RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/authors/shoshana-bryen/

Some of us have snow days; Israeli children have “rocket days” – if you need an explanation, you haven’t been paying attention. Children in southern Israel had a rocket day Monday (Feb.24th), which was fortunate because a Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) rocket slammed into a kindergarten playground. It was only one of dozens launched from the Gaza Strip this week.

The fact that the rockets are PIJ, not Hamas, is, in fact, an important point.

While Hamas’s main enemy is the Palestinian Authority (PA), which it ousted from Gaza in a bloody and brutal war in 2007, the State of Israel provides a 20-mile wide physical barrier between the two. But PIJ is in Gaza and it has become increasingly unhappy with what it perceives to be Hamas’s “softness.” In December, the Israeli Security Cabinet was considering a long-term truce with Hamas. Israel-Hamas Truce talks, brokered by Egypt, have been a staple rumor for years, but this one gained traction in 2020 after PIJ commander Baha Abu al-Ata was assassinated.

Israel holds Hamas responsible for whatever happens in Gaza – which is appropriate – but it is also true that Hamas has never actually governed Gaza; it doesn’t know how and doesn’t want to. The goal for Hamas was to build an asymmetric force to challenge Israel. It tried tunneling under the border fence, rioting at the fence, shooting hundreds of rockets over the fence at Israel. With kites – and an “incendiary falcon” – in 2018, Hamas burned over 7,400 acres of land, an area equal to half of Manhattan. Tire burning produced an ecological catastrophe because tires have carcinogens that are released when they burn. (It isn’t clear whether Hamas considered the health effects on the Palestinian civilians who breathe the same air as Israeli civilians.) The kite fires burned cultivated fields and nature preserves and killed thousands of animals.

https://www.nysun.com/foreign/argentina-reversing-progress-on-probe-of-big/91029/

Justice? Not as far Argentina’s new government is concerned. Buenos Aires is eager to walk back any progress made in investigations into the 1994 bombing of a Jewish center in Buenos Aires — the worst terror act in the country’s history — or the suspicious death of the man who was set to break the case open.

Previous probes yielded ample evidence that Iran was behind the attack on the Asociación Mutual Israelita Argentina, which killed 85 people, as well as an earlier terrorist act, the 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, when 29 civilians perished. The new Argentinian government would rather ignore it all.

And no wonder. Since December, Kristina Kirchner is Argentina’s vice president, a demotion for the woman who was president between 2007 and 2015. At that time, after the Interpol already issued red notices for the arrests of Iranian officials and Hezbollah operatives, Mrs. Kirchner was set to form a joint investigative commission with Tehran.

Before he died, Kirchner’s foreign minister, Hector Timerman, who sealed struck in 2013 a Memorandum of Understanding with Tehran, scoffed once when I told him the proposed joint investigation sounded as credible as O.J. Simpson’s vow to find the “real killers.” Meanwhile the Interpol’s red notices were put on ice while Argentina sought to widen its trade with Iran.

In 2015 an investigator, Alberto Nisman, accused Mrs. Kirchner of scheming with the Iranians to allow the Hezbollah and Iranian operatives to escape justice for their alleged role in the AMIA bombing. The night before Nisman was scheduled to present detailed evidence of his findings to Argentina’s congress, he was found dead in his apartment’s bathroom with a single gunshot to the head.

Mrs. Kirchner and her supporters in the press quickly spread the notion that Nisman committed suicide — a strange act for a man about to make public a case marking the culmination of his life’s work. Consequent investigations completely demolished the suicide theory.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/02/iran-election-low-turnout-shows-regimes-weakening-state/

The regime’s continued rogue behavior has left the country increasingly isolated.

What if you held a national election and no one turned out? That’s the situation currently confronting Iranian officials, who are grappling with the aftermath of a truly disastrous outcome in last week’s parliamentary elections.

According to the official Fars News Agency, just 42 percent of Iranians voted in the country’s latest parliamentary elections, which took place on Friday. That’s the lowest percentage ever recorded in the 41-year history of the Islamic Republic. (By way of comparison: The turnout for Iran’s last parliamentary elections, in 2016, was approximately 60 percent.) Yet there’s good reason to believe that even those official numbers are inflated, and perhaps significantly so. Outside reports, relying on internal Iranian media sources, indicate that actual voting tallies fell far below the official 42 percent figure, forcing the regime to keep polling stations open longer than planned to scrape together even a minimum number of legitimate votes.

If you’ve been paying attention to events in Iran, that lackluster showing shouldn’t come as much of a surprise. Over the past two years, persistent protests in practically every major Iranian city — and at virtually every stratum of Iranian society — have showcased a population that has become profoundly disaffected with the country’s clerical regime. These protests have flared anew in recent weeks, following the Iranian government’s accidental January 8 downing of a Ukrainian airliner amid heightened tensions with the United States. That event helped to convince many Iranians that their government is dangerously incompetent, and a real hazard to their own safety.

The regime in Tehran responded in predictable fashion: by trying to tighten its hold on political power. Ahead of Friday’s parliamentary vote, Iran’s government disqualified more than 7,000 applicants from running. That in and of itself is hardly new; Iran’s religious institutions have long been used to weed out politicians deemed insufficiently loyal to the country’s governing religious ideology. But this time, the ranks of those disqualified included dozens of parliamentarians who had previously passed clerical muster and were now standing for reelection. Apparently, Iran’s ayatollahs are now unable to tolerate even a semblance of pluralism within the country’s secular institutions.