Iran Can Destroy Israel (Dan 8:4)

  
Khamenei’s Military Aide: Hezbollah Could Destroy Tel Aviv, Haifa
by TheTower.org Staff | 05.22.15 1:01 pm

A military adviser to Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei threatened on state television that Iran, with help from Hezbollah, could destroy Tel Aviv and Haifa, Agence France-Press (AFP) reported today.

The Shiite militia has more than 80,000 rockets ready to fire at Tel Aviv and Haifa, said General Yahya Rahim Safavi, military adviser to Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
“Iran, with the help of Hezbollah and its friends, is capable of destroying Tel Aviv and Haifa in case of military aggression on the part of the Zionists,” he said, quoted on state television.

AFP reported that a senior Israeli intelligence official had predicted an escalation with Hezbollah over the next two years, saying that “[t]he Iranian threat is a tangible threat to Israel,” referring to Hezbollah.

Safavi himself said something similar last year: “Iran’s line of defense against Israel extends to South Lebanon, and our strategic defense depth extends to the Mediterranean and above Israel’s head [i.e., to the region north of Israel].”

The New York Times reported last week that Israeli officials had demonstrated how Hezbollah had set up its terror infrastructure in civilian homes in southern Lebanon, increasing the likelihood that civilians could be harmed in a future conflict with Israel.

Iran is forbidden from arming Hezbollah by United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended the 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel, but the resolution has not been enforced.

Iran Could Destroy Israel But Won’t, God Will (Rev 11:13)

Iran Responds to Liberman: We’ll Destroy Tel Aviv in 10 Minutes

 

After FM calls to block Iranian bomb with strike, Khamenei representative says Iranian rockets can hit Israel in 6 minutes.

By Ari Yashar

First Publish: 2/21/2015, 6:58 PM

A senior figure in the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, Mujtabi Du Al-Nour, threatened on Saturday that Iran will destroy Tel Aviv in ten minutes if Israel “makes a mistake” and strikes the Islamic regime’s nuclear facilities.

Al-Nour, who is a representative of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in a talk with journalists responded to Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman’s (Yisrael Beytenu) comments from Friday, when he said Israel should stop talking and start acting by striking the facilities said to be developing nuclear weapons.

“If the Zionists were sure that they would win in war they would already have initiated it, but they don’t have the strength to do that – so they just threatened,” blustered Al-Nour.

According to the Revolutionary Guards leader, Iran has rockets that can reach the heart of Tel Aviv within six or seven minutes, “even before the rockets of the Zionists reach us.”

The threat, coming as it does during Iran’s efforts to increase its nuclear output capability by 19-fold and feasibly obtain the ability to equip nuclear warheads on the rockets Al-Nour claims the country possesses, gives extra urgency to Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s warnings against a bad nuclear deal.

Netanyahu is posed to address the US Congress on March 3 about the Iranian nuclear problem in a speech that has raised uproar among the left in Israel and the US, given its proximity to March 17 Knesset elections.

The speech is meant to warn against leaving Iran with nuclear capabilities as talks between world powers and Iran approach a March 31 deadline, with Netanyahu warning the deal in its current formation would leave Iran a nuclear threshold state, and a state which has threatened to destroy Israel as Al-Nour reiterated on Saturday.

Climate Leading To The Nuclear War Is Nothing Compared To The Climate Change After (Rev 16)

Climate change brings world closer to ‘doomsday’: scientists

Source: Dawn.com

WASHINGTON: Climate change and the danger of nuclear war pose an ever-growing threat to civilization and are bringing the world closer to doomsday, a group of prominent scientists and Nobel laureates said Thursday.

“It is now three minutes to midnight,” said Kennette Benedict, executive director of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, as the group moved its symbolic “Doomsday Clock” two minutes forward.
The Doomsday Clock was created in 1947. It has changed 18 times since then, ranging from two minutes to midnight in 1953 to 17 minutes before midnight in 1991.

The clock has been at five minutes to midnight since 2012 and the last time it was three minutes to midnight was in 1983, during the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union.
“Today, unchecked climate change and a nuclear arms race resulting from modernization of huge arsenals pose extraordinary and undeniable threats to the continued existence of humanity,” Benedict said.

“And world leaders have failed to act with the speed or on the scale required to protect citizens from potential catastrophe.” The scientists called on people to demand action from their leaders to curb fossil fuel pollution and to stop developing ever more modern nuclear weapons that are endangering the planet.

“We are not saying it is too late to take action, but the window for action is closing rapidly. The world needs to be awakened from its lethargy and start making changes,” Benedict said.

Such actions should cap greenhouse gas emissions at levels sufficient to keep average global temperature from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels, the group said.

“Efforts at reducing global emissions of heat-trapping gases have so far been entirely insufficient,” said Richard Somerville, a member of the Science and Security Board, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and a distinguished professor emeritus and research professor at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California San Diego.

“Unless much greater emissions reductions occur very soon, the countries of the world will have emitted enough carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases by the end of this century to profoundly transform the Earth’s climate,” he said, noting that 2014 was the hottest on record and that the tipping point of ice loss in west Antarctica has been reached, meaning the melt is now unstoppable.

The climate changes that human are driving “will harm millions of people and will threaten many key ecological systems on which civilization relies”, he said.

Nuclear cuts

The scientists also called for dramatically reduced spending on nuclear weapons modernization programs, and a renewed focus on disarmament.

Benedict said that the world has about 16,300 nuclear weapons, which she described as “far too many”.

While the United States and Russia have far fewer weapons today than they did during the Cold War, the disarmament process has “ground to a halt”, said Sharon Squassoni, member, Science and Security Board, Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, and director of the Proliferation Prevention Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Meanwhile, the United States has invested big money in modernizing its nuclear weapons systems, with some $355 billion planned for the next decade, and Russia is also upgrading its nuclear weapons, Squassoni said.

The United Kingdom has halved its nuclear arsenal stockpile since 2010 but continues to support its nuclear submarine program.

France is also building a next generation air-to-ground nuclear missile, while China is developing a new class of ballistic missile submarines, she said.

India has plans to expand its nuclear submarine fleet and Pakistan has started a third plutonium reactor and is developing a new short-range nuclear missile.

“Israel reportedly is also modernizing some of its undeclared nuclear forces and North Korea as we all know continues its nuclear program without any of the restraints previously applied under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty,” she told reporters.

She said that any post-nuclear optimism that arose at the end of Cold War “has essentially evaporated”.

Five Minutes To The Judgment (1 Peter 4:17)

Doomsday clock, related to nuclear disarmament, is too close to midnight

 

By The Republican Editorials
on January 20, 2015 at 1:54 PM

By Ira Helfand

 

This Thursday, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists will update their famous Doomsday Clock. Since 1947 the Bulletin has used the clock to illustrate the severity of the threat of nuclear war. During the worst years of the Cold War in the early 1980’s, the clock stood at 3 minutes to midnight. When the Cold War ended the clock was set back to 17 minutes to midnight. Despite the widespread inattention to the ongoing threat of nuclear war, the experts at the Bulletin feel the danger has grown substantially since that hopeful moment and the clock now stands at 5 minutes to midnight.

It is not clear how the clock will be reset this year.

Incredibly, In the face of these terrible threats, the nuclear weapons states are all planning major upgrades of their nuclear forces.

 

On the one hand, there have been major increases in the risk of nuclear conflict over the past year. But we have also seen the emergence of a powerful, new international movement pressing for nuclear disarmament.

On the negative side, the most ominous development is the rise of tension between Russia and the West over the crisis in Ukraine, best summed up by President Putin’s warning to the world not to mess with Russia because it has a powerful nuclear arsenal. The crisis has underlined the fact that the US and Russia still confront each other with a combined total of more than 14,000 nuclear weapons, more than 1500 of which are on hair trigger alert, able to be launched in less than 15 minutes.

A war involving the current nuclear forces of the US and Russia would kill hundreds of millions of people in the first 30 minutes and cause a full blown nuclear winter. The soot from the fires started by more than a thousand nuclear explosions would blot out the sun dropping temperatures around the globe to Ice Age levels. Ecosystems would collapse, food production would plummet, and the vast majority of the human race would starve.

But even a much smaller war would have catastrophic global consequences, and the possibility of limited nuclear war also grew this past year. There was a significant increase in fighting between India and Pakistan along their tense border in Kashmir. A war between India and Pakistan, involving just 100 small nuclear weapons, would not cause a full nuclear winter, but it would disrupt climate and food production enough to put 2 billion people across the globe at risk of starvation.

Incredibly, In the face of these terrible threats, the nuclear weapons states are all planning major upgrades of their nuclear forces. Here in the US the administration is considering a modernization plan that will cost over 300 billion dollars in the next 10 years, and nearly a trillion dollars over the next three decades.

On the positive side, a dynamic new movement for nuclear disarmament is forming around the world. In December 158 countries gathered in Vienna for the 3rd International Conference on the Humanitarian Impact of Nuclear Weapons and affirmed the need to base nuclear weapons policy on the evolving data about the medical consequences of nuclear war. The Pope, the President of the International Committee of the Red Cross, UN Secretary General Ban Ki Moon, and 44 countries called for a new treaty to ban nuclear weapons. The Austrian government issued a pledge to build support for such a treaty in the New Year, and to lead efforts to pressure the nuclear weapons states to honor their existing commitments to negotiate the elimination of their nuclear arsenals.

A few days later, the Nobel Peace Laureates, meeting at their annual Summit, called on all nations to “commence negotiations on a treaty to ban nuclear weapons at the earliest possible time, and subsequently to conclude the negotiations within two years.”

In the realm of civil society, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons now involves more than 350 organizations around the world working to ban nuclear weapons.

Whatever the Bulletin decides to do about the time on the Doomsday Clock, we are clearly much too close to midnight.

For decades the nuclear weapons states have said that they are wise enough, and their technology perfect enough, for us to trust them with weapons that can destroy the world. When we say that they are wrong we are only stating the obvious: no human is wise enough, no human technology perfect enough to hold this power. The time has come to eliminate these weapons once and for all.

Ira Helfand, M.D., is co-president of International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War. He lives in Northampton and practices at Family Care Medical Center in Springfield.

The Antichrist Returns (Revelation 13)

Iraqi cleric al-Sadr re-emerges

After the fall of Baghdad, 60 Minutes introduced this powerful cleric to the American public with his first televised interview. 60 Minutes producer Peter Klein remembers

By Peter Klein

As U.S. troops are battling the militant group known as ISIS, one name that has re-emerged is Muqtada al-Sadr, the Shiite leader in Iraq who controls a sizable militia and previously launched two successful insurgencies against U.S.-led forces in the country.

In his Friday prayer last week, Sadr denounced the American-led intervention, and he addressed the United States directly in a press statement, saying: “If you come back, so will we … Like we gave you a taste of the heat of our fire and our might in the past, we will give a taste of the scourge of this decision, which will be the cause of your regrets and regression.”

Sadr also alleges that the CIA is responsible for the creation of ISIS, a conspiracy theory that seems to be gaining traction on the streets of Iraq.

As we discovered a decade ago, it’s the streets where Sadr wields the most power. Shortly after the fall of Baghdad, 60 Minutes introduced this influential young cleric to the American public with his first televised interview.

In the summer of 2003, Bob Simon, associate producer Trisha Sorrells Doyle and I were asked to go to Iraq to find a story about the Shiites – since back then few Americans knew much about the different sects of Islam, which have been in power struggles amongst themselves for centuries.

We were initially asked to profile a young man named Hussein Khomeini, whose grandfather, the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran, had famously called America the “Great Satan.” The young Khomeini had broken with the radical views of his family and the Iranian regime, and came out in favor of the United States, since it freed Shiites from decades of oppression under Saddam.

It seemed like a great story, but as often happens, the story was more complex than it seemed. Despite his Iranian lineage – or perhaps because of it – Hussein Khomeini had little credibility in neighboring Iraq.

We did, however, hear about another young cleric with an equally impressive family line. His name was Muqtada al-Sadr, and while the 29-year-old was still quite young to be influential, he commanded the respect of several million Iraqis because his father had been the Grand Ayatollah of Iraq, until Saddam Hussein had him assassinated in 1999.

We decided to go meet Sadr, so we traveled to the holy Shiite city Najaf, where the young man had a small mosque. Trisha dressed in a full burka out of respect for the orthodox customs of the holy Shiite city, but she was still not allowed into the building – no women were allowed in the mosque, and they certainly weren’t allowed to meet the holy leader.

Sadr led Bob and me into a humble prayer room with no chairs and empty walls. This is a filming challenge, to say the least – a drab setting with nothing interesting in background. Fortunately my cameraman Derek Williams was a veteran of challenging filming environments, having covered every war since Vietnam for CBS News. He and cameraman Rob Fortunato lit the room as best they could, sat Bob and the cleric down on the ground, cross-legged, and framed just their faces against the stark background, resulting in the classic 60 Minutes headshot.

Sadr had a scraggly beard that did little to hide his youth, but the commanding black turban made him seem a weighty contender. A black turban means the wearer is believed to come from the bloodline of the prophet Mohammed, and it is a sign of religious royalty. At the time, eight months before the first Shiite insurgency, few people knew Sadr was quietly amassing an insurgency army.

We were the first Westerners he invited into his mosque, and Sadr had a clear message for the U.S.: “The little serpent has left and the great serpent has come.” Bob leaned in and asked: “The big serpent was Saddam Hussein, and the Americans are the small serpents?” Sadr shook his head, gave a wry grin and explained: “It is the opposite, my friend.” Bob’s eyes lit up in realization, and he shot his classic half-smirk as he understood what Sadr meant: “The Americans are the big serpents. The Americans got rid of your enemy, Saddam Hussein. Isn’t the enemy of your enemy your friend?”

Sadr went on to explain that it was not the United States, but the “grace of God” that got rid of Saddam. Bob couldn’t help himself – he prodded the young man further: “If getting rid of Saddam was a favor of God, why was it that God waited until the Americans came in to do the job?” Sadr handled the 60 Minutes grilling with aplomb: “All praises to Allah. He works in mysterious ways.”

This opening exchange of our interview ended up being widely quoted and featured on radio and television programs around the world – but this memorable exchange almost never made air, due to a linguistic dispute. Our soundman Mark Wilson had rigged up a system for simultaneous translation, so the Arabic field translator could hear the interview from another room, and his translation was fed to Bob and me through earpieces. After the translator spoke into our earpieces “The little serpent has left and the great serpent has come,” Bob continued with “serpent” in his follow ups.

Our policy at 60 Minutes is to do an independent second translation after the interview and a respected Arabic linguist we brought in said the translator in the field got it wrong – Sadr used the word “shaitan,” which he said means devil, not serpent. This was a real problem since Bob’s responses all referred to serpent, not devil. After consulting with several other language specialists, and a stack of Arabic-English dictionaries, we concluded that the most common translation of “shaitan” was devil, but many sources offered serpent as an alternative translation.

The field translator stuck by his translation, claiming this was the nuanced implication Sadr had meant. We finally clarified with Sadr’s handlers if serpent was a reasonable translation, and they agreed. Thinking back on that day in Najaf, what strikes me most was the moment after the spirited interview, when Sadr excused himself and escorted Bob and me into the courtyard. It was high noon and streams of bright sun shone down, making a pattern obscured by metalwork at the top of the three-story building. The wood double-doors swung open and more than a hundred men in white thobes, those full-body gowns, poured into the room. They encircled us, chanting, “Na’am, na’am, Muqtada!” Yes, yes, Muqtada. It was clear from that moment the power this one man had. What was unclear then – and to some extent remains unclear – was how he plans to wield it.

Additional reporting by Ali Rawaf of 60 Minutes.
“Muqtada al-Sadr,” produced by Peter Klein and reported by Bob Simon, aired on the 60 Minutes broadcast on May 30, 2004.