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The Revolutionary Guards said on Saturday that Iran would strike Israel’s nuclear facilities if the Jewish state attacked it, state television reported.
“If the Zionist Regime (Israel) attacks Iran, we will surely strike its nuclear facilities with our missile capabilities,” Mohammad Ali Jafari, Guards commander-in-chief, told Iran’s Arabic language al-Alam television.
The Revolutionary Guards are the ideologically driven wing of Iran’s military with air, sea and land capabilities, and a separate command structure to regular units.
Iranian leaders often dismiss talk of a possible strike by Israel, saying it is not in a position to threaten Iran, the world’s fifth-largest oil exporter. They say Iran would respond to any attack by targeting U.S. interests and Israel.
“We are not responsible for this regime and other enemies’ foolishness … If they strike Iran, our answer will be firm and precise,” state television quoted Jafari as saying.
The United States, Israel and their Western allies fear that Iran is enriching uranium with the aim of producing nuclear weapons and have not ruled out military action if diplomacy fails to resolve the row.
Iran says it is pursuing only a nuclear power generation program.
Israel, widely believed to be the Middle East’s only nuclear power, has repeatedly described Iran’s nuclear program as a threat to its existence. Iran refuses to recognize Israel.
Jafari said Israel was entirely within the reach of Iran.
“Our missile capability puts all of the Zionist regime (Israel) within Iran’s reach to attack,” Jafari said. “The Zionist regime is too small to threaten Iran.”
Military experts say Iran rarely reveals enough detail about its new military equipment to determine its military capabilities.
Israel has so far quietly acceded to Washington’s strategy of talking to Tehran about curtailing its sensitive nuclear work.
Israel believes that a multi-level missile shield underwritten by the United States would protect the country against possible missile attacks.
Jafari said such a shield could only protect Israel “in a limited way.”
“But they will have no answer when Iran bombards them and sends a great number of its missiles,” he added.
President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said in May Iran had tested a missile that defense analysts say could hit Israel and U.S. bases in the Gulf. Washington said the test was a “step in the wrong direction” to remove concerns over its nuclear work.
Iran has repeatedly threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz, conduit for about 40 percent of globally traded oil, if it is attacked. The U.S. military says it will prevent any such action.
Military experts say Iranian missiles often draw on technology from China, North Korea and other countries.
Israel has three German-made submarines that are widely assumed to carry nuclear missiles.
One of the submarines sailed from the Mediterranean, via the Suez Canal, to Israel’s Red Sea port of Eilat in early July, seen as a signal to Iran of the long reach of its arsenal.
Jafari said Iran “was not scared” of Israel’s military capabilities. “It is part of the psychological war that the West has launched against Iran,” he said.
Ahmadinejad, who has called for Israel to be wiped off the map, was re-elected in a disputed June 12 presidential vote that stirred the largest display of internal unrest in the country since the 1979 Islamic revolution.
North Korea publicly executed a Christian woman last month for distributing the Bible, which is banned in the communist nation, South Korean activists said Friday.
Ri Hyon Ok, 33, was also accused of spying for South Korea and the United States and organizing dissidents. She was executed in the northwestern city of Ryongchon near the border with China on June 16, according to a report from an alliance of several dozen anti-North Korea groups.
Ri’s parents, husband and three children were sent to a political prison camp in the northeastern city of Hoeryong the following day, the report said, citing unidentified documents it says were obtained from North Korea. It showed a copy of Ri’s North Korean government-issued photo ID.
It is virtually impossible to verify such reports about secretive North Korea, where the government tightly controls the lives of its citizens and does not allow dissent.
On Thursday, an annual report from a state-run South Korean think tank on human rights in the North said that public executions, though dropping in number in recent years, were still carried out for crimes ranging from murder to circulating foreign movies.
North Korea claims to guarantee freedom of religion for its 24 million people but in reality severely restricts religious observances. The cult of personality surrounding national founder Kim Il Sung and his son, current leader Kim Jong Il, is a virtual state religion.
Citizens barred from churches
The government has authorized four state churches, one Catholic, two Protestant and one Russian Orthodox, but they cater to foreigners and ordinary North Koreans cannot attend. However, defectors and activists say more than 30,000 North Koreans are believed to practice Christianity secretly.
The U.S. State Department reported last year that “genuine religious freedom does not exist” in North Korea.
“North Korea appears to have judged that Christian forces could pose a threat to its regime,” Do Hee-youn, a leading activist, told reporters, claiming public executions, arrest and detention of North Koreans are prevalent.
The Investigative Commission On Crime Against Humanity also alleged in its report that in March, North Korean security agents arrested Seo Kum Ok, 30, another Christian, in a city near Ryongchon and tortured her. The agents alleged she was attempting to spy on a nuclear site and hand over the evidence to South Korea and the U.S.
The report said it remains unclear whether she survived. Her husband was also arrested and their two children disappeared, it said.
The commission said it was seeking to try to take North Korean leader Kim to the International Criminal Court over alleged crimes against humanity.
Activists claim that such atrocities — including murder, kidnap, rape, extermination of individuals in prison camps — cannot take place in North Korea without Kim’s knowledge or direction as he wields absolute power.
“Let’s file a suit against Kim Jong Il to the International Criminal Court,” the activists chanted.
‘Long live the Taliban” might seem an unlikely thing for a prominent anti-war figure to declare, but that’s to-day’s peace movement for you. Stranger still, the man who recently uttered those words, Azzam Tamimi, is being promoted by a new Toronto-based institute that says it is embarking upon a national campaign to cultivate wholesome, faith-based civic virtues among Canada’s young Muslims.
The Mississauga, Ont.-based Al-Fauz Institute for Islamic Thought claims its purpose is to teach young Muslims how to apply Islamic ideas to Canada’s pluralistic society and “prepare young minds that will take up the mantle of the Muslim community.” But Tamimi — who currently has top billing on the Al-Fauz website, and is listed as a member of the institute’s “faculty” — has loudly renounced democracy. Indeed, he recently proclaimed: “I don’t believe in democracy anymore,” explicitly praises suicide bombers, and says he is willing to blow himself up in Israel: “It’s the straight way to pleasing my God and I would do it if I had the opportunity.” He distinguishes good Muslims from their adversaries this way: “We love death. They love life.”
You’d never know any of this from the billing the Al-Fauz Institute gives Tamimi. He’s presented as a Palestinian-born British academic and a “political activist.” His leading role with Britain’s Stop The War Coalition is noted. But nowhere does the institute mention that Tamimi is also a high-ranking advisor to Hamas, an organization considered by Canada to be a terrorist group. His best-known book is titled Hamas: A History From Within. Nor is this fact mentioned by Toronto’s Ryerson University, which is permitting Tamimi to deliver a four-day “intensive course on Islamic history” from July 24 to July 27.
Aside from Tamimi, five well-known Canadian imams are listed by the Al-Fauz Institute as “faculty” members. But the best known among them — Hamid Slimi, chairman of the Canadian Council of Imams — told me he’d never even heard of the institute. “I don’t know anything about this,” Slimi said. “I must be completely out of the loop.”
Iqbal Masood Nadvi, the institute’s “senior patron,” denied any knowledge of Tamimi’s dodgy associations or his various bloodcurdling pronouncements. “I am hearing this from you for the first time,” he said. “I don’t believe in the Taliban. What I know about Tamimi is he is an academic person.”
Nadvi referred further questions to the Al-Fauz Institute’s co-ordinator, Junaid Mirza, who had taken the lead in bringing Tamimi onboard. While Mirza was quite familiar with Tamimi’s political background, he said it was Tamimi’s academic expertise in the history of Islamic reform movements that landed him the institute faculty post and the Ryerson gig. But if the point is to present Canadians with “a balanced and comprehensive vision of Islam,” isn’t a character like Azzam Tamimi pretty well the worst choice the Al-Fauz Institute could have made?
“We’ll have other points of view down the road, too,” Mirza said.
As for Tamimi’s support for the Taliban, Mirza claims that’s not so clear. “It’s not a blanket defence,” Mirza said. And what about Tamimi’s grisly advocacy of suicide bombing? Mirza says the subject isn’t expected to come up during Tamimi’s lectures, which will look back on 1,400 years of Islamic history.
“This is an academic discussion,” says Mirza. “We’re not trying to get people motivated and inspired like you would at a political rally.”
Is the Al-Fauz Institute really interested in helping young Muslim Canadians make healthy contributions to this country’s mosaic? Azzam Tamimi preaches a toxic, anti-democratic Islamism and espouses a decidedly oppressive way of life. The Al-Fauz Institute must be called to account — Canadians deserve to know just what this group has planned.
A global Islamic extremist political organization hosted its first organized conference in the United States on Sunday. Hosted by the group Hizb-ut-Tahrir, the conference, titled “Fall of Capitalism and Rise of Islam,” was hosted at a Hilton hotel in Chicago.
The conference was free to the public and attracted some 700 people, according to a report by Chicago’s CBS 2 network.
The organization, whose name means The Liberation Party, is known for being a political, non-violent Sunni movement formed as a reaction to the Muslim Brotherhood.
The party was established in Jerusalem in 1953 by Palestinian intellectuals. The leader at the time, Taqiuddin an-Nabhani, established the organization as an ideological political party striving to create an Islamic caliphate, i.e. an ideal, unified Muslim state.
Hizb-ut-Tahrir is “a political party whose ideology is Islam,” according to the group’s official Web site.
The group is the “first Islamic radical organization to adopt a global policy,” said Reuven Paz, the director of Project for the Research of Islamist Movements (PRISM). The party has established centers across the world, but has been banned in much of the Arab world and central Asia because the group has been seen as an opposition to Islamic governments already in place, he explained in an interview with The Jerusalem Post on Sunday.
Paz said that though the organization has a strong base in London, the US branch was created in the 1970s in states with large Muslim populations.
Kamran Bokhari, STRATFOR’s director of Middle East analysis, explained that until this conference, the Hizb-ut-Tahrir has been largely dormant in the US, but he believes the group is trying to make a comeback and reestablish a presence.
“They are trying to make use of the financial crisis and show that capitalism is in decline and Islam is the answer,” he said. “They decided it’s the right time to come back – the hunt against Islam is not as intense as it used to be.”
He explained that the organization is serious about theology, idealogy and methodology. “Unlike organizations like al-Qaeda, they do not use force. They are more into doing conferences and holding study circles to shape public opinion,” he said.
Paz explained that the conference is taking place in the United States because the group is taking advantage of freedom of speech. Most of the members are young intellectual elites, he said.
Though anti-Israel, anti-Shi’ite and anti-Western, the organization is not at all violent, but is seen as a threat for having unique doctrines and attracting followers to demonstrations, said Paz.
“The group is a minority in the Muslim world, but they are very vocal. They can be very extreme, but never violent,” Paz said. “They are far from the present doctrines of al-Qaeda.”
In a phone interview with CBS News, conference deputy spokesman Reza Imam stressed that Hizb ut-Tahrir does not call for violence or spread radical ideas. He said the group has not been accused of being tied to violent activities.
According to the organization’s Web site, Hizb-ut-Tahrir aims to educate Muslims as an “entity that seeks to change people’s thoughts through intelligent discussion and debate,” and “does not accept forcing people or societies to change by means of violence and terror.”
Imam said the conference was hosted to highlight the disintegration of capitalism during the global financial crisis.
“Our organization is an intellectual organization, so anybody who subscribes to its ideas is a member,” said Imam. “Our currency is ideas…it is not a card-carrying type of organization,” he added.
Hizb ut-Tahrir has no headquarters in the US and no leader, said Imam, adding that it has a strong presence in Chicago.
The conference was originally scheduled to be held at Al Aqsa Islamic School in Bridgeview, Ill., but the school canceled the event. According to CBS News, school officials felt the group misrepresented their goals when they asked to use the venue
If you think drone aircraft are all the rage at the U.S. Air Force, just wait a few years. The men in the Pentagon who look into the future believe UAVs — Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, or pilotless planes — are the future.
Comparing today’s drones to the development of manned military flight, “we are in the 1920s,” said Lt. Gen. David Deptula. He spoke at a Defense Department briefing looking 30 years into the future.
UAV’s are already used, principally for reconnaissance, where they can fly high and steady. But Defense Department planners say they can foresee drones used as cargo planes, bombers or fighters.
Planners also say they imagine the development of nano-aircraft the size of bugs, which could be used to spy inside enemy buildings.
They expect to see jets that could fly at hypersonic speeds, far beyond the ability of even the hottest pilot to keep them under control.
And they painted a picture of multi-purpose unmanned planes, which could be fitted with “pods” up front for specific missions.
A drone can be remote-controlled, steered by a “pilot” on the ground at a U.S. base, far from danger. Or, eventually, they could be self-controlled, following a preset flight plan but changing it as conditions change during its mission. The Air Force says it has seen a more than 600 percent increase in demand for unmanned missions in the past decade.
“They are very important and very effective,” in targeting enemies, said Deptula. He said drones hit what they are aiming at 95 percent of the time.
30-Year ‘Flight Plan’
In the Pentagon’s Unmanned Aircraft Systems Flight Plan, which looks out to the year 2047, the sky is basically the limit, say the planners. They said they made their ideas public in order to attract interest from aerospace companies and university engineers, who are likely to come up with leading-edge innovations — but need to know what the Air Force, the CIA and other users think they will need in the future.
The plan also suggests what the Air Force calls a loyal wingman concept. In this scenario, a pilot in a conventional manned aircraft could fly to a target, followed by a dozen or more heavily armed drones. The pilot, after dropping the bombs or missiles on his own plane, could then assign his “loyal wingmen” to do the same. It would be highly efficient — an entire squadron, led by one pilot.
The Air Force is also experimenting to see how many drones one operator, back at a base, can control remotely at once. With a sufficiently advanced autopilot, a drone is unlikely to need full-time piloting.
There are obstacles to overcome. Right now drones are operating in airspace controlled by the U.S. or its allies — but they are far from being ready to tangle with enemy pilots. If they are flying in contested airspace, “they’ll start falling like rain,” said Gen. Deptula. So the Air Force will consider stealth and other technologies to protect the drones in hostile territory.
Deptula couldn’t suggest a ratio of manned to unmanned aircraft in the years to come, but he said it’s clear UAV’s are a big part of the future. As the No. 2 man in the Air Force, Gen. William Fraser, said, “We have embraced this technology.”
Days before US secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s tour of India kicked off, the Union agriculture ministry cleared three genetically modified (GM) food crops — tomato, brinjal and cauliflower — to be introduced in the country in three years. The final clearance will have to come from two committees — the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee and the Review Committee on Genetic Manipulation. Given the consistent — and often uncritical — bias both have shown in favour of GM crops, there is every possibility that these three GM vegetables will soon be in the markets. There is no call to float conspiracy theories, but it must be significant that India has come down on the US side of the GM debate ignoring the European Union’s consistent scepticism about genetic modification, at a time when Clinton has made talks on agricultural technology part of the agenda of bilateral cooperation. It is nobody’s case that GM crops should be completely ruled out of court — potentially it has a serious role to play in meeting the crisis of food security that haunts developing countries. But precipitate action is extremely unwise for a number of reasons.
To begin with, there are health issues. At the current state of knowledge about GM food crops, no one can be certain about its health impacts. Much greater research and pilot testing will be necessary before GM crops can be declared completely safe for human consumption. A related issue is the matter of choice — a EU-US bone of contention for a long time. The question is: will the government be able to put in place a regulatory and labelling regime to ensure that consumers know what they are consuming?
It is unclear what the impact of the cultivation of GM crops will have on existing landraces and strains. There is a possibility that if the regulatory regime is weak and proper precautions aren’t taken to segregate GM crops from others, native strains will be adversely affected. This could, in fact, end up imperilling food security. There are other issues — the question of the introduction of ‘terminator’ genes, already played out in the case of GM cotton, and the control that it gives to seed corporations must also be revisited. But for the moment health and safety are the most crucial questions — and as long as there is public scepticism about the pro-industry bias of the two expert committees, the political establishment must proceed with far greater caution.
News that Chinese researchers have succeeded in growing healthy living mice from mouse skin cells takes scientists a significant step closer to human cloning, experts say, and thus figures to reignite an ethics debate.
The new feat — in which animals were grown from cells that had been reverted to embryos — is different from cloning.
Cloning, in which the nucleus is removed from a cell and implanted in a fertilized egg, has never been achieved in humans. Nor has the new technique — using induced pluripotent stem, or iPS, cells — been tested in them. Because that process works in mice, however, it should work in humans.
“We now have the technology to create iPS cells from skin or hair follicles,” said Dr. Robert Lanza of Advanced Cell Technology Inc., who was not involved in the studies. “…What’s very troubling is that if you have a piece of skin from anybody — Albert Einstein, Marilyn Monroe, Michael Jackson — you could create a child.”
The researchers involved in the new studies said it should not be tried on humans.
“It would not be ethical to attempt to use iPS cells in human reproduction,” said Fanyi Zeng of the Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
Her study, she added, was “in no way meant as a first step in that direction.”
A robot that can open doors and find electrical outlets to recharge itself. Computer viruses that no one can stop. Predator drones, which, though still controlled remotely by humans, come close to a machine that can kill autonomously.
Impressed and alarmed by advances in artificial intelligence, a group of computer scientists is debating whether there should be limits on research that might lead to loss of human control over computer-based systems that carry a growing share of society’s workload, from waging war to chatting with customers on the phone.
Their concern is that further advances could create profound social disruptions and even have dangerous consequences.
As examples, the scientists pointed to a number of technologies as diverse as experimental medical systems that interact with patients to simulate empathy, and computer worms and viruses that defy extermination and could thus be said to have reached a “cockroach” stage of machine intelligence.
While the computer scientists agreed that we are a long way from Hal, the computer that took over the spaceship in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” they said there was legitimate concern that technological progress would transform the work force by destroying a widening range of jobs, as well as force humans to learn to live with machines that increasingly copy human behaviors.
The researchers — leading computer scientists, artificial intelligence researchers and roboticists who met at the Asilomar Conference Grounds on Monterey Bay in California — generally discounted the possibility of highly centralized superintelligences and the idea that intelligence might spring spontaneously from the Internet. But they agreed that robots that can kill autonomously are either already here or will be soon.
They focused particular attention on the specter that criminals could exploit artificial intelligence systems as soon as they were developed. What could a criminal do with a speech synthesis system that could masquerade as a human being? What happens if artificial intelligence technology is used to mine personal information from smart phones?
The researchers also discussed possible threats to human jobs, like self-driving cars, software-based personal assistants and service robots in the home. Just last month, a service robot developed by Willow Garage in Silicon Valley proved it could navigate the real world.
A report from the conference, which took place in private on Feb. 25, is to be issued later this year. Some attendees discussed the meeting for the first time with other scientists this month and in interviews.
The conference was organized by the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, and in choosing Asilomar for the discussions, the group purposefully evoked a landmark event in the history of science. In 1975, the world’s leading biologists also met at Asilomar to discuss the new ability to reshape life by swapping genetic material among organisms. Concerned about possible biohazards and ethical questions, scientists had halted certain experiments. The conference led to guidelines for recombinant DNA research, enabling experimentation to continue.
The meeting on the future of artificial intelligence was organized by Eric Horvitz, a Microsoft researcher who is now president of the association.
Dr. Horvitz said he believed computer scientists must respond to the notions of superintelligent machines and artificial intelligence systems run amok.
The idea of an “intelligence explosion” in which smart machines would design even more intelligent machines was proposed by the mathematician I. J. Good in 1965. Later, in lectures and science fiction novels, the computer scientist Vernor Vinge popularized the notion of a moment when humans will create smarter-than-human machines, causing such rapid change that the “human era will be ended.” He called this shift the Singularity.
This vision, embraced in movies and literature, is seen as plausible and unnerving by some scientists like William Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems. Other technologists, notably Raymond Kurzweil, have extolled the coming of ultrasmart machines, saying they will offer huge advances in life extension and wealth creation.
“Something new has taken place in the past five to eight years,” Dr. Horvitz said. “Technologists are replacing religion, and their ideas are resonating in some ways with the same idea of the Rapture.”
The Kurzweil version of technological utopia has captured imaginations in Silicon Valley. This summer an organization called the Singularity University began offering courses to prepare a “cadre” to shape the advances and help society cope with the ramifications.
“My sense was that sooner or later we would have to make some sort of statement or assessment, given the rising voice of the technorati and people very concerned about the rise of intelligent machines,” Dr. Horvitz said.
The A.A.A.I. report will try to assess the possibility of “the loss of human control of computer-based intelligences.” It will also grapple, Dr. Horvitz said, with socioeconomic, legal and ethical issues, as well as probable changes in human-computer relationships. How would it be, for example, to relate to a machine that is as intelligent as your spouse?
Dr. Horvitz said the panel was looking for ways to guide research so that technology improved society rather than moved it toward a technological catastrophe. Some research might, for instance, be conducted in a high-security laboratory.
The meeting on artificial intelligence could be pivotal to the future of the field. Paul Berg, who was the organizer of the 1975 Asilomar meeting and received a Nobel Prize for chemistry in 1980, said it was important for scientific communities to engage the public before alarm and opposition becomes unshakable.
“If you wait too long and the sides become entrenched like with G.M.O.,” he said, referring to genetically modified foods, “then it is very difficult. It’s too complex, and people talk right past each other.”
Tom Mitchell, a professor of artificial intelligence and machine learning at Carnegie Mellon University, said the February meeting had changed his thinking. “I went in very optimistic about the future of A.I. and thinking that Bill Joy and Ray Kurzweil were far off in their predictions,” he said. But, he added, “The meeting made me want to be more outspoken about these issues and in particular be outspoken about the vast amounts of data collected about our personal lives.”
Despite his concerns, Dr. Horvitz said he was hopeful that artificial intelligence research would benefit humans, and perhaps even compensate for human failings. He recently demonstrated a voice-based system that he designed to ask patients about their symptoms and to respond with empathy. When a mother said her child was having diarrhea, the face on the screen said, “Oh no, sorry to hear that.”
A physician told him afterward that it was wonderful that the system responded to human emotion.
Britain has seen an unprecedented number of anti-Semitic “hate crimes”, with more incidents recorded so far in 2009 than in any previous entire year, a Jewish advisory body said on Friday.
Up to the end of June, there were 609 anti-Semitic incidents ranging from verbal abuse to extreme violence, compared with 276 in the same period last year.
The Community Security Trust (CST), which advises Britain’s estimated 300,000 Jews on safety issues, said it was the highest number it had recorded since it began collating figures in 1984.
Israel’s Gaza offensive against Hamas militants which was launched at the end of December was the main cause, it said, with many of the incidents taking place in January and including direct references to the fighting.
“British Jews are facing ever higher levels of racist attack and intimidation,” said Mark Gardner from the CST. “There is no excuse for anti-Semitism, racism and bias, and it is totally unacceptable that overseas conflicts should be impacting here in this way.”
The CST said there had been 77 violent anti-Semitic incidents including two it classified as “extreme violence”, an attack which could cause loss of life or grievous bodily harm.
Most incidents took place in London and Manchester, the two biggest Jewish communities in Britain.
‘Extremism on the march’
“This rise in anti-Semitism is not just concerning for the British Jewish Communities but for all those who see themselves as decent human beings,” said Shahid Malik, the government’s Cohesion Minister.
Denis MacShane, an MP who led a 2006 parliamentary inquiry into anti-Semitism, said the issue was “once more a very real problem”.
“This is a warning to all of our society, a warning that the damaging forces of extremism and scapegoating are again on the march,” he said.
Earlier this month, a senior British counter-terrorism officer said police were concerned about a rise in attacks by far-right groups.
Last week, a white supremacist, who prosecutors said wanted to embark on a war with the “non-British”, was found guilty of plotting bomb attacks after he was found with components for homemade incendiary devices.
As Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman concluded his visit to Brazil – the first stop of his 10-day Latin American tour – Israel expressed concern over Hizbullah’s growing strength in the region, especially in a country not on Lieberman’s itinerary: Venezuela.
The minister was expected to discuss the progress that Iran and Hizbullah have made in Venezuela, as well as a report released by the Foreign Ministry in May which details how its president, Hugo Chavez, helped Iran bypass UN Security Council economic sanctions and provided it with uranium.
Iran moved into Latin American in 1982, starting with Cuba, and developed economic ties and opened embassies in Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Argentina, Chile, Venezuela and Uruguay, according to the report.
Israeli officials have expressed concern at the Islamic republic’s growing ties with leftist-led nations in Latin America. Iranian companies are building apartments, cars, tractors and bicycles in Venezuela and the two countries’ leaders have exchanged several visits.
Iran has opened new embassies in Bolivia and Nicaragua, and a secret Israeli report recently suggested that Bolivia and Venezuela are supplying uranium to Iran – an allegation sharply denied by both South American countries.
A top Israeli diplomat accompanying Lieberman told The Associated Press that Israel wanted to halt all Hizbullah activities in the region.
“Ever since Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was first elected as president in 2005, it seems Iran is making a big effort to penetrate Latin America,” said Dorit Shavit, deputy director-general of Latin American and Caribbean affairs at the Foreign Ministry. “This is worrying for us.”
There are Hizbullah cells in Venezuela’s border area with Colombia, Shavit said. “It may be right now they’re not active, but they might be active tomorrow.”
And Hizbullah’s presence has significantly increased in the northwestern region of Guarija and on the Caribbean island of Margarita, she said.
Venezuela has denied the allegation, but copious evidence of cooperation between Hizbullah, Iran and Venezuela has intelligence and terrorism experts concerned.
The relationship between Iran, Hizbullah’s chief sponsor, and Venezuela has intensified, with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad visiting Caracas three times since 2006, and Chavez visiting Teheran several times.
“We’ve heard that they Hizbullah are training and financing in Venezuela, especially in Margarita Island, which is a logistical hub and center of money, document fraud, and visa fraud,” said Fred Burton, former US counter terrorism agent for the State Department and currently vice president of the Austin, Texas-based STRATFOR private intelligence agency’s Counter Terrorism and Corporate Security Division.
Hizbullah efforts in Venezuela have been aided by that nation’s close oil and diplomatic ties with Iran, and the large Shi’ite Lebanese population that resides in Venezuela.
“Hizbullah has a history of being active in Latin America and using the vast Lebanese Shi’ite expatriate population to its advantage, specifically as it relates to the production and trafficking of narcotics,” said Mathew Brodsky, legacy heritage fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council.
“Also, last year the US targeted a Hizbullah drug trafficking ring in the Tri-Border region of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay, and they identified and dismantled an international cocaine smuggling and money-laundering ring comprised of a Columbian drug cartel and Lebanese members of Hizbullah,” he said.
Hizbullah’s presence in Venezuela is particularly troublesome for Israeli government due to its distance from the long arm of the IDF.
“This is where you begin to worry if you’re in Israeli intelligence, because you know you only have fixed number of assets to look at, and logistically this is a long way away from Israel,” Burton said.
“The farther Hizbullah gets away from home base, the more difficult it is for the Israelis to operate against them.”
The US government directly linked Hizbullah to Venezuela in June 2008 and saw the connections as troubling when the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assists Control designated several entities there as tied to Hizbullah, according to Brodsky.
He sees the growing Hizbullah presence in Venezuela as part of a larger Iranian effort to gain influence in the region.
“In sum, Hizbullah’s connection to Venezuela is part of a much larger and more threatening pattern of behavior by Iran in South America,” said Brodsky.
“Earlier, Iran also began banking operations in Venezuela in an effort to bypass the international sanctions already in place. So Hizbullah has been engaged in fund-raising and facilitating the travel of senior operatives – which has become easier since weekly flights between Iran and Venezuela began in 2007 with return stops in Syria.
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