Iran has convinced Syria to allow Hezbollah to open a “new front” against Israel in the Golan Heights, the London-based Arabic-language newspaper al-Hayat reported Wednesday.
The report comes a week after Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah vowed to respond to Jerusalem’s aggression with the help of Syria’s advanced “game-changing” weapons. The next stage, he warned during a public speech, would be opening up a front on the Golan Heights.
Tehran, seeking to prevent the fall of Syrian President Bashar Assad’s government, asked Damascus if Hezbollah could set up a new military front against Israel in the Golan.
“All Arabs and Muslims” are requested to join the fight against Israel, Tehran said, according to Israel Radio.Iran persuaded Syrian President Bashar Assad to allow Hezbollah to open a new front from which to attack Israel in the Golan Heights, Israel Radio reported Wednesday citing a report by the pan-Arab newspaper Al-Hayat.
According the report, an Iranian source told the newspaper that Tehran is determined to prevent the fall of Assad's regime in Damascus, because the Syrian president has been convinced to open the Golan to all Arabs and Muslim wanting to fight Israel.
The report follows similar claims last week that following alleged Israeli air strikes near Damascus, Syrian authorities considered allowing Palestinian armed groups to launch attacks against Israel across the Golan Heights border, as reported by Syrian daily Al Watan.
A number of mortar shells landed in the Golan Heights in the area of Mount Hermon on Wednesday morning, the IDF Spokesperson confirmed.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, only just back from China, was back overseas on Tuesday, meeting with President Vladimir Putin to ensure –- or more accurately to plead — that Russia refrain from sending Syria four S-300 batteries, a $900 million, long-range aerial defense system that, Israeli experts say, would change the calculus of Israeli and US involvement in Syria.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov struck a defiant tone in advance of the meeting. “Russia is not planning to sell,” he told reporters in Warsaw, without specifying which systems he was referring to. “Russia already sold them a long time ago. It has signed the contracts and is completing deliveries, in line with the agreed contracts, of equipment that is anti-aircraft technology.”
The S-300, which can intercept fighter jets and cruise missiles, “is the ultimate system,” said Uzi Rubin, the former head of missile defense at Israel’s Defense Ministry and a senior researcher at the Begin Sadat Center for Strategic Studies. “It covers enormous surfaces and is so potent that when the Cypriots bought the system the Turks threatened them with war because it endangered Turkish aircraft flying over Turkey.”
Nonetheless, Rubin said, it is the fact of Russia’s unstinting involvement on Bashar Assad’s behalf in Syria, more than the precise nature of that role, which dictates the course of events.
Al Quds al-Arabi newspaper claimed Tuesday that Assad’s army actually already possesses the S-300 system, but that it is under Russian control. This cuts to the heart of the matter: the extent of Russian-Syrian cooperation. More than the technological ability of each weapons system, the very fact of Russian involvement on the ground — in terms of technical support and strategic backing — is pivotal.
“The surface-to-air missiles are a small problem,” Rubin said, with varying degrees of severity. “The big problem is Russia itself.”
The super-active sunspot responsible for unleashing the three most powerful solar flares of 2013 within a 24-hour stretch this week is slowly rotating toward Earth and will likely be facing our planet by the weekend, experts say.
Active Region 1748, as the sunspot is known, unleashed three monster solar flares between Sunday and Monday (May 12 to 13). Every one of the solar storms registered as an X-class flare — the most powerful type — with each successive event stronger than the last, culminating in an X3.2 megablast Monday night.
These solar explosions did not affect Earth, since AR1748 was not facing our planet at the time. But the sunspot is now circling into view, so future
flares and any associated eruptions of super-hot solar plasma — called coronal mass ejections (CMEs) — could potentially target our planet, scientists say.Also see:
The IRS came after Billy Graham, too, his son charged Tuesday in a letter to President Barack Obama.
Franklin Graham, the president of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and the family’s international humanitarian organization Samaritan’s Purse, said that the IRS notified the organizations in September that it was conducting a “review” of their activities for tax year 2010.
With the IRS admitting it gave extra scrutiny to conservative political organizations, Graham says he now believes that the review was part of an Obama administration effort of “targeting and attempting to intimidate us.”
The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association urging of voters to back “candidates who base their decisions on biblical principles and support the nation of Israel” during last year’s presidential race was the reason why IRS agents visited the North Carolina offices of both Graham groups, the letter accuses.
“While these audits not only wasted taxpayer money, they wasted money contributed by donors for ministry purposes as we had to spend precious resources servicing the IRS agents in our offices,” Graham wrote in the letter, which was shared with POLITICO. “I believe that someone in the administration was targeting and attempting to intimidate us. This is morally wrong and unethical – indeed some would call it ‘un-American.”
Graham said that “in light” of the IRS admission that it targeted tea party groups for added scrutiny, “I do not believe that the IRS audit of our two organizations last year is a coincidence – or justifiable.”
Take a look at this first paragraph and let it sink in for a few minutes:
A federal judge has issued a startling ruling that suppressing Christian speech is allowed when Muslims threaten violence because they’re upset over the message.
I believe this is worth repeating and contemplating some more...Maybe a different color will allow this to sink into our collective grey matter:
A federal judge has issued a startling ruling that suppressing Christian speech is allowed when Muslims threaten violence because they’re upset over the message.
Wow.
The ruling from Judge Patrick J. Duggan in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan granted Wayne County’s motion for summary judgment of a lawsuit brought by a team of Christians who were badgered, bullied and targeted with garbage thrown by Muslims who disliked their message at last year’s Arab Fest in Dearborn, Mich.
In his ruling, Duggan said, “The court finds that the actual demonstration of violence here provided the requisite justification for [the Wayne County sheriffs'] intervention, even if the officials acted as they did because of the effect the speech had on the crowd.”
The case had been filed by the AFLC after several Christian evangelists were violently assaulted by a hostile Muslim mob while preaching at the festival last year in Dearborn, which has the largest concentration of Muslims in the United States.
The lawsuit, which will be appealed to a higher court, alleged the county, sheriff and deputies refused to protect the Christians from the attack, and they threatened to arrest the Christians for disorderly conduct if they did not halt their speech activity and immediately leave the festival area.
Robert Muise, AFLC co-founder and senior counsel, said, “The First Amendment was dealt a severe blow today as a result of this ruling. Indeed, this ruling effectively empowers Muslims to silence Christian speech that they deem offensive by engaging in violence. And pursuant to this ruling, the Christian speakers are now subject to arrest for engaging in disorderly conduct on account of the Muslim hecklers’ violent response to their speech. In short, this ruling turns the First Amendment on its head.”
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