Gaza Rocket Attack: After Gaza militants fired a Qassam rocket into the western Negev on Thursday, killing a Thai foreign worke, Israel’s response was firm. Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon said, “With or without Goldstone [Report on the Gaza War], Israel will defend its citizens. Today we see how absurd the Goldstone report was.”
According to the Israeli Defense Forces, more than 100 rockets have been fired from Gaza into Israel since Operation Cast Lead ended in January 2009. Although Hamas did not take the responsibility, Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai declared the Palestianian organisation responsible. Deputy Premier Silvan Shalon vowed that “the Israeli response will be appropriate. It will be strong,” adding, “This is a crossing of the red line, which Israel cannot accept.”
The killing came an hour after the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, Catherine Ashton, stepped into the Gaza Strip. She said:
2150 GMT: A Final Note. We’ll know more tomorrow, after Iranian state media kicks into high gear, but the Ahmadinejad statement on the nuclear talks — which had effectively gone into the freezer — could be big. All of a sudden, the move of Iran’s uranium stock outside the country is A-OK: “If we allow them to take it, there is no problem. We sign a contract to give 3.5 percent enriched uranium and receive 20 percent enriched one after four or five months.”
But — and watch this, because it will probably be missed by Western media more concerned with the West-Iran dynamic — Ahmadinejad may have re-opened a fight with Iran’s “conservatives” over his nuclear strategy. As the Associated Press notes, “He dismissed concerns by what he called ‘colleagues’ that the West would not return the uranium.”
2135 GMT: Hamlet and 22 Bahman. Let’s close tonight on a high literary note.
Rah-e-Sabz, unsurprisingly, is jabbing away at the Government. For example, it is claiming that the Revolutionary Court has stepped back in its latest bulletin by not connecting the two executions last week to the post-election demonstrations. However, its cheekiest story is a summary of Seyed Hassan Khomeini’s supposed comments as he cold-shouldered President Ahmadinejad yesterday: “To be or not to be a protester, that is the question.” Read the rest of this entry »
Gary Sick has offered the following reading of latest US policy, with private manoeuvres and public “spin”, on Iran’s nuclear programme and sanctions.
My own reaction is that this is “too clever by half”, not on the part of the author but as attributed to Washington. As I wrote Sick, “Could it be that there there are two factions still battling within the Administraton? One faction, probably coming out of the State Department, is not as keen on aggressive sanctions. Linked to this is a wish to move the debate to the human rights rather than nuclear focus. The other faction, probably in the National Security Council and Department of Defense, is keener on a sanctions-first, nuclear-first focus. So they use New York Times as the ventriloquist’s dummy for their line. I’m not sure Obama is a central player in this battle.”
Sick’s concise response: “One of the great benefits of strategic leaking is that it conceals the real intentions of the leakers, thereby leaving interpretation up to the observer.”
Pretend for a moment that you are the president of the United States and you have gotten yourself into a bit of a hole with your Iran policy.
First you offered to negotiate with Iran over nuclear (and potentially other) issues without the Bush preconditions. But there were powerful political forces that felt this was an example of your inexperience and even appeasement tendencies. So you unwisely accepted a six month deadline for the negotiations to show that you meant business. You tried to soften that by saying you would take another look at the issue at the end of the year, but everyone ignored that and let you know that January 1 was the drop-dead date to solve all the negotiating problems with Iran. Read the rest of this entry »
UPDATE 1320 GMT: HomyLafayette offers an important correction on the text used by the “Iranian Cyber Army” (see 0945 GMT): “The red text on the green flag in fact reads, ‘O Hossein, peace be upon him,’ referring to Imam Hossein, a key figure in Islam and the 3rd Imam of Shiites.” It is Hossein’s death that is commemorated in the month of Moharram that starts today.
UPDATE 1010 GMT: Twitter has posted, “Twitter’s DNS [Domain Name System] records were temporarily compromised but have now been fixed. We are looking into the underlying cause and will update with more information soon.”
“Above the flag, in Arabic, read: ‘Hezbollah is victorious.’ On the flag, in red Arabic writing: ‘Yassin’ (an Arabic name written in bold) then in smaller Arabic print ‘the feast of peace’. Below the flag was more written in Farsi.”
I woke this morning to find that Twitter was running extremely slowly and sometimes grinding to a halt. Indeed, since 1200 GMT yesterday there have been serious slow-downs in delivery of messages.
Service is now picking up, but the hot story is that Twitter was hacked yesterday by the “Iranian Cyber Army” with this message:
THIS SITE HAS BEEN HACKED BY IRANIAN CYBER ARMY
iRANiAN.CYBER.ARMY@GMAIL.COM
U.S.A. Think They Controlling And Managing Internet By Their Access, But THey Don’t, We Control And Manage Internet By Our Power, So Do Not Try To Stimulation Iranian Peoples To….
NOW WHICH COUNTRY IN EMBARGO LIST? IRAN? USA?
WE PUSH THEM IN EMBARGO LIST
Take Care.
Yet, in this apparent victory for Iranian cyber-warfare, there lies I think a greater admission of defeat. If Twitter has not been that important in the challenge to the regime’s legitimacy since the Presidential election of June, why try to knock it out — raising the ire of millions of users who so far have had little interest in the events in Iran — at the start of Moharram? That seems more a confession of worry than an assertion of strength. Read the rest of this entry »
In an interview with the Arabic service of the BBC in Arabic, Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas accused Israel of conducting secret talks with Hamas, allegedly on the issue of a Palestinian state with temporary borders. Abbas also repeated that Jerusalem wasn’t truly interested in peace and added that “Washington isn’t pushing Israel enough to advance the peace process”.
Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum’s responsded, “The things that Abu Mazen [Abbas] is talking about never happened. We don’t negotiate with the enemy.” Barhoum accused Abbas of “putting his personal political failure on Hamas.”
The situation in the Middle East is very difficult, and I’ve said repeatedly and I’ll say again, Israel’s security is a vital national interest to the United States, and we will make sure they are secure.
I think that additional settlement building does not contribute to Israel’s security. I think it makes it harder for them to make peace with their neighbors. I think it embitters the Palestinians in a way that could end up being very dangerous.
1930 GMT: Mir Hossein Mousavi and his wife, Zahra Rahnavard, have visited the family of detainee Feizollah Arabsorkhe and claimed “investigators have been challenged by their daily conversations and dialogues with the children of the Revolution”.
Feizollah Arabsorkhi is a leading member of the reformist Mojahedin of the Islamic Revolution and has been in prison since June.
Mr. Mousavi insisted that political activists and youth in the post-election protests are not “sabotaging or destroying”: “If the media were free and people were allowed to have their say, we would not have fallen to this state.”
1915 GMT: Back from a break to find a couple of stories on a relatively quiet day, as various forces prepare for 13 Aban.
Journalist Fariba Pajooh has ended her hunger strike, begun on 26 October, because of serious health problems. Pajooh was arrested on 22 August and has been detained in Tehran’s Evin Prison.
Iranian authorities have barred Emaddedin Baghi from leaving the country to collect the Martin Ennals Award for Human Rights Defenders. Baghi is a prominent opponent of the death penalty in Iran and founder of the Society for the Defense of Prisoners’ Rights.
1525 GMT: The Facebook site associated with Mir Hossein Mousavi has published an English translation of the account of Mehdi Karroubi’s meeting this weekend with the student organisation Daftar-Tahkim-Vahdat. Beyond his claim that votes were allocated in advance of the Presidential election on 12 June, Karroubi’s speech was a rallying call: Read the rest of this entry »
1705 GMT: Establishment Battles Resume? Parleman News is claiming that supporters of President Ahmadinejad have tried — and failed — to unseat Speaker of Parliament Ali Larijani as the head of the Principlist majority group. If true, this could be a sign that the temporary reconciliation of conservative and principlist factions, prominent at the start of September with the approval of the Ahmadinejad Cabinet, may be breaking down.
And that in turn raises the question: is this split being fostered by the imminence of a National Unity Plan which may seek to marginalise Ahmadinejad?
1640 GMT: We think Hashemi Rafsanjani’s statement, which we noted here earlier, is important enough to warrant a separate entry.
1625 GMT: The Unity Gesture? EA’s Mr Smith predicted that this step would occur in the Supreme Leader’s speech at the end of Ramadan on 20 September. Looks like he was only two weeks off: “Iran is to release on bail around 20 people accused of post-election violence, including top reformists and an Iranian-American scholar.”
According to the Islamic Republic News Agency, citing a source inside Iran’s judiciary, those who may be freed include former Vice President Mohammed Ali Abtahi, journalist Mohammad Atrianfar, reformist leaders Shahab Tabatabaei, Saeed Shariati and Abdollah Momeni, and Iranian-American academic Kian Tajbakhsh.
1430 GMT: Pointless Analysis of Day. A Jeffrey Kuhner, the declared President of the “Edmund Burke Institute”, is allowed to take up space in The Washington Times with this: “War with Iran is now inevitable. The only question is: Will it happen sooner or later?”
1240 GMT: Good Cop, Bad Cop. Speaker of Parliament Ali Larijani has provided the critical counterpoint to the positive signals from this morning’s briefing by IAEA head Mohammad El-Baradei (0905-0920 GMT):
The [IAEA] is an international authority which should supervise all nuclear activities of states, but the agency’s records indicate that it was not successful in this regard for political reasons. The agency acted successfully with regard to nuclear activities in certain places like Japan, but it bowed [to pressure] where it faced political barriers and proved unsuccessful.
The head of Iran’s nuclear programme, Ali Akhbar Salehi, sounded a different tune after his press conference with El Baradei. Confirming the late October inspection date for the second enrichment plant and discusions on “third-party enrichment”, he said, “As far as safeguards are concerned, Iran’s nuclear issue has been fully resolved.”
1200 GMT: Report that two members of the reformist student group Daftar-Tahkim-Vahdat (Unity Consolidation Bureau) are still in Evin Prison, with 16 released yesterday. Original reports were that there were 15 detainees, and all were freed.
0920 GMT: El Baradei calls for Iran to rejoin the Subsidiary Protocol (Code 3.1) of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which provides a stricter framework for inspection and monitoring. Iran left the Protocol in 2007 after a dispute with the IAEA over access to information on military programmes as well as the nuclear facilities.
Gaza Rocket Attack: After Gaza militants fired a Qassam rocket into the western Negev on Thursday, killing a Thai foreign worke, Israel’s response was firm. Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon said, “With or without Goldstone [Report on the Gaza War], Israel will defend its citizens. Today we see how absurd the Goldstone report was.”
Gary Sick has offered 
UPDATE 1320 GMT: HomyLafayette offers an important correction on the text used by the “Iranian Cyber Army” (see 0945 GMT): “The red text on the green flag in fact reads, ‘O Hossein, peace be upon him,’ referring to Imam Hossein, a key figure in Islam and the 3rd Imam of Shiites.” It is Hossein’s death that is commemorated in the month of Moharram that starts today.
In an interview with the Arabic service of the BBC in Arabic, 
2125 GMT: More University Protests. In addition to today’s demonstration and hunger strike at Sharif University (
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