Hamas had months, if not years, to plan for the last Gaza war. Yet the terrorist group was phenomenally unsuccessful in the field. It gained a huge propaganda victory, as we wrote about on Friday. But it failed to kill many Israeli soldiers.

Before the war, reports stated that Hamas had 15,000 men at its disposal, and that they had anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles. Reports now indicate that Israel encountered a much smaller fighting force than had been advertised. Were Hamas radicals lying before? Were reports of Hamas’s capabilities overblown?

Perhaps. There is, however, a more chilling and more likely explanation: that Hamas, under orders from Iran, simply chose not to fight this battle.

“It is very dangerous for the Israel Defense Forces to believe it won the war when there was no war,” reported Ha’aretz this weekend. In an article titled “The war that wasn’t,” it wrote (note: this article apparently has been altered significantly since it was first posted, though Google still remembers the following text):

The expressions of satisfaction and praise for the war’s outcome voiced by the army’s top brass may lead the idf to draw the wrong conclusions. Contrary to the image portrayed by reports in the Israeli media—asserting that the idf’s performance in the war was near-perfect and that the army adopted the lessons from the Second Lebanon War—in reality, not a single battle was fought during the 22 days of fighting.The Hamas fighters did not even try to stop the idf soldiers who entered the Strip, opting to withdraw without a fight. The challenge the soldiers were faced with in their advance on Gaza City was not—as senior command had said prior to the operation—hand-to-hand combat with determined fighters, armed to the teeth and willing to die, but the need to find booby traps and explosives, and occasionally to neutralize individual snipers as well. This is not war. It is not even a real battle. …True, the soldiers were better equipped, the commanders were in the field and not stuck behind plasma screens, and the intelligence was a lot better than in 2006. But all this does not alter the fact that what happened in the Strip was essentially a military operation characterized by advancing forces in hostile territory, densely populated by civilians, without facing a military force.

According to intelligence agency Stratfor, Iran made it very clear to Hezbollah that it was not to get involved in any of the fighting. After missiles were launched from Lebanon in Israel, Hezbollah was quick to deny responsibility. It did not want war with Israel.

Could it be that Iran is simply choosing its battles? Rather than using Hamas and Hezbollah against Israel now, perhaps Tehran told Hezbollah to sit tight and Hamas to wait the war out. Israel focused on destroying Hamas’s rocket-launching capabilities. If Hamas did choose to wait it out, it may well have emerged from the war with its guerrilla force still armed and intact. Iran may well be saving Hamas for later.

Guantanamo Will Close: Yemenis Will Go Home

One of Barack Obama’s first acts as president was to order the closure of Guantanamo. Now, news has emerged that the 94 Gitmo detainees from Yemen will be heading home.

In an interview with America.gov on January 22, U.S. Ambassador to Yemen Stephen Seche revealed the plan regarding the Yemeni detainees (emphasis ours):

“We are going to have to find a way to relocate them at some point. Certainly we would like to be able to bring them back to Yemen and have them integrate themselves back into their own society with their families and make a future for themselves here,” he said. …”Except in the case perhaps of some very hard-core elements, we believe that the majority of these detainees can be put productively into a … reintegration program with the goal over time of enabling them to find a way back into Yemeni society without posing a security risk,” he said.

Yesterday, Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh said, “Now, within 60 to 90 days, 94 Yemeni detainees will be here among us.”

So, who will decide whether these terrorist suspects no longer pose a security risk? Stephen Hayes at the Weekly Standard remarks,

Let’s hope it’s not the Yemeni government—a regime that never quite accepted the “with us or against us” paradigm of George W. Bush’s war on terror and insisted on both. At various times, Yemen has released high-ranking al Qaeda terrorists, including Jamal Ahmed al Badawi, the mastermind of the attack on the USS Cole in October 2000. When they’re not releasing terrorists outright, Yemeni prisons seem subject to a surprising number of “escapes,” such as this one in February of 2006, when al Badawi and 12 other al Qaeda terrorists [escaped].

Hayes also mentions a New York Times story about another man released from Guantanamo who now serves as an al Qaeda leader in Yemen, and who recently appeared in a new al Qaeda video beside another former Guantanamo prisoner.

It will be worth keeping an eye on what happens to these Guantanamo prisoners, and what price America ends up paying for shutting this prison down.

President Will Advance Homosexual Cause

Barack Obama is poised to be the most pro-homosexual president in history. Many of the new administration’s immediate plans to promote the homosexual cause were laid out on the government website—whitehouse.gov—during Obama’s swearing-in ceremony.

The website pledges “Support for the lgbt Community,” the acronym for “lesbian, gay, bisexuals and transgendered” individuals. It says that President Obama will work to create more federal hate-crime laws, expand the role of homosexuals in the military, and broaden the definition of what constitutes workplace discrimination. The new president will also push for “full civil unions that give same-sex couples legal rights and privileges equal to those of married couples.” To do that, the president will repeal the Defense of Marriage Act, which means that homosexuals, bisexuals and transgendered people will be able to adopt children and file joint tax returns.

Other projects we can expect to see include lifting the federal ban on needle exchange, so that illegal drug users can break the law with less risk of contracting communicable diseases. He also wants to distribute more contraceptives throughout the prison system, as well as through the public health system.

The Pope Sends a Message to Jews

In 1988, the Roman Catholic Church excommunicated four traditionalist bishops who had been ordained without the permission of the Vatican. The bishops lead the Society of Saint Pius X (sspx), an ultra-conservative group of about 600,000 that opposes the modernization of Catholic worship and doctrine.

Yesterday, Pope Benedict xvi lifted the excommunication of these four bishops. In a decree, the Vatican said it sought to overcome the “scandal of divisiveness” by reconciling with sspx. The pope’s comfort level with such conservative thinkers is hardly surprising. But what some may be surprised by is the fact that one of these reinstated bishops is a Holocaust denier.

This bishop, British-born Richard Williamson, says he rejects the idea that 6 million Jews died in World War ii, saying he believes the actual number is somewhere between 200,000 and 300,000. He also says, “I believe there were no gas chambers.”

Understandably, Jewish leaders say Williamson’s reinstatement will seriously damage relations with the Catholic Church and could well stoke anti-Semitism that is already rising in Europe. The Guardian reports,

Relations between the Vatican and Jewish groups are already strained by the row over Pope Pius xii, who was pontiff during the second world war, and is being considered by the Vatican for beatification. He is accused by some historians and Jewish leaders of failing to speak out against the Holocaust.Israeli officials recently protested when a senior cardinal said Israel’s offensive in Gaza had turned it into a “big concentration camp.”It is not the first controversy for Benedict. His decision to allow freer use of the old Latin mass, including a Good Friday prayer for the conversion of Jews, caused widespread anger. His reintroduction of the Latin mass earned him criticism from Jewish groups but brought him closer to the Swiss-based Society of Saint Pius x, which opposed many of the changes introduced in the 1960s by the Second Vatican Council, including holding mass in local languages.

It is increasingly clear that the steps toward reconciliation between Jews and Catholics effected by Pope John Paul ii were essentially cosmetic. Biblical prophecy reveals the outcome of this relationship, and Benedict xvi’s willingness to tread on the Jews’ toes, as witnessed by this sequence of decisions, points toward that prophesied end. You can read about it in our booklet Jerusalem in Prophecy.

“The Jihad of Our Era” Opens Shop in D.C.

memri reports that an Islamist news organization called Islamonline.net (iol) has opened an office in the National Press Building in America’s capital.iol was founded and is overseen by Yousef Al-Qaradhawi, a prominent Sunni sheikh. memri writes,

Al-Qaradhawi, who is banned from entering the U.S. and the U.K., is among the top spiritual leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood movement, and serves as a spiritual guide for many other Islamist organizations across the world. He heads the European Council for Fatwa and Research, and is founder and director of the International Union of Muslim Scholars (iums). …Most recently, in his Friday sermon of January 9, 2009, he promoted boycotting U.S. goods, including the Starbucks chain, as well as the UK chain Marks and Spencer, stressing to his audience, “[P]ut the boycott against the nation’s enemies into action. Every riyal you pay turns into a bullet in the heart of your brothers in Gaza and in other Islamic countries.” In the same sermon, he also said, “Oh Allah, take this oppressive, Jewish, Zionist band of people … and kill them, down to the very last one.’”

memri cites one source that calls iol “one of the most-visited Arabic/English Islamic web portals which issue fatwas.”

In a promotional brochure for iol, Sheikh Al-Qaradhawi said of its mission: “This project is neither nationalistic nor one aiming at a grouping or a group of people; it is a project for the entire Islamic community. It is the jihad of our era.”

Britain on the Brink: Only Three Hours From Collapse

The Daily Mail reported yesterday that Britain came within three hours of a “complete banking collapse” last October. City Minister Paul Myners disclosed that, had things gone bad, the UK government would have been forced to nationalize virtually every bank across the whole country.

So much money was fleeing Britain, the Mail says, that “the Bank of England was forced to contact [the Royal Bank of Scotland’s] creditors abroad to persuade them not to withdraw their funds” and “that on Friday, October 10, the country was ‘very close’ to a complete banking collapse after ‘major depositors’ attempted to withdraw their money en masse.”

The Mail on Sunday has been told that the Treasury was preparing for the banks to shut their doors to all customers, terminate electronic transfers and even block hole-in-the-wall cash withdrawals. Only frantic behind-the-scenes efforts averted financial meltdown.

Both Royal Bank of Scotland and hbos were nearing failure. But Lord Myners says that the problems were much more widespread.

“There were two or three hours when things felt very bad, nervous and fragile,” he said. “Major depositors were trying to withdraw—and willing to pay penalties for early withdrawal—from a number of large banks.” … [T]he Bank of England was forced to contact rbs’s creditors in New York and Tokyo to persuade them not to withdraw their funds, but it is not known which other banks faced a run on their reserves.

The steps Britain has taken since to address the problem—putting the nation in even far deeper debt—are only delaying the inevitable. The fundamental economic realities that put Britain so close to the brink are still very real.

Elsewhere on the Web

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad—the man with whom Ehud Olmert would like to forge a peace agreement, and who Nancy Pelosi visited and spoke with in 2007—yesterday congratulated Hamas on its “legendary victory” over Israel in the Gaza war. A Syria-based Hamas source told cbs News that Assad said ” it was the duty of his country to support the resistance and that it would keep doing so until achieving the Palestinian national goals: expelling the occupation and establishing an independent Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital.”

Writing in the Washington Times today, Deroy Murdock hopes that having a well-groomed, well-educated black man as president might undermine, and even somewhat eliminate, the ghetto culture pervading black society. “Will Barack Obama’s erudition and elegance finally eclipse the corrosive, often deadly scourge of hip-hop culture and the ghetto mentality that gnaw away like an army of starved termites beneath black America’s floorboards?” he asks.

And Finally …

The Vatican is already on President Obama’s case for his liberal policies. Breitbart reports,

A senior Vatican official on Saturday attacked U.S. President Barack Obama for “arrogance” for overturning a ban on state funding for family-planning groups that carry out or facilitate abortions overseas.It is “the arrogance of someone who believes they are right, in signing a decree which will open the door to abortion and thus to the destruction of human life,” Archbishop Rino Fisichella was quoted as saying by the Corriere della Sera daily.

Division between America and the Vatican is a trend we have watched for years. Expect it to accelerate quickly.