Netanyahu: In fighting Iran, we serve security and peace beyond Mideast

In fighting Iran, Israel “serves the cause of security and peace beyond the Middle East,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Thursday, in his address to the the International Homeland Security Forum in Jerusalem.

“We ask for the support of your governments,” he added, appealing to the 20 Ministers at the conference hosted by Israel’s Minister of Public Security Gilad Erdan.

“After the Iran deal, it took the money and started expanding its empire, trying to put military in Syria, trying to attack Israel – we are of course resisting it,” Netanyahu said, comparing the threat of the Islamic State and that of another branch of militant Shia Islam, led by Iran, which he said is trying to create an empire. The latter, he said, is a “much bigger” threat.

Iran is trying to colonize Syria, as part of its first goal of defeating Israel, Netanyahu said. “It wants to use 80,000 Shia militants in Syria. Syria is 90% Sunni – their goal is to convert the Sunnis. This is the recipe for another civil war… by preventing that we are also helping the security of other countries in the world,” he asserted.

Netanyahu also outlined how Israel is fighting the threat of the Islamic State, saying that Israel has stopped dozens upon dozens of attacks.

The Islamic State group is trying to start a state in Sinai he said, adding that “we are preventing a mass migration and an ISIS state in Sinai…we don’t want another ISIS state”

Netanyahu also discussed the “nightmare” situation created by drones. “All you need is a $50 contraption and 5 kilos of TNT…to hit the White House.”

This he said, has immense consequences. “We have to harness technology against technology. It’s a huge challenge,” the prime minister remarked.

Israel Police Commissioner Roni Alsheich also discussed the changing face of terror in the opening speech of the sessions on Thursday.

“The Israeli Police carries out classic policing and law enforcement operations, but we are also responsible for public safety by law. In the past, the security threats were mainly of wars, conducted by armies within the borders of the state,” he told the audience. “The security burden has gradually shifted to the shoulders of the Israel Police, and today we are unfortunately faced with terrorism that has no political or organizational limits. Terrorists are less vulnerable because they do not occupy a defined territory and they represent a radical ideology making decisions sporadically.”

“Through cyberspace and the knowledge that is available, this process has also created a blurring of the boundaries between crime and terrorism. In our case we are dealing with the phenomenon of ‘lone wolf’, which requires all the police for a rapid response capability at any time and anywhere, no matter what the role,” he continued.

“As a police force that faces numerous complex challenges in the fight against terrorism and law enforcement, we have chosen to place the law-abiding normative citizen at the center of our organizational attention and we always prefer to prevent crime as much as possible and not to fill prisons,” Alsheich said.

“This process is even more demanding for the policeman in the field, since it compels him to take the initiative, to distinguish between a criminal and a normative citizen, all taking into account the differences and cultural characteristics of every population. This reform, called the Trust Reform, was presented in the Stockholm Convention on Criminology, and recently one of Israel’s senior researchers has praised the system that supports it as the most advanced system in evidence-based policing.”