A senior figure in Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps warned Saturday that should Israel launch an attack on his country, Tel Aviv would be destroyed instantly.
“If the Zionists were certain that they could win a war against us, they’d have initiated one by now, but since they don’t have the strength to do so, they do nothing but threaten,” said Mojtaba Zolnour, who represents Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in the IRGC.
Should Israel nevertheless decide to strike Iran, the Islamic Republic’s missiles will fall in the heart of Tel Aviv, “even before the Zionists’ missiles will reach us,” he claimed, according to Iranian media.
Zolnour’s comments were reportedly a response to Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman, who said Friday that Israel was doing too much talking about Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons program, and that “if you want to shoot, shoot, don’t talk.”
Netanyahu has long threatened to attack Iran in order to destroy, or at least hobble, its nuclear program, although such threats have largely tapered off since the West launched nuclear negotiations with Tehran.
The prime minister is resolved to take on the Obama administration with a speech that he is scheduled to deliver to the US Congress on March 3, in which he will likely warn against an deal with Iran that doesn’t do away with its uranium enrichment program.
Tehran’s chief negotiator in nuclear talks with the US and other world powers threatened to walk away from the table, Iranian media reported Monday, as a second day of high-level negotiations were set to get underway in Switzerland.
Abbas Araqchi said Iran would leave the talks if “other parties impose their wills,” Iran’s Press TV reported Monday morning.
The comment came days after US Secretary of State John Kerry warned US President Barack Obama was “fully prepared” to pull the US out before accepting a deal leaving Tehran with potent nuclear arms-making ability.
On Sunday, senior Iranian official Ali Akbar Velayati responded by saying staying or leaving “depends on the Americans.”
Kerry arrived in Geneva on Sunday for the latest round of talks with Iranian counterpart Mohamed Javad Zarif, after warning “significant gaps” remain ahead of a key deadline.
There is a heightened sense of urgency as the clock ticks down toward a March 31 deadline to agree on a political framework for the deal.
But Kerry warned in London Saturday that “there are still significant gaps, there is still a distance to travel.”
Iran is seeking to open a "third front" against Israel using Hezbollah fighters on the Syrian Golan Heights, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Sunday.
Netanyahu said Tehran's attempts to entrench itself along Israel's borders was one of the biggest emerging security threats facing the Jewish state.
"Alongside Iran's direct guidance of Hezbollah's actions in the north and Hamas's in the south, Iran is trying also to develop a third front on the Golan Heights via the thousands of Hezbollah fighters who are in southern Syria and over which Iran holds direct command," he said.
Speaking at the start of the weekly cabinet meeting, Netanyahu said his ministers were to be briefed on "the security challenges developing around us, first and foremost Iran's attempt to increase its foothold on Israel's borders even as it works to arm itself with nuclear weapons."
[We should never forget what happened when Gaza was evacuated]
Late in January, Efrat Tawil sat in her mobile home in the large northern West Bank city-settlement of Ariel, amidst piles of bed linens and boxes of books. She and her husband, Rabbi Zion Tawil, were preparing to move into their newly built home on a hill overlooking Ariel University. Moving day had come in the nick of time; the roof of the trailer in which they had been living with their large family for the past nine years had collapsed due to a recent heavy snowfall.
Zion Tawil is the rabbi of Netzer-Ariel, a community of some 100 religious Zionist families — 20 of whom were evacuated from the Gush Katif settlement of Netzarim during Israel’s unilateral disengagement from Gaza in the summer of 2005. For the past decade, the group has been living in temporary dwellings. With their current move to the comfortable, spacious and permanent homes they have built for themselves in Ariel, these families have become the only community evacuated from Gaza to resettle permanently — as a community — over the Green Line in the West Bank.
Welcoming news that the Department of Homeland Security is circulating an intelligence assessment on the threat posed by “right-wing sovereign citizen extremist groups,” the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) says it’s now time for security agencies to release a report on violence against American Muslims and others of Middle Eastern or South Asian heritage.
The DHS report – which has not been publicly released – was leaked to CNN at a time when some U.S. Islamic groups are questioning the administration’s “countering violent extremism” (CVE) initiative. Some of those critics, who have called for a greater focus on non-Islam-related terror threats, declined to attend last week’s White House CVE summit as a result.
“We welcome this new intelligence assessment on the threat posed by domestic right-wing violent extremists,” CAIR said in a statement, citing a CNN news story on the subject.
“We now call on the DHS and FBI to release an intelligence assessment addressing the spike in hate crimes targeting Muslim, Arab, Middle Eastern, Sikh, Hindu, and South Asian communities throughout the United States,” CAIR said.
The CNN report on the threat posed by so-called “sovereign citizens” – Americans opposed to all federal government authority and prepared to break the law in resisting it – quoted Michael Steinbach, assistant director of the FBI’s counterterrorism division.
“We’ve been talking about the international terrorism threat, but there’s also domestic groups that are just as concerning, that we worry about here in the United States,” Steinbach said.
Also see:
Ya know, as unsettelening as all this mess is, its reassuring in another way.
ReplyDeleteThe odds against all of this occurring by accident and this degree of stupidity or blindness is beyond calculation. At least for me, it has to be supernatural and it can only fit into one time frame as described in The Word.....
Our time is short! We're gonna soon meet the King, our Savior, and our Hero!
Amen brother
ReplyDeleteThe timing is so interesting too. Aren't elections occurring in Israel next month? It seems like Israel is surrounded and something has to give.
ReplyDeleteAmen, indeed Caver. As long as the wait has been once it occurs this life will be a distant memory if we remember at all.
ReplyDeleteMaranatha!
And it will happen in the 'twinkling of an eye.'
ReplyDelete