Israel's Iranian weapons seizure and the naivete of expectations

...But the current US president had no intention of being swayed by the facts, nor to deviate from his new strategy of dialogue and reconciliation with the regime of the mullahs. Unlike his predecessor, who showed a firm hand in fighting terrorism, Barack Obama holds a quasi-pacifist ideology and condemns anything that could disrupt his policy of appeasing one of the most evil regimes in the world. He has evidently learned nothing from history: totalitarian regimes always swallow weak democracies.


Shraga Blum..
I24 News..
16 March '14..

An elite unit of the Israeli Navy, the famed "Shayetet 13", recently seized the "Klos C" cargo vessel carrying weapons from Iran to terrorist organizations operating from the Gaza Gaza or the Sinai Peninsula. It was a delicate operation, started long ago by Israel’s intelligence agencies, that followed the route of these weapons from Syria, to Iran and Iraq, from where they sailed toward a Sudanese port and were supposed to be transported from there to their final destination.

Tehran wanted to blur the tracks and keep its support of Islamic terrorism concealed. The rocket attacks in recent days from the Gaza Strip on southern Israel demonstrate the kind of damage that the terrorist Islamic Jihad organization could have inflicted on Israeli civilians had it been in possession of the M-302 missiles found in the intercepted ship's cargo.

Having thus caught Tehran red-handed, Israeli leaders believed, perhaps naively, that the international community, the United States above all, would respond to the duplicity of the Iranian regime with its smiling charm offensive. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has been warning the West for months that the change in the attitude of the Iranian leadership was a fiction, hoped that this discovery would trigger a sea change in attitudes toward Iran and would benefit Israel.

But none of this came to pass. Dozens of foreign journalists present in the Red Sea port of Eilat during the unveiling of the weapons found in the ship's hold didn't seem particularly enthusiastic or even convinced - showing positively none of the conviction they always muster when Israel is lambasted for mere announcements of settlement construction. The Financial Times even posed the naive question of "what might have been the motives of the Iranian regime to do this kind of operation." And EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, who was in Tehran at the time, her head covered by a headscarf, for talks with Foreign Minister Mohammad Zarif, did not even deign to raise the matter before the official with his unctuous smile.


The Israeli people's pride at the success of its soldiers, and the hopes of Israeli leaders, have thus remained an internal matter, and Israel once again finds itself alone, despite the evidence provided to the international community.

This latest weapons seizure ought to be compared to the 2002 interception of the "Karin A" motor vessel, on which Israel found more than 50 tons of weapons bound for the PLO, directly implicating its late chairman Yasser Arafat. Despite overwhelming evidence of his involvement, Arafat swore to George W. Bush that he had nothing to do with it, which only intensified the President’s anger to the extent that he declared Arafat a "persona non grata" in the United States.

But the current US president had no intention of being swayed by the facts, nor to deviate from his new strategy of dialogue and reconciliation with the regime of the mullahs. Unlike his predecessor, who showed a firm hand in fighting terrorism, Barack Obama holds a quasi-pacifist ideology and condemns anything that could disrupt his policy of appeasing one of the most evil regimes in the world. He has evidently learned nothing from history: totalitarian regimes always swallow weak democracies.

Europeans and Americans know full well the true nature of the Iranian regime and the extent of its involvement in global terrorism and the destabilization of the Middle East. But they are locked in their misconception that Iran is trying to take a positive turn and they should therefore support the "forces of reform and moderation" represented by Hassan Rouhani, Mohammad Zarif and company. We still remember how John Kerry, visiting Damascus in 2009, praised the Syrian dictator Bashar Assad and the "important role his country could play in the region"...

A proverb has it that "when you want to kill your dog, say it has rabies." In this case, one could make the opposite claim: when you want to keep the dog alive, you close your eyes to its illness.

Link: http://www.i24news.tv/en/opinion/140316-the-iranian-weapons-seizure-a-failed-israeli-success

Shraga Blum is an independent journalist. He publishes a weekly press review in the "P'tit Hebdo" and political analysis on Israeli-French language sites.

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