Israeli Intelligence Asset Beheaded By Isis

by Barry Chamish

Congratulations USA. You found the perfect pretext to return your troops to the Middle East. Your creation, ISIS, beheaded a second American, Steve Sotloff, and you won’t take it anymore. The problem is Satloff was an Israeli intelligence asset. And that muddies an already murky war.

Israel loves soldiers with foreign passports. We get invited to an unassuming office on a major Tel Aviv avenue where we are asked if we’d like a more interesting service. In my case, I was offered a teaching post in the Philippines. Then I was given a week’s holiday from my army unit where I was followed, my mail was opened and I even got professionally seduced.

It was decided that I was totally unsuited to be a spy. Sotloff was apparently not so fortunate:

Beheaded Journalist Steve Sotloff Was American Oleh to Israel

Sotloff, who grew up in Miami, made aliyah in 2005 and studied foreign relations at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya.

To get to the bottom of the mystery, I have something personal to contribute. In 1979, Michael Oren and I were drafted into the Israeli army on the same day, arrived at the Bakkum Induction Center on the same bus, and became really good buddies in the two days we waited until we were assigned separate units. I ended up a sand-eating drudge and he got the best the army could offer, induction into the Mossad.

Michael looked tall, blond and gentile, so he was given a press card from the Kansas City Star, and toured Middle Eastern capitals as a journalist, not for Kansas, but for Israel. After our service ended, we met and, while I could only describe a bland time in the military, he described his tours of Iraq and Syria, the risks of being discovered, looking down on the Galilee from the Syrian POV, and, I remember this point most clearly, how good the food was in Damascus.

Permit me to add Oren’s bio then compare it to Satloff’s:

Mr. Oren was Israel’s ambassador to the U.S. from 2009 to 2013. He holds the chair in international diplomacy at IDC Herzliya in Israel and is a fellow at the Atlantic Council. His books include “Six Days of War: June 1967 and the Making of the Modern Middle East” and “Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present.”

The intelligence of Israel is taught at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzlia. It relies on its spies for accurate reports. Oren learned his diplomatic skills there and Sotloff was gaining his entry into the foreign affairs world at the IDC, when he was sent on a dangerous assignment into Iraq. His cover was the same hackneyed story as Oren’s. He was a Kansas City Star reporter, while Sotloff was a freelance journalist “who cared about oppressed people,” according to one publicized statement by a friend who mourned his loss.

His CV contained articles in the Jerusalem Post which could have tipped ISIS off, although one insider gives a good hint that maybe not:

Beheaded Journalist Hid His Judaism from ISIS Captors

Journalist Steven Sotloff, beheaded by the ISIS, secretly practiced his Judaism but hid it from his captors, according to a fellow kidnap victim who was among those freed. The ISIS posted a video Tuesday showing the execution of Sotloff, less than two weeks after it distributed a similar video of the beheading of journalist James [.]

However, and why-ever Sotloff was publicly decapitated, perhaps ISIS got lucky, or thinking sinister thoughts, maybe Sotloff was sacrificed, either way his execution was just the issue needed to push a war-weary America back to the front lines of the Middle East.

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