In this issue:

Dubai Hit Calculated To Start New Mideast War

Iran Arrests London-Linked Narcoterrorist

Rothschild Funds Israeli Cultural Warfare Against Palestinians

Dubai Hit Calculated To Start New Mideast War

Feb. 27 (EIRNS)—The Jan. 20 assassination of Hamas official Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in Dubai was calculated to trigger a retaliatory attack against Israel, providing a pretext for an Israeli military attack on Iran, Lyndon LaRouche declared today. "Why else would there have been a cast of dozens, directly implicated, caught en flagrante on security cameras, staging the hit? A clean hit would have involved two people, and would not have caused the month-long international stir. There was a purpose behind this kind of staging, and the purpose was to provoke something much bigger."

To date, Dubai officials have identified at least 26 people as part of the hit team. Hotel and area security cameras captured critical aspects of the operation, and Dubai authorities have accused the Israeli Mossad of the killing. Passports of individuals from England, Ireland, Germany, and France were used by the surveillance and hit team, provoking further international scandal. The security services in the United Arab Emirates, including Dubai, are dominated by "former" British MI6 and MI5 officials, and the British have, according to LaRouche, "been playing this story to the hilt, fueling the very strong likelihood—almost the guarantee—that Hamas will now be obliged to carry out a high-level retaliation."

Today, Dubai security officials announced that they had discovered DNA and fingerprint evidence at the murder scene, and would be confronting Israeli authorities with that evidence.

According to one U.S. Middle East expert, the situation runs parallel to the 2001-02 events following the assassination of Israeli Minister Rehavam Ze'evi, who was gunned down by four assassins from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) in front of a Tel Aviv hotel, in October 2001, in retaliation for the Israeli killing of PFLP leader Abu Ali Mustafa two months earlier. Ultimately, the Ze'evi assassination, and the hunt for his killers, led to the Israeli military invasion and re-occupation of parts of the West Bank.

"Today," LaRouche warned, "the circumstances are similar to the Ze'evi killing, but, at the same time, very different. We are in a far more desperate situation today. At the top, leading factions in the City of London are convinced that their financial system is doomed, and they are prepared to unleash absolute Hell on Earth, out of raw desperation. The same Sykes-Picot dynamic controls the greater Southwest Asia region today, as tightly as it did in the immediate post-World War I period. So, the Dubai assassination of a top Hamas official, conducted in the manner that the hit was carried out, was intended to trigger a retaliatory action, which would then give Israel the justification/pretext for a full-scale military strike on Iran, likely targeting its nuclear facility at Natanz, or some other similar target. If this happens," LaRouche concluded, "it will trigger an all-out regional conflict, that will rapidly spread. We could be weeks away from the triggering of a new dark age."

LaRouche emphasized: "Don't look to Israel for the trigger of this operation. Look to the Venetian-style gamemasters in London. They have the psychological profiles of all the parties. They know how to set off a chain-reaction confrontation. Why did they choose Dubai as the location for the hit? Because the security structures in Dubai are British-run, British-staffed."

A retaliation could even be directed at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, according to one source. Any strong Hamas retaliatory attack against an Israeli target will, in all likelihood, trigger broader war. Certain circles in London are going for genocide: "They are desperate, and they are showing their desperation, with this folly in Dubai," LaRouche warned.

Iran Arrests London-Linked Narcoterrorist

Feb. 23 (EIRNS)—On Feb. 23, Iran announced the arrest of Abdolmalek Rigi, leader of the Jundallah narcoterrorists—a Baluchistan outfit that EIR has repeatedly identified as an opium-trafficking asset of the British Empire faction. The arrest of Abdolmalek Rigi was announced by Iran's chief of intelligence, and Rigi is claiming that he was about to meet with a "high-level American intelligence official" about U.S. plans to use his organization for destabilization inside Iran. The details of how Rigi was arrested remain obscure, with at least three different reports floating around the international news media: that Rigi was detained when Iran intercepted his flight from Dubai to Kyrghyzstan; that he was arrested in Pakistan, and then turned over to Iran; that he was arrested in Dubai and then brought to Iran.

Rigi is known to have travelled in all three places in the past, as part of the Jundallah's drugs- and weapons-trafficking. But what the reports are leaving out concerning the Jundallah are its London connections, through the opium trade out of Afghanistan; the Baluchi tribes spread across all three borders of Pakistan-Afghanistan-Iran.

In May and October 2009, Jundallah carried out two major terrorist operations inside Iran. In May, the target was a mosque in Zahedan, the capital of Sistan Baluchistan province. In October, Jundallah, operating from Pakistan's Baluchistan province bordering Iran, carried out a massive bomb attack on the southeastern Iranian headquarters of the Revolutionary Guard, killing 30 people, including six commanders.

EIR reported in May 2009, that the bombing claimed by Jundallah occurred just days after the leaders of Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan held a summit in Tehran, where they agreed to step up cooperation to combat terrorism and drug trafficking. Earlier in 2009, the three countries set up a joint anti-drug trafficking headquarters in Tehran and conducted several successful joint anti-narcotics operations. The attack also occurred only days after the secretary general of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, Antonio Maria Costa, made an official tour of Iran and Afghanistan and called for the principal anti-drug effort to be stopping the flow of drugs out of Afghanistan.

Rothschild Funds Israeli Cultural Warfare Against Palestinians

Feb. 28 (EIRNS)—At a special meeting of the Israeli Cabinet on Feb. 21, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced a new Heritage Project, and asked the Cabinet members to thank the Rothschild Foundation of Israel for putting up the seed money. Netanyahu said his government would finance the project, where Israeli tourists could follow two roads to 150 refurbished Jewish and Zionist historic sites, thus shaping the idea that Israel was a state for the Jewish people.

No sooner had the Heritage Project been announced than the settlers' movement asked Netanyahu—who readily agreed—to include Hebron's Tomb of the Patriarchs and Rachel's Tomb in the project. Both of these sites are deep in the West Bank territory under semi-autonomous control of the Palestinian Authority; and the Tomb of the Patriarchs is the site where Dr. Baruch Goldstein, an American-born terrorist settler from the Meir Kahane organization, entered a mosque on Feb. 25, 1994, during prayer services, and opened fire, killing 30 Palestinians and wounding 200 others.

On Feb. 24, 2010, Israeli press headlines featured calls for a renewed Intifada from unknown Palestinians facing the prospect of right-wing Zionists descending on the West Bank sites—just as Gen. Ariel Sharon's visit to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem triggered the second Intifada in September 2000. On Feb. 28, East Jerusalem and areas in the West Bank were the sites of heated protests over these Israeli "heritage" claims on the Palestinian Authority lands.