Serbia Wishes A Very Happy New Year To The Gaddafi Family

Frosty Arab Winter Forecast For Syria

Weapons and fighters sent to support overthrow of President Bashar al-Assad

Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Monday, November 28, 2011

The same Al-Qaeda terrorists who fought U.S. troops in Iraq and helped NATO overthrow Colonel Gaddafi are now being airlifted into Syria to aid rebels there topple President Bashar al-Assad.

Libya’s transitional ruling authority has agreed to send weapons and fighters over to Syria to help the Free Syrian Army fight government forces.

“There is something being planned to send weapons and even Libyan fighters to Syria,” a Libyan source told the London Telegraph, speaking on condition of anonymity. “There is a military intervention on the way. Within a few weeks you will see.”

In a separate piece, the Telegraph also reports that terrorist commander Abdulhakim Belhadj, now head of the Tripoli Military Council, “met with Free Syrian Army leaders in Istanbul and on the border with Turkey,” after being sent there by Mustafa Abdul Jalil, the interim Libyan president.

A rival Libyan rebel brigade detained Belhadj at Tripoli airport for traveling on a fake passport and threatened to jail him before Jalil stepped in to intervene.

“Members of the Free Syrian Army on the borders of Lebanon and Turkey denied rumours circulating in Tripoli that “hundreds” of Libyans had tried to cross into Syria,” states the article, amidst other reports that Libyans have already been detained trying to infiltrate the country from the Turkish border. More Here

Italian Diplomacy Hits an Islamic Minefield

Tip-toeing through diplomatic niceties

MailOnline

Global diplomacy will miss, if not mourn, Ignazio La Russa, who has just lost his wicket as Italy’s Defence minister.

La Russa was almost as colourful as his prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi. He liked to tease French officials that their president, Nicolas Sarkozy, had a thing about pinching cutlery from summit banquets. 

Les garcons from the Quai d’Orsay never found La Russa’s jests wildly amusing.

On a recent visit to Libya, La Russa told an off-colour joke in front of Tripoli’s new rulers and a few British dignitaries. It concerned a sheikh in a war-torn Arab country who was proceeding down the road with his wives. Unusually, the wives were walking in front of their husband.

The sheikh was upbraided by his friends. ‘You are a bad Muslim,’ said the friends. ‘Holy teaching tells us to keep our wives subordinate and make them walk behind us.’ The sheikh replied: ‘Ah, but the holy Koran was written before the invention of landmines.’

Having told this tale in his nicotine-tarred Italian (it sounds like something out of a Martin Scorsese film), La Russa leaned back with satisfaction, waiting for the guffaws when the interpreters finished their translation.

He waited in vain. The Libyans heard the punchline with the frozen horror of hosts not wishing to betray their discomfort. La Russa’s Italian officials gazed out of the windows, looking faintly sick. The British delegation, I hear, managed (just) to keep straight faces.

Israel speeds up work on airline defense system

Seattle PI

JERUSALEM (AP) — Israel has sped up work on a missile defense system for its commercial airliners because of fears that Palestinian militants in Gaza have obtained anti-aircraft weapons looted from Libya, defense officials said Friday.

All Israeli passenger planes will be fitted with the laser-based system "within months," or about a year ahead of schedule, the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity because they are not allowed to brief journalists.

Israel began developing the system in 2002, after Islamic militants tried to hit an Israeli passenger plane with shoulder-fired missiles outside Mombasa, Kenya. The missiles missed, but the incident pushed Israel to find a way to better protect its commercial airliners.

About 100 planes are being fitted with the system, named C-Music, at a cost of about $135 million. It aims to improve on earlier technology installed on a smaller number of jets flying to destinations known to be home to militant groups or otherwise considered dangerous, especially in Africa and parts of Asia. That device fired flares to lure heat-seeking missiles away from the plane.

The officials said the new system uses lasers to more effectively jam heat-seeking mechanisms and throw missiles off target.

The project was sped up because of fears that weapons looted during the civil war in Libya have been smuggled into the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip, the officials said.

Israel has maintained a tight blockade on the Gaza Strip to prevent weapons smuggling since the militant group Hamas seized control of the territory from its more moderate Palestinian rivals in 2007. But tunnels underneath Gaza's border with Egypt still provide an entry point for smugglers.

During Libya's eight-month civil war, human rights groups and reporters came across a number of weapons depots that were left unguarded and were looted after Moammar Gadhafi's fighters fled.

The United Nations says preventing more weapons from being smuggled out of the country is a top concern but that it will be difficult because of the vast desert nation's porous borders.

In particular, the U.N.'s top envoy to Libya, Ian Martin, has urged authorities there to prevent thousands of shoulder-fired missiles and other weapons purchased by Gadhafi from getting into the hands of armed groups and terrorists.

He said Libya under Gadhafi accumulated the largest known stockpile of shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles of any non-producing country.

Gadhafi was overthrown in August when anti-government rebels took control of the capital, Tripoli. He was captured and died in the hands of rebels on Oct. 20.

Palestinian militants tried to hit an Israeli military helicopter with a shoulder-fired missile this summer while it was pursuing Palestinian gunmen who had crossed from Egypt's Sinai desert into Israel where they killed eight people.

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