Northern Israel, Syria, Sharon & History

JNS.ORG ARTICLE   Netanyahu: Iran behind Hezbollah attack on northern Israel Posted on January 29, 2015 by JNS.org. (JNS.org) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Thursday that Iran, the state sponsor of Hezbollah, “is the one behind yesterday’s attack” on northern Israel that killed two Israeli soldiers and wounded seven others. Speaking at a memorial service that marked the one-year anniversary of former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon’s death, Netanyahu said, “This radical power Ariel Sharon spoke about was, and still is, Iran. Today Iran is the one arming, organizing, funding, and sending its terrorist satellites to our borders, both north and south.” Dr. Ely Karmon, a senior research scholar at Israel’s International Institute for Counter-Terrorism, said that Hezbollah’s attack on Wednesday is part of “an attempt to change the strategic rules of the game.” According to Karmon, Iran and Hezbollah have been working for months to take advantage of instability in Syria in order to create a forward military position against Israel in Syria’s Quneitra region, close to the triple Syria-Lebanon-Israel border. “This is actually an Iranian project,” Karmon told JNS.org. “They have around 1,500 people on the ground in Syria, most of which are counseling or training Syrian militias, and they have Hezbollah providing military support.” http://www.jns.org/news-briefs/2015/1/29/netanyahu-iran-behind-hezbollah-attack-on-northern-israel COMMENT PM Netanyahu's blaming Iran "the state sponsor of Hezbollah", which is to be expected seeing his election campaign centres around exploiting the issue of Iran and national security. Meanwhile, Syrian government is blaming Israel for being on-side with those sponsoring opposition terrorism within Syria (Dec 2014): Syria: Terrorism Sponsors in Cahoots with Israel December 08, 2014 - 17:23 TEHRAN (Tasnim) – Syrian Foreign Minister Walid al-Muallem took a swipe at Israel for aiding and abetting terrorism, stressing that Syria will emerge victorious in the face of terrorists that have invaded his country. “The countries sponsoring terrorism are in the same front with Israel. Syria will continue resisting and has no option but to overcome terrorism,” the Syrian foreign minister said in a joint press conference with his Iranian counterpart Mohammad Javad Zarif in Tehran on Monday. His remarks came after Sunday’s reports of Israeli airstrikes on Syria, near the capital Damascus. Israeli planes bombed the area near Damascus international airport and the town of Dimas, the Syrian army said in a statement. Elsewhere in his comments, Muallem said he has visited Iran to expressed gratitude to the Islamic Republic for its continued support for the Syrian nation. Syria has been gripped by deadly violence since March 2011 with ISIL Takfiri terrorists currently controlling parts of it mostly in the east. The US and its regional allies have been supporting the militants operating inside Syria for more than three years. An estimated 200,000 people have been killed in over three years of fighting in the war-ridden country, according to the United Nations. http://www.tasnimnews.com/English/Home/Single/582368 Iran is obviously a supporter of the Syrian government. Looks like Israel's been an aggressor in Syria proper, bombing near the Damascus international airport. The Ariel Sharon info that caught my eye was: Sharon's stroke occurred a few months before he had been expected to win a new election and was widely interpreted as planning on "clearing Israel out of most of the West Bank", in a series of unilateral withdrawals. [Wikipedia] The first thing I thought was, wow, what a coincidence.  Now I'm probably seeing sinister causes in everything.  It probably was a coincidence. Heaps of information on Sharon.  The most startling find was this information regarding the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon: Complaint Against Ariel Sharon for his involvement in the massacres at Sabra and Shatila For the next 40 hours inside the "surrounded and sealed" camps, the Phalangist militia raped, killed and injured a large number of unarmed civilians, mostly children, women and old people. These actions were accompanied or followed by systematic roundups, backed or reinforced by the Israeli army, resulting in dozens of disappearances.  Until the morning of Saturday 18 September 1982, the Israeli army, which knew perfectly well what was going on in the camps, and whose leaders were in permanent contact with the militia leaders who perpetrated the massacre, did not intervene. Instead, they prevented civilians from escaping the camps and organised for the camps to be lit up throughout the night by flares sent into the sky from helicopters and mortars.  The count of victims varies between 700 (the official Israeli figure) and 3,500 (notably in the inquiry launched by the Israeli journalist Kapeliouk). The exact figure will never be determined because in addition to the approximately 1,000 people who were buried in communal graves by the ICRC or in the cemeteries of Beirut by members of their families, a large number of corpses were buried under bulldozed buildings by the militia themselves. Also, particularly on 17 and 18 September, hundreds of people were carried away alive in trucks towards unknown destinations, never to return.   [EXTRACT ONLY - FULL @ SOURCE - cabu.org] Israeli subsequent findings: After 400,000 Peace Now protesters rallied in Tel Aviv to demand an official government inquiry into the massacres, the official Israeli government investigation into the massacre at Sabra and Shatila, the Kahan Commission (1982), was conducted. The inquiry found that the Israeli Defense Forces were indirectly responsible for the massacre since IDF troops held the area.  The commission determined that the killings carried out by a Phalangist unit acting on its own, but its entry was known to Israel and approved by Sharon. Prime Minister Begin was also found responsible for not exercising greater involvement and awareness in the matter of introducing the Phalangists into the camps. The commission also concluded that Sharon bore personal responsibility "for ignoring the danger of bloodshed and revenge [and] not taking appropriate measures to prevent bloodshed". It said Sharon's negligence in protecting the civilian population of Beirut, which had come under Israeli control, amounted to a dereliction of duty of the minister. [Wikipedia] Only partially read that Complaint Against Ariel Sharon. Freaked out by this information.