RUTHFULLY YOURS

Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, a virtueless scrap of humanity, is dead. All good so far.

But how he died and who killed him have now become the story.

There are two possibilities about his death in Dubai: that he was killed in a pillow fight gone wrong; or that Mossad agents bumped him off in a daring, indeed thrillingly bold, assassination on enemy soil. Israel isn’t saying anything. That’s the second scenario confirmed then.

On the evening of January 19, four people entered the Palestinian’s room at the Al-Bustan Rotana Hotel using an electronic device that decoded Mabhouh’s pass.

The assassins ambushed their target, injected him with a paralysing sedative and then suffocated him using a pillow. It was all over in 10 minutes. Nothing in the room was disturbed. The killers left calmly, leaving the door locked – from the inside.

The agents – and another 23 colleagues who joined them as plotters, spotters and decoys – then headed for the airport, flying to Asia and Europe.

That’s a slick operation. You have to stand in awe at the audacity of the planning and the courage of the men – and one woman – who volunteered for it. Just 19 hours earlier none of them had even arrived in Dubai.

Al-Mabhouh had been gloating recently about how he killed two Israeli soldiers in 1989. He had a brain-squirming hatred for the Israelis who claim evidence that he spent his days smuggling rockets into Gaza. Ever since the Israelis retreated from their territory and left the locals to their own devices Gazans have thanked their neighbours with an almost ceaseless volley of deadly rockets.

Just days off turning 50, al-Mabhouh knew he was a worthy target for assassination. Usually, he travelled with a team of bodyguards, but they couldn’t get seats on his flight, which was said to be the first leg of a weapons-buying trip to Thailand.

To help secure the success of this well-thought-out killing, Mossad’s agents travelled on forged passports appearing to have been issued in Germany, France, Ireland, the UK and Australia.

Foreign ministers from these countries, including our own Stephen Smith, have been mildly critical of Israel, at least compared with the excitable Hamas spokesman who told Israel to “prepare to receive the hellfire of our anger”. What, and that’s new?

Our reaction was more subdued; forging Australian passports was not “the act of a friend”.

Yes it was.

We cancelled the screening in Parliament House of an Israeli film called Noodle.

Take that, Tel Aviv!

Then we sent a small team from the Australian Federal Police to investigate the passport issue.

Uh-oh. That’s asking for trouble. Yet to recover from the laugh-a-minute leadership of Mick Keelty, the AFP is capable of almost anything. Within hours of arriving in Tel Aviv, these Keystone clowns had screeched out of the underground car park beneath the Australian embassy there, hit a woman riding a bicycle and sped off.

The Mossad team also can be said to have done a hit and run, but I know who I’d want looking after my interests.

The woman they hit, Oshra Bar, 22, wants an apology from the AFP. Maybe that will come after they have worked up the courage to grovel to Dr Mohamed Haneef, the Brisbane doctor they falsely charged with providing assistance to terrorists, ruining his life.

If Australia’s security services had to defend Israel, surrounded as it is by Arabs who attack it regularly and who, with a few Persian nutters running Iran – all of them united under the Koran – now plan its nuclear destruction, Israelis would clog their country’s airports seeking a quick exit.

Even that brave people would know the game was up.

What could the agents of our Australian Secret Intelligence Service do in defence of the Middle East’s lone democracy – don monkey masks and take on Hamas?

That’s what they did during exercises at the Sheraton Hotel on Spring St. Disguised in “grotesque masks” they stormed the 10th floor, destroying property, panicking guests and assaulting the hotel manager. Taxpayers attended to the compensation bill, which ran to hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Imagine if they – we – had real enemies. Australia’s security services and federal police are a hopeless embarrassment and that would be a serious problem for us all if we had anything other than oceans for neighbours.

It was reported that a former ASIS agent said last week that forging passports was old hat – indeed as old as the espionage game itself. It’s probably fair to assume we have done the same – if your security agency has the words secret in its title, don’t expect to find out – but there is less need for it. Australian agents don’t need to travel the globe eliminating people who threaten our very existence.

In any case, I can picture now passports forged by ASIS. Two innocents from, say, Nunawading, have had their identity stolen, but the pictures are certainly not of them. Standing before the immigration desk at Ben-Gurion Airport are two men. The talkative one is in a blue jacket, red polka dot bow tie and red-and-white striped bucket hat on which is written Peters Ice Cream. “No, I’m Zig!” he insists.

Security in Israel is no joking matter. Except to the United Nations, which last year hosted a conference against racism unforgivably inviting the unpredictable Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak. He ranted about how the Holocaust never happened – he doesn’t want anything overshadowing the modern nuclear holocaust he plans.

IT’S bad enough that the UN cannot get international action to make a rogue state such as Iran adhere to its Non-Proliferation Treaty on nuclear weapons.

So, mostly alone but always threatened, Israel is forced to police its own future. Its defence must always be in its own hands.

That’s why, on a Sunday afternoon in June 1981, using US provided satellite pictures it sent in its American-made fighter jets to bomb and destroy Iraq’s Osirak nuclear facility just outside Baghdad.

The nuclear plant – being built using technology supplied by the West’s most unreliable “ally”, France – was near completion, but was to have been used only for the peaceful generation of power. Saddam Hussein had promised.

At the time, Israel’s critics condemned it for trying to be the region’s police, and pointed out that it had long been suspected that Israel itself was moving towards becoming a nuclear power. Golly, why would it be doing that?

Quietly, over the years, after having breathed a sigh of relief, most of the world came to understand what a favour that little country had performed for them.

These days attention has turned towards Iran and its development of a nuclear program. This, too, is to generate power. Then why hide it at terrific expense under the desert?

Gaza is an Iranian proxy state where that country’s hate for the West is played out in fights against Israel.

This is the War on Terror.

Iran is the terror. Its Gaza agents are the terrorists. We must kill them.

And next on the agenda is Iran’s nuclear plant.