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IRAN, SWEDISH MUSLIM ACCUSED IN BULGARIA KILLINGS—NEW ROLE OF EUROPE & WEST IN TERRORISM

Yesterday, at least six civilians, including 5 Israelis, were killed by a terrorist at the airport of the Bulgarian city of Burgas. The attack targeted one of four Israeli tour buses carrying passengers who arrived on a charter plane from Ben-Gurion Airport. An investigation carried out by Bulgarian and Israeli authorities, in conjunction with the FBI, CIA and Interpol confirmed the attack was a suicide bombing. Bulgarian media on Thursday indentified the perpetrator as Mehdi Ghezali, although the claim has not been verified.

 

Ghezali is a Swedish citizen, of Algerian and Finnish origin, who previously was held at the US’s Guantanamo Bay detainment camp from 2002 to 2004. He apparently became radicalized while studying at a Muslim religious school and mosque in Britain, before traveling to Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan.

 

Bulgarian Interior Minister Tsvetan Tsvetanov revealed in a press conference that Ghezali had been in Bulgaria for between 4-6 days, although other reports claim he had been in the country upwards of five weeks, and that he was 36 years old. He was found in possession of a forged US passport and Michigan State driver’s license.

 

Thirty-three additional Israelis wounded in the attack have arrived back in Israel for medical treatment. A second Israel Air Force plane carrying three people in life-threatening condition reportedly also has set out from Bulgaria for Israel. The coffins of the five Israelis killed are scheduled to arrive in Israel Thursday night.

 

Although there is as yet no claim of responsibility, yesterday’s attack came on the 18th anniversary of the Iran-sponsored, Hezbollah-perpetrated bombing of the AMIA Jewish center in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

 

GLOBAL REACTIONS TO THE TERROR ATTACK IN BULGARIA:

We got on the bus. There were a lot of people on it.… Suddenly someone got on there, and something exploded. We heard a boom. And we actually saw body parts. We tried to escape. The door was closed. But there was a hole in the side, through which me and my friend escaped.”—Gal Malka, a young woman who flew to Bulgaria for a vacation prior to being drafted into the IDF, relating the horrifying details of yesterday’s attack.

All the signs lead to Iran. Only in the past few months we have seen Iranian attempts to attack Israelis in Thailand, India, Georgia, Kenya, Cyprus and other places. This is an Iranian terror campaign that is spreading throughout the world. Israel will react powerfully against Iranian terror.”—Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, reiterating that “It’s time that all the world’s countries speak the truth clearly and say that Iran is behind the wave of terror,” and warning that “A terror state should not have nuclear weapons. The most dangerous country in the world [cannot] have the most dangerous weapon on the face of the earth.

We were witnesses to a deadly terror attack coming out of Iran.… We know there were other attempts, and this time they succeeded. [Israel] has the means and the will to silence and paralyze terror organizations.”—Israeli President Shimon Peres.

The defense establishment will work with all its might to find the perpetrators of this terrorist attack.… We have a long struggle with [terrorism] that has [had] many successes and many difficult days. Today is such a difficult day.”—Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak.

We are aware of [the Iranians’] tactics, their infrastructure and most of all their insistence on killing Israelis.”—Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon. For his part, Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman told Army Radio that Israel has solid information that Hezbollah, in “close cooperation with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps”, carried out the terror attack.

I strongly condemn today’s barbaric terrorist attack on Israelis in Bulgaria. These attacks against innocent civilians, including children, are completely outrageous. The United States will stand with our allies, and provide whatever assistance is necessary to identify and bring to justice the perpetrators of this attack.”—US President Barack Obama.

The EU utterly condemns all acts of terrorism, wherever they take place. The terrorists who planned and carried out this attack must be brought to justice. I send my condolences to the families of all those killed. Many more have been injured. We wish them a speedy recovery.”—EU Foreign Policy Chief Catherine Ashton. [The notoriously anti-Israel Ashton, who currently heads the P5+1, a group of six world powers engaged in nuclear negotiations with Iran, was unable to bring herself to acknowledge that the victims of the attack were Israeli.—Ed.]

The following commentary by UN Watch Executive Director Hillel Neuer describes
the United Nations’ inadequate—albeit predictable—response to the attack in Bulgaria:

“A U.N. spokesperson said that Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon condemned the attack ‘in the strongest possible terms.’ In fact, however, the U.N. chief’s choice of terms was weak in comparison to his statement two weeks ago on the bombing of churches in Kenya. In that case, Mr. Ban rightly spoke of ‘terrorist’ attacks, ‘reprehensible and criminal,’ saying the perpetrators ‘must be held to account.’ Yet in this case he referred only to the deadly ‘bombing’ of Israelis—noticeably declining to describe it as an act of terrorism—and he made no call for holding the perpetrators to account.

“U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay has remained silent on the attack. By contrast, hours after the Gaza Flotilla incident of 2010, Ms. Pillay expresed her ‘shock’ and condemned Israel. The top story on her office website instead criticizes Western states for how they combat terrorism, with America accused of having ‘dangerous’ laws that violate due process.…

“The U.N.’s 47-nation Human Rights Council has also stayed silent. By contrast, in 2004 it wasted no time in convening an emergency session to eulogize Hamas terrorist leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, and to condemn Israel.… The council has never mandated an inquiry into terrorism or rocket attacks targeting Israelis.”

The unfounded statements by different statesmen of the Zionist regime in connection with the accusations against Iran about its possible participation in the incident with the blown-up bus with Israeli tourists in Burgas is a familiar method of the Zionist regime…and is a sign of [its] weakness.…”—Excerpt of a statement issued by Iran’s embassy in Sofia, Bulgaria.

TODAY OUR KIDS CAME HOME
Marni Mandell

Times of Israel July 19, 2012

Today our kids came home. Some in boxes, others on stretchers, and still others walked off the plane. But the scars in their heads will last a lifetime. All for the simple fact of having an Israeli identity.

As a nation we have already begun the mourning process. You can hear it in the outrage, in the disbelief, in the confusion and the pain. We have not yet tapped into the sadness—but that, too, will come.

As a friend of mine and I were working on a project for Shabbat last night, we selected some readings for this week, and opted to include Yehudah Amichai’s “Diameter of a Bomb:”

The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters
And the diameter of its effective range about seven meters,
With four dead and eleven wounded.
And around these, in a larger circle
Of pain and time, two hospitals are scattered
And one graveyard. But the young woman
Who was buried in the city she came from,
At a distance of more than a hundred kilometers,
Enlarges the circle considerably,
And the solitary man mourning her death
At the distant shores of a country far across the sea
Includes the entire world in the circle.
And I won’t even mention the crying of orphans
That reaches up to the throne of God and beyond, making
A circle with no end.…

We are in the weeks leading up to Tisha B’Av, a day on which both temples were destroyed and other terrible events took place. This period in the Jewish calendar marks a time of national morning, as if all of Israel and the Jewish people are in a collective state of a sharp intake of breath. Painfully aware of waiting for the other shoe to drop. Once Tisha B’Av comes, and then goes, we can exhale, and release. Only then can we be begin to prepare for the new year that awaits just beyond the bend.

But in the meantime, we must survive this period. We must pray for the families, and our country…and band together to support one-another through these difficult times.…

May the victims’ memories be for a blessing.

THE COMPLEX HISTORY OF THE TERRORIST ATTACKER
IN BULGARIA SHOWS THE COSMOPOLITAN—AND NAIVELY
WESTERN-ENABLED—NATURE OF CONTEMPORARY TERRORISM
Barry Rubin

Pajamas Media, July 19, 2012

…If the deceased [perpetrator of yesterday’s suicide bombing] is the man who is being accused by Bulgarian authorities it tells us something about the complex nature of contemporary terrorism.

His name is Mehdi-Muhammad Ghezali and he was born not in the Middle East but in Stockholm, Sweden, a country whose citizenship he held, in 1979. His parents were Algerian and Finnish.

Ghezali travelled to Portugal where he was arrested for armed robbery in 1979. Perhaps he was at the start a simple criminal. Many such people have been recruited first to impassioned Islamic belief and then to revolutionary Islamist terrorism. Given the mercy of the Portuguese system, however, he served ten months of a ten-year sentence and returned to Sweden.

He then went to England where Ghezali studied at the mosque of the radical cleric Omar Bakri Muhammad. Next he went to Pakistan and Afghanistan where he consorted with known al-Qaida agents. By 2001 he was arrested after the U.S. takeover of Afghanistan and spent about three years in Guantanamo Bay prison. He denied any links to al-Qaida. Sweden’s prime minister asked that Ghezali be transferred to a Swedish prison and the United States agreed.

But when he arrived in Sweden in 2004, the Swedish government did not charge him with anything so Ghezali walked free. He was arrested and briefly detained in Pakistan in 2009 while trying to cross the border into Afghanistan illegally. And now he shows up in Bulgaria to commit an act of terror.

What does this background show us?

First, that seemingly poor people—with no visible means of support—can zip around the world with ease, someone obviously paying for these excursions.

Second, that the world of jihad has wide borders. In Ghezali’s case his recruitment, indoctrination, and training encompassed Sweden, Britain, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and possibly Portugal. Indeed, Ghezali was European-born, still another in the growing list of revolutionary Islamist terrorists who is the product of such an environment.

Third, that terrorism is not being carried out by desperate, repressed people but relatively coddled ones. Twice—or three times if one includes his detention in Pakistan—Ghezali was let go due to political pressure and misplaced mercy in his favor. Unless they choose to blow themselves up, terrorists seem to be able to live on the kindness of their enemies. One man’s terrorist is another man’s, or more likely Western governments’, poor misunderstood victim.…

TERROR GIVES THE LIE TO IRAN’S POSE AS RATIONAL ACTOR
Jonathan S. Tobin

Contentions, July 19, 2012

The terrorist attack on Israelis vacationing in Burgas, Bulgaria yesterday ought to change the nature of the conversation about Iran. If, as Israel is asserting, the bombing which took the lives of five Israelis and left many wounded, is the work of Iran’s ally Hezbollah, then those counseling further appeasement of the Islamist regime are going to have to explain why the West should believe more feckless diplomacy will restrain Tehran and its Lebanese auxiliaries from further outrages or persuade them they should give up their effort to get a nuclear weapon. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made it clear his country’s intelligence sees the long arm of Iran as being behind the slaughter.…

The trouble with the discussion about the effort to stop the Iranian nuclear program is that foreign policy realists and many diplomats treat that issue as a separate matter from Tehran’s history as a state sponsor of terror when the two are intimately related. The worldview of Iran’s leadership is one that sees it locked in a long struggle with the West and Israel with terror just one tool in its arsenal. The vicious anti-Semitism at the core of the political culture of the Islamist regime makes it clear Iran needs no excuses to justify its efforts to kill Jews.

The Burgas attack ought to serve as a wake-up call for the West as it finds itself locked in meaningless dead-end nuclear negotiations with Iran. International terrorism didn’t die with Osama bin Laden. Nor can we pretend that the Iran that many imagine can be trusted to refine uranium for peaceful atomic purposes is not the same government that employs terrorist mercenaries to kill Jews all throughout the world. The idea that the same nation that slaughters Jewish civilians is a rational actor is one that cannot be sustained.

TIMELINE: ATTACKS ON JEWISH TARGETS, ISRAELIS ABROAD
Reuters, July 19, 2012

September 5, 1972: The radical Palestinian terror group Black September infiltrates Israeli team quarters at the Munich Olympic Games and takes hostages. Two Israeli athletes die in the initial attack and nine hostages along with a West German policeman are killed during a subsequent shoot-out at the Munich airport.

September 19, 1972: A Black September letter bomb kills Ami Shehori, an attache at the Israeli embassy in London.

July 4, 1976: Palestinian and leftist West German terrorists hijack an Air France airliner in Europe and divert it to Entebbe, Uganda. Israeli commandos rescue 98 Israeli and Jewish hostages. Three hostages and the head of the commando unit, Yonatan Netanyahu, die in the operation.

December 31, 1980: A bomb blast hits the Jewish-owned Norfolk Hotel in Nairobi, killing 15 people and wounding more than 80.

June 3, 1982: Israel’s ambassador to Britain is wounded in an attack blamed on Abu Nidal’s Palestinian Fatah group.

December 27, 1985: Terrorists from Abu Nidal’s Fatah Revolutionary Council attack El Al counters at the Rome and Vienna airports simultaneously, killing 19 people.

September 6, 1986: Palestinian gunmen kill 22 worshippers in a raid on Istanbul’s Neve Shalom synagogue.

March 7, 1992: The Israeli embassy security chief in Ankara dies in a car bomb attack. Islamic Jihad claims responsibility.

March 17, 1992: A car bomb smashes into Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, killing 29 people. Islamic Jihad claims responsibility.

July 18, 1994: At least 96 people are killed when a bomb explodes at a Jewish community center in Buenos Aires.

July 27-28, 1994: A car bomb targets the Israeli embassy in London, injuring 14. Twelve hours later, another car bomb at a Jewish fundraising group’s offices in London injures five.

April 11, 2002: A truck explodes near the El Ghriba synagogue on the Tunisian island of Djerba, killing 14 Germans, five Tunisians and a Frenchman.

July 4, 2002: An Egyptian kills two at the El Al counter in Los Angeles airport.

November 28, 2002: Fifteen people are killed in car bomb attack on a hotel frequented by Israeli tourists in the Kenyan port of Mombasa. Simultaneously, two missiles miss an Israeli airliner taking off from the city.

November 15, 2003: Car bombs explode outside two synagogues in Istanbul, killing 24 people.

July 30, 2004: In the Uzbekistan capital, Tashkent, a suicide bomber strikes the Israeli embassy killing at least two people.

February 1, 2008: In Mauritania’s capital, Nouakchott, gunmen open fire on the Israeli embassy, injuring three bystanders including a French woman.

November 26-29, 2008: Coordinated bombing and shooting attacks by 10 gunmen, including on luxury hotels, kill 166 people in Mumbai. A Jewish center in Mumbai was among the locations targeted and at least five people were killed including a rabbi and his wife.

February 13, 2012: Bombers target staff at Israel’s embassies in India and Georgia, wounding four people. The bombers succeeded in New Delhi and a car exploded. However the bomb in Tbilisi, underneath a diplomat’s car, was found and defused.

February 14, 2012: Explosions in Thailand aim at Israeli targets cause no injuries. Four Iranian suspects are arrested.

March 19, 2012: A gunman opens fire at a crowd of parents and children outside a Jewish school in Toulouse, France, killing four.

July 18, 2012: Israel accuses Iran of carrying out a bomb attack that killed six people on a bus carrying Israeli tourists at a Bulgarian airport.

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