Haifa hit by Iranian made Fajr missiles

Eight Israelis are killed:

For the past five days, Israel has been pounding Lebanon with airstrikes and the guerillas have been launching rockets into northern Israel.

Israeli officials said the guerillas, who had been firing relatively small Katyusha rockets, launched at least four Iranian-made Fajr missile at Haifa. Those missiles, with a range of 45 kilometers, have a far larger warhead than the Katyushas. Maj. Gen. Udi Adam, the head of Israel's northern command, confirmed that Iranian-made missiles were fired at Haifa. It was the first time Hezbollah had used the Fajr missiles in attacking Israel.

Hezbollah guerillas said they hit Haifa, Israel's third-largest city, with Raad-2 and Raad-3 missiles. The attack came after Israeli warplanes bombed a major power station south of Beirut and other targets in Lebanon. But it was certain to invite a far harsher Israeli retaliation.

That while Iran fans the flames of war:

Accusing Israel of adopting the tactics that Hitler had used against the Jews, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad taunted the Israelis - cockily claiming Israel would not dare to strike Tehran, and warning that any attack on Syria would provoke a "crushing response" from the Islamic world.

Jeff Jacoby today in his Boston Globe editorial states that it all boils down to Iran:

Gaza, Hezbollah, Iraq, Al Qaeda: It is all the same fight. ``No one should have any lingering doubts about what's going on in the Middle East," writes Michael Ledeen, an expert on terrorism and Iran. ``It's war, and it now runs from Gaza into Israel, through Lebanon and thence to Iraq via Syria. There are different instruments, ranging from Hamas in Gaza to Hezbollah in Syria and Lebanon and on to the multifaceted `insurgency' in Iraq. But there is a common prime mover, and that is the Iranian mullahcracy, the revolutionary Islamic fascist state that declared war on us 27 years ago and has yet to be held accountable."

Twenty-seven years ago was 1979, the year that Islamist radicals loyal to the Ayatollah Khomeini invaded the US embassy in Tehran and held dozens of American diplomats hostage for the next 444 days. Washington's response was weak and feckless, as it would be time and again in the years that followed. Only after 9/11 did the United States finally acknowledge that it was in a war with militant Islam and began fighting back in earnest. But not against Iran, which continues, unscathed and unrepentant, to stoke the terrorist fires. Its goals, unchanged since Khomeini's day, are to become the dominant power in the Middle East, to create Islamist regimes worldwide, to annihilate Israel, and to kill Americans.

We will never win this war, Ledeen and others argue, until the Iranian theocracy is brought down. That does not have to mean military action. Our aim instead should be to empower Iran's restive population, which is largely pro-Western and moderate. Give them as much support as possible, much as the Reagan administration did for Lech Walesa and Solidarity in Poland -- and let them find the means to reclaim their government for themselves.

The war is on. Iran will be the ultimate battlefield. Let there be no mistake about it.

UPDATE: Cox and Forkum weigh in, with both picture and words:

Robert Tracinski has an excellent editorial at Real Clear Politics about Iran's war: The War Comes to Us.

If, in the face of repeated threats and provocation by an aggressive dictatorship, you refuse to go to war, the war will eventually come to you.

That's the meaning of Iran's de facto declaration of war against Israel--which is, ultimately, a new war Iran is waging against the US. Iran is so desperate for war with the West that it is bringing the war to us, openly and willfully initiating a regional conflict that may soon involve three of Iran's proxies--Hamas, Hezbollah, and Syria--fighting against America's proxy, Israel.

The danger for us is that, in seeking to avoid an unavoidable war with Iran, we have allowed Iran to start the conflict on terms that it believes will be most favorable to it. ...

In my view, the issue is not why Iran chose to begin a shooting war now; the issue is where it chose to do so. Iran is striking at the point where it thinks it is strongest and the West is weakest.

This is an Iranian strong point because it controls a whole network of proxy forces that can attack Israel on two fronts. As for the weakness of the West, the craven Europeans, crushed by leftist self-loathing over their "colonialist" past, seek to apologize for their sins by offering a scapegoat for sacrifice: the Jews who fled Europe to establish the one outpost of Western civilization in the Middle East. As for America, Israel is the one area where we have consistently suspended every virtue of American war policy.

Worse, the Palestinian Authority is the one area where we have tolerated the creation of a new Islamist terrorist regime, on the grounds that it is "democratically elected." As I explained in "The Weapon of Democracy," in TIA's last print issue, this is how the US has been disarmed by the dangerously vague concept of "democracy": if we claim that we are fighting for liberty, and then we equate liberty with "democracy"--then how can we condemn a "democratically elected" terrorist regime?

Thus, predictably, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon split the West, with the European Union taking its usual anti-Israel stance, even as the US vetoed a proposed Security Council resolution condemning Israel.

The Iranian provocation of Israel is also calculated to roll back one of the recent achievements of US foreign policy: the Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon. After Syrian troops were forced to withdraw from Lebanon last year, the advocates of Lebanese independence began calling for the disarmament of Hezbollah, the Shiite militia in Southern Lebanon that has long served as a Syrian ally and proxy. But, using the "weapon of democracy," Hezbollah has long had a large representation in Lebanon's parliament.

Comments

[ahmedinajad]

ISLAM IS THE RELIGION OF ABRAHAM, MOSES, JESUS AND MUHAMMAD (PEACE BE UPON THEM ALL).
THINK ABOUT IT HOW COULD AN ILLITERATE MAN INSPIRE MILLIONS OF PEOPLE AND 1400 YEARS LATER STILL BE HAVING AN EFFECT ON THE WORLD.
WAKE UP FEAR THE GOD OF ISRAEL AND THE UNIVERSE.
AS A WESTENER THE RATE OF ISLAMS INFLUENCE IS SKY ROCKETING ESPECIALLY IN EUROPE. SO STOP BURYING YOUR HEADS IN THE SAND (no pun intended) LIKE OSTRICHES.
STOP DEMONISING THE FUTURE FAITH OF MANKIND.
IF ISLAM IS AN ARAB RELIGION FOUNDED BY AN ARAB IT WOULD NOT HAVE SPREAD FURTHER THAN MECCA OR MEDINA.

Visit the following websites for further information on ISLAM.
http://www.al-sunnah.com/muhammad_in_the_bible.htm
(MUHAMMAD IN THE BIBLE)
http://www.witness-pioneer.org/vil/Books/MB_BQS/default.htm
(Quran and Science)
http://www.harunyahya.com/
http://www.barnabas.net/
http://www.answering-christianity.com/ac.htm
http://www.islamicity.com/
http://www.islamonline.net/english/index.shtml

[Rick]

I'm leaving that last comment up... as evidence for what it is we're facing.

SiteMeter tells us that the commenter lives in SwallowField, England.

There's a lesson in that folks.