LCCC
ENGLISH DAILY NEWS BULLETIN
ِAugust
16/2010
Bible Of
the Day
Luke 1/:46-55: "Mary
said, “My soul magnifies the Lord. 1:47 My spirit has rejoiced in God my Savior,
1:48 for he has looked at the humble state of his handmaid. For behold, from now
on, all generations will call me blessed. 1:49 For he who is mighty has done
great things for me. Holy is his name. 1:50 His mercy is for generations of
generations on those who fear him. 1:51 He has shown strength with his arm.
He has scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts. 1:52 He has put
down princes from their thrones. And has exalted the lowly. 1:53 He has filled
the hungry with good things. He has sent the rich away empty. 1:54 He has given
help to Israel, his servant, that he might remember mercy, 1:55 As he spoke to
our fathers,
Romans 1:16/For I am not
ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who
believes...
Free Opinions, Releases,
letters, Interviews & Special Reports
Muslim Cleric Calls for Jihad,
Coptic Christians Attacked in Egypt/(AINA)/August
15/10
Government at risk of collapse
if STL indicts Hizbullah/By: Mariam Karouny/August
15/10
Underestimating our
enemies/By: By DAVID HOROVITZ/August 15/10
Lebanon Positioned to Take a
Beating/By Anthony Tsontakis/American Thinker/August
15/10
Netanyahu's warning/By George F.
Will/W.Post/August
15/10
Latest News
Reports From Miscellaneous Sources for August 15/10
Awadh's Killing 'Positive Step'
Although it Buried Bombing and Murder 'Secrets' /Naharnet
Asarta Stresses on Cooperation with
Lebanese Army, Says Situation Normal Along Blue Line /Naharnet
Strugar Reassures on South Calm,
Says Lebanon, Israel Don't Want War /Naharnet
Ain al-Hilweh remains calm
following Awad’s killing/Now Lebanon
Gemayel: Dualism in defense
responsibilities undermines the state/Now Lebanon
Underneath Lebanon, Israel Sees
Hidden Battlefield /Naharnet
Israeli
Exercises on Street Fighting in South Lebanon-Like Terrain
/Naharnet
Issawi:
No Timeframe to Issue Tribunal Indictments
/Naharnet
Hariri:
I Choose When to Speak; Chaos and Instability are Manmade Things, They Don't
Come Out of the Void
/Naharnet
Qassem: Hizbullah Solved
Tribunal Negligence Problem/Naharnet
Wahab:
March 14 Ministers Should Quit after Withdrawing Tribunal Funding
/Naharnet
Report: Nasrallah Advised
Aoun to Ease up after Attempts to 'Mobilize' him against Karam's Arrest
/Naharnet
Fatfat: Those who Replace Chaos
with Justice Are with Assassinations/Naharnet
Underneath Lebanon, Israel
Sees Hidden Battlefield
/Naharnet
Hussam Hussam: Ghassan
al-Jed Was Near Hariri Crime Scene
/Naharnet
Conflicting Reports About
Release of 2 Lebanese Jailed over Israel Embassy Bomb Plot in Azerbaijan
/Naharnet
The Independent: More than
500,000 People Visited Hizbullah Theme Park
/Naharnet
Cabinet
to Discuss Equipping the Army from Outside Agenda
/Naharnet
Strugar Reassures on South
Calm, Says Lebanon, Israel Don't Want War
/Naharnet
Telecom Ministry: Low
Night Tariffs for Prepaid Cell Phone Services Starting September
/Naharnet
Otari: Syria Has Returned
to Lebanon Stronger Than Before, Conflict with Israel Will Always Exist
/Naharnet
The Independent: More than 500,000
People Visited Hizbullah Theme Park /Naharnet
Al-Qaeda deputy leader slams
Turkey's ties with Israel/Now Lebanon
Underestimating our enemies
By DAVID HOROVITZ
08/13/2010 15:25
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=184614
To ridicule and dismiss Hassan Nasrallah’s public bragging this week is hubris.
Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah is feeling the heat.
The UN tribunal investigating the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese prime
minister Rafik Hariri is, by all accounts, about to point an unerring finger of
blame in Hizbullah’s direction.
Lebanon is on tenderhooks. The potential for explosive unrest, in a country
beset by internal divisions, is acute. The killing itself set off a
near-revolution five years ago. Now Hariri’s own son, the current prime minister
Saad, is so afraid of the incendiary impact of an indictment of Hizbullah that
he is reportedly pleading behind the scenes for the tribunal to postpone its
fateful announcement.
In Israel, it is emphatically believed that Nasrallah was indeed behind the
fatal Beirut car-bombing.
“He knows exactly who was to blame,” said Maj.-Gen. (res.) Ya’acov Amidror, the
former head of IDF Research and Assessment, of Nasrallah on Tuesday. “He
dispatched them.”
And thus, on this side of the border, Nasrallah’s Israel-bashing TV appearance
on Monday night was generally interpreted as a rather desperate diversionary
tactic. The sheikh’s protracted effort to assert that Israel carried out the
killing of the tycoon-politician who was rebuilding Lebanon was instantly
dismissed as “ridiculous” by officials in Jerusalem… who may have missed the
point: Nasrallah was primarily bent on sowing doubt among the Lebanese – and he
likely succeeded – and on prodding the Lebanese government into halting all
cooperation with the tribunal.
RATHER MORE attention was devoted here to Nasrallah’s bragging on the subject of
1997’s Shayetet 13 disaster, when naval commandos on an operation in Lebanon
triggered explosive devices that had been laid by Hizbullah, with the ultimate
loss of no fewer than 12 of their 16-strong team.
The deaths of so many elite commandos in that one incident, at the hands of
Hizbullah, has been characterized by some analysts, with no little
justification, as the beginning of the end of Israel’s deployment in the south
Lebanon security zone – the catalyst for the zone’s dismantlement, and the
unilateral withdrawal to the international border, that followed three years
later.
Nasrallah claimed Monday that this bloody interception represented a glorious
intelligence and operational success for his organization, further proof of its
heroism and its savvy. Plainly, his motivation in returning to the incident –
which involved him reviving claims that had already been made several years ago
by his deputy Naim Kassem – was to demonstrate Hizbullah’s purportedly peerless
capacity to harm those Zionist enemies to the south, and thus to underline its
value to Lebanon and the need to safeguard it from the harmful repercussions of
the Hariri affair.
Nasrallah, as ever, was also taking aim at the Israeli psyche, hoping that the
reopening of this 13-year-old wound would prompt a new bout of debilitating
recrimination, perhaps involving the bereaved parents and certainly senior IDF
officers, past and present. And, to some extent, he has been successful: The
question of what exactly Hizbullah knew of the Shayetet operation ahead of time,
and how exactly it knew it, did indeed return to the public agenda this week.
Hours before Nasrallah’s TV appearance, Gabi Ofir, the reserve general who
chaired an IDF investigation into the catastrophe, was still insisting that the
commandos had not fallen victim to an intelligence “leak,” and that the
Hizbullah interception was “purely coincidental.”
But Nasrallah’s performance, which featured footage allegedly obtained from
unmanned IDF drones that were scouting out the commandos’ route, further
vindicated the already widespread belief that the operation had indeed been
compromised. Hizbullah, it is now largely accepted, may have managed to view the
unencrypted footage from the drone – simply by identifying the relevant
broadcast frequency.
Prompted by Nasrallah to reexamine the terrible incident once again, generals,
parents and analysts have been discussing why it was that the drones’ footage
was not encoded. Amidror, who was military secretary to defense minister Yitzhak
Mordechai at the time, has been arguing that the capacity for such encoding was
quite new, and was being tested initially in drones being used by another elite
IDF outfit, Sayeret Matkal – the General Staff’s commando unit. The author and
journalist Amir Rappaport has countered that there was no good reason that this
latest technology should not have been available to the Shayetet, and called the
failure scandalous.
Arguments have also raged as to how obvious the specifics of the operation would
have been to Hizbullah once it had got its hands on the footage – and thus how
easy for Hizbullah to thwart the commandos.
And there has been much renewed discussion of what exactly happened in the
terrible moments after the commandos first inadvertently detonated those
explosive devices that Hizbullah had placed on their route.
Nasrallah boasted about an ambush, featuring fighters who were lying in wait for
the hapless IDF troops. “Our men waited there for weeks,” he claimed. The IDF
narrative, by contrast, is that Hizbullah personnel were not hiding in the field
night after night for the commandos to come and that, rather, the Shayetet
fatalities were the victims, first of the hidden Hizbullah bombs, and second, of
the consequent detonation of the explosives they were themselves carrying.
NASRALLAH IS feeling the heat over Hariri.
Nasrallah is emphasizing Hizbullah’s bravery, determination and importance.
Nasrallah is seeking to chivvy away at Israel’s perceived weaknesses. All of
this is obvious here, south of the border. Our analysts are highly skilled in
assessing Hizbullah’s motivations, and our officials are adept in dismissing the
more risible of his claims.
What seems to have been under-discussed this week, however, is the original sin.
And it’s the same original sin that left an Israeli naval vessel defenseless in
the face of a Hizbullah strike in the Second Lebanon War – the INS Hanit, hit
off the coast of Beirut in July 2006 by a shore-toship missile, with the loss of
four lives.
It’s the same original sin that, a month earlier, at Kerem Shalom on our
southern border, saw Gilad Schalit’s Armored Corps unit vulnerable to Hamas’s
tunneling and attack.
It’s the same original sin that rendered the Shayetet 13 commandos, again,
inadequately prepared to grapple with the core of violent thugs who jumped on
them when they boarded the Gaza-bound Mavi Marmara on May 31.
The same original sin, breeding a welter of immensely compromising and
problematic repercussions.
And which sin is that? The cardinal sin of underestimating the enemy.
CHIEF OF staff Lt.-Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi acknowledged to the Turkel Commission on
Wednesday that the IDF didn’t know enough about the extremists on board the Mavi
Marmara and the IHH organization that had assembled them.
The IHH “was not on our list of priorities,” he said – although it had been
recognized by the security establishment, and even characterized by Defense
Minister Ehud Barak, as a pro-Hamas, proterror entity. The ill-equipped
commandos were expecting to be met by “10 or 15 people,” said Ashkenazi, and the
assumption was “that if we threw stun grenades, they would move away.”
Neither, self-evidently, was the army sufficiently braced for the kind of brazen
Hamas incursion that saw the abduction of Schalit and the killings of Hanan
Barak and Pavel Slutsker early on June 25, 2006, even though the Shin Bet said
it had conveyed precise intelligence information highlighting the danger. “The
incident in Kerem Shalom caught us unprepared,” said Ashkenazi’s predecessor,
Dan Halutz, that day.
Similarly, the INS Hanit’s anti-missile defenses had not been activated off the
Lebanese coast because it was deemed unlikely that Hizbullah possessed the
Iranian- made C-802 missile that holed it, even though the IDF was in possession
of enough intelligence information to suggest the contrary.
Just as, back in 1997, we didn’t believe that Hizbullah had the capacity to
intercept unencrypted footage from our reconnaissance drones, even though the
technical process involved in accessing such footage was straightforward.
WE DIDN’T realize. We didn’t believe. We didn’t know.
But we probably should have known.
And surely we should have prepared more effectively for the worst, in each of
these awful incidents, rather than hoping for the best. Surely, we should have
long since recognized the ruthless Iranian inspiration that is common to all
these bitter incidents. Our very survival, after all, requires that we
internalize the methodical malevolence with which Iran is working toward its
declared goal of our destruction.
So if we scoffed at Nasrallah’s lengthy bragging this week, deriding him as
military chief on the defensive, a vicious murderer confined to his bunker and
lashing out in all directions as the walls close in, we had best think again.
For such scoffing would only confirm a familiar hubris – a hubris that is
intolerable, indefensible and untenable in the face of Nasrallah’s rapacious and
relentless paymaster, Iran
Muslim Cleric Calls for Jihad, Coptic Christians
Attacked in Egypt
GMT 8-14-2010
http://www.aina.org/news/20100814184359.htm
Assyrian International News Agency
(AINA) -- On August 13 Sheikh Tobah, Imam of the village of Shimi 170 KM south
of Giza, called during Muslim Friday prayers for Jihad against Christians living
there. As a result the Christian Copts living in the village were assaulted over
two consecutive days. Eleven Copts were hospitalized and many Coptic youths were
arrested.
The assaults begain a couple of hours after the Sheikhs incitement. An argument
between Copt Maher Amin, who was washing his taxi, and Mohamed Ali Almstaui, a
Muslim extremist from the village, escalated into violence as Mohamad assaulted
Maher. The altercation was stopped by bystanders. However, after the evening
break of Ramadan fast, Ahmad, the brother of the perpetrator Mohamad, who is
reported to belong to an extremist organization, together with twenty other men,
went to Maher's family home, breaking down the door and assaulting him and his
family with batons, including his old mother and his paralyzed sister, injuring
them and breaking their furniture.
Security forces came and took away the Christian victims and kept them at the
station in spite of their wounds, to pressuree them into accepting
"reconciliation" with their attackers. None of the Muslims were arrested.
Saad Gamal, Egyptian MP for Elsaff, phoned from Gaza, where he is on a visit,
and gave orders to the police to force reconciliation on the Coptic parties.
"I was against reconciliation, because I know that the culprits know that they
can assault Copts, and in the end it will boil down to Copts giving up all their
rights with the reconciliation sessions," said Reverend Ezra Nageh of St.
George's Church in Elsaff.
"I was told by the security authorities that for the sake of the Holy month of
Ramadan, everyone ought to make peace."
The next day, after the compulsory reconciliation between the Amin family and
Almstaui family, a large number of Muslims were gathered by the Almstauis and
attacked again the houses of the Copts, beaten the inhabitants, and went to the
fields and assaulted the Copts there also.
"Why should they not do that, when they are told that the MP will defend them,"
said Rev. Ezra, adding the police have yet to issue a report about the
incidents, because they were afraid of the MP. "So to whom should we go for
help? MP Saad Gamal hates Christians, and President Mubarak pretends that he is
not present or unaware of our plight."
Ghali Tawfik, one of the Coptic victims, said "We are forced into reconciliation
and in less than 24 hours, we are assaulted again."
In an aired audio interview with activist Wagih Yacoub, Maher Amin said "they
have humiliated us. We were beaten and we could not do anything about it. We are
weak and helpless and have to accept reconciliation. They will next come to our
homes and rape our women, and we will not be able to do anything about it."
Karam Bebawy, another Coptic victim, said the arrival of strangers to the
village two weeks ago "with long beards and wearing short dresses like the
Islamists" have a hand in poisoning the atmosphere in their village and inciting
the Muslims against the Copts. He said that his Muslim neighbors have turned
against him without reason since then.
Police today released the assaulted Copts who were detained on Friday and
arrested three new Coptic youths in their twenties on charges of having some old
cases against them. They were transferred to State Security. However, Rev. Ezra
said that State Security is using the same old trick, which is detaining
innocent Copts and fabricating crimes against them, to twist the arm of the
church into accepting a forced reconciliation.
The village mayor, Sheikh Saad contacted Rev. Ezra on August 14, regarding a
second reconciliation, but he flatly refused.
"They attack us today and force reconciliation on us. Are they waiting for us to
be killed tomorrow and then they would think about the rule of law?" asked
Reverend Ezra.
By Mary Abdelmassih
Copyright (C) 2010, Assyrian International News Agency. All Rights Reserved.
Terms of Use.
Gemayel: Dualism in defense responsibilities
undermines the state
August 15, 2010
“Dualism in defensive responsibilities” between Hezbollah and the Lebanese Armed
Forces (LAF) hurts the state’s legitimacy when dealing with foreign governments
and international institutions, Kataeb leader Amin Gemayel said while speaking
to a youth delegation on Sunday, according to the National News Agency (NNA).He cited the recent announcement by the US State Department that it is reviewing
military aid to Lebanon, after US Congressman Howard Berman placed a hold last
week on $100 million in American aid for the Lebanese army because of concerns
“about reported Hezbollah influence on the LAF.”
Gemayel added that “it is illogical in the diplomatic arena and in international
law to mix decisions that have an official and governmental character with
practices that have a revolutionary and illegitimate character.”-NOW Lebanon
Ain al-Hilweh remains calm following Awad’s killing
August 15, 2010 /NOW Lebanon’s correspondent reported on Sunday that the situation in the Ain al-Hilweh
Palestinian refugees camp remains calm following the Saturday killing of Fatah
al-Islam leader Abed al-Rahman Awad.
Fatah military chief in Lebanon Brigadier General Sobhi Abu Arab told NOW
Lebanon on Saturday that the two men killed in the Lebanese army intelligence
ambush in the Bekaa town of Chtoura on Saturday are Fatah al-Islam head and
Al-Qaeda commander Abed al-Rahman Awad and his bodyguard, Abu Bakr Ghazi
Mubarak.
Abu Arab also told NOW Lebanon on Sunday that all Palestinian factions in the
camp are on alert to maintain security.
Head of the Fatah military wing in Ain al-Hilweh, Colonel Mahmoud Abdel Hamid
Issa, told NOW Lebanon on Sunday that the situation is calm in the camp, adding
that contact between Fatah and other Palestinian factions is ongoing to maintain
stability in the camp.“Assaulting the Lebanese army is unacceptable,” he added.-NOW Lebanon
Al-Qaeda deputy leader slams Turkey's ties with Israel
August 15, 2010 /Al-Qaeda deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahiri slammed Turkey's ties with Israel and
its role in Afghanistan, in an audio message posted on Islamist websites.
"Change will come when the Turkish people ask their government to stop
cooperating with Israel and recognizing it and to stop sending their forces to
kill Muslims in Afghanistan," a man identified Sunday as Zawahiri by US
monitoring group SITE said in the 20-minute audio tape.
The Turkish government "appears to sympathize with the Palestinians through
statements and by sending some relief aid, while it actually recognizes Israel,
engages in trade, carries out military training and shares information with it,"
Zawahiri said.
The authenticity of the statement could not immediately be verified.
Israel on May 31 raided a Gaza-bound flotilla of six ships trying to run the the
blockade of Gaza in a botched operation in which nine Turks were killed.
The bloody ending to the standoff triggered international criticism of Israel
and dealt a heavy blow to Turkish-Israeli ties.-AFP/NOW Lebanon