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Muslim Stabs an Israeli in Brooklyn Synagogue, Saying 'Kill the Jews' (+video)

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Screen Shot 2014-12-10 at 12.56.34 AMA knife-wielding man stabbed an Israeli student in the head inside a Brooklyn synagogue early Tuesday before being fatally shot by police after he refused to drop the knife, authorities said.

The man stormed into the Chabad-Lubavitch Hasidic world headquarters in Crown Heights at about 1:40 a.m. and attacked Levi Rosenblat, who was studying inside the synagogue, spokesman Motti Seligson said. He said there were other people inside at the time.

According to witnesses, the attacker was heard saying repeatedly “Kill the Jews,” said Chaim Landa, another spokesman for Chabad-Lubavitch. Several other people immediately intervened, he said.

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US Gov’t Publicizes Super-Secret Israeli Missile Base, Shocking Ally (+video)

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Photo Credit: DVIDSHUB

Israel’s military fumed Monday over the discovery that the U.S. government had revealed details of a top-secret Israeli military installation in published bid requests.

The Obama administration had promised to build Israel a state-of-the-art facility to house a new ballistic-missile defense system, the Arrow 3. As with all Defense Department projects, detailed specifications were made public so that contractors could bid on the $25 million project. The specifications included more than 1,000 pages of details on the facility, ranging from the heating and cooling systems to the thickness of the walls.

“If an enemy of Israel wanted to launch an attack against a facility, this would give him an easy how-to guide. This type of information is closely guarded and its release can jeopardize the entire facility,” said an Israeli military official who commented on the publication of the proposal but declined to be named because he wasn’t authorized to discuss the facility. He declined to say whether plans for the facility have been altered as a result of the disclosure.

“This is more than worrying, it is shocking,” he said.

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Report: New Iranian Missile Launchers Could Overwhelm Israeli Defenses

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Photo Credit: Iranian Ministry of Defense

Iran could have enough launchers to send a salvo of medium range ballistic missiles that would overwhelm Israeli ballistic missile defense systems, according to a Wednesday report from IHS Jane’s.

A May, 26 broadcast on Iranian television showcased a collection of transporter erector launchers (TELs) capable of launching the Iranian Shahab-3 guided ballistic missiles.

“Iranian television footage showed at least 26 TELs lined up in two rows for the event, which marked their purported delivery to the Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) Aerospace Force, which operates the country’s ballistic missiles,” according to the report.

The Shahab-3 is based on a North Korean design and is capable striking Israel from Iranian territory.

“The delivery of such a large number of missile launchers demonstrates the Islamic Republic of Iran’s self-sufficiency in designing and building the strategic system and shows the Iranian Armed Forces’ massive firepower and their ability to give a crushing response to the enemy,” Defense Minister Brigadier General Ahmad Vahidi said in a report carried by Iranian state news.

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Syria Says Israeli Strike Hits Military Center (+video)

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Photo Credit: Daily StarBy The Daily Star. Massive explosions shook Damascus early Sunday and Syrian state media said Israeli missiles had hit a military research center on the outskirts of the capital.

“Initial information indicates that the explosions at the scientific research center in Jamraya near Damascus were caused by Israeli missiles,” the official SANA news agency. It gave no further details.

Damascus residents reported hearing massive blasts at 1:50 am Sunday.

“There was a large explosion. We first felt shakes like an earthquake and 30 seconds later heard gunfire,” one resident told The Daily Star by telephone from the Syrian capital.

“There was an electricity cut then a large boom.The door of my balcony opened from the after effect,” another resident said, adding that warplanes could be heard overhead.

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‘Israeli officials confirm Syria airstrike that hit Hezbollah-bound weapons’

By AP and Times of Israel Staff. Israeli officials on Saturday reportedly confirmed the Israeli Air Force carried out a strike against Syria and say it targeted a shipment of advanced missiles.

The officials said the shipment was not of chemical arms, but of “game changing” weapons bound for the terror group Hezbollah. One official said the target was a shipment of advanced, long-range ground-to-ground missiles.

The officials said the attack took place early Friday. It was not immediately clear where the airstrike took place, or whether the air force carried out the strike from Lebanese or Syrian airspace.

There was no immediate comment from Syrian officials, and no word of the airstrike on Syrian state media.

According to a source quoted by Reuters in a report Saturday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu convened his security cabinet for secret talks on Thursday night, hours before the strike. Read more from this story HERE.

Israeli Chief Of Staff: Syria ‘Could Blow Up At Any Moment’

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Photo Credit: Front Page Mag

One doesn’t know what to make of murky reports this week about the U.S., Britain, and France training a small force of purportedly moderate Syrian rebels in Jordan—especially with the Obama administration taking the official line that it does not directly aid the Syrian opposition.

If there was ever a time to build a coherent, more or less trustworthy, genuinely moderate Syrian opposition to replace the Assad regime—and it is a questionable proposition—that time would appear to have passed, as the Syrian chaos worsens and the radicals gain strength by the day.

How badly the situation has deteriorated was evident from a report in Israel Hayom on Monday that “Syrian rebels…near the border with Israel threatened…to fight to regain the Golan Heights from Israel following the toppling of Syrian President Bashar Assad.”

The report includes a video in which a “rebel fighter” in the Syrian part of the Golan—just across from the Israeli part—declares:

These lands are blessed and the despicable Assad family promised to liberate them, but for 40 years the Syrian army did not fire a single bullet. We will open a military campaign against Israel. We will fire the bullets that Assad did not and we will liberate the Golan.

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Lawyer: Cyprus Attack Plan Suspect Admits Hezbollah Ties, Denies Plotting Attacks on Israelis

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Photo Credit: acrollNICOSIA, Cyprus — A man being tried on allegations he planned attacks on Israeli tourists in Cyprus has admitted being a member of the militant group Hezbollah and staking out locations that such visitors frequent, his lawyer said Wednesday.

Hossam Taleb Yaacoub’s admissions follow accusations that the Lebanon-based Hezbollah was behind a bombing in Bulgaria that killed five Israeli tourists. Authorities here have been reluctant to link the Cyprus case to the attack in Bulgaria, but both have fed concerns about militant activity in Europe.

Lawyer Antonis Georgiades noted that Yaacoub, who is Swedish and Lebanese, told a Cyprus court that he came to this country on business with no plan to harm anyone. But Yaacoub, 24, also admitted that an unidentified man in Lebanon, where Hezbollah is based, gave him the “mission” of recording flight arrivals and bus routes of Israeli tourists and checking out a hospital parking lot.

Georgiades said Yaacoub acted alone in Cyprus and that instructions where given to him “in complete secrecy” by a man whose face he couldn’t see. The lawyer said that while his client’s actions may raise suspicions, there is no hard proof that Yaacoub was planning an attack.

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Israeli Strike Into Syria Said to Damage Research Site

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Photo Credit: Goran Tomasevic/ReutersWASHINGTON — The Israeli attack last week on a Syrian convoy of antiaircraft weapons appears to have damaged the country’s main research center for work on biological and chemical weapons, according to American officials who are sorting through intelligence reports.

While the main target of the attack on Wednesday seems to have been SA-17 missiles and their launchers — which the Israelis feared were about to be moved to Hezbollah forces in Lebanon — video shown on Syrian television backs up assertions that the research center north of Damascus also suffered moderate damage.

That complex, the Syrian Scientific Studies and Research Center, has been the target of American and Western sanctions for more than a decade because of intelligence suggesting that it was the training site for engineers who worked on chemical and biological weaponry.

A senior United States military official, asked about reports that the research center had been targeted, said that any damage was likely “due to the bombs which targeted the vehicles” carrying the antiaircraft weapons, and from “the secondary explosions from the missiles.”

The official, speaking on condition of anonymity in order to discuss intelligence reports, said that “the Israelis had a small strike package,” meaning that a relatively few fighter aircraft slipped past Syria’s air defenses and that targeting both the missiles and the research center “would risk doing just a little damage to either.”

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Israel hit Syrian nuke plant in 2007 after Bush refused to do so

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Former prime minister Ehud Olmert ordered the 2007 strike on a Syrian nuclear reactor immediately after former US president George W. Bush informed him that the Americans would not attack the facility, according to a Channel 10 report aired on Sunday evening.

Bush’s deputy national security adviser Elliot Abrams was present when the president called Olmert on September 6, 2007 and made clear that the US would not take action, and that then-secretary of state Condoleezza Rice would fly to Israel to hold a joint press conference with Olmert to alert the international community of the secret reactor. The US had decided to handle the Syrian threat via diplomacy.

Olmert responded to Bush that the secretary’s visit would not be necessary and that Israel would deal with the nuclear facility on its own.

“If you’re not going to act against the reactor then we are,” Abrams quoted Olmert as saying during the teleconference. “You don’t want to know where or when,” the former prime minister reportedly added.

The Israelis were convinced that time was fairly short, and that they had to strike the reactor — built by the Syrians with extensive input from the North Koreans — before it went live, the TV report said.

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Germany cooperated with Black September after Munich Massacre

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German newspaper Der Spiegel revealed Sunday that German authorities cooperated with Black September, a Palestinian terror group, after it had carried out an attack that killed 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Olympic Games in Munich. Germany, it was reported, did so for fear of additional attacks on its soil.

According to the report, the German government held secret contacts with the planners of the Munich Massacre. Several months after the attack, Germany’s then foreign minister, Walter Scheel, met secretly with several Black September members to “rebuild trust.”

Berlin demanded that the terror group not carry out any more terrorist attacks on German soil. The Palestinians, on their part, demanded Berlin’s support of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO).

According to Der Spiegel, Germany suspended its criminal investigation against the massacre’s perpetrators as the talks progressed. Several weeks later, the deputy foreign minister announced that the investigation had been concluded.

In 1977, French police asked Germany whether it wanted it to extradite Abu Daoud, one of the planners of the attack, but Germany decided not to answer the question.

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Massive Cyberattack: Act 1 of Israeli Strike on Iran?

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Talk in Israel of a military strike on Iranian nuclear facilities has reached a fever pitch. Last week brought the news of an alleged “war plan” leaked to a blogger. This week, a well-informed military correspondent in Jerusalem reported that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is “determined” to attack Iran before the U.S. election. Two weeks ago, an outgoing government minister told Israelis to prepare for a war that would last 30 days.

David Makovsky of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy has his own contacts in the Israeli leadership. He says there’s more going on here than just war talk. “I think there’s a 50-50 chance before the U.S. election of an Israeli strike,” he says.

The alleged war plan that was recently leaked said an Israeli strike would begin with an unprecedented cyberattack designed to paralyze the Iranian regime and blind it to what was happening on its territory. The Internet, telephones, radio and television transmissions, the electrical grid would all be taken out.

That’s an attention grabber: The world has never seen a cyberattack remotely that dramatic.

John Bumgarner, chief technology officer at the U.S. Cyber Consequences Unit, says the plan does make sense, at least in theory: “Israel has very good cybercapabilities. Some of the best computer scientists in the world come out of the Israeli military and intelligence branch,” he says. “Some of the best cybertools that are currently used in the world come out of Israel.”

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