Stoned in Iran

Justice in the Islamic Republic.

If an Iranian prosecutor has his way, a 43-year-old mother of two will soon be taken from her cell in Tabriz prison, wrapped in a white shroud, buried up to her chest in a dirt pit, and stoned to death. In accordance with Iran's penal code, the rocks pelted at her head will be big enough to inflict pain, but not large enough to kill her immediately. It will take time—maybe half an hour—for her to die.

Welcome to Iranian justice, where the testimony of a woman is worth half that of a man, and gays are hanged in the public square.

The Islamic Republic insists that the crimes of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani are manifold. A poor Azeri who speaks little Persian, Ms. Ashtiani was first found guilty by an East Azerbaijan court in May 2006 of having "illicit relationships" with two men. For this, she was lashed 99 times.

In another trial several months later, she was sentenced to stoning for alleged adultery with the man accused of murdering her husband. Last Sunday the head of the East Azerbaijan Judiciary told the Islamic Republic News Agency that, in addition to these sexual crimes, Ms. Ashtiani was also convicted of the murder itself.

Following a campaign by her two children, the Western press and various politicians and celebrities, the Iranian embassy in London issued a statement last week saying the stoning was suspended. Yet Ms. Ashtiani's fate remains unclear. Her lawyer, Mohammad Mostafai, says that the stay is ambiguous and that there's a "very serious chance" of execution by other means, like hanging.

The chief of the judiciary in her province confirmed that "whenever the respectable head of the judiciary [Sadeq Larijani] finds it expedient, the execution of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani will be carried out." Tehran has banned newspapers and TV stations from reporting accurately on Ms. Ashtiani's case. Most Iranians don't even know her name. Meanwhile, we hear that her 22-year-old son Sajad has been summoned by the Tabriz intelligence ministry. Our calls to him went unanswered.

Ten other Iranians accused of adultery (seven women and three men) currently await the same medieval punishment for their "crime against God," according to Amnesty International. The silver lining in all of this is that the public outcry is making a difference. If only the Obama Administration understood this lesson.

Reprinted from The Wall Street Journal

More on the Dubai Assassination

Interesting article by Jay Epstein, published in The Wall Street Journal. 

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Attached is the article since the WSJ may require registration:

James Jesus Angleton, the legendary CIA counterintelligence chief, once discussed a series of suspicious deaths in Germany with me. "Any gang of thugs could murder someone," he said, "but it took an intelligence services to make a murder appear to be a suicide or natural death."

According to this precept, the assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai on the evening of Jan. 19, 2010, was almost certainly the work of an intelligence service. When Mabhouh's body was discovered the next day in his room in the five-star Al Bustan Rotana hotel, it appeared he'd died in bed of natural causes. There were no wounds, bruises or other signs of foul play.

Room 230 had no balcony or windows that could be opened, and the electronic door latch appeared to have been locked from the inside. If an ordinary tourist died under such nonsuspicious circumstances, investigators would routinely assume he had died in his sleep from natural causes.

But Mabhouh was no ordinary tourist. He was a senior commander and a co-founder of Hamas's military wing, Izzedine al-Qassam Brigades. His activities included the abduction of Israeli soldiers, and he was wanted in three countries: Israel, Egypt (where he had been imprisoned for almost a year for his Muslim Brotherhood activities and was wanted on suspicion of subversion) and Jordan, on suspicion of terrorism.

Based in Damascus, Syria, Mabhouh was also a key intermediary in the covert arms traffic between Iran's Revolutionary Guard, the Syrian intelligence service, the Hamas government in Gaza, and other militants. He was ordinarily protected by a team of armed bodyguards. But they had not been allowed to accompany him to Dubai on Jan. 19 because there was no room on the flight, according to a Hamas spokesman in Damascus, Talal Nasser. So whether by design or accident, he was stripped of his protection, making his assassination easier to accomplish.

When the Dubai police, under pressure from Hamas, looked more closely into the crime scene, they found that the electronic lock on the door of his room had been reprogrammed to allow others to enter. The electronic lock can be accessed directly at the hotel room door by a sophisticated hacker.

Then a Dubai forensic lab retesting his body fluids discovered traces of succinylcholine. This is a quick-acting, depolarizing, paralytic drug that, by rendering Mabhouh incapable of resisting, could account for the lack of bruise marks on the body.

In February, Dubai's chief coroner, Fawzi Benomran, reversed his verdict of a natural death. Instead, describing the death as "one of the most challenging cases" in the history of the emirate, he concluded it was a disguised homicide "meant to look like death from natural causes during sleep."

Meanwhile, Dubai investigators examined 645 hours of videos from surveillance cameras at the hotel and elsewhere. They saw that, after Mabhouh left his hotel room, four suspicious-looking individuals got out of the elevator on the second floor near his room. Several hours later, at 8:25 p.m., Mabhouh returned to his room (according to the electronic lock). Shortly afterwards, the four men were seen via the cameras leaving the floor.

The police theorized that these men had surreptitiously entered Mabhouh's room while he was out, incapacitated him with the paralytic drug on his return, induced a heart attack by suffocating him with a pillow, and reprogrammed the electric lock to make it appear it had been locked from the inside.

With the aid of facial recognition software, Dubai police then identified 26 suspects. All had been in Dubai at the time of Mabhouh's brief visit. All had entered Dubai using fake or fraudulently obtained passports from countries not requiring a Dubai visa, including Britain, Ireland, France, Germany and Australia.

All the passports turned out to be stolen identities with faked passport photos. The charge cards, airline tickets and pre-paid phone cards these suspects used were also in the name of their stolen identities. The only real clue to their real identities was that eight of the identities had been stolen from people with dual Israeli citizenship. Since Mossad, Israel's national intelligence agency, had previously used dual citizens' passports to fake identities, Dubai authorities concluded the suspects were from Mossad.

Dahi Khalfan Tamim, the head of the Dubai police force, stated on a government-owned Web site, that he "is 99 percent, if not 100 percent, that Mossad is standing behind the murder." While this authoritative finger-pointing was largely accepted as am "aha" moment by the media, Dubai is not exactly an uninterested party in the Mabhouh affair. It is, after all, the principal transshipment points for the lethal arms trade between Iran and Hamas—and Mabhouh had been one of the major players in this trade.

The much-publicized hotel surveillance videos, while highly diverting on YouTube, do not show any of the 26 suspects engaging in any illegal activities other than using false identities, a practice which is not unknown in Dubai. (Mabhouh himself reportedly had five different passports.) Even if all 26 identity thieves were intelligence operatives, as seems the case, it does not necessarily follow that they were all in Dubai on the same business, or even working for the same side.

Since Iran maintains its largest offshore financing facility in Dubai—which is used by the Revolutionary Guard, among others, to support its traffic in covert weapons— more than one intelligence service might be interested in Mabhouh's trip. Consider, for example, the peculiar fact that two of the 26 Dubai suspects exited by boat to Iran, according to Dubai authorities; this is not a likely escape route for Mossad agents.

Two other individuals whom the Dubai police had named as suspects worked for the Palestinian Authority, an arch-enemy of Hamas. (They were arrested in Jordan and turned over to Dubai.) Another person wanted by Dubai for questioning returned to Damascus just prior to the killing. And then there is the question of who in Syria played a role in stripping Mabhouh of his protection just hours before his flight to Dubai.

The key missing piece in the jigsaw remains Mabhouh's mission to Dubai—apparently important enough for him to travel there without his normal contingent of bodyguards.

Mabhouh arrived from the airport at his hotel shortly before 3 p.m., and after changing his clothes left for an unknown destination. He was gone for several hours. But even with its state-of-the-art surveillance cameras in Dubai, and extensive interviews with all the taxi drivers at the hotel, authorities claim they cannot determine either his whereabouts during these hours or the identity of whom he met.

The world-wide focus on the spooks—whose false identities allowed many of them to vanish in the intelligence netherworld—has diverted attention from the potentially embarrassing mission that brought Mabhouh to Dubai. The real intrigue here is not who killed a wanted terrorist, but what he was up to. Without this missing piece, any rush to judgment about who his killers were may be premature.

Mr. Epstein, who frequently writes on intelligence issues, is the author most recently of "The Hollywood Economist" (Melville, 2010).

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, Mrch 27, 2010, page A15

Worth Reading!

Norman Podhoretz has written in the Wall Street Journal an excellent defense of Sarah Palin. The article compares attacks on Palin with attacks on Ronald Reagan. The accusations of her lack of expertise in foreign affairs is looked upon while comparing her to Biden, who despite being an expert in the field has been wrong on his conclusions on major issues for most of his career in the Senate. The comparisons and contrasts are terrific and illustrate the irrational hatred of Sarah Palin’s opponents.

Read Article in The Wall Street Journal.

The following article by Ronen Berman, correspondent for Yediot Aharonot, offers three scenarion for the outbreak of hostilities in the Midddle East:

How the Next Middle East War Could Start
By Ronen Bergman

The three most plausible scenarios all involve Iran.


This May, Israel will celebrate its 62nd Independence Day. And barring the unexpected, the country will have good reason to celebrate. This will have been the safest year in a decade and a half for Israeli civilians—the year with the fewest fatalities in acts of war or terror.

Ironically, Israel’s most bitter foes are responsible for this achievement. The leadership of both Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza have imposed a temporary policy of nonconfrontation on their respective followers, as well as on other armed groups operating within the territories they control. They are now part of the administration and don’t want to be blamed for igniting another war in the region. As a result, the once almost daily rocket attacks on civilian targets in the north and south of Israel have been reduced to a trickle.

This is as good as it gets in this part of the world. But the truth is that the Middle East remains as ever on the brink of war. One careless move by any party, and the now dormant volcano could erupt once again.

Israel is certainly aware of this volatility, and it is preparing for the worst. In late February the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) conducted a secret war game, code-named Firestone 12, which simulated a general conflict in the region. Under the scenario used in the exercise, Iran instructs its Hezbollah proxies to initiate military action against Israel in order to divert attention from the Iranian nuclear project. Israel responds with massive force against Hezbollah in Lebanon, which draws Syria and Hamas into the conflict.

The exercise was supposed to conclude with the mobilization of a large number of reserves. But because military and political tensions were running high, the army decided not to call up the additional units.

Until recently, the most plausible scenario for the outbreak of the next war would have begun with an Israeli aerial assault on Iranian nuclear installations. This would lead to a response by members of the group that the Israeli intelligence community refers to as the “radical front”: Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. But for now, this scenario is regarded as somewhat less likely, since it appears that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will go along with the U.S. demand that Israel allow time for sanctions to achieve their purpose.

Yet there are other scenarios that create a very real danger of war breaking out.

Scenario I: Hamas attacks in order to break the impasse. These are hard times for Hamas. It sustained a military defeat at the hands of Israel in late 2008 and is now engaged in a bitter confrontation with Egypt over a barrier Egypt is constructing to prevent smuggling from the Sinai Peninsula into Gaza. Various sources, including IDF Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi, who briefed parliament on Tuesday, have suggested that Hamas may try to break the impasse by instigating a military operation to upset the balance of forces in the region. In addition, the organization’s desire to avenge the assassination of senior commander Mahmoud al-Mabhouh last January in Dubai has only increased its motivation to act.

Scenario II: Hezbollah avenges Imad Mughniyeh’s assassination. Hezbollah believes that the Mossad was behind the assassination of the organization’s military commander two years ago. Mughniyeh was the most wanted terrorist on the FBI’s list before Sept. 11, 2001, and he was in charge of the suicide attacks on the American Embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut in 1982/1983. Mossad and the CIA tried to catch or kill him numerous times in the past.

In order to avenge Mughniyeh’s death, Hezbollah attempted to blow up the Israeli Embassy in Azerbaijan, attack Israeli tourists in the Sinai, and abduct Israeli businessmen in Africa. Yet these failures have not blunted its resolve. Any successful act of revenge—especially if it is a spectacular operation such as killing a large number of Israelis or Jews outside Israel, or assassinating a prominent figure inside Israel—would lead to considerable public pressure on the Israeli government to take action against Hezbollah inside Lebanon.

***

Scenario III: Syria supplies Hezbollah with “equilibrium-breaking” weapons. Today Syria is Hezbollah’s chief supplier of arms. Many Iranian-developed weapons are manufactured in Syria and transported to Lebanon where they are delivered to the Shiite organization. Syria possesses a number of weapons systems, mainly various types of long-range missiles and anti-aircraft and antinaval missiles, that Israel regards as “equilibrium-breaking” (i.e., systems that in the hands of Hezbollah would threaten Israel’s ability to operate with impunity in Lebanon’s airspace and along its coastline).

The Syrian ambassador to Washington, Imad Mustafa, was recently summoned to the State Department, where he was informed that the U.S. expects Syria to cease arming Hezbollah because of the very real risk of war. This meeting took place after Israel came close to attacking a Syrian arms convoy, deciding not to at the last moment.

This final scenario is perhaps the most dangerous. Syrian President Bashar Assad has taken significant risks in the past, most recently when he embarked on the joint Syrian-Iranian-North Korean nuclear project knowing full well that Israel would not be able to allow it to reach completion. If Mr. Netanyahu shows less restraint than he has so far and orders an attack on a Syrian military convoy, the high number of Syrian casualties that would likely ensue could force Mr. Assad’s hand.

What these three scenarios all have in common is the centrality of Iran: It is arming Hamas, it effectively controls Hezbollah, and it is doing its best to involve Syria in open confrontation with Israel. To date, these attempts have been unsuccessful. But only the U.S. has the ability to take decisive steps to prevent a general conflagration in the region.

Mr. Bergman, senior military and intelligence analyst for Yedioth Ahronoth, an Israeli daily, is the author of “The Secret War With Iran” (Free Press, 2008).

Bibi had to make this statement. Did he really mean it?

Recommended Reading

Once again Charles Krauthammer gives brilliant analysis of current Washington events. Read this column, and you need read nothing else the rest of the weekend.

Read Article

Hey, did you know that if you are a Palestinian and you beat your wife, it's the fault of the Israeli occupation? Well, The Lancet, the British medical publication seems to agree with this thesis.

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Will Israel use tactical nuclear weapons to wipe out the Iranian nuclear program? Michael Goodwin of the New York Post seems to think so. Meanwhile Obama continues to demand a dialogue to solve the problem. If this fail, Obama will blame Bush.

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Haiti, the country that in the best of times has had 300,000 children in orphanages and hundreds of thousands living in abject poverty in the streets, has suddenly discovered the need to protect its children. 10 Americans have been arrested and charged with abduction for attempting to get 33 children into an orphanage they had set up in the Dominican Republic without having completed the paperwork. In Creole this means not having bribed enough officials. I guess Haiti wants us to believe that the abductors were doing these because of the high demand for adoptions of black children. Give me a break.

Read Article

Transformation by Kidnapping

How does a reporter become more aware of the realities of the Islamic world, Islamism and Islamists organizations? Let him be kidnapped.

This seems to be transformative moment New York Times reporter David Rohde who reported from the region for 7 years. The following segment appeared in an article in yesterday's New York Times. You can read the complete article by clicking here: Held by the Taliban.

"During our time as hostages, I tried to reason with our captors. I told them we were journalists who had come to hear the Taliban's side of the story. I told them that I had recently married and that Tahir and Asad had nine young children between them. I wept, hoping it would create sympathy,and begged them to release us. All of my efforts proved pointless. Over those months, I came to a simple realization. After seven years of reporting in the region, I did not fully understand how extreme many of the Taliban had become. Before the kidnapping, I viewed the organization as a form of "Al Qaeda lite," a religiously motivated movement primarily focused on controlling Afghanistan. Living side by side with the Haqqanis' followers, I learned that the goal of the hard-line Taliban was far more ambitious. Contact with foreign militants in the tribal areas appeared to have deeply affected many young Taliban fighters. They wanted to create a fundamentalist Islamic emirate with Al Qaeda that spanned the Muslim world."

If only we could get some of the State Department officials to be transformed by this method.


On a similar note:

Reporters around the world have rediscovered the word "terrorists", normally missing from reports in Israel. The word emerged in reports about the explosion in Iran.

Obama, Iranian Thugs, and the NY Times: By Tom Gross, National Review Online

"It is amazing. It took many, many days for the administration of Nobel peace-prize laureate Barack Obama to condemn the brutalization of pro-democracy demonstrators in Iran last June (and even then it did so only in the most tepid way), but by contrast it took just a couple of hours for the Obama administration to condemn the attacks on the brutalizers yesterday."

An Interview With Benny Morris

Running Out of Solutions, an article published at Foreign Policy offers an interview with Benny Morris, the Israeli historian and icon of the left.

For decades Morris has advocated a two state solution and published work that shattered the Israeli image by claiming that the Palestinian refugee problem was caused not only by Arabs fleeing the newly created Medinat Israel, but also by methodical expulsion by the Israeli military. Now he, like many in the Israeli left, is waking up to the existential threat posed by a nuclear Iran, and the realization that many of Israel's neighbors have only one goal in mind; namely, the destruction of the Jewish state. Very interesting article for those interested in the fragmentation of the left that has taken place since 2000.

From London to Londonistan

Over the last two decades I have become interested in demographics and the impact that demographic changes have had on world politics. By far the best book on the topic is America Alone, by Mark Steyn. The reason I consider this the best study on the topic of demographics is that it is written in plain English, it is easy to understand without being simplistic, and most importantly is politically incorrect. Most studies conducted by members of academia are influenced by the fear of losing a grant or not getting tenure. Steyn doesn’t give a damn about correctness nor is he intimidated by thought police. A Google search would allow you to read more about him, and the persecution he faced at the hands of the Ontario Human Rights Commission on behest of the Canadian Islamic Congress.

Today I was thinking about Steyn and his forecasts when reading an article published in the London Times. The headline of the article is “Muslim population 'rising 10 times faster than rest of society”. A study by the British Office for National Statistics has shown that the Muslim population in England is multiplying at a rate ten times faster than the rest of the population. This, combined with conversions and immigration has led to the Muslim population increasing in the last four years by 500,000 while the number of Christians has declined by 2 million.

This trend is not different from the trend seen in countries across Western Europe. The Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, France, Spain, Germany and Italy are facing similar demographic changes, and in many of this countries the shifts have become irreversible. After all, if a German couple marries when the woman is 27, and have a couple of children by the time she 30, in no way can they reverse the demographic changes occurring when a Muslim couple who is married when the woman is 19 and who by age 30 had six children. Many of this couple's children will at age 18 be sent to their ancestral lands to marry a native cousin, who will then migrate to Europe ensuring that by the end of the twenty first century Europe will become Eurabia.

While we are on the topic of Islam, yesterday Iran stoned a man accused of adultery. According to Sharia law, he was buried up to his waist and stoned with stones small enough to ensure a slow death. It is estimated that in some cases it takes up to half an hour to kill the the victim. I was stunned by the silence of of the media and human right organizations. I guess they were too busy fighting water boarding.

The Carter-Obama Corollary

The Jimmy Carter Corollary: A foreign affairs phenomenon that occurs when one powerful nation kowtows to a less powerful one which in return uses this opportunity to kick the powerful nation in the posterior. Named after the 39th president when his genuflection to the Ayatollahs concluded with 55 Americans being held hostage for 444 days.

Some students of history also attribute the invasion of Afghanistan by the USSR to this corollary. Said invasion, in conjunction with the rise of the Iranian clergy led to the rise of Islamism, and al-Qaeda, events for which we are still paying the consequences. And now, once again we are facing this phenomenon that I propose should be renamed the Carter-Obama Corollary.

The first signs of a return to the genuflecting school of politics took place when the US Badminton team was refused entry visas to Iran on February 4, 2009. Since then the US has polished its act, and in an example of extreme courage approached Russia with the proposal that the United States would remove the missile defense system from Europe in exchange for Russia’s help in convincing the Iranians to give up their nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. Russia response was: “no haggling, just remove the missiles and we will be happy.”

In another act of vision and diplomatic courage, the Obama administration will donate 900 million dollars that we will borrow from China, for rebuilding Gaza. In an insult to the diminishing intelligence of many Americans, Hillary explained that the money would not go to Hamas. I am not aware of anyone in the media asking how this will be prevented. If Hamas, which rules Gaza, has funds for rebuilding infrastructure and we give them money, would it not free said funds for the purchase of weapons and missiles?

I am not disappointed because I expected the worst from the new administration. My fears were confirmed when a bust of Winston Churchill was removed from the Oval Office and sent back to England.

Knowing Barack Obama, I have no doubt that he would be much more comfortable with a bust of Chamberlain.

Umbrellas Fold

Ha’aretz reports from Israel that the Obama administration is willing to offer Israel a nuclear umbrella in case of a nuclear attack on the part of Iran. This would mean that the United States would retaliate with a devastating nuclear attack if Israel were ever attacked by Iran with nuclear weapons. Analysts view this as acceptance on the part of the United States that Iran will become a nuclear power.

Israel should just say NO! Retaliation would come too late.

A nuclear attack would mean the annihilation of Israel. The retaliation, if it took place, would do nothing to save Israel. As long as religious fundamentalists, who expect the return of the Mahdi, continue to rule Iran, the retaliation by the United States might be actually viewed as a positive incentive, since they also believe that the Mahdi's return would be preceeded by a catastrophic event. The concept of nuclear deterrence can work only when you have two rational opponents who understand the cost of using these weapons. The Soviet Union, at the height of the Cold War, understood this, and acted accordingly. Furthermore, I don’t believe that Barack Obama would ever order a nuclear strike. He will be saddened and disappointed, but ultimately he would not have the fortitude to order an attack that would result in the death of hundreds of thousands of Iranians.

Wouldn’t it make sense and save countless lives to eliminate Iran’s nuclear capabilities before the atomic weapons are ready? All the United States has to do is give Israel the green light and the right to land on American carriers in the Persian Gulf.

Israelis have plenty of practice. Remember Osiraq?