Israel’s defense minister hints at possible regime change in Iran should the Islamic republic continue its attacks, comparing Ayatollah Khamenei to Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

By David Rosenberg, World Israel News

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz (Likud) threatened Iran’s supreme leader on Tuesday, hinting that he could suffer the same fate as deposed Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein.

Katz held a security assessment with top military brass and Israeli intelligence officials as the war between Israel and Iran entered its fifth day.

At the conclusion of the assessment, Katz issued a statement, publicized by the Defense Ministry, emphasizing that Israel’s ongoing campaign against Iran, dubbed Operation Rising Lion, spans “all fronts,” without elaborating.

“We are striking Iran with great force on all fronts, in line with our strategic objectives,” Katz said.

Iranians living in Tehran, Katz added, should evacuate, with a special warning to those living near government facilities.

“Do not put your lives in danger or become human shields for the regime,” he said.

The Israeli defense chief confirmed that the IDF killed his Iranian counterpart, Ali Shadmani, in a strike on Monday, just days after Shadmani took office following the assassination of his predecessor.

Katz hinted that Israel’s campaign against Iran could culminate in the overthrow of the Islamist regime, making a veiled reference to Saddam Hussein.

“Remember what became of the dictator in the country neighboring Iran who took this path against Israel.”

“Our long arm will continue to reach every enemy, everywhere,” Katz continued.

Hussein, who ruled Iraq as president from 1979 to 2003, attacked Israel with more than 40 Scud missiles in 1991, after Iraq’s military was confronted by an international coalition in response to his invasion of Kuwait.

After the second Iraq invasion in 2003, Hussein was deposed, captured and placed on trial. Three years later, he was executed.

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Idan had her Iraqi citizenship revoked in 2019 when she expressed solidarity with Israel at the UN.

By Vered Weiss, World Israel News

Former Miss Iraq and 2024 US congressional candidate Sarah Idan told Channel 12 following her visit to the devastated remains of Kfar Aza that the war between Israel and Hamas “isn’t about freeing Palestine.”

She explained, “I want them (the anti-Israel protestors) to see the horror that caused the war on Gaza. The world is shouting ‘Free Palestine’ and it was never about freeing Palestine.”

Idan added, “(October 7th was about) killing innocent families and burning them alive. This is not freeing Palestine, this is terrorism.”

Sarah Idan who represented Iraq in the Miss Universe pageant in 2017, stirred controversy when she took a selfie with Miss Israel Adar Gandelsman in Las Vegas, captioned, “Peace and Love from Miss Iraq and Miss Israel.”

Idan had her Iraqi citizenship revoked in 2019 when she expressed solidarity with Israel.

At the UN Human Rights Council she declared that the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians wasn’t based on good-faith disagreement, but on a “deeply rooted in the belief systems taught in Muslim countries, which are antisemitic.”

The former beauty queen now lives in the United States and is running for Democrat Adam Schiff’s seat as the California congressman prepares for a 2024 Senate run.

Sarah Idan pointed out parallels between the fight against terrorism in her native Iraq and the struggle against Hamas in Israel.

At the age of 18 in 2008, she taught herself English as a refugee in Syria and worked as a translator for US forces operating in Iraq.

There, she saw firsthand the war against terror as US forces fought the Iraqi version of Hamas.

In an X post, Sarah Idan described her experiences, “So us, the US military, and the Iraqi military were fighting [Iraqi] Hamas together. Tell me, if Hamas were trying to free Iraq, why were they trying to hinder the process of Iraqis establishing their own government and becoming independent?”

She concluded, “Here it’s exactly the same war, the same enemies.”

Sarah Idan is running for Congress in California’s 30th district which includes Burbank, West Hollywood, and parts of Glendale and Pasadena.

She decried the progressive anti-Israel wing of the Democratic party and she said, “The Squad, when it comes to the Middle East, I feel like they have no experience, they’re being told what to say.”

Idan drew an analogy between the dynamic in Iraq and what’s happening with Hamas in Gaza.

“No one has killed the Iraqi people as much as Iraqi people have killed Iraqi people.”

She described how Saddam Hussein, like Hamas terrorists, hid weapons beneath her school.

“The civil war killed us, the radical Islam killed us and that’s literally what I see is happening with Palestinians.”

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“We knew they were gathering intelligence about Israel, but we had no idea there was a distinct division for Jews,” says professor.

By Adina Katz, World Israel News

An American professor is speaking out about an archive of Jewish texts, records and materials he discovered in an Iraqi government building during the 2003 war.

Dr. Harold Rudd was instrumental in salvaging much of a Jewish archive damaged during an American airstrike in Baghdad and retrieving the documents for restoration in Washington, D.C.

Rudd, a Pentagon consultant at the time, was on the ground during the initial American invasion of the country.

But after an American missile struck the then-internal intelligence agency’s headquarters in Baghdad, Rudd received a surprising phone call.

‘Come quickly!’- A race against the clock

A member of an Iraqi political opposition party phoned Rudd to inform him that there was an expansive archive regarding Iraqi Jews that was stored in the basement of the building.

While the missile had not detonated, it had severely compromised the building’s water systems, causing flooding on the bottom floors.

Rudd rushed to the site and was shocked by the scale and magnitude of Jewish materials stored there.

“We knew they were gathering intelligence about Israel, but we had no idea there was a distinct division for Jews, which also included a highly specialized archive,” Rudd told Ynet.

According to Rudd, Saddam Hussein had ordered his internal intelligence to repeatedly raid synagogues and other Jewish sites throughout the country, storing all materials – from birth records to graduates of Jewish schools to Torah commentary dating back to the 16th century – at the entity’s headquarters.

Rudd, who himself is Jewish, said that he immediately understood the significance of the archive, which contained everything from wedding records to religious texts dating back 500 years.

As water flooded the basement, Rudd felt the pressure to ensure that the archive would be preserved for posterity.

“I found myself immersed in waist-deep water, surrounded by sacred books and scrolls,” he said. “It dawned on me that urgent action was imperative to prevent further damage [to the materials.]”

After retrieving the documents, many of which were wet, Rudd phoned a number of contacts – including famed Soviet Jewish prisoner-of-Zion Natan Sharansky – for advice on how to minimize damage and asking for help.

Sharansky, Rudd said, reached out to then-Vice President Dick Cheney for assistance. Within hours, Rudd accounted, Cheney sent experts to help him properly store and pack the materials for preservation and restoration in the U.S.

The archive was originally flown to Texas, then on to a specialized facility in Washington D.C., where it remains to this day.

A new home for the archive?

Rudd noted that according to international law, the American government should theoretically return the archive to Iraq. However, because the archive is specifically focused on Iraqi Jews, Rudd said he believes “it should be entrusted to the Babylonian Jewish Heritage Museum in Israel, which now safeguards the records and archives of Iraqi Jewry.”

While there are legal complications and bureaucratic hurdles to overcome, Rudd said he is certain “this transition will occur eventually.”

Although the entirety of the archive is accessible online, “there’s no substitute for the ability of Iraqi Jews and their descendants to physically engage with and closely examine the documents and books that constitute their personal legacy.”

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“If you behave like a human being, you don’t need to fear an autocratic regime,” says popular Lebanese musician.

Lebanese Musician Ghassan Rahbani: I Oppose Democracy, Prefer a Benevolent Dictator Like Saddam Hussein, Muhammad Bin Salman; If You Behave Like a Human Being, You Don’t Need to Fear an Autocratic Regime #Lebanon #democracy pic.twitter.com/Nsme76L7FM

— MEMRI (@MEMRIReports) July 13, 2023

The post WATCH: Lebanese musician prefers ‘benevolent dictators’ like Saddam Hussein appeared first on World Israel News.

The autobiography of Israel’s longest-serving prime minister demonstrates everything we like and dislike about him, but also explains why he remains necessary.

By Jonathan S. Tobin, JNS

After his four decades as a public figure, and a soon-to-be-extended record run as Israel’s longest-serving prime minister, is there anything we don’t already know about Benjamin Netanyahu? Though there are still plenty of questions for future historians to try to answer about his life and remarkable career, readers of his recently published autobiography, Bibi: My Story, will find few surprises in its more than 650 pages of text.

That’s not entirely a bad thing, as the work contains many elements that are clear reflections of the author’s personality. In the forefront is his unflinching loyalty to his family, including hero worship of his father and slain older brother, Yoni, as well as a willingness to go to bat to defend the much-battered reputations of his wife, Sara, and their elder son, Yair.

His insatiable thirst for getting even with a long list of political enemies is also on display. The score-settling with personalities like his former commander-turned-political-rival Ehud Barak (whom he eagerly claims was always a publicity hound undeserving of the title of “Israel’s most decorated soldier”) begins early in the narrative and never lets up. His often-scathing portrayals of Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert, Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid fall into the same category.

In his telling, the Israeli press, which he rightly regards as his real opposition, is largely a pack of politically biased hacks with no interest in accuracy. In his words, it lies about him with impunity—an allegation with which an impartial observer (if there is such a thing about Netanyahu) would have to agree.

Nor, with a few, not-very important exceptions, does he demonstrate much interest in soul-searching about decisions he’s made over the years. He is willing to acknowledge a few tactical political errors, including the way he treated other senior Likud leaders during his rocky first time as prime minister in the 1990s.

And he knows he definitely shouldn’t have taken 10-year-old Yair on a climb of Australia’s Ayers Rock, after a gust of wind nearly killed the boy—something for which he probably has never stopped apologizing to Sara.

He draws a veil of silence, however, over his personal misbehavior during his early political life, including his astounding confession in 1993 on live Israeli TV to an extra-marital affair. This was when, as a candidate for the Likud Party leadership, he accused supporters of his primary rival of trying to blackmail him with a video of the tryst. Though no such tape materialized, he survived the scandal. But it was just the beginning of his troubles with local media.

The decision to avoid recounting such embarrassing episodes makes sense. The work, above all, is a political biography and a Zionist polemic. In it, he seeks not so much to reveal personal information about himself as to place his life in the context of the history of the state.

Indeed, the book is only partly about Netanyahu, the individual, a magnet for controversy. The real subject is Netanyahu, the man with a clear and prescient vision for the security and prosperity of the Jewish state—a figure who has followed in the footsteps of the Jewish people’s greatest leaders of the last century.

And because history actually has vindicated the basic principles that have guided his political career, Bibi is, despite some clear literary shortcomings, an important book. Written as it was during what he rightly expected would be merely a break from the premiership, rather than the end of his career, it isn’t an exercise in introspection, but something of a campaign biography.

The Bibi we read about is a man who was right about most things to start with, and the passage of the years has only served to reinforce his conclusion that he’s still correct about almost everything.

This can be a bit off-putting at times, especially when he revises recent history to suit his purposes. One example is his portrayal of himself during the late 1990s and early 2000s as primarily focused on the threat from Iran, leaving out his ardent advocacy for what turned about to be the disastrous U.S. invasion of Iraq. The benefits of the demise of Saddam Hussein notwithstanding, the war wound up strengthening Tehran.

In his telling, he was interested in stopping Iran, while then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was indifferent. This flies in the face of the fact that Sharon privately opposed the Iraq war in conversations with the Bush administration for the above reason.

Another problem is the somewhat pedestrian prose style adopted in much of the book. Netanyahu is on firm ground when he writes about history and policy, and it is in those realms that his trademark eloquence shines through. He’s equally inspired when writing about his family and army service. He’s never more impassioned than when speaking of his parents and, above all, Yoni, the hero of Entebbe.

His depiction of life in “the unit” —Sayeret Matkal, the Israel Defense Forces’ most elite combat formation in which he and his brothers all served with distinction—also provides insight into his thinking about many things.

Unfortunately, the long passages describing much of his political career—the people he’s met, places he’s gone and ceremonies he’s attended—are deadly dull. Someone inclined to play a drinking game in which one must lift a glass whenever he speaks of how “deeply moved” he was about something, or whether his audiences laughed at his jokes, may not make it through some chapters sober.

This doesn’t detract from his emphasis on efforts to educate the world about Israel’s security dilemmas, or description of his mainly successful crusade to free the country’s economy from the shackles of its socialist origins.

Still ready to fight

At the heart of the hefty volume is his explanation for the bankruptcy of the Oslo peace process in which three successive U.S. administrations—those led by Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama—were so heavily invested. Netanyahu was right that trying to trade land for peace with a terrorist-controlled Palestinian national movement that was unreconciled to the existence or legitimacy of a Jewish state would lead only to failure and bloodshed.

His accounts of his confrontations with the affable but misguided Clinton and the arrogant and even more wrongheaded Obama are the highlights of the book. He clinically dissects the misconceptions behind the obsession on the part of the American foreign-policy establishment with pressuring Israel to make concessions to achieve a peace that the Palestinians didn’t want. No one who understands these issues can read these passages without being moved to anger by Obama’s malevolence, and being reminded of the stubborn courage that Netanyahu showed during those years.

Regarding the account of his campaign to alert the world to the existential threat that a nuclear Iran poses to Israel: We are left wanting to learn more about his failure to convince Israel’s own security establishment to launch a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities early in his second term as prime minister, when it might have had far more of an impact than it would now.

But the recounting of his refusal to bend to Obama’s ill-considered appeasement policy and decision to flout tradition and address Congress to persuade it to oppose a sitting president’s policy are right on target.

Given the historic support Israel received from former President Donald Trump, some may be surprised by Netanyahu’s occasionally unflattering portrayal of him. Getting Trump to drop his foolish belief that he could bring about peace with the Palestinians was a heavy lift for the prime minister and the president’s coterie of pro-Israel Jewish aides. But he does give Trump his due for ultimately doing the right thing and moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv, recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights and brokering the Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and four Arab and Muslim nations.

Though many Israelis are sick of Netanyahu’s ego, readers of Bibi can well understand his belief that no one is good enough to succeed him; that his family is treated unfairly; and that it is the longstanding vendetta of the country’s leftist establishment responsible for the attempt to bring him down by any means possible. (It’s the only explanation for the flimsy corruption charges on which he’s been standing trial for a couple of years, with no end in sight.)

Yet the autobiography also sheds light on why most Israelis still believe he’s the one man with the talent and the experience to lead their country. His clear-eyed vision on security, diplomacy and economics has not only been proven correct time and again. His ability to lead on all these issues is unmatched by any political rival or ally.

His next term as prime minister, slated soon to begin, will provide more of the same kind of dilemmas with respect to the Palestinians, Iran and the economy, as well as looming confrontations with a less-than-friendly American administration.

The efforts by both American and Israeli opponents to portray his new government as “extreme” are just a new version of the same biased and misguided policy perspectives that he’s been facing for the last 30 years. But if there’s one thing we can learn from his book, it’s that Netanyahu is as ready to fight and win these next battles as he was the ones that came before.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him on Twitter at: @jonathans_tobin.

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The State Department mistakenly assumes that generous diplomatic and financial gestures could induce the violently volatile Middle East to embrace peaceful-coexistence, good-faith negotiation, democracy and human rights.

The post WATCH: State Department’s systematic failures in the Middle East appeared first on World Israel News.

Iraqi opposition activist Mazen Al-Samarrai said in a June 26, 2020 interview that the only mistake Saddam Hussein had made was that he had not killed the people who are currently leading Iraq and dumped their bodies like stray dogs, MEMRI reports.

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The initial refusal by the IDF’s upper echelon to listen to warnings from a parliamentary committee almost prevented the discovery of a Syrian nuclear plant, Israeli TV reported.

By: World Israel News Staff

Former IDF Chief of Staff Moshe Ya’alon, former IDF intelligence chief Aharon Farkash and other high-ranking military officers initially rejected warnings received from politicians in 2004 about a possible Syrian nuclear weapons program because they thought they knew better, a report indicates.

According to a report by Hadashot TV’s Amit Segal, a Knesset sub-committee warned the IDF of Syria’s nuclear ambitions two years before the Mossad found clear-cut evidence that a reactor was being built there with North Korean help.

However, the IDF initially belittled the politicians, claiming they were out of their element, the report claims.

Farkash said in response that he does not remember the incidents as presented by Hadashot TV. Ya’alon declined to comment.

In March, Israel decided to confirm that the September 6, 2007 sortie which destroyed Syria’s nascent nuclear program and that was code-named “Outside the Box,” was Israel’s doing. Until this point in time Israel had imposed silence.

Israeli gathered intelligence information about the nuclear reactor and verified that the reactor did in fact exist in 2006. The fact that it took so long for Israel to gather this information and make this verification was seen as a failure on the part of the Israeli military and intelligence community.

Hadashot uncovered a situation in which politicians were well ahead of the military and intelligence community when it came to suspicions about a possible nuclear reactor in Syria. As early as 2004 these politicians attempted to generate interest in these claims among the military and intelligence personnel.

The information available seemed to point to the distinct possibility that a there was nuclear program being developed, according to the proceedings from a commission tasked with looking into the matter during the stint prime minister Ariel Sharon.

The commission was the doing of Energy Minister Yuval Steinitz, who pushed to ensure that Israel would know if any nation or rogue group attempted to establish a nuclear reactor in the Middle East.

What provoted Steinitz to do this were two different incidents. First, Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi managed to begin a nuclear reactor without the knowledge of Israel and only when he agreed to give up the program in the wake of the allied forces’ attack on Iraq’s Saddam Hussein did this program become known.

The second incident was the the faulty IDF intelligence surrounding Saddam Hussein’s purported nuclear program. Israel, and the US, though Hussein was developing nuclear weapons when in reality he was doing no such thing.

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Leaders from Turkey, Iraq, and Syria denounce the drive for Kurdish self-determination, with Iraq saying it would be a “second Israel.”

As the  Kurdish people, an ethnic minority that inhabits portions of Turkey, Iraq,  Iran, and Syria, among other Middle Eastern countries, fights to establish a nation of its own, they continue to meet opposition from political leaders and religious figures in the Muslim-majority nations in which they live.

On Sunday, the vice president of Iraq decried the creation of an independent Kurdistan, explaining that his nation would not suffer the creation of “a second Israel,” according to AFP. The comment was made after the Jewish state distinguished itself as the only nation that supported a slated Kurdish independence referendum in northern Iraq.

The response in Iraq mirrored previous sentiments in Turkey. The Israeli embassy in Ankara had to be evacuated on Friday due to a demonstration by a Turkish ultra-nationalist party protesting the creation of a “second Israel” in Iraqi Kurdistan, reported Times of Israel.

These responses come on the heels of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s comments regarding an independent Kurdistan. Specifically, the Prime Minister’s Office released a statement on the heels of the Israeli leader’s historic trip to Latin America. “While Israel rejects terror in any form, it supports the legitimate efforts of the Kurdish people to attain a state of its own,” the statement read.

According to various news outlets, Israeli flags have been flown at rallies for Kurdish independence. The Kurds have faced persecution in a number of Middle Eastern countries, including horrific treatment by the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein

By: World Israel News

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In a stunning shift of loyalties, the Shi’ite Muslim Fundamentalist regime of Iran, which once cheered America’s destruction of its Sunni neighbors in Iraq and Afghanistan, is now sending senior commandos to assist the Sunni Taliban in their jihad against the US-backed Afghani government.

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