Syrian Rebels Behind Attack On Israel
It was the Syrian opposition and not the Syrian government that was behind the firing this weekend at the Israeli border, a top Syrian official claimed to this column.
The Syrian official accused the jihadist opposition of attempting to draw Israel into the conflict to aid the rebels by targeting the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
“Why would we fire at Israel?” asked the official, speaking on condition of anonymity. “We have no interest in getting Israel to attack the Syrian military.”
The border incidents began on Saturday, when a round of gunfire coming from the Syrian side hit an Israeli Defense Forces jeep on routine patrol in the northern Golan Heights. Another round fired from Syria targeted the same area in Israel Sunday. The gunfire came from a region where rebels have been attempting to seize control of a border town these last few days.
Israel responded with a missile attack that destroyed a Syrian army machinegun position despite questions about whether the Syrian army was behind the border incidents. Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon made clear that he views Assad as bearing ultimate responsibility for any attacks from his side of the border.
The round of violence comes as the rebels are reportedly being fingered in last week’s alleged chemical attack in the Syrian town of Khan al-Assal, west of Aleppo. The UK Telegraph reported that the Syrian military is said to believe that a home-made locally-manufactured rocket was fired by rebels containing a form of chlorine known as CL17, easily available as a swimming pool cleaner. Syria claims the warhead contained a quantity of the gas, dissolved in saline solution.
Informed Mideast security officials speaking to WorldNetDaily said it appears that the rebels are attempting to create a humanitarian crisis to precipitate the deployment of NATO to fight the Assad regime.
Obama Channels Saul Alinsky In Jerusalem
In his address in Jerusalem last week, President Obama channeled Saul Alinsky, citing the radical community organizer’s defining mantra as he urged young Israelis to “create change” to nudge their leadership to act.
Obama told a crowd of college students at Jerusalem’s main convention center that Israel “has the wisdom to see the world as it is, but also the courage to see the world as it should be.”
One of Alinsky’s major themes was working with the world as it “is” to turn it into the world as “it should be.” In his defining work, Rules for Radicals, which he dedicated to “the first rebel,” Lucifer, Alinsky used those words to lay out his main agenda. He asserted radical change must be brought about by working within a system instead of attacking it from the outside.
“It is necessary to begin where the world is if we are going to change it to what we think it should be. That means working in the system,” wrote Alinsky.
Obama related his Alinsky quote to a suggestion that “peace” begins with the people and not just the leadership. He suggested Israelis do an end-run around the country’s leadership and “create the change that you want to see.”
It’s not the first time Obama has used the Alinsky phraseology of the world as it “is” versus how it “should be.” In a May 2011 speech on the Mideast revolutions, Obama stated: “But after decades of accepting the world as it is in the region, we have a chance to pursue the world as it should be.”
In an April 2009 talk to a London girl’s school, first lady Michelle Obama recalled that on her first date with Barack Obama, he took her to a “community meeting” and taught her about the world “as it is” and “as it should be.”
President Obama started his career as an Alinsky-style community organizer in Chicago and taught the radical’s tactics at the University of Chicago. This journalist was first to report that the executive director of the Midwest Academy, an activist organization that taught Alinsky’s tactics of direct action, confrontation, and intimidation, was part of the team that developed volunteers for President Obama’s 2008 campaign.
This reporter also first exposed that the Woods Fund, a nonprofit for which Obama served as a paid board director from 1999 to December 2002, provided capital to the Midwest Academy. Obama sat on the Woods Fund board alongside William Ayers, founder of the Weather Underground domestic terrorist organization.
Also, in 1998, Obama participated in a panel discussion praising Alinsky alongside Midwest Academy’s founder Heather Booth, an organizer and dedicated disciple of Alinsky. The panel discussion followed the opening performance in Chicago of the play “The Love Song of Saul Alinsky,” a work described by the Chicago Sun-Times as “bringing to life one of America’s greatest community organizers.”
Former 1960s radical and FrontPage Magazine Editor David Horowitz describes Alinsky as the “communist/Marxist fellow-traveler who helped establish the dual political tactics of confrontation and infiltration that characterized the 1960s and have remained central to all subsequent revolutionary movements in the United States.”
Horowitz writes in his 2009 pamphlet “Barack Obama’s Rule for Revolution: The Alinsky Model”: “The strategy of working within the system until you can accumulate enough power to destroy it was what ’60s radicals called ‘boring from within.’ … Like termites, they set about to eat away at the foundations of the building in expectation that one day they could cause it to collapse.”