Tension? What Tension?!

"[Iran will not negotiate with the United States.] Neither we, nor them [sic] is seeking war. They know that it is not to their benefit."
"Achieving 20 percent enrichment is the most difficult part. The next steps are easier than this step." 2019
"Should the Iranian nation beg for the right of exploitation of nuclear energy from the bullying world powers until they accept that the nation has a nuclear right?... No. This is not the way of a free and independent nation... Rights cannot be achieved by entreating. If you supplicate, withdraw and show flexibility, arrogant powers will make their threat more serious." 2007 
"Today, America poses a threat to peace and security in the world. Therefore, the slogan 'Death to America' is no longer used only by our people. Today, you see throughout the world people setting fire to the effigy of the American president and chanting the slogan 'Death to America'. This is because of the American regime's exaggerated demands, its arrogance, its vanity, and its desire to control, and because it is a pawn in the hands of the Zionists." 2006
"Israel Is A Hideous Entity In the Middle East Which Will Undoubtedly Be Annihilated." 2010
"There are documents showing close collaboration of the Zionists with the Nazi Germany, and exaggerated numbers relating to the Jewish holocaust were fabricated to solicit sympathy of the world public opinion, lay the ground for the occupation of Palestine and to justify the atrocities of the Zionists. There is even evidence on hand that a large number of non-Jewish hooligans and thugs of Eastern Europe were forced to migrate to Palestine as Jews. The purpose was to install in the heart of the Islamic world an anti-Islamic state under the guise of supporting the victims of racism and to create a rift between the East and the West of the Islamic world after 1400 years of unity between those two parts." 2001
"Iran's stance has always been clear on this ugly phenomenon [Israel]. We have repeatedly said that this cancerous tumor of a state should be removed from the region… No one will allow a bunch of thugs, lechers and outcasts from London, America and Moscow to rule over the Palestinians." 2000
Grand Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Islamic Republic of Iran

Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei waves his hand, as he delivers a speech on the first day of Persian New Year, also known as Nowruz in Mashhad, northeast of Tehran, Iran March 21, 2019. Khamenei.ir/Handout via REUTERS

"Olmert hadn't asked for a green light and I hadn't given one. He had done what he believed was necessary to protect Israel."
President George W. Bush, 2008

"Our stance against Israel is the same stance we have always taken. #Israel is a malignant cancerous tumor in the West Asian region that has to be removed and eradicated; it is possible and it will happen. 7/31/91#GreatReturnMarch."
Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Seyed Ali Khamenei  2018

Iran has been acting out again. Its leader states "no one is seeking war", while he warns in the next breath that the Islamic Republic will easily enrich uranium to weapons-grade quality, even as tensions rise. All non-essential non-emergency U.S. government staff has been alerted they must leave Iraq immediately. Houthi rebels in Yemen launched a drone strike on a critical oil pipeline in Saudi Arabia at the behest of the Republic, while Hezbollah is thought to be responsible for sabotaging oil tankers off the coast of the United Arab Emirates.

A US Air Force B-52H Stratofortress aircraft assigned to the 20th Expeditionary Bomb Squadron takes off from Al Udeid Air Base, Qatar, May 12, 2019. (Staff Sgt. Ashley Gardner, US Air Force via AP)

An aircraft carrier strike group and B-52 bombers were dispatched by Washington into the region even as Khamenei affirms yet again that he has no intention of conducting any negotiations with the United States, since such efforts as diplomacy represent "poison". If no new nuclear deal arises to take the place of the one that the U.S. has pulled out of, threatens Tehran, they are poised to enrich uranium beyond the level the deal permits, within a period of four days' the 20 percent threshold for weapons-grade uranium.

"An aircraft carrier that has at least 40 to 50 planes on it and 6,000 forces gathered within it was a serious threat for us in the past but now it is a target and the threats have switched to opportunities."
"If [the Americans] make a move, we will hit them in the head."Amir Ali Hajizadeh, commander, Aerospace Division, Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

In this Thursday, May 9, 2019 photo released by the US Navy, the Nimitz-class aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln transits the Suez Canal in Egypt. (Mass Communication Specialist Seaman Dan Snow, US Navy via AP)

The step following that, warns Khamenei is 'easy', the production of nuclear arms, and the fitting of a nuclear tip to those ballistic missiles the Republic has been busy perfecting for range and accuracy, recalling the sneering promise that one well-aimed ICBM would wipe Israel off the face of the Middle East. Israel takes these statements as seriously as they are meant to be received. It, after all, as the junior Satan, is within easy reach of Iran's missile trajectory, whereas its reach to the U.S. coast is a trifle more demanding.

But Israel also has experience in demolishing the nuclear plans of its geographic-co-located enemies, implacable in their determination to exterminate the Jewish state. Syria's nuclear reactor which its collaboration with North Korea made possible at Deir al-Zour was months from activation, in 2007, recognized as an imminent threat to Israel's existence in its very backyard, prompting then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak to authorize a destructive attack decommissioning the reactor before it could be activated, targeting it with Israeli F-15 and F-16 fighter jets.

A like fate awaited Iraq's nuclear reactor, earlier in 1981. Israel has a track record of defending itself against impossible odds. It is the only nation on Earth to have destroyed two nations' nuclear reactors with precision strikes and the use of specific military force in the face of an existential threat. The country recognizes that if one of its enemies demonstrates the potential to use a nuclear weapon against it, it must act in its own defence for no one else ever will. Now, in facing that same threat from Iran, Israel fully understands the added complexity of Iran's underground facilities protected from conventional air strikes.

In this September 24, 2017 file photo, surface-to-surface missiles and a portrait of the Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei are displayed by the Revolutionary Guard. (AP Photo/Vahid Salemi)

Even so, there is confidence within the Israeli military that the Israeli air force is capable of causing sufficient damage to those threatening facilities built into the side of a mountain as well as the others built with massively credible reinforcement to withstand conventional air strikes, to enable an Israeli strike force to visit critical disabling damage to the nuclear program the Republic is so proud of achieving representing a lethal threat to the entire Arab community of Sunni nations by Shi'ite Iran.

The U.S. has the time and the distance in its favour to withhold taking pre-emptive strikes against a hostile, theistic terror-state, but Israel does not have that luxury, vulnerable as it is to a surprise attack from a near-abroad enemy state which has openly boasted time and again of its intentions to destroy the "Zionist entity". Iran plans to "eradicate" Israel in its entirety in keeping with its Islamist ideology.

Israel plans to destroy the lethal components of destructive capacity; a world of difference from two different world orders.

A view of the nuclear enrichment plant of Natanz in central Iran. Photograph: EPA

Too Much Hate In The Country

"We are a Jewish nation that will stand tall. We will not let anyone take us down. Terrorism like this will not take us down."
"[I saw] a young man standing with a rifle, pointing right at me. I couldn’t see his eyes. I couldn’t see his soul. [He raised his hands to protect himself and lost one of his fingers in the shooting.] Miraculously the gun jammed."
"[Lori Kaye was a] pioneering, founding member [of the congregation]. Lori took the bullet for all of us. She didn’t deserve to die."
Congregation rabbi Yisroel Goldstein

"I thought I heard shots, but I thought maybe it was a car. Then I heard it again, and I heard people screaming. I started to run outside and my wife yelled at me to call the cops instead."
"This kind of thing is getting too common. There's too much hate in the country right now."
Jake Padilla, Poway resident

Rabbi Yisroel Goldstein, center, arrives for a news conference at the Chabad of Poway synagogue, Sunday, April 28, 2019, in Poway, Calif. A man opened fire Saturday inside the synagogue near San Diego as worshippers celebrated the last day of a major Jewish holiday. (AP Photo/Denis Poroy)

"We completely deplore what he [synagogue attacker John Earnest, a church congregant] did. It is not part of our beliefs, our practices, our teachings in any way."
"Our hearts, our prayers, our tears go out to the victims. To all those wonderful neighbors at the synagogue, we pray for them."
"We believe in lifting high the love of Christ to all people -- men, women, old and young from every tribe and denomination. This is a complete surprise. He was quiet, kept to himself, sweet guy. We had no idea. This a surprise to all of us."
Zach Keele, pastor, Escondido Orthodox Presbyterian Church

How sweet this 19-year old man is can be disputed. He was inspired, it seems, by a manifesto posted on the online message board Schan that the gunman in the mosque attack n Christchurch, New Zealand had posted. Leading John Earnest to post his own anti-Semitic screed on the same site before his armed attack on the Chabad of Poway synagogue yesterday. The messages he received as a lifelong congregant of the Escondido Orthodox Presbyterian Church of equality and love evidently made less of an impact on his belief system than did that of a brief encounter with a message posted by a pre-massacre psychopath.

The concluding day of Passover was the day chosen for John Earnest to display his rejection of the message of love in favour of a more exciting message of hatred. He had evidently practised by setting fire to a mosque in Escondido, California a month before. Two men did their utmost to stop the carnage at the synagogue, one a new member of the Chabad congregation, an off-duty Border Patrol agent Jonathan Morales, as well as former soldier Oscar Stewart, who attempted to tackle the gunman when his gun jammed.

Mr. Morales was enjoined by the Rabbi to bring a weapon with him when he decided to join the congregation for Passover, to celebrate his newly-discovered Jewish roots, taking him from El Centro California to Poway. "We never know when we will need it" -- the protection -- he advised Mr. Morales presciently. As for 51-year-od Oscar Stewart, the San Diego County Sheriff's Department had praise for his intervention, when he rushed toward the synagogue after hearing gunfire, to confront the attacker, and deterred his intention to leave.

This was the point at which an off-duty Border Patrol Agent came on the scene, firing at the attacker's vehicle as it drove off. The gunman then called the California Highway Patrol with his location in Rancho Bernardo on Interstate 15 where a police officer en route to the synagogue, saw the gunman as he pulled over, exited his vehicle and surrendered to the police officer, his rifle sitting on the front passenger seat of his car. Had his AR-15-type weapon not malfunctioned there would have been more dead than 60-year-old Lori Kaye who had tried to shield Rabbi Goldstein.

There was no official guard stationed at the synagogue, with around a hundred people at the Passover service. When he entered, the gunman shouted that Jews were ruining the world. A young Israeli girl of 8 was wounded as well as a young man and the rabbi. Rabbi Goldstein had attempted to reason with the attacker before being shot in the hand. In the event, Lori Kaye's husband was also at the synagogue for the end-of-Passover service. A physician, he began tending to the wounded. And when he reached her, to attempt CPR, realizing it was his wife, he fainted.

"Apparently, God was looking after us because we got there a little later than normal."
"As we were getting out of the car, we heard gunshots. I thought maybe someone was stepping on those little plastic bubbles."
"She [Lori Kaye] can't do enough for people around her. If you are sick, she brings you food. She's a wonderful, wonderful person."
Nancy Levanoni, 80, Chabad congregant

A vigil for the victims of the Chabad of Poway shooting.

Sandy Huffaker/AFP/Getty Images

Ramadan's Killing Fields

"They opened fire randomly on all of its passengers. Many children are among the dead."
"We are trying to calm them down. A girl has lost her parents and aunt. Another child, in front of me now, holds his mother's hand bag and doesn't know yet that she is dead."
Mikhail Ayoub,  Coptic church official

"It was a horrible scene, the heads of some people were destroyed and their brains were out."
"Others were lying dead inside and outside the bus, on the side of the road and under the bus."
Nabil Kamel Abdel Shahid, bus owner

The Egyptian Christians were killed on a desert road leading to a monastery Credit: Minya Governorate Media office via AP

"What you've seen today will not go unpunished. An extremely painful strike has been dealt to the bases."
"Egypt will never hesitate to strike terror bases anywhere."
Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah El-Sissi

The ten million Egyptian Christian Copts in a nation of 90 million, long predated Islam. There has always been a uneasy truce between the Arab Muslim Middle East and its minority Christians, and various levels of persecution by the majority Muslims from among the orthodox Islamists has always ensured that Christians in the Middle East in general have lived in the Chinese-cursed "interesting times".

Egypt now has in President El-Sissi a conciliator, a true moderate who is also a devout Muslim and even he is discovering that the ember of suspicion and hatred the breathes beneath the surface of Egyptian society is occasionally ignited into paroxysms of deadly violence and is difficult to douse, particularly when his government must fight a rear-guard action against the Muslim Brotherhood.

Islam does not look kindly upon competing religions challenging the primacy of Islam. And Sharia law, drawing from the Koranic precepts, the Sunnas and other sacred writings so often consulted, incite believers to holy jihad in the name of Islam. Christians and Jews are held by Islamists to represent an existence repulsive to Islam, tolerated only on Islamist terms recognizing them as inferior, supplicants who may be permitted to 'buy' protection through Jizya, failing which they may be slaughtered.

And this is precisely what the ten masked gunmen set out to accomplish once again as a symbol that throughout Ramadan, the killing of non-Muslims should be viewed as offering Allah a sacrifice that is most pleasing to the almighty. Twenty-eight souls, in one fell swoop, among them children. The bus was riddled with machine-gun fire along a remote desert road, in a deadly ambush by terrorists belonging to Islamic State riding in three SUVs, to attack the helpless civilians.

Coverage on Egypt’s state-run Nile News TV showing the remains of the bus. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

Since December, four deadly attacks have succeeded in killing Egyptian Copts. Egypt once before sent its military to bomb eastern Libya when Egyptian Copts working in Libya had been targeted for death. This time, once again fighter jets were dispatched to strike an al-Qaeda-linked Islamist militia. Islamic State resulted from a breakaway group that had been part of the al-Qaeda network, going its own way, to proclaim its new identity through naming itself the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant.

Egypt, under President El-Sissi is addressing violent Islamofascism on a number of fronts, the most deadly targeting Egyptian police and its military, established in the Sinai where Salafist Bedouin, members of al-Qaeda, Islamic State and Hamas have all converged with the connivance of the Muslim Brotherhood, to counter and destabilize the government's efforts at containing the terrorists' ambitions.

The Egyptian Copts were embarked on a journey as pilgrims, en route to the St. Samuel the Confessor monastery in Maghagha, Minya some 220 kilometres south of Cairo. In December, 29 people died when an ISIL suicide bomber blew himself up in a Cairo church. On Palm Sunday in April, 45 people wee murdered when a pair of suicide bombings at churches took  place with ISIL claiming credit.

Jihadists' killing campaign of Christians in the Sinai has resulted in Christians fleeing, desperate to escape the fate Islamic State has planned for them. Given the opportunity to save themselves from death, the terrorists demanded of the Christians that they recite Islamic texts in proof of being Muslim, and therefore exempt from the death penalty being meted out. The Christians failed, loyal to their faith, becoming a Ramadan sacrifice.