Tikun Olam-תקון עולם: Make the World a Better Place

Mossad draws a red card (Getty Images)

In a soccer match, when the referee draws a red card the player is ejected.  In international law enforcement, when Interpol issues a red card you damn well better be in a secure place and never raise your head to see the light of day.  This means that the 27 Mossad agents implicated by Dubai in the al-Mabouh hit will be in cold storage for a long time and unavailable for any future heroics in the international battle of the Jewish people against Islamic terror (that’s meant ironically):

Interpol said it would join an international task force investigating the Dubai assassination of Hamas official Mahmoud al-Mabhouh and issued “red notices” on Monday for 16 more suspects.

The notices…bring to 27 the number of suspects that Interpol is assisting Dubai’s search for connected to the Jan. 19 murder of Mr. Mabhouh…

“The creation of the task force and the publication of the new Red Notices came as investigative information provided by the authorities in Dubai bore out the international links and broad scope of the number of people involved,” Interpol wrote in a statement.

The agency also explained why a first group of 11 suspects were identified before the additional 16. It said that the first 11 were a “core group alleged to have carried out the killing” while the second group of 16 “is believed to have aided and abetted the first team by closely watching, following and reporting Al Mabhouh’s movements from the moment he landed at Dubai airport until his murder.”

The red notices lend additional credibility to the case being assembled here…

By pressing for the international alerts, the Dubai authorities are “throwing the ball in the court of the Western police forces,” says Riad Kahwaji, head of the Institute for Near East and Gulf Military Analysis here…The authorities here are sending the message that they are doing all they can…If nothing happens “it would make the international community look bad,” he says. They are saying, “if you can’t do your job, then don’t blame Dubai.”

In case you thought that the Mossad had exhausted its portion of sheer brazenness in this murder case, rest assured it has not.  Bloomberg reports that the pre-paid debit cards issued fraudulently to the assassins by an Israeli-American company, Payoneer, with potential ties to Israeli intelligence, allowed the assassins who entered the U.S. after the killing to actually work in this country.  Yes, I know it’s hard to believe.  But the Mossad is nothing if not ballsy:

Suspected assassins of a Hamas leader in Dubai “fraudulently” acquired prepaid payroll cards and stole identities to obtain jobs at U.S. companies, according to card-issuer MetaBank. Authorities informed Meta, a unit of publicly traded Meta Financial Group Inc., that the suspects used fake passports to get cards issued by the firm and other banks, according to an e- mailed statement from Meta yesterday.

Paul Woodward asks the excellent question: which companies?  Of course, they would be companies that either would provide cover for their spy identities or allow them to pursue their assassination plans (or both).  I’d love to know though whether any of these companies enjoy, like Payoneer, extraordinarily close ties to Israeli intelligence agencies or those affiliated with the Israel lobby.

Friends of Mossad (perhaps an idea for a new Israeli NGO?) have been busy, eager beavers spreading the good news about how the agency rid the world of a nasty piece of work and should be wished a hearty mazel tov for doing our dirty work for us.  A splendid example of this is the notorious Judy Miller, of faux WMD fame, writing in the Jewish Tabloid (er, Tablet).  She breathlessly recounts in vivid prose, doubtless due either to her overactive imagination or cozy ties with Israeli intelligence and aligned journalists, previous Israeli assassination attempts against al-Mabouh.  The takeaway: Mossad always gets their man.

Note but one example of her love affair with spooks and gooks, no matter whether they’re Scooter Libby or Meir Dagan:

As an Israeli reporter put it to me, al-Mabhouh’s death was a “two-fer”—a man who from Israel’s standpoint deserved killing not only for having murdered Israelis in the past, but also because he was buying weapons from Iran that would be used to kill Israelis in the future.

Did you recoil as I did when you read the word “twofer,” as if you’d just heard a joke in especially bad taste?  But this is Judy Miller, the queen of slavish devotion to every bad habit of every overreaching intelligence agency from DC to Tel Aviv. Further, Judy seeks to deflect blame from the Mossad and turn it back on Dubai.  You see, it wasn’t the fault of the actual assassins, but of Dubai which didn’t stop them before they snuffed their quarry:

Emirati and Hamas officials, both apparently eager to blame the victim rather than themselves for failing to prevent the murder, criticized Mabhouh for having been lax about his own security.

Further weakening the case against Israel, Miller claims that Arab states are actually happy about the killing:

…The operation…has fascinated the world, infuriated Hamas, and been quietly condoned by many Arab states…

In fact, so “quietly condoned” that none seem to have breathed a word about their satisfaction–except to Judy of course.

Judy really should be writing for Rupert Murdoch, one of Israel’s greatest media supporters.  But Rupert has someone already on the job–the managing editor of Australia’s largest daily, Alan Howe, who is Mossad’s biggest fan Down Under.  Howe expects an updated version of Munich any day now featuring those he-men and daring women who offed Mahmoud al-Mabouh:

THE good thing about Israel quite correctly eliminating threats to its existence is that it is undertaken professionally. We seldom lose anyone of worth and there’s normally a ripper film celebrating it.

After the murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics, then prime minister Golda Meir famously said: “Send forth the boys.” It became Operation Wrath of God in which dozens of the organisers of the atrocity were hunted down and killed over two decades…Wrath of God produced Sword of Gideon and Steven Spielberg’s Munich. Perhaps there’ll soon be 9 Minutes in Dubai.

I asked Sol Salbe, who pointed me to this drivel, who this moron was, hoping he’d tell me he was some Australian version of Steven Plaut, a ranting pro-Israel wingnut.  No such luck, as I mention above.  Thanks to Rupert, the Mossad has a huge fan planted in the editor’s chair at Melbourne’s and Australia’s largest daily.  The Mossad has it made in the shade.

David Kimche, Mossad's next target for identity theft?

I did have one rather modest proposal for the Mossad. Since 27 out of what one journalist claimed were 48 agents called kidonim, or trained assassins, have been outed, I can at least offer one new identity that it would be safe for the Mossad to appropriate. Yesterday, one of Israel’s greatest modern civil servants and spies died, David Kimche. He rose in the ranks of the Mossad to become deputy director before moving to the foreign ministry where he became director general (chief of staff).

Kimche was remarkable in his pragmatic, but idiosyncratic views. Most recently, he advocated Israeli negotiations with Hamas. He also signed the 2003 Geneva Initiative. He served during a time when Israeli leaders were known for actually having strategic ideas and ethical principles. Alas, we will not see his like again.

What is convenient for the Mossad is that Kimche was an English Jew and therefore a prime suspect for identity/passport theft. If you’ll note this 1983 photo, he sports glasses and what looks to possbily be a toupee. I’d maintain this would be a perfect disguise for the next Dubai-type assassination. And the crowning good of this proposal is that Kimche won’t be needing his British passport any time soon. Go to it, Mr. Dagan and colleagues.