Uganda will head a new four-nation military force to capture Joseph Kony, the fugitive warlord whose global profile has soared in recent days due to a celebrity-backed Internet campaign to bring him to justice.

Announcing the creation of the regional military force on Friday, Ugandan Defence Minister Crispus Kiyonga said it had been conceived before the web campaign to hunt down Kony and the remnants of his Lord’s Resistance Army took off.

“We are creating a brigade of about 5,000 troops, with the commander provided by Uganda,” Kiyonga told reporters. The Democratic Republic of Congo, Central African Republic and South Sudan would take part in the force, he said.

One hundred US military advisers deployed to Uganda were already helping hunt for Kony, but the task force needed more international support, Kiyonga said.

“We still need more help because these soldiers are moving big distances, most of the time on foot. If we could have airlift capacity it would make things faster,” he said.

A video about Kony posted on YouTube by a California film-maker has been viewed by tens of millions of people, promoted on Twitter with tags that include #Kony2012 and endorsed by the likes of Justin Bieber, George Clooney and Oprah Winfrey.

The 30-minute video has brought unprecedented international attention to Kony, accused of terrorizing northern Uganda for two decades, but it rubbed raw scars when it was screened this week in Lira, a small town haunted by LRA atrocities.

Kony is wanted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes, accused of abducting children to use as fighters and sex slaves and said to have a fondness for hacking off limbs.

Violence has subsided since 2005 and Kony is believed now to command only hundreds of followers, scattered in remote jungle hideouts.

The defense minister said the LRA had been reduced to a force of between 200 and 250 fighters split up into groups of about 10 and 20.

Kiyonga called for international assistance for the task force in the form of technology, equipment and wages for troops.

“Those who can help us should help us so that we move faster, with technology and equipment,” he said. It was not clear when the force would start its operations.

Before his death, Osama bin Laden boldly commanded his network to organize special cells in Afghanistan and Pakistan to attack the aircraft of President Obama and Gen. David H. Petraeus.

“The reason for concentrating on them,” the al-Qaeda leader explained to his top lieutenant, “is that Obama is the head of infidelity and killing him automatically will make [Vice President] Biden take over the presidency. . . . Biden is totally unprepared for that post, which will lead the U.S. into a crisis. As for Petraeus, he is the man of the hour . . . and killing him would alter the war’s path” in Afghanistan.

Administration officials said Friday that the Obama-Petraeus plot was never a serious threat.

The scheme is described in one of the documents taken from bin Laden’s compound by U.S. forces on May 2, the night he was killed. I was given an exclusive look at some of these remarkable documents by a senior administration official. They have been declassified and will be available soon to the public in their original Arabic texts and translations.

The man bin Laden hoped would carry out the attacks on Obama and Petraeus was the Pakistani terrorist Ilyas Kashmiri. “Please ask brother Ilyas to send me the steps he has taken into that work,” bin Laden wrote to his top lieutenant, Atiyah Abd al-Rahman. A month after bin Laden’s death, Kashmiri was killed in a U.S. drone attack.

The plot to target Obama was probably bluster, since al-Qaeda apparently lacked the weapons to shoot down U.S. aircraft. But it’s a chilling reminder that even when he was embattled and in hiding, bin Laden still dreamed of pulling off another spectacular terror attack against the United States.

The terrorist leader urged in a 48-page directive to Atiyah to focus “every effort that could be spent on attacks in America,” instead of operations within Muslim nations. He told Atiyah to “ask the brothers in all regions if they have a brother . . . who can operate in the U.S. [He should be able to] live there, or it should be easy for him to travel there.”

U.S. analysts don’t see evidence that these plots have materialized. “The organization lacks the ability to plan, organize and execute complex, catastrophic attacks, but the threat persists,” says a senior administration analyst who has carefully reviewed the documents.

The bin Laden who emerges from these communications is a terrorist CEO in an isolated compound, brooding that his organization has ruined its reputation by killing too many Muslims in its jihad against America. He writes of the many departed “brothers” who have been lost to U.S. drone attacks. But he’s far from the battlefield himself in his hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where he seems to spend considerable time watching television.

The garbled syntax of bin Laden’s communications may result from their being dictated to several of his wives, according to the U.S. analyst. And his rambling laundry list of recommendations illustrates the problems of communicating with subordinates when it could take several months to receive an answer. The al-Qaeda leader had a “great fear of irrelevance,” the analyst believes.

Because of constant harassment and communications difficulties in Pakistan’s tribal areas, bin Laden encouraged al-Qaeda leaders to leave north and south Waziristan for more distant and remote locations.

Bin Laden had an unlikely managerial focus, for such a notorious terrorist. He discusses the need for “deputy emirs” and “acting emirs” to run regional operations when the local boss is away, and he suggests that emirs should serve two-year terms and write an “annual report to be sent to the central group detailing the local situation.” He allowed a relatively frank exchange with his subordinates, who voiced criticisms about the organization’s errors.

Though open to internal debate, bin Laden and his aides had rigid views about Muslim theology. Atiyah sent his leader a strident letter in June 2009 detailing what he saw as doctrinal errors among other jihadists.

Bin Laden’s biggest concern was al-Qaeda’s media image among Muslims. He worried that it was so tarnished that, in a draft letter probably intended for Atiyah, he argued that the organization should find a new name.

The al-Qaeda brand had become a problem, bin Laden explained, because Obama administration officials “have largely stopped using the phrase ‘the war on terror’ in the context of not wanting to provoke Muslims,” and instead promoted a war against al-Qaeda. The organization’s full name was “Qaeda al-Jihad,” bin Laden noted, but in its shorthand version, “this name reduces the feeling of Muslims that we belong to them.” He proposed 10 alternatives “that would not easily be shortened to a word that does not represent us.” His first recommendation was “Taifat al-tawhid wal-jihad,” or Monotheism and Jihad Group.

Bin Laden ruminated about “mistakes” and “miscalculations” by affiliates in Iraq and elsewhere that had killed Muslims, even in mosques. He told Atiyah to warn every emir, or regional leader, to avoid these “unnecessary civilian casualties,” which were hurting the organization.

“Making these mistakes is a great issue,” he stressed, arguing that spilling “Muslim blood” had resulted in “the alienation of most of the nation [of Islam] from the [Mujaheddin].” Local al-Qaeda leaders should “apologize and be held responsible for what happened.”

Bin Laden also criticized subordinates for linking their operations to local grievances rather than the overarching Muslim cause of Palestine. He chided his affiliate in Yemen for saying an operation was a response to U.S. bombing there. He even scolded the organizers of the spectacular December 2009 suicide attack on the CIA base in Khost, Afghanistan, for describing it as revenge for the killing of Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud. “It was necessary to discuss Palestine first,” lectured bin Laden.

Bin Laden’s focus on attacking the U.S. homeland led to sharp disagreements with his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, who favored easier and more opportunistic attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq, Afghanistan and other areas.

Bin Laden told Atiyah that al-Qaeda’s best chance for establishing an Islamic state was Yemen, which he described as the “launching point” for attacks on the Persian Gulf oil states. “Control of these nations means control of the world,” he wrote. But he worried that the push in Yemen would come too soon, and he advised his colleagues to wait three years, if necessary, before making a decisive move. By fighting too hard in Syria in the early 1980s, he noted, the Muslim Brotherhood “lost a generation of men.”

Bin Laden and his aides hoped for big terrorist operations to commemorate the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11, 2001. They also had elaborate media plans. Adam Gadahn, a U.S.-born media adviser, even discussed in a message to his boss what would be the best television outlets for a bin Laden anniversary video.

“It should be sent for example to ABC, CBS, NBC, and CNN and maybe PBS and VOA. As for Fox News let her die in her anger,” Gadahn wrote. At another point, he said of the networks: “From a professional point of view, they are all on one level — except [Fox News] channel, which falls into the abyss as you know, and lacks objectivity, too.”

What an unintended boost for Fox, which can now boast that it is al-Qaeda’s least favorite network.

Osama bin Laden chided terrorists in his network for not making the Palestinian cause a primary issue.

“It was necessary to discuss Palestine first,” the terrorist leader, assassinated last year in a US operation, said after a December 2009 suicide attack on a CIA base in Afghanistan.

The attackers had instead said the attack was revenge for killing a Pakistani Taliban leader.

That statement and others like it were in a cache of documents made available by US authorities to The Washington Post’s David Ignatius, who included them in a column on Friday.

Bin Laden did not make Palestine an issue until the early 2000s, focusing in  the 1990s on the US presence in Saudi Arabia as his primary reason for targeting Americans. Some analysts have suggested that his decision to emphasize Palestine so was tactical, made in the wake of the attention generated by the Second Intifada; Ignatius’ revelations suggest the terrorist leader had come to attach ideological import to the issue.

The al-Qaida leader also said US President Obama’s decision to abandon the language of his predecessor, George W. Bush, who described a “war on terror,” had damaged the terrorist organization.

He said Obama’s officials “have largely stopped using the phrase ‘the war on terror’ in the context of not wanting to provoke Muslims.”

By naming al-Qaida as the enemy, the Obama administration had diminished its popularity, he said.

Bin Laden’s spokesman, Adam Gadahn, advised him to mark the 10th anniversary of the Sept. 11 2001 attacks with a video statement to US media — but not to the Fox News Channel.

“As for Fox News let her die in her anger,” said the former Adam Pearlman, an American born a Christian, and whose grandfather was Jewish.

The documents found at Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan also indicate that before his death, he directed operatives to assassinate Obama and US Gen. David H. Petraeus.

According to the report, bin Laden explained to his top lieutenant his reasoning for targeting the two.

“Obama is the head of infidelity and killing him automatically will make [Vice President] Biden take over the presidency … Biden is totally unprepared for that post, which will lead the US into a crisis. As for Petraeus, he is the man of the hour… and killing him would alter the war’s path in Afghanistan,” the al-Qaida leader allegedly said.

The Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, Sheikh Abdul Aziz bin Abdullah declared, last Monday, that it is “necessary to destroy all the churches of the region,” Raymond Ibrahim of Jihad Watch reported in an article published in the Middle East Forum, on March 14^th.

“The Sheikh based his proclamation on the famous tradition, or hadith, wherein the prophet of Islam declared on his deathbed that ‘There are not to be two religions in the [Arabian] Peninsula,’ which has always been interpreted to mean that only Islam can be practiced in the region,” Ibrahim explained.

Ibrahim noted the inherent hypocrisy in the Grand Mufti quoting the hadith as reason to destroy churches, whereas, when non-Muslims do so “they are accused of being ‘Islamophobes,’ of intentionally slandering and misrepresenting Islam, of being obstacles on the road to ‘dialogue.”
The Mufti’s proclamation to obliterate Churches was made immediately following his recent calls to silence and suppress dissenting views, namely those of the former columnist Hazma Kashgari, whom he insisted be tried in a religious court for a series of ‘blasphemous’ tweets.

While the Mufti asserted that the “justice system in Sadi Arabia is fair,” he nonetheless went on to say that, “all matters related to justice should be reviewed by Shariah courts as God the Almighty said in the Holy Quran.”

Kashgari immediately apologized for his comments, tweeting: “I have made a mistake, and I hope Allah and all those whom I have offended will forgive me,” before fleeing the country.
Furthermore, Ambassador to the United States Micheal Oren, in an article he published in the Wall Street Journal last Friday, affirmed that Arab discrimination against Christian minorities is becoming an increasingly prevalent phenomenon throughout the Arab world.

“In Egypt, 200,000 Coptic Christians fled their homes last year after beatings and massacres by Muslim extremist mobs,” Oren stated. “Since 2003, 70 Iraqi churches have been burned and nearly a thousand Christians killed in Baghdad alone, causing more than half of this million-member community to flee.”

He went on to state that “[c]onversion to Christianity is a capital offense in Iran, where last month Pastor Yousef Nadarkhani was sentenced to death” and that “Saudi Arabia outlaws private Christian prayer.”

In fact, Oren asserted, the “only place in the Middle East where Christians aren’t endangers but [are] flourishing is Israel.”

The facts seem to speak for themselves. Yet, as Ibrahim notes, “the West, with all its institutions of higher learning, including governmental agencies dealing with cultural and religious questions—is still thoroughly ‘confused’ as to what Islam teaches.”

Jerusalem is of incidental significance to Islam, its importance varying through history according to political circumstances – that was the message scholars delivered Wednesday at a panel discussion in the capital on the city’s significance to Muslim tradition and faith.

The event, titled “Jerusalem: How Important is it to Muslims?” was organized by the Middle East Forum and held at the Menachem Begin Heritage Center.

Daniel Pipes, the founder and director of the Philadelphia-based Middle East Forum, opened the panel by outlining Jerusalem’s centrality to Judaism – it is mentioned in the Bible more than 800 times as well as in prayer services, daily blessings and wedding services.

Since the Temple’s destruction in 70 CE and the subsequent exile of Jews from the Land of Israel, Jerusalem has been the focus of Jewish spiritual longing.

In Islam, Jerusalem plays a far more subordinate role, Pipes said.

“It is not prayed to, not mentioned once in the Koran; there are no events in Muhammad’s life directly connected to it; it is not a capital and it is sometimes even seen as a place rejected by God,” he said.

After emigrating from Mecca to Medina in 622 CE, Muhammad enacted religious laws allowing Muslim men to eat Jewish-prepared food and marry Jewish women, and encouraged them to pray in the direction of Jerusalem.

Pipes said that by 624, once it was clear that the Jews had rejected Muhammad’s claim to prophethood, he changed the direction of prayer to Mecca.

“This set a precedent of Muslims raising or lowering Jerusalem’s importance in accordance with political concerns,” said Pipes, who holds a doctorate in medieval Islamic history from Harvard University and is a visiting fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution.

Jerusalem’s importance in Islam was temporarily heightened by the Umayyads, the caliphs who transferred their seat of power from Mecca to Damascus in 661. To bolster their legitimacy, the Umayyads deemphasized Muslim sites associated with Muhammad and his successors in Mecca and Medina in favor of pre-Islamic holy sites in Syria – an area in which they included Jerusalem, Pipes said.

Muslims believe the Koran was compiled between 610 and Muhammad’s death in 632. The book describes the Islamic prophet’s night journey atop a winged steed to the “farthest mosque” – in Arabic, “al-masjid al-aksa” – but the location of the mosque is not identified.

The Umayyads built the Dome of the Rock on the site of the ruined Jewish Temple in 651, and what is today known as Al-Aksa Mosque in 705. “The Umayyads built a mosque and called it ‘al-masjid al-aksa,’” Pipes said. “Seventy years after Muhammad, the revelation became a mosque.”

When the caliphate passed from the Umayyads to the Baghdad-based Abbasids six years later, Jerusalem again fell into obscurity, Pipes said. The idea of Jerusalem as the third holiest city in Islam came about centuries later in response to the Crusades, he said.

“Jerusalem became important to Islam when someone else wanted it,” said Moshe Sharon, an Islamic history scholar at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and an Arab affairs adviser to prime minister Menachem Begin.

“Jerusalem is not on any major trade routes. Only independent or semi-independent states with biblical cultures have made it a capital: The Jews, Crusaders and British,” Sharon said.

“Jerusalem was never a capital under Islam. When the Muslims came here, they created a new capital – Ramle, not Jerusalem.”

Mordechai Kedar of Bar-Ilan University said Islam has historically viewed itself as superseding or completing all religions that preceded it. To orthodox Muslims, therefore, the revival of Jewish sovereignty in Jerusalem and elsewhere in Israel is first and foremost a theological predicament.

Kedar showed a 2008 interview he gave to Al Jazeera in which he responds to the anchor’s warning against “erasing Jerusalem from the Koran” by saying that the city is not mentioned by name once in the Muslim holy book.

“Jerusalem belongs to the Jews, period,” Kedar says in the clip, which has been viewed over 350,000 times on YouTube.

Wednesday’s discussion was notable for its absence of dissenting voices – all its speakers were Jewish, and all but Pipes live in Israel. Speaking to The Jerusalem Post on the sidelines of the conference, Pipes delivered the same unvarnished message that typified the evening’s remarks.

“I’ve done a fair amount of research on this topic, and I can’t say I’ve encountered anything by Muslims on this subject that is real scholarship,” he said. “I hope one day there will be.”

Israel has struck oil again, this time off the Tel Aviv coast. Developers maintain the find includes 100 million barrels of oil, worth $10 billion.

Modiin Energy and Adira Energy discovered an estimated 128 million barrels of oil and 1.8 trillion cubic feet of gas in their Gabriella and Yitzhak licenses, in shallow water less than 15 miles northwest of Tel Aviv.

Officials called the find “significant” and added, “Surveys conducted in recent months found oil in the target strata. The potential oil reservoir is 128 million barrels of oil, and the contingent reserves are an additional 120 million barrels.”

“Bottom line, there is oil. It’s 100 percent. Secondly, the quantities are commercial,” said Tzachi Sultan, controlling shareholder of Modiin.

The Gabriella license is near shore in shallow water. “At a time of soaring oil prices, this is good news for IDB, Modiin, Adira, said Chaim Gavriella, CEO of the IDB  holding company that owns most of Gabriella’s shares.

The oil was defined as “ high quality” and reportedly can be extracted even easier than the gas.
The amount of oil is estimated to meet Israel’s needs for 18 months, in addition to other energy finds in the Tamar and Leviathan fields off the Haifa coast. Companies developing those fields say there is enough gas and perhaps oil to turn Israel into an exporter.

Sultan said drilling will begin by the end of the year and that it will take approximately five years for the first well to start producing oil.

Adira CEO Jeffrey Walter was ecstatic. “I said that I came to find oil and gas and was laughed at. I was told that there is no oil here. They were wrong,” he told Globes.

The discoveries of oil and gas are expected to provide thousands of new jobs for engineers and others needed to work on infrastucture, and the forecast ability of Israel to be self-sufficient could eventually lead to a large decline in domestic fuel prices and a stronger shekel.

The Knesset’s Education Committee discussed Tuesday the ongoing damage to the Temple Mount caused by Muslims.

The Chairman of the Antiquities Authority, Shuka Dorfman, told the committee that “the Temple Mount is an antiquities site that is not supervised by me like the other antiquities sites are. There are limitations on the supervision. We work in cooperation with the police. We know what goes on there even without being there – I am not pleased with what goes on in the Temple Mount.”

“The authority to approve or prevent [excavation] work [on the Mount] is in our hands and I have received criticism for it. I do not want to criticize, bit prime ministers and ministers know what is going on atop the Temple Mount,” Dorfman said, hinting at Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. 

MK Aryeh Eldad told Arutz Sheva after the committee session that “there is systematic destruction of antiquities organized by the Waqf and the Islamic Movement in order to build the ideological infrastructure for the claim that our Temples never existed. Our prime ministers over the years have surrendered to the Waqf and were willing to accept their rampage on the Temple Mount.”

MK Tzipi Hotovely (Likud), who initiated the discussion, said that “there is a dereliction of Israel’s sovereignty on the Temple Mount. Day after day, another bite is taken out of our sovereignty. I ask that the State Ombudsman’s report regarding the Temple Mount, the most holy site for Judaism, be made public.”

A member of the Public Committee for Prevention of Destruction on the Temple Mount, Yisrael Kaspi, said bluntly: “We blame the Prime Minister. There is criminal negligence, there a state of anarchy, destruction is being carried out and by now it cannot be undone.”

Kaspi said that instructions have been issued forbidding work with tractors atop the Temple Mount and forbidding work under the cover of darkness – yet the damage continues. “I am fuming mad,” he said. He asked the committee to call on the government to supervise and safeguard Israel’s national treasures.

The police representative, Lt. Col. Avi Biton, told the committee that the police supervise the Mount 24 hours a day and have access to all spots on the Mount. At present, he said, there is only one tractor on the Mount that transports equipment from place to place.

“The continued, deliberate and illegal destruction of archeological remains from the Temple Mount with the tacit approval of the Israeli government is an unforgivable crime against the people of Israel and an attempt to eradicate all Jewish connection to our holiest site, “ said Rabbi Chaim Richman, Director of the International Department of The Temple Institute. “This is exactly why the Temple Institute is calling on people worldwide to observe the 2nd of Nissan (March 25th) as International Temple Mount Awareness Day  to highlight and celebrate the centrality of the Temple Mount, the theme of the Holy Temple and its intrinsic connection to the Jewish people” he added. Rabbi Richman is the host of Israel National Radio’s Temple Talk podcast.