. In that time, of course, the Palestinians, backed by their Arab patrons, repeatedly have rejected Israel’s right to exist, both as a geographic entity and as a majority-Jewish state.
Offered generous terms of settlement -- including Ehud Barak’s 2000 offer of Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and 97 percent of the West Bank, as well as Palestinian control over East Jerusalem and $30 billion in compensation -- the Palestinians have, in Abba Eban’s famous phrase, never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Loathe to come to terms with the reality of an Israeli state, they have placed their faith in leaders who sought to accomplish with terrorism and duplicitous public relations what Arab armies had failed to do with Soviet-made artillery.
President Bush boldly recognized the fact when, in 2002, he called on Palestinians to elect “leaders not compromised by terror.” The 2006 election of Hamas should have been sufficient proof that Palestinians were not equal to the task. But instead of confirming Bush in his sober realism, the violent aftermath seems to have encouraged the president in the dangerous illusion that peace is within reach.
Dangerous is the only appropriate word. Whatever the merits of the “two-state” solution in the long run, the fact remains that now is the worst possible time to put this vision into practice. Gaza, left to the untender mercies of Hamas, is today one of the most violent places in the Middle East. So intense has been the rocket barrage of Israeli cities from “Hamastan” that Israeli troops in recent days have been forced to intervene to stop the endless assault.
Against this chaotic backdrop, the administration’s insistence that Israel turn over full control of the West Bank to the Palestinian authorities looks like a prescription for disaster. It is something the president would do well to keep in mind as he tours the territory under the kind of impeccable security that Israeli citizens will not be afforded once the West Bank becomes Palestinian domain.
President Bush legitimately can claim to be the most pro-Israel president in history. It would be a shame if he now sacrificed that impressive legacy for the promise of an illusory peace.
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EZEKIAL CHAPTER 39
