Mohammed El Baradei (IslamOnline photo)
As the Iran mullahocracy presses forward with its nuclear program, the IAEA is swinging into action ... against Israel. From the World Tribune, with thanks to Jeff, who notes that this is "a) the result of a concerted effort by Iran to shift focus away from its own nuclear program and broken promises to the IAEA and b) indicative of the moral relativism of the Arabs and Europeans which fails to draw a distinction between nukes in the hands of a Western, democratic state versus the hands of the terror states (like Iran)."
JERUSALEM – The International Atomic Energy Agency plans a campaign to force Israel to permit international inspections of its Dimona nuclear facility.The agency has been under longterm pressure from the European Union, Arab states and Iran to focus more attention on Israel's nuclear program.
Several Arab countries reiterated their call for a nuclear free zone in the Middle East during a United Nations sponsored disarmament conference in Geneva on May 27. Arab envoys said the establishment of such a zone would be their priority over the coming year.
IAEA director-general Mohammed El Baradei plans to visit Israel over the next two months, officials said. The visit was expected to take place following the IAEA board of directors's meeting in mid-June to discuss Iranian compliance with international nuclear inspection efforts. The United States has charged that Teheran has violated its pledge to the IAEA.
I'm glad at least someone has noticed.
What do people think? Personally, I think they've picked on the wrong country to bully. I think Israel will tell them to f-off. The IAEA will put out press releases about Israeli intransigence and the tranzis will try to build it up into an issue until it is received wisdom that Israel is an international nuclear renegade. Not much better than N Korea, really.
The International Red Cross will present some figures it made up earlier, projecting the number of deaths that will occur in the area if blah blah blah and predicting "a humanitarian disaster".
In other words, same old, same old.
Israel has not signed the NPT so there is no legal requirement for them to not have nukes. They should tell the IAEA to mind it's own business and do it's job better in places like Iran and North Korea who have signed the NPT.
Yes, of course Israel should give up its nuclear arsenal. Given its vast size, and the enormous forces under arms (what is it? three million men?) it should have no trouble deterring any would-be aggressors. Why does Israel think it needs nuclear weapons? America does, France does, Great Britain does, China does, Russia does, India does, and Pakistan does -- but these are tiny countries, surrounded by implacable enemies.
C'mon, give up those weapons. If you want a real peace, you have to be willing to surrender something. You gave up the Sinai, and look -- Egypt hasn't attacked you. So that shows peace treaties work, doesn't it? If you really expect the Arab states to make permanent peace, they need a guarantee that you won't take advantage of them. With those nuclear weapons, you just might threaten them and insist that Jewish settlements be put all over the Middle East, from Morocco to Afghanistan. Naturally it's a real worry - conquest from within like that.
Nothing would do more for real and permanent peace between Jews and Arabs than for Israel to give up those weapons. That will restore the trust of the Arabs that has been so cruelly abused these many years. And if, for some reason, some Israeli hotheads or settlers start another war with the Arabs -- well, let it be a fair fight, man-to-man, with no special advantages on either side.
And no sling-shots either.
Just to point out in '73 when Israel's back was to the sea and we were in deap shit (as we were at the start of that war) Israel didn't nuke an arab capital. Nor did they even bomb Cairo or Damascus with convential arms.
And to be honest if Israel were at war with Egypt (which could happen, given a coup in Egypt) and was in Deap shit, I mean real deap shit, Egyptian army in Askalon type shit, we would not nuke Cairo. Its too close, and there is a much better way to do it.
Just look at a map of Egypt...
Zach:
I'm afraid I don't get it. Could you spell it out for me? Sorry, no time to find a map ...
HUGH:
Your cynicism always makes me laugh. Your points are always solid. Your insight ever refreshing.
Keep up the fight for truth!
Doesn't El Baradei actually happen to be an Arab? By any chance?
Screw this. Baradei can't find a Muslim country that has a nuclear arms program, and they are the ones who are building nuclear bombs with the intent to annihilate people. He wants Israel to let the IAEA in? He's got to be kidding. It's a bad idea to have a Muslim head the IAEA, cuz he's there with an agenda to see no evil in re Muslim countries and to see all evil in re Israel. Screw him.
No need to nuke Cairo....just drop it into Lake Nasser and rupture the Aswan dam....
The IAEA is better to clear the nuclear mess in Iran in the first hand. Mullahs are the worst enemies of mankind and Mr el-Baradei is better to dismanlte the ever-increasing threat by Islamists in Iran. The overwhelming majority of Iranians are against nuclear bomb and nuclear energy. The next step should be a Middle East free from nuclear weapons.
B. A.-Iran
Naturally, the EU stands fully behind the IAEA’s endeavours to divert attention onto Israel’s atomic armoury, away from Iran’s ongoing, gross violations of the UN’s Nuclear Proliferation Treaty - in effect, the Europeans are running interference for Tehran’s atomic weapons program.
The EU, deep in delusion and denial, lost in a self-induced moral miasma, can bring itself to discern no shade of difference between the possession of A-bombs by regressive, Islamist Iran (which has signed the NPT and then intentionally circumvented it) or by a democracy, Israel (which, however, like the democracy of India and like Pakistan, never signed the NPT).
Israel’s repeatedly pledged that it won’t use its nukes for a first strike, reserving them exclusively for the role of deterrence. Iran’s Grand Council of Islamic Guidance has announced the opposite: as soon as the Iranians have acquired an adequate quantity of payloads (a dozen, twenty), these ought to be immediately fired at Israel. This is due to their confidence that such a bold coup will totally obliterate tiny Israel, while those warheads which Israel may manage to launch in its posthumous retaliation would damage - but not destroy - the dar el-Islam. Besides, any Moslem casualties, the Ayatollahs’ve decreed, will become “martyrs”, flying straight up to Paradise.
With many of them already profoundly steeped in dhimmitude, obsequiously pursuing the “Euro-Arab Dialogue”, the Europeans are doing everything they can to enable the “Palestinians”, the Arab states and Iran to gain the upper hand on Israel. The EU’s preparing for its projected act of Grand Appeasement, when it finally contrives to “sacrifice” Israel to the genocidal hordes. The Europeans are blindly (and in the end, suicidally) trusting that facilitating the Arabs to play out their mass-murderous obsession with eliminating the Jewish State will earn them points with the dar el-Islam - particularly in the Middle East and North Africa.
In those two regions, the Europeans hope to fill the sudden vacancies - on many levels and in multiple dimensions - left by the departing Americans, whom they wish to manoeuvre into abandoning the Mideast (and beyond), seeking a US retreat into neo-isolationism, or else a neo-hemispherism (à la Monroe Doctrine). - How practical either of these two options could prove for Washington, in the modern world, is definitely open to question.
Of course, the best arrangement for all the people of the planet would be for the West - North America, Europe and all of their associates, such as India, Russia, Israel, Turkey, the Philippines, Singapore, Australia, New Zealand, Japan and South Korea, inter alia - to work closely in an equitable partnership, to impose and maintain stability in any recalcitrant areas on the globe.
The Europeans lack the military strength to realize their dreams of dominance over the Mideast and are unable to beef up their forces and arms-budgets, having sanctimoniously over-sold their citizenry on the alleged benefits of smug pacifism, pretending that this approach was primarily responsible for the peace and prosperity that’s arrived on their continent for the first time ever. In fact, it had been American might alone that kept the Soviets from invading western Europe after 1945; then, in the 1980s, it was sheer US resolution, in deliberately out-competing Moscow - cardinally on the military plane - which caused the USSR’s collapse.
While the EU schemes of commanding the Middle East and North Africa via diplomacy and by economic penetration - because it doesn’t have the direct strength to do so otherwise - the radical Arabs and Moslems are simultaneously plotting to vanquish Europe, by infiltration, subversion, deceit, corruption, blackmail and finally - once it’s been almost paralyzed through their complex of machinations - by terrorist intefadas in countless European cities, suburbs and towns.
Further, unlike the demographically shrinking Europeans, the Arabs and Moslems DO have the numbers on their side - and they’re growing rapidly. Once they accrue the necessary equipment, the EU won’t be able to match them without American support, especially when they’ve been so terminally hollowed out by the dark forces operating right in their midst.
HG--
There is yet another scenario. Muslims rising in the ranks of the armed forces, or the civilian government, of, say, France. They can be "moderate" Muslims. Or even Muslims who pretend that they long ago jettisoned their belief in Islam -- what a good way to do the work of Allah, to harbor the right thoughts inside, and present an Infidel exterior, all while struggling in the path of Allah.
If you can't steal or build bombs and missiles yourself, you can perhaps acquire those of the French force de frappe by carefully arranging for the placement of certain forces around those missiles and those bombs. You know, the odd Muslim equivalent of General Jack D. Ripper in "Dr. Strangelove." Think it far-fetched? Utterly impossible? Well, I am putting this in the time-capsule of the Jihadwathc website today, June 6.
Let's both look back, or someone else do it for us, in five years, ten years, twenty years. Let's see if my fears are justified, or silly. I hope they're silly; I want to have egg on my face. I want to be wrong.
Hugh:
Yeah, there’s cause for anxiety about the Strangelovian scenario of Paris’ force de frappe falling into the hands of some renegade, French-Moslem officer, but, thankfully, not in the near term.
More worrying are several prospects that could well be a lot closer: Jihadis taking over volatile Pakistan, with its 40 to 60 nukes, Iran’s deranged Grand Council of Islamic Guardians finishing construction of their atomic arsenal, or el-Qaeda obtaining one (or some) of the ex-Soviet devices which went “missing” during the mid-1990s, pilfering one (or some) of Pakistan’s warheads and/or purchasing one (or some) from the rogue state of North Korea.
If the full volume of the French force de frappe or Pakistan’s flights of nukes were loosed on the West, the devastation would be enormous. Otherwise, it’d be horrendous, but somewhat more limited. What’d be the sensible response to such an attack? If a régime in Pakistan or Iran is found culpable, there’s a solid argument to be made for smiting those countries in reprisal. If it’s established that the responsibility lay with an individual “Général Jacques de Ripper”, alone, should all of France cop nuclear retribution forthwith? What targets for retaliation ought to be selected for a counter-strike if an atomic explosion’s set off by el-Qaeda or its confederates?
In the latter case, it depends how tough you want to play. Ultimately, there’d be no excluding Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia from the list of sites (while simultaneously demolishing el-Aqsa in Jerusalem with armoured bulldozers). Visualize it - a cruise missile entering the Grand Mosque, penetrating the Kaaba and detonating on impact with the Holy Black Stone in its corner, vapourizing it. Accompanying this, a further handful of missiles, bearing “dirty” payloads, peppering the environs of Mecca (and Medina) for miles around, rendering them lethally unapproachable for the next 22,000 years.
Following the Arab defeat by Israel in 1967, reputedly there arose in the dar el-Islam a previously unimaginable question (identical to that of the Christians when the Barbarians sacked Imperial Rome, or of the Jews when the Babylonians and then the Romans destroyed the First and Second Temples): Has our God abandoned our Religion, letting such things take place?
This questioning was urgently suppressed by a concerted campaign throughout the Arab/Moslem sphere, which soon transmogrified it into an unshakeable conviction in the existence an immense and complex, global Conspiracy, arrayed specifically to assault “poor, innocent” Islam.
Christianity managed to live through the fall of Rome (and later of Byzantium), Judaism got through the destruction of the Temples - but does Islam possess the inner resources and flexibility to survive the permanent loss of Mecca, Medina and el-Aqsa? Or would the shock prove terminal, exposing the religion’s shortcomings and causing its dissolution?
In putting this to the test, there can be no doubt whatever that the immediate reaction to such a stroke by the West would be ultra-violent and hyper-terroristic on the part of the Islamic world. But once this is severely put down (including the application of nukes, where requisite), the remnant of Moslems will be unavoidably confronted with the inescapable necessity of either drastically reforming their beliefs or irrationally sticking to them and perishing.
Sorry to sound so callous, but this is WAR (whether people like it or not) - which, remember, the Islamo-fascists ignited, not the West - against a mortal enemy that openly, daily vows that its primary aim is to totally eradicate the West, plus every trace and any memory of it, root and branch, forever. - Nobody goes into War with the goal of losing!
Our options are narrow - either to fight back or to surrender. The scant alternatives before us are PEACE THROUGH VICTORY (at whatever expense) or death in the endeavour, or else to be butchered, or to submit to dhimmitude and enslavement, or to conversion and slavery - should our new masters deign to spare us in our defeat (which they’re nowhere obliged to do).