The most recent call to formally label the Pakistan-based Haqqani an FTO came from a bi-partisan coalition of leading lawmakers, whose ranks included Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Republican Representative Mike Rogers, chair of the House Intelligence Committee.

In a letter to President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton, the lawmakers said the Haqqani Network — named after its leader, Jalaluddin Haqqani –is “continuing to launch sensational and indiscriminate attacks against US interests in Afghanistan,” and, therefore, had more than met the FTO threshold.

To be fair, however, the Haqqani Network had long ago exceeded the threshold for indiscriminate terrorist violence, barbarism that has escalated in intensity ever since the group fled Afghanistan to Pakistan’s North Waziristan tribal region following the Taliban’s ouster from power in 2001.

Since then, the Haqqani Network, with an estimated 15,000 fighters — many who gained experience fighting Soviet occupation troops in Afghanistan in the 1980s — has developed a well earned reputation as the most lethal and treacherous of the insurgent groups.

For starters, despite just being one of several insurgent factions that have been fighting American-led NATO and Afghan government forces, the Haqqani Network has been responsible for at least 90 percent of all attacks against Coalition forces in eastern Afghanistan.

Moreover, many of these attacks have come via suicide bombing, a tactic that the Haqqani is said to have introduced into the Afghanistan conflict.

A short list of these Haqqani suicide attacks on American-led NATO troops include a March 2009 truck bombing in Khowst Province, which killed three American soldiers; a May 2010 bus bombing that killed 5 American soldiers and a Canadian colonel; and an October 2011 car bombing that killed 13 American, British and Canadian soldiers.

In addition to targeting Coalition forces, the Haqqani has been equally adept at terrorizing both the Afghan populace and its government through focused campaigns of suicide bombings and assassinations.

Those campaigns of terror have been abetted by the Haqqani’s use of death squads, the largest of which is the Khurasan, responsible for at least 250 assassinations and public executions, including mass beheadings.

Unfortunately, the Haqqani’s ability to carry out these atrocities has come with the direct assistance of the Pakistani army’s intelligence wing, the Inter Services Intelligence directorate (ISI).

Aided by the ISI, the Haqqani, according to recent a Pentagon report, has been able to flourish in North Waziristan, using the mountainous territory to establish training camps and bases from which to launch raids into Afghanistan against Coalition forces by Taliban and al-Qaeda insurgents

In fact, in September 2011 after heavily-armed Haqqani fighters attacked both the US Embassy and the headquarters of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Kabul, then Joint Chiefs Chairman Admiral Mike Mullen, was prompted to label the Haqqani “a veritable arm” of the ISI.

Not surprisingly then, the familial closeness between the Haqqani and the ISI has led Pakistan’s military to refuse repeated requests from American military commanders to launch major offensives in North Waziristan to root out the Haqqanis.

Yet, even though the State Department has acknowledged the Haqqani as being at the “forefront of insurgent activity in Afghanistan, responsible for many high-profile attacks,” it has steadfastly balked at requests to label the Haqqani Network an FTO.

Instead, the State Department has felt it sufficient enough to limit its activities to targeting individual Haqqani Network commanders as global terrorists,deferring any future decision against the entire terrorist organization to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Unfortunately, Clinton still remains undecided as to a course of action, despite having been engaged since November 2011 in what the State Department then called the “final formal review” of the Haqqani.

Clinton’s reluctance to render a judgment against the Haqqani has been attributed in part to concerns that listing the Haqqani as an FTO will furtherdamage American relations with Pakistan.

Those relations have been rapidly disintegrating since the May 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden by US Special Forces in Abottabad, Pakistan, where bin Laden had been reportedly living for years under the watchful protection of elements within the ISI.

While one American analyst asked, “Once you designate the Haqqani Network, how do you not designate Pakistan as a state sponsor of terrorism,”given the ISI’s continuous support of the Haqqani, that ship has already sailed.

But Jihad is not philosophy. It is a call to action, not meditation or self-examination. A central tenet of Islam, it can mean helping others and self-improvement. But for most Muslims it means a divinely mandated war against “infidels” – non-Moslems. It can take many forms: piloting planes into buildings, blowing up planes with hidden bombs, murdering people who are accused of insulting Mohammed and the Koran, and urging others to engage in violence – that is, incitement.

It is also incumbent on Muslims anywhere, anytime, and for any reason they personally feel applicable. Since Islam does not have a hierarchy of authority, although some leaders are more acceptable than others, one can pick and choose. There are basically no rules or restrictions. One can follow a local sheikh collecting charity, or a preacher exhorting homicidal attacks.

Had Mehanna succeeded in being trained to kill, and if he and his friends who accompanied him had survived and returned to America, they might have opened a 7-11, or they might have plotted another 9-11.

Two weeks ago, US Congressman Joe Walsh published an op-ed in the The Washington Times in which he called for the US and Israel to abandon the two-state solution.

After running through the record of Palestinian duplicity, failed governance, terrorism and bad faith, he called for Israel to apply its sovereignty to Judea and Samaria. In his words, Israel should “adopt the only solution that will bring true peace to the Middle East: a single Israeli state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Israel is the only country in the region dedicated to peace and the only power capable of stable, just and democratic government in the region.”

The evidence that the two-state paradigm has failed is overwhelming. The Palestinians’ decision to reject statehood at Camp David in 2000 and launch a terror war against Israel made clear that they had not abandoned their refusal from 1947 to accept partition of the Land of Israel with the Jews.

So, too, the Palestinians’ election of Hamas in the 2006 elections, and their missile war against Israel from Gaza in the aftermath of Israel’s complete withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, all made clear that they are not interested in a Palestinian state. Rather, their chief desire is Israel’s annihilation.

Consequentially, there is no chance whatsoever that the two state paradigm can work.

Indeed, the fact that there is no Palestinian leader willing to recognize Israel’s right to exist makes clear that if a Palestinian state is established in Judea and Samaria – in addition to the de facto Palestinian state in Gaza – that state will be in state of war with Israel. All territory under its control will be used to attack the rump Jewish state.

Given the abject failure of the two-state paradigm, it is abundantly clear that for all the complications that may be associated with the application of Israeli sovereignty over Judea and Samaria, it is a better option for Israel than Israeli surrender of the areas.

Walsh’s op-ed is not his first statement of support for Israeli annexation. Last September, ahead of the UN general assembly, Walsh authored Congressional Resolution 394 supporting Israel’s right to annex Judea and Samaria in the event that the Palestinians asked the UN to recognize a Palestinian state outside the framework of a peace treaty with Israel. Forty-four other congressmen co-sponsored the resolution.

And this makes sense.

The Palestinians’ decision to turn the issue of Palestinian statehood over to the UN constituted a substantive breach of the treaties the PLO signed with Israel. Those agreements stipulated that both sides agreed that their conflict would be solved through negotiations and not through unilateral actions. By ending negotiations with Israel and turning the issue of statehood over to the UN, the Palestinians canceled their treaties with Israel. Consequently, Israel is no longer bound by those accords and is free to take its own unilateral actions, including applying its laws to Judea and Samaria as it did in Jerusalem and the Golan Heights in the past.

For his unstinting support for Israel, Walsh has been subject to an unbridled assault by leftist American Jews. Ron Kampeas from JTA, for instance,attacked Walsh, accusing him of being no different than Israel’s enemies who seek to destroy Israel by ending its ability to define itself as a Jewish state through what they refer to as the “one-state solution.”

Kampeas blasted Walsh for suggesting that Palestinians unwilling to live under Israeli rule could move to Jordan which, with its 75-percent Palestinian majority, is effectively the Palestinian state. To back up his condemnation, Kampeas quoted Robert Wright’s excoriation of Walsh in The Atlantic.

There Wright wrote, “Offhand, I don’t recall a member of Congress in my lifetime saying anything so grotesquely at odds with American ideals about ethnic relations and for that matter basic human rights.”

For its part, the Jewish-run anti-Israel lobby J Street is mobilizing its supporters to bring about Walsh’s defeat in the November elections by soliciting contributions to his Democratic challenger. J Street executive director Jeremy Ben-Ami wrote that “Walsh’s prescription amounts to a call for an end to Israel as the democratic home of the Jewish people.”

It is hard to know where to begin a discussion of this assault in which Jewish Americans attacked one of Israel’s strongest supporters simply because he had the temerity to recognize reality and call for the US to support an Israeli victory against our enemies who seek our destruction.

Strangely few perceive the inherent contradiction between the call for a “strong and secure Israel” and the call to give up the very territory that would – at minimum – comprise said strength and security.

This was the case with Egypt, for example. More than 30 years ago, Israel gave up the entire Sinai Peninsula, including its vast strategic depths and bottleneck passes as well as the Abu Rodeis oil fields, which supplied Israel more than half its energy needs and would have made Israel energy independent within a few short years more than 30 years ago. And this is also the case today with the Palestinian Arabs. As long as there are Palestinian Arabs willing to take territory from Israel even without any quid pro quo from their side, Israel is expected to unilaterally give up its most strategically critical territory.

Israel, without the administered territories, is a strategically crippled country. These areas, known historically as Judea and Samaria and labeled “the West Bank” following the Jordanian occupation of said territories in 1949, are the key to Israel’s strategic strength against any attack from the east (Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Iran, et al.). An Israel with control of these territories is a strategic asset to the West in defense against radical Islamic expansionism no less, if not more, than during the Cold War period when Israel was the West’s reliable bulwark against Soviet expansionism in the Middle East.

Up until the late 1980s, following the outbreak of the so-called “Palestinian uprising” or “first intifada,” everyone viewed the security threat to Israel to be solely by conventional Arab armies who, to quote the late Egyptian President Nasser, wished to “drive the Jews into the sea.” In the following two decades, with the vast increase of terrorist attacks and the introduction to the missile age, it appeared that conventional war no longer threatened Israel’s existence per se. And if the threat was primarily terrorism and missiles fired from afar, territory with its high ground and strategic depth no longer seemed as important. From the standpoint of Israel’s national security, however, this is a misconception. Territory is not only still vital for national defense, it is even more so than previously.

There is a basic premise: Israel’s security can be discussed only in terms of national survival. It is necessary to understand the price Israel pays if she unilaterally gives up more of these territories and what she benefits by their retention.

Given the three potential threats of missile attacks, terrorism, and conventional warfare, Israel must retain a safety zone with the aforementioned high ground and strategic depth to deal with any potential future threats — even if political agreements are signed with its Arab neighbors. Israel cannot afford to bet its survival on signed agreements while giving up critical tangible physical strategic assets. Israel needs to maintain the ability to defend itself under any and all possible circumstances. (Given the Muslim/Arab history for not keeping agreements with non-Muslims, this is not mere whimsy.)

The key question Israeli policy makers must ask themselves: If Israel were attacked by a combination of a conventional Arab army, ballistic missiles, and terrorist bands, would a truncated border with its lack of strategic depth be sufficient for the IDF’s small standing army to successfully repel the invaders and do so with minor damage to Israel’s national infrastructure? Or to be blunt: Could Israel survive such an attack in the event of an all-out war?

This stunt was followed by the Obama administration’s attempted legitimization of one of the top Egyptian presidential candidates, Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, as a moderate. The Los Angeles Times went so far as to label Fotouh a “dynamic pragmatist.” Dynamic may not have been the right word – it’s too similar to dynamite, which is apparently Fotouh’s political method of choice. In 2004, he said, “I would personally hope to have a chance to bear arms to confront the US occupation in Iraq.” But happy days are here again on the Nile!

This, in the opinion of the Obama administration, is all charming multiculturalism. When the Egyptian parliament discusses bills allowing men to have sex with their dead wives, that’s just a lifestyle choice. When Chinese smugglers traffic pills filled with powdered human baby flesh, and when the Chinese government beats the wife of a dissident to force him to abandon the US embassy, that’s simply a disagreement about the meaning of freedom. And we can all agree to disagree, can’t we?

It’s time to stop worrying about the rest of the world, says the Obama administration. It’s time to start worrying about the real threat: us. This week, President Obama promised that the time had come to refocus from external enemies to the real battles that need fighting here at home. “After more than a decade of war,” he said in his weekly address, “it is time to focus on nation building here at home.”

This was one of Obama’s favorite themes during the 2008 campaign – the notion that Americans required fundamental change. It’s why Michelle assured Americans that “before we can work on the problems, we have to fix our souls. Our souls are broken in this nation.”

We are, in short, a dangerous bunch. And we require government to fix our brokenness.

On the morning of April 29, Boko Haram struck Catholic and Protestant worship services simultaneously at Bayero University in Kano. Twenty-two so farhave been confirmed dead, and twenty-three wounded. In the evening they attacked a church service in Jere, near Maiduguri, Borno State, killing another five people.

U.S. Congressmen Peter King (R-NY), Chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, and Patrick Meehan (R-PA) recently wrote to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, urging that she designate the group as a terrorist organization. Meehan’s Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence released an extensive, bi-partisan report on Boko Haram as an “emerging threat to the U.S. Homeland.” But the State Department continues to downplay Boko Haram’s Islamist nature, preferring to see the terrorist murderers – of whom even the Nigerian police are afraid – as victims of poverty and marginalization.

One survivor of the April 29 attack on the Catholic Mass was a geography professor, Emmanuel Olofin. Olofin reported that Mass had just gotten underway in the university indoor sports complex at 8:10 AM when the worshippers heard the sound of “gunshots and pellets falling on the roof of the building.” According to reports, the attackers arrived in a car and two motorcycles. They threw explosives into the building and sent people into a panic. They fled from the building, straight into the attackers’ line of fire.

Professor Olofin, age 71, leaped over an eight-foot fence instead of using the actual exit in the gate. “I believe that most of the people that died were those who took the pedestrian exit because it seemed as if the attackers used the pedestrian gate to gain entrance,” said Olofin, who found refuge under a tree. Among the dead were two of Olofin’s university colleagues, Professors Jerome Ayodele, Department of Chemistry, and Andrew Leo Ogbonyomi, Library Science.

At the same time the attack on the Catholics was taking place, other members of the sect attacked the Chapel of Victory Protestant church service, meeting outdoors near the Faculty of Medicine. Professor Julius Falola, who was preaching when the Islamists arrived, recounted a horrific scene similar to that described by Professor Olofin. Explosions and gunshots were followed by fleeing church members who provided easy targets for Boko Haram killers.Falola said that some of the Christians “jumped over the fence while others ran deeper into the campus.” Falola hid in the university clinic. Falola and Olofin, as well as other witnesses, said that the police did not arrive until 10 AM. “The shooting went on for 45 minutes,” said Falola.

Boko Haram topped off their killing spree later that night, by opening fire on the Church of Christ in Nigeria parish in Jere. Because of a state of emergency in the town, worshippers had foregone meeting in the morning in favor of what they assumed would be an unnoticed and therefore less dangerous evening worship. Halfway through the service, witnesses reported that the Islamists came “in their trademark car, Volkswagen Golf, dressed in flowing gowns.” After “their routine shout of ‘Allah akbar,’ they . . .  headed straight for the altar” where they shot and killed the pastor, Reverend Albert Naga. Four others died from the attack, as well.

In response to Sunday’s targeted killing of Christians by Boko Haram, Secretary Clinton put out a paragraph on May 1, saying that the United States “strongly condemns the recent attacks on innocent civilians in Nigeria, including yesterday’s disgraceful assault during church services at Bayero University in Kano.” Clinton said that they are “concerned about attacks on churches, news media, and government installations that increasingly target innocent civilians across Northern Nigeria.” She condemned “attempts by those in Nigeria who seek to inflame Christian-Muslim tensions, and support those who recognize Nigeria’s ethnic and religious diversity as one of the country’s greatest strengths.” She concluded by saying that “Our thoughts and prayers are with the families and loved ones of those who were killed and injured.”

The men were arrested late Monday night. According to the complaint filed yesterday morning in U.S. District Court in Cleveland, their initial plan called for diversionary smoke bombs aimed at distracting law enforcement officials, so the men could destroy financial institution signs placed on high-rise buildings in Cleveland. The plot took a far more serious turn when these men decided to purchase C4 explosives, create two improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and place them under the bridge. The IEDs would have been detonated by remote control. Law enforcement officials allege the men had also planned to use the May Day OWS protest in Cleveland as an alibi for their whereabouts when the explosion took place.

Why blow up the bridge? An unnamed FBI official contended that, during the course of the investigation, several members of the group repeatedly complained that the Occupy Wall Street movement “wasn’t violent enough.”

According to an affidavit filed by FBI agent Ryan Taylor, the group was infiltrated by a paid FBI informant. Conversations recorded over a period of months reveal they were interested in attacking a number of different targets, including a train, a federal counterterrorism center, the Group of 8 leaders meeting in Chicago, the Republican National Convention in Tampa, and a neo-Nazi or Ku Klux Klan office. According to court papers, the five-some also considered setting off a car bomb outside the Cleveland branch of the Federal Reserve Bank.

When the men allegedly decided to add explosives to the mix, they agreed to purchase eight one-pound bricks of what they thought was C4 for $50 apiece from an undercover agent. The exchange was reportedly supposed to take place under the bridge on the Ohio & Erie Canal Towpath Trail near the Cuyahoga Valley Scenic Railroad Brecksville Station. The men allegedly focused on the Brecksville-Northfield High Level Bridge, which is heavily traveled, because they believed it would damage both commerce and American corporations.

The core of the group included Douglas L. Wright, a 26-year-old with a Mohawk haircut who has sometimes gone by the alias Cyco; Brandon Baxter, 20, known to use the alias Skabby; and Anthony Hayne, 37. Those men were arrested on charges of conspiracy and trying to use explosives to damage property affecting interstate commerce. The other two men, Connor Stevens, 20, and Joshua S. Stafford, 23, were ostensibly late additions to the alleged plot, according to authorities, and, as of this writing, charges were still pending against them. Wright allegedly told the FBI informant that “as long as stuff ‘gets f–ked up’ he’ll be happy with the action,” noted the FBI in its affidavit. Wright also expressed concern that the man who sold him the C4 was a police officer, but he continued on with the plot regardless.

The Bureau stressed there was never any danger to the public because the explosives were inert and under control by the undercover agent. Yet Special Agent Stephen D. Anthony, who oversees the FBI’s Cleveland division, illuminated the group’s grand ambitions. “The individuals charged in this plot were intent on using violence to express their ideological views,” he said. “The Joint Terrorism Task Force will continue to be vigilant in its efforts to detect and disrupt any terrorism threat, domestic or international.”

The group initially aroused suspicion last October 21st, when the FBI learned that some “self-described anarchists” would be attending a “Cleveland protest.” The protest taking place in Cleveland on that day was yet another OWS demonstration, during which approximately a dozen people were arrested.

I responded that the more appropriate and correct name for Israel’s security fence is the “Leftists are Idiots Fence.”  Indeed, I would urge everyone to adopt that name for it and insist that no other be used in polite company.

The security barrier should be dubbed the “Leftists are Idiots Fence” because the very need for its construction was as a countermeasure to the countless acts of murder and other violence triggered by the imposition upon Israel of the Left’s political agenda with regard to making “peace” with the “Palestinians.”   The building of the “Leftists are Idiots Fence” became necessary because of the “recognition” of the PLO by Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres and all the fruits of that poisonous tree that followed.  The consequential series of agreements to allow the PLO to import its army of assassins and terrorists into the West Bank and Gaza (never mind that the Hamas later evicted the PLO from Gaza) produced so many massacres of Israelis that the only way to reduce the level of violence was with large fences and barriers that prevented “Palestinians” from getting close enough to Jews to murder them.

The “Leftists are Idiots Fence” was only the latest bi-product of the long-time theology of the Left concerning how to make peace with Arabs.  The Left believes that Israel can appease its way to peace by making endless concessions to the Arabs.  The fact that every single round of appeasements and concessions to date has produced escalation of terror never persuades the Left that something is flawed with its approach to peace or in its political theology.  The universal explanation by the Left for the utter and complete failure of its “ideas” has always been to insist in totalitarian unison that they fail because Israel does not make enough appeasements and concessions.

The Israeli Left has been wrong about absolutely everything for at least 20 years, and it would be very difficult to uncover anything about which it was not wrong going back even 60 years.  The Israeli Left of the 1950s believed in Soviet-style economic central planning.  Under David Ben Gurion, it built and then preserved a command-and-control economic mechanism that resembled that of Soviet regimes in many ways.  It was designed to place near totalitarian control of the economy in the hands of the MAPAI socialist party (later renamed the Labor Party).   Israel was essentially a one-party state until 1978, and that single ruling party was MAPAI.

Thanks to that command-and-control structure, Israel remained an impoverished, underdeveloped Third World country until well into the 1980s, complete with Third World levels of corruption, primitive technology, and tax rates sometimes exceeding 100% of earnings.  By the late 1980s, the command-and-control regime was largely although not completely dismantled, this thanks to a complex set of causes, and Israel quickly morphed into a developed wealthy First World country, to the chagrin of its socialists.  The Far Left yearns to restore the semi-bolshevik planning and control structure, and has now managed to co-opt much of the “Social Justice” protests in Israel and recruit those protesters behind this goal.

But in the long term, the more harmful segment of leftist ideology was the belief that the bulk of Arabs are good and decent people who truly want peace and co-existence.  That belief happens to be false.  The vast majority of Arabs want a genocidal resolution to the “problem” of the existence of Israel and its Jewish population.

But the Left is so passionately wedded to this part of its political theology that it has dominated everything the Left has done or said for decades.  And since the Left has been in office in Israel more often than it has not been (while the Likud has itself often behaved in many ways like a party of the Israeli Left), most of the most destructive decisions and errors Israel has made stem directly from this theology.

“This is a reminder that you are not in control,” an accompanying message read. “Just in case you needed some incentive to stop working we have a little surprise for you. Think fast you have seconds.”

This effort to intimidate participants in the American marketplace for political advantage was not unexpected. As FrontPage Magazine reported Friday, former community organizer Brandon Darby, a leading expert on leftist tactics, said May Day protesters would commit “a lot of violent acts.”

Police sources told ABC News that San Francisco-based Wells Fargo may have been targeted for the white powder mailings because roughly six key Occupy Wall Street members have connections to Oakland, San Francisco, and Berkeley.

Although the news report didn’t mention it, in what is surely a bizarre, freaky coincidence unworthy of the attention of the mainstream media, former Obama green jobs czar Van Jones, a self-described communist whose Rebuild the Dream group is participating in the nationwide protests, hails from Oakland, long a hotbed of left-wing radicalism. Jones, who used to belong to a Maoist group, now says that he supports only nonviolent methods of protest against Americans’ cherished economic freedoms.

Incidentally, this isn’t the first time Wells Fargo has been targeted by left-wing activists. Both before and during the bursting of the nation’s housing bubble, the bank was targeted by the radical street thugs of ACORN, as I reported in my recent book, Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers. ACORN affiliates took in almost $11 million from 1999 through 2008 from the family charity of left-wing plutocrats Herb and Marion Sandler, founders of subprime lender World Savings Bank. A decade ago as ACORN launched a class action lawsuit and conducted demonstrations against Wells Fargo, the bank just happened to be the Sandlers’ biggest competition in California.

Meanwhile, the radical, anti-American Occupy Wall Street movement, consisting of a dazzling array of Democratic politicians, labor unions, open-borders immigration groups, and a constellation of neo-communist and anarchist collectives, is calling for a general strike against capitalism today. Occupiers want Americans to shun their usual business in order to show the richest so-called one percent of the population what life would be like without the other “99 percent” of society.

The movement website occupywallst.org describes May 1, also known as International Workers’ Day, as “A Day Without the 99%.” Occupiers have urged Americans to refuse to work, attend school, perform housework, or go shopping and instead “Take the Streets on Tuesday!” The May Day activities are part of what left-wingers are calling the “99% Spring.” These actions are designed to disrupt the U.S. economy and capitalize on Americans’ growing political and economic jitters.

It took Obama a day to disavow his commitment to a united Jerusalem. It took him a little longer to disavow his commitment to “Never Again.”

In his memorandum, Obama certified the 192 million dollar aid package as “important to the national security interests of the United States” and White House spokesman Tommy Vietor claimed that it would ensure “the continued viability of the moderate PA government.” That same moderate government which has tried to form a pact with Hamas and whose high ranking officials have repeatedly engaged in terrorism.

The Palestinian Accountability Act, which Obama waived with a flourish of the pen, was one in a series of attempts to stem the flow of taxpayer money to the terrorist corruptocracy in Ramallah. The Act mandated that no funds may be made available to the Palestinian Authority until it ends its terrorist activities and an independent audit is conducted of its finances. Rather than complying with the bill, Obama dismissed it by resorting to the transparently fraudulent claim of national security.

So where is that money really going?

According to the Palestinian Authority, its budget crisis was caused by the funding that it provides to Hamas run Gaza at a rate of 120 million dollars a month. If we take these figures as actual, then its 1.3 billion dollar budget deficit is almost entirely composed of Gaza expenditures.

Another 60 million dollars a year is paid out to convicted terrorists in Israeli prisons. Obama’s generous waiver would cover a month’s worth of expenses for Hamas run Gaza and a year’s worth of salaries for the imprisoned murderers and bombers. Including members of Hamas. Then there are the infrastructure projects, like homes for released terrorists built by the Palestinian Investment Fund.

Nearly 1.8 billion dollars of the PA budget for 2012 consists of government salaries. With above 20 percent unemployment, those in the West Bank and Gaza who don’t work in Israel, work directly or indirectly for the Palestinian Authority or the UNRWA, both funded by foreign donors, including the United States. The World Bank found that the Palestinian Authority’s government employment rates are more than twice the average for the region with around 150,000 employees.  About 65,000 of those are in Hamas run Gaza.

For all the talk about the needs of the Palestinian people, the Authority is in the guns, not butter business. Security spending is its single largest sector expenditure. Within the governance sector, which American aid heavily focuses on, 43 percent of funds goes to security. Its projections for the next three years call for 234 million dollars in security spending.

The Palestinian Authority’s National Development Plan projected a 30 percent increase in security spending for 2012. While it cut the number of health care workers, it did manage to add another 1,122 security employees in the West Bank and 203 in Gaza. These employees are for the most part members of allied militias who are involved in terrorist operations.

Those were not the words of some back alley preacher, but of noted Moscow lawyer, Dagir Khasavov, giving an interview to a television station about his proposal to implement Sharia courts in Russia. Interspersed with footage of death sentences being executed, Khasavov spoke about his new organization that would protect Muslim rights and claimed that his proposal was only the beginning of a worldwide expansion.

“We are going to expand this net, we will begin in Russia, first Asia, and then everything will be encompassed, as it was in the Caliphate,” Khasavov said. According to Khasavov, Russian security services already unofficially refer cases involving Muslims back to Sharia courts and his proposal to officially establish such courts would only legitimize the parallel justice system that already exists for the millions of Muslims who now live in Moscow and other cities.

There is no official count of the number of Muslims who have migrated to find work in Moscow, but it might be as high as a third of the population. Muslim prayers spill out into the streets and take over portions of the city. After the demolition of the decrepit Cathedral Mosque, eighty thousand Muslims took over the streets to celebrate Eid al-Adha while the police scrambled to control the streets.

Halal cafes are easier to set up than mosques and have proliferated much faster. Unofficial Sharia courts already operate out of Moscow mosques with Imams acting as the arbitrators, but Khasavov would like to go much further. Last year he proposed the creation of a Council of Imams, the first step toward establishing a united Muslim legal system. Nor is Khasavov a man who can be easily dismissed as a bearded lunatic playing Al-Awlaki sermons.

Khasavov has an extended background with the MVD, Russia’s Ministry of Internal Affairs, a section of its security services, and graduated from two of its institutions, including one named after Felix Dzerzhinsky, the godfather of Russia’s police state. Until recently he served as an aide to a member of the Federation Council dealing with social policy. And media coverage of his Sharia courts proposal was generally positive until a hostile interviewer on REN TV baited him into a rant that led to a catastrophic backlash causing him to temporarily leave the country.  It is entirely possible that his proposal was a trial balloon from higher up the food chain.

One of the stranger acts of Muslim terror in Moscow was the assassination of a Russian Orthodox Priest who had spent a great deal of time campaigning against Islam. Fr. Danill Sysoyev was killed in his own church by a masked man armed with a Makarov pistol tipped with a silencer. Security services supposedly turned up the pistol in the hands of a dead man they had killed, but no one appears to believe this version of the story, including the Moscow Patriarchate.

The method of the killing would have been out of character for Muslim terrorists, but entirely in character for the Russian security services, which have assassinated enemies of the state in the exact same manner. Opposition figures have been killed by masked gunmen armed with silenced pistols in public places, with their murders added to the list of unsolved crimes or attributed to some convenient career criminal. It would not have been the first time that the Russian security services had murdered a priest who fell out of line with government policy and treated it as an unsolved murder. The case of Alexander Men comes to mind.

Saeid Moradi stumbled through a muggy Bangkok afternoon past colorful phone booths, knowing that the operation had gone wrong and that he had a limited window for reaching the airport, boarding a plane to Malaysia and then back to Iran. But the taxi did not stop. So Moradi threw one of his remaining bombs at it. He attempted to throw another one at the police, but instead blew off his own legs outside a school.

Mohammad Hazaei, one of the other terrorists, was stopped at the airport while waiting to board a flight to Malaysia. Masoud Sedaghatzadeh was arrested already in Malaysia, while Leila Rohani made it back to Iran. Their bombs had been intended for Israeli diplomats, and it was not the first Iranian backed act of terror against Israel in the country, but it was still startling.

Thailand suffers from Muslim terrorism and Bangkok does have a sizable number of Muslims, but the majority of its Muslim population is Sunni. Thailand Shiites, like many Shiites around the world, do act as agents of Iran, if there was any doubt about that it was quickly dispelled when Syedsulaiman Husaini, the leader of Shiites in Thailand, blamed the attack on MEK activists out to make Iran look bad, a talking point transparently coined in Tehran.

However Iran’s real presence in Thailand isn’t religious, it’s chemical. Iranian gangs and dealers prowl Bangkok plying their crystal meth and muscling out locals with a combination of aggressiveness and underselling. And Bangkok, for all its dangerous reputation, is only one stop on the express train of Iran’s meth empire.

Iranian drug rings are a sizable presence everywhere from Europe to Southeast Asia to the United States.  By the spring of last year, Thai authorities had already arrested their twentieth Iranian meth smuggler. The same story repeats itself in Indonesia, Malaysia, Burma and Vietnam. Asia is no stranger to the drug trade, yet it’s being swamped by Iranian meth, Iranian meth labs and Iranian dealers.

In Japan, they were running meth labs, a rarity in the country, and the majority of those arrested on meth charges in the land of the rising sun were Iranians. That pattern too repeats itself in countries with hardly any Muslim populations, such as Korea. Forget oil, Iran is suddenly in the position of supplying the crystal meth needs of half of Asia.

On January 23, the Facebook page of CAIR-MN announced that Best Buy would be a “Platinum Sponsor” of its fifth annual banquet. CAIR was labeled by the federal government as an “unindicted co-conspirator” in the trial of the Holy Land Foundation, a charity that was shut down for fundraising for the terrorist group Hamas, whose charter calls for the extermination of Jews.

CAIR grew out of the Islamic Association of Palestine, another group that was shut down for being a Hamas front. The Muslim Brotherhood’s secret Palestine Committee in the U.S., set up to support Hamas, listed CAIR as a “working organizations” in one of its documents in 1994.

In a 2007 federal court filing, it is stated that, “From its founding by Muslim Brotherhood leaders, CAIR conspired with other affiliates of the Muslim Brotherhood to support terrorists” and “the conspirators agreed to use deception to conceal from the American public their connections to terrorists.” District Judge Jorge Solis ruled that the government provided “ample evidence” tying CAIR to Hamas to justify its designation as an “unindicted co-conspirator.”

This information can easily be found in a quick Internet search, but Best Buy wasn’t simply negligent. After the story broke, Best Buy could have said it acted hastily and would change course. Instead, the company boasted that the donation proves its good will and tolerance.

Best Buy’s customers and employees around the world represent a variety of faiths and denominations. We respect that diversity, and choose to engage with our customers, employees and communities in ways that reflect their traditions and maintain good relationships for Best Buy,” a statement on Facebook reads.

Nearly 5,000 people signed the pledge within the first 24 hours to boycott Best Buy until it rescinds its support for CAIR. Add your name to the list by clicking here.

Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here.

In Afghanistan it may be a matter of navigating the Pashtuns, Hazaras and Tajiks, and their various families, while in Brooklynbad, Al-Minneapolis or Londonistan it’s Somalis, Turks and Lebanese, but it’s still much the same game. The big brass, in coordination with local activists who claim to represent the community leadership, unveil a new strategy which involves lots of face time, aid and respect for the assorted cultures involved. The boys in blue or khaki fall in line, but know that it mostly comes down to having enough boots on the ground and hoping that the locals are afraid enough not to try anything big.

We can of course withdraw from Afghanistan, send up the choppers in whirls of dust, ship the gear back home and trim down the military. And some of those ex-soldiers will go into local police forces and security companies where they will be doing the same thing they did back in Afghanistan, but with less firepower and more discretion, because while the people on the ground may be Pakistanis, Somalis or Iraqis, they have the right papers and are officially Americans or Europeans.

Withdrawing from Baghdad or Kabul is a snap compared to withdrawing from London or Los Angeles and even small towns are on the line. 3,000 Somalis showed up in Lewiston, Maine, pop. 36,000. Now Lewiston has nearly double the violent crime rate of the state average. In the Finnish town of Lieksa, it’s the same story. Or in Shelbyville, Alabama. There are Little Mogadishus all over which share the problems of the big Mogadishu. The bigger they get, the bigger the problems get.

There was always a thin line between community policing and counterinsurgency, but the rise of domestic Muslim violence has nearly eliminated the line as the insurgency comes home. In Afghanistan soldiers look for IEDs, while back in London or New York their law enforcement colleagues search for bombs in cars and bus stations. Angry bearded mobs shake their fists and threaten death in London and Jalalabad. And uniformed men visit mosques, take off their shoes and discuss working together with the local leaders on stopping the violence.

The war has already come home and the only real tactic on tap is cultural sensitivity. Display enough of it and you’ll win over the locals and if you win over the locals, they’ll help you stop the violence. And along the way the eyes of the law have to be closed to some of their nastier habits, like beating their wives and killing their daughters. If they turn violent when a Koran is burned, then everything possible has to be done to prevent anyone from ever torching one or drawing an offensive cartoon or doing anything else to light the fuse.

The failure in Afghanistan is predictive of the failures in Europe and America, and vice versa, all the glowing visions of girls going to school and a participatory society giving way to tribal enclaves, violent explosions and blood feuds. The drug dealers pass by the mosque and the corner grocery, while the suicide bomber and the rapist have their atrocities sanctified by the black book of the Koran.

Despite all the best efforts and the fortunes plowed into the project, integration never seems to take off, though there are plenty of spokesmen for it. The violence never goes away, no matter how much outreach takes place or how many young men and community leaders are bribed with aid money. And the clock always seems to keep moving relentlessly to the midnight hour when the masks come off, the bombs go off and the cities burn.

In Afghanistan we discovered that three cups of tea don’t work, but they also don’t work in London or New York. There are plenty of cordial meetings and some tips do come in. A Taliban attack in Helmand province, a suicide bombing on the A train to Far Rockaway, are headed off. And the brass smile and exchange handshakes because it’s working. But then next week three unreported attacks shake their faith. And the leaders they had three cups of tea with have a higher price this time because violence has become their asset, letting them take in money and support from both sides, while acting as intermediaries between the brass and the bombers.

The Pulitzer Board at Columbia University cited AP reporters Matt Apuzzo, Adam Goldman, Eileen Sullivan and Chris Hawley “for their spotlighting of the New York Police Department’s clandestine spying program that monitored daily life in Muslim communities, resulting in congressional calls for a federal investigation, and a debate over the proper role of domestic intelligence gathering.”

Here’s what not debatable: the NYPD has thwarted fourteen separate plots against New Yorkers since 9/11. Furthermore, the AP’s and Pulitzer Prize Committee’s sensibilities are completely at odds with the public. A poll by Quinnipiac University revealed that voters, by a margin of 59-28 percent, believe the NYPD has behaved appropriately in dealing with Muslims, and approve of the way the NYPD is doing its job in general by a margin of 63-31 percent. A whopping 82 percent also think the NYPD has done an effective job of combating terrorism. Police Commissioner Ray Kelly? He enjoys a 64-25 percent approval rating.

“New Yorkers brush aside the gripes about police surveillance of the Muslim community,” said Maurice Carroll, director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute. “Voter approval of the way police are handling terrorism is through the roof and overall approval for police in general and for Commissioner Ray Kelly is undented by criticism.”

None of it matters to those determined to undermine the strategy. In February, the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) demanded that the NYPD be investigated for using federal drug fighting funds to help underwrite its surveillance of Muslim mosques and businesses. “We are deeply concerned that federal resources may have been used and spying information stored in violation of federal regulations that protect Americans’ privacy and constitutional rights against law enforcement overreach,” said Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU’s National Security Project. In March, Attorney General Eric Holder claimed he was “disturbed,” and that the NYPD’s methods for combatting terrorism are “under review at the Justice Department.” 34 members of Congress demanded a federal investigation, as did the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), while schools such as Yale, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Buffalo condemned surveillance aimed at their students.

The ever-reliable New York Times piled on, noting that a lack of sufficient supervision “of this formidable and far-flung intelligence operation…operating in secrecy and under murky rules” was an invitation for the NYPD “to abuse their powers.” New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and Newark Mayor Cory Booker also criticized the NYPD’s tactics when it was revealed that some of their leads have taken them across the river into the Garden State and other Northeast locations. Michael Ward, director of the FBI’s Newark division, contended that the expansion of investigations into New Jersey was undermining the FBI’s ability to gather counter-terrorism intelligence.

Commissioner Kelly and Mayor Michael Bloomberg remained unrepentant. Kelly defended the practice of using federal drug funds (whose specific allocation cannot be controlled by the feds) to combat terror, noting that the NYPD had arrested 44 terrorism suspects and the department’s “primary goal is to keep this city safe and save lives.” Eric Holder has yet to file any charges at all, and Mayor Bloomberg defended the expansion of investigations outside of New York, noting that the city has been granted limited ability to conduct investigations in the Garden State. “Anything we’ve done in New Jersey, we have done under an agreement with the state of New Jersey that was signed by a previous governor, and still remains in effect,” he said. He further contended that the NYPD “goes where there are allegations. And they look to see whether those allegations are true,” he told reporters in February. “That’s what you’d expect them to do. That’s what you’d want them to do. Remind yourself when you turn out the light tonight.”

The NYPD also reminded those criticizing its expanded investigations of an inconvenient truth: the bomb that was detonated at the World Trade Center in 1993 was built in New Jersey, and would-be Times Square bomber Faisal Shazad assembled his device in Connecticut. Commissioner Kelly emphasized the point. “We have to be cognizant of what’s going on in the surrounding area. Obviously, it would be naive to limit our focus just to the five boroughs of New York City,” he said.

He starts off with praise for Marwan Barghouti, a Palestinian terrorist leader serving five consecutive life sentences for the murder of many Israelis in terror attacks.  Friedman considers Barghouti to be “the most authentic leader Fatah has produced.”  He is right. Barghouti is one of the most, if not the most, authentic of all Palestinian leaders living today. But Friedman fails to note, or fails to mention, that Barghouti’s authenticity, and his popularity with the Palestinian rank-and-file, arise from his success at killing Israelis and his ability to plan and execute lethal terror attacks.

Yet this “authenticity,” festooned as it is with the blood and gore of hundreds of Israelis shot or stabbed or blown up or burned alive, inspires Friedman to place great confidence in Barghouti’s call, from his jail cell, for non-violent civil disobedience; even though, as Friedman envisions it, this “non-violence” can include throwing rocks and waging economic and political war and lawfare against Israel.

He neglects to ask if Israelis share his confidence in such an “authentic” leader.  He fails to note the real purpose of Arab economic and political warfare against Israel, the goal of lawfare, and the life-threatening potential of stone-throwing. For Palestinian leadership, and for much leadership of Arab countries, the end-game goals of all of these endeavors do not include peace with Israel. Rather they are part of the 65-year war waged for the destruction of Israel and its replacement with “Palestine.”  How did Friedman miss these critical points?

He misses a similar critical point when he urges the Palestinians to offer Israel a peace plan in the form of a “map delineating how, for peace, they would accept getting back 95 percent of the West Bank and all Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem, and would swap the other 5 percent for land inside pre-1967 Israel.”  What he fails to note, or neglects to mention, is that the Palestinian leadership from Arafat to Abbas to Hamas have already done that.  As Arafat so quaintly put it decades ago:

Since we cannot defeat Israel in war we do this in stages. We take any and every territory that we can of Palestine, and establish sovereignty there, and we use it as a springboard to take more. When the time comes, we can get the Arab nations to join us for the final blow against Israel.

And it is not just Arafat.  Numerous Hamas and PA leaders have said the same thing.

• “Palestine is a Muslim land …we do not recognise the sovereignty of Jews on a hand-span of our country.”
• “Our fate from Allah is to be the vanguard in the war against the Jews until the resurrection of the dead.”
• “The Jews are the Jews…therefore it is necessary to slaughter them and murder them…..kill them….have no mercy on the Jews, murder them everywhere”
• “The day of resurrection will not come until the victory of the believers over the descendents of monkeys and pigs, with their annihilation.”

But enough about the Jews.  What about plans for the future of peace with Israel?

• “The Zionist entity will be destroyed within the first quarter of this century.”
• “[T]here is no place for the state of Israel on this land.”
• “When we speak of Jerusalem it does not mean that we have forgotten about … Jaffa or Acre (Israeli cities)….from a religious point of view Palestine from the sea to the river is Islamic.”  Any room for Israel in that vision?
• “Even if agreements were signed regarding Gaza and the West Bank, we will not forget (the Israeli cities and regions of) Haifa, Acre, Jaffa, the Galilee Triangle, and the Negev.  It is only a question of time.”  Time for what; congenial cooperation?
• “All of the agreements….are temporary.” Good to know this in advance.
• “We exaggerate when we say ‘peace’…what we are speaking about is ‘hudna,’ a temporary ceasefire.”  Temporary till when?

Such rhetoric of annihilation accompanies hate-teach from kindergarten up in PA schools.  And their deeds match their words.

The killer is Mohammed Merah, a 24-year-old Frenchman of Algerian origin who claims to be an Al-Qaeda member. Merah had been in Pakistan and Afghanistan. In Afghanistan in 2007 he was arrested for bomb making, but escaped months later in a large-scale Taliban jailbreak.

As for his recent attacks, he told police negotiators they were motivated by the French army’s involvement in Afghanistan and by a desire to avenge the deaths of Palestinian children.

In that regard Merah’s words were remarkably similar to those of EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton on Monday, the day of the school massacre. Speaking to a conference in Brussels called “Engaging Youth—Palestinian Refugees” that was sponsored by the Belgian government and the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, she said:

when we think of what happened in Toulouse today, when we remember what happened in Norway a year ago, when we know what is happening in Syria, when we see what is happening in Gaza and in different parts of the world—we remember young people and children who lose their lives.

These words—clearly connoting that children in Gaza are brutally murdered by Israeli forces—sparked enraged responses in Israel, including from the prime minister, foreign minister, and opposition leader. On Tuesday, Ashton’s office issued a purported “clarification.” It stated that she had “referred to tragedies taking the lives of children around the world and drew no parallel whatsoever between the circumstances of the Toulouse attack and the situation in Gaza.”

The problem, though, is that Ashton’s statement clearly did draw that parallel, and her “clarification” is a weak and unconvincing denial rather than a genuine retraction. Israeli officials reportedly—with justice—see it that way and remain “unwilling to forgive” her remarks. As Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu had put it, “What gets me especially incensed is the comparison between the targeted slaughter of children and the surgical, defensive activities of the Israel Defense Forces that are meant to hit terrorists who use children for human shields.”

It could have been worse for the Israelis, except their missile defense system, known as “Iron Dome,” intercepted 90% of the rockets that were targeted. Israeli-designed and built in Israel by Rafael Advanced Defense Systems, Iron Dome promises to be a “game changer” according to some analysts, once it is fully deployed across the southern border.

Late Sunday, it was reported that Israel had informed Egypt that it would halt air strikes at midnight. Hamas has also agreed to a cease fire, although the PRC has not indicated its agreement to halt the barrage. It hardly matters. Although the barrage was carried out by the Popular Resistance Committees and another terror group, the Palestinian branch of Islamic Jihad, the Israelis believe that Hamas enables the attacks, or at best, refuses to prevent them.

Iron Dome has an unconventional history. It took only three years from design to deployment — a rarity among complex weapons systems. The tracking system was developed by Elta, an Israeli defense company while the computer software was created by the Israeli firm Prest Systems. The interceptor rocket was built by Rafael.

It is a marvel of technology and can actually determine if a rocket is a threat to a population center, or whether it will land harmlessly in an open field. CNN describes the system:

First deployed in April 2011, the Iron Dome system targets incoming rockets it identifies as possible threats to city centers and fires an interceptor missile to destroy them in mid-air. Each battery is equipped with an interception management center to calculate the expected location of impact, and to prioritize targets according to pre-defined targets. The battery also has firing-control radar used to identify targets, and a portable missile launcher.

This was the first serious battlefield test of Iron Dome and it passed with flying colors. The Jerusalem Post reports that Iron Dome intercepted a total of 27 rockets for a 90% success rate. It is currently deployed around three of the larger cities in the south: Ashdod, Ashkelon, Beersheba. The system is entirely mobile and it is expected that once all batteries are deployed, Israel will potentially be able to intercept any missile fired from Gaza.

“The most important question is how would the Iron Dome affect the decisions of Hamas leaders and their Iranian supporters,” said Dore Gold, Israeli Ambassador to the United States. “While Hamas rockets are aimed primarily to target civilians and terrorize the Israeli home front, a secondary and just important aim is to hit strategic sites in the future,” he added. Gold also pointed out that by eliminating the terrorists’ ability to hit strategic targets, it will force them to re-think what kinds of rockets they will have to purchase in the future.

Join the Jamie Glazov Show on Tuesday, February 21, 2012 at 8-9 pm Pacific (11-12 pm EST) on Blog Talk Radio. The focus will be on how CAIR is tying the hands of the FBI and gagging the media.This week’s guests are:

Eric Allen Bell, a regular blogger for the “Daily Kos” — where he was recently banned for the crime of writing three articles that ran afoul of the mindset there, specifically naming “Loonwatch.com” as a “terrorist spin control network.” He is currently producing a documentary entitled “Not Welcome” that is about the backlash against construction of a 53,000 square foot mega mosque in America’s Bible Belt.

and

Dr. Tim Furnish, an author and Muslim world analyst who holds a PhD in Islamic history from Ohio State and who learned Arabic in the US Army; his areas of expertise are Islamic eschatology, Mahdism, sects and transnational movements. He has lectured at Joint Special Operations University, the Army War College, Ben Gurion University and the annual Mahdism Conference in Iran.

To listen to the program, click here.

Or go to: http://www.blogtalkradio.com/radio-jihad/2012/02/22/the-jamie-glazov-show

Phone in #: (347) 857-1380

See you Tuesday night!

If Iran is indeed behind the spate of recent bombings and foiled attacks that have targeted Israeli and Jewish civilian institutions in India, Georgia, Azerbajan and Thailand—as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has alleged—then it has become crystal clear that Iran is at war with Israel, Zionism and Jewish communities throughout the world.  The Rajah news website, which is identified with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinajad, has expressly threatened to “take the war beyond the borders of Iran, and beyond the borders of the region.” A recent Iranian News Agency headline declared that, “Israeli people must be annihilated,” and a strategist close to Iran’s Supreme Leader Khamenei has released a report providing a religious and legal justification for a final attack against Israel and the Jewish people by 2014.  Over the past week, news reports have circulated that Jewish and Israeli institutions in the United States have been placed on high alert over intelligence reports that Iran or one of its proxies may target them.  Iran’s supreme Khamenei himself has also recently promised that “the Zionists and the Great Satan (America) will soon be defeated.”

These and other recent threats and attacks have led Israeli and American authorities to believe that Iran is preparing attacks against Israeli embassies and consulates as well as Jewish houses of prayer, schools, community centers, restaurants and other soft Jewish targets.

This is not the first time that Iranian agents have bombed or attacked Israeli and Jewish targets in distant countries.  Back in 1992, Iranian agents blew up the Israeli embassy and a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, killing and injuring hundreds of civilians, many of whom were children.  The Argentine government conducted a thorough criminal investigation and indicted several Iranian officials.  But these officials were well beyond the reach of Argentine legal authorities and remain at liberty.

If Iranian agents were to attack Israeli or Jewish soft targets in the United States, the United States should deem any such action as an armed military attack on the United States.  It should not treat it the way the Argentine authorities did, merely as a criminal act.  Under international law, an attack on an embassy is an attack both on the embassy’s country and on the country in which the embassy is located.  An attack against a nation’s citizens on its territory is also an act of armed aggression under the United Nations Charter that justifies retaliatory military action.

In light of the deliberately provocative statements recently issued from Iran, the United States should now publicly announce that any attack by Iranian agents against any American citizen, institution or religious group will be considered a military attack by Iran against the United States and that the United States will—not may, but will—retaliate militarily, at a time and place of its choosing.  An attack on an American synagogue is no different than an attack on the World Trade Center or on American aviation.  We correctly regarded those attacks as acts of war committed by the Taliban and facilitated by the government of Afghanistan and we responded militarily.  Similarly, an attack by Iranian agents on a Jewish (or any other) American target should be deemed a military attack requiring retaliation.  All American citizens, regardless of their religious affiliation, are equally entitled to the protection of the American military.