Where Providing Water Is a Crime

EVELYN GORDON    JAN. 29, 2016 

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/foreign-policy/middle-east/israel/rawabi-palestine-providing-water-crime/

How do you build a state for people who don’t want it built? That’s the obvious question that emerges from the latest chapter in the ongoing saga of Rawabi, the first new Palestinian city. It’s a flagship project that international diplomats routinely laud as a model of Palestinian state-building, but it has won no such praise from fellow Palestinians. Instead, the very people it was meant to benefit are now accusing Rawabi’s founder of collaboration with the enemy for having committed such horrendous crimes – this is not a joke – as providing residents with electricity and running water.

Rawabi was founded with the goal of providing decent, affordable housing for middle-class Palestinians – theoretically a goal that should be welcomed by the Palestinian Authority and its residents, who routinely complain to the international community about how wretched their situation is. From the start, however, the PA did its best to undermine the project; despite repeated promises of support, it refused to provide even the basic infrastructure that most governments routinely provide to new residential developments. Thus as JTA reported last week, Rawabi’s water and sewage system, streets, schools and medical clinic were all financed, like the houses themselves, by entrepreneur Bashar Masri and the Qatari government.

The PA even tried to prevent Rawabi from obtaining running water, by refusing, for five long years, to convene the joint Israeli-Palestinian water committee that’s supposed to approve all new water projects. Rawabi got its water only when Israel finally lost patience and approved its connection to water mains unilaterally.

Despite this obstructionism, Masri persisted, and Rawabi finally opened its doors to new residents in August. But since then, only a trickle of people have moved in, even though Masri claims Rawabi has lower prices and better amenities than nearby Ramallah. Of the 637 apartments that are ready (out of a planned total of over 6,000), only 140 have been occupied, he told JTA.

Partly, this is due to the security situation, Masri said: The wave of Palestinian stabbing attacks against Israelis that began in October has caused an economic downturn in the PA, so people are reluctant to take out loans to buy an apartment.

But as JTA noted, another deterrent is the collaboration accusations being hurled at Masri and Rawabi by fellow Palestinians:

**The Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions National Committee has accused Masri of “normalization with Israel that helps it whitewash its ongoing occupation, colonization and apartheid against the Palestinian people.” Wasel Abu Yousef, a senior Palestinian official, told Al-Monitor that “all Palestinian factions” should be boycotting Israel, “including Rawabi.”  **

To be clear, Masri isn’t being accused of cooperating with the settlements; in fact, he demanded that every company involved in building Rawabi sign a contract promising not to use any settlement products. What he stands accused of is working with Israeli officials to obtain staples that most other Palestinians also get from Israel, like electricity, water and cement. As Masri pointed out, “Eighty-five percent of the cement in all of Palestine — in all of the West Bank and Gaza — is coming from Israel. In the West Bank, all of our electricity is from Israel.”

But according to the “anti-normalization” activists, it’s better for Palestinians to do without new houses, electricity and running water than to commit the crime of talking with an Israeli.

Nor is Rawabi exceptional; the “anti-normalization” activists are equally opposed to any other effort to build their state by improving Palestinian life. In 2013, for instance, these activists forced two Israeli Arab businessmen to cancel plans to open a branch of an Israeli clothing store in Ramallah. The store would have provided jobs for 150 people, but who needs jobs? In 2012, UNICEF was forced to scrap a plan to build a desalination plant in Gaza – a territory where 90 to 95 percent of the water is deemed polluted – because both the Hamas government and civil-society groups objected to its decision to invite bids from a nearby world leader in desalination technology, aka the Zionist entity. Four years later, Gaza still has no desalination plant, and its residents still drink polluted water.

Over the 21 years of its existence, the PA has been the world’s largest per capita recipient of foreign aid. But it hasn’t built a single hospital or university or rehoused a single resident of the refugee camps located in PA territory; it would rather pay salaries to terrorists and finance campaigns against Israel in international organizations. And now, not content with merely failing to build Palestine itself, it’s even trying to prevent private entrepreneurs from doing so.

Most of the Western world seems desperately eager to create a Palestinian state. But a state isn’t just a flag and a name on a map; it has to be built on the ground as well. And as the experience of Iraq and Afghanistan demonstrated, no amount of outside effort can build a functioning state if a critical mass of local residents isn’t willing to cooperate.

Thus, as long as many Palestinians view ostracizing Israel as higher priority than providing their own people with basic necessities such as electricity and running water, the West’s dream of a Palestinian state will remain a pipe dream. You can’t build a state for people who would rather tear down the neighboring one than build up their own.[

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach speech{ video} before  the Oxford Union 

“Hamas is a genocidal organization that proudly touts its charter calling on the annihilation of Jews utterly unconnected to any conflict. It seeks the murder of all Jews, including those sitting in the Oxford Union chamber. It aids and abets honor killings of Palestinian women, shoots gay Palestinians in the head on false chargers of collaboration, machine-guns all Palestinian protesters who dare to defy its rule, violently punishes any form of criticism, engages in daily forms of deadly incitement against Jews, celebrates when Westerners, including in Britain, are blown up by bombs, ended any vestige of democratic rule once it was elected, and builds its military installations under hospitals and nurseries so that the infirm and the vulnerable can serve as human shields to its cowardly terrorists. Israel has tried since its creation to make peace with Arab states and has endangered its security with repeated territorial concessions that were met with nothing but terror attacks. Arabs in Israel live with greater freedoms and human rights than any Muslim country on earth. There is no excuse for terror. Jews even under the horrors of Hitler didn’t turn to blowing up German children. The justifications for terrorism that were being offered were an affront and an abomination to Islam which, just like Judaism, abides by the commandment not to murder.”

http://www.israelvideonetwork.com/rabbi-shmuley-boteach-exploded-on-the-oxford-union-in-this-epic-speech/?omhide=true&utm_source=MadMimi&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Rabbi+Shmuley+Boteach+exploded+on+the+Oxford+Union+in+this+epic+speech&utm_campaign=20160128_m129521321_1%2F28+Today%27s+Israel+Connection%3A+Rabbi+Shmuley+Boteach+exploded+on+the+Oxford+Union+in+this+epic+speech&utm_term=shmuley-boteach-hamas-email_png_3F1453969882

ZOA Condemns EU, PA and Obama Administration Moves To Declare “Settlements” Illegal

NEW YORK, January 26, 2016 — Morton A. Klein,, president of The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) released the following statement:

The European Union (EU) (with the Obama administration’s support) and the Palestinian Authority (PA) are once again waging perverse diplomatic warfare to attempt to deny the fact that Israel has the strongest legal right to areas over the 1949 Armistice lines, including the Jewish towns and communities in Judea/Samaria (misleadingly so-called “settlements”), the eastern portion of Jerusalem (the old city, also called the City of David after the Jewish King David who ruled there), and the Golan Heights.

Specifically:

(1) On January 18, 2016, the European Union passed a resolution declaring legal Israeli “settlements” to be illegal and an “obstacle to peace,” and declaring that EU agreements with Israel will no longer apply over the 1949 Armistice lines (the non-binding lines marking where the fighting stopped after seven Arab nations invaded Israel in 1948-1949);

(2) On January 20, 2016, the Obama administration backed the EU’s anti-Israel resolution; and

(3) the Palestinian Authority (PA) is reportedly attempting to pass a UN resolution declaring legal Israeli “settlements” to be illegal and an “obstacle to peace.”   The PA’s planned anti-Israel, anti-Semitic proposed UN resolution is expected to also demand that the (600,000) Jews living over the 1949 Armistice lines must removed from their homes, communities, jobs and synagogues.  In other words, the PA seeks to ethnically cleanse Jews from the lands to which the Jewish people have the strongest legal right (as well as the strongest historical and religious rights).

The ZOA strongly urges the Obama administration to veto and strenuously oppose the PA’s planned anti-Israel UN resolution.  Throughout the past seven years, the Obama administration has repeatedly attempted to ameliorate its anti-Israel actions by asserting that only a solution negotiated by the PA and Israel is appropriate.   The PA’s unilateral UN resolution would be the death knell of any possibility of a negotiated solution.  Such an anti-Israel UN resolution would enable the PA to avoid sitting down and negotiating with Israel, and avoid making a final peace.  Instead, the PA would take whatever it can obtain from the Obama administration and the UN, and continue demanding the destruction of all of Israel.  A UN resolution would also reward the PA for inciting the ongoing wave of Palestinian Arab knife, car ramming and shooting attacks that have murdered 29 and wounded 280 innocent Israelis in the past 4 months – and encourage the PA to increase these attacks.

Israel has the strongest legal right to Judea/Samara/Jerusalem/the Golan:

Under the internationally binding San Remo agreements, League of Nations’ decisions, British Mandate and the UN Charter [Article 80], Israel (known as “Palestine” when those legal agreements were signed and enacted) is the Jewish national home and belongs to the Jewish people.  Palestine at the time also included all of Jordan.  In 1920-1923, Britain unlawfully carved out and gave Jordan 78% of the territory designated for the Jewish people.   Jordan is a majority Palestinian Arab state.

The Jewish people were the only people who ever had an independent sovereign state or kingdom in Israel.  No independent Arab or Palestinian state ever existed in Palestine, and no Arab capital ever existed in Jerusalem, even after the Muslim invasions in the seventh century.

Jewish sovereignty lasted over 400 years – longer than the existence of the United States – through King Saul’s unification of Jewish tribes who had already lived in the land of Israel for hundreds of years, King David’s establishment of Jerusalem as the capital in 1000 BCE, King Solomon’s building of the First Temple and consolidation of government functions, and King Solomon’s son’s division of the kingdom into two parts, until the Babylonian conquest of Judea in 586 BCE.

The very name “Judea” -a term which was commonly used by the international community throughout the centuries – is derived from the same root as the word “Jew,” testifying to the deep Jewish connection to the land.  The Jewish people also enjoyed brief periods of sovereignty during the next 700 years, until the Roman drove out many – but not all of the Jews in 135 CE after the Bar Kochba revolt and renamed Judea “Syria Palestina” in attempt to de-Judaize Israel.   Josephus estimated the Jewish population at nearly 7 million in 70 CE.  This was reduced to about 3 million by 135 CE.

Throughout the next 1900 years, there was also always a Jewish presence in Israel – despite persecutions and expulsions and foreign conquerors – none of whom ever established an independent state in Israel.  The Mishnah (200 CE) and Jerusalem Talmud were compiled (200 to 500 CE) in Israel.  In 614, there was another Jewish revolt, which enabled Jews to rule Jerusalem for 3 years – well before the various Moslem invasions began in 632.  The Moslems ruled from afar – from Cairo, or Turkey or Damascus or Baghdad – and never established an independent sovereign kingdom or state in Israel/Palestina.   Jews helped Arabs defend Jerusalem from the Crusaders.  The famous Jewish poet Yehuda Halevi, died in Jerusalem in 1141.  The famous Rambam Nachmanides died in Israel in 1270.

Israel continued to be central to Jews in the diaspora throughout all this time too.   Jews pray towards Jerusalem every day and Shabbat – while Muslims pray towards Mecca.  Jerusalem is part of Jewish wedding ceremonies, and Jewish comfort to mourners.  Jerusalem is mentioned almost 700 times in the Bible – and is never mentioned in the Koran.

By the late 1700s to mid-1800s, most of Israel was a wasteland, as a result of repeated conquests, plunder and Bedouin raids.  Mark Twain and others wrote about the desolation.  In 1785, the total population of Palestine was about 50,000 to 100,000.

Numerous plans were suggested by writers, politicians including Napolean and Egyptian ruler Mehmet Ali and others for large-scale Jewish restoration to Palestine in the 150 years prior to Israel’s rebirth – and no one ever suggested that the Holy Land should not be returned to the Jews because it belonged to someone else.

Napolean launched a campaign in 1799 to conquer Palestine, with a promise to restore it to the Jews.   Mehmet Ali, who ruled Palestine from Egypt from 1831-1840, agreed to Moses Montefiore’s plan for large-scale Jewish regeneration in Palestine – but Turkey regained control prior in the interim.   The Turks were also interested in Jewish restoration plans.

Jews were the majority group in Jerusalem from the 1840s onwards.

Jewish immigration and restoration of the land also brought Arabs into the area, for the jobs created by Jewish development.  The Arabs emigrated into Israel from Egypt, North Africa, Algeria, Syria, etc.; the Arabs are not an “indigenous” people to Judea/Samaria/eastern Jerusalem.  Common “Palestinian” Arab names such as Mughrabi and al Masri make it obvious that they hailed from outside Israel.

During World War I, the Jewish legion and Jewish intelligence operations played a major role in helping Britain free Palestine from Turkish rule – while the Arab population did virtually nothing.  T.E. Lawrence wrote that “there is no national feeling” among the Arabs.

In 1919, Emir Faisal, who was briefly king of Syria, and then became king of Iraq, and Chaim Weitzman signed a treaty outlining friendly relations between Syria and a Jewish Palestine that extended to the Litani River (now part of Lebanon), the territory east of the Jordan, and part of the Sinai.

In 1917, the Balfour declaration promised the Jewish people a homeland in Palestine – which then also included the area that is now Jordan.  This was enshrined in the legally binding San Remo agreements.  Britain used its promise to the Jewish people to obtain the British mandate over Palestine.  League of Nations documents made the mandate a sacred trust on behalf of the Jewish people.  However, in 1920 to 1923, the British carved out 78% of the Palestine mandate and gave it to Jordan – an immense betrayal of the Jewish people’s rights.  (A betrayal which the recent EU resolution seeks to make even worse.)

In November 1947 the UN General Assembly adopted the United Nations committee’s recommendation to divide the Land of Israel west of the Jordan river into two states: one Arab and one Jewish.   But this plan was never implemented, and therefore was not binding under international law, because the Arab states all rejected the 1947 “partition plan” and instead started a war to prevent the plan’s implementation and destroy the fledgling Jewish state.

When Israel declared its statehood in 1948, the UN and numerous nations recognized Israel.  Seven Arab nations responded by invading the Jewish State, with the declared intention of murdering all the Jews there.

After the 1948-1949 war, Egypt occupied Gaza, and Jordan illegally occupied Judea/Samaria and eastern Jerusalem.  The Jews living in these areas were killed or were expelled.  Jordan destroyed 58 synagogues in eastern Jerusalem, and used the tombstones from the 3,000-year-old Jewish Mount of Olives cemetery to line latrines and pave roads.   Jordan denied Jews access to the holiest Jewish religious sites, including the Kotel (Western wall of the Temple) – thereby violating Article VIII of the Israel-Jordan Armistice Agreement, which called for “free access to the Holy Places and cultural institutions and use of the cemetery on the Mount of Olives.”

The Arab states also demanded that the armistice agreements signed in 1949 needed to state that the cease-fire line (the Armistice Demarcation Lines, also referred to as the “1949 Armistice lines” or “green line”) should not be construed in any way as a political or territorial border.  In accordance with the Arab states’ demand, the armistice agreements reiterated that the armistice lines were not permanent boundary lines:  The parties recognized that the armistice agreement “shall not in any way prejudice the rights, claims and positions of either Party” (Israel-Jordan Armistice Agreement (April 3, 1949), Article II, para. 2); and the parties agreed that the Armistice Demarcation Lines defined in the agreement were “without prejudice to future territorial settlements or boundary lines or to claims of either Party relating thereto.” (Id., Article VI, para. 9)

Thus the 1949 Armistice lines are not and have never been an internationally recognized border – and do not limit Israel’s rights.   The recent EU resolution, and expected PA UN resolution thus have no legal grounds to transform the 1949 Armistice lines into a border.  There is no legal basis for claiming that Jewish communities beyond the 1949 Armistice lines are “illegal.”

Post-1949 developments further reveal the legal absurdity of the EU’s resolution.

In April 1950, Jordan illegally occupied and annexed Judea/Samaria (the “West Bank”).  Jordan’s annexation was not accepted on any legal basis, and virtually all countries (including most Arab states) refused to recognize Jordan’s illegal annexation.   Jordan continued its illegal occupation of Judea/Samaria and eastern Jerusalem from 1949-1967, in defiance of the UN Security Council and international agreements.

The Palestinian Arabs made no claim to Judea/Samaria/eastern Jerusalem during the 19 years of Jordan’s illegal occupation of these areas.  In fact, the original Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Charter, written in 1964, specifically disclaimed PLO (the declared representative of the “Palestinian” Arab people)’s sovereignty rights to Judea/Samaria/eastern Jerusalem, stating:  “This Organization does not exercise any regional sovereignty over the West Bank in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, on the Gaza Strip or the Himmah Area.”  (Article 24.)

In 1967, Israel pleaded with Jordan to remain out of the 1967 war.  Jordan ignored Israel’s entreaties, and began shelling of western Jerusalem.  In the defensive war, Israel reunited Jerusalem and recaptured Judea/Samaria.  It was only after Israel captured these areas in a defensive war that the PLO demanded that Judea/Samaria and eastern Jerusalem should be theirs.

And Israel’s lawful self-defense in and of itself gives Israel the better claim.

In 1988, Jordan renounced any claim to Judea/Samaria, and declared that it no longer considered itself as having any status over that area.  On July 31, 1988, Jordan’s King Hussein announced Jordan’s full legal and administrative disengagement from the West Bank.

The Levy Commission Report on the Legal Status of Building in Judea and Samaria (cleaned up translation of key sections) noted that:

“Thus the original legal status of the territory was restored, namely, a territory designated as a national home for the Jewish people, who had a “right of possession” to it during Jordanian rule while they were absent from the territory for several years due to a war imposed on them, and have now returned to it.”

The Levy Commission Report also concluded, after careful legal analysis that: “Israel has had every right to claim sovereignty over these territories, as maintained by all Israeli governments” and “that from the perspective of international law, the establishment of Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria is not illegal.”

Despite Israel’s right to claim sovereignty over the areas beyond the 1949 Armistice lines, Jewish communities comprise only 2% of Judea/Samaria.  Moreover, Israel gave away control of all of Gaza and 42 percent of Judea/Samaria, where the Palestinian Arabs have their own parliament, schools, universities, TV and radio stations, newspapers and police force running all aspects of their lives except some Israeli security control necessitated by continuing Palestinian Arab terrorism.

Jewish communities over the 1949 Armistice lines are clearly not the obstacle to peace; the obstacle to peace is the PA’s refusal to accept any state (including the over-generous offers to the Arabs in 1937, 1947, 2000, 2008 and 2015) that would require them to give up their ambition of destroying all of Israel.

In addition, the April 14, 2004 letter from former U.S. President George Bush to former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon confirmed that Jewish communities over the 1949 Armistice lines would remain in Israel in any peace agreement.  President Bush’s letter stated:

“As part of a final peace settlement, Israel must have secure and recognized borders, which should emerge from negotiations between the parties in accordance with UNSC Resolutions 242 and 338.  In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli populations centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949, and all previous efforts to negotiate a two-state solution have reached the same conclusion. It is realistic to expect that any final status agreement will only be achieved on the basis of mutually agreed changes that reflect these realities.”

President Bush’s letter thus further confirms that Israeli Jewish communities beyond the 1949 Armistice lines are legal.    Moreover, in the Wall Street Journal, Elliott Abrams (who handled Middle East affairs at the National Security Council from 2001 to 2009) demonstrated that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s claim that “there were no informal or oral enforceable agreements” between President Bush and PM was incorrect.

Accordingly, ZOA urges the Obama administration to should retract its support for the EU resolution, and to oppose any similar PA-instigated resolution at the UN.

‘Operation Thunderbolt,’ by Saul David

By ALAN FURST  NEW YORK TIMES BOOKREVIEW JAN. 22, 2016

Israeli soldiers carry a hostage rescued in the raid at Entebbe Airport in Uganda, July 1976.

On June 27, 1976, an Air France plane took off from Ben-Gurion International Airport in Lod, Israel, heading for Paris with a stopover in Athens, carrying 228 passengers of Israeli, French and various other nationalities. Security at the Lod airport was famously tight — but in Athens, where security was lax, four hijackers boarded the Airbus carrying large black bags that held guns and hand grenades, took over the plane and forced the pilot to divert to Entebbe Airport, on the shore of Lake Victoria in Uganda. Six days later, a team of Israeli Special Forces personnel attacked the airport in a daring and ingenious raid, named Operation Thunderbolt, and freed the hostages.

That raid is the subject of Saul David’s new book, “Operation Thunderbolt: Flight 139 and the Raid on Entebbe Airport, the Most Audacious Hostage Rescue Mission in History.” This is a ­minute-by-minute narrative of that week by a scrupulous and thorough historian, who has written what will most likely be the definitive work on the subject and produced a tense and riveting account of what has come to be known as the Entebbe raid. By means of extraordinarily deep research, David essentially lets the characters speak for themselves.

And what characters they are. The hijackers were led by two German left-wing terrorists, a man and a woman with connections to the Baader-Meinhof gang, supported by two members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. They were opposed and ultimately defeated by the leading political and military personalities of Israel. Some 40 years later, many of the names associated with the hijacking are still remembered: the Palestinian terrorist Wadie Haddad and the Israelis Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Ehud Barak and Menachem Begin (with a brief appearance by Moshe Dayan). The leader of the raid, killed in combat at the airport, was Yoni Netanyahu, the brother of the current prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. In some ways at the center of the narrative is Idi Amin Dada, “Uganda’s eccentric, flamboyant and ruthless dictator who, just two days earlier, had been declared ‘president for life’ by the Ugandan Parliament.”

These characters and a vast assortment of others — hostages, diplomats, aircrew members and soldiers — are all described in great detail and, through the use of diaries, articles, books and private papers, heard as well, as they attempt to deal with the inevitable conflicts arising in a crisis. David is a military historian; his previous books include “The Indian Mutiny,”  “Military Blunders” and “Zulu: The Heroism and Tragedy of the Zulu War of 1879,” and he is especially adept at explaining the ­decision-making process that takes place as a complex military operation is considered, planned and executed.

The gravely difficult choice facing the Israelis was this: Do we give in to the hijackers’ demands and, in exchange for the hostages, free terrorists captured in previous attacks, even those who have Jewish “blood on their hands”? Or do we initiate a rapidly planned and daring operation that may turn out to be a disastrous failure? Both options are explored in depth, with the defense minister, ­Shimon Peres, supporting the military operation and the prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, undecided as the 48-hour deadline set by the terrorists approaches. David’s exploration of the various conflicts generates a high level of drama and tension for the reader, even though the outcome is known. This is the achievement of a masterly, first-rate historian.

He is also a master at detailing the chaotic action of combat: “With his team strung out behind him, Giora Zussman” — one of the Israeli commandos — “made a solo entry into the small hall that had held the Israeli hostages. He could see several empty mattresses with sheets, a number of suitcases and a table piled with passports; but no hostages or terrorists. Just in case, he sprayed the hall and the gap in the wall of boxes with bullets from his Kalashnikov until his clip was empty. As he ducked back out of the hall to reload, the two missing members of his team moved past him and into the hall, firing as they went. Reaching a room at the far end that had been used as a kitchen, they found and killed two Ugandan soldiers.”

The great value of a work like “Operation Thunderbolt” is that it relights the dim corners of past events. For the Israelis, meeting in a secure bunker known as the Pit, the problem was not so much murderous enemies as it was the role played by Idi Amin. As Peres told his staff, a hijacking had never had the “explicit support of any president, army or state.” If this was now the case, the game had changed, and the Israelis would have to send sufficient troops to fight Ugandan soldiers guarding the airport.

Amin himself kept visiting Entebbe, making speeches to the hostages with basically two themes: We must hope that your home governments are sensible about your predicament and will accede to the hijackers’ demands; and we want to make sure that you, though hostages, are as comfortable as possible in a concrete airport building. Mattresses and food were provided from local tourist hotels.

Then there was the response of the victims. Michel Cojot, a leader of the ­hostages and David’s principal character among them, spoke to the airport director, saying, “It is not easy to receive 257 persons unexpectedly.” The airport director looked perplexed: “But I expected you.” Amin had, in fact, been in on the hijacking from the beginning.

Recalling that week in 1976, the fight against terrorists may seem like a fairly standard procedure — the Israelis did it so courageously and well that the event became famous, and will remain so. But in these times of ISIS and its brutality, the terrorists of 1976 look like political idealists. In a way, that’s the scariest part of “Operation Thunderbolt.”

OPERATION THUNDERBOLT

Flight 139 and the Raid on Entebbe Airport, the Most Audacious Hostage Rescue Mission in History

By Saul David

Illustrated. 446 pp. Little, Brown & Company. $30.

The Iran factional delusion

• Michael Rubin  1-22-16
• 
  
• https://www.aei.org/publication/the-iran-factional-delusion/

Seldom has a conventional wisdom been so corrosive to US national security or the effectiveness of US policy as the assumption that factions within the Iranian government truly matter. Every single administration since Jimmy Carter has sought to reach out to “reformists” in order to privilege them against “hardliners.” In no case did American partners win out. The Reagan-era “Arms-for-Hostages” scheme began as an effort to exploit divisions between so-called pragmatists and more extreme elements. Much like President Barack Obama would two decades later, President George H.W. Bush used his inaugural address to reach out to Iranian moderates. President Bill Clinton embraced the hope of reformism when his Iranian counterpart Mohammad Khatami issued a rhetorical call for a “Dialogue of Civilizations.”

In each case, the United States got played. The Iranian promise to release hostages in exchange for spare parts? It worked… until Iran seized more hostages. Iran’s once-covert nuclear program? It developed against the backdrop of the so-called dialogue. Not only Khatami’s advisers but also Hassan Rouhani — Iran’s current president who at the time was a nuclear negotiator — acknowledged that much of the logic was to get the United States to let its guard down. Indeed, as he stepped down from his position as Supreme National Security Council chief in 2005, Rouhani told an assembled group of revolutionary elite that the doctrine of surprise which he oversaw worked: He would lull the United States into complacency and then strike. “The plots and plans [the United States] had designed against the revolution or against the development of the regime and the nation were defeated. Why? It was because they were taken by surprise,” Rouhani explained. “The actions of the regime took the world by surprise and they were usually unpredictable.”

Those whom American policymakers identify as reformers seldom are, and yet diplomats and analysts not only assume they are, but also believe that being a reformer in the Iranian context means agreement with the norms of diplomacy or basic human rights. Executions, however, skyrocketed under both Khatami and now Rouhani relative to the capital punishment rates under their respective predecessors. Or, to put it another way, as wrong as Saudi Arabia’s execution of Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr was, Iran’s rate of executions is almost an order of magnitude higher than the Saudi kingdom’s. The Iranian regime is doubly hypocritical, as they failed to push for Nimr’s release while he was alive because, as an adherent of the Shirazi school of thought, Nimr was dubious of the type of clerical rule that Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei embraces. For Tehran —reformers and hardliners both — Nimr was a liability while alive even if a convenient martyr once dead.

And yet Americans continue to wallow under the delusion that factions are hooks upon which to hang American policy. Take Nicholas Burns, a diplomat who has served administrations across the political spectrum but always advocated for further engagement with Iran. In the New York Times, he calls Rouhani a “reformist president,” but Rouhani’s own writings and electoral campaign contradict that. Burns also notes that Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif was US-educated. By the same logic, Muslim Brotherhood ideologue Sayyid Qutb was also pro-American. And, if Syrian President Bashar al-Assad was a reformer as so many American officials once insisted because he was a Western-educated doctor, wouldn’t the same logic mean that Haiti’s notorious dictator Papa Doc Duvalier would have been a reformer as well?

The simple fact is that sometimes adversaries use English fluency or their American experience less to embrace Western values and more to learn better how to pull the wool over the eyes of Americans. Likewise, the notion that Rouhani’s internal struggles are just beginning is based on an assumption that he sincerely wants to wage factional struggle to moderate the regime, rather than simply project an image of moderation to relieve pressure. Again, it’s the tried and true good cop, bad cop strategy which Tehran has played to great effect. Nor is the fact that the Guardian Council has banned 60 percent of candidates seeking to run for parliament new. When Khatami won the presidency, he was in the one percent of candidates allowed to run. Rouhani became president—likely with some regime massaging of the returns to give him a first round victory—with one goal: to relieve the financial pressure under which the Iranian government labored.

This is not to suggest that factions do not exist; they do in all countries. They existed in Iraq under Saddam Hussein, and they exist under Kim Jung-un in North Korea. But just because factions exist does not mean that they represent true debate about the character or ideology of the regime. To believe they do is to be guilty of projecting a Western sense of political debate onto adversaries, and that is a recipe not for success but rather for the continued failure of US intelligence and diplomacy.

Whither the Middle East after the Iran nuclear deal

Hisham Melhem   Al Arabia  Sunday, 24 January 2016

http://english.alarabiya.net/en/views/news/middle-east/2016/01/24/Whither-the-Middle-East-after-the-Iran-nuclear-deal.html

Those of us wordsmiths writing, thinking , wondering and obsessing about things Middle Eastern have a new phrase to ponder; ‘Implementation day’. On January 16, 2016 you could hear many people saying: rejoice, the day we have been waiting for is upon us, while others denounced it as a day that shall live in infamy. After the International Atomic Energy Agency or IAEA certified that Iran had delivered on its initial commitments under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), the United States and the P5+1 and the IAEA announced that the implementation of the nuclear deal with Iran has begun on January 16, 2016.

In return for Iran’s dismantlement of more than two-third of the centrifuges it once used to enrich uranium, shipping 98 percent of its low-enriched uranium stockpile to Russia and rendering its heavy water reactor at Arak obsolete after removing its reactor and pouring concrete into it, ‘implementation day’ also triggered the suspension of a complex web of nuclear related sanctions the U.S. the European Union and the United Nations have imposed on Iran in recent years. The nuclear accord will allow Iran, inter alia, to retrieve at least $60 billion of its frozen assets and to return to the international oil market as a major producer. The nuclear deal is not open ended and does not eliminate Iran’s ability in the future to become a nuclear power, but if it is fully implemented it will severely restrict Iran’s ability to produce a nuclear device in the next 10 to 15 years.

The nuclear deal does not signal the emergence of Iran as the undisputed regional hegemon, for Iran lacks the economic and military requisites for such status. However, it signals the recognition of the United States and the other major powers of Iran’s rising importance as a state and a regional power with clout and interests that cannot be ignored or easily intimidated. What began as secret negotiations between the United States and Iran then developed into open and multilateral negotiations, remained restricted to the nuclear domain. And while American and Iranian officials did informally discuss other issues on the sidelines of the official talks, the U.S. and its allies, in a major concession to Iran did not seek to link the nuclear talks to Iran’s blatant interventions in the internal affairs of its neighbors, or for that matter, Iran’s blatant violations of the fundamental rights of its own citizens. For all of President Obama’s claims about supporting the struggles of the peoples of the Middle East for dignity, and political empowerment, his administration repeatedly failed Arabs and Iranians when they demanded these rights.

The day after

The nuclear deal may have been a victory for those Iranian ‘bridge-builders’, as analyst Karim Sadjadpour of the Carnegie Endowment For International Peace calls them, ‘people like President Rouhani and Foreign Minister Zarif that want to build bridges with the West, with the United States,’ at the expense of ‘the saboteurs within the Revolutionary Guards,’ who don’t have much popular support, but yield much ‘coercive power’, but it remains a limited victory and not a panacea. The saboteurs and Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei made it clear by actions and words that the day after ‘implementation day’ of the nuclear deal does not signal a new beginning with the United States.

Even if Iran uses a tiny portion of its released frozen assets after ‘implementation day,’ it will be enough to sustain the financial burdens of the operations of the Quds force and Hezbollah in Syria

Hisham Melhem

Missile tests were conducted in violation of U.N. resolutions, and American sailors who accidentally entered Iranian waters were publicly humiliated before they were freed. Recently, the Guardian Council, supposedly the body of the stern custodians of the purity of the revolution which is tasked with vetting candidates for next month's parliamentary elections decimated the hopes of the ‘bridge builders’ by disqualifying thousands of reformers. Finally, as if to extinguish any hope of a détente with the U.S. Ayatollah Khamenei warned Iranian President Rouhani to guard against American ‘deceptions’. To be sure, Iran has a large modern, war weary and mostly youthful constituency for re-integrating Iran in a globalized world, and ushering in a new beginning with the United States; but this constituency of peace is not about to forcefully challenge the hardliners and the ‘saboteurs’ who crushed the ideals of Iran’s Green Revolution in 2009.

Most states in the Middle East opposed Iran’s nuclear program, most vociferously Israel, the only country in the region with advanced nuclear weapons and delivery systems. A nuclear Iran would enhance its deterrence against Israel, while maintaining a significantly armed Hezbollah close to Israel’s borders. But for most of Iran’s Arab neighbors, the immediate threat is not a potential nuclear arsenal that could be used against them, but Iran’s considerable mastery of the art of conducting proxy wars to spread its regional clout, and its growing ability to influence and exploits the marginalized Shiite communities in Arab societies in its struggles with Arab governments. It goes without saying that those Arab governments that continue to alienate their Shiite populations end up pushing them deeper into Iran’s orbit.

The day after the ‘implementation day’, is essentially the beginning of President Obama’s last year in office, which is likely to be the year of living more dangerously than in previous years for the whole region. The nuclear deal with Iran, will renew the pre-existing real and imagined fears among America’s allies that the Obama administration has begun the long process of normalizing relations with an ascendant Iran, at a time when the U.S. is doing enough to keep the faltering Iraqi state from collapsing, and enough to ‘manage’ but not stop the wars in Syria, and Libya while kicking the hot cans down the road to the next president. Those Cassandras forecasting gloom and doom in 2016 and beyond can only point out to the collapsing prices of oil to buttress their dark prophesies of the great unwinding of the region.

Iraq, the times of the scavengers

The crashing oil prices, the mounting cost of the war against the Islamic State (ISIS), continued conflict with the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) over oil revenues, and widespread corruption will combine to create an economic perfect storm in Iraq this year, even though the country is producing more than 4 million barrels of oil a day. Politically and militarily the picture is grimmer. Turkey has informed the United States that it will not withdraw its military forces from Northern Iraq, a deployment ostensibly to fight ISIS is in fact designed to check potential greater Iranian encroachment into the Mosul region an area that was for centuries part of the Ottoman Empire. Northern Iraq is being treated by the claimants of the Ottoman and Persian Empires as a buffer zone under the nominal suzerainty of a weak authority in Baghdad.

Both Turkey and the KRG see Baghdad drifting further and further into Iran’s universe. Turkish, Kurdish and Gulf Arab officials believe that those who control whatever leavers of power left in Iraqi hands are the Popular Mobilization Units (PMUs), or al-Hashd al-Sha’abi, the Shiite paramilitary formations established in June 2014 to fight ISIS following its occupation of Mosul. While these units are nominally an integral part of the Iraqi security forces (ISF) joint command in Baghdad, they are answerable to Iraqi groups beholden to Iran, and ultimately controlled by the Quds Force, a branch of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, a division tasked with external military and clandestine operations, and led by the ubiquitous General Qasem Soleimani.

The assessment of American diplomats and senior military officers in Baghdad and Erbil, regarding Iran’s grip on Iraq, is not that far from the assessment of the weary neighbors, according to recent visitors to Iraq. That gloomy American assessment of Iraq’s future from the heart of Baghdad is not reflected in the more upbeat and deceptive assessments one hears from officials in Washington in charge of what goes for U.S. policy in Iraq.

Ramadi as a metaphor for Iraq

For all the talk about liberating Mosul from ISIS following the military campaign to oust ISIS from Ramadi, no serious analyst of Iraq expects that battle any time soon, and probably not this year, which means that Obama will leave Washington while Iraq’s second largest city which fell into the pretend Caliph al-Baghdadi’s hand on his watch, will remain in that twilight zone they call the Islamic Caliphate, with the Kurdish North under the control of the KRG, and Western Iraq under the beleaguered Sunni tribes, and a ‘central’ government with a weak writ over the Shiite lands stretching from Baghdad to Basra in the south. Long after Obama departs the White House and forgets his eloquent speeches about Iraq and the rest of the Middle East the scavengers of ISIS and the PMUs will continue to feed on Iraq’s carcass.

U.S. officials concede now that the battle for Ramadi was from planning to execution a wholly American controlled and directed operation. The battle’s outcome, which led to the ultimate destruction of the city, highlights America’s dilemma in trying to get regular Iraqi army ground units that include Sunni Arabs to fight and coordinate effectively with U.S. advisors and air power against ISIS controlled cities without relying heavily on the PMUs. In fact there were credible press reports that elements of the PMUs, the same elements that slaughtered Sunni civilians after routing ISIS fighters from cities like Tikrit, were involved in the fierce fighting at Ramadi. The liberated Ramadi is uninhabitable; it is estimated that rebuilding the city will cost $10 billion. To paraphrase that infamous quote from the Vietnam War; it became necessary to destroy Ramadi in order to save it.

Syria, the perfect storm is upon us

The methodical killing of the Syrian state and society mostly at the hands of the Assad regime, before it was joined by ISIS and other radical Islamists, could not have been done so thoroughly and systematically without Iran’s active and direct involvement along with its sectarian Shiite proxies, particularly the Lebanese Hezbollah and other lesser known Shiite militias and non-Arab Shiite ‘volunteers’. With each phase of what American officials call the Syrian Peace Process, Iran and its proxies have deepened their grip on Syria. Long before Russia’s recent military intervention, it was Iran and its Shiite Lebanese Janissaries that saved the Assad regime from imminent collapse.

Even if Iran uses a tiny portion of its released frozen assets after ‘implementation day’ it will be enough to sustain the financial burdens of the operations of the Quds force and Hezbollah in Syria. Russia’s military intervention has so far widened the Syrian war, and made its resolution the more difficult, but Iran was and is the outside force with the most at stake in Syria, and the ultimate arbiter when it comes to the future of the Syrian despot Assad. Short of a fundamental shift in Iran’s policy towards Syria, and to a lesser extent that of Russia (such as dumping Assad and accepting a transition towards a more inclusive form of governance acceptable to most opposition groups outside ISIS and al-Nusra Front) the war will continue, no matter what happens at the peace fora at comfortable European hotels. And short of an equally fundamental shift in the policy of the United States towards ISIS (such as adopting a unified strategy to defeat the Caliphate in both Syria and Iraq, through the deployment of more U.S. special forces and limited ground units working with allied special forces moving up the Euphrates valley to retake Raqqa in Syria, as a prelude to routing ISIS from Mosul) ISIS will remain capable of bleeding Syria beyond the Obama years.

While the physical destruction visited on Syrian cities and infrastructures is immense – a testimony to the efficient brutality of the Syrian regime and its allies, including Russia- the pulverization of Syrian society, the murder of Syria’s best and brightest, the transformation of more than 4 million Syrians into refugees and double that number into internal exile is the real calamity that befell Syria in the last five years. Bridges, roads and schools can be rebuilt, but is it possible to rebuild the social and cultural bonds among Syria’s once rich and largely welcoming mosaic of religious and ethnic communities? Can the beasts of sectarianism and demonization be tamed any time soon, especially in the absence of a potential clear victor that will not exact retribution from the vanquished?

With Iran in a better position to support its Syrian satrapy centered on Damascus and the coastal region, the Syria we have known for most of the last century will continue to disintegrate into warring regions and factions. The perfect storm is upon us in Syria. Unless ISIS is defeated, and unless Iran’s ability to wreak havoc in Syria, Iraq and Lebanon is checked, the unraveling of the Levant and Mesopotamia will continue, but its reverberations will not be limited to a broken Middle East, and in the era of globalized sacred terror no one can be immune. 

___________

Hisham Melhem is a columnist and analyst for Al Arabiya News Channel in Washington, DC. Melhem has interviewed many American and international public figures, including Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush, Secretaries of State Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen, among others. He is also the correspondent for Annahar, the leading Lebanese daily. For four years he hosted "Across the Ocean," a weekly current affairs program on U.S.-Arab relations for Al Arabiya. 

Terrorism pays: How to flummox the White House, the EU --- and defeat the 'Palestinians'

 Caroline B. Glick Jan. 22, 2016 { Reproduced from Jewish World Review}

“I’m proud of him.”

That’s what the father of Dafna Meir’s murderer said when the Palestinian media asked him what he thinks of his cold-blooded son Murad Adais.

On Sunday afternoon, Adais butchered Meir in her home, in front of her children.

Whether Adais Sr. is really happy that his son will rot in prison is less important than the fact that he said what he said to his home crowd.

He knows that his audience thinks his son is a hero. And so he played to his audience.

Since last September when the Palestinians began their current terrorist onslaught, killers like Adais have been characterized as lone wolves. But a study published last November in Mosaic online journal by Shalem College’s Daniel Polisar shows that this characterization is both wrong and unhelpful.

Polisar studied Palestinian public opinion data from surveys conducted by four independent research groups over the past 25 years. His data exposed three key aspects to Palestinian positions about Israel that all bear directly on the current Palestinian terrorist offensive.

His first finding is that throughout most of the past quarter-century a solid majority of Palestinians have supported terrorism against Israelis.

Moreover, the more murderous an attack, the more it is supported.

Polisar’s second finding was that the vast majority of Palestinians hate Israelis and believe that Jews have no right to the Land of Israel, and therefore our state has no right to exist.

Taken together, these first two insights lead to one clear conclusion about the nature of the current Palestinian terrorism campaign against Israelis. As Polisar explained, they show that this campaign is not being carried out by “lone wolves,” who have been incited by Palestinian Authority propaganda. Rather, that propaganda reflects the murderous hatred that the vast majority of Palestinians feel toward Israelis and Israel.

Adais and his comrades may or may not be members of terrorist groups. But they are the loyal representatives of their terrorism-supporting society.

Obviously, any talk of a peace process in this climate is utter folly. The most Israel can aspire to is to deter the hate-soaked Palestinians from attacking us.

This brings us to the third insight of Polisar’s study. Twenty-five years of survey data make clear that most Palestinians believe that terrorism pays.

And the plain fact is that they are right. For the past generation, the Palestinians have only benefited from killing Israelis through terrorism.

The fact that Israeli concessions to the Palestinians have strengthened their conviction that terrorism pays rather than convinced them to make peace shows that all concessions in the face of terrorism are dangerous.

While the majority of Israelis have learned this lesson and so elected governments that oppose appeasement, the Palestinians have learned that the Israeli public does not have the final word on whether or not they will be rewarded for their crimes against humanity.

The Palestinians believe that Israel is dependent on Western goodwill. So to the extent that the West pressures Israel surrender to Palestinian demands, the US and the EU work hand in glove with Palestinian terrorists and prove that they are right to murder mothers in their homes in front of their children.

This week US Ambassador Dan Shapiro proved the Palestinians right, yet again.

At the outset of his speech before the Institute of National Security Studies on Monday, Shapiro issued a pro forma condemnation of “barbaric acts of terrorism” against Israelis at the outset of his remarks.

But that was just clearing his throat. In his substantive remarks, Shapiro accused Israel of institutional racism in Judea and Samaria.

Shapiro’s slanderous accusation channeled and escalated his boss Secretary of State John Kerry’s anti-Israel libel from two years ago. In early 2014, Kerry alleged that if Israel didn’t cough up Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem soon, it risked becoming a criminal apartheid state in the future.

Read more at http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0116/glick012216.php3#G5vVSX0wdlVTtSmX.99

UPDATE ON BENGHAZI..Special forces were ready and able to go to the rescue, but never received permission to proceed

Full Measure (Sunday morning news program -video) presents new information from the US Defense Department confirming   their offer and their ability to send military help to Benghazi. {Up to this point,  what may be the most confounding mystery surrounding the Benghazi controversy has been:: " Why no outside US military help came to the rescue as terrorists battered two compounds and the Americans inside over nearly eight long hours.”}

 A US Defense Department email from former Department of Defense Chief of Staff,Jeremy Bash and testimony from (now retired) US Army special forces Lt. Col. Andrew Wood indicate that special forces elements were ready to go and  were actually  actively preparing to go but for some reason their actual departure was  not authorized ( apparently due to some decision and/or lack of decision at high echelons of the US State Department).

http://fullmeasure.news/news/politics/rescue-interrupted

*Full Measure, a Sunday morning news program ,hosted by Sharyl Attkison is   available to 43 million households on Sinclair Broadcasting’s ABC, CBS, NBC, FOX, CW and Telemundo affiliates. It is  also live streamed. In Washington DC, “Full Measure” will appear on WJLA ABC Channel 7 and also on NewsChannel 8.  Partial list below:

City	Station	Affiliation	Time Period
Washington DC	WJLA	ABC	9:30am
Seattle	KOMO	ABC	10am
Minneapolis	WUCW	CW	10:30am
St. Louis	KDNL	ABC	9:30am
Pittsburgh	WPGH	FOX	9:30am
Portland OR	KATU	ABC	9:30am
Raleigh	WLFL	CW	11am
Baltimore	WBFF	FOX	10am
Nashville	WZTV	FOX	9am
Columbus OH	WTTE	FOX	9:30am
San Antonio	KABB	FOX	10am
San Antonio	WOAI	NBC	9am
Salt Lake City	KUTV	CBS	10am
Milwaukee	WVTV	CW	8:30am
Cincinnati	WKRC	CBS	11am
Greenville/Spartanburg/Asheville	WLOS	ABC	10:30am
West Palm Beach	WPEC	CBS	11am
Austin	KEYE	CBS	10am
Grand Rapids	WWMT	CBS	8:30am
Las Vegas	KSNV	NBC	9am
Norfolk	WTVZ	MNTV	11am
Birmingham	WBMA	ABC	9:30am
Oklahoma City	KOKH	FOX	10am
Harrisburg	WHP	CBS	11:30am
Greensboro/Winston-Salem	WXLV	ABC	10am
Buffalo	WUTV	FOX	10am
Providence/New Bedford	WJAR	NBC	11am
Fresno	KMPH	FOX	10am
Wilkes-Barre/Scranton	WOLF	FOX	10am
Little Rock	KATV	ABC	9am
Richmond	WRLH	FOX	10am
Albany NY	WRGB	CBS	11am
Mobile/Pensacola	WEAR	ABC	9am
Mobile/Pensacola	WPMI	NBC	10am
Tulsa	KTUL	ABC	9am
Lexington	WDKY	FOX	10am
Dayton	WKEF	ABC	11:30am
Dayton	WRGT	FOX	10am
Wichita	KSAS	FOX	9:30am
Charleston/Huntington	WCHS	ABC	11am
Charleston/Huntington	WVAH	FOX	10am
Roanoke	WSET	ABC	10am
Green Bay	WLUK	FOX	10am
Flint	WSMH	FOX	10:30am
Flint	WEYI	NBC	10am
Des Moines	KDSM	FOX	9am
Spokane (Lewiston, ID)	KLEW	CBS	9:30am
Omaha	KPTM	FOX	9:30am
Toledo	WNWO	NBC	10am
Columbia SC	WACH	FOX	9:30am
Rochester NY	WHAM	ABC	9:30am
Rochester NY	WUHF	FOX	10am
Portland ME	WGME	CBS	11:30am
Portland ME	WPFO	FOX	10am
Paducah KY/Cape Girardeau MO	KBSI	FOX	9am
Madison	WMSN	FOX	9am
Syracuse	WSTM	NBC	11am
Syracuse	WTVH	CBS	11:30am
Champaign/Springfield	WICS/WICD	ABC	11am
Champaign/Springfield	WRSP	FOX	10am
Harlingen	KGBT	CBS	10am
Chattanooga	WTVC	ABC	10am
Cedar Rapids	KGAN	CBS	10:30am
Cedar Rapids	KFXA	FOX	9am
El Paso	KFOX	FOX	7:30a
El Paso	KDBC	CBS	9am
Savannah	WTGS	FOX	10am
Charleston SC	WCIV.2	ABC	11am
Myrtle Beach/Florence	WPDE	ABC	11:30am
Johnstown/Altoona	WJAC	NBC	10am
Tallahassee	WTWC	NBC	12pm
Tallahassee	WTWC.2	FOX	10am
Reno	KRXI	FOX	8am
Reno	KRNV/KENV	NBC	9am
Boise	KBOI	CBS	7:30am
Peoria	WHOI	ABC	10am
Traverse City	WPBN/WTOM	NBC	10am
Traverse City	WGTU/WGTQ	ABC	11am
Macon	WGXA	FOX	10am
Macon	WGXA.2	ABC	10:30am
Eugene	KVAL	CBS	9:30am
Eugene	KMTR	NBC	9am
Yakima	KIMA/KEPR	CBS	9:30am
Bakersfield	KBAK	CBS	9:30am
Bakersfield	KBFX	FOX	9am
Amarillo	KVII	ABC	9am
Columbia Jefferson City MO	KRCG	CBS	10am
Medford	KTVL	CBS	9:30am
Beaumont	KFDM	CBS	9:30am
Beaumont	KBTV	FOX	9am
Sioux City	KMEG	CBS	10:30am
Sioux City	KPTH	FOX	9:30am
Albany GA	WFXL	FOX	10am
Wheeling WV/Steubenville OH	WTOV	NBC	11am
Wheeling WV/Steubenville OH	WTOV.2	FOX	10am
Gainesville	WGFL	CBS	11am
Gainesville	WNBW	NBC	10am
Quincy	KHQA	CBS	10am
Quincy	KHQA.2	ABC	9am
Marquette	WLUC	NBC	10am
Marquette	WLUC.2	FOX	9:30am
Ottumwa	KTVO	ABC	9am
Ottumwa	KTVO.2	CBS