Category: Israel

‘CIA and Mossad paying $1,000 to Christian converts in northern Iraq’

Iran’s Fars news agency claimed Tuesday that the CIA and the Mossad were actively promoting Christianity in the Kurdish region of northern Iraq.

According to the report, the Americans and Israelis were offering $1,000 to any youngster willing to convert to Christianity.

The news agency further claimed that several Christian organizations had translated the Bible into Kurdish and were distributing them to young Kurds.

Source: www.jpost.com, Aug 4, 2009

CIA, Mossad Promoting Evangelism in Northern Iraq

TEHRAN (FNA)- The US and Israeli spy agencies are trying to promote evangelism in Iraq’s Kurdistan region, sources said.

According to a series of information obtained by FNA, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Israeli Secret Services (Mossad) are striving to promote Christianity among the youth in Iraq’s northern region of Kurdistan.

According to FNA dispatches, the two intelligence agencies have also allocated heavy funds for the task and pay $1,000 to every young person who turns to Christianity.

The plot began from the very beginning of US military aggression against Iraq and occupation of the country after ousting former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and even earlier, sources said.

Head of the Islamic Group in Kurdistan Ali Bapir warned about the development, saying, “The international organization for evangelism in Iraq will pay 1,000 US Dollars to those who convert to Christianity.”

Member of the Islamic Unity Movement of Kurdistan Babakr Ahmad told FNA, “Islamic parties have felt the danger. Unfortunately, the international Christian organizations are actively promoting Christianity given their available huge funds.”

Kurds who have recently embraced Christianity hold annual meetings in Arbil, the capital of the Kurdistan autonomous region.

Ali Bapir strongly criticized the authorities of Kurdistan autonomous region for their inaction in the face of the development and for issuing the required permission for holding such meetings.

According to FNA dispatches, other evangelist institutions like ADS Institution are funding translation of Bible into the Kurdish language.

An informed source from the evangelist institution in Arbil told FNA on the condition of anonymity that the main mission of the institution is distribution of Bible in Kurdish language.

The source said the manager of the institution is a British who uses an alias name, “Eskandar” (Alexander), to escape identification.

The source underlined that the institution’s books are coming from England and Greece and that the translated books are distributed among the people for free.

Source: english.farsnews.com, 2009-08-04

August 20, 2009
INTERVIEW – Israel shuts door on Turkish-mediated Syria talks

Wed Aug 12, 2009 5:32pm

“If they (Syria) are really serious on peace, and not just a peace process which may serve them to extricate them from international isolation, if they are really serious, they will come and sit with us.”

U.S. DIPLOMACY

The overtures to Olmert helped Assad’s relations with the West, long frayed over Syrian involvement in neighbouring Lebanon and Iraq, alleged pursuit of weapons of mass destruction, and sponsorship of Palestinian militants.

U.S. President Barack Obama, who is trying to advance Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking as well as stabilise Iraq, has sent envoys to coax Syria into the circle of diplomacy.

Like Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, Ayalon is from the far-right Yisrael Beitenu party, junior partner to Netanyahu’s conservative Likud in the coalition government.

Lieberman keeps a low media profile and has largely ceded public diplomacy to Ayalon, a former Israeli ambassador to Washington.

https://www.reuters.com/?edition-redirect=in

August 14, 2009
Israel must be suspicious of Armenia: expert

13 August 2009 [18:57] – Today.Az

“I believe the Armenian-Israeli relations are very weak and quite formal,” Azerbaijani political expert Vafa Guluzade said commenting on Israeli ambassador’s secret visit to Yerevan.

The Israeli government is fully aware that Armenia is an ally of Iran and will fulfill any orders of the country, he said.

“For this reason, Israel-Armenia relations can never be strong. Israel must treat Armenia with suspicion,” he said.

As to the question whether it is true that Israeli ambassador’s visit to Yerevan is linked with crash of Iranian TU-154 with weapons on board for Hezbollah, Guluzade said:
“I believe that this visit is 100 percent linked to this matter. Because Israel could be very interested and concerned about arms shipments for the Lebanese movement Hezbollah via Armenia. The ambassador might have arrived in Yerevan to clarify this issue.”

/ANS PRESS/

August 13, 2009
Kurdish mag sparks wrath by urging Jews to return

Dawood Baghestani, Iraqi Kurdish editor-in-chief of "Israel-Kurd", holds a copy of the magazine in Arbil, the capital of Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region. The newly launched monthly magazine has caused a stir in northern Iraq after calling on Jewish Kurds to return to the region. (AFP/File/Safin Hamed)

by Abdel Hamid Zebari

ARBIL, Iraq (AFP) – A new magazine in Iraq’s Kurdistan region has caused furore among conservative Muslims with a rousing call for Jews to leave Israel — and come back to Iraq.

The magazine, “Israel-Kurd”, is the brainchild of Dawood Baghestani, the 62-year-old former chief of the autonomous northern region’s human rights commission.

The glossy, full-colour monthly in Kurdish and English has a lofty mission: to help solve the intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict by convincing more than 150,000 Kurdish Jews living in Israel to return to Iraqi Kurdistan, Baghestani told AFP.

“The biggest reason behind the complexity of the Palestinian problem is the unjust practices of Arab regimes against the Jews — there are more than 1.5 million Jews originally from Arab countries in Israel,” Baghestani said.

“If the Jews had not been subject to an exodus, the Palestinians wouldn’t have been either,” he said, referring to the flight of 700,000 Palestinians from the newly created Jewish state in 1948 during the first Arab-Israeli war.

“If the situation in our new federal and democratic Iraq, and particularly in Kurdistan, becomes stable, then many Jews would want to return and reduce the number of Jewish settlements in Palestine.”

The latest edition of the 52-page magazine, which has a circulation of around 1,500 copies, features a woman draped in an Israeli flag on the cover.

Inside are stories about Kurdish Jewish traditions and photographs from the first half of the twentieth century, as well as arguments on how a return of Jews would help to build a wealthy and strong Kurdistan.

But many people in Iraq are not buying the argument.

“I’m suspicious. I don’t see the point of this kind of publication,” said Zana Rustayi, a representative of the Islamist Jamaa Islamiya party in the regional assembly.

“The Kurds are part of the Muslim nation, and Kurdistan is part of Iraq.”

Iraq has no relations with Israel, and the country was an implacable foe of the Jewish state under the regime of former dictator Saddam Hussein, who was overthrown by the US-led invasion in 2003.

A Sunni member of parliament in Baghdad, Mithal Alusi, was suspended from parliament and threatened with charges last year after visiting Israel for a conference. The decision was later overturned by the constitutional court.

Dawood Baghestani, Iraqi Kurdish editor-in-chief of 'Israel-Kurd', reads a copy of the magazine in Arbil, the capital of Iraq's autonomous Kurdish region. The newly launched monthly magazine has caused a stir in northern Iraq after calling on Jewish Kurds to return to the region. Photo:Safin Hamed/AFP

Kurdistan does have a warmer history with the Jewish state, however. Many of the current crop of Kurdish leaders have visited Israel in past decades.

Jews lived in Kurdistan for centuries, working as traders, farmers and artisans.

But the creation of Israel and the rise of Arab nationalism in the mid-twentieth century dramatically altered the situation, spurring most of Kurdistan’s Jews to leave.

Baghestani — who has been to Israel four times, including on a clandestine trip in 1967 — denies that he works for the Israelis.

“What I am asking for is enshrined in the constitution: every Iraqi has the right to return to one’s homeland. Jews who were Iraqi citizens were subject to injustice,” he said.

“If every Arab country allowed the Jews to return, ensured their safety and gave them back their land,Palestinian refugees would be able to return to their territory because Israel would not need so much land.”

Mahmud Othman, a Kurdish Coalition MP in Baghdad, disputes this. He says that while relations with Israel may be a nice idea, such a move would not be pragmatic for a region ringed by other Muslim states.

“Kurdistan needs the Arabs. We are living in an Arab country and we are federal region within Iraq. We don’t need a relationship with (Israel), we need a relationship with Arabs, we need a relationship with Iran, we need to be close to Turkey,” Othman said.

“I haven’t heard of any Jews in Israel trying to return to Kurdistan. I think they’re better off there.”

Source: news.yahoo.com, Aug 12, 2009

Southern commander Zvika Zamir teaching a Kurdish fighter how to assemble a Galil rifle (1969)

Source: www.nrg.co.il, ג’קי חוגי | 10/8/2009

August 13, 2009
Turkey and Russia Conclude Energy Deals

By SEBNEM ARSU

Published: August 6, 2009

ISTANBUL — Russia and Turkey concluded energy agreements on Thursday that will support Turkey’s drive to become a regional hub for fuel transshipments while helping Moscow maintain its monopoly on natural gas shipments from Asia to Europe.

Turkey granted the Russian natural gas giant Gazprom use of its territorial waters in the Black Sea, under which the company wants to route its so-called South Stream pipeline to gas markets in Eastern and Southern Europe.

In return, a Russian oil pipeline operator agreed to join a consortium to build a pipeline across the Anatolian Peninsula, from the Black Sea to the Mediterranean, and Gazprom affirmed a commitment to expand an existing Black Sea gas pipeline for possible transshipment across Turkey to Cyprus or Israel.

Energy companies in both countries agreed to a joint venture to build conventional electric power plants, and the Interfax news agency in Russia reported that Prime MinisterVladimir V. Putin offered to reopen talks on Russian assistance to Turkey in building nuclear power reactors.

The agreements were signed in Ankara, the Turkish capital, in meetings between Mr. Putin and his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Italy’s prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, who has joined Mr. Putin on several energy projects, attended the ceremony. The Italian company Eni broke ground on the trans-Anatolian oil pipeline this year.

While the offer of specific pipeline deals and nuclear cooperation represented a new tactic by Mr. Putin, the wider struggle for dominance of the Eurasian pipelines is a long-running chess match in which he has often excelled.

As he has in the past, Mr. Putin traveled to Turkey with his basket of tempting strategic and economic benefits immediately after a similar mission by his opponents. A month ago, European governments signed an agreement in Turkey to support the Western-backed Nabucco pipeline, which would compete directly with the South Stream project.

By skirting Russian territory, the Nabucco pipeline would undercut Moscow’s monopoly on European natural gas shipments and the pricing power and political clout that come with it. That may explain why Nabucco, which cannot go forward without Turkey’s support, has encountered a variety of obstacles thrown up by the Russian government, including efforts to deny it vital gas supplies in the East and a customer base in the West.

Turkey and other countries in the path of Nabucco have been eager players in this geopolitical drama, entertaining offers from both sides. Turkish authorities have even tried, without much success, to leverage the pipeline negotiations to further Turkey’s bid to join the European Union, while keeping options with Russia open, too.

“These countries are more than happy to sign agreements with both parties,” Ana Jelenkovic, an analyst at Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy, said in a telephone interview from London. “There’s no political benefit to shutting out or ceasing energy relations with Russia.”

Under the deal Mr. Putin obtained Thursday, Gazprom will be allowed to proceed with seismic and environmental tests in Turkey’s exclusive economic zone, necessary preliminary steps for laying the South Stream pipe, Prime Minister Erdogan said at a news conference.

After the meeting, Mr. Putin said, “We agreed on every issue.”

The trans-Anatolian oil pipeline also marginally improves Russia’s position in the region. The pipeline is one of two so-called Bosporus bypass systems circumventing the straits between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, which are operating at capacity in tanker traffic.

The preferred Western route is the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, which allows companies to ship Caspian Basin crude oil to the West without crossing Russian territory; the pipeline instead crosses the former Soviet republic of Georgia and avoids the crowded straits by cutting across Turkey to the Mediterranean.

Russia prefers northbound pipelines out of the Caspian region that terminate at tanker terminals on the Black Sea. The success of this plan depends, in turn, on creating additional capacity in the Bosporus bypass routes. Russia is backing two such pipelines.

Mr. Putin’s offer to move ahead with a Russian-built nuclear power plant in Turkey suggests a sweetening of the overall Russian offer on energy deals with Turkey, while both Western and Russian proposals are on the table.

The nuclear aspect of the deal drew protests. About a dozen Greenpeace protesters were surrounded by at least 200 armored police officers in central Ankara on Thursday.

Andrew E. Kramer contributed reporting from Moscow.

The New York Times

August 7, 2009
Can Cyprus be a model for Middle East peace?

Analysis: Can Cyprus be a model for Middle East peace?

As he toured a series of European capitals in May, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman told his audience at a dinner party in Rome that he believed Cyprus – which was divided between its Greek and Turkish citizens in 1975, after years of bloodshed – was a fitting model for ending the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians.

Turkish soldier opens door in temporary wall by UN buffer zone on Turkish-Cypriot side of Nicosia. Photo: AP

“We’re interested in this,” Lieberman said. “In Cyprus, it was the same situation as in Israel. Greeks and Turks were living together, and there was friction and tension and bloodshed.”

Greeks and Turks did live together, for hundreds of years, on the island, but Ottoman and later British rule kept a lid on violence between the sides. When the British left in 1960, the groups united in what was then called the Republic of Cyprus.

But in 1963, the Turks were pushed out of that government, and the following 11 years were marked by incessant violence. The Turks say that Greek actions in their towns and villages constituted nothing less than a coordinated campaign of ethnic cleansing.

On June 20, 1974, five days after a Greek Cypriot coup d’etat on the island, the Turkish army intervened – or invaded, depending on whom you ask – and pushed Greek forces back to the southern part of the island. A year later, the UN oversaw a population transfer – Greeks to the south and Turks to the north – completing the separation that lasts to this day.

And it was precisely this separation, Lieberman said, which had brought about peace and prosperity there. Now, he claimed in May, the Netanyahu government was basing its approach on the model provided by Cyprus.

But is Cyprus really a good example?

While the Greeks enjoy stability and international recognition, they continue to view the north as “occupied territory” that was “illegally invaded” by Turkey in 1974. Their motivation for a comprehensive agreement has been less robust than the Turks’, if only because they don’t need an agreement as much as do their neighbors to the north.

The Turkish Republic of North Cyprus goes unrecognized by every nation in the world except for Turkey, and has tough international restrictions on investors and developers that has local restaurants such as “Burger City” and “Pizza Hat” filling in for their original counterparts – since Burger King and Pizza Hut are not allowed to open branches, due to international embargoes.

Greece continues to use its EU membership and international weight to prevent the Turkish Cypriots from gaining international recognition, which would, first and foremost, allow the Turkish Cypriots to open their air and sea ports to international flights, a development that would render North Cyprus a formidable competitor for the island’s main source of income, tourism. As of now, every flight into the north must come from Turkey.

Greek Cypriots are unsatisfied with the current situation, but have a Western standard of living that allows them to wait, while Turkish Cypriots decry their international isolation as unbearable. And while both sides have been negotiating a comprehensive agreement for years, it remains unattainable, for now.

Therefore, another problem with Lieberman’s argument is that Cypriots themselves view their situation as a temporary one. Separation is viewed as a means to achieving a final, comprehensive agreement, not the end of the conflict.

While that agreement has historically been viewed through the prism of federation, an increasing number of Turkish Cypriots are awakening to the reality that such a deal could see Greek Cypriots return to the Turkish part of the island en masse, effectively ending Turkish autonomy there through demographics – an Israeli equivalent to a one-state solution.

Speaking to The Jerusalem Post at a reception on Monday evening to commemorate the 35th anniversary of the 1974 Turkish “Peace Operation,” Turkish Cypriot President Mehmet Ali Talat said, “Maybe your foreign minister was referring to the fact that there has been no violence here since 1974.

“With that I agree with him. But the central goal in North Cyprus is federation.”

But when asked how Turkish demographic integrity would be maintained after federation, Talat said, “[Greek Cypriots] will be able to come here, but with restrictions. They will not be able to settle here freely.”

Not only are Cypriots’ wishes regarding their political fate different from those of Israelis and Palestinians, their conflict remains unresolved.

So could the Cyprus model be an example for Israel? And if so, is Lieberman referring to a 35-year-old military standoff as his vision for ending the conflict? Or is it simply a separation of two peoples, in which one is recognized, and the other is not?

Source: www.jpost.com, Jul 26, 2009

July 27, 2009