Agents of Hizbullah and Iran’s Revolutionary Guard have deployed special forces in Venezuela intended to kidnap Jewish businessmen and smuggle them to Lebanon, Israel Radio reported Thursday. An expert on counter-terrorism warned in an interview with The Los Angeles Times that Iranian-backed agents have managed to recruit collaborators among Venezuelan citizens living in the capital Caracas. The collaborators are supposed to observe traffic at the Caracas airport and around it in order to collect information on Jewish travelers there. Hizbullah has strengthened its grasp of Venezuela following the warm relationship that grew between Venezuela and Iran. Experts quoted by the Times warned that Venezuela might become a base out of which Hizbullah could carry out terror attacks.

Well, gentle reader, do not worry! They are only coming for dem Jooz. Those people, after all, are wealthy and they are known nuisances. Hugo Chávez, the Bolivarian Socialist, that malodorous piece of Devil’s excreta has deep ties with Hizbullah. Not only did he allow them to open a regional office in his capital, but his former ambassador to Lebanon collected funds for Nasrallah’s boys. Chávez friendship with every despot and America hater is well documented; he uses his country’s oil wealth not for the benefit of the poor - who put him in power - but to subvert other Latin American countries and put his own puppets in.

For the rest of this post go to: Freedom’s Cost

I was away this past week I barely had any internet access, the week however was filled with disgrace!

Israel, has shown a new facet to the world… This is how the German perceived it according to Spiegel OnLine (H/T: IMRA):

The center-left daily Suddeutsche Zeitung writes:

“The macabre Israeli-Lebanese deal, which saw living Lebanese prisoners being swapped for the bodies of Israeli soldiers, is a major success for the Shiite militia.. The prisoner exchange shows who really has the power in Lebanon and who can force archenemy Israel to make concessions: It is Hezbollah, it is Nasrallah. That elevates the radicals’ image in Lebanon, inthe Arab world and in the Muslim world.”

[…]The new and obvious reality is that Israel has in fact rewarded and strengthened Hizbullah. Some in Lebanon refuse to cheer for Samir Kuntar,, since they perceive him as nothing more than the ruthless murderer he truly is. There is nothing heroic about killing an unarmed father and bludgeoning his 4 year old daughter to death with a rifle butt, after she witnessed her father savagely assassinated. And yet, Kuntar returned mostly as a hero, as someone worthy of admiration rather than contempt. I do not blame Hizbullah on this as much as I blame Allmerde and his entourage.

For the rest of this post, check out: Freedom’s Cost

How this can surprise anyone, is beyond comprehension. Of course Israel’s enemies are celebrating; the Israelis released many terrorists, and in return got the bodies back of Israeli soldiers who had been killed by other terrorists. That’s not a victory for Hezbollah, Iran, Hamas, etc., and a major defeat for the Jewish nation-state. (more…)

The German newspaper the SPIEGEL reports that ‘a German intelligence agent has been brokering a prisoner exchange deal between Israel and Hezbollah on behalf of the United Nations. Now an official proposal is on the table, and Jerusalem is due to decide shortly whether to accept it. (more…)

Well, that’s what I’m guessing president Bush and his crew will be telling Israel. After all, negotiating with terrorists is appeasement, and Israel is doing just that. Not only are they in indirect discussions with Hezbollah, they are in fact negotiating concessions, in the form of released prisoners, with an group the United States considers is a terrorist group.

I expect President Bush to go to the Knesset and tell the Israeli government that they are appeasers, no better than those who sought to appease the Nazis that murdered so many of their families.

Unless the term appeaser is only one to be cynically used on domestic political opponents, and not subject to any form of accuracy, consistency, or integrity?

Nah, couldn’t be.

For the second day in a row, government troops and Hezbollah terrorists clashed with each other in Lebanon, especially in the country’s capital Beirut. The Shiite terrorist organization ‘accused’ the government of declaring war on it, which sadly probably is not correct. (more…)

Spencer Ackerman does a poor Persian:

Let’s say you’re Iran.

You look to your east and there are a bunch of U.S. troops. You look to your west and there are a bunch of U.S. troops. You send out peace feelers, but they’re rejected. Then you get pissed off and elect a Holocaust-denying asshole as your president. You get it through your head that the people who have encircled you and who for nearly 30 years have talked incessantly about overthrowing you (again) might have inadvertently given you a gift. What gift? The gift of thinking your best friends are actually their allies? Well, there’s that. But the real gift is tens of thousands of their troops that you can pay someone to attack. You might even try to kill U.S. troops at several steps removed — like the U.S. did the Soviets in Afghanistan not too long ago.

(more…)

For several years now, the West has tried to contain Iran. Iran, the country ruled by Muslim extremists dedicated to destroy Israel (more…)

Michael Young writes for The Daily Star:

We can thank the US speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, for having informed Syrian President Bashar Assad, from Beirut, that “the road to solving Lebanon’s problems passes through Damascus.” Now, of course, all we need to do is remind Pelosi that the spirit and letter of successive United Nations Security Council resolutions, as well as Saudi and Egyptian efforts in recent weeks, have been destined to ensure precisely the opposite: that Syria end its meddling in Lebanese affairs.

Pelosi embarked on a fool’s errand to Damascus this week, and among the issues she said she would raise with Assad - when she wasn’t on the Lady Hester Stanhope tour in the capital of imprisoned dissidents Aref Dalila, Michel Kilo, and Anwar Bunni - is “the role of Syria in supporting Hamas and Hizbullah.” What the speaker doesn’t seem to have realized is that if Syria is made an obligatory passage in American efforts to address the Lebanese crisis, then Hizbullah will only gain. Once Assad is re-anointed gatekeeper in Lebanon, he will have no incentive to concede anything, least of all to dilettantes like Pelosi, on an organization that would be Syria’s enforcer in Beirut if it could re-impose its hegemony over its smaller neighbor.

Michael’s conclusion:

erhaps Pelosi and other foreign officials will understand this simple equation one day, after again failing to persuade Assad to sell Hizbullah out. Unfortunately, foreign bigwigs come to town, their domestic calculations in hand; then they leave, and we’re left picking up the pieces.

And that’s really what this was all about, wasn’t it? Pelosi did what she did, not to help Lebanon, but to score points domestically. The sad reality of the situation is that Pelosi has made the situation worse by doing just about everything wrong.

She overreached tremendously.

More at Reason Magazine, Gateway Pundit and D.A. Ridgely.