[Pic] Exclusive: Book: Allah’s Bomb – The Islamic Quest for Nuclear Weapons!

Original Post Date: 2006-12-24 Time: 00:00:00  Posted By: Jan

[Here in a world exclusive, directly from Al Venter in England – is your first view of Al Venter’s 300 page book, “Allah’s Bomb – The Islamic Quest for Nuclear Weapons!”

Al told me his publisher had given him only 30 days to write a 300 page book… He managed to do it in 45 days! Wow! Having done my own writing I can appreciate how much work it really was.

Anyhow, here, directly from Al, who is also a consultant to the emminent Jane’s – is the prologue.

I have asked Al to let me know when it hits the stores and is on Amazon.com.

People should not forget that Pakistan is really the First Muslim nuclear power… but they’re rather afraid of the USA – remember the USA threatened to bomb them back into the stone age. But Iran is a whole different kettle of fish… and now, several Islamic nations all want the bomb. Big trouble is coming…

Note below, the fascinating mention of the reaction across the Islamic world to 9/11. Jan]

P R O L O G U E

A book covering as vast and complex a Middle East and Islamic panoply like this one deserves a personal note.

Since I've been to war, literally, with both Arab and Jew, I should start with the 1982 invasion of Lebanon by the Israeli Defense Force, or as we all called it, the IDF. That conflict, which resulted in thousands of deaths, followed a botched assassination attempt on the life of Shlomo Argov, Israel's ambassador in London.

The invasion took Israeli troops all the way to Beirut and me and British cameraman George De'ath with it. In Lebanon we moved about those parts of the country that had been ‘occupied' by the IDF very much as the mood took us, traveling in a car rented at Hertz in Tel Aviv, like we hacks used to do in those days. Sometimes, when the going became a little hairy, we'd attach ourselves to one of the convoys moving long the coast. Other times, in the interior where the Israeli military presence was sparse, we didn't bother.

In a sense we were ’embedded', though we didn't have the customary IDF minder appointed to journalists who worked with the army. Consequently, we were able to come and go just about as we pleased, usually entering Lebanon at the restricted border post at Rosh Haniqra.

Getting into an IDF camp inside the embattled state was another matter: though they knew exactly who we were, there were M-16s pointed at all our heads until we'd passed the final barrier that led inside. These people took no chances: too many lives had already been lost because of slack security.

Once in Beirut, an IDF headquarters was established at Baabda, a not altogether appropriate choice because Lebanon's presidential palace was only a short distance away. The operation itself was codenamed ‘Peace for the Galilee' which we journalists thought hilarious. In a lighter, beer-infused moment, one of the wags declared that whoever back in Jerusalem had thought that one out deserved an award for idiocy. Peace, he declared over drinks at the bar of West Beirut's Commodore Hotel, was as likely to break out in the Levant just then as the prospect of seeing Yasser Arafat riding stark naked on the back of white stallion down Beirut's Corniche.

For all that, these were interesting times. I was in and out of Beirut, both with the Israelis and with militia forces on either side of the Green Line. All of us became targets at some time or another, though the Commodore, tucked away behind an array of taller buildings was spared much of the nightly shelling that we'd listen to from our beds, very much as people in other parts of globe would hear their dogs bark.

While conflict continued, we'd drive down along the coastal highway – or what was left of it – through Tyre and Sidon, sometimes twice a day. I also spent a week onboard an Israeli gunship patrolling the coast for infiltrators. The crew must have numbered about a dozen and the oldest onboard was its captain who couldn't have been more than 22. That's the way this war was fought.

Lebanon's Chouff Mountains were part of it. There I witnessed an impromptu exchange of the remains of former combatants between an IDF unit and a bunch of Druze combatants who didn't take kindly to my camera. The two sides exchanged clusters of bones, most of them gathered together in numbered plastic packages. It was a poignant experience, Druze families of the long-lost gathered together in a pathetic bunch in a nearby mountainside village.

After George left to go home – he always traveled first class and would make a ritual of ordering Beluga caviar and a fine champagne after take-off – subsequent peregrinations took me through to the eastern frontiers of Lebanon with Syria and onto the snow-covered slopes of Mount Hebron with members of the UN NorBatt contingent. Along the way I'd be stopped several times by people who called themselves Pasdaran, the forerunners of today's Hezbollah. Only afterwards was I to discover that Pasdaran is the security wing of Iran's Islamic Republican Guard Corps or, as it is better known, the IRGC.

After the Israelis pulled back into what they called their ‘Exclusion Zone' and Hezbollah's insurgency started in earnest, I went back to South Lebanon many times, often enough to get onto first name terms with Timur Goksel, the three-packs-of-Marlboro-a-day Turkish media officer at the UN base at Naqoura along the coast. I came out each time with mixed feelings.

One lasting impression of these adventures remained fixed in my mind all these years: that was the implacable hatred that the combatants had for each other. The emotion was so tangible you could almost touch it.

I realized only long afterwards that while odium, revulsion even, was as much a part of conflict as the situations that created mindless violence, one also sometimes encounters antipathy. But this war was different. I've covered others – in the Middle East, in parts of Africa and Central America and elsewhere – but never had I found the sentiments of those involved so totally debased.

At the various Israeli military bases where I would sometimes spend a night, we'd discuss the goings on among us: the side bombs, Arafat's Al Fatah, the daily ambushes, sniping, the Christian Falanghists as well as the systematic killing of one group by another that we only afterwards came to regard as ethnic cleansing. That side of things seemed to have become a feature of hostilities between ethnic Arabs and Christians in this largely mountainside enclave hedged in by Syria and Israel.

Jewish soldiers, it seems, took things a step further, probably because they were following examples set by their parents only a generation before: there wasn't a man among them who hadn't lost a relative in those earlier battles. Many of these troops were reservists, quite a few into middle age.

One and all they regarded the enemy that opposed their presence as sub-human. “Like animals” was something I was often to hear.

Being a visiting foreign correspondent, I'd also spend time with groups of Arab fighters who made up the hundred-odd factions then battling for control of an embattled Lebanon of the early 1980s. Moving between the two groups of combatants presented problems, if only because Western journalists are invariably suspected by Third Worlders – even today – of being spooks. It was also a time when it had become fashionable to grab them as hostages. So like the rest of the media contingent in Lebanon at the time, I tended to tread warily.

I'd also discuss the war with some of the Arab irregulars I encountered, at least those who could manage passable English. But these exchanges had limitations because even the mention of word Israel would elicit contempt. To most of these zealots who later became Jihadists, the only word that would do was Palestine. It was made quite clear that it would be in all our interests never if I never forgot that vital minutiae of protocol.

In a sense it was a bit like my more recent visit to Syria. With a small group of passengers on a local flight, we'd come into Damascus from Larnaca in Cyprus. The only problem was that some of the luggage had gone missing. After a good deal of obfuscation from the most bureaucratically hidebound regime in the Middle East, we were able to establish, horror of horrors that the bags had erroneously landed in Israel. And because the word Israel simply does not exist in the Syrian lexicon – like George Orwell's famous 1984, the Jewish Homeland had become an ‘uncountry' – it took a while to sort out that mess.

Looking back over the years, I see now that the real tragedy faced by both sides was that neither even began to consider that those who opposed them were people, ordinary people, very much like themselves. They too had families, mothers, grandparents and others that loved them. Many were married with children. That most fundamental of human traits simply never entered the picture, which in this compassionate day and age is tragic beyond compare.

I heard it on both sides of the front and the language was identical: “They are all barbarians…they must be slaughtered…their bones must left to rot…for the dogs…”

The same theme was constantly reiterated. Which begs the question: when people have such severe views, how does anybody begin to contemplate a settlement? More to the point, could peace ever become a reality in such an emotionally embroiled environment?

That was the eighties. I've been back to Lebanon many times since. In the same week that Princess Diana died in a Parisian car crash I was taken by car to a South Beirut Shi'ite stronghold to meet Ibrahim Moussawi, the spokesman for the Hezbollah guerrilla group. The assignation was certainly not helped by the fact that while in country, I'd been the guest of General Emile Lahoud, then head of the Lebanese armed forces and soon to become its president.

In Moussawi, I found a charming, quiet-spoken Muslim cleric who knew all that he needed to know about me and probably a good deal more, including the fact that only weeks before I'd spent time in an IDF forward base along the Lebanese frontier near Metullah. Asked about Hezbollah's war against the Jewish State, he was almost dismissive: “Just a question of time,” he declared with a smile, “and then there will be no more Israel…only Palestine…”

Since I was on his turf, I couldn't argue. In any event, my brief was a profile of the guerrilla movement for Jane's Defence Weekly, and, as it later turned out, quite a good one. To the chagrin of my Israeli friends, I predicted a withdrawal of the IDF from their exclusion zone a year hence: I was out by about a week.

My single lasting impression of the Moussawi meeting – and others, before and after – was that there can never be peace in the Middle East as long as a Jewish Homeland exists. The fanaticism I encountered- in Lebanese military camps, at Hezbollah strong-points south of Sidon and Tyre and along the hills adjoining the Litani River – where there are enough anti-personnel landmines buried in the shallow soil to start another war – was almost corporeal. There was no let-up to this fanaticism, not for a moment.

Nor are you likely to find many run-of-the-mill Israelis on the streets of Haifa, Tel Aviv or Beersheva who have a kind word to say about their Arab neighbors.

The word intransigence was coined for today's Middle East.

None of it was for effect, or to impress this visiting scribe. I found people in Syria, Egypt, the Sudan and elsewhere in the Islamic world as dedicated to removing the State of Israel off the face of the map as the countermanding will to survive I encountered among Jerusalem's leaders. But what is of real concern is that this new form of holocaust – for that's what it really is, an extermination program – gets the bulk of its inspiration from Iran. Which, essentially, is what this book is all about.

Iran's Supreme Spiritual Guide, Ayatollah Ali Khamene'i has told his people many times that the first objective of the Iranian nation is to reclaim the holy city of Jerusalem for Islam, which is instructive, because after Mecca and Medina, Jerusalem is the third holiest city in the Islamic world. That issue is something that Khamene'i always likes to stress when addressing the Iranian majlis or parliament, usually with his head held high and fists clenched.

It is the same each time: “the country that is called Israel and all the Zionists who live there must be annihilated”. To which members of the majlis, almost as one, will rise from their seats and they'll punch the air in front of them. The call that echoes through this great hall is in unison: “Allah u-aqbar!” – God is Great! We've seen it often enough on network television. Though much of it is grandstanding, what disturbs a lot of people is that these histrionics are a pretty constant theme in today's Tehran. And while these emotions might be condemned by some, we need only to recall events that took place in Europe a few generations earlier.

There, an obscure World War 1 corporal – born in Austria, mark you – displayed the same kind of racial prejudice that we now find prevalent in Tehran, Qom, Shiraz, Isfahan and elsewhere in Iran. In his fervor, this so-called racial purist almost succeeded in ridding much of the continent of the people he hated. While comparisons, as the saying goes, are odious, his abhorrence of the Jews has the same intensity as that displayed by today's Supreme Spiritual leader of Iran and those who follow him.

Yet, closer to home, another dimension has surfaced in recent years, only this one doesn't have an Israeli appendage. Instead, it has to do with the West and is coupled to values held sacred so many peoples of the developed world.

One example will do and it deals with an event that took place in the largest teaching hospital in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Early in the new millennium in one of the operating theaters, a complex procedure was taking place with a handful of Saudi surgeons and other staff gathered around a comatose figure. In an adjacent but distant corner, but still in view of the medical team, was a television set tuned in to CNN. Nobody took any notice of the silent screen: the set was there for those taking a break and the volume was turned down.

Suddenly somebody's attention was drawn to a news flash which was accompanied by images of a tall building in flames. Moments later the screen showed an explosion, followed an aircraft striking the second tower. By now the broadcast had the attention of everybody. Somebody turned up the sound and it didn't take long for those watching to be made aware that this wasn't a film. Nor was it a promo for some forthcoming TV event. What they were looking at was a real time view of one of the historic events of our age.

While there must have been people in operating theaters, offices, workshops and other places around the globe who watched the same scenes with great shock, our learned doctors in Riyadh reacted very differently. As one of the Western nurses present at the time commented – like many other medical personnel she was in Saudi Arabia on contract – it was like something out of a Three Stooges film. In a moment, the patient was totally forgotten while his doctors dropped their instruments, whooped and hugged one another in joy. In unison they offered a momentuous cheer for the Great Allah, after which they danced a jig around the operating table.

This charade apparently went on for some minutes. I never did get to hear whether the medical team eventually got their act together enough to finish the procedure.

There were many such celebrations throughout the Saudi Kingdom that warm September night. In fact, there was jubilation throughout the Islamic world.

Everywhere the word went out, the public was told that the Great Satan had suffered a terrible defeat. Details were only to emerge gradually and with each disclosure there would be more joy, more celebrations and further homage to Allah. It happened in Cairo, in Amman, in Damascus and dozens of Islamic cities, towns and byways up and down North Africa, the Middle East and central Asia.

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