SELECTED NEWS BRIEFS

DEBKAfile reported that Iran has offered to deploy Revolutionary Guards on the Golan border with Israel by the end of summer.

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Ahmed Jibril’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command is distinguished by an unusual specialty: motorized hang-gliders, hot-air balloons and remote-controlled model planes developed for border-defying suicide attacks into Israel.

Counter-terror sources reveal that – at Tehran’s behest - the extremist PFLP-GC has placed this aerial terror unit at the disposal of Hamas’ Ezz-e Din al-Qassam in the Gaza Strip. A team of instructors was smuggled into the territory in early May, along with German-made remote-controlled model planes adapted to delivering explosives and motorized hang gliders piloted by suiciders carrying explosives.

They are currently engaged in assembling the craft, instructing Hamas operatives in their use and teaching them to make their own motorized hang gliders.

Jibril’s team of instructors flew from Beirut to Cairo with the disassembled aerial equipment in their luggage. It was listed as sports gear. Egyptian security let the terrorists and equipment through without demur - yet another bone to pick with Egyptian security officials over their systematic failure to monitor terrorist traffic marching in and out of their territory.

Military sources report that IDF surveillance units have already sighted Hamas operatives going through their paces with the new gear. They passed the word on to government officials, but were told to keep it quiet.

However, IDF chiefs are deeply perturbed by the strengthening of Hamas’ terrorist capabilities by the influx of a key PFLP-GC element armed with a weapon that can outwit Israel’s border defenses. To meet this new strategic threat to the population of southern Israel’s towns and villages, Israeli military planners must overhaul the air force’s preventive operations and the electronic surveillance systems in force for the Gaza Strip.

The pilot-less aerial vehicles and other means of tracking terrorist activity will have to be diverted from routine tasks inside the Gaza Strip to the additional functions of keeping suicidal gliders and exploding model planes from invading Israeli air space. The task is complicated by the devices ability to fly underneath Israel’s radar screens.

Israeli generals calculate that with its aerial increment, Hamas has doubled its destructive capability; the terrorist group in Palestinian government can now combine airborne suicide bombers with surface missiles for lethal strikes against a single target, such as a city, a strategic installation or a military facility.

Israel has an unfortunate former acquaintance with this menace. In the 1980s, Israeli troops manning the security zone of southern Lebanon employed special spotters to track the airborne terror device. They used anti-air rapid-firing guns to shoot them down, the only effective weapons they had.

In November 1987, a team of Jibril’s hang-gliders penetrated Israel from Lebanon. One landed near an Israeli military base near the Galilee town of Kiryat Shemona, took the sentries by surprise and killed six Israeli soldiers before he was shot dead.

This incident is recorded in IDF annals as The Night of the Gliders, a setback which encouraged the Palestinians under Yasser Arafat to go ahead and prepare the all-out terror war against Israel which was launched three years later.


The Wall Street Journal reported that many people in Iran fear that Mr. Ahmadinejad could be stoking runaway inflation. Moreover, he has created soaring expectations, particularly among Iran's agricultural and working poor, that could be hard to meet.

BBC News reported that forty professors and lecturers from Tehran University in Iran are being retired on Thursday. The move is causing concern that the new government of President Ahmadinejad is purging professors.

Michael Ledeen, The National Review Online reported that some day we will be forced to deal fully with the war we are in, and when that happens we’re going to discover a lot of very nasty problems about the future of America. Maybe we’d tackle the tough issues if we got that we’re at war.

Amir Taheri, Asharq Alawsat asked: Interested in big power games? If yes, reserve a balcony seat to watch a new version of “The Great Game” taking shape in western and central Asia, in which Iran is emerging as an important player.

OpenDemocracy reported that Iran also sent another infamous human rights abuser to the UN Human Rights Council: Justice Minister Jamal Karimirad.

CNET News reported that internet web surfers frustrated by government censorship in search engines are increasingly turning to a little-known Internet browser with a big following, Maxthon.

Eli Lake, The New York Sun reported on the discovery of more than 500 chemical weapons shells in Iraq has heightened concerns at the Pentagon that terrorists in that country could use the old munitions against American soldiers.

Rooz Online published several statements by Iranian leaders that Iran is attempting to buy time in not having responded to the Perm-5 nuclear proposal.

Louis J. Freeh (former FBI Director), The Wall Street Journal reminds us of the evidence gathered that Iran was responsible for the Khobar Tower bombing in Saudi Arabia that killed 19 and the Clinton administration's pitiful response.