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WHERE ARE YOU?

Posted by Fred Reifenberg, March 01, 2013

where are you

Contact Fred Reifenberg by email at freify@netvision.net.il Go to to see more of his graphic art at
http://www.flickr.com/photos/from_by_fred/
http://nowthese.blogspot.co.il
http://freifenberg-newblog.blogspot.com/
http://abstractsfromfred-fred343.blogspot.com/
http://reifyreadying.blogspot.com/


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MUD SLINGING AT JEWISH PIONEERS ACCUSING US OF THE ARABS' CRIMES. MANY CASES ALONG THE YEARS

Posted by Sergio HaDar Tezza, March 01, 2013

The article below was written by David Lev who is founder & editor of Aliyah Magazine, dedicated to attracting Jews to live in Israel. He has won a leading writing award for a competition hosted by A7. Email him at http://www.aliyahmagazine.com. This article appeared February 28, 2013 in Arutz Sheva and is archived at
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspSSx/165

Samaria residents slammed leftist groups after it turned out that Arabs were responsible for a 'price tag' attack blamed on Jews.

burnt car

Members of the Samaria Residents Council slammed leftist groups Thursday after police said that what had been thought to be a "price tag" action by Jewish residents of Esh Kodesh in the Binyamin region turned out to be a dispute between Arabs. It was the Arabs who set fire to six vehicles in the village of Korsa near Shechem last week, deliberately blaming the Jews for their activities.

Among the groups with egg on their face in the wake of the police findings is the "Rabbis for Human Rights" organization, which in the wake of the claims by Arabs that they had been attacked by Jews, issued a harsh statement condemning Esh Kodesh residents for their "hateful" activities.

Police said that the "evidence" supplied by Arabs that Jews had undertaken the attack — an Israeli identity card left at the scene — was fabricated. The ID card belonged to a soldier who, on the night of the attack, was stationed far from the Arab village. He had apparently lost the ID card, with Arabs finding it and holding onto it, apparently for an event just like the one that occurred in the village last week.

In a statement, the Council said that "today it is clear that this incident was, beyond the shadow of a doubt, choreographed by the Arabs, with the support and assistance of leftist groups who continue to support terror, increasing tensions between Jews and Arabs by encouraging these blood libels against Jewish residents of Samaria."

According to Council head Benny Katzover, "hundreds of Arab rioters last week attempted to invade Esh Kodesh, after leftist groups said that they carried out a 'price tag' attack and burned the cars." Several residents were injured in an ensuing fight.

The Council also expressed shock that it took police a week to announce the truth about the incident. "It would be a good idea for police to deal with issues like this immediately, due to the high levels of incitement and potential for violence caused by the claims and actions of fifth column leftist groups."

Sergio HaDar Tezza can be reached at Hadar-Israel@verizon.net


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BENNETT VINDICATED AS COALITION CRAFTING ENTERS OVERTIME

Posted by Arutz Sheva, March 01, 2013

This is by Gil Ronen, a writer for Arutz-Sheva (www.IsraelNationalNews.com).

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu will meet President Shimon Peres Saturday evening and ask him for a two-week extension in which to put together a coalition of parties and form a new government.

Peres will grant Netanyahu the two-week extension.

If Netanyahu fails to cobble together a coalition within a fortnight, however, he will be in serious trouble. Peres could decide to task someone else with creating a coalition, or new elections could be called.

We are, therefore, entering the "money time" of coalition crafting.

The reports in two major news sources Friday that Netanyahu's representatives offered Yesh Atid a policy of destroying Jewish communities in return for their entry into the coalition without Bayit Yehudi, vindicate Bayit Yehudi's decision to enter into a tactical alliance with Yesh Atid. Together with reports that Likud made contradictory overtures to Bayit Yehudi, they portray Netanyahu in an unflattering light and are no cause for pride, for supporters of Likud / Yisrael Beytenu.

Bayit Yehudi leader Naftali Bennett wrote on his Facebook page Friday: "While the Likud was explaining to us how important it is to abandon the connection with Lapid in order to strengthen the settlement enterprise, it was explaining to Lapid how important it is to abandon Bayit Yehudi in order to tear down the settlement enterprise."

If readers sense some bitterness and disappointment between the lines, their senses are probably not misleading them.

Likud's offers to Yesh Atid, if they indeed were made, vindicate Bennett's tactical move, to enter into a gentlemen's agreement with Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid. The two promised each other not to enter the coalition without each other.

Yesh Atid is a center-left, largely secularist party, which placed the matter of hareidi men's enlistment to the military as a central plank in its agenda. The party contains a strong ultra-leftist contingent, but its leader, Lapid, is less of an ideologue and more mainstream than his more radical MKs.

The hareidi enlistment issue is a favorite wedge issue of the Israeli left wing, because it splits the nationalist camp between hareidim and non-hareidim. The issue has, for decades, been seen as largely unsolvable, and governments have preferred to manage it rather than confront it head-on.

What Naftali Bennett did was to make Lapid an offer he couldn't refuse. He would enable him to square the circle and force a true change as regards hareidi enlistment. For this, Bennett would be willing to weather the storm of accusations that he was "selling out" his hareidi brethren and joining a secularist to do so.

In return, what Bennett has apparently received is a guarantee that the next coalition will not only include Bayit Yehudi but will also have to respect Bayit Yehudi's core principles, especially regarding the political and strategic issues that surround the settlement enterprise in Judea and Samaria.

Bennett has been warning for months that Netanyahu is planning a leftist, defeatist government, based upon a coalition with hareidim and leftist parties, including Yesh Atid. Likud's reported overtures to Yesh Atid confirm that he was right. What Bennett appears to have achieved through his pact with Lapid is a realignment of Israeli politics: essentially, the center will stop leaning to the left on Judea and Samaria, while the religious Zionists side with the secular Zionists on key issues regarding the power and privileges of the non-Zionist hareidi stream.

If the Bennett-Lapid pact holds up, this revolution will come close to turning into reality in a fortnight's time.

There is much gnashing of teeth on both sides of the political spectrum, meanwhile. Many in hareidi circles are understandably aghast at the developments. Some nationalists see Lapid as a sell-out just by virtue of the fact that he is letting Yesh Atid into the coalition. They do not trust Lapid and think he will bolt the coalition at the first opportunity, leaving the nationalist bloc splintered, perhaps permanently.

On the left-wing, too, there is much apprehension. Channel 2's Rina Matzliach, whose leftist views are no secret, has incongruously become a great fan of the hareidi-Zionist Tekuma stream within Bayit Yehudi in the last week. She apparently hopes that MK Uri Ariel and other Tekuma MKs will split off from Bennett and prevent the Yesh Atid — Bayit Yehudi plan from being implemented. At this point, however, the pact between Bennett and Lapid appears strong.

Contact Arutz Sheva at news@israelnationalnews.com


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PRESIDENT OBAMA, BEWARE OF BENEVOLENT ETHNOCENTRISM

Posted by Yorum Ettinger, March 01, 2013

On the eve of President Obama's visit to the Middle East, he should examine the damage, to vital US economic and national security interests, caused by benevolent ethnocentrism.

Ethnocentrism — judging other cultures by one's own standards — is morally wrong, especially when motivated by superiority complex or racism.

Benevolent ethnocentrism — the assumption that other cultures are ready to embrace one's own standards and worldview - is morally flawed and strategically self-destructive. This reflects a superficial view of global complexity and undermines one's posture of deterrence in a world of intensifying disorder, and increasing hostility towards Western values, in spite of President Obama's outreach campaign since 2009.

The tectonic history of international relations, from time immemorial. attests that Free World leaders — who represent a global minority - should avoid the delusion that most non-democratic societies would depart from their centuries-old values, preferring engagement to confrontation, peace over war, tolerance over fanaticism and freedom over oppression, if offered adequate diplomatic and economic incentives.

Free World leaders should not assume that cardinal democratic values such as life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, peaceful coexistence, and the belief that all men are created equal, could be adopted by most non-democratic cultures. Most non-democracies consider these values a lethal threat. One should not ignore the drastic and endemic historical, ideological, religious, cultural and educational differences, as well as conflicting interests and visions, which separate the global democratic minority from the tyrannical majority. They should avoid oversimplification and over-globalization in a highly diversified, conflict ridden world, which has been afflicted for millennia by insoluble conflicts, unpredictability, instability, shifty policies and violent intolerance.

For example, in 1967, British Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, was determined to introduce self-determination into Aden (South Yemen). His decision was impacted, in part, by a US policy to push Britain out of Arabia and the Gulf and by South Yemen anti-British upheaval. However, rather than advancing self determination, the British/US policy transformed South, and North, Yemen into a major platform of Islamic and international terrorism, further destabilizing the Arabian Peninsula, undermining democracy and vital British and American interests.

In 1978, President Carter pressured the Shah of Iran to accelerate the expansion of civil liberties and tolerate the activities of Ayatollah Khomeini and other anti-Shah elements. Carter informed Iran's military of his disregard for the Shah — who was America's leading and most loyal "policeman" of the Persian Gulf — triggering a pro-Khomeini shift among Iran's generals, thus transforming Iran into America's most determined enemy in the world.

In 1989/90, the disintegration of the USSR was misinterpreted by President George H.W. Bush and Secretary of State Baker as a New World Order, vying for democracy and producing Peace Dividends. Instead, the New World Disorder that evolved culminated with Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, Iran's pursuit of nuclear capabilities and the proliferation/explosion of Islamic terrorism throughout the world, including on the US mainland.

In 1993, President Clinton followed Israel's Prime Minister Rabin and then Foreign Minister Peres, embracing Arafat as a messenger of peace, recommending him as a Nobel Peace Laureate and considering the Oslo Process a venue to a more peaceful, prosperous, free and stable Middle East. Instead, Oslo produced unprecedented Palestinian hate-education, terrorism and non-compliance, consistent with 1,400 years of no intra-Arab peace, no intra-Arab compliance with agreements and no Arab democracy.

In 2003, the democratization of Iraq was a top priority for President George W. Bush, who assumed that elections in a violent society could be "free," leading to democracy. Instead, unprecedented terrorism has engulfed Iraq, accelerating the disintegration of the country, transforming Baghdad into an Iranian satellite, and serving as the principal conduit of military shipments to the Assad regime.

In 2011, the tumultuous Arab Street was perceived, by the Free World, as an Arab Spring featuring the March of Democracy, Facebook and Youth Revolutions, and the reincarnation of MLK and Mahatma Gandhi. In 2013, it is evident that the seismic Arab Street is experiencing a stormy Arab Winter, top heavy with rogue entities, which are less familiar, less predictable, more treacherous, more violent and threatening to the US and the Free World.

In 2013, the Free World prefers diplomatic and economic engagement — rather than confrontation — with Iran. The delusion that the Ayatollahs are vulnerable to inherently ineffective economic sanctions, and responsive to the democratic values of negotiation, compliance with agreements, peaceful-coexistence and enhancement of civil liberties, defies reality as is evidenced in the case of North Korea. This has provided Iran with more time to develop/acquire nuclear capabilities, which could devastate critical American economic and national security interests.

The exercise of benevolent ethnocentrism — projecting one's democratic values upon non-democratic societies — consistently is interpreted by non-democratic societies as weakness. It erodes the Western posture of deterrence, aggravating, rather than solving, regional conflicts, while undermining Western national security and economic interests.

Ambassador (ret.) Ettinger, the Executive Director of "Second Thought: A US-Israel Initiative" and an expert on Middle East politics and US-Israel relations, served as Minister for Congressional Affairs at Israel's Embassy in Washington and Consul General in Houston, Texas. He regularly briefs Israeli and US legislators and their staff on US-Israel strategic ties, Mideast politics and overseas investments in Israel's high tech. His articles are published at:
http://www.TheEttingerReport.com.


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WHY IS THE WHITE HOUSE THREATENING BOB WOODWARD, THE WHISTLEBLOWER OF THE "WATERGATE SCANDAL", AND THE "WHITE-HOUSE-FRIENDLY" MEDIA MAKING FUN OF HIM?

Posted by Sergio HaDar Tezza, March 01, 2013

The article below was written by Jeffrey T. Kuhner who is a radio commentator in Boston. This article appeared March 01, 2013 in the Washington Times and is archived at
Washington Times.com/news/2013/mar/1/educating-bob-woodward/

Bob Woodward has become an enemy of the Obama regime. His crime? He warned the White House that he was about to publish an opinion piece in The Washington Post, which criticized President Obama's handling of the forced budget cuts — known as the "sequester."

Senior economic adviser, Gene Sperling, threatened Mr. Woodward, saying the journalist would "regret doing this." Mr. Woodward wrote a best-selling book on the August 2011 budget deal. He interviewed congressional Democrats and Republicans, as well as administration officials. Blow-by-blow, fact-by-fact, Mr. Woodward demonstrates one incontrovertible truth: The sequester — the plan to implement across-the-board $85 billion budget cuts — was Mr. Obama's idea. He proposed it. His staff largely drafted it. He signed the bill — and he owns it.

Yet for weeks, the president has been acting like a demagogue, seeking to pin the blame for the looming cuts in defense and domestic programs on the GOP. In short, Mr. Obama is lying. For revealing this, Mr. Woodward is now viewed by the White House as a traitor. It has declared war on him.

"It makes me very uncomfortable to have the White House telling reporters, 'You're going to regret doing something that you believe in,' " Mr. Woodward said.

In other words, the administration is assaulting freedom of the press. Its senior officials are threatening and attempting to bully journalists who criticize Mr. Obama. The irony is that Mr. Woodward is a liberal and a once-strong Obama supporter. He is not a conservative or some right-wing gadfly. Rather, for decades he has been a pivotal part of the Democratic media establishment. Liberals lionized him for helping to bring down President Richard Nixon. He was a relentless critic of President Ronald Reagan. He consistently defended President Bill Clinton, despite his numerous abuses of power. In short, he has embodied progressive conventional wisdom.

I don't care for Mr. Woodward. Unlike some on the right, I refuse to now jump on his bandwagon, praising him as some brilliant, courageous muckraker whose journalistic integrity is beyond dispute. He — along with Carl Bernstein — waged a relentless campaign against Nixon for one reason: They despised his politics. Whatever Nixon's crimes — political cheap tricks, enemies' lists, domestic surveillance of critics — they were also committed by Lyndon B. Johnson and John F. Kennedy. They were Democrats. Hence, The Washington Post couldn't have cared less. One need only see how Mr. Woodward was willing to turn a blind eye to Mr. Clinton's numerous scandals to realize that he is nothing more than a creature of the Beltway. He serves the liberal ruling class. Like a moth to a flame, he is attracted to the burning fires of power.

This raises the question: Why is Mr. Woodward growing so disenchanted with Mr. Obama? He realizes that the president is an inept narcissist who is out of his depth. For Mr. Woodward to turn on Mr. Obama, it is obvious even the Beltway mandarins are getting nervous. America is about to careen off a real fiscal cliff, and Mr. Obama is asleep at the wheel. The national debt is soaring to nearly $17 trillion. The administration has racked up consecutive trillion-dollar deficits. Mr. Obama's projected budgets reveal oceans of more red ink. The $85 billion sequester is a drop in the fiscal bucket compared to our $3.6 trillion annual budget. Instead of acknowledging this, Mr. Obama has been engaging in irresponsible fear-mongering — meat inspectors will be fired; air-traffic controllers will be let go; police officers and firemen will not be able to get paid; more than 800,000 Pentagon employees will be laid off. In short, according to the president, the sky will fall if the budget cuts kick in.

This includes protecting our national interests. Mr. Obama claims that he cannot deploy the USS Harry Truman to the Persian Gulf because of the sequester. Mr. Woodward rightly said that Mr. Obama was showing a "kind of madness I haven't seen in a long time" for his decision not to deploy an aircraft carrier owing to alleged budgetary constraints.

"Can you imagine Ronald Reagan sitting there and saying, 'Oh, by the way, I can't do this because of some budget document'?" Mr. Woodward said on MSNBC.

No. But Reagan was a grown-up — not an immature community activist obsessed with being a celebrity president. In the end, however, Mr. Woodward is the victim of his own ideology and liberal journalism. The revolution devours its own children. Mr. Woodward rose to national prominence on the rubble of the Nixon presidency. The Democratic left despised Nixon and his defense of the "Silent Majority." Mr. Woodward gave aid and comfort to the anti-war movement by destroying its main bulwark. Since the fall of Nixon, anti-American liberals — with the exception of the Reagan years — have been on a long march to power. Mr. Obama represents the culmination of '60s radicalism. Like a socialist autocrat, he is no longer willing to tolerate a hint of criticism — even from his own camp. Heretics like Mr. Woodward must be expelled. Nixon must be laughing in his grave.

Contact Sergio HaDar Tezza at nutella59@UCLA.edu


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NEWEST ARTICLE FROM PHILLY AFSI

Posted by Philly AFSI, March 01, 2013

The article below was written by Moshe Phillips who is the president of the Philadelphia Chapter of Americans for a Safe Israel/AFSI. Op-ed columns by Moshe Phillips appeared on over 50 websites and newspapers since 2008 including American Thinker, Arutz Sheva, Family Securty Matters, Intellectual Conservative and NewsReal Blog. Moshe's blog was named of "One of the Top 10 PA Blogs" for Townhall.com / WNTP 990 AM Radio in Philadelphia in 2009. He has written and lectured on Israel Affairs, Jerusalem, Middle East Current Events, Zionist History, Counter-Terrorism, Politics, Jabotinsky, Herut, Military History and Tanach for over twenty years.This article appeared February 28, 2013 in the Algemeiner and is archived at
http://www.algemeiner.com/2013/02/28/john-kerry-kyrzakhstan-and-palestine/

On John Kerry's first international trip as U.S. Secretary of State he made a gaffe worthy of Joe Biden. The headline of London's Telegraph read "John Kerry invents country of Kyrzakhstan" and the Daily Mail asked "Where's that exactly, Mr Secretary of State? John Kerry makes up new country 'Kyrzakhstan."

But more than just fodder for the British press Kerry's blunder exposes the truth that he is not the expert on international affairs that the mainstream media, Obama Administration and J Street all vehemently claimed.

And at this time, when Kerry created Kyrzakhstan out of thin air, there is no time like the present to remind Kerry and the rest of the denizens of Foggy Bottom that "Palestine" and "East Jerusalem" are just as mythical as "Kyrzakhstan."

Let's recall what actor, comedian and pundit Larry Miller (Pretty Woman, The Nutty Professor and The Princess Diaries) wrote in an April 2002 essay titled "Whosoever Blesses Them: The intifada and its defenders" for The Weekly Standard (it went viral and by mistake was almost always credited to Dennis Miller):

"The Palestinians want their own country. There's just one thing about that: There are no Palestinians. It's a made up word. Israel was called Palestine for two thousand years. Like "Wiccan," "Palestinian" sounds ancient but is really a modern invention. Before the Israelis won the land in war, Gaza was owned by Egypt, and there were no "Palestinians" then, and the West Bank was owned by Jordan, and there were no "Palestinians" then. As soon as the Jews took over and started growing oranges as big as basketballs, what do you know, say hello to the "Palestinians," weeping for their deep bond with their lost "land" and "nation." So for the sake of honesty, let's not use the word "Palestinian" any more to describe these delightful folks, who dance for joy at our deaths until someone points out they're being taped."

Another lesson important for Secretary Kerry to hear before he visits Israel is that "East Jerusalem" does not actually exist. "East Jerusalem" is what the Bible means when it refers to Jerusalem.

Words, and especially names, have meaning. Especially in today's ever changing Middle East.

So, just what is "East Jerusalem" and why is adding the word "East" to describe part of Judaism's holiest city and Israel's capital of any serious magnitude?

East and West in Israel are not simple geographic terms as they are in the U.S. Northeast Philadelphia, the Upper East Side in Manhattan and East L.A. are used to denote neighborhoods and sections of a city. In Israel, where Judea and Samaria have been labeled as the West Bank, things are different. The term West Bank was created by Arab propagandists to de-emphasize the area's inherent Jewishness and to disassociate the land from the State of Israel. East Jerusalem was similarly invented.

What is "East Jerusalem"?

In the Christian Bible every single instance when a specific location in Jerusalem is mentioned it refers to an area that many at the State Department would now like to see given to the Palestinians. The term "East Jerusalem" cannot be found in a Christian Bible. And that is because "East Jerusalem" is about as real as Santa Claus.

The prayer "Next Year in Jerusalem!" that Jews recite at the close of the Yom Kippur service and at the highpoint of the Passover Seder refers to ancient parts of Jerusalem that the State Department Arabists include as part of this mythical creation of "East Jerusalem" in its unholy Palestinian state. There is no "East Jerusalem" in Judaism.

According to Wikipedia: "East Jerusalem refers to the part of Jerusalem captured by Jordan in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, and subsequently by Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War. It includes Jerusalem's Old City and some of the holiest sites of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, such as the Temple Mount, Western Wall, Al-Aqsa Mosque and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher."

So, "East Jerusalem" is Jerusalem's Old City and its surrounding neighborhoods. The original and oldest parts of Jerusalem are in this "East Jerusalem".

There has never been in history an independent municipal entity known as "East Jerusalem" just as there has never been an independent national entity known as Palestine just as there has never been a Kyrzakhstan.

When anti-Israel extremists created the term "East Jerusalem" it was for one reason. They wanted to rip Israel's capital apart in order to defeat Israel. This effort tragically gained full force with the Oslo Accords. This was fully explained in the B'tzedek Online Journal on December 30, 1996 in an editorial titled The War Has Just Begun:

"The Oslo Accords are indeed the fulfillment of the PLO "salami" strategy. That is to say, Israel shall be destroyed not through overt military action of Arab nations, but through the whittling away of Israeli resolve and slow but determined territorial expansion of a Palestinian state. Slice by slice Israel will be carved away by the knife of terrorism and world opinion, both deftly handled by the Israeli created Palestinian entity."

The very name Jerusalem means city of peace, city of completeness and city of perfection. This was something that Bible believing Americans of all faiths in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were taught. See Hitchcock's Bible Names Dictionary (1869) and Easton's Bible Dictionary (1897) for more on the fascinating derivation of the name Jerusalem.

A Jerusalem that is not complete is just not Jerusalem.

As Secretary of State Kerry can do much to show he understands what Jerusalem really is. The U.S. government has failed to relocate the American Embassy to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv for over ten years. The Jerusalem Embassy Act was passed by the U.S. Congress on October 23, 1995 and the law reads that "Jerusalem should be recognized as the capital of the State of Israel; and the United States Embassy in Israel should be established in Jerusalem no later than May 31, 1999″.

"For Zion's sake I am not silent, and for Jerusalem's sake I do not rest," reads Isaiah 62:1. For Jerusalem's sake contact your Congressperson today and demand that they pressure John Kerry and the Obama Administration to honor the Jerusalem Embassy Act.

Contact Philly AFSI at phillyafsi@gmail.com.


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JACKSONVILLE CITY COUNCIL AND BLACK PANTHER PARTY APPROVE OF HAMAS SUPPORTER FOR HUMAN RIGHTS POST

Posted by Dr. Richard Swier, March 01, 2013

The article below was written by Randy McDaniels who is a former United States Marine whose occupational specialty was in Operation and later Counter Intelligence. He served 6 years before being honorably discharged. He is a Chapter Leader for ACT! for America and Mentor for the South East, American by the grace of God, Christian by Choice, and Patriotic Warrior by necessity.

Panther Party
Jacksonville City Council goes with HAMAS

The former national Chairman of the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) was approved for a 2nd term on Jacksonville's Human Rights Commission despite overwhelming opposition from the general public and almost a third of the Council members making a motion to delay the vote until March 4th, which may have allowed for Council Member's to question Parvez Ahmed.

The meeting continued to offer spectators surprises when the Southern Regional Director for the New Black Panther Party (NBPP) Mikhail Muhammad, along with (2) uniformed Black Panther Soldiers/body guards swaggered in to speak in favor of Parvez Ahmed's appointment. Describing himself as a "Freedom Fighter", the Black Panther leader spoke of his active role supporting Trayvon Martin just prior to launching into a rant about the racist white man and how he sympathized with Parvez Ahmed.

The NBPP Leader gained notoriety when he said "I don't obey the white man's law" during an interview on national television with Anderson Cooper.

Muhammad's statement goes to the heart of concerns expressed by many Jacksonville citizens in regard to Parvez Ahmed's leadership of CAIR, an organization designated as the Palestine Committee, whose Bylaws state they must adhere to Sharia or Islamic law and not man made law or white man's law as Mikhail Muhammad states.

Muslim Brotherhood documents have encouraged Sharia Adherent Muslims to join the political process as part of their "GRAND JIHAD" to subvert and destroy Western Civilization from within, as stated in An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America by Muhammad Akram. This document was discovered during an FBI raid of the home of a Sr. Muslim Brotherhood leader Ismael Elbarasse and list CAIR's parent organization the Islamic Association of Palestine, as well as several other mainstream Islamic Groups as friends or members of the Muslim brotherhood. Elbarasse, also founded the Dar Al Hijrah Mosque whose former Imam Anwar Awlaki was killed in a US drone strike, and current Imam Shaker Elsayyed preached a sermon last week calling for Muslims in America to Arm for JIHAD.

Councilman Robin Lumb, addressed serious concerns he had regarding Parvez Ahmed to include:

  • Parvez Ahmed's recorded statements in favor of Anti-Blasphemy Laws in great length in 2006 and again suggested Anti-blasphemy laws should be considered in a 2012 article, which Lumb said was a none starter as far as he was concerned.
  • The fact that Parvez Ahmed was the National Chairman of CAIR, at the time CAIR sued a Commercial Airline in what came to be know as the "Flying Imams" case, more importantly the passengers were named in the suit for simply following federal guidelines and reporting mysterious behavior which mimicked the behavior of the 9/11 Hijackers. Lumb, went on to say he was curious if Parvez Ahmed condoned the actions of CAIR's and if in his capacity of National Chairman was he powerless to influecne against litigious actions against the passengers.
  • While Councilman Lumb said he believed there was no direct linkage of Dr. Ahmed and the Holy Land Foundation which was closed down for funding HAMAS, the fact that Parvez Ahmed described the legal process as illegitimate and that the defendants were prosecuted for merely providing humanitarian relief, caused him concern as that was clearly not the case. Lumb went on to say that anyone serving on a Human Rights Commission should be able to understand and apply law.

Councilman Lumb requested that City Council Bill 2013-75, be returned to Rules for proper vetting just moments before former Council President, Richard Clark called the Bill to question. The "Call to Question" effectively shelved any discussion prior to an up or down vote on the appointment, which passed 13-6, the same vote count as 2010. Interestingly, three of the six votes against this nomination were from districts who replaced councilman who also voted against Parvez Ahmed in 2010.

Clay Yarborough, the Presiding Officer of the Rules Committee, had sent notice one week prior to Tuesday night's vote that the appointments and reappointments would be delayed until March 4th, 2013...allowing sufficient time for another Bill introduced by Councilman Matt Schellenberg, which if approved would reduce the Human Rights Commission from 20 to 11 members, effectively make these appointments irrelevant. However, Councilman John Cresembeni, appealed the decision in Rules Committee and garnered a 4-3 vote in favor of bring it before council as on February 26th.

A Councilperson who declined to be named said the move by Councilman Cresembeni was highly irregular and in fact, such an appeal had never occurred during their entire six years of service on the City Council. John Cresembeni, nominated Parvez Ahmed in 2010, after receiving a substantial amount of his campaign contributions from the Islamic community to include donations from Parvez Ahmed.

Councilman Lumb, while addressing the rest of the council described the whole process as rare and unusual citing:

  • The denial of his request made to Jessica Deal of Mayor Alvin Brown's office to have Parvez present at Rules Committee for questions.
  • Surrogates and not Parvez Ahmed appearing at the Rules Committee with printed talking points from Professor Ahmed counter concerns Lumb had expressed.
  • The fact these surrogates who found time to appear included non other than former Mayor John Delaney, the current Chief of Staff at UNF where Parvez Ahmed is a Professor of Finance, and an unnamed representative from ONEJAX.
  • The fact former Mayor John Delaney and the ONEJAX representative knew to ONLY distribut Parvez Ahmed's talking points specifically to the four Rule Committee members who appealed the decision Clay Yarborough, whom consisted of consisted of John Cresembeni, Lori Boyer, Warren Jones, and Jim Love, which added to the dubious nature of the events surrounding this appointment.
  • A subsequent denial by the Mayor's Office, in regard to Councilman Lumbs request for a noticed meeting with Parvez Ahmed after the Rules Committee's almost unprecedented move to appeal the Committee Presidents decision.
  • An accusation by Parvez Ahmed in prepared remarks submitted by John Delaney and the ONEJAX representative suggesting that Councilman Lumb was sourcing his information from a "Hate Group", in an obvious reference to ACT! for America, an accusation Councilman Lumb took exception too.

Interestingly, the Islamic Center of North East Florida, (where Parvez Ahmed once held a board position), sponsored a Gala to honor Former Mayors John Delaney, John Peyton, ONEJAX, and the Florida Times Union for all their work to help the Islamic Community. All were fierce proponents of Parvez Ahmed, with the Florida Times Union taking great journalistic liberties promoting Mr. Ahmed, while at the same time attacking critics and failing to report on the mountains of evidence provided by the opposition in any substantive way.

The Islamic Center of North East Florida was one of over 100 Mosques/Centers subject to an undercover investigation by Dave Gaubatz, a former Counter Intelligence Specialist and the Author of Muslim Mafia.

Each of the 100 Mosques investigated were rated on specific behavior and dress of the leadership and congregation, segregation of women, if sermons taught on the inferiority of women, inequality or hatred of non-Muslims, Jews, as well as the superiority of Sharia over manmade legislation. Gaubatz looked for radical literature to include books by Muslim Brotherhood leaders such as Sayyid Qutb or Abul Al Mawdudi, whose writing are credited with reinvigorating Islamic Movement and Jihad worldwide.

Each category was given a point value which when totaled would give a rating on Islamic Center or Mosque on a scale of 1-10, regarding three specific areas of concern; threat level, Sharia adherence, and overall potential for support of cultural or violent Jihad. The Islamic Center of North East Florida received an overall threat assessment of 9 with the maximum being 10. The Center rated 9 out of 10 in regard to Sharia adherence and 8 out of 10 in regard to potential to support Cultural or Violent Jihad.

Abdul Azziz, an employee of the Islamic Center of North East Florida, was recently captured on video by ACT! for America's Jacksonville Chapter handing out radical literature and selling books by radical Muslim Brotherhood leader Abul Al Mawdudi at the Flea Market on Beach Boulevard. Abdul said the Islamic Center has been operating the booth for just over a year. Neighboring booth operators said that Abdul's wife typically shows up in the morning wearing a full Burqa, sets up the booth for her husband, then sits in the car until it is time to break down the booth at the end of the day. This behavior seems to corroborate the findings of investigator Dave Gaubatz.

The failure of Jacksonville City leaders to properly understand doctrines of Political Islam and their propensity to embrace and place Sharia adherent Islamist like Parvez Ahmed in positions of authority will propel us on our way to becoming the Dearborn of the south!

Contact Dr. Richard Swier at drswier@gmail.com


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CHICKEN LITTLE, SEQUESTER EDITION

Posted by The Patriot Post, March 01, 2013

"Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm." --James Madison, Federalist No. 10

sequestration

We're publishing today from a secure bunker in an undisclosed location so as to avoid the fallout from the apocalypse known as the sequester. Today, the $85 billion in federal spending "cuts" take effect now that the Senate failed to pass either Democrat or Republican alternatives yesterday. The devastation is unthinkable -- unable to afford plane trips home to Delaware, Joe Biden will even begin taking the train again. We just pray the nation survives.

All kidding aside, the sequester does, in fact, involve real pain for real people. Barack Obama is ensuring that layoffs, furloughs, pay cuts and the like are as widespread and as painful as possible, all in an effort to defeat his political opponents and extract even greater tax hikes out of them. He even released hundreds of detained illegal aliens, and then blamed his Department of Homeland Security for doing it without his knowledge. DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano also blamed underlings. Obama also warned that cuts will affect an agency that no longer exists. And the sequester is a "manufactured crisis" the White House blames for delaying its own budget submission, due Feb. 4.

But just remember who manufactured it to begin with -- Barack Obama. He will continue the charade to ensure that the maximum damage is done from the "Republican Sequester."

As we go to press, the president is meeting with Republican leaders John Boehner and Mitch McConnell, presumably to rhetorically abuse them in private before he does so again in public. To show how serious Obama is at replacing sequestration, or even just better managing it, the White House threatened a veto of a GOP offer to let the president have even more authority to selectively implement the sequester. Senate Democrats were happy to kill the bill for him.

For his own political gain Obama needs the sequester to be a blunt object that causes as much pain as possible. Besides, it's a win-win for him. Now he can tell the affected people, "I feel your pain," all while blaming Republicans. If the GOP caved, spending would have continued to grow out of control, just like he wants. For that matter, it will still grow out of control, just at an imperceptibly slower pace. In reality, the spending "cuts" for FY2013 amount to just $43 billion.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) added to the blame game: "The Republicans want the sequester to go forward," he said. "We cannot solve the problems of this country with cuts, cuts, cuts. We've cut $2.6 trillion. We need to do more but we're going to do it in a balanced approach. We cannot continue to hurt the middle class and the poor." As usual, by "cut" he means reduced growth, and by "hurt the middle class and the poor" he means reduce government redistribution of wealth.

Remember, we're talking about just 2 percent of the federal budget, and 6 percent of deficit spending. All working Americans took a 2 percent pay cut at the beginning of the year thanks to the payroll tax hike, though we weren't supposed to notice it. How can the government not continue to function while undergoing such small spending reductions?

If you remember just one thing about this latest "crisis," remember this: Obama and his NeoCom cadres will blame the "Republican Sequester" for any and all ills between now and the 2014 midterm election. Obama knows that the net effect of his $300 billion payroll and income taxes hikes (which reduced incomes by the most in 20 years), on top of skyrocketing ObamaCare health insurance premiums, mounting debt and deep military cuts already enacted, will send the economy back into recession.

Thus, from sequester forth, every negative economic GDP or jobs report, which in reality demonstrates the continued planned failure of Obama's socialist "recovery stimuli," will be blamed on the "Republican Sequester." Indeed, while GDP growth for the fourth quarter was revised up to an exciting 0.1 percent, and we suppose that's an improvement over the initial estimate of 0.1 percent contraction, you'll have to forgive us if we don't jump for joy.

Obama will employ his classist "politics of disparity" playbook to blame sequester "cuts" for every runny nose in America, claiming the nation can't "afford" even minuscule cuts to socialist welfare programs. And make no mistake -- in partnership with his Leftmedia public relations network, Obama may win the public opinion contest. Of all people, Bob Woodward is the only one standing in the way, which is why his colleagues are now disowning him.

The sequester is absolutely the wrong way to go about cutting spending -- it's indiscriminate (though more so than it actually has to be) and it targets defense disproportionately, all while not even really cutting anything. But given that the Obama White House isn't interested in governing, only moving from crisis to crisis, it ended up being the only option.

From the 'Non Compos Mentis' File:
"We don't need to be having something like sequestration that's going to cause these job losses -- over 170 million jobs that could be lost." --Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA)

There are only 134 million jobs in the U.S. Sadly, Waters' job won't be one of those lost.

Congress

The Senate Judiciary Committee this week held hearings on California Democrat Sen. Dianne Feinstein's proposed gun ban bill, and also considered three other bills: one dealing with universal background checks, sponsored by Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY); another addressing school security, sponsored by Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA); and one covering illegal trafficking, sponsored by Sen. Pat Leahy (D-VT). No word on whether Leahy's bill covers the Justice Department illegally trafficking guns to Mexico. As for Schumer's bill, the fear is that "universal" background checks will soon become a national registry of firearms. Registration, of course, is the first step toward confiscation.

Courts

The Second Amendment Foundation reports that "the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals let stand a December ruling by a three-judge panel of the court that forces Illinois to adopt a concealed carry law, thus affirming that the right to bear arms exists outside the home." In December, Judge Richard Posner gave the Illinois legislature 180 days to "craft a new gun law that will impose reasonable limitations, consistent with the public safety and the Second Amendment ... on the carrying of guns in public."

Unfortunately, Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan showed his contempt for constitutional Liberty by crafting and introducing a repugnant concealed carry bill. In Madigan's world, before obtaining a permit, gun owners would have to purchase $1 million in liability insurance coverage, undergo 40 hours of police-conducted training including 20 hours of range time (just imagine the cost of ammunition), and submit to a mandatory psychological evaluation.

Also unfortunately, the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last Friday that the Second Amendment does not guarantee the right to carry arms. Gray Peterson, a Washington state resident who holds a concealed carry permit as well as a Florida non-resident one, brought the case. He sued because he frequently travels to Denver, and Colorado doesn't recognize either of his permits -- though it does honor permits from states that reciprocate -- and it doesn't issue non-resident permits. The Court ruled against him, saying, in effect, because there is a long history of infringing the Second Amendment, it really doesn't mean what it says.

States

In New York, the state Supreme Court warned that it will issue an injunction against the recently passed SAFE Act, which limits magazine capacity and bans semiautomatic rifles, if the state fails to prove that the law is compliant with the Second Amendment. Of course it isn't, so this could get interesting. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that firearms "in common usage" may not be restricted nor may entire classes of firearms. New York did both with its seven-round magazine limit and outright ban of semi-auto rifles -- both AR-15s and standard-capacity mags holding more than seven rounds are clearly in common usage. And good luck finding a seven-round magazine. Gun manufacturers indicate they won't produce special New York-style magazines.

Meanwhile, New York Democrat Gov. Andrew Cuomo is pushing to exempt Hollywood from his state's unconstitutional law. "There's no reason not to make a change ... to give an industry comfort," the governor said, "especially ... [one] we want to do business in the state." Clearly, he doesn't want to hinder any of those leftist Hollywood-types from making movies that glorify the criminal violence he's purporting to combat. Or perhaps Gov. Cuomo, a possible 2016 presidential candidate, is only principled at a price.

Once more we look to Illinois, where Robin Kelly was chosen as the Democrat nominee to replace former Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., who resigned from his Chicago district and pleaded guilty to corruption. Kelly is an anti-gun zealot who won the backing of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. He filled her coffers with $2 million for television ads slamming former Democrat Rep. Debbie Halvorson because of her "A" rating from the NRA. Bloomberg is crowing about the win. Joe Biden also chimed in, saying, "The voters sent a message ... not just to the NRA but to the politicians all around the country by electing Robin Kelly, who stood up, who stood strong for gun safety totally consistent with our Second Amendment rights. The message is there will be a moral price as well as a political price to be paid for inaction. This is not 1994. People know too much." Actually, in Chicago, they clearly haven't learned a thing.

This Week's 'Braying Jackass' Award:
Joe "Double Barrel" Biden, who last week advised his wife to grab that double-barrel shotgun and "fire two blasts outside the house," is at it again, arguing for the superiority of a shotgun over an AR-15. "[M]y shotgun will do better for you than your AR-15," he bragged, "because [if] you want to keep someone away from your house, just fire the shotgun through the door."

Shooting through a door? What could go wrong? Maybe he should ask the Virginia resident who was just arrested for doing just that.

Biden wasn't done, either. He argued against the AR-15 as a tool of Liberty, saying, "For example, if the idea was to be able to repel a tyrannical government, then you should be able to own an F-15 if you have the money to buy it, with full ordnance. But you're not allowed to do that, and the [Supreme] Court says you can deny certain weapons available for individual ownership. You can't have a nuclear bomb."

No nuclear bombs, ergo no semiautomatic rifles. Sound logic, there, Joe.

Deficits and Suckers

A prominent politician once said, "I will not sign a plan that adds one dime to our deficits -- either now or in the future." That was Barack Obama, when selling his massive health care entitlement to the public. But if there's one way to phrase ObamaCare's costs, it's "up, up, up." A new report from the Government Accountability Office projects ObamaCare adding $6.2 trillion to the deficit over the next 75 years. And that's surely a lowball calculation.

In other ObamaCare news, New Jersey Republican Gov. Chris Christie followed Florida GOP Gov. Rick Scott's footsteps in accepting ObamaCare's Medicaid expansion after publicly rejecting it -- not surprising, considering both governors won re-election; Virginia Republican Gov. Bob McDonnell is set to follow suit -- all to secure Democrat votes for his proposed transportation tax increase. In New Jersey, joining the exchange means 300,000 uninsured residents will be able to receive coverage, but Christie, like other GOP governors before him, fell under the spell of the promised financial benefits of the Medicaid expansion program without properly accounting for the cost. According to The Star-Ledger, New Jersey "could reap up to $300 million by expanding the state program in the coming budget year." Check back in three years.

However, the Florida Medical Association is warning that the state already doesn't have enough doctors to meet health care demand -- a problem that will only worsen with the expansion of Medicaid. Eight percent of the state's 45,000 doctors are expected to retire within five years. Additionally, up to 2.5 million are expected to join the 15 million residents already on insurance. The combination means longer lines, shorter visits and less effective and efficient care.

Finally, don't like your health coverage? There's a solution for that. CNS News reports, "The Affordable Care Act sets up a new arena of whistleblower protections for employees who complain that their company-provided health insurance doesn't do what it's supposed to do." In other words, if you aren't receiving, say, the contraception coverage you want, then you can't be held accountable for complaining to Big Daddy Obama.

Purposeful Ignorance:
"Just got off the phone with my health care [sic] provider asking them to explain why my premium jumped up. No good answer." --Donna Brazile, Al Gore's 2000 campaign manager

Uh, Donna, the answer is ObamaCare. We agree it's not good, but you can stop pretending you don't know.

The White House is offering high-end donors an opportunity to become members of the board of Organizing for Action, Barack Obama's permanent campaign apparatus. According to the New York Times, donors who give or raise more than $500,000 will be offered seats on the board of OFA and direct access to the president at quarterly meetings, along with invitations to other White House meetings, presumably to discuss and shape policy that OFA seeks to influence. Press Secretary Jay Carney said there was no cause for alarm, although he was at a loss for words when it came to explaining how the OFA effort amounts to anything more than institutionalized influence peddling at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

This certainly doesn't sound like the Barack Obama who vigorously campaigned in 2008 against the "special interests" who buy access to elected officials. Maybe this is simply the "new politics" he kept promising us. Besides, if you're going to "fundamentally transform" America in your own image, sometimes you have to make compromises.

Judicial Benchmarks: Voting Rights Act Before High Court

The Voting Rights Act of 1965, echoing the language of the 15th Amendment, prohibits states from imposing any "voting qualification or prerequisite to voting, or standard, practice, or procedure ... to deny or abridge the right of any citizen of the United States to vote on account of race or color." Some Jim Crow-era Southern states would often do things like require otherwise qualified voters to pass literacy tests in order to register to vote, thus disenfranchising blacks.

Pivotal to the Act is Section 5's pre-clearance. "Covered jurisdictions" have to convince the Justice Department or a three judge panel of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia to "pre-clear" attempts to change "any voting qualification or prerequisite to voting, or standard, practice, or procedure with respect to voting." Covered jurisdiction includes more than the Old South, however, extending even to specified townships in New Hampshire and counties in California and Florida, as well as the New York City boroughs of the Bronx, Brooklyn and Manhattan.

As Bob Dylan's song goes, "The Times They Are A-Changin." Wednesday, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Shelby County v. Holder. Some of the states covered by the Act, like Alabama, where the plaintiff's case originated, contend that Section 5, which was supposed to be temporary, is an outdated burden, because racial discrimination is "scattered and limited."

One of the Section 5 issues will be the use of photo IDs for voting, as a number of the covered jurisdictions have enacted such laws. Opponents of photo voter IDs complain that such laws are supposedly an unfair burden on poor, minority and young voters, who are the groups most likely to lack a driver's license or the means to obtain the documents, such as birth certificates. Yet in 2009, according to the Statistical Abstract of the United States, there were 211 million licensed drivers in the U.S. In 2012, 129 million people voted in our presidential election. Is there a burden? Hardly.

Economy

Regulatory Commissars: Minimum Wage

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and her cronies announced plans to push for a minimum wage hike as part of their effort to retake the House in 2014. They used this highly effective campaign hot button to great effect in 2006, and their strategy this time uses similar tactics to pre-frame Republicans as unsympathetic to low-wage workers. Pelosi summed up their plan succinctly: "Just keep it simple. We want to raise the minimum wage, and you don't. Why not?"

Leftists claim that the minimum wage will increase employment among the middle class and the poor, though it's not at all clear how raising the cost of labor will lead to employers securing more of it. Pelosi argues that a higher minimum wage will put more money into the pockets of low-income people, which is true -- if they keep their jobs. The leftist Center for American Progress claims that a higher minimum wage will actually lower crime, and they ginned up some statistics from a study in Chicago purportedly showing that youth crime was directly related to downward wage trends.

None of this holds water. If lower wages alone cause higher crime, then how does one explain the continued drop in violent crime across the country despite several years of depressed economic activity? Beyond that, the idea that the minimum wage puts more money in people's pockets and creates more jobs is demonstrably false.

Economist Walter E. Williams explained it best: "In his State of the Union address, President Barack Obama proposed raising the minimum wage from $7.25 an hour to $9 an hour. That would be almost a 25 percent increase. Let's look at the president's proposal, but before doing so, let's ask some other economic questions. Are people responsive to changes in price? For example, if the price of cars rose by 25 percent, would people purchase as many cars? Supposing housing prices rose by 25 percent, what would happen to sales? Those are big-ticket items, but what about smaller-priced items? If a supermarket raised its prices by 25 percent, would people purchase as much? It's not rocket science to conclude that when prices rise, people adjust their behavior by purchasing less." The same is true for employers, who would pay 25 percent more for the same work. They will hire less and cut hours, and young minorities will be hardest hit.

Lew Confirmed for Treasury

On Wednesday, the Senate confirmed Barack Obama's nominee for Treasury Secretary on a vote of 71-26. Jack Lew is a former executive at Citigroup who pocketed a $940,000 bonus the day before the bank took a $301 billion federal bailout in 2008. Vermont Socialist Bernie Sanders voted "no," saying, "We need a secretary of the Treasury who does not come from Wall Street but is prepared to stand up to the enormous power of Wall Street. We need a Treasury secretary who will end the current Wall Street business model of operating the largest gambling casino the world has ever seen and demand that Wall Street start investing in the job-creating productive economy." Sanders added that he's "extremely concerned that virtually all of [Obama's] key economic advisers have come from Wall Street." That's due in part to the pathetic lack of any real-world experience whatsoever on Obama's part. Then again, maybe it means the administration's pattern of banker bashing will come to an end. Or that it's always been phony.

Security

Warfront With Jihadistan: Afghanistan Withdrawal Accelerates

The Obama regime is accelerating the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, and now it appears that our Afghan "allies" are also trying to speed up the process, giving us a strong good-bye kick out the door. Last Sunday, the Afghan government ordered that U.S. Special Forces must leave the critical Wardak province, southwest of Kabul, in two weeks. Wardak has long been a staging area for Taliban attacks on the Afghan capital. The government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai said it had to take this step because of reports that "armed individuals named as U.S. special forces stationed in Wardak province engage in harassing, annoying, torturing, and even murdering innocent people." U.S. military officials deny that our forces were involved in such acts or approved of Afghan troops committing them. With regular U.S. troops pulling out of Wardak this spring, Special Forces would have been the only U.S. military presence in the region.

These withdrawals won't help stabilize Afghanistan, which is still tumultuous, despite recent claims to the contrary. The Obama regime had been reporting that terrorist attacks and violence in the country was falling, but on Tuesday, the American-led coalition command acknowledged that its widely repeated claim that violence is easing and that the terrorist insurgency is in steep decline was in fact incorrect. Responding to questions from the Associated Press about the latest security statistics from Afghanistan, the coalition command in Kabul said it erred in reporting a 7 percent decline in attacks, that in fact there was no decline at all. Whoops. Sadly, combined with the U.S. withdrawal, the continuing strength of the Taliban does not bode well for Afghanistan's future -- or ours.

Then again, maybe Afghanistan just needs what Democrats propose for the United States: A Department of Peacebuilding.

'Whistleblower' Reports to Slammer

Better late than never: On Thursday, former CIA operative John Kiriakou reported to the federal prison in Loretta, Pennsylvania, to begin his 30-month sentence for revealing classified information. Readers may remember Kiriakou's 2007 interview with ABC News in which he confirmed the use of waterboarding against captured al-Qa'ida leaders. The transcript is worth reading, as it makes clear the real-world motivations for waterboarding senior jihadist leader Abu Zubaydah:

"Frankly there were lives at stake. And we knew that he was the biggest fish that we had caught. We knew he was full of information. And we wanted to get it. One of the reasons why it was of such importance to us that night is the room where he was when the raid [that caught him] began had a table in it. And on the table Abu Zubaydah and two other men were building a bomb. The soldering arm was still hot. And they had the plans for a school on the table. So we knew that there were immediate threats that he could help us with."

The Washington Post reported last week that Kiriakou was given a lavish going-away party at Washington's Hay-Adams hotel, funded to the tune of $20,000 by a wealthy anti-war activist and Code Pink. Kiriakou and his fans -- self-styled martyrs of the Left always have fans -- maintain that he was just a whistleblower with a conscience, and that the waterboarding program might never have been known if he had not bravely stepped forward to tell the world about it. Never mind that leaders from both parties in Congress were briefed on the program in 2002 as it was happening, including Nancy Pelosi, Jane Harman and Porter Goss. Kiriakou broke the law when he went to ABC, and he was prosecuted and sentenced accordingly.

Culture

Faith and Family: Republicans Splinter Toward Same-Sex Marriage Support

It's not a large group of Republicans, and many of them are retired politicians no longer in office, but 75 have signed a friend-of-the-court brief to be presented to the Supreme Court in the effort to overturn California's Proposition 8. Perhaps the most well known is former Utah governor and second-tier GOP presidential candidate Jon Huntsman. His support is interesting because he opposed same-sex marriage in his campaign, preferring instead to support civil unions. The White House likewise is asking the Court to overturn California's law.

Many of these Republicans contend that their views have "evolved" over the last few years -- a word borrowed from Barack Obama. Some of them embrace Dick Cheney's contention that "freedom means freedom for everybody." The brief was approved by former Bush Solicitor General Theodore Olson, who is one of two lead attorneys in the case, and signatures were gathered by onetime RNC Chair Ken Mehlman, who came out as homosexual several years ago.

Obviously the same-sex marriage issue doesn't play as well with most grassroots conservatives, but the idea for these Republicans seems to be one of attracting younger people who tend to support the redefinition of marriage. In more recent elections, several states ended a long winless streak at the ballot box for same-sex marriage, meaning a favorable decision at the Supreme Court may be the final hurdle toward nationalizing the concept. Around the Nation: The Bloomberg Soda War

Just wait for the black market in two-liter bottles of Coke. Next month New York mayor Michael Bloomberg's long-awaited ban on sugary drinks of more than 16 ounces will take effect. Once the ban is in place, restaurants and convenience stores that sell sugary drinks in containers larger than 16 ounces will risk a $200 fine.

Needless to say, those who run restaurants, delis, or even sports venues that fall under the purview of the city's health department by selling food for on-premises consumption are unhappy about the change. The Korean-American Grocers Association was the first to head to court to try to stop the mayor's regulation from taking effect. "It would be a tremendous waste of expense, time and effort for our members to incur all of the ... costs associated with the ban," said Association president Chong Sik Le. As one example, restaurants that deliver pizza would no longer be able to sell two-liter bottles with the meal; instead they'll be forced to sell a package of six 16 ounce bottles at over twice the cost.

While Bloomberg enacted his ban on large sugary drinks in the city, he called on the long arm of the state to reach where he cannot and ban retail grocery stores statewide from selling the large drinks. In the meantime, one can expect stores just outside the border of New York City to see a surge in business from consumers with a big thirst for Liberty.

And Last...And now for Great Moments in American Diplomacy with John Kerry.

The newly confirmed secretary of state began his illustrious tenure with some laughable moments this week. First, he made up the name of an ally when he praised U.S. diplomats for working to secure "democratic institutions" in the nation of "Kyrzakhstan." That must have been a portmanteau of Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. Those "stans" all look alike, we suppose.

Next, he explained that we should go ahead and have bilateral talks with Iran over their nuclear weapons program, despite their repeated broken promises and general belligerence. Why? "Iran is a country with a government that was elected and that sits in the United Nations," Kerry said. Gee, why didn't somebody think of that before?

Finally, Kerry lectured the Germans about free speech after they voted to ban the Nazi party. Kerry may not recall, but the Nazis were a tyrannical left-wing party that took over most of Europe 75 years ago and killed millions of innocent people in concentration camps. The German people still live with the weight of that memory, so perhaps they can be forgiven for banning the responsible political party.

Kerry, however, bragged to the Germans that, "As a country, as a society, we [the U.S.] live and breathe the idea of religious freedom and religious tolerance, whatever the religion, and political freedom and political tolerance, whatever the point of view." (Unless, of course, your view is that contraception and abortion are immoral. In that case, you're still required to buy health insurance covering them.) Kerry continued, "People have sometimes wondered about why our Supreme Court allows one group or another to march in a parade even though it's the most provocative thing in the world and they carry signs that are an insult to one group or another," for example, neo-Nazis marching in Jewish neighborhoods.

Not to worry, Kerry explained all of his own gaffes when he concluded: "In America, you have a right to be stupid, if you want to be." Indeed, and you might even become secretary of state.

right.to.be.stupid

The Patriot Post is protected speech pursuant to the "unalienable rights" of all men, and the First (and Second) Amendment to the Constitution of the United States of America. In God we trust. Contact The Patriot Post at no-reply@patriotpost.us


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SURRENDERING SOVEREIGNTY — AGAIN

Posted by Martin Sherman, March 01, 2013

funeral

Definition of "sovereignty": Supreme power or authority; the authority of a state to govern itself; complete power to govern a country; the state of being a country with freedom to govern itself —The Oxford Dictionary

Our hope — a hope 2,000 years old — will not be lost: To be a free people in our land, the land of Zion and Jerusalem —from the national anthem, "Hatikva"

You can take the Jews out of the ghetto, but you can't take the ghetto out of the Jews —A disparaging dictum of uncertain origins

Just over a year ago, I wrote a column in this series titled "Surrendering sovereignty" (December 2, 2011), which I commenced with very similar introductory excerpts.

Mughrabi fiasco

In it, I severely criticized the government's reversal of its decision to replace the Mughrabi Bridge, linking the Western Wall and the Temple Mount.

The wooden bridge, built in 2007, which provides the only access for non- Muslims to the Temple Mount complex, and was always intended to be a temporary structure, was deemed to be in a state of dangerous disrepair in 2011.

However, when confronted by shrill and wildly unfounded accusations from various Islamic sources that the construction of a new, permanent and structurally safe bridge was intended to cause the collapse of the Dome of the Rock (almost half a kilometer away from the planned ramp), together with threats of violence in Israel, and warnings of instability in various Arab states, the government backed down.

The following is from that article: "It is easy to downplay the significance of the decision; to present it as giving precedence to prudence over pride. That would be a mistake.

"For it is yet another symptom of the insidious spread of an ongoing malaise, gnawing away at the foundations of the Jewish national ethos. It is a malaise that if not soon confronted, will have perilously corrosive consequences... By its actions... the government has in effect conferred the status of force majeure on Muslim rage — an inevitable force of nature which can only be avoided by Israeli capitulation..."

Still-virulent malaise

This week we were given — by means of a seemingly minor event — a disturbing reminder that this malignant malaise is just as virulent as ever.

This was the announcement on Wednesday to the Knesset by Public Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch that Israel is contemplating the participation of an international investigator in the inquest regarding Arafat Jaradat, the Palestinian detainee, who died in Israeli custody, after being arrested for hurling stones and a Molotov cocktail at Israeli troops.

What made this announcement even more troubling was the fact that it was made a matter of hours after The Jerusalem Post reported that "Israeli officials dismissed on Tuesday a Palestinian Authority demand for an international inquiry into the death of Palestinian detainee Arafat Jaradat as a 'predictable' maneuver and part of a larger strategy to bring the international community into the conflict whenever possible."

It is difficult to see how Aharonovitch's statement cannot be interpreted as hasty Israeli capitulation to Mahmoud Abbas's strident demand, issued at the the PLO Executive Committee meeting in Ramallah on Tuesday, "for an international commission of inquiry to find out how Jaradat was assassinated in prison."

While many agree that the affable Aharonovitch is perhaps not the sharpest knife in the governmental drawer, he is nevertheless a minister responsible for a vitally important sphere of state activity that impinges on the lives of the entire population.

It is more than a little disconcerting that he apparently has such a poor grasp of the basic do's and don'ts entailed in the exercise of national sovereignty.

Demeaning disregard

For whether intentional or not, Aharonovitch's announcement can only — and inevitably will — be seen as a clear expression of no-confidence in the competence and integrity of the Israeli authorities to investigate misdeeds allegedly committed by official organs of the state.

Whether he meant it or not, it will be seen as endorsing those who wish to cast the gravest aspersions on Israel and its credibility.

In so doing he has — unwittingly or otherwise — shown disrespect and disregard for the professional capabilities and the moral standing of his country, implying that it cannot be trusted without outside supervision. The unbecoming alacrity with which he embraced the Palestinian demands makes him — willfully or not — complicit with the efforts of Israel's most hostile adversaries' efforts to demean, demonize and delegitimize it.

It seems to indicate that even after almost seven decades of political independence, the Jewish people has not managed to internalize the cognizance of the inalienable rights that accrue to, and the indispensable duties that are demanded of, a people who wish to maintain and administer their national sovereignty.

Patently preposterous

It is patently preposterous to suggest that Israel is not capable of conducting a credible inquiry into the Jarafat incident without international accompaniment.

More than any other country, Israel has proved itself able to conduct exceedingly — some might say, excessively — harsh investigations into allegations of malfeasance perpetrated by official organizations and individuals — no matter how prominent or senior.

Defense minister Ariel Sharon was forced from office (1983) by the all-Israeli Kahan Commission's inquiry into the events relating to massacres conducted by Christian Phalangist forces in the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Shatilla.

The head of the Shin Bet (Israel Security Agency), Avraham Shalom, along with several other senior members of the organization, was dismissed following the killing of two terrorists (1984), belonging to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine after their attempt to hijack a busload of civilians was foiled. True, the investigation process was torturous and flawed, and some might find the presidential pardons granted those involved questionable (although they were upheld by the High Court), but the truth regarding the events was largely exposed without any international intervention.

Finance minister Avraham Hirchson was convicted (2008) and imprisoned for embezzlement. One year earlier, justice minister Haim Ramon was convicted for sexual misconduct. In 2010, Tzachi Hanegbi, who held numerous important ministerial and parliamentary positions, was convicted of perjury. The president of Israel, Moshe Katsav, was tried and convicted (2011) for sexual transgressions, including rape, and is serving a sevenyear sentence.

Prime minister Ehud Olmert was forced to step down following a series of charges brought against him. He was convicted of breach of trust (2012) and is facing additional bribery charges.

Perilous precedent

So while there might be those who feel that the punitive measures handed out in the above-mentioned incidents were not sufficiently severe (and others that they were overly severe), Israel has proved itself willing to pursue investigations/inquiries into claims of any wrongdoing, no matter how senior the alleged perpetrator or how embarrassing/ damaging the alleged transgressions.

I do not know if anything untoward occurred during Jaradat's incarceration or what in fact led to his demise. However, based on precedent, there can be little doubt that whatever (if any) penalties are eventually meted out, an all-Israeli inquiry will ferret out the truth.

Israel need take no lessons from anyone in investigating suspicions of malfeasance by any organizational entity or individual. Accordingly, the Palestinian demand for international intervention into the Jaradat affair is not a genuine quest for the facts but — much like the ludicrous Turkish demand for an apology over the Mavi Maramra affair — little more than a transparent attempt to show that it can coerce Israel to submit to its will.

This is precisely why Aharonovitch's inappropriately accommodating declaration entails potentially perilous consequences.

Indeed, it could open up a veritable floodgate of initiatives, aimed at neutralizing any autonomy in Israeli decision- making, investigation and inquiry.

License to second guess

In effect, it could comprise a license for any alien entity to second-guess every decision taken or conclusion drawn by Israeli authorities. For if international participation is called for to accompany the Jaradat affair, why should it not be called on for every other investigation? And if Israeli decisions or verdicts are not sufficient to satisfy foreigners, why should they be so for Israelis? Why should any Israeli citizen, who sees him/herself wronged by some judicial or administrative decision taken by an Israeli institution, not demand that it be reviewed by some international entity to ensure its credibility/fairness? Aharonovitch may have — inadvertently or otherwise — sown the seeds of an "ethos of expectation" in which continual Israeli concessions and compliance with the demands of others — no matter how outlandish — become the norm, from which no divergence is to be brooked.

Let's not forget the context

The death of Arafat Jaradat should be fully and fairly investigated. Any improper conduct toward the unfortunate detainee must he unflinchingly addressed. However, in doing so, we should not lose sight of the context.

While we might well sympathize with his young children, who lost their father, he was after all, according to numerous sources including the BBC and Al Jazeera, a member of the murderous Al-Aksa Brigades, which have chalked up a long and chilling list of bloody atrocities in which many Israeli civilians were butchered.

The acts he was arrested for are grave.

Stones are lethal weapons. Molotov cocktails indisputably are. Both can — and have — killed Israelis. Hurling them at soldiers should not be lightly dismissed.

Indeed, it should be considered an act of attempted homicide. The ineffectiveness of the attempt should not be a mitigating factor in assessing the gravity of the intent.

Those involved in such activities should expect to be treated harshly, perhaps even to sustain injuries when being apprehended. In such circumstances, Israel has every reason to doubt the impartiality of international participants — even under the assumption that they may have no inherent bias against it. For example, foreign media representatives have been threatened with physical retribution for disclosing the truth — as witnessed by the fate of journalists who dared to attempt recording the brutal lynching of two Israeli reservists in Ramallah (2000).

Talkbackers get what government doesn't

While the government seems oblivious to the impact its response to the demands in the Jadarat affair could have on the nation's sovereign status, the same certainly cannot be said of the general public or at least segments thereof — such as readers of the Post.

Consider the reaction by some talkbackers to the report on Aharonovitch's announcement, who with variable degrees of courtesy, finesse and grammatical rigor, expressed the follow astute perspectives:

Frank Adam: "Israel will have submitted to the Arab aim to prove Israel [has] only partial or limited sovereignty."

Boris: "israel needs to stop being so insecure. if it wants to survive. it needs to stop having something to prove. like its right to exist"

Evil Zionist: "It will be a dangerous precedent and undermine our sovereignty"

iCry: "Next experts will need to be called in to "prove" Israel didn't poison the original Arafat.... Arabs can make Israel jump like a trained seal."

And finally, NormanF: "The Israeli government's default mode is to surrender to Arab blackmail, threats and intimidation. It can't say "no" and uphold Jewish sovereignty... Any other country on earth would never accept for themselves the "international observer" nonsense Aharonovitch peddled before the Knesset. It would reject outright all attempts to compromise its independence. What his statement proved again in the face of escalating global anti-Semitism, is that its easy to take the Jew out of the ghetto but its very difficult to take the ghetto out of the Jew!"

The hallmark of good diplomacy

I found it difficult to disagree.

Until the leaders of the Jewish state realize that the litmus test of good diplomacy is not to get the world to applaud your compliancy and capitulation, but to accept your pursuit of national interests and imperatives, we will not be able to say we have truly extricated ourselves from the clutches of the ghetto mentality.

Martin Sherman (www.martinsherman.net) is the founder and executive director of the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies.


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MOVIE MUSINGS

Posted by Borntolose, March 01, 2013

The article below was written by Sarah Honig who is is a writer for the Jerusalem Post. She writes the "Another Tack" column. This article appeared March 01, 2013 and is archived at
https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/STANDING_WITH_ISRAEL/conversations/messages/50290

It's not every day that news broadcasts open with a lament for what did not actually happen. But this anomaly is occasionally recurrent in our little insular setting. Periodically at this time of year the top item on our news purveyors' agenda is likely to be what isn't new: yet again no Israeli entry was awarded the coveted Oscar.

It's as if the whole international community was holding its breath for some obscure Israeli documentary or film short to get the ultimate nod. All else in Tinseltown's annual pageant is marginal.

And so Monday morning's news announcers mournfully informed us that there would be no Oscar for Israel this year.

Neither Israeli nominee for best documentary — 5 Broken Cameras or The Gatekeepers — won. That, of course, afforded commentators their opportunity to ruminate and spew such time-tried clichés as "what a disappointment," "it hurts" and "it's a blow to our national pride."

It's here that a sanity check is called for.

Is our national pride boosted by films that malign us? Is this what Israeli national pride has been reduced to — the desire to see our face ignominiously slapped before the entire sneering world? Are we pained because another Israel-bashing project didn't get the glory that our left wing eagerly sought (so as to rub our collective nose in it)? Seriously?

Some of us backward types actually heaved a huge sigh of relief that both Israeli contenders lost. It was sweet that the Oscar for best documentary went to the British/Swedish Searching for Sugar Man.

For decades no film that tells our story and presents our case had come out of this country. Somewhere along the line, local producers must have figured out that their only way to rake in profits and score points overseas — especially in Europe, which despite all pretenses to the contrary, still hasn't shaken off its congenital Jew-revulsion — is to portray the Jewish state as villainous.

So after all the accolades expectedly showered in Europe on these latest made-in-Israel defamatory offerings, the only solace left us here is to revel in the fact that the Oscar eluded them.

Their central thematic core is every bit as predictable, cravenly conformist and run-of-the- mill as nearly all Israeli flicks of past decades. Local filmmakers uniformly revel in picturing Israelis as jaded, essentially unpleasant (if not altogether repulsive), justifiably apprehensive, rightfully apologetic, malaise-ridden, terminally devoid of vitality, corroded within and/or wretchedly racked by self—reproach.

The Arab is revealed as the antithesis to the inherently disagreeable, fatigued, befuddled, farcical, foolish and/or pathetic Israeli. Arabs are dedicated patriots, confident in their cause, outspoken in their righteous indignation, vindicated in their umbrage, noble, proud, tough, young, vigorous and deserving of victory.

Some occasional counterfeit cardboard dichotomies are tolerable — freedom of expression and all that rot. However, when simplistic falsehoods become the single premise, then the overbearing presence of pressure by manipulative group-think must at least be suspected. The utter lack of deviation from this one homogeneous portraiture style testifies to the imposition of ideological diktats — obviously in the name of democracy and artistic freewill.

Misgivings are further intensified when we realize how many of these one-dimensional productions are subsidized by the Education Ministry's Israel Film Fund. Portions of our hard-earned incomes go — as taxes collected from you and me — to underwrite either outright vilification of the Jewish state or, at best, unsympathetic depictions of a bumbling imbecilic entity.

No government dares reduce officialdom's largess to Israel's self-appointed creative emissaries, who blithely batter their country's image at any available film festival abroad. Hand-in-hand with omnipotent media cliques, our artistes vehemently orchestrate intimidating reputation-trashing onslaughts which no higher-up or administration in recent memory could overcome.

And so — willing or not — we bankroll them and, at our expense, they relish in thumbing their avant-garde noses at the "benighted" aggregate of ordinary Israelis who are denied other homegrown cinematic fare, certainly anything Zionist. Guy Davidi, co-director of 5 Broken Cameras, has gone so far as to recommend — openly, out loud and brashly before the microphones — that an international boycott be declared against Israel.

Since nothing pro-Israeli can win applause at Cannes or Berlin, the preferences of overseas nabobs must be pandered to in our filmmakers' quest for fame and fortune. Thus, in order to bask in the limelight of enlightened foreign approval, Israelis enhance the fraudulent Arab narrative. Pleasing the enemy is the one surefire way to make it in Israeli showbiz.

In their own twisted way it's as if today's Israeli filmmakers had paid heed to the admonitions arrogantly issued by Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. to the Jewish movie moguls he assembled before him in 1940.

The multi-billionaire dynasty founder and father of the future president, was himself a movie tycoon (co-founder of RKO, among other conquests). He never concealed his contempt for the ground-breaking immigrant and first-generation Jews who had invented Hollywood and created the movie industry from its humble beginnings as the nickelodeon novelty. He referred to them mockingly as "pants pressers" and referred to himself as their "American" antithesis in the entertainment business.

Kennedy addressed the Jewish studio heads soon after his resignation (at president Franklin D. Roosevelt's unambiguous insistence) from his post as US ambassador to London. His two-and-a-half years at Grosvenor Square should have tipped off his California audience to what was in store.

Kennedy's 1938 appointment to the Court of St. James began shortly before the Anschluss (the merger of Germany and Austria) and while Hitler hoarsely demanded Czech territory. Rather than perceive Hitler as someone who must be stopped, Kennedy regarded as him as someone who must be appeased. And so the American ambassador venerated Neville Chamberlain and despised Winston Churchill. He never recanted — not even postwar.

From the outset, Kennedy conducted friendly talks — though lacking State Department authorization — with Hitler's ambassador, Herbert von Dirksen. As a result, von Dirksen opined to his Third Reich bosses that Kennedy was "Germany's best friend" in London.

After Kristallnacht, Kennedy's eldest son, Joe Jr. noted in his diary that his father "is alarmed that the country should get so worried up by the treatment of Jews." Joe, who would ironically be killed in a 1944 combat accident, was a devoted disciple of his father's anti-Jewish and pro-appeasement sentiments.

The father sent his son to visit Nazi Germany in 1934, when the Jews were already subjected to merciless persecution. Joe Jr. wrote his dad extolling Hitler's various "accomplishments," including the policy of sterilization, which the Kennedy heir apparent lauded as "a great thing." Exuding liberality, he elucidated: "I don't know how the Church feels about it, but it will do away with many of the disgusting specimens of men who inhabit this earth."

He expressed gratification that Hitler had "things well under control. The only danger would be if something happened to Hitler." Joe Jr. described Hitler as "building a spirit in his men that could be envied in any country" and as having merely exploited the prevalent "well founded" dislike of the Jews.

The father was delighted and replied to Joe Jr. that his "conclusions are very sound."

A head-on collision with Roosevelt became inevitable. No sooner was the blitz unleashed on Britain then ambassador Kennedy insolently asserted that the Brits were losers and that "Hitler will be in Buckingham Palace in two weeks." The king himself complained to Roosevelt.

But Kennedy could not be reined in. He told the press: "As far as the US goes, we ought to mind our own business."

Joe Sr. remained convinced that a nefarious Jewish cabal was in the works to dissuade Roosevelt from making nice to Hitler and facilitating ongoing trade with the Nazis. Hence, when Roosevelt called for his resignation in 1940 (after Kennedy publicly proclaimed that "Democracy is finished in England"), the disgraced ambassador knew whom to blame — the Jews.

Convinced that the Jews are warmongers who aim to drag America into battle needlessly, he took it upon himself, right after his return to the US, to sternly warn them not to harm relations with Germany, lest they be blamed for any fighting which would erupt.

And so, delivering a speech on the "European Situation," he cautioned Jewish studio executives: "You guys are going to be responsible for pushing the United States into war against the Nazis unless you stop your anti-Nazi films, your anti-Hitler propaganda, your anti-German propaganda. When war breaks out, the American people are going to turn on American Jewry, and there's going to be an outbreak of anti-Semitism like you've never seen, because the Jews are going to be held responsible for every American soldier and the destruction of the American economy."

Kennedy went even further. It wasn't just the content of films he regarded as offensive. "You're going to have to get those Jewish names off the screen," he bullied his stunned listeners.

Rather than fight anti-Semitism, Kennedy brandished it as a threat. He hectored the Jewish movie magnates about irritating their sworn enemy. The riot act he read them generated shock and underscored all the underlying Jewish insecurities that never went away, despite these entrepreneurs' presumed rights as Americans and despite their affluence and incontestable achievements.

Their mogul status notwithstanding, Hollywood's Jews still remained fearful and vulnerable enough not to have produced any film during all of WWII that focused on the methodically organized inhumanity against their own brethren.

Israel's movie-makers — while they had demonstrated nothing even remotely approaching the originality, dynamism or success of the industry's Jewish founders — do, nonetheless, seem to have adopted their spinelessness.

Indeed they had gone a huge cardinal step beyond the timidity and faint-heartedness of yesteryear's moguls. They don't just desist from challenging the genocidal enemy that bays for their people's blood, they cynically espouse and hype that enemy's cause.

Contact Borntolose at borntolose3@charter.net


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ANTI-SEMITISM AND THE GERMANS

Posted by Ted Belman, March 02, 2013

The article below was written by Isi leibler who chairs the Diaspora-Israel relations committee of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and is a former chairman of the governing board of the World Jewish Congress. He can be contacted by email at ileibler@netvision.net.il This article appeared March 01, 2013 in Israpundit and is archived at http://www.israpundit.com/archives/53208#more-53208

In the aftermath of the Holocaust, successive German governments have meticulously upheld their obligations to the Jewish people. Study of the Holocaust is a mandatory component of the German state education curriculum, Holocaust denial is classified as a crime and restitution commitments were honored and even exceeded.

Chancellor Angela Merkel is a genuine friend of the Jews and despite intense political pressures and occasional minor vacillations, has consistently supported Israel, describing its security as "part of my country's raison d'etre." However in recent years, as in other European countries, German public opinion has turned against Israel, perceiving it as the principal threat to global stability and peace. This hostility has increasingly assumed overt anti-Semitic tones.

There is growing resentment against Jews, who are blamed for imposing excessive emphasis on collective German national guilt for the Holocaust.

Anti-Jewish hostility is often expressed in the more "politically respectable" demonization of the Jewish nation state, allegedly not related to anti-Semitism, although the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) explicitly defines such behavior as anti-Semitic.

The German Left has accused Israel of war crimes, occupation and racism and also engages in inverse Holocaust imagery, enthusiastically condemning Israel for allegedly behaving toward the Palestinians as its Nazi forebears did to the Jews.

When reproached for engaging in anti-Semitism, the Left condemns the "global Zionist propaganda machine" for seeking to deny Germans the right to criticize Israeli government policies.

These trends are fortified by the sizable Islamic migrant community — now numbering over four million — which aggressively agitates against Israel, utilizing obscene placards at demonstrations and chanting "gas the Jews" or "death to the Jews." Muslims are at the forefront of violence directed at identifiable Jews in urban areas, especially in Berlin, where some Jewish community leaders are now advising Jews not to wear kippot in public.

Yet the government has welcomed the immigration of almost 200,000 former Soviet Jews and invested major funds in resurrecting a vigorous Jewish community and in fostering Jewish education.

Despite receiving state subsidies, the Jewish leadership displays its independence and frequently speaks out if it feels that the government is not fulfilling its obligations to the Jewish community or not being evenhanded toward Israel.

However, the intensification of extreme anti-Israeli hostility, combined with a recent spate of disconcerting incidents, has created angst within the Jewish community.

Last year, there was a traumatic national debate which assumed ugly anti-Semitic overtones after a judgment in Cologne ruled that male circumcision causes "bodily harm" and declared the practice illegal. The matter was only resolved following the direct intervention of Chancellor Merkel who initiated the passage of legislation legalizing circumcision.

In April 2012, in a provocative outburst, 84 year old Nobel Prize laureate Gunter Grass bitterly accused the Israeli government of seeking to obliterate the Iranian population. He warned that the Jewish state, which he considers "insane and unscrupulous," represents the principal obstacle to peace in the region and called on his government to cancel delivery to Israel of the last German Dolphin submarine.

Despite being discredited for having initially concealed that he had served as a member of the Nazi Waffen SS, Grass's vicious attack on Israel, while condemned by numerous politicians and journalists, was enthusiastically endorsed by many Germans.

Shortly after that incident, the state-sponsored Berlin Jewish Museum invited Judith Butler, a notorious Jewish promoter of BDS against Israel, as a guest lecturer. Butler received enthusiastic applause from the 700-strong audience when, purporting to act in accordance with the highest Jewish moral values, she renewed calls to boycott Israel and "abolish political Zionism" in order to create a bi-national Palestinian state.

To provide a platform for such an outspoken anti-Israeli activist at a state-sponsored Jewish Museum in Berlin is surely obscene, but not unprecedented. Former Israeli communist Felicia Langer lives in Germany where she condemns the German government for supporting Israel, constantly equates Israelis with Nazis, calls for Israeli leaders to be tried as war criminals, describes Israel as an apartheid regime and even praises Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. In Aug. 2009, German President Horst Kohler, who four years earlier had addressed the Knesset, shocked the Jewish community by honoring Langer with the Federal Cross of Merit, Germany's most prestigious award.

In 2010, despite protests from the Israeli Embassy, Frankfurt's Mayor Petra Roth invited Alfred Grosser, a German-born Jew known to be frenziedly hostile to Israel, to give the annual Kristallnacht oration at the city's St. Paul's Church. He used the occasion to draw parallels between the behavior of Israelis and Nazis and was lauded by the media.

Another ongoing scandal prevails at the German Center on anti-Semitism in Berlin, considered the most important German institute engaged with the subject. Until last year it was headed by Professor Wolfgang Benz, who received his PhD from Professor Karl Bosl, a former Nazi stormtrooper who maintains an ongoing association with right wing extremist groups. To this day, Benz continues defending his mentor.

Benz equates Islamophobia with anti-Semitism, alleging that critics of Islamic practice are reminiscent of Nazi anti-Semites attacking the Talmud. He recently challenged that the Muslim terrorist murders in Toulouse had an "anti-Semitic dimension." He dismisses concerns about the Muslim Brotherhood as being reminiscent of anti-Semitic phobias like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and bizarrely complains that drawing attention to the fact that Muslims comprise 70 percent of Berlin prison inmates is comparable to Hitler's ravings over "the fact that 89% of Berlin pediatricians in the 1930s were Jews."

The Center focuses on right-wing extremism and largely ignores or understates left-wing and Islamic anti-Semitism. Yet, despite protests, no effort has been made to redirect the activities of this government funded institute.

The most recent upheaval erupted in response to a list compiled by the U.S.-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, purporting to identify the ten worst anti-Semitic statements of 2012. It included Ahmadinejad, the Muslim Brotherhood, Nation of Islam founder, Louis Farrakhan and European anti-Semites. Ninth on the list was Jakob Augstein, publisher of the magazine Der Freitag, who also provides columns to Der Spiegel, Germany's leading weekly, founded by his father.

I have an aversion to simplistic lists prioritizing bigots and having reviewed some of Augstein's outbursts, I consider that bracketing him with Ahmadinejad or Farrakhan absurdly magnifies his standing and impact. But nevertheless, his outbursts, by any benchmark, warrant describing him as an anti-Semite.

Augstein alleged that when "Jerusalem calls, Berlin bows its will"; that U.S. presidents were obliged to "secure the support of Jewish lobby groups"; that American Republicans and the Israeli government profited from violence in Libya, Sudan and Yemen; that "the Netanyahu government keeps the world on a leash with an ever-swelling war chant"; that "Israel incubates its opponents in Gaza"; that the recent Prophet Muhammad video that provoked worldwide riots was initiated by Israel; that ultra-Orthodox Jews are like Islamic fundamentalist terrorists who "follow the law of revenge."

Even the broadest interpretation of the OSCE definition would qualify such demonization of Israel and allusions to Jewish global power as anti-Semitic.

In response, Augstein shamelessly claimed that being opposed to Jew hatred and "deeply respecting" the Simon Wiesenthal Center, he was distressed to be defamed as an anti-Semite.

Prominent German Jewish writer and commentator Henryk Broder was sufficiently outraged to describe Augstein as "a pure anti-Semite ... who only missed the opportunity to make his career with the Gestapo because he was born after the war."

President of the Jewish Central Council of Jews Dieter Graumann, while condemning Augstein's "horrible, hideous" articles on Israel, criticized his placement on such a list. His vice president, Salomon Korn, went further and foolishly defended Augstein against charges of anti-Semitism.

Juliane Wetzel from the German Center on anti-Semitism was amongst those who rejected suggestions that Augstein was disseminating hatred of Jews. Overall, the bulk of the German media, as well as both leftist and CDU politicians, defended him, insisting that he was merely expressing legitimate criticism of Israel.

It was significant that in 2010, two Bundestag leftist representatives were aboard the Turkish Marvi Marmara and that for the first time, the Left and the Right united in parliament to carry a unanimous resolution censuring Israel for the Gaza flotilla episode. This in itself may not represent anti-Semitism, but reflects the atmosphere of increasing hostility against Israel which would have been inconceivable in Germany only a few years ago.

For Jews, the positive side of Germany is the evident abundance of pro-Israeli and even philo-Semitic rank-and-file Germans in all walks of life. Yet, simultaneously the intensifying efforts by left-wing activists uniting with Muslim extremists and occasionally even Nazis, to demonize Israel and promote anti-Semitism, provide valid grounds for concern about a future for Jews in Germany.

The situation is likely to further deteriorate drastically after the culmination of Angela Merkel's term as chancellor.

Ted Belman is a retired lawyer and the Editor of Israpundit. He made aliya from Canada last year and now lives in Jerusalem, Israel. Contact him at tedbel@rogers.com


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JEWISH ORGANIZATIONS' FAILURE

Posted by Nurit Greenger, March 02, 2013

Reading the article 'Hagel Without Tears' (http://www.nysun.com/editorials/hagel-without-tears/88207/) has brought up the question, are the organizations that suppose to represents Jewish causes and help Israel in the international arena doing their job?

When you read that Jewish organizations, such as American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), and the American Jewish Committee (AJC) do not take a formal public position in cases, such as the nomination of Chuck Hagel to a Secretary of Defense you begin wondering, are they doing their job right?

PM Benjamin Netanyahu at AIPAC Annual Conference
PM Benjamin Netanyahu at AIPAC Annual Conference

When you read that Morton Klein, the president of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) claims that the leaders of the Jewish organizations, mentioned above, were worried about the consequences for the Jewish community if they took an forceful position against Hagel's nomination, you know something is wrong; they do not have what it takes to lead.

The nomination of Chuck Hagel was an American issue, not only Israel's issue, or Jews, despite his mainstream anti-Semitism sentiments and his negative position on Israel and his favoritism of her foes. Hagel appeared to be simply unfit to be the Secretary of State of all Americans, not only American Jews. Had the Jewish organizations come out and lobbied against Hagel, there was a chance that he would have been stopped and that would have been good for every American.

In observation of what the Jewish organizations have done for us, Jews and Israel, lately, besides constantly asking for money to keep their doors open and raise funds, I come up rather empty handed.

Here is an interesting triangle: The Union of Reform (Deformed) Judaism (URJ) just came out against Israel building in area E-1, but it is actually promoting a J Street (J'ihad Street) event to take place in a URJ Temple Isaiah on Pico Blvd., Los Angeles, this after J Street advocated for Hagel nomination and called those who opposed Hagel smear artists. Is J Street for or against USA and Israel's interests?

We better get used to the word 'stealth'; there is full blown stealth jihad by Moslems against the non-Moslem world; there is also stealth civil war, the Left war against all that the Left is not for and does not supports; and there is a stealth civil war among Jews on wide spectrum of issues.

For instance, in my opinion, Jeremy Ben-Ami, the executive director of J Street is a stealth Israel hater and he needs to be confronted. That is what StandWithUs (SWU) will be doing on March 11, 2013 when the organization's CEO Roz Rostein will be debating Ben-Ami on the subject "Israel's Future and the Role of the American Jewish Community"; venue: Temple Isaiah, 10345 West Pico Blvd., Los Angeles,90064. If you are still in the loop and you have not distanced yourself from Israel, as many Jews have done already, and you are concerned about Israel's future, join the efforts, go listen, make your voice heard.

With organizations such as J Street and even URJ influencing our Jewish youth we are raising generations who will be ashamed of Israel and will have nothing to do with the Homeland of the entire Jewish nation.

These organization are, for instance, blind to what the Palestinian Authority and Mahmud Abbas really are; they have whitewashed Jewish history and the real legal rights of the Jewish people to the land, not the land they elected to relate and deal with but all the land that make up the land of Eretz Israel. If we allow J Street, the Jewish organizations that have elected to shut up and religion based movements, turned political, such as URJ, to continue on their path, watch how fast the connection to Israel vanishes and anti-Semitism sentiments fill the vacuum in the West, including the United States. Failing to speak up when one had the chance has its detrimental consequences.

Time is dire. It appears that we have to redouble our efforts of telling the truth so many simply elected not to tell or hear. This is what Sarah N. Stern, Founder and President of EMET (Endowment for Middle East Truth) tells us to do.

StandWithUs, should not be afraid to come up with a booklet that tells the truth about the Palestinian Authority, similar to the one they have issued on Hamas; political correctness and false hopes will not bring about peace with this Arabic entity. They have never been and are not a peace partner for Israel, no matter how one approaches this long conflict issues. In fact the PA are just like Hamas only that they have chosen the diplomatic and legal warfare against Israel rather than the arms' struggle, the operation path of Hamas. It is time to tell it as it is, not hide behind hopes, delusions, lies and deception, as we have been doing for decades. Until these Islamo-jihadists change their education system NOTHING will make them a genuine peace partner for Israel, not now, not ever.

The world has lost a huge chunk of its moral compass, or perhaps it really did not have it. If we do not define what is right, make our case and then fight for it we are doomed.

If the Israeli Leadership Council (ILC), based in Los Angeles, promotes the SWU-J Street debate event, then their duty is to also keep the Los Angles-Israeli community well balanced on information; they should invite, for instance, Gerald Steinberg of the NGO Monitor who will update the community on what J Street, the New Israel Fund and Americans for Peace Now really are and how they are harming Israel and with that, indirectly, the entire world's Jewry.

People need to know that organization such as J Street wears the cloak of respectability but the fact is that it works to subvert Israel every day and its aggressive advocacy to see Hagel nominated is just the latest example.

Here is another idea: how about SWU running a campaign on campuses all over the world, to expose and delegitimize the fake pro-Israel groups? It is not just the covert and overt anti-Semitism on campus that is the problem, it is also the stealth jihad that is rampant there too. Just like it is not just Hamas that is the problem for Israel; the PA and its leadership and its head Abbas are too a major problem that is not properly dealt with. As if because they all wear suits and ties everyone lives with the delusion that they are not the terrorists they really are. It is not just the Muslim Brotherhood that is the problem, it is also its USA front groups, including those the Jewish community supports and does "interfaith" meetings with, such as MPAC (Muslim Public Affairs counck) and ISNA, Islamic society of North America, that are the problem.

Here is a scenario our minds need to grasp and think along: in order to have Israel's Ambassador to the USA Mr. Michel Oren's approval, J Street declared they have changed their mind on the Goldstone Report, which they first promoted, now reject. BUT, when the PA went to UN to seek membership, against all the agreements it has signed with Israel, to which the USA and EU were witnesses, and members of Congress were passing a bill to deny any future funding for the PA and to shut its DC office, J Street made sure no such bill got a majority, and indeed it never passed. In other words, J street has given a pass to Israel's enemy for its recalcitrant behavior, which undermines Israel's position in the international arena. That must not be tolerated.

So, it appears that AIPAC, ADL and AJC have been silenced. Silence can be death too.

Behind the AIPAC

NO more debates and parlor meetings. Action is needed. If Jews and Israel want to be respected, rather than bashed, expose and delegitimize those who demonize, delegitimize and subvert Israel and Jewish positions.

We have to re-evaluate everything we do because thus far we rank a failure.

There were over 600 rabbis who promoted Obama for a second term as president. This after his record was already shameful. Has anyone asked these rabbis why? What good is Obama brining to the entire American nation, to Israel and to the world? What has he done in the past 4 years that has made the USA and the world a better place to live? Name one!

I am well aware about the egos that run organizations, all functioning on the benevolence of the public. Have we asked them, what have you done for us lately?

Contact Nurit Greenger by email at nurit.nuritg@gmail.com. Visit her blog: http://ngthinker.typepad.com


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THE PERVERSE WORLD OF ABU ISLAM

Posted by Raymond Ibrahim, March 02, 2013

Egyptian Sheikh Abu Islam — of Bible-destroying, rape-approving fame — is again causing drama. In regards to his second claim-to-fame — inciting Muslims to rape women protesters, because they must all be Christian "crusaders" anyway — a lawyer has recently submitted complaints that help provide context for Abu Islam's "worldview" concerning women: among other things, he is accused of raping a Syrian minor girl, as well as sexually assaulting his own daughter-in-law.

For all these reasons—specifically "insulting religion," a crime in Egypt, and inciting rape of Christian women—he was recently arrested for questioning. A little before he was arrested, his final TV tirade was about the gall of some Muslims and the media for referring to killed Egyptian Christians as "martyrs," when infidels should ever receive that honorific, which should be reserved for suicide-bombers and terrorists.

Most recently, his family and friends began saying that Abu Isam died in prison, first by a snake bite, then because he was denied his diabetes medicine—prompting many Salafis to protest. Authorities deny that he died, saying he will soon be released (even as several Egyptian Christians languish in jails over rumors that they insulted Muslim Muhammad).

Such is the world of one of Sharia law's most vocal supporters in Egypt.

Raymond Ibrahim is an American research librarian, translator, author and columnist. His focus is Arabic history and language, and current events. He is the author of two books, Ibrahim was born in the United States to Coptic immigrants from Egypt. He is fluent in Arabic and English. Ibrahim studied at California State University, Fresno, where he wrote a Master's thesis under Victor Davis Hanson on an early military encounter between Islam and Byzantium based on medieval Arabic and Greek texts. Ibrahim also took graduate courses at Georgetown University's Center of Contemporary Arab Studies and is studying toward a PhD in medieval Islamic history at Catholic University. Contact Raymond Ibrahim at raymondibrahim1@gmail.com. The article appeared March 2, 2013 on his own blogsite and is archived at http://www.raymondibrahim.com/from-the-arab-world/the-perverse-world-of-abu-islam/i>


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ANOTHER PALESTINIAN ARAB DIES IN CUSTODY - BUT THERE WILL BE NO RIOTS

Posted by Hadar-Israel, March 03, 2013

'The amount of outrage over an Arab death is inversely proportional to the square of the possibility that the death can be blamed on Jews.'

A prisoner being held in a Palestinian Authority jail in Jericho died on Friday, a senior Palestinian official said.

Ayman Mohammad Sharif Samara, 40, died while being detained on charges of assault, Palestinian Authority attorney general Muhammad Abdul-Ghani al-Uweiwi told Ma'an.

He was arrested on Friday and transferred to a nearby hospital, where he passed away, al-Uweiwi said.

The PA attorney general denied that the prisoner was tortured or beaten during interrogations and said that an autopsy would be performed and the results made public once completed.

An investigation into his death has already begun, al-Uweiwi added.

This article appeared March 2, 2013 in the Elder of Ziyon Daily News. Contact Hadar-Israel at hadar-israel@verizon.net


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FRANK SINATRA AND THE JEWS

Posted by Ted Belman, March 03, 2013

By coincidence, a week ago I watched Cast a Giant Shadow for the umpteenth time and particularly noted all the great stars that acted in the movie including Kirk Douglas, John Wayne, Angie Dickenson and Frank Sinatra. Then this email came along.

Frank Sinatra

Francis Albert Sinatra (1915-1998) may have been one of America's most famous Italian Catholics, but he kept the Jewish people and the State of Israel close to his heart, manifesting lifelong commitments to fighting anti-Semitism and to activism on behalf of Israel.

Sinatra stepped forward in the early 1940's, when big names were needed to rouse America into saving Europe's remaining Jews, and he sang at an "Action for Palestine" rally (1947).

He sat on the board of trustees of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, and he donated over $1 million to Jerusalem's Hebrew University, which honored him by dedicating the Frank Sinatra International Student Center. (The Center made heartbreaking headlines when terrorists bombed it in 2002, killing nine people.)

As the result of his support for the Jewish State, his movies and records were banned in some Arab countries.

Sinatra helped Teddy Kollek, later the long-serving mayor of Jerusalem but then a member of the Haganah, serving as a $1 million money-runner that helped Israel win the war.

The Copacabana Club, which was very much run and controlled by the same Luciano-related New York mafia crowd with whom Sinatra had become enmeshed, happened to be next door to the hotel out of which Haganah members were operating. In his autobiography, Kollek relates how, trying in March 1948 to circumvent an arms boycott imposed by President Harry Truman on the Jewish fighters in Eretz Yisroel, he needed to smuggle about $1 million in cash to an Irish ship captain docked in the Port of New York. The young Kollek spotted Sinatra at the bar and, afraid of being intercepted by federal agents, asked for help. In the early hours of the morning, the singer went out the backdoor with the money in a paper bag and successfully delivered it to the pier.

The origins of Sinatra's love affair with the Jewish people are not clear but, for years, the Hollywood icon wore a small mezuzah around his neck, a gift from Mrs. Golden, an elderly Jewish neighbor who cared for him during his boyhood in Hoboken, N.J. (years later, he honored her by purchasing a quarter million dollars' worth of Israel bonds). He protected his Jewish friends, once responding to an anti-Semitic remark at a party by simply punching the offender.

Time magazine reported that Sinatra walked out on the christening of his own son when the priest refused to allow a Jewish friend to be the godfather. As late as 1979, he raged over the fact that a Palm Springs cemetery official in California declared that he could not arrange the burial of a deceased Jewish friend over the Thanksgiving holiday; Sinatra again threatened to punch him in the nose.

Sinatra famously played the role of a Jewish pilot in Cast a Giant Shadow, the 1966 film filmed in Israel and starring friend Kirk Douglas as Mickey Marcus, the Jewish-American colonel who fought and died in Israel's war for independence (Sinatra dive-bombs Egyptian tanks with seltzer bottles!) He donated his salary for the part to the Arab-Israeli Youth Center in Nazareth and he also made a significant contribution to the making of Genocide, a film about the Holocaust, and helped raise funds for the film.

Less known is Sinatra in Israel (1962), a short 45-minute featurette he made in which he sang In the Still of the Night and Without a Song. He also starred in The House I Live In (1945)*, a ten-minute short film made to oppose anti-Semitism at the end of World War II, which received an Honorary Academy Award and a special Golden Globe award in 1946.

Ted Belman is a retired lawyer and the Editor of Israpundit. He made aliya from Canada last year and now lives in Jerusalem, Israel. Contact him at tedbel@rogers.com This article appeared March 02, 2013 in Israpundit and is archived at
http://www.israpundit.com/archives/53216#more-53216


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SHADING THE NEWS FROM GAZA

Posted by Richard H. Shulman, March 03, 2013

New York Times headline: "Gaza Gunfire Erupts Along Border With Israel."

New York Times article: "Palestinians fired at an Israeli military jeep along the Gaza border on Friday...and three Palestinian protestors were wounded by Israeli fire during disturbances along the border fence... The confrontations erupted three days after Gaza militants fired a rocket into Israel for the first time since a cease-fire agreement took hold in November" (3/2/13, A5).

Gunfire didn't just "erupt." That headline is misleading. The first sentence reveals that what really happened is that Muslims attacked Israelis. They opened fire on a jeep within Israel, patrolling to detect and deflect attacks. Muslims in Gaza also approached the fence, probably in their usual way of passing beyond the permitted area, physically attacking the fence that blocks their rampaging into Israel for the purpose of murder, planting roadside bombs to blow up Israeli patrols, or to get a closer shot at Israelis.

Actual physical descriptions of Arab "disturbances" are omitted by that newspaper. Actual descriptions would prove that the Arab Muslims almost invariably commit aggression and prevent peace. What kind of reporting omits the key facts by which readers can evaluate which side acts wrongly? Biased reporting. The Times whitewashes the Muslim side or blackwashes the Israeli side.

The same kind of bias produced the misleading headline. Many people read just the headline. The headline does not show who did what to whom, the standard for proper journalism. The Times does not practice proper journalism, it practices advocacy journalism.

Years of Times whitewashing and blackwashing have blurred people's understanding of right and wrong in the Arab-Israel conflict. So, on the one hand, Jews get blamed by the, yes, antisemites at the Times and at the head of the Defense Dept. for allegedly controlling Congress in Israel's behalf, and on the other hand, Jews get blamed, including by naïve Jewish readers of the Times, for mistreating Palestinian Arabs.

The New York Times is succeeding in its mission, not publicly stated, of molding public opinion. In this case, it molds anti-Zionism and cushions jihad from American public wrath.

Richard Shulman is a veteran defender of Israel on several web-based forums. His comments and analyses are a regular feature on Think-Israel. He provides cool information and right-on-target overviews. He distributes his essays by email. To subscribe, write him at ricshulman@aol.com.


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ISLAM ISN'T MIDEAST'S ONLY PROBLEM

Posted by Richard H. Shulman, March 03, 2013

I focus on jihad, but jihad and Islam are not the Mideast's only problem.

Dictators have turned the Arab world into mostly failed states. Saudi Arabia consumes its ancient aquifers, and Egypt wastes half its water and pollutes the rest, while its population still grows (IMRA, 3/3/13 from Louise Sarant, Egypt Independent, 26/02/13 http://www.egyptindependent.com/news/climate-change-and-water-mismanagement-parch-egypt). Property rights are not protected. The whole economy is mismanaged. Islamists exploit discontent.

The U.S. diversion of food production to ethanol reduces international food supplies, not energy consumption. Thus the U.S. raises prices for impoverished Arabs and for American citizens and taxpayers, but raises the incomes of corn harvesting states.

Climate change and water mismanagement parch Egypt

Climate change, a fast growing population, ill-designed infrastructure, high levels of pollution and lack of law enforcement have made Egypt a country thirsty for water — both in terms of quantity and quality.

The River Nile, which is considered poor by many experts and hydrologists, lies at lower altitude than the rest of the country. Massive electric pumps extract the water from the river's bed and canals and direct it to industry, agriculture and for individual water use.

A significant portion of the water contained in Lake Nasser's 5,000 square kilometer basin is lost to evaporation, while old networks of leaking pipes also deprive the country of satisfactory access to its most important resource: water.

In order to debate water scarcity in Egypt, its causes, and how climate change makes the issue more pressing than ever, as well as looking to solutions, a panel of experts were invited to participate in the 13th Cairo Climate Talk last week entitled "Growing Thirst: Sustainable Water Solutions for Egypt."

Tarek Kotb, the First Assistant Minister in the Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation, and a member of the panel discussion, talked about the dwindling water share per capita with a sense of urgency. "Every year, the Egyptian population grows by 1.8 million, while the annual quota of Nile water allocated to Egypt, 55 billion cubic meters, has remained unchanged since the 1959 Nile Water Agreement," he says.

While Egyptians in the 1960s could enjoy a water share per capita of 2800 cubic meters for all purposes, the current share has dropped to 660 cubic meters today—below the international standard defining water poverty of 1000 cubic meters.

Kotb estimates that Egypt is gradually going to leave the stage of water scarcity and enter a phase of drastic water stress in the next 40 years, if no sustainable water management is put in place.

"By 2050, there will be about 160 million Egyptians and only 370 cubic meters of water per capita," he says. While Egypt has other options for its water needs, such as tapping into groundwater basins and desalinating sea-water, the bulk of water is still extracted from the Nile, leading to longstanding tensions with the other Nile basin countries.

The treaty signed under colonial rule in 1959 granted Egypt and Sudan most of the Nile water share, while upstream countries were given access to a very small allocation of water. Lama al-Hatow, a hydrologist and one of the founders of the Water Institute for the Nile (WIN) condemns Egypt's historical and ongoing hydro hegemony, by which the country claims its entitlement to benefit from most of the Nile water.

"A lot of science has been published on how not to lose water if the Ethiopian Millennium Dam is built, but it is not given much attention by the politicians," Hatow says. "The upstream countries have the right to develop," she says, "and there are ways to make it happen without Egypt losing water."

She adds that preventing water evaporation in Lake Nasser could even increase Egypt's water share.

Kotb responding to her remarks, saying that Egypt is investing millions of dollars in Sudan, South Sudan and Ethiopia to overcome losses due to evaporation in marshes and basins. "We don't deny these countries' right to development; actually, we help them," he said.

Claudia Bürkin, the Water Sector Coordinator for the German Development Cooperation and Senior Programme Manager at KfW Development Bank, explains that Egypt's water resources face two main challenges: water loss and bad quality.

"Egypt loses about 50% of its freshwater through poor maintenance of supplies and distribution problems, and the water is polluted," she says, stressing that a significant number of diseases are water borne. Polluted water also affects the ecosystems' balance, the soil quality, and seeps into the aquifers. "Egypt needs to set up strong standards for water quality and control the drainage nutrients, pesticides and waste found in the water."

Kotb admits that while most of the issues and potential solutions have been identified by the government, much needs to be done in terms of implementation of existing laws and stronger cooperation between ministries.

"Water management is not the mandate of the Ministry of Water Resources and Irrigation exclusively, which makes the implementation process so much harder," he says.

A National Water Resource Plan was established a few years ago, Kotb says, to curb the amount of pollution in the Nile emanating from cruise boats, factories, industries and villagers deprived of a waste management system. As part of this, he explains, factories located close to the Nile or the canals have been moved further away from the water streams, and new industries will be prevented from setting up a plant within 20km from the water.

"Law 48 on pollution has been reviewed and the penalties will be tougher," he says. Meanwhile, Hatow argues that enforcing stronger penalties is not the solution to prevent farmers from polluting.

"Instead of punishing them, we should give farmers incentives to make better use of water, and provide them with premium crops," she says.

The conversation then shifted to the effects of climate change, which can already be felt in the Northern part of the Delta and in the Mediterranean coastal cities of Damietta and Rosetta. The gradual rise in sea levels taking place turns fields into barren land unfit for agriculture, and the sea water that infiltrates the Nile is reaching further and further away from the coast.

"In order to keep a good yield and maintain agricultural production," says Kotb, "we need to use more fresh water to combat rising temperatures."

Lama's take on how to combat climate change is quite different from this. "We need to study community based resilience techniques to figure out how local and indigenous knowledge can provide answers and climate resilience."

Richard Shulman is a veteran defender of Israel on several web-based forums. His comments and analyses are a regular feature on Think-Israel. He provides cool information and right-on-target overviews. He distributes his essays by email. To subscribe, write him at ricshulman@aol.com


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KERRY & TURKEY

Posted by Richard H. Shulman, March 03, 2013

Sec. of State Kerry "chastised" the Prime Minister of Turkey for calling Zionism a "crime against humanity." The news report explains that such a comment "could frustrate Mr. Kerry's desire to see an improvement in estranged Turkish-Israeli relations." The reporter also explains that Turkey is a moderate Muslim-majority nation.

Sec. Kerry called the comment offensive, preferring tolerance instead. He said all leaders should be tolerant. He reportedly held a "frank discussion" of the Turkish comment with PM Erdogan.

PM Erdogan denied hostility toward Israel. He blamed Israel for poor mutual relations, for allowing self-defense by its commandos, stabbed and shot by Islamists encouraged by Turkey to break Israel's legal, partial blockade of Gaza. [I described the blockade-running flotilla incident factually and meaningfully, which the reporter did not.)

The report attributes the deterioration in mutual relations to the rise of Erdogan and Turkey's newly "assertive regional posture." (Michael R. Gordon, NY Times, 3/2/13, A4). Correct.

If Turkey were a "moderate" Muslim country, why does it have a Radical Muslim regime, dispatch Islamists to attack Israel, call the Jewish national liberation movement and only Jewish nationalism a crime, and threaten war on other countries? The Mideast Forum wrote a lengthy article documenting the many hostile acts by Turkey against neighboring countries, more resulting from Turkish nationalism than from Radical Islam. Turkey's nationalism has its criminal tinge. (Turkey was fairly hospitable to my family, and has the potential of restoring civility.)

Did you notice that Sec. Kerry did not call Erdogan's antisemitic remark mistaken? I think that the U.S. walks on eggs with certain other countries, especially Islamic ones and China. Our government apparently does not stand for anything anymore. We let Turkey, Iran, and the Arab countries smear Israel and Judaism. But that amounts to condoning not only the antisemitism but the propaganda arm of jihad. Yet the U.S. is a victim of the same jihad.

Apparently since Kerry's foolish and treasonous youth, he has gained stature but not sense. He makes not sense in thinking that Turkey's present, Islamist and neo-Ottoman imperialist regime could establish good relations with Israel. His boss and his predecessor make the same mistake with the Islamist Egyptian regime.

U.S. policy is to shore up the Egyptian economy by siphoning money from ours. U.S. policy is to pour more advanced arms into the Egyptian armed forces. It does this in the name of stability. So, Obama helps topple reasonably stable regimes in Libya and Egypt, lets Islamists attack Americans, and then suggests we help stabilize them. Do modern jets in Egypt's Islamist hands help stabilize the country and region?

Richard Shulman is a veteran defender of Israel on several web-based forums. His comments and analyses are a regular feature on Think-Israel. He provides cool information and right-on-target overviews. He distributes his essays by email. To subscribe, write him at ricshulman@aol.com


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BAHRAIN AS A TARGET PREFERRED BY IRAN FOR TERRORISM AND SUBVERSION

Posted by Terrorism Information Center, March 03, 2013

1. On February 16 and 19, 2013, the Bahraini authorities announced they had exposed a terrorist cell run by the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards. The cell's operatives had been involved in shooting policemen and were planning to assassinate public figures and carry out terrorist attacks on various sensitive targets, among them the King Fahd Bridge (which links Bahrain to Saudi Arabia), Bahrain International Airport and the ministry of the interior. Two affairs preceded the exposure: in November 2012 five suspects were detained on suspicion of placing IEDs which exploded in various locations in Manama, and at the beginning of November 2011 a terrorist cell was captured who members had been planning to carry out showcase attacks in Bahrain and attack important facilities. One of their targets wasthe King Fahd Bridge, which in our assessment is regarded as a strategic target by the Iranians.

2. Tariq al-Hassan, head of Bahraini general intelligence, said that the cell most recently exposed had been recruited by two men living in Qom, Iran. Its operatives were handled and funded by the Islamic Revolutionary Guards, and trained by Guards proxies in Iraq and Lebanon. In previous affairs Iran and Hezbollah were accused of handling terrorist cells in Bahrain, training them and providing them with weapons. In every instance Iran and Hezbollah denied the accusations.

3. Actually, however, in our assessment the terrorist cells are part of Iran's comprehensive, ongoing efforts at subversion and terrorism, sometimes carried out with the assistance of Hezbollah, its Lebanese proxy. Their efforts have accelerated in the past two years, the result of the upheaval in the Arab world and the intensified Iranian confrontation of the United States and Saudi Arabia in the Persian Gulf.

4. Since the regional upheaval began, there have been protests in Bahrain by its Shi'ite majority. The Shi'ites are supported by Iran, which exploits them to further its efforts to overthrow the Bahraini regime. The regime has acted to contain the protests but the Shi'ites have become more daring and confrontations between Shi'ite demonstrators and the Bahraini security forces have become routine. This explosive situation provides, in our assessment, fertile ground for the continuation and intensification of Iran's subversive and terrorist activities within the Bahraini Shi'ite population. The Iranians do that either directly or by using proxies such as Lebanese Hezbollah and the Shi'ite militias in Iraq as subcontractors (the Iranian modus operandi in other Shi'ite communities throughout the Arab-Muslim world).

Bahrain: Iran's Choice as a Target for Its Terrorism and Subversion

5. Iran chose Bahrain as a target for terrorism and subversion because it is located in the heart of the Persian Gulf, which is strategically important for Iran, and because of its political-societal makeup: it has a Shi'ite majority and is ruled by a Sunni monarchy which has Saudi Arabia as an ally and is oriented toward America. In concrete terms there are several reasons for Iran's decades of terrorism and subversion in Bahrain:

1) The presence of the American army: Bahrain hosts the United States' largest Persian Gulf naval base, Naval Support Activity (NSA) Bahrain, home of the Fifth Fleet. NSA Bahrain has been the seat of American army support for the wars in Iraq (ended) and Afghanistan (ongoing). As far as Iran is concerned, an American military force in Bahrain is capable of providing a response to an Iranian threat to the Gulf States and can threaten vital Iranian interests (most of Iran's commercial activity, including its oil exports, is channeled through the Straits of Hormuz and the Persian Gulf). In addition, from the Iranian point of view, if and when the time comes, the American presence in Bahrain is liable to be used in an attack on Iran (as it was in the attack on the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq).

Bahrain Map

2) Bahrain's politics and demographics: An estimated 60%-70% of Bahrain's more than a million inhabitants are Shi'ites ruled by a Sunni minority. Bahraini Shi'ites have a long history of protesting, both nonviolently and violently, against various issues on the Bahraini and regional agenda. Iran, with Hezbollah support, intensively incites Bahrain's Shi'ite population to overthrow the monarchy. The regional upheavals escalated both the Shi'ite protests and the Iranian efforts to subvert and destabilize the Bahraini regime, which so far has been able to contain the protests.

3) Iran's irredentist aspirations: Iran claims sovereignty over Bahrain (calling it "Iran's 14th province") and has even claimed to have found "historical proof" for the claim. In February 2009 Ali Akbar Nateq Nuri, advisor to Supreme Leader Khamenei, said that until its independence in 1970, Bahrain was Iran's 14th province and even had representation in the Iranian parliament. At the time, the statement (not the first time it was made) led to a storm of protests in Bahrain and gave rise to open expressions of solidarity with Bahrain throughout the Arab world. In 1979, during the first months of Iran's Islamic Revolution, the Ayatollah Sayyid Sadeq Rohani, an important Iranian cleric, asserted that Bahrain was an integral part of Iran and that it was illegal to separate it from Iran. He called on the inhabitants of Bahrain and the other emirates to rise up against their rulers and to institute regimes of "justice and equality" (Shia-online.ir website).

Ali Akbar Nateq Nuri, advisor to Khamenei
Ali Akbar Nateq Nuri, advisor to Khamenei

4) Iran's aspirations to hegemony in the Persian Gulf: Iran regards the Gulf as strategically extremely important both in terms of its economy and its security. Iran seeks hegemony in the Gulf and to remove the presence of Iran's enemies, principally the United States, other Western countries, and Saudi Arabia and its allies. The Shi'ite communities in the countries in the Persian Gulf and at the entrance to the Red Sea, among them Bahrain, Yemen, southern Iraq and eastern Saudi Arabia are, in Iran's perception, bridgeheads for Iranian influence and the advancement of its regional interests.

5. Exploiting the Shi'ite community in Bahrain for subversion and terrorism is a permanent part of the Iranian pattern, carried out by the Qods Force and with Hezbollah as a subcontractor. The most recent example was in Yemen, where on January 23, 2013, a ship was intercepted and found to be carrying a large quantity of weapons from Iran. The weapons were en route to the Shi'ite Houthi rebels in north Yemen. Other countries with Shi'ite communities which are targets for Iranian subversion and terrorism are Lebanon (a prominent example of Iran's success in exporting the Islamic Revolution), Syria (where Iran and Hezbollah support the Alawite regime, which they regard as Shi'ite), Iraq (where Iran established Shi'ite militias), Pakistan (where there is a large Shi'ite community) and Azerbaijan (a Shi'ite country which Iran has traditionally targeted for its subversion and terrorism).

6. Three appendices are available in the original article.

Contact Terrorism Information Center at newsleter@terrorism-info.org.il

This article appeared February 28, 2013 and is archived at
http://www.terrorism-info.org.il/en/article/20486

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DEPLORABLE

Posted by Arlene Kushner, March 03, 2013

Now I'm referring not to the state of the world, but to the state of Israeli politics. I am so often proud of who we are. But now? I would gladly grab hold of certain political shoulders and shake until the heads that sit on those respective shoulders rattled. Where? I want to ask. Where is your devotion to the state and the greater good during these difficult times?

To whose shoulders am I alluding? There is, in my opinion, enough blame to go around. No one that I'm seeing stands up as a leader (or even a potential leader), resolute in his vision, embracing his fellow Jews, and focused on the nation and not his own political future or that of his particular party.

Do I know what's in people's heads? Not with any clarity. Which makes posting difficult.

~~~~~~~~~~

On Friday, the coalition negotiations between Likud Beitenu and Habayit Hayehudi broke down. These are the two parties that should have been natural allies, logical coalition partners.

Prime Minister Netanyahu has secured from President Peres another 14 days in which to form a coalition. President Obama has said if a government is not formed by the 16th of this month, then he will cancel his trip, scheduled for the week after.

Today the prime minister met with Shas. There had been reports that he absolutely refuses to exclude them because of Bennett-Lapid demands. And there have been other, more recent, reports that he told Shas he wants to include them, but that because of Bennett and Lapid, it will be difficult to do so.

Following this meeting, Netanyahu had a long meeting with Bennett, which is being described by members of Habayit Hayehudi as "positive and productive." There was discussion of the party joining the coalition, although there is at yet no announcement.

~~~~~~~~~~

I am reluctant to repeat rumors or level charges that are no more than hearsay, and yet I feel I must at this point give my readers some window into what is going on here.

By way of a re-cap:

Fault lies first with Netanyahu who ran a regrettable campaign. The lack of vigor with which he and his party campaigned resulted in fewer mandates for Likud-Beitenu than had been expected and plenty of anger within Likud circles.

What is more, Likud ran a very negative campaign, with the negativity leveled first and foremost against Habayit Hayehudi. This was stupid and counterproductive. There are rumors, which apparently do have some basis in fact, regarding bad blood between Netanyahu and Bennett, head of Habayit Hayehudi, who once worked for Netanyahu.

However, what has been the case, as well, is that Bennett's posture as an up-and-coming leader in the nationalist camp threatened Netanyahu -- who has exposed his insecurities. Compared with the previous strength of the "old" Habayit Hayehudi (aka the National Religious Party), this new incarnation with Bennett at its head was demonstrating great promise in the polls and it was looking as if Likud was at risk of losing voters to Habayit Hayehudi.

Thus apparently did Netanyahu level criticism against Bennett. His hope, surely, was that disenchanted potential Habayit Hayehudi voters would turn to Likud. What I see is that, seeking a new young face, they instead moved over to Lapid and Yesh Atid. Netanyahu bears some responsibility for the 19 mandates Lapid garnered.

~~~~~~~~~~

Since the coalition negotiations began 28 days ago, there are only two discernable facts we can point to:

First, Netanyahu brought Tzipi Livni on board and gave her an incredible amount of power -- Justice Ministry and responsibility for negotiating with the PA -- for her six mandates. A very foolish move that I have already described as a betrayal of the principles of many inside the Likud-Beitenu faction and of those who voted Likud-Beitenu.

And then, the partnership, the "mini-coalition" of Bennett (on the right in the picture) and Lapid. At first this was no more than suggested by rumor, but the fact of this agreement has become clear in recent days.

Yair Lapid leader of the Israeli Yesh Atid party(L) and Naftali Bennett, head of Israel's Jewish Home party attend the swearing-in ceremony of the 19th Knesset, the new Israeli parliament, on February 5, 2013 in Jerusalem, Israel. The 120 members included a record 48 new law makers.

Bennett says he joined with Lapid only because Netanyahu had treated him badly, not negotiating with his party in good faith and passing over him when others were approached.

Bennett: "for days after the election the Likud refused to speak to the Jewish Home. They boycotted us... we expected to be a natural partner and to be the first to enter the Netanyahu government." The message he claims he got was, "the religious Zionist party won't enter the coalition, at any price." (Whether this was a literal message or the "feeling" he got, he does not say.)

Likud had denied this, saying that Bennett was approached first.

But it's now clear that this wasn't so, because Likud negotiator David Shimron said today that, "They are trying to punish us because Bennett's phone rang after Gal-on's." Zahava Gal-on, head of the far left Meretz party. It made the press when Netanyahu contacted her, as well as others, immediately after the elections. This was before Bennett had been called.

Foolish of Netanyahu. Rude. Conveying to the newcomer Bennett a sense of being excluded. But is this sufficient reason for Bennett to have fashioned his current policy as he has? Once he was called, would it have been prudent for him to have moved on rather than attempting a power play?

~~~~~~~~~~

The two issues that Bennett and Lapid have raised mutually have been the position of Livni and the matter of legislation that would require haredim who are learning in yeshivas to also serve in the IDF or do national service. This second issue has been an enormous hot potato, and I have concern that rigid positions on both sides are causing divisions within the country at a time when we can ill-afford this.

Part of what disturbs me is that I'm hearing that Lapid says he doesn't want to sit in a coalition with the haredi parties. Although we cannot know what's being said in closed rooms or hinted between the lines, this stipulation certainly seems more stringent and stiff-necked than saying he would of course sit with them but wants to see them negotiating a compromise on the issue of haredi service. A compromise, even if a modest beginning -- a concession that some compromise is necessary.

On the other hand, there are haredi leaders demonstrating no willingness to compromise. They are reported to have said some very disturbing things. One rabbi allegedly said he would rather sacrifice the settlements than sacrifice Torah. That got my dander up, big time. (Translation here: they would sit with Labor.) And then charges against Bennett, who is an observant, kippa-wearing Jew, about his being against Torah.

~~~~~~~~~~

This business of saving Torah. Oi v'voi. When the nation was founded, the Jewish people had just undergone the Holocaust, and the horrendous destruction in eastern Europe of Torah scholars. Ben Gurion, in a desire to strengthen Torah study -- and the population of those studying -- within the new Jewish state, structured a plan by which ultra-Orthodox men studying in yeshivas would be exempt from army service. That plan has been retained since Ben Gurion's time. The haredim have come to see this as an entitlement, and have come to believe -- many with great and passionate sincerity -- that the mantle of preserving Torah rests with them.

But back then there were hundreds studying in yeshivas and today -- thank Heaven! -- there are tens of thousands. More studying than has ever been the case. The haredim protest that they are serving Israel as much as those who serve in the IDF -- that it is this religious study that guards Israel. Who can say otherwise?

But no one is suggesting that the yeshivas be closed. There are proposals that would defer the age at which these yeshiva students could be drafted. And proposals that say that the finest of Torah students -- however they would be identified and however many would be included in this category -- would still be exempt, and still be permitted non-stop study. Part of the problem, of course, is that there are multiple proposals with various proponents arguing for what they have advanced.

It should also be noted that there currently are alternatives within the IDF that permit a combination of study and military service, alternatives that must be expanded and seriously developed. I have in mind the Hesder Yeshiva programs and the battalion called Nahal Haredi. There are some haredim who do serve now, and this practice needs to be publicized and encouraged.

~~~~~~~~~~

There are multiple problems with the current deferment system for yeshiva students. One is that not every haredi man is automatically a scholar who merits the latitude of being exempt from other duties. While there are pious and devoted men who spend long hours in their study, there is a certain percentage of the haredi population that simply takes advantage of that exemption.

Another is the sense within the larger population (and to a considerable extent this is what Lapid represents) that the burden of serving must be equalized. The haredi population must give, in service to the State.

And even beyond the issue of military service, there is the question of their subsequently joining the ranks of the employed and thus contributing to the economic wellbeing of the nation -- and, in the process, becoming less isolated and more firmly part of the social fabric of the nation.

~~~~~~~~~~

It is my own conviction that changes are necessary, but that they have to be made slowly and with awareness of the sensibilities of the haredi community, so as to avoid tearing this nation apart. It is my impression that the IDF is not prepared to accept all of them immediately in any event, if ever.

~~~~~~~~~~

And there is yet one other part of the equation here that must be addressed, and that is Yair Lapid and his manner of conducting himself. His 19-mandate victory went to his head and he has made some unfortunate statements: Failing to project the humility and the desire to garner experience that we might hope for from someone new at politics, he has presented himself as someone who can come in and change matters forthwith. This is unsettling and suggests the possibility of rash judgment.

~~~~~~~~~~

There has been a good deal of criticism of Bennett, and talk about what is in his head, that he has held fast to this agreement with Lapid, with whom he hardly agrees on all particulars. Of late, Netanyahu has been working to break apart that mini-coalition, bringing Bennett in, and leaving Lapid out.

What makes it somewhat less likely that Netanyahu can succeed is this:

Four key rabbis of the Tekuma faction of Habayit Hayehudi have now come out supporting Bennett's agreement with Lapid. Tekuma, please understand, came from National Union, which is to the right politically; Uri Ariel, Bennett's second on the list and the one who has been doing negotiating for the party, is from Tekuma.

Rabbis Dov Lior (a big name), Haim Steiner, Isser Klonsky and Haim David Halevi have released a letter that they sent to Bennett and Ariel:

"In the light of updates we have received from MKs and members of Jewish Home, and taking into account the media stories on the matter, we wish to 'strengthen the hands' of the path Jewish Home has chosen, as it works to preserve the world of Torah and the communities of the Land of Israel. We support the cooperation with Yesh Atid and with Yair Lapid."

Interesting..."to preserve the world of Torah and the communities of the Land of Israel."

~~~~~~~~~~

Here is the situation for Netanyahu:

In spite of enormous pressure on Shelly Yachimovich of Labor, she refuses to join the Likud-Beitenu coalition because the factions are too far apart on basic issues. Pheww!!

He does not want to alienate the haredi parties. But he wants a coalition.

Thus, he may have to take both Bennett and Lapid, without Shas and United Torah Judaism (UTJ). That would bring him 68 mandates or 70 if he brought in Kadima.

Or, if he can draw Bennett away from Lapid, he can include Shas and UTJ with Bennett for 67 mandates or 69 with Kadima.

In either event, I would say he will have to restructure his deal with Livni, even as he retains her party in the coalition.

My prediction is that we're on the cusp of a resolution here. What we will still need to watch, even after resolution, is which party is granted which portfolios. If he does lure Bennett from Lapid, what he offers Habayit Hayehudi will be a big part of the story.

Another major part will be the selection of Defense Minister. This will tell us a good deal about what Netanyahu intends and how secure he is.

~~~~~~~~~~

Sincerely do I hope I have helped my readers to wrap their heads around a crazy and complex situation, and not simply caused confusion. Hopefully, in my next post I will be able to turn to other matters.

Contact Arlene Kushner at akushner@netvision.net.il and visit her website: www.ArlenefromIsrael.info


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BEIJING'S & JEDDA'S INTERNATIONAL SHOPPING SPREE LEAVES THE POOR & DISENFRANCHISED IN THE DIRT

Posted by ACD/EWI, March 04, 2013

International Shopping Spree

International Shopping Spree

Over the past decade, Saudi Arabia's GDP more than tripled. China's increased by a factor of 6. In the same time frame, both countries reported between 3 and 5 percent unemployment annually. Or so they (and the World Bank) tell us.

These two countries are vested with incredible wealth, which they use not to invest in their subjects (known in the West as citizens), but mostly to buy financial and media institutions, sensitive technologies, natural resources, land and influence around the world. If the GDP numbers above are more or less accurate, the unemployment figures are a total deception.

Some Chinese economists claim the unemployment is at least double the official figure. But in October 2012, when China's population was estimated at 1.354.04 billion people, former International Monetary Fund economist Eswar Parsad stated that China's official unemployment rate "has no credibility at all."

Chinese unemployment figures take into account only registered urban unemployment: workers laid off by state-owned enterprises don't count. Rural unemployment and underemployment, and temporary rural urban and rural workers aren't considered either.

China's "economic miracle" created enormous dislocations beginning in the early 1990s. Economic reforms to secure high economic growth led to the shedding of excess labor, lay-offs, early-retirement schemes, and an increasing demand for skilled workers that the Chinese workforce could not supply. Between 1992 and 2002, more than a million jobs were lost in Shanghai alone. From a peak of 145.1 million in 1992, the number of jobs in China's state sector fell to 82.8 million in 2002.

A few years ago it was estimated that 15 million new workers would enter the Chinese job market annually between 2003 and 2020. The number of new jobs available annually would average only about 8 million. In the urban-industrial north, some estimates of unemployment have been greater than 25 percent, and for men aged 51-60, it's 27.5 percent.

International Business Editor of The Daily Telegraph Ambrose Evans-Pritchard reported last month that the Chinese "have pledged stimulus worth $2 trillion." While some investments are made, "Some of it is a fictional wish-list," he noted. Economic stimulus is not the same as steady investment.

As for Saudi Arabia, its population has increased by nearly a factor of 5 since 1970 to today's estimated 28 million. In contrast to the Chinese, and unlike themselves in the past, the Saudis have begun to talk in public about the extent of their unemployment problem. Prince Al-Waleed Bin Talal bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, of all people, has recently said that there are 8 million migrant workers employed in service jobs in Saudi Arabia and over 2 million illegal migrant workers.

Meanwhile, 2 million Saudis are jobless and, apparently, the real number of unemployed could be threefold, according to experts. If Prince Talal -- one of the richest men in the world, well known for his foreign, rather than domestic investments -- is right about the numbers, the jobless rate among Saudi's is at least 12.5 percent and may be much higher:

"Media reports and private estimates suggest that between 2 million and 4 million of the country's native Saudis live on less than about $530 a month -- about $17 a day -- which analysts generally consider the poverty line in Saudi Arabia." Some estimate that as many as a quarter of all Saudis live in poverty. In addition, youth unemployment is rife: more than two-third of Saudis are younger than 30, and the unemployment rate for Saudis in their 20s is nearly 75 percent.

In April 2000, King Abdullah announced the planned establishment of the Saudi Arabian General Investment Authority (SAGIA). Its initial purpose was to attract and process foreign direct investment. In 2006, facing growing al-Qaeda activities, the king announced new plans to create four new "cities" to bring in modern technology, management skills, corporate governance, and new industries. SAGIA was given the job of regulating the Economic Cities Authority (ECA).

The "cities" aim to encourage investments from the private sector, and to create jobs. "Core jobs are expected to be created, which in turn will spur supporting ancillary jobs." The object here is clearly to create environments to lure foreign investment with the hope of a trickle-down effect that will create jobs for unemployed and underemployed Saudis.

In addition, the King has spent nearly $4 billion to establish a top-flight coed university north of Jeddah. And it is true that Abdullah and others in the Saudi royal family have indeed spent billions to help the poor. But despite that, and well-meant long-range plans for economic development, there is still a glaring disparity between the extent of the wealth created in the Kingdom and the poverty afflicting the Saudi people.

Growing the royal wealth and keeping it safe abroad seems more important than creating jobs or relieving destitution. Not surprisingly, Prince Talal's assessment was provided by Iran's Press TV, not by any Saudi media outlet. The Saudis prefer to keep things quiet. In 2011, for example, three young Saudi video bloggers were arrested and jailed for two weeks for producing an online video about poverty in Saudi Arabia.

While data on Saudi foreign direct investment is among the most difficult to find, there was a report out of the Saudi embassy in 2009 that Saudi investment in the U.S. had reached $400 billion. This number at least gives an idea of the scale of Saudi FDI. And then there's the case of Prince Talal. Al-Waleed Bin Talal owns a number of hotels, firms, and television stations and Forbes puts his personal fortune at $18 billion. He also owns 95 percent of Kingdom Holding, which has stakes in Apple Inc., Citigroup and General Motors. Talal is also a significant shareholder in Rupert Murdoch's NewsCorp.

For the Saudis, it's clear that its unemployment problem is more threatening than China's, hence what King Abdullah and the government have done regarding it, however ineffectual that may be to date. The Saudis mean to keep the Arab Spring out of their country, inasmuch as al Qaeda, the Muslim Brotherhood, and Iranian-sponsored Islamists might use the Saudi poor to their advantage and use them to overthrow the monarchy.

As for the Chinese, their method of dealing with unemployment and underemployment has been to misreport it, avoid investing in their own country (except to quell disturbances in this or that province), while, in the meantime, "exporting" large numbers of domestically unemployable Chinese. Most go to Africa, but they can be found everywhere China is attempting to gain influence, including, most lately, the Caribbean.

On June 11, 2011, U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, gave a speech in Zambia warning of a new colonialism caused by the Chinese (although she didn't mention China by name): "It is easy to come in, take out natural resources, pay off leaders and leave." Clinton described only part China's MO in Africa. In addition to buying off and underwriting public works projects for local leaders, the Chinese have been injecting a substantial number their own citizens into the continent as "temporary" workers. This has brought them remittances, continued influence in Africa, and very, very modest relief to their unemployment problems.

In 2009, China became Africa's single largest trading partner, surpassing the U.S. It's direct foreign investment there went from under $100 million in 2003 to more than $12 billion in 2011, according to the New York Times. With this have come Chinese laborers and other "immigrants."

Migration Information reports that, in 2009, the Chinese population in Africa was estimated at between 580,000 and 820,000: today it's well over one million according to the same source.

"While most Chinese in Africa are there only temporarily -- as contract laborers and professionals -- there are a growing number of Chinese migrants choosing to remain in Africa to explore greater economic opportunities. Though many Chinese migrants said they will eventually return to China, countless have already stayed years beyond their original plans."

These Chinese have come in a variety of ways -- some of them seeking economic opportunity on their own. Most have accompanied Chinese-funded public works projects and exported Chinese goods into the continent. The money they send back home has increasingly originated in crime. In addition to money, PRC émigré communities everywhere have been providing their home government with commercial and other intelligence.

Last June, economist Dambisa Moyo inked an improbable op/ed for the New York Times. Moyo ignored the matter of the growing PRC Chinese presence in Africa, and the extent to which they have in fact become the competitors of native Africans for jobs, to explain that China's increasing presence in Africa served to bring hundreds of millions out of poverty back home:

"To satisfy China's population and prevent a crisis of legitimacy for their rule, leaders in Beijing need to keep economic growth rates high and continue to bring hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. And to do so, China needs arable land, oil and minerals. Pursuing imperial or colonial ambitions with masses of impoverished people at home would be wholly irrational and out of sync with China's current strategic thinking."

Astonishingly, with this Moyo inadvertently identified China's investment abroad as the principal cause of poverty at home.

As a point of comparison, the extent of China's foreign direct investment in the United States is less substantial than that of Saudi Arabia. However, it is in the midst of a rapid increase. It has grown nearly seven-fold over the past five years, from $3.4 billion in 2007 to $22.8 billion at the end of 2012.

Politically tyrannical and elite-serving economic regimes such as China and Saudi Arabia seem to invest just enough in their countries to placate the more educated portion of their population, while keeping large numbers of people in poverty.

This modus operandi is an old story. It's Stalinism or Maoism by other means. What the Arab and Northeast Asian parts of the world learned from the twentieth century was that, with single parties (or their equivalent, e.g., large families) and an enormous secret police, you can not only keep your subjects from revolting, you can also make them accept lives of misery.

China, unlike the Saudis, doesn't fear the spread of religiously motivated "reform" movement such as the Arab Spring. Demonstrations in China are not always reported and often are treated harshly to discourage future protests. Thus far, they've succeeded. Keeping a lid on the opposition enables China to fulfill its national plan to export their goods, sell arms, buy property, commodities, industries and influence, wherever they can. Whatever is their national plan to improve the lives of their own citizens, seems to have been put on a slower burner.

Fearing incitement by al-Qaeda sympathizers who call to end the monarchy's corrupt hold on the country, as well as a possible uprising by the Shiite minority, keep the Saudi royal family edgy. While they have managed to control widespread demonstrations thus far, the destabilization in the region presents a real threat. To mitigate it, the Saudis do what the Saudis have always done -- provide funds to disenfranchised groups to go elsewhere to spread the holy jihad.

When cash is king -- both China and Saudi Arabia qualify - tyrannical regimes are unlikely to sit on the bench when the opportunities in the international field are so numerous and tempting. With more money in their pockets, they will continue to repress their own, to assure the continuation of their authoritarian regimes at least in the near future.

Dr. Ehrenfeld is the Director of the New York-based American Center for Democracy (ACD) and the Center for the Study of Corruption & the Rule of Law, www.acdemocracy.org). She is an authority on the shadowy movement of funds through international banking systems and governments to fund terrorism. Rachel Ehrenfeld and Ken Jensen host the ACD Economic Warfare Institute website. Contact them Email at info@acdemocracy.org. This article appeared March 05, 2013 on the Ruthfully Yours website and is archived at
http://www.ruthfullyyours.com/2013/03/05/rachel-ehrenfeld-ken-jensen-beijings-jeddas-international- shopping-spree-leaves-the-poor-disenfranchised-in-the-dirt/


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DEMS TO US JEWS: IF YOU DON'T STICK UP FOR YOURSELF, WE WON'T EITHER

Posted by Sergio HaDaR Tezza, March 04, 2013

The article below was written by the New York Sun Editorial Board and was distributed by the IsraelMatzav website. It is archived at
http://israelmatzav.blogspot.it/2013/02/dems-to-us-jews-if-you-dont-stick-up.html

Great Moments in Schumer History

There is no sugar-coating the point. The Senate has just confirmed the most truculent cabinet officer in respect of Israel in more than a generation because important institutions and leaders shrank from making an issue of it.

This is a story that is painful for many people to talk about. It would be inaccurate to suggest that the only objection to putting Mr. Hagel in at the war department had to do with Israel. He would be inadequate, even were Israel not an issue. There is a broad sense within the Jewish community — as there is among a number of non-Jewish senators who permitted his nomination to go to the floor — that Mr. Hagel has proven himself incompetent and disingenuous.

Yet there's no gainsaying the special concern that his hostility to Israel has raised among the Jewish leadership. And one of the stories that is being spoken of in private is how humiliated the leaders of the Jewish community feel. Nearly all of them — not all, but nearly all — were opposed to the elevation of Mr. Hagel to the Pentagon. But only one of the Jewish defense agencies spoke out forcefully against him.

That was the Zionist Organization of America, which is the oldest pro-Israel organization in America, having been founded in 1897, the same year in which Theodor Herzl convened at Basel, Switzerland, the First Zionist Congress. It opposed the Hagel nomination early, forthrightly, and unapologetically. The result, according to the ZOA's president, Morton Klein, is that it received objections from several leaders worried about the consequences for the Jewish community of such a public position.

Mr. Klein believes the Hagel nomination would not have been confirmed had the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, and the American Jewish Committee taken a formal public position against Mr. Hagel. All three agencies have had many heroic moments. But they stood down on Mr. Hagel. Said Mr. Klein: "Several senators — and important ones — said to me: 'If Aipac, ADL and AJCommittee — especially Aipac — had come out and lobbied against Hagel, he would have been stopped."

Sergio Tezza can be reached at Hadar-Israel@verizon.net


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THE POSSIBILITIES, G-D FORBID, IF ISRAEL CONTINUES TO SHRINK ITSELF INTO DEFENSELESS BORDERS

Posted by Israel Commentary, March 04, 2013

The article below was written by Eric Lichtblau who is an American journalist and Washington bureau reporter for The New York Times. Lichtblau joined The Times in September 2002 as a correspondent covering the Justice Department. Previously, Lichtblau worked at the Los Angeles Times for 15 years, where he also covered the Justice Department in their Washington bureau from 1999 to 2002. . This article appeared March 01, 2013 in Israel Commentary and is
archived at http://www.israel-commentary.org/?p=6048

THIRTEEN years ago, researchers at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum began the grim task of documenting all the ghettos, slave labor sites, concentration camps and killing factories that the Nazis set up throughout Europe. What they have found so far has shocked even scholars steeped in the history of the Holocaust.

The researchers have cataloged some 42,500 Nazi ghettos and camps throughout Europe, spanning German-controlled areas from France to Russia and Germany itself, during Hitler's reign of brutality from 1933 to 1945. The figure is so staggering that even fellow Holocaust scholars had to make sure they had heard it correctly when the lead researchers previewed their findings at an academic forum in late January at the German Historical Institute in Washington.

"The numbers are so much higher than what we originally thought," Hartmut Berghoff, director of the institute, said in an interview after learning of the new data. "We knew before how horrible life in the camps and ghettos was," he said, "but the numbers are unbelievable." The documented camps include not only "killing centers" but also thousands of forced labor camps, where prisoners manufactured war supplies; prisoner-of-war camps; sites euphemistically named "care" centers, where pregnant women were forced to have abortions or their babies were killed after birth; and brothels, where women were coerced into having sex with German military personnel.

Auschwitz and a handful of other concentration camps have come to symbolize the Nazi killing machine in the public consciousness. Likewise, the Nazi system for imprisoning Jewish families in hometown ghettos has become associated with a single site — the Warsaw Ghetto, famous for the 1943 uprising. But these sites, infamous though they are, represent only a minuscule fraction of the entire German network, the new research makes painfully clear.

The maps the researchers have created to identify the camps and ghettos turn wide sections of wartime Europe into black clusters of death, torture and slavery — centered in Germany and Poland, but reaching in all directions. The lead editors on the project, Geoffrey Megargee and Martin Dean, estimate that 15 million to 20 million people died or were imprisoned in the sites that they have identified as part of a multivolume encyclopedia. (The Holocaust museum has published the first two, with five more planned by 2025.)

The existence of many individual camps and ghettos was previously known only on a fragmented, region-by-region basis. But the researchers, using data from some 400 contributors, have been documenting the entire scale for the first time, studying where they were located, how they were run, and what their purpose was.

The brutal experience of Henry Greenbaum, an 84-year-old Holocaust survivor who lives outside Washington, typifies the wide range of Nazi sites. When Mr. Greenbaum, a volunteer at the Holocaust museum, tells visitors today about his wartime odyssey, listeners inevitably focus on his confinement of months at Auschwitz, the most notorious of all the camps. But the images of the other camps where the Nazis imprisoned him are ingrained in his memory as deeply as the concentration camp number — A188991 — tattooed on his left forearm.

In an interview, he ticked off the locations in rapid fire, the details still vivid. First came the Starachowice ghetto in his hometown in Poland, where the Germans herded his family and other local Jews in 1940, when he was just 12. Next came a slave labor camp with six-foot-high fences outside the town, where he and a sister were moved while the rest of the family was sent to die at Treblinka. After his regular work shift at a factory, the Germans would force him and other prisoners to dig trenches that were used for dumping the bodies of victims.

He was sent to Auschwitz, then removed to work at a chemical manufacturing plant in Poland known as Buna Monowitz, where he and some 50 other prisoners who had been held at the main camp at Auschwitz were taken to manufacture rubber and synthetic oil. And last was another slave labor camp at Flossenbürg, near the Czech border, where food was so scarce that the weight on his 5-foot-8-inch frame fell away to less than 100 pounds.

By the age of 17, Mr. Greenbaum had been enslaved in five camps in five years, and was on his way to a sixth, when American soldiers freed him in 1945. "Nobody even knows about these places," Mr. Greenbaum said. "Everything should be documented. That's very important. We try to tell the youngsters so that they know, and they'll remember."

Contact Israel Commentary at israelcommentary@comcast.net


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I WANT TO GO TO TEXAS

Posted by Billy Mills, March 04, 2013

"Survivor - Texas Style"

Due to the popularity of the "Survivor" shows, Texas is planning to do one entitled:

"Survivor - Texas-Style!"

The lucky contestants will all start in Dallas, drive to Waco, Austin, San Antonio, then over to Houston and down to Brownsville. They will then proceed through Mission, up to Del Rio, El Paso, Odessa, Midland, Lubbock, and Amarillo. From there they will go on to Abilene and Fort Worth. Finally back to Dallas.

pinkcar

Each contestant will be driving a pink Prius with 15 bumper stickers which will read:

1. "I'm A Democrat"

2. "Amnesty For Illegals"

3. "I Love The Dixie Chicks"

4. "Boycott Beef"

5. "I Voted For Obama"

6. " George Strait Sucks"

7. "Re-elect Obama In 2016"

8. "Vote Eric Holder Texas Governor"

9. "Rosie O'Donnell Is Texas Born"

10. "I Love Obama Care and Chuck Schumer"

11. "Barney Frank Is My Hero"

12. "I Side With Jane Fonda"

13. "It's Bush's Fault"

14. "Islam Is A Peace-Loving Religion

and the last sticker is...;

15. "I'm Here To Confiscate Your Guns"

The first contestant to make it back to Dallas alive wins.

hollowpoints

frank p.

"In my heart, there are two wolves:

a wolf of love and a wolf of hate.

Which one thrives depends on which one I feed each day."

First Clue Your day is about to suck

Contact Billy Mills at rewrite@suddenlink.net


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THE MYTH OF JEWISH SETTLEMENTS IN INT'L LAW

Posted by Daniel Mandel, March 04, 2013

Because time works in favor of legal perversions, today's absurdity vis-à-vis the settlements could become tomorrow's law.

Settlers enter building in Hebron 370.

By permitting Jewish residence in the West Bank, is Israel ignoring international law? Ruth Gavison, a law professor at Jerusalem's Hebrew University, seems to thinks so.

Gavison criticized the report issued last year by former Israeli Supreme Court Justice Edmund Levy which affirmed the legality of building under international law.

The article above was written by Daniel Mandel who is a Fellow in History at Melbourne University and author of H. V. Evatt and the Establishment of Israel: The Undercover Zionist (Routledge, London, 2004). His blog can be found on the History News Network. The article appeared March 04, 2013 in the Jerusalem Post and is archived at
http://www.jpost.com/Magazine/Opinion/The-myth-of-Jewish-settlements-in-intl-law


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NO ISRAELI "OCCUPATION" OF JUDEA AND SAMARIA

Posted by Howard Grief, March 04, 2013

I submitted a Letter to the Editor of The Jerusalem Post refuting the notion that Judea and Samaria are under Israeli "occupation" as asserted no fewer than four times by Jonathan Rosen in his column published on February 14, 2013. Rosen is described as "a veteran Israeli writer and translator" but who has no professional legal training or legal background.

Mr. Lawrence Rifkin, Senior Editor as well as the Letters Editor of The Jerusalem Post, contacted me to inform me that my original letter of about 600 words was too long for publication and had to be cut down to no more than 250 words in order for my letter to be published.

To comply with his requiremt, I reluctantly deleted the last four paragraphs of my letter to leave only the principal point intact that there is no Israeli "occupation" of Judea and Samaria under international law as asserted by Jonathan Rosen. After exchanging emails with Mr. Rifkin and then speaking with him, I learned that my original letter may have been published as an op-ed piece in The Post had I submitted it to the Op-Ed Editor, Seth J. Frantzman, but I thought that it was not long enough for that purpose.

Mr. Rifkin decided to hold up my letter till he heard from me as to what I wanted to do. In our conversation I told Mr. Rifkin that I wanted the abridged version of my letter published since not only was I not sure that Mr. Frantzman would publish my letter as an op-ed piece, but having been assured by Mr. Rifkin that the abridged version would be published, I thought that it was very important to refute in print the falsehood of Jonathan Rosen that Judea and Samaria were under Israel's "occupation". This falsehood which Rosen evidently believes in as gospel truth should never go unchallenged in the pages of The Jerusalem Post whose circulation is worldwide and thus influences many people.

The abridged version of my letter as published in The Jerusalem Post on February 24, 2013 is attached as well as the longer unabridged version that was not published but perhaps could have been an op-ed piece had I submitted it to Mr. Frantzman.

I was very pleased that two days after my letter appeared in The Jerusalem Post, a letter by Dan Vogel of Jerusalem, whom I do not know, was published, citing me along with Michael Tal for making the legal case for Judea and Samaria and thereby demolishing the Goebbels-like claim constantly repeated by Israel's enemies that our presence on land recovered in 1967 is one of "occupation". In his letter, Vogel advised the Government of Israel that we "must imprint on the minds of the multitudes the rectitude and legal standing of our case". This statement was an affirmation of the legal argument I had made in my letter.

On a personal note, I was also rather happy that this was the first time The Jerusalem Post acknowledged or took due notice of my book, citing me as the author of The Legal Foundation and Borders of Israel under International Law. That I feel is an important acknowledgement

Howard Grief was a Jerusalem-based attorney and notary born in Montreal, Canada. He served as the adviser on Israel under international law to Yuval Ne'eman while Ne'eman was the Minister of Energy and Infrastructure in the Yitzhak Shamir Government. He has petitioned the Israeli Supreme Court to annul the Oslo Accords in 1999, and reportedly claimed he was the first to advance the thesis that de jure sovereignty over all of Palestine was devolved upon the Jewish People at the 1920 San Remo Peace conference. He is the author of the book The Legal Foundation and Borders of Israel under International Law published in 2008, as well as of numerous articles mainly published in the Ariel Center for Policy Research's journal Nativ. Contact him at griefisrael@yahoo.com


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TIME TO TEACH TURKEY A LESSON

Posted by Michael Freund, March 4, 2013

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has done it again. Despite his extensive efforts to masquerade as an enlightened and civilized statesman, his temper got the best of him last week, peeling away the veil to reveal for all to see his profound hatred of Israel and the Jewish people.

Speaking at the Fifth Alliance of Civilizations Forum in Vienna's Hofburg Palace, in the very same country where Hitler was born, the Turkish leader declared Zionism to be a "crime against humanity" and equated it with anti- Semitism, fascism and Islamophobia. This from a man whose country continues to deny its own acts of genocide against the Armenian people a century ago, and its brazen oppression of its Kurdish minority today.

Needless to say, this is hardly the first time Erdogan has shown his true colors. On more than one occasion in recent years, he has hurled venom and vitriol at the Jewish state. Just four months ago, on November 19, at a conference of the Eurasian Islamic Council in Istanbul, Erdogan accused Israel of carrying out the "mass killing of Muslims" and massacring children in Gaza.

"For this reason," he explained, "I say that Israel is a terrorist state and its acts are terrorist acts." And who can possibly forget his dramatic performance at the World Economic Forum in Davos four years ago? On January 29, 2009, Erdogan shared the stage with President Shimon Peres, and the two clashed over the IDF's counterterrorism operation in Gaza aimed at halting Palestinian rocket attacks. At a certain point in the discussion, the Turkish prime minister became incensed and got up from his seat. He was, the New York Times reported, "red-faced, and with one hand grasping the arm of the moderator." Erdogan then turned to Peres, one of Israel's biggest political doves, and said to him, "Your voice comes out in a very loud tone and the loudness of your voice has to do with a guilty conscience.

When it comes to killing, you know well how to kill," before storming out of the room.

And how about the Mavi Marmara affair, when Turkey facilitated the attempt to break Israel's blockade of Gaza? ERDOGAN'S RHETORIC and behavior is more befitting of a neighborhood thug than a regional power with diplomatic ambitions. As a member of NATO and a would-be EU candidate, Turkey clearly needs to be taught a lesson by the West, which cannot and must not tolerate such disgraceful behavior. Erdogan's radicalism and rancor only contribute to the further destabilization of the region, and undermine any chances of bringing about peace and understanding.

There are various political, economic and diplomatic levers that the US and European countries can use to bring about a change in Erdogan's conduct. But don't hold your breath waiting for that to happen. If the virtual apathy which greeted Erdogan's eruption last week is any indication, Israel and its supporters should be very worried.

Take, for example, US Secretary of State John Kerry, who happened to be visiting Turkey the day after Erdogan's outburst. Speaking at a news conference with Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu at his side, Kerry offered a mealy-mouthed denunciation, saying that, "We not only disagree with it, we found it objectionable."

Objectionable? When you are served the wrong soup in a restaurant, that would be considered objectionable.

But when someone says that the ideological underpinning of your nation's closest ally in the Middle East is akin to fascism, it is far more than merely objectionable.

It is loathsome and repugnant, Mr. Secretary.

Similarly, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who was present during Erdogan's speech, waited nearly 24 hours before dispatching his spokesman to mumble a few words of disagreement to the press regarding Erdogan's characterization of Zionism.

This cannot be allowed to stand. Hence, Israel should consider withdrawing its ambassador from Ankara, downgrading relations with Turkey and cutting back on Israeli tourism and investment, until Erdogan apologizes for his slur. We need to make it clear that any assault on Zionism is an attack on the very conceptual foundation of the Jewish state and its right to exist.

After all, Zionism is the national liberation movement of the Jewish people, the set of ideas that give expression to our age-old hope of regaining sovereignty in the land of our ancestors. If someone opposes Zionism, it means they aim to deny freedom and self-determination to the Jewish people, which is akin to anti-Semitism. And that, Mr. Erdogan needs to learn, is the real "crime against humanity" which will not be tolerated.

The article above was written by Michael Freund who served as Deputy Communications Director in the Israeli Prime Minister's Office under Binyamin Netanyahu. He is the founder and chairman of Shavei Israel/Israel Returns -- www.shavei.org and www.IsraelReturns.org -- a Jerusalem-based organization that searches for and assists the Lost Tribes of Israel and other "hidden Jews" seeking to return to Zion. In addition, Freund is a correspondent and syndicated columnist for The Jerusalem Post. A native New Yorker, he is a graduate of Princeton University and holds an MBA in Finance from Columbia University. He has lived in Israel for the past 16 years. This article appeared March 04, 2013 in the Jerusalem Post and is archived at
http://www.michaelfreund.org/13014/erdogan-zionism. Contact him by email at msfreund@earthlink.net


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"A HEAVY STRUGGLE"

Posted by Arlene Kushner, March 04, 2013

There is a lot of hard work to do, a lot of heavy pulling, to bring our nation to where it needs to be. I hold on to hope that all will yet be well, but am sorely disheartened.

Yesterday, I quoted Naftali Bennett, head of Habayit Hayehudi, thus:

"for days after the election the Likud refused to speak to the Jewish Home. They boycotted us... we expected to be a natural partner and to be the first to enter the Netanyahu government." The message he claims he got was, "the religious Zionist party won't enter the coalition, at any price."

What Netanyahu did was foolish, I said. Rude. Conveying to the newcomer Bennett a sense of being excluded. But, I asked, now that Netanyahu had contacted Bennett was the prime minister's original rudeness sufficient reason for Bennett to have fashioned his current policy as he has?

Today, I have a likely answer, from someone very close to Habayit Hayehudi. Bennett, I was told, understood that once he broke his alliance with Lapid, Netanyahu would take in Lapid, and leave him out.

Oh.

Bennett's impression that Netanyahu was determined that the religious Zionist party would never enter the coalition was not just a response to a snub early on; Bennett apparently recognized this behavior as a reflection of a deeper Netanyahu intention.

~~~~~~~~~~

Today I also heard another story about Netanyahu's intentions. This is the second time I have heard it. At first I discounted it as hearsay. Now, although I cannot confirm with absolute certainty that the charge is accurate, I no longer can discount it.

Someone inside of Yesh Atid maintains that Netanyahu told Lapid that if he breaks with Bennett and comes in by himself, it will be easier to take down settlements.

Uh huh.

The endorsement of the Tekuma rabbis makes a whole lot of sense now.

~~~~~~~~~~

And still I am not done. The AIPAC convention has been going on in Washington, and lame duck Defense Minister Ehud Barak addressed the thousands gathered there.

A "full fledged peace deal with the Palestinians" was not possible now, Barak said.

Good that he says this upfront, I thought.

Then he said that an interim agreement should be attempted to protect Israel's security.

I was no longer sure this was good, depending on what he was referring to.

~~~~~~~~~~

And then...he said that if this couldn't be achieved, it might be necessary for Israel to take unilateral steps to prevent a bi-national state: Israel may need to "consider unilateral steps that would include demarcating a line within which Israel would keep the settlement blocs and ensure a Jewish majority for generations to come." Israel would establish a "long term security presence on the Jordan River.

Say what??? UNILATERAL steps?? We did that once already, when we pulled out of Gaza. We saw what that brought us. What he's suggesting here is that without an end of conflict agreement with the Palestinian Arabs, without a mutually agreed upon border, Israel should pull back from some parts of Judea and Samaria and fully turn over land to them.

A very very bad idea. I can only touch here upon all of the reasons why it's a terrible idea.

Note first that he refers to settlement blocs, so be certain that there are many Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria that would be demolished under such a plan. Many Jews who would be torn from their homes.

We would be relinquishing rights to the land -- something we should not do.

~~~~~~~~~~

But beyond this, we would be diminishing Israel's security. A border is only an internationally recognized border if parties on both sides agree. Israel "demarcating a line" would not be recognized internationally and would certainly not be recognized by the PA, which would demand we keep pulling back until we were behind the '67 armistice line.

Once we pulled back, we would be UNILATERALLY relinquishing the practice by the IDF of doing operations to take out terrorists and training centers, and weapons caches and weapons manufacturing sites in Palestinian Arab areas. The fact, my friends, is that the IDF does these operations nightly. It's what has kept things quiet, because the PA security forces will not do this. (I'll come back to this in more detail in a future posting.) Without an IDF presence in these areas, security and intelligence and military officials agree, there is a great likelihood that Hamas would take over. Abbas is very weak. And so then we would have Hamas on our eastern border as well as at our southwest in Gaza.

Great idea!

Please note that Barak refers to a security presence in the Jordan Valley (to prevent smuggling of weapons and entry of foreign forces). But he says "long term," not permanent. But how long is "long term," and what happens after that?

With all of this I still haven't mentioned the question of what would happen to certain high places in Samaria if there were a pullback. All Barak spoke about was retaining settlement blocs, not retaining land for security purposes and strategic depth. If Arabs had control of those high places they could even hit the airport.

~~~~~~~~~~

No done deal here. Just an idea floated -- perhaps even a trial balloon. We must respond and be vigilant to the greatest degree possible.

I assure you, Barak did not speak without Netanyahu's go-ahead.

I provide here the e-mails of key members of Likud-Beitenu. Please! write to them. Tell them that you know about Defense Minister Barak's outrageous suggestion at AIPAC that unilateral withdrawal from parts of Judea and Samaria might have to be considered.

Provide a couple of lines on why this is a terrible idea. Say that Barak is lame-duck, on his way out, and had no business speaking for Israel in an international forum at this point. And urgently request that they do everything within their power to assure that there are no withdrawals:

Danny Danon: ddanon@knesset.gov.il Moshe Ya'alon: myaalon@knesset.gov.il

Tzipi Hotovely: zhotovely@knesset.gov.il Ze'ev Elkin: zelkin@knesset.gov.il

Yuli Edelstein: yedelstein@knesset.gov.il Ruby Rivlin: rrivlin@knesset.gov.il

Moshe Feiglin: mfeiglin@knesset.gov.il Gideon Sa'ar: gsaar@knesset.gov.il

Ofir Akunis: oakunis@knesset.gov.il Uzi Landau: ulandau@knesset.gov.il

Yisrael Katz: yiskatz@knesset.gov.il Yariv Levin: ylevin@knesset.gov.il

Yair Shamir: yshamir@knesset.gov.il Avigdor Lieberman: aliberman@knesset.gov.il

Click on each address; write one message and copy and paste to each, with an individual salutation added.

The new government must not be a one-man show. The actions of key members of the Knesset will be critical in helping to keep the prime minister accountable and honest in his political dealings. Members of the ruling faction must be roused to take a responsible role here.

Please, share this broadly.

~~~~~~~~~~

One other significant point must be made here, before I move on:

Barak referred to taking this action in order to "ensure a Jewish majority for generations to come." Well, it is a crock that if we retain all of the land to the Jordan River we will become a minority, swallowed up by an Arab majority. This is a scare tactic, used as a reason to give up land.

See here with regard to Jewish and Arab birthrates and their implication for Israel:

http://www.theettingerreport.com/Demographic-Scare/Jewish-Arab-Demography-Defies-Conventional--Wisdom.aspx

And here, information about misrepresentations in the PA census, which leads people to believe there are more Arabs in Judea and Samaria than there are:

http://www.theettingerreport.com/Demographic-Scare/The-Two-State-Religion.aspx

~~~~~~~~~~

The other concern I have had in these last few days has to do with sinat hinam. Causeless hatred, which, we are taught, is what brought about the destruction of the Second Temple. If we do not love our fellow Jews, do not unite for common causes, then we cannot be strong.

I have been vastly uncomfortable with the notion that the haredi parties, which are fighting for the status quo in yeshiva exemptions, should be excluded from the coalition. That exclusion will not bring compromise or peaceful settlement, but bitterness.

And sure enough, I've seen some very bitter comments from haredi leaders who have said, You don't want us? Wait until we're in the government again, and see what we'll do to you. I have even seen threats to vote against retention of settlements. A bad way to go.

~~~~~~~~~~

Only late today did I see a comment by Lapid that offered a glimmer of hope regarding the possibility of moving past this unfortunate situation. At a faction meeting today, he said that Yesh Atid wants to represent everyone's interests, including the ultra-Orthodox.

"I hope to establish a good, broad government that's good for the people, and not for the politicians. And even the ultra-Orthodox will find that Yesh Atid is not only not against them, but takes care of them too."

A bit audacious for my taste. HE hopes to establish a government? And he thinks he can represent everyone's interests? Not sure about that. But the tone is certainly conciliatory. He's saying he cares about the ultra-Orthodox as well. Now we have to see how he demonstrates this.

~~~~~~~~~~

Bennett's statement seems more modest, more in keeping with the tone that might be expected of a newcomer:

"We rolled up our sleeves and are working very hard to help Netanyahu form a government that serves the people."

~~~~~~~~~~

In any event, both Lapid and Bennett are saying that while meetings are going well, it is not time to close on coalition agreements yet.

May it come for good things in the end.

~~~~~~~~~~

In closing, a correction: I got fooled. The story about Mick Jagger doing concerts here in Israel in spite of pressure on him not to was a Purim gag coming out of France. Got it from a good source, so I guess a whole lot of people were fooled. My thanks to David Orbach, who alerted me.

Contact Arlene Kushner at akushner@netvision.net.il and visit her website: www.ArlenefromIsrael.info


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AGAINST WHOM ARE THESE LIGHT TANKS AND ALL THOSE BULLETS TO BE USED?

Posted by Dr. History, March 04, 2013

Jim Hoft who is the author of the article below and author of Gateway Pundit, is one of the leading conservative blogs on the internet today. His site currently draws over a quarter of a million readers each month. He has led the pack on many news stories and has been the guest of numerous radio talk shows and panel discussions on current events. Gateway Pundit is often linked by internet giants and has been mentioned in the Washington Post, New York Sun, and the British daily Telegraph. This article appeared March 03, 2013 in Gateway Pundit and is archived at
http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2013/03/obama-dhs-purchases-2700-light-armored-tanks-to-go-with-their-1-6-billion-bullet-stockpile/

This is getting a little creepy.

According to one estimate, since last year the Department of Homeland Security has stockpiled more than 1.6 billion bullets, mainly .40 caliber and 9mm.

DHS also purchased 2,700 Mine Resistant Armor Protected Vehicles (MRAP).

Mine Resistant Armor Protected Vehicles (MRAP).

The Department of Homeland Security (through the U.S. Army Forces Command) recently retrofitted 2,717 of these 'Mine Resistant Protected' vehicles for service on the streets of the United States.

Although I've seen and read several online blurbs about this vehicle of late, I decided to dig slightly deeper and discover more about the vehicle itself.

The new DHS sanctioned 'Street Sweeper' (my own slang due to the gun ports) is built by Navistar Defense (NavistarDefense.com), a division within the Navistar organization. Under the Navistar umbrella are several other companies including International Trucks, IC Bus (they make school buses), Monaco RV (recreational vehicles), WorkHorse (they make chassis), MaxxForce (diesel engines), and Navistar Financial (the money arm of the company).

VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=0pS9aw5pcJo#t=41

Contact Dr. History at drhistory@cox.net


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FAMOUS ANASHEED: 'MADIN KAS-SAYF' BY ABU ALI

Posted by Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi, March 04, 2013

When it comes to media articles on jihadism, one of the least explored aspects is the phenomenon of anasheed ('songs' [sing. 'nasheed']- distinguished in this context by lack of use of musical instruments as per a widely held Islamic view that instruments are haram). Of the munshid artists who produce songs of this type, one of the most prominent is Abu Ali, of Saudi origin.

While Aaron Zelin regularly provides links to more recent anasheed, I decided to translate the lyrics of one of Abu Ali's most well-known songs: 'Madin kas-sayf' ('Sharp Like The Sword'): famous at least in jihadist circles. The tune is in fact identical to another nasheed he composed, entitled 'It blew like the wind'— a song that does not refer to jihad but rather calls for the revival of the Ummah's glory and encourages believers to seek knowledge and help each other out (in the Youtube video linked to for 'It blew like the wind', the user has misidentified it as 'Sharp like the Sword').

Given the glorification of suicide bombing that becomes very clear towards the end, the reference to 'the occupier' and al-Aqsa, one might expect that this nasheed was composed around the time of the Second Intifada, which saw numerous instances of suicide bombings. Yet the earliest instance I know of its use is in a 48-minute video released by the Somali al-Qa'ida affiliate Harakat ash-Shabaab al-Mujahideen, entitled 'Labbayka ya Osama' ('I am at your service, oh Osama') in 2009 (H/T: Phillip Smyth).

Here is a translation:

'Sharp like the sword, the wind, the billows in abundance.

Strong like the horse, the lion, the thunder, sparkling.

Sharp like the sword, the wind, the billows in abundance.

Strong like the horse, the lion, the thunder, sparkling.

Bold, he seeks his upheaval and sees good tidings in death.

May the Taghut of the world that only rules stones vanish.

He discards them like Ababeel that tear through his wall with fright.

He has rejected humiliation and has arisen, weaving his pride with might.

Like a weary fugitive has his day concealed him and passed by in concealment.

Like the roaming star, his orbit falls on the path of glory.

He was once not satisfied with the world at all, and injustice is his oppressor.

Sharp like the sword, the wind, the billows in abundance.

Strong like the horse, the lion, the night, the thunder, sparkling.

Sharp like the sword, the wind, the billows in abundance.

Strong like the horse, the lion, the thunder, sparkling.

Bold, he seeks his upheaval and sees good tidings in death.

May the Taghut of the world that only rules stones vanish.

He discards them like Ababeel that tear through his wall with fright.

He hearkened unto glory when Al-Aqsa summoned its revolutionaries.

He chanted, filled with longing for death, and proceeded to play his lute.

The occupier set up his trickery, and his broker was seduced by it.

He molded the words as promises, he embroidered his dialogue with deception.

Sharp like the sword, the wind, the billows in abundance.

Strong like the horse, the lion, the thunder, sparkling.

Sharp like the sword, the wind, the billows in abundance.

Strong like the horse, the lion, the thunder, sparkling.

Bold, he seeks his upheaval and sees good tidings in death.

May the Taghut of the world that only rules stones vanish.

He discards them like Ababeel tears through his wall with fright.

They cultivated his path in fright, they imposed his blockade with starvation.

So he advanced; cunning did not divert him, even as it summoned its false steps.

How preposterous! He makes a truce until he should wipe away his shame with might.

A volcano of faith; this Talmud is his frenzy.

Sharp like the sword, the wind, the billows in abundance.

Strong like the horse, the lion, the thunder, sparkling.

Sharp like the sword, the wind, the wave in abundance.

Strong like the horse, the lion, the billows, sparkling.

Bold, he seeks his upheaval and sees good tidings in death.

May the Taghut of the world that only rules stones vanish.

He discards them like Ababeel that tear through his wall with fright.

So he [the occupier] built his strongholds in fear, he raised his walls in them.

So he [the mujahid] blew himself up among them in anger; he fixed his nails in them.

You see him as splinters of fire; a commando makes his raid.

He did not slow down his pace until he carried out his decision in death

Sharp like the sword, the wind, the billows in abundance.

Strong like the horse, the lion, the thunder, sparkling.

Sharp like the sword, the wind, the billows in abundance.

Strong like the horse, the lion, the thunder, sparkling.

Sharp like the sword, the wind, the billows in abundance.

Strong like the horse, the lion, the thunder, sparkling.

Sharp like the sword, the wind, the billows in abundance.

Strong like the horse, the lion, the thunder, sparkling.

Bold, he seeks his upheaval and sees good tidings in death.

May the Taghut of the world that only rules stones vanish.

He discards them like Ababeel that tear through his wall with fright.'

Explanatory Notes:

Taghut- An Islamic term used to describe idolatry and error. It is one of a group of words that occur in the Qur'an with the —ut termination (cf. ملكوت- 'kingdom', especially as in the 'Kingdom of God'). In the 19th century, Geiger contended that the word is of Rabbinical Hebrew origin, since, he said, 'no pure Arabic word' ends with the —ut termination. In any event, the etymology is a matter of much dispute; for an attempt to connect the term with Ethiopic, see this discussion by Gabriel Said Reynolds.

Ababeel— Mentioned in Qur'an 105:3 (in the chapter known as 'The Elephant'). These are apparently birds sent by God against an Aksumite force that tried to conquer Mecca in the 6th century, driving off the invaders with stones.

How preposterous! He makes a truce until he should wipe away his shame with might— Appears to be a reference to how some Islamist militants interpret the concept of hudna (Arabic for 'ceasefire'). The idea is to sign a truce with your enemy and then wait until you think you have the upper hand, at which point you should resume hostilities.

Alternative Reading (Update and Revision: 26 May 2013)

On account of the quality of the recording, multiple interpretations can arise as regards the transcription of the Arabic lyrics. I have listened to this nasheed a number of times and I think one can propose some plausible alternatives:

Alternative Reading (Update and Revision: 26 May 2013)

On account of the quality of the recording, multiple interpretations can arise as regards the transcription of the Arabic lyrics. I have listened to this nasheed a number of times and I think one can propose some plausible alternatives:

*- Alternatively, this line could be transcribed as: 'He has clashed with the Taghut of the world. He has possession of nothing except stones'. The next line would then be referring to how he throws those stones, presumably at the occupier.

The article above was written by Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi who is Student and Middle East analyst, currently holding a position of Fellow at Middle East Forum. He has written in Haaretz, The Jerusalem Post, The Daily Star (Beirut), National (Abu Dhabi), The Guardian, the BBC, and the American Spectator), as well as having peer-reviewed journal articles in The Levantine Review, the Middle East Quarterly, and the Middle East Review of International Affairs. He can be contacted at his website at http://www.aymennjawad.org. This article appeared March 03, 2013 in Jihadology and is archived at
http://jihadology.net/2013/03/03/guest-post-famous-anasheed-madin-kas-sayf-by-abu-ali/


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'PALESTINIAN-ONLY BUSES' IS ANOTHER DAMN LIE

Posted by Lori Lowenthal Marcus, March 04, 2013

Of course there are no "Jews only" roads in Israel, just as there are no Jews only buses or even 'Palestinian only' buses in Israel. But if you tell a big lie often enough, well, Goebbels was the master and look where that took us.

Afikim bus in Israel

The headlines roll out, the journalistic warfare continues, and the Jewish State once more is cast in the starring role of "evil, Apartheid empire." This time the story is that Israel is forcing the Arab Palestinians to ride separate buses from the ones Jewish Israelis ride.

The reality is exactly the opposite — there are no "Palestinian only" buses. Instead, with its new bus routes, Israel is reducing crowded buses, attempting to relieve ethnic tensions and security concerns, and is assisting Arab Palestinians enter Green Line Israel to work. But we'll get to the facts — which exonerate Israel from "Apartheid" charges — in a minute. For right now you can rest assured that despite efforts to cast the Arab Palestinians in the role of Rosa Parks, a closer fit would be to cast the purveyors of this latest attack as peddlers of the Big Lie.

First, the hysteria:

One headline, from the magazine formerly known as Newsweek, and now known as — more accurately — the Daily Beast, "West Bank Buses Only the Latest in Israel's Segregated Public Transport," and one from the uber-leftist +972, "Israel' new 'Palestinian only' segregated bus line," and even the Israeli news media outlet YNet fans the flames: "Ministry launches 'Palestinians only' buses."

The claims are exactly as you would expect them, and made by those whom you would suspect. For example, Jessica Montell is the director of the anti-Israel, pro-Arab B'tselem Rights group. "Creating separate bus lines for Israeli Jews and Palestinians is a revolting plan," Montell told Army Radio. "This is simply racism."

And the far-leftist political Meretz party chairwoman Zahava Gal-On reamed Transportation Minister Israel Katz, demanding that he "immediately cancel the segregated lines in the West Bank. Separate bus lines for Palestinians prove that occupation and democracy cannot coexist," she said.

What are the facts?

HISTORICAL FACTS

First of all, all Israeli citizens are permitted to ride all Israeli transportation vehicles, whether they are Arab, Finnish or Lithuanian, Jewish, Muslim, Christian or Buddhist.

Second, any non-citizen of Israel, just as is the case with every other country in the world, has to show identification when entering Israel's official borders — it is true for American citizens entering Canada and Mexico, just as it is the case for citizens of the Palestinian Authority who wish to enter Israel.

Third, Israeli citizens who live in Judea and Samaria pay taxes, a portion of which subsidize the transportation infrastructure and vehicles, whereas Arabs who live in the PA towns do not. In fact, taxes paid by Arabs in Israel are turned over to the PA to support their infrastructure, which includes — or should — transportation services for their residents.

One consequence of the preceding points is that the Israeli bus lines travel from and to all areas in which tax-paying Israeli citizens live — from Jerusalem to Shilo, from Tel Aviv to Efrat, and so forth. The Israeli bus companies do not stop at, for example, the Arab town of Ramallah, just as they do not stop at non-authorized Jewish towns such as Givat Har-el.

WHAT IS NEW?

The bare fact: the Israeli government added two bus lines (so far, there was overcrowding on Monday, March 4, the first day the service was instituted, and the Transportation Ministry said more buses will likely be added) that will serve Arab Palestinian towns with transportation into central Israel. The Israeli bus lines previously did not stop in towns controlled by the Palestinian Authority. Despite the efforts of BDS advocates, there are tens of thousands of Arab Palestinians who work in different parts of Israel. Arab Palestinians with work permits would previously have to travel first to a place where the Israeli buses stop, or would be dependent on the much higher-priced Arab buses to get into central Israel.

So why the hysteria? Because some see this as an evil plot to segregate Jews and Arabs. But non-citizens are not entitled to use Israeli public transportation into central Israel without showing border identification, and prior to the provision of these new bus lines, Arab Palestinians were dependent on transportation services by "pirate" (Arab, by the way) companies which charged the Arabs far more than the Israeli lines do.

Lori Lowenthal Marcus is the US correspondent for The Jewish Press. She is a recovered lawyer who previously practiced First Amendment law and taught in Philadelphia-area graduate and law schools. You can reach her by email: Lori@JewishPressOnline.com The article above appeared March 5, 2013 in the Jewish Press.com and is archived at
http://www.jewishpress.com/news/palestinian-only-buses-in-israel-goebbels-big-lies-are-back/2013/03/05/


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BRING POLLARD TO ISRAEL; STORM IN A CUP OF TEA - AUSTRALIA WAS INFORMED; AGREEMENTS NEVER HONORED BY PA - TERRORIST

Posted by Steven Shamrak, March 04, 2013

Bring Pollard to Israel

More than 50,000 people have signed a letter calling on United States President Barack Obama to free Jonathan Pollard. An ongoing campaign to free Pollard has gone into high gear in light of Obama's plan to visit Israel in March.

Jonathan Pollard was given a sentence of life in prison for passing classified defense-related information to Israel. His supporters say his sentence is unusually harsh for the crime of revealing classified information to a friendly state.

The petition states, "Jonathan Pollard has now served 28 years of a life sentence in American prisons. A few short weeks from now, he will mark his 10,000th day in jail. Both he and Israel have repeatedly expressed remorse. We have learned our lesson and have been living with the painful consequences for nearly 3 decades." (Jonathan Polard's crime was that he had provided Israel with information about enemies of the Jewish state, which the United States agreed to supply but withheld from Israel. During his trial judge even dismissed a plea-bargain and gave him a harsh life sentence. Even Soviet spies were not held in the US prison for so long!)

Food for Thought by Steven Shamrak

The old religious hate-conflict between Shiites and Sunnis has been invigorated again. The major players, Iran and Saudi Arabia , have been using their Islamic proxies, like Hezbollah and Al Qaeda , to wage it. Western democracies should not be involved in so-called Arab Spring and civil war in Syria . Regardless of which side wins, we will be blamed, and already are, for the results of their idiotic blood-thirsty nature and intolerance!

Iran Accelerates Nuclear Bomb program

The US slammed as "provocative" the installment of 180 advanced centrifuge at Iran's main uranium enrichment site at Natanz. The UN nuclear atomic agency in its latest report confirmed that the new IR-2m centrifuges can enrich three to five times faster than the outdated machines in use at Natanz until now. The report's findings "prove that Iran continues to advance quickly to the red line" which Israel considers intolerable.

IDF Sends Helicopter to Save Life of PA Arab Rioter

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/165612#.VWdaEbyVsWM

Israeli taxpayers laid out tens of thousands of shekels to transport to hospital by helicopter a hurt Arab rioter who attacked IDF soldiers. The number of riots by PA Arabs had climbed significantly, as had the number of injured Arab rioters. Consequently, the number of Arab rioters Israel is treating in its hospitals had also grown considerably. (This hunanitarian act of Israel the international press does not report!)

Syrian Isamists 'Helping' Israel Fight Hezbollah

http://www.jpost.com/Middle-East/Syrian-rebels-say-they-killed-Hezbollah-deputy-chief

Hezbollah's deputy chief Naim Qassem was killed last Tuesday when Syrian rebels bombed a convoy consisting of high-ranking Syrian government officers near the Lebanon border. Qassem had served as the deputy to Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.

Storm in a Cup of Tea - Australia was Informed

Australia's Fairfax Media quoted a "well-placed source familiar with the case" as saying Israeli intelligence had told Australian officials about the 2010 arrest of Zygier, a dual Australian-Israeli citizen dubbed Prisoner X. (It does not matter if he was a traitor, double agent or working for ASIS. His arrest was kept secret, most likely, to save Australia from embarrassment - that is probably why the Australian government maintained a 'plausible deniability' status in this case!)

At the same time: Austrian Hostage in Yemen

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/165567#.VWdbNLyVsWM

An Austrian man, Dominik Neubauer, kidnapped in Yemen late last year with a Finnish couple said in a video posted on the Internet that his captors would kill him in a week if their demands were not met. (And this is not front-page news!)

Israel Successfully Tested Arrow III Interceptor

A successfully test of the next-generation of the Arrow (Hetz) ballistic missile interceptor represented a powerful upgrade of Israel's multi-tier missile defense system. The system is designed to defend against medium-range missiles that could be fired from countries such as Iran. The Pentagon's missile defense agency and the US company Boeing are partners in Arrow project. (This is another example how both the US and Israel benefit from mutual co-operation.)

Here We Go Again: Rocket Fired from the Gaza Strip

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/165654#.VWdcSryVsWM

A rocket fired from the Gaza Strip (26 February 2013) has landed in southern Israel - the first such attack since shortly after a ceasefire ended eight days of clashes in November, Israeli police say. Meanwhile, a s enior Hamas leader, Salah al-Bardawil, urged the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers saying that, "a new Palestinian Intifada is about to break out in support of prisoners." Fahd El-Lil (Night's Leopard), Fatah-linked group, issued a statement claiming responsibility for the attack . (Hamas and Fatah are unwilling to change their hateful nature. it is certain that anti-Semitic idiots, especially in the UN, will find justification for this attack and will blame Israel for any retaliation that follow!)

PA: "Too Soon" for Soccer Match with Israel

The head of the PA's soccer federation said that it is "too soon" for a match against Israel, as suggested by Barcelona club president Sandro Rosell. Several months ago Hamas reacted furiously after the Barcelona soccer team invited Gilad Shalit to attend a Barcelona-Real Madrid derby. (Not long ago the world was 'infuriated' when fans of the Zionist soccer club, Maccabee, protested against inviting an Arab player. Anti-Semites never object to anti-Israel discrimination! How many Jewish players are playing in Arab sport clubs?)

John Kerry - Another Delusional or Bad Poker Player

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/165651#.VWdc6ryVsWM

A new US Secretary of State, John Kerry, insisted there is still a "diplomatic path" to be forged with Iran on its disputed nuclear program, as world powers and Tehran met for a new round of talks. (As usual, as normal people expected, the talks produced no result but another agreement to meet in two months - see below.)

Egypt Court Ordered Destruction of Tunnels to Gaza

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2013/02/201322619219970812.html

A Cairo court has ruled the government must destroy all tunnels between Egypt and the Gaza Strip. Egypt 's ruling Muslim Brotherhood has close ties with the Hamas movement that runs Gaza, but many Egyptians fear the enclave is a security risk for Egypt . President Mohammed Morsi's national security adviser, Essam Haddad, has said Egypt will not tolerate the two-way flow of smuggled arms through the tunnels that is destabilizing its Sinai Peninsula. An estimated 30 percent of goods that reach Gaza 's 1.7m Palestinians come through the tunnels, circumventing a blockade imposed by Israel and Egypt for more than seven years. (This ruling shows that Muslim countries can fight terrorism effectively when they want! But, could it be just about tunnel tax which is collected by Hamas at the moment? And no one complains about the Egyptian blockade, just the Israeli one.)

System does Work when Good Laws are Enforced

A combination of the desire to return home and the implementation of the amendment to the 1954 "infiltrators law" has lead several hundred asylum-seekers, possibly as many as a 1,000, to leave Israel for Sudan in the past six or seven months. (Most of the illegal infiltrators into Israel are economic migrants - otherwise they would stay in refugee camps in Africa and would not take the dangerous and expensive journey through Sinai.)

Israel's Prison is Place to Receive Good Education

http://israelagainstterror.blogspot.co.il/2013/02/some-25-of-palestinian-prisoners.html

Over the years, many of Arab prisoners have obtained academic degrees, including a doctorate awarded to prominent Fatah leader Marwan Al-Barghouti. The Education Committee states that it has managed to implement the studies project in all Israeli prisons, including an expansion of available programs and degrees. According to data recently published by the Education Committee, 361 high school diplomas approved by the Gaza Education Ministry were granted to prisoners in the last two years. Some 25% Of Palestinian Prisoners Receive High School And College Education In Israeli Prisons. (Some Palestinians deliberately commit minor offences in order to receive proper education in Israeli prisons!)

Fake Negotiations are Camouflage for Inaction

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2013/02/201322762913285669.html

World powers and Iran have ended their two-day meeting on the country's nuclear program in the Kazakh city of Almaty without breakthrough, according to a Western official. Saeed Jalili, Iran 's chief nuclear negotiator said that all sides agreed to meet in the same city on April 5-6 after first gathering their nuclear experts for consultations in Istanbul, Turkey, in March.

Quote(s) of the Week:

"Anything that is theoretically possible will be achieved in practice, no matter what the technical difficulties, if it is desired greatly enough." - Arthur C. Clarke, "Profiles of Future" - This viewpoint is applicable to any aspect of life. The creation and survival of the Jewish state is one example. Immigration of Jews from the Soviet Union , in spite of the fact that it contradicted the main principle of Communism, equality of the nations, is another one.

Agreements Never Honored by PA - Terror is!

by Aaron Klein (27 Feb, 21013)

http://www.wnd.com/2013/02/obamas-israel-trip-already-wreaking-havoc/?cat_orig=world

President Obama will visit Israel in March. Obama's planned visit to Israel already has secured Israeli and Palestinian pledges to restart so-called land-for-peace talks, according to informed Palestinian and Israeli officials. As usual, the PA is getting ready for the negotiations by re-activating its terror apparatus!

The high committee of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah party made a quiet decision yesterday to stop disarming members of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades terrorist group. The decision to allow the Brigades, Fatah's so-called military wing, to bear arms is in violation of a 2007 amnesty agreement signed with Israel that requires Brigades members to completely disarm.

The security source further divulged a Fatah decision to allow the Brigades and other gunmen to carry out what is being described as "low-grade" attacks, meaning stoning throwing and Molotov cocktail attacks aimed at Israeli forces in the West Bank .

The Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades in recent days has held two armed marches, one in the Balata camp in Nablus and another in the Askar camp on the outskirts of Nablus in the northern West Bank. The marches, the first of their kind since 2007, also violate the terms of the amnesty agreement signed with Israel.

Perhaps as part of the strategy of violence as a pressure tactic, the PA this week released from its prisons at least 12 members of the Hamas and Islamic Jihad terrorist groups who were captured in recent months. The move comes as the executive committee of the PLO earlier this month formally endorsed the use of what it called "popular resistance" - a phrase tacitly green lighting the use of demonstrations, stone throwing and Molotov cocktails.

PS: Mahmoud Abbas said a week ago that he and Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal have reached agreement on the need for a 'peaceful' intifada. (Destruction of Israel is the only subject Hamas and Fatah are agreed on!)

Steven Shamrak was involved in the Moscow Zionist movement. He worked as a construction engineer at the Moscow Olympic Games project and as a computer consultant in Australia. He has a website at www.shamrak.com. He can be reached by email at StevenShamrak@gmail.com


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OBAMA PLANS TO EXTRACT TIMETABLE FOR ISRAELI PULLOUT FROM WEST BANK

Posted by Midenise, March 04, 2013

This article appeared in WorldTribune.com on March 03, 2013 and is archived at
http://www.worldtribune.com/2013/03/03/obama-plans-to-extract-timetable-for-israeli-pullout-from-west-bank/

JERUSALEM — U.S. President Barack Obama has demanded a timetable for an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank.

Israeli sources said Obama, scheduled to arrive in Israel on March 20, wants a detailed Israeli withdrawal plan from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during the president's visit. The sources said the Israeli plan would be considered in what could be an imminent U.S. initiative to establish a Palestinian state in the West Bank in 2014.

A settlement in East Jerusalem.

"Obama has made it clear to Netanyahu that his visit is not about photo-ops, but the business of Iran and a Palestinian state," a source said. "The implication is that if Israel won't give him something he can work with, then he'll act on his own."

The sources said Obama's demand has sparked concern in the office of the Israeli prime minister. They said Netanyahu has been unable to form a coalition amid a boycott by left-wing parties and an alliance by two new movements — Yesh Atid and Jewish Home — with 31 seats in the 120-member parliament and opposed to major territorial concessions in the West Bank.

"The ties between Yesh Atid and Jewish Home are strengthening," Uri Ariel, the No. 2 member in Jewish Home, said.

So far, Netanyahu has been unable to woo any parties except for the U.S.-supported "The Movement," led by former Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni. The prime minister has received a two-week extension from President Shimon Peres.

"In these past four weeks I tried to form the broadest possible government," Netanyahu said. "But the main reason that I have not managed to complete the task by today is because there is a boycott of a certain sector."

Netanyahu was referring to a demand by Yesh Atid to ban ultra-Orthodox from the next government. The ultra-Orthodox comprise nearly 20 seats in the Knesset.

On March 1, the Israeli daily Makor Rishon reported that the next Netanyahu government would destroy numerous Jewish communities in the West Bank. The newspaper quoted Likud negotiators as saying that the plan depended on Yesh Atid ending its alliance with Jewish Home, led by Naftali Bennett.

"We are going to difficult decisions," a Likud negotiator was quoted as telling a Yesh Atid parliamentarian. "If you do not break up your pact with Bennett we won't be able to uproot communities if there is a need for difficult decisions. Together we can do it."

Other Israeli newspapers, quoting Likud sources, carried similar reports. They said the first step by Netanyahu would be the dismantling of Jewish communities in the West Bank deemed isolated.

The sources said the White House warned that Obama's forthcoming visit could characterize U.S. relations with Israel over the next four years. They said Obama aides stressed that Congress, which approved $3.1 billion in military aid to Israel for 2013, supported the establishment of a Palestinian state as a U.S. priority.

"The Obama people are making this a litmus test of Netanyahu's leadership and credibility," the Israeli source said. "Obama supporters in Congress have sent Netanyahu a similar message."

Contact Midenise at midenise@zahav.net.il


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DEFENSE SEC. FOR U.S. OR FOR IRAN?

Posted by Richard H. Shulman, March 04, 2013

This article is from the Zionist Organizaton of America and it appeared March 4, 2013 in the ZOA News Israel.

Could Pres. Obama have nominated a poorer candidate from the American people's interest, or a better candidate from the Iranian regime's interest?

What does that tell us about Pres. Obama, who is filling his Cabinet with all the worst people for our country? What does that tell us about the newspapers that fall in with his deleterious choices?

What does that tell us about the supposed pro-Israel position of J Street and Americans for Peace Now

What does the silence of most of the major American Jewish organizations tell us about them and about the power that antisemites allege that the Israel lobby has?

It must be getting increasingly difficult to believe that Pres. Bush is not trying to destroy our country. He has been putting students, housing, and government into more unsustainable debt. His policies deter job-creation and cause reductions in hours and medical insurance benefits. When the Federal Reserve no longer can keep interest rates down, the national debt would become hundreds of billions of dollars a year higher. The Justice Dept. is persecuting people and shaking down companies. It pursues discriminatory policies that it pretends are against racism. The Administration acts beyond Constitutional and legislated powers.

Deeply Troubled That U.S. Senate Confirmed Iran/ Terror Group Apologist, Anti-Israel, Incompetent Hagel for Secy. Defense

This is a sad and worrying day for America, the West and Israel. This is a good day for Iran, Hamas, Hizballah and such. It is deeply troubling that the U.S. Senate has confirmed Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense. Hagel was confirmed by 58 votes to 41 votes.

There has never been a confirmed Defense Secretary who attracted more than eleven opposing votes. In contrast, Hagel's predecessor, Leon Panetta, was confirmed by a unanimous 100—0 Senate vote.

The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) today also lamented the failure of virtually all major pro-Israel Jewish organizations to oppose Chuck Hagel's nomination. These include AIPAC, Anti-Defamation League (ADL), American Jewish Committee (AJC), Orthodox Union, B'nai B'rith, National Jewish Democratic Council and many others. Some expressed "concern." AIPAC didn't even express concern — AIPAC was silent. But none of these major Jewish defense groups explicitly opposed Hagel or lobbied Capitol Hill against him. (ADL's Abe Foxman even said, "[Hagel] does not have to be as bad as some fear," because he'll simply take orders from Obama. Not only is this a dubious assumption, but Obama has now stated that he will be counting on 'Hagel's judgment and counsel').

While almost all major Jewish groups were not opposing Hagel, Iran, Hamas and Louis Farrakhan were supporting and praising Hagel's nomination. The extremist leftwing Jewish groups, like J Street and Americans for Peace Now, also supported Hagel.

As Commentary magazine's Jonathan Tobin has observed, "none of the major groups, aside from the Zionist Organization of America, spoke up publicly about his unsuitability for the post or his out-of-the mainstream views."

The New York Sun has editorialized about the silence of Jewish groups other than the ZOA, noting, "only one of the Jewish defense agencies spoke out forcefully against [Hagel] That was the Zionist Organization of America ... It opposed the Hagel nomination early, forthrightly, and unapologetically. The result, according to the ZOA's president, Morton Klein, is that it received objections from several [Jewish] leaders ... Said Mr. Klein: "Several senators — and important ones — said to me: 'If Aipac, ADL and AJCommittee — especially Aipac — had come out and lobbied against Hagel, he would have been stopped.'" We believe these Jewish groups abdicated their responsibility and duty to their mission.

Chuck Hagel was the most incompetent and dangerous nominee for Defense Secretary in recent history — dangerous for America, the West and Israel. How can we entrust a man who agrees with the idea that the U.S. is the "world's bully" to defend the U.S. and its security interests as well as the security of important allies?

How can a man who called Israel's defending itself against Lebanon after being pounded by thousands of Hizballah rockets a 'sickening slaughter' be entrusted with the cabinet position charged with militarily assisting U.S. allies?

In his confirmation hearings, Hagel displayed a lack of knowledge and grasp of the issues. He also dramatically reversed himself on an array of previously held views. Unless he underwent a truly extraordinary transformation, rejecting a range of views he has held for the last 15 years, should we believe the contrary statements that Hagel uttered in a single afternoon of hearings, or should we believe Hagel's statements and votes over 15 years?

What was especially troubling about the Jewish community's response is that this was a black and white issue. There was no gray. Virtually everyone who cared about stopping Iran's nuclear ambitions, stopping radical Islamist terrorists, and supporting Israel's defense knew that Chuck Hagel was as problematic and dangerous a choice as one could have imagined.

For years, Hagel's position has been that the U.S. should eschew all measures, not only military but economic as well, to prevent Iran becoming a nuclear power. Hagel's position has also been that the U.S. engage and legitimize the most vicious terrorist groups, like the genocidal Hamas and Hizballah and that Israel is a brutal, slaughtering, war criminal.

It is not a trivial matter when a U.S. Defense Secretary is hostile to any important U.S. ally. But it is incomparably more serious when that ally is Israel, because Israel is not a relatively unthreatened ally, like Britain or Canada or Australia — it is surrounded by hostile regimes, most of whom do not even recognize it and several of whom have repeatedly made war on it. Iran has not threatened Spain with destruction, but it has repeatedly threatened Israel with destruction. Hagel's confirmation communicates the terrible message that the U.S. is not serious about stopping Iran becoming a nuclear power.

The ZOA praises those organizations, including Christians United for Israel, the Emergency Committee for Israel, JINSA, the National Council of Young Israel, Republican Jewish Coalition, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and NORPAC, the largest pro-Israel PAC, which spoke out loudly and clearly with moral clarity in opposition to this nomination.

Had the major American Jewish organizations that abstained from the fight put themselves on record, especially early on when the Hagel nomination had been rumored but not yet formally announced, we believe that many Democratic senators who were privately troubled by Hagel's record would have felt fortified and given cover by the depth of American Jewish concern and opposition to come out against him. Several U.S. senators expressed this to me.

A detailed record of Hagel's statements, votes and views follow:

  • In his confirmation hearings, Hagel claimed that the Iranian regime — which has bloodily cracked down on democracy protesters, rigged elections, viciously persecutes Bahais and hangs homosexuals — is "an elected, legitimate government." Hagel also reaffirmed earlier statements that he supported containing Iran should it become a nuclear power, before switching positions after receiving a written note from one of his assistants.
  • Hagel has sealed his archives in Nebraska, not permitting access to anyone and thus precluding scrutiny of his those parts of his record that might have evaded coverage till today. What was Hagel hiding?
  • In a 2012 report for the Global Zero advocacy group, which works for the elimination of all nuclear weapons, Hagel co-wrote a report, 'Global Zero: U.S. Nuclear Policy Commission,' which advocated an 80% reduction in the U.S. nuclear-weapons to about 900 weapons, with only half of those being deployed. He also called for the eventual phasing out of short-range nuclear weapons and the elimination of ICBMs and B-52 bombers.
  • In an April 2010 speech at Rutgers University, Hagel stated inaccurately that Israel, which has a stable majority within the territories of Israel and the West Bank, as heading towards apartheid. Hagel labelled the thrice-elected Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a "radical." He also argued for the inclusion of Hamas, a terrorist organization committed to Israel's destruction and the global murder of Jews, in negotiations.
  • In a 2009 report co-written by Hagel, 'A Last Chance For A Two State Israel-Palestine Agreement,' he called for deploying a "U.S.-led multinational force" in the West Bank which would "feature American leadership of a NATO force supplemented by Jordanians, Egyptians and Israelis" to maintain a peace agreement between Israel and a new Palestinian state, while also recommending a "more pragmatic approach" towards Hamas that legitimizes it rather than seeks to oust it.
  • During a 2009 Al-Jazeera interview, Hagel agreed with a questioner that the U.S. was "the world's bully" and that Palestinians were the victims of Israeli war crimes.
  • In an interview on the Al-Jazeera network in 2009, Hagel argued that the U.S. and Russia, rather than rogue states, should take the first steps towards nuclear disarmament saying, "Let's begin with the two nuclear powers that now are responsible for ninety-six percent of the nuclear weapons in the world. Russia and the United States have a particular obligation. We must join in some unison here to lead the rest of the world ... That's the point behind having American leadership as well as Russian leadership out front on eliminating nuclear weapons ... How can we preach to other countries that you can't have nuclear weapons but we can and our allies can? There is no credibility, there's no logic to that argument. And we have been losing on that argument ... I think and many people in the United States of America and Russia and in other parts of the world believe it has to go and that it is the elimination, the phasing out of nuclear weapons" (Aaron Klein, 'Hagel: U.S. should give up nukes before rogue nations,' World Net Daily, January 11, 2012).
  • In October, 2009, Hagel claimed in a speech to the left-wing J Street group, "I believe there is a real possibility of a shift in Syria's strategic thinking and policies.... If we can convince Damascus to pause and re-consider its positions and support regarding Iran, Hezballah, Hamas and radical Palestinian groups, we will have made progress for the entire Middle East, Israel, and the U.S. Syria wants to talk — at the highest levels — and everything is on the table.... The next bi-lateral peace treaty for Israel is with Syria." Hagel also said that he opposed isolating Iran through diplomacy and sanctions, saying, "How in the world do we think isolating someone is going to bring them around to your way of thinking? He also embraced the discredited 'linkage' theory which contends that the Middle East can be greatly tranquilized and U.S. relations with Arab states enhanced if the U.S. pressures Israel into a peace agreement with the Palestinians, saying, "The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is central, not peripheral, to U.S. vital security interests in combating terrorism, preventing an Iranian nuclear weapon, stability in the Middle East and U.S. and global energy security." Hagel also called for a Fatah-Hamas merge, saying, "No peace will be possible nor sustainable as long as the Palestinians remain a house divided." He did not mention any conditions for Hamas ('Chuck Hagel Delivers Speech for J Street First National Conference,' Atlantic Council, October 27, 2009).
  • In 2009, Hagel signed a letter urging President Obama to begin direct negotiations with Hamas, a U.S. designated terrorist group committed in its Charter to the destruction of Israel.
  • In 2009, Hagel said that he wants the Fatah/Palestinian Authority to merge with Hamas.
  • In 2008, Hagel was "solely responsible" for blocking an Iran sanctions bill (Seth Colter Walls, 'Dems Blame Senate GOP For Blocking Iran Sanctions Bill,' Huffington Post, March 10, 2008).
  • In a March 2007 speech at Rutgers University, Hagel reportedly said that "the State Department has become adjunct to the Israeli Foreign Minister's office."

  • In 2007, Hagel outspokenly opposed President George W. Bush's surge in Iraq, calling it the "most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam." In fact, the surge prevented a humanitarian and politician catastrophe in Iraq and an Al-Qaeda victory. Though opposed to the surge at the time, President Obama said in his 2009 Cairo speech that "I believe that the Iraqi people are ultimately better off without the tyranny of Saddam Hussein."
  • In a 2006 interview with former Middle East negotiator Aaron David Miller, Hagel said that "the Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people" on Capitol Hill ('Hagel named to intelligence board,' Jewish Telegraphic Agency, October 29, 2009).
  • In August 2006, Hagel was one of only 12 Senators who refused to formally call upon the European Union to declare Hizballah a terrorist organization ('NJDC Criticizes Senators for Refusing to Call on EU to add Hezbollah to List of Terrorist Organizations,' National Jewish Democratic Council press release, August 7, 2006). He also said in Senate speech that Israel had committed a "sickening slaughter" in Lebanon.
  • In July 2006, at the outbreak of the Lebanon war, Hagel argued against giving Israel the time to break Hizballah, urging instead an immediate ceasefire ('Key Republican breaks with Bush on Mideast,' CNN.com, July 31, 2006).
  • In December 2005, Hagel was one of only 27 senators who refused to sign a letter to President Bush urging him to pressure the Palestinian Authority (PA) to ban terrorist groups from participating in Palestinian legislative elections.
  • In June 2004, Hagel refused to sign a letter urging President Bush to highlight Iran's nuclear program at the G-8 summit and was one of only two senators in to vote against renewal of the Libya-Iran sanctions act.
  • In January 2003, Hagel said that Israel was "keep[ing] Palestinians caged up like animals" ('Hagel in 2003: Israel Keeps "Palestinians Caged Up Like Animals,"' Washington Free Beacon, January 9, 2013).

  • In 2002, Hagel urged the Bush administration to support Iranian membership in the World Trade Organization.
  • In 2002, Hagel was one of only 10 senators to oppose banning the import to America of Iraqi oil until Iraq stopped compensating the families of Palestinian suicide bombers.
  • In November 2001: Hagel was one of only 11 senators who refused to sign a letter urging President Bush not to meet with the late Yasser Arafat until his forces ended the violence against Israel.
  • In July 2001, Hagel was one of only two senators to vote against extending the original Iranian sanctions bill.
  • In October 2000, when Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority launched a terror war against Israel after rejecting without counter-offer a plan for Palestinian statehood accepted by Israel, Hagel was one of only four senators who refused to sign a Senate letter in support of Israel.
  • In 1999, Hagel showed indifference to the plight of Jews trapped in the Soviet Union in 1999 when he was the only senator out of 100 who refused to sign a statement against manifestations of increased anti-Semitism in Russia. The petition was set to appear as a full-page newspaper ad during then-president Boris Yeltsin's visit to the United States ('Hagel as senator didn't sign anti-Semitism pledge,' Washington Times, December 19, 2012).
  • In August 1998, Hagel rationalized Palestinian terrorism against Israeli Jews by alleging, "The Israeli government essentially continues to play games ... Desperate men do desperate things when you take hope away. And that's where the Palestinians are today" (Glenn Kessler, 'Chuck Hagel and Israel in context: A guide to his controversial statements,' Washington Post, January 7, 2013).
  • In 1998, as Senator, Hagel opposed the appointment of James Hormel as ambassador to Luxembourg on the grounds that Hormel is "aggressively gay." Hagel apologized to Hormel — in December 2012, when his nomination as Defense Secretary was imminent.
  • When Hagel served as the president and CEO of the World USO from 1987 to 1990, he proposed closing the USO in Haifa, a facility run by the UNited Services Organization, a non-profit that provides programs, services and live entertainment to United States troops and their families. Hagel told Jewish leaders lobbying him to keep the post open, "Let the Jews pay for it."
  • As a professor at Georgetown University, Hagel taught a foreign policy course based primarily on anti-Israel materials and far-left manifestos that castigate America's role in the world.

Were all of these troubling actions not enough to oppose the Hagel nomination?

To quote Commentary's Jonathan Tobin, writing before the Hagel vote, 'Should [Jewish organizations] fail to find their voices now about Hagel, many of the good people inside these organizations may have reason to look back with regret on their decisions. Hagel's appointment raises genuine doubts about this administration's commitment to stopping Iran's nuclear threat and continued support of Israel at a time when its enemies (such as the Muslim Brotherhood government in Egypt) are gaining strength. Silence at such a moment is impossible for men and women of conscience.'

Richard Shulman is a veteran defender of Israel on several web-based forums. His comments and analyses are a regular feature on Think-Israel. He provides cool information and right-on-target overviews. He distributes his essays by email. To subscribe, write him at ricshulman@aol.com.


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Iranian Shiite Terror Cell in Nigeria Followed a Familiar Pattern

Posted by Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, March 05, 2013

The article below was written by Col. (ret.) Dr. Jacques Neriah, a special analyst on the Middle East at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs. He was formerly Foreign Policy Advisor to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Deputy Head for Assessment of Israeli Military Intelligence. This article appeared March 5, 2013 on the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs website.

  • Nigeria is the most populous country in Africa and the fifth largest provider of oil to the U.S. More than half the population practices Islam.
  • On February 20, 2013, Nigeria's State Secret Service accused a local Shiite cleric, Mallam Abdullahi Mustaphah Berende, 50, of heading a terrorist group backed by Iran that was plotting to assassinate Nigerian officials and attack Israeli and American targets in Nigeria.
  • The Berende case offers a rare look at the work of Iranian intelligence agencies. Berende first visited Iran in 2006 to study at Imam Khomeini University, and was recruited when he returned for further studies in 2011. He was trained in the use of the AK-47 rifle, pistols, and the production of improvised explosive devices.
  • In April 2012 Berende was asked to establish a terrorist cell in Lagos. With two of his followers, he identified and gathered intelligence on public places and places frequented by Americans and Israelis. They also provided specific details on such agencies as USAID and the Peace Corps, as well as the Israeli Zim international shipping company and the Jewish cultural center in Lagos.
  • Sheikh Ibrahim al-Zakzaky, the undisputed leader of the Islamic Movement of Nigeria, is another Nigerian Shiite. A protégé of Iran, he is creating a radical socio-economic and military system that resembles that of Hizbullah in Lebanon. He is said to have a supporter base numbering over a million. His organization has been involved in many confrontations with the army and the Christian population. (See photos of a Hizbullah parade in Nigeria in this article.)
  • Similar Iranian-Hizbullah terrorist efforts in Cyprus, Bahrain, Bulgaria, and elsewhere confirm the pattern revealed in the Berende affair. Handlers from the Iranian Revolutionary Guards use local Shiite agents or those with dual nationalities. In the first phases they concentrate on the collection of intelligence, and train in the use of weapons and explosives in Iran. In a later phase they will seek to carry out their terrorist attacks through proxies.

Contact Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs at briefmail@list-jcpa.org


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AND I'M THE 'ISLAMAPHOBE'

Posted by FSM Security Update, March 05, 2013

The article below was written by Gadi Adelman who is a freelance writer and lecturer on the history of terrorism and counterterrorism. He grew up in Israel, studying terrorism and Islam for 35 years after surviving a terrorist bomb in Jerusalem in which 7 children were killed. Since returning to the U. S., Gadi teaches and lectures to law enforcement agencies as well as high schools and colleges. He can be heard every Thursday night at 8PM est on his own radio show "America Akbar" on Blog Talk Radio. He can be reached through his website gadiadelman.com. This article appeared March 05, 2013 in Family Security Matters and is archived at
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/and-im-the-islamaphobe?f=must_reads

islamophobe

I'm used to it, sad to say, but true. When you speak, lecture, teach and write about terrorism or more specifically Islam, you get used to the name calling and threats.

My last article "Cloaks and Keffiyehs" received the normal comments, among them; as usual I was called an "Islamaphobe". The comment also said I was "a horrible person". I hang my head in shame, not!

It was rather humorous since as always I state facts and was blasted for repeating what someone else stated. I always link my sources and in this case even the person who named called pointed it out,

You repeat the words of a KNOWN bigot (Guandolo) as if they are credible, and deal in racist insinuation. It is disgusting.

But that's what happens when you write about Islam, it doesn't matter if its fact, it only matters if it's considered blasphemous against Islam. According to Islamic (Sharia) law, it is a criminal offense to speak negatively of Islam, its Prophet, and its holy Scriptures (Qur'an and Hadith). Blasphemy is punishable by death. Again this is fact not my opinion.

Well now the 'stealth Jihad' has entered our schools with blessings from Allah the almighty, well, that's what some schools in Texas are teaching about Allah anyway. CSCOPE appears to be the culprit behind the curriculum. All it started when a picture was posted by a student on Facebook.

According to the Washington Times,

A Texas lawmaker is launching an investigation after a high school teacher reportedly invited her female students to dress in burqas and refer to Muslim terrorists as "freedom fighters."

Yes, before you wonder, this does include the "freedom fighters" that flew planes into the World Trade Center on 9/11. You know, the "freedom fighters" that murdered 3000 Americans and took the U.S. to war in Afghanistan.

Oh, but it gets worse, much worse. This was in a Geography class. I'd ask the obvious question, but I don't have to. One of the students father asked for me,

The girl's father is confused why a geography class is teaching religion at all. "She went from learning about Mexico to learning about Russia to learning about Islam," he told Fox. "Islam is not a country. Islam is not a continent."

Another parent pointed out the religious aspect,

"I felt like the line had been crossed," a parent of the daughter who posted the Facebook photo told Fox. "Christian kids who want to pray have to do it outside of school hours - yet Islam is being taught to our kids during school hours."

According to the article,

The school district released a statement to Fox News defending the class: "The lesson that was offered focused on exposing students to world cultures, religions, customs and belief systems. The lesson is not teaching a specific religion, and the students volunteered to wear the clothing."

"Volunteered to wear the clothing"? If that is the case why did one student claim she was asked to sign a statement about the burqa,

After a photo went viral of several Lumberton High School students wearing burqas, traditional Islamic women's garb, April LeBlanc said her daughter called her from school in tears because administrators asked her to sign a statement saying she was not forced to don the garment.

According to one student in the class, the lesson was to teach about the life of women in Islam. The burqa exercise focused on fashion.

Fashion? Really? Need I explain that the teacher didn't bother to teach the students that women in Islamic countries that are caught dressed improperly are subject to beatings, prison and is some cases even death?

So how does CSCOPE fit in to all this? According to all reports the parents who contacted the principal, said he defended the program that is required under CSCOPE. The story of CSCOPE being the group behind the lesson made national news and caused CSCOPE to refute the claim.

The CSCOPE website states,

CSCOPE provides TEKS-aligned and updated K-12 curriculum, assessment, and instruction components for English and Spanish Language Arts, Mathematics, Science, and Social Studies (foundation curriculum).

Hmmm. I didn't see Geography listed there, but then again I too am a product of a public school education.

The website also answers my question of how many school districts are using CSCOPE,

As of September 25, 2012, there are 875 active CSCOPE districts. This equates to approximately 70% of the districts in Texas.

Their homepage has the following about the burqa controversy,

False Information on Burqas in CSCOPE

Certain articles have recently claimed that a picture of students wearing burqas was part of a CSCOPE lesson used in a teacher's classroom. This activity was not a part of any lesson in CSCOPE; rather, it was a locally developed lesson in a Texas school district. For more information from the school district, click here.

Following the link takes you to a letter from the Lumberton Independent School District,

Lumberton ISD Response to CSCOPE and Promotion of Islam

Recently a picture had surfaced showing five students dressed in burqas (Islamic attire) in a World Geography classroom at Lumberton High School. The lesson that was offered was not a written CSCOPE lesson; however it informed students to the customary culture of the people in the Middle East. The lesson that occurred was presented on February 1, 2013. As part of the curriculum from the World Geography TEKS (as prescribed by the state of Texas), the students are to study the culture (TEKS number 17)

Not a written CSCOPE lesson but a TEKS lesson. So what exactly is TEKS? TEKS stands for Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills. The Texas Education Agency website states,

TEKS are the state standards for what students should know and be able to do.

However another report states,

In the 70 percent of Texas public schools where a private curriculum has been installed, students are learning the "fact" that "Allah is the Almighty God," charge critics of a new online curriculum that already is facing condemnation for its secrecy and restrictions on oversight.

The program, called CSCOPE, is a private venture operating under the umbrella of the Texas Education Service Center Curriculum Collaborative, whose incorporation documents state its independence from the State Board of Education of the Texas Education Agency.

The report continues,

According to excerpts, under the heading, "Who Is Allah?," students are told:

"Allah is the Almighty God."

"Allah alone is the Creator. He alone deserves our devout love and worship."

A Foxnews reporter interviewed the parents of one of the girls in the photo,

The parents said they confronted their daughter and told her to explain exactly what she had been taught.

"They were asked about their perception of Islam," she said. "Most of the class said they thought about terrorism. And her response was, 'we're going to change the way we perceive Islam.'"

The State Senator who launched the investigation spoke to Fox as well,

State Sen. Dan Patrick, chairman of the senate education committee, told Fox News he is very disturbed by the photograph as well as reports that students were exposed to a story that blamed Egypt's turmoil on democracy - rather than the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Washington Times article also reported,

Janice VanCleave, the founder of Texas CSCOPE Review, which monitors what is being taught in the state's schools. Said, "They are definitely promoting the Islamic religion."

A Blaze reporter also spoke to Janice VanCleave,

VanCleave argues that CSCOPE offers no comparable lessons on Christianity or Judaism.

"I do think CSCOPE promotes the Islamic religion," she added. "I don't think it's right to be proselytizing the Islamic religion in our schools."

Yes burqa's are a "fashion", terrorists are "freedom fighters" and "Allah is the Almighty God".

But I, I am an "Islamaphobe".

Contact FSM Security Update at info@familysecuritymatters.org


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CHINESE AGGRESSION SHOWS THE LAW OF THE SEA TREATY IS WORTHLESS

Posted by FSM Security Update, March 05, 2013

The article below was written by Chris Carter who is the director of the Victory Institute and the deputy regional director of the U.S. Counterterrorism Advisory Team. His work also appears at The US Report, International Analyst Network, Human Events, Canada Free Press, Deutsche Welle, NavySEALs.com, Blackfive and other publications. He also served on the 2010 National Medal of Honor Convention project. He is a veteran of the U.S. Air Force, and a firefighter by trade. This article appeared March 4, 2013 in Family Security Matters and is archived at
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/chinese-aggression-shows-the-law-of-the-sea-treaty-is-worthless?f=must_reads

Supporters of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) would have us believe that the treaty makes the world a safer place. For 30 years, media, political, and even military elite have all called for ratification of UNCLOS.

But why should the U.S. ratify a treaty that, considering Chinese ongoing territorial aggression against its neighbors, we can see is useless when it comes to maintaining "peace, justice and progress for all peoples of the world," as the charter states?

China navy

Chinese naval vessels recently violated UN law by using their fire control radar to target a Japanese naval destroyer and military helicopters operating near the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands in February.

The rocky, uninhabited islands belonged to the Japanese until after World War II, when the United States assumed temporary control. The islands returned to Japanese administration in 1972, but the Chinese didn't voice their claim to the islands until a potentially significant oil field was discovered in the region later that decade.

For months, Chinese and Filipino vessels have maintained a delicate standoff over the Scarborough Shoals (Huangyan Island to China). Although 500 miles from the nearest Chinese port, Chinese fishing vessels flaunt the law by harvesting their catch within the UNCLOS-established exclusive economic zone of the Philippines, just 124 miles from their coast.

In 1947, the Chinese government claimed virtually all of the South China Sea in what has become known as the "Nine-Dash Line." China, a member nation of UNCLOS, refuses to explain the details on how they reached their far-fetching boundary.

A U.S. diplomatic cable published by WikiLeaks states that a senior Chinese government maritime law expert admittedly did not know of any historical basis behind the "Nine-Dash Line."

China knows that if they open the door to international scrutiny, their extravagant claim and ambiguous evidence would not survive and any illusions of a legitimacy would vanish. And so would the massive deposits of oil and natural gas surrounding these desolate islands the Chinese want exclusive access to.

The Philippines even offered to settle the matter of Scarborough Shoal in a UNCLOS tribunal, but the Chinese have stated they will not participate in any of the treaty's dispute resolution mechanisms - or abide by any UNCLOS ruling.

The Chinese claim to seek bilateral talks because they know that the Philippines will refuse, and the issue will remain unsettled. The Chinese interest is to keep things exactly as they are.

Prior to becoming Secretary of State, John Kerry was one of the strongest supporters of ratifying UNCLOS as a member of the Senate. Confronted with Chinese warmongering however, Secretary Kerry can only spout meaningless platitudes about "forging stronger and deeper relations" with the Philippines.

Not altogether inspiring, considering we have mutual defense pacts with both Japan and the Philippines that go back over 60 years. Perhaps President Obama doesn't plan on honoring our agreements, but we are obligated to treat an attack on either nation as if it were an attack on the United States.

Kerry's empty words and the Obama administration's make-belief world of political narratives may resonate in an Ivy League faculty lounge or with a sycophantic media, but China lives in the real world, where words only mean as much as your ability to back them up.

China can be aggressive because they know that the UN is only out to get paid, President Obama's "soft power" is big on soft and short on power, and no other nation is capable of doing anything about it.

Demographically and economically speaking, the future belongs to China. They are building aircraft carriers and air supremacy fighter jets while we are grounding and decommissioning ours. The Chinese are expanding their nuclear arsenal while we are unilaterally dismantling our aging weapons. Our economy is going the way of Greece, and the Chinese are financing the demise.

Diplomacy will only weaken the Chinese position, and their political and military leaders are telling their people to prepare for war. No one wants to go to war with the Chinese, but diplomacy tends to work better when one side has significant leverage over the other, both parties can find common ground, or if both parties at least wish to avoid war. Feeble treaties will not stand in their way.

If we could magically cast out corruption from the UN, a Law of the Sea treaty would be a great idea. Internationally agreed-upon laws would rule the oceans and seas, while courts - not fleets - would solve disputes. And the world wouldn't depend solely on the United States to solve their problems with our blood and treasure.

But any treaty that permits a member to lay claim to an entire sea shared by several nations, and does nothing while a member openly violates provisions of the treaty is absurd. Considering the inability to check Chinese aggression, the trillions of dollars in fees that will be paid by U.S. taxpayers to the UN, and giving control over much of our resources to an unaccountable international organization, the United States is far better off without UNCLOS.

Contact FSM Security Update at info@familysecuritymatters.org


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THE APARTHEID BUS BLITZ

Posted by David Ha'ivri, March 05, 2013

The new trending topic on the anti-Israel network is "Apartheid Buses." According the narrative, Israel has now launched Arab-only bus lines as a new means of oppressing the local Arab population. In fact, the truth behind this story is a special service that this Israeli bus company has begun to provide for Palestinian workers from the security checkpoint they pass though to the work areas in central Israel.

To draw this in a negative light, propagandists have spiced up the story by reporting that the new service was launched after Jewish Israelis complained about the workers traveling on their regular buses. As usual, the propagandists do not allow small details - like the facts - to get in the way of the twisted picture they wish to project about Israel.

Tens of thousands of non-Israeli Palestinians are permitted to work in Israel every day. Those who receive these work permits consider themselves lucky, because the economy in the Palestinian Authority areas is so bad that work places there are hard to find and pay very poorly. Those holding work permits are allowed to enter only at designated security crossings. This is a rule determined by the government security agencies, and has nothing to do with the preferences of the Jewish commuters.

After this blitz grew wings and became the center of media attention, Israel journalist Chaim Levenson of Haaretz wrote on his Facebook page that he was going to meet with the Arab workers on the new bus line at 4:30 AM leaving the Eyal crossing. Many workers are headed for early starts at building jobs, where they need to be on site by 6 or so. Obviously, these buses have been provided as a special service, at the time and place according the needs of the worker population from that area. Does someone suggest that they wait for the first bus leaving Ariel at 5:30am, and be late for work?

Arab-only bus lines throughout Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem are nothing new. There are Arab-owned lines running between Shechem (Nablus), Ramallah, Jerusalem, Bethlehem and Hevron. You will never see them stop for a Jew waiting at a bus stop on the way. There is an Arab-only bus station in the American Colony in Jerusalem. Don't expect to see Jewish people walking around there. Why, you might ask? It's because the Jews feel threatened there, and fear for their safety.

On the other hand, Israeli-owned public transportation in all of these places is used by Jews and non-Jews alike. The same bus company, Afikim, which is being accused of running special bus lines tailored to the needs of Palestinian workers, has also launched special bus lines fit for the needs of the students at the university in Ariel. 80% of the university's 14,000 students are commuting from Israel's more central areas, and need more buses coming in during the morning hours, and more leaving at the end of the day. The university's Arab students enjoy those buses just as Jewish students do.

The rumor that Jewish residents were involved in the new bus arrangement was thrown in by some propagandist to make the story more sensational. It is an obnoxious distortion of the facts. The Jewish commuters have nothing to do with security regulations.

In fact, the new buses are set to save the Palestinian Arab commuters a lot of money, as their previous alternative was to pay for expensive private taxis to their workplace destinations. This is racism?

David Ha'ivri is an Israeli settler and political activist. He emigrated with his family from the United States to Israel at the age of 11 and served in the IDF. Ha'ivri lives with his wife and eight children in Kfar Tapuach in the West Bank. He is a controversial leader, writer and speaker. Contact David Ha'ivri at haivri@gmail.com


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WHAT IF THEY MEAN WHAT THEY SAY?

Posted by Jewish Policy Center, March 05, 2013

The U.S. generally makes allowance for verbal excesses from foreign governments, but if expressions of hatred and incitement to violence are actually harbingers of behavior, destruction and murderousness cannot be far behind.

At the UN Alliance of Civilizations [sic], Turkey's Prime Minister equated Zionism with crimes against humanity. The American response was swift; speaking for himself and the administration, Kerry called the remark "objectionable." But after expressing dismay, he called for nicer play. "That said, Turkey and Israel are both vital allies. We want to see them work together to go beyond rhetoric and take concrete steps to change their relationship." A State Department official concurred, saying the comment was "particularly offensive" and "complicates our ability to do all the things we want to do together."

But what if Ergodan doesn't want what the U.S. wants him to want -- that is to say, he doesn't want a changed relationship with Israel? What if harsh rhetoric and open political and financial support for Hamas -- a U.S. designated terrorist organization -- are part of Turkey's regional Sunni Islamic ambition, which does not include Israel? What if Turkey's prior cooperation was a phase to allow it to acquire political and military benefits?

In a similar vein, a few weeks ago, a North Korean diplomat told the UN Conference on Disarmament, "As the saying goes, a new-born puppy knows no fear of a tiger. South Korea's erratic behavior would only herald its final destruction." He added, "If the U.S. takes a hostile approach toward North Korea to the last, rendering the situation complicated, [we] will be left with no option but to take the second and third stronger steps in succession." A North Korean general warned of the "miserable destruction" of the United States.

The U.S. Ambassador to the UN Conference on Disarmament called the comments "profoundly disturbing," and the Spanish ambassador said he was "stupefied." Why?

Beginning with President Carter, American administrations have treated North Korea's pursuit of nuclear capability as defensive: designed to keep South Korea and the U.S. from overthrowing the cultish regime of the North. The U.S. tells itself that since it harbors no plans for any such invasion, it can reassure North Korea on that point and thus lessen its determination to have nuclear capability — hence the U.S. offers food, fuel and a light water reactor, thinking those "gifts" will reassure North Korea of America's benign intentions. But what if North Korea is not defensive, but rather Kim Jong Un, like his predecessors, believes that the unification of the peninsula should happen under governance of the North? How then should we understand the diplomat and the general? And how should we understand North Korea's latest nuclear test?

The British ambassador said of the North Korean diplomat's remarks, "It cannot be allowed that we have expressions which refer to the possible destruction of UN member states." That is, of course, patently untrue. The UN tolerates and sometimes applauds Iranian representatives who have called not for the "possible" destruction of a UN member state, Israel, but for its outright annihilation.

"The Zionist regime and the Zionists are a cancerous tumor," Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said. "The nations of the region will soon finish off the usurper Zionists in the Palestinian land... In the new Middle East there will be no trace of the Americans and Zionists... Cancer must be eliminated from a body (the region)." For Qods Day last year Ahmadinejad told the Iranians, "Any freedom lover and justice seeker in the world must do its best for the annihilation of the Zionist regime in order to pave the path for the establishment of justice and freedom in the world."

The P5+1, the five permanent UN Security Council members plus Germany who are negotiating with Iran, still seem to presume that Iran is pursuing nuclear capability for some reason other than to use it, and that it can, therefore, be dissuaded from developing it. But what if "annihilation of the Zionist regime" really is topmost in the minds of the Mullahs? What if they believe Israel has to disappear and they can make it happen? What will happen if they still really believe that when they get nuclear weapons?

The Palestinian Authority and Hamas teach raw anti-Semitism in schools, and that "Palestine" must be "liberated." Terrorists are publicly honored -- last week it was members of the DFLP who massacred 22 high school students in Ma'alot in 1974. Successive American administrations have operated on the assumption that such teachings have no impact on the "peace process."

Egypt's Mohammed Morsi has said appalling things about Jews, although he has been constrained since taking power by his need for American aid and political support. The State Department condemned Morsi's rhetorical excesses almost exactly as it did Erdogan's. Victoria Neuland told reporters, "The type of offensive rhetoric that we saw in 2010 is not acceptable, not productive, and shouldn't be part of a democratic Egypt. That said," she continued, "we look to President Mursi and Egyptian leaders to demonstrate in both word and in deed their commitment to religious tolerance and to upholding all of Egypt's international obligations" (referring to the Egypt-Israel Peace Treaty).

"That said." Having made her pro forma condemnation of rhetoric, she, like Secretary Kerry, wants nicer play. But what if Egyptian anti-Semitism is the reality and the Peace Treaty only a phase to allow Egypt to pile up political and military benefits from the U.S.? Like Turkey. It is not hard to believe that ideologically driven countries would do what the "civilized world" does not think logical or possible.

When Mein Kampf was published, many people thought Hitler's words were just words. They were wrong. Not only did he believe them, he put what power he had behind them; if he'd had nuclear weapons, he would have used them. How is it possible, then, to watch the acquisition of nuclear technology and more destructive means of terrorism by those who preach the annihilation of others — whether Israel, South Korea, or the United States is the object of their hatred -- and choose to believe they do not mean what they say?

The article above Shoshana Bryen is Senior Director of The Jewish Policy Center. This article appeared March 5, 2013 on the Gatestone Institute website. It is archived at
http://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/4004/what-if-they-mean-what-they-say


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A SPECIAL SHABBAT IN LODZ, POLAND

Posted by Shavei Israel, March 05, 2013

The article below was written by Brian Blum who is a freelance writer, journalist and editor. He works for an eclectic mix of newspapers, online magazines, universities, non-profit organizations and public companies. "This Normal Life," his personal blog, has appeared weekly since 2002. A former hi-tech entrepreneur, Brian moved to Jerusalem from the San Francisco Bay Area in 1994 with his wife and three children. Contact him at brianblum@gmail.com. The article appeared March 03, 2013 on Shavei Israel and is archived at
http://www.shavei.org/communities/hidden_jews_of_poland/articles-hidden_jews_of_poland/a-special-shabbat-in-lodz-poland/

Some 40 "Hidden Jews" of Poland gathered last month in the town of Lodz for a weekend seminar sponsored by Shavei Israel. The Shabbaton was geared specifically for graduates of previous Shavei seminars for Polish Jews, including our three-week program in Israel last summer, which we covered here.

Group at the guesthouse in Lodz

The theme of the weekend, which included communal prayers, meals and classes, was "Jewish responsibility" and it touched on Jewish law, Jewish ethics, and group memory. One of the speakers was Rabbi Jeffrey Saks, director of WebYeshiva, a Jerusalem-based online Jewish learning program with more than 8,000 registered students, including some in Poland. It was Rabbi Saks' fourth visit to Poland, but his first time at a Shavei Israel seminar. He shared with us some thoughts on the nature of Jewish life in Poland today.

"Most people are shocked when they hear there are still Jews in Poland," he begins. "They think, weren't they all killed or didn't they all leave? And, yes, the Holocaust is always hanging over everything; it's there in between the lines. Yet, despite that, the community is caught up in so many other, positive, things. There's this whole process of rediscovering [their Jewish heritage]. The place is so full of life. In Krakow, they have a beautiful JCC. It's almost as if they're saying, leave the Holocaust at the door, we're moving forward."

Indeed, it's that fresh embrace of Judaism, for many young Poles who only recently found out they have Jewish roots, that has been the catalyst for Shavei Israel's work in Poland. We have two emissaries in the country — Rabbi Boaz Pash and Rabbi Yehoshua Ellis — as well as close ties with Poland's Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich. You can read more about our activities here.

Rabbi Saks described the significance of the Shabbaton setting. "The town of Lodz found itself on the German side of the border during World War II and as a result it was not destroyed during the fighting. The Jewish community includes four buildings around a central courtyard. There is a guest house, a mikve (ritual bath), a beautiful shul and a communal kitchen. There is also a small Jewish community that lives in Lodz full time."

In the pictures, you can see the leader of the community, Simcha Keller, leading the havdalah service at the conclusion of Shabbat. He is one of two men wearing a traditional fur hat; the other is a local named Shimon who runs the kosher shop in town, which sells a kosher version of Slivovitz, the region's famous plum brandy. "I can't tell you how many bottles we drank during the weekend," Rabbi Saks marvels. "That stuff is something like 78% alcohol. We went through it like water."

Simcha Keller is also a musician and played flute during a Saturday night kumsitz — a concert composed of local Jewish musicians. You can see pictures from that event here [link]. Following the musical festivities, Rabbi Pash led an educational Purim quiz based on the format of the popular "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" TV show. On Sunday morning, following another class and breakfast, the Shabbaton concluded with a tour for out-of-towers of Jewish Lodz.

Despite the festive atmosphere, the history of the Jews in Poland is never far away. "Everyone is still suffering from that trauma, whether they know it or not," Rabbi Saks says. "And so all of the work we do in Poland is really trying to repair this catastrophic breach of what happened during the Holocaust."

The ongoing success of the tikkun (the Hebrew for "repair") can be seen in the enthusiasm for Shavei Israel's seminars and programs in Poland. Rabbi Ellis, who helped organize the Shabbaton, reports that interest was so high in this most recent weekend, space was particularly tight, "although we made room for everyone," he insists. Which is important, because in a place like Poland, the effect you have can be as unpredictable as the revival of Jewish life in a land where it was so nearly extinguished.

That Shavei Israel has assisted in the creation of an environment where young Poles from diverse backgrounds are rediscovering their roots and contributing to the renewed vitality of Jewish life in Poland only underlines the importance of our continuing work there.

Contact Shavei Israel at info.shavei@gmail.com


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PALESTINIANS' DOUBLE-STANDARDS EXPOSED AGAIN

Posted by GWY123, March 05, 2013

The article below was written by Khaled Abu Toameh who is an Israeli Arab journalist, lecturer and documentary filmmaker. Abu Toameh writes for The Jerusalem Post and for the New York-based Gatestone Institute, where he is a senior distinguished fellow. The article appeared March 5, 2013 on the Gatestone Institute International Policy Council website and is archived at
http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3613/palestinians-double-standards

What is surprising — and disturbing — is that the UN, the international media and human rights groups are willing to be complicit in this effort to prevent the outside world from learning about what is going on in Palestinian prisons in the West Bank. Once again it has been proven that a story that reflects negatively on the Palestinian Authority leadership has no chance of finding its way to the international media. But a story that reflects negatively on Israel will always be welcomed by the international media, human rights organizations and the UN.

Six days after Arafat Jaradat was found dead in Israel's Megiddo Prison, another detainee died in a Palestinian Authority prison in Jericho.

Jaradat's death triggered widespread condemnations not only from Palestinians but also from international human rights organizations and the United Nations.

"The United Nations expects an independent and transparent investigation into the circumstances of Mr Jaradat's death, the results of which should be made public as soon as possible," said Robert Serry, the UN Middle East peace envoy.

Richard Falk, the UN Special Rapporteur for human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, issued a statement also calling for an international investigation into the death of 30-year-old Jaradat.

"The death of a prisoner during interrogation is always a cause for concern, but in this case, when Israel has shown a pattern and practise of prisoner abuse, the need for outside, credible investigation is more urgent than ever," Falk said in his statement.

The case of Jaradat has also won massive coverage in the international media, including BBC, Time, The Guardian and France 24. Even Jaradat's funeral drew scores of journalists from all around the world.

But when Ayman Samara, a 40-year-old Palestinian man, died in the Palestinian Authority's Jericho Prison a few days later, neither the UN nor the international media showed the slightest interest in his case.

Many Jerusalem-based Western journalists chose to ignore the story of Samara. Some claimed they were too busy to cover the death of the Palestinian man in Jericho Prison; others admitted their editors were simply not interested in this story because it was an "internal Palestinian issue."

In a further sign of double-standards, the UN has not called for an international and independent inquiry into the death of the Palestinian man in Jericho Prison. Nor have international human rights organizations, whose representatives reacted differently to the death of Jaradat in Israeli custody.

The Palestinian Authority has actively prevented Palestinian journalists from covering the mysterious death of Samara. One Palestinian reporter, who was caught interviewing people outside Jericho Prison, was even detained for several hours by Palestinian Authority security officers.

That the Palestinian Authority has been trying to prevent the media from covering the death of a detainee in one of its prisons is not surprising.

What is surprising -- and disturbing -- is that the UN, the international media and human rights organizations are willing to be complicit in this effort to prevent the outside world from learning about what is going on in Palestinian prisons in the West Bank.

The Palestinian Authority obviously finds the story of Samara to be embarrassing, especially on the eve of US President Barack Obama's visit to the region later this month.

The Palestinian Authority leadership would like Obama and the rest of the world to think that there are no human rights abuses in Palestinian prisons and that the only "bad guys" are the Israelis.

Once again, it has been proven that a story that reflects negatively on the Palestinian Authority leadership has no chance of finding its way to the international media.

At the same time, a story that reflects negatively on Israel will always be welcomed by representatives of the international media and human rights organizations, as well as the UN.

Contact GWY at gwy123@aol.com


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LINCOLN AS WEST BANK JEWISH SETTLER

Posted by Steven Plaut, March 05, 2013

An interesting trend has emerged in recent weeks. The Israeli Left, along with most of the world's pseudo-intellectual classes, has suddenly discovered Abraham Lincoln. Obviously it is thanks to the new Hollywood movie. Leftists do not read books; they form their moral evaluations mainly based on fashionable movies, like the abominations that Israel sent to the Oscar ceremonies this year or like the movies produced by Michael Moore.

The Israeli Left has embraced Lincoln because it is convinced that, if Lincoln is regarded as a moral champion, clearly identification with Lincoln must lead one to support the political agenda of the Israeli Left. First and foremost this would mean supporting Palestinian demands and aggression against Jews. And of course the "social justice" economic and social bolshevism of the Left.

Take the column by Bradley Burston, the English-language columnist for Haaretz, that Palestinian newspaper printed in Hebrew, from a few days ago. You can read it here: http://www.haaretz.com/blogs/a-special-place-in-hell/as-lincoln-abolished-slavery-israel-must-abolish-occupation.premium-1.505908

The title pretty much tells you what you need to know: 'As Lincoln abolished slavery, Israel must abolish occupation." Bradley opines: 'I realize now that I am an abolitionist and that occupation is slavery. I also realize that I need to pay more attention to Abraham Lincoln, in his ability to remind us all of the wisdom hidden in the obvious.' If you have a strong stomach, read the whole article.

Then today (March 5) we have a column in Haaretz by one Ithamar Handelman Smith, who claims to be a writer and journalist, one who is so anti-Israel that the Likud government is likely to grant him a governmental subsidy to make some Bash-Israel flicks. His column is here: http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/what-do-you-know-of-lincoln-ms-livnat.premium-1.507280

It is titled ' What do you know of Lincoln, Ms. Livnat? He opines: 'The culture minister couldn't see the parallels between the Academy Award-winning story she loved (Lincoln -- SP) and the stories behind the Israeli documentaries she shunned.'

You will like this excerpt from Smith: 'Israel is a democracy to be proud of? Maybe, if you're extremist-right-wing-Jewish settlers. But everyone else Arabs, Haredim, African refugees, leftists live here under one of the least democratic regimes in the Western world. And no, a democracy doesn't get defensive about movies like "The Gatekeepers" and "5 Broken Cameras." A democracy learns from films like these about what's wrong with it and what can be fixed.'

Not of course from any books!

SO what do we make of this new "Lincoln as Leftist Pro-Palestinian social democrat" campaign by Israel's Left and by Haaretz?

Well, even someone with only the shallowest familiarity with American history would know that the two most important principles represented by Lincoln would make him for all intents and purposes the ethical analogue of the Jewish settler leaders in the West Bank.

Lincoln fought the American Civil War first and foremost in to order to prevent the division of his homeland, and he was fully prepared to use massive military force to achieve that goal. This makes him the moral brother of every Jew in the world who is OPPOSED to partition of the Land of Israel and carving out from it any Palestinian state. Those proposing such a "two-state solution" are the 21st century's copperheads.

Second, Lincoln had no reluctance about using the word "treason," and throughout the Civil War he made it clear that he considered the Union war against the Confederacy and its supporters to be a campaign against treason. Those who supported succession or the Confederacy were consistently described by Lincoln as "traitors." Those who opposed the Union's national interests were engaging in treason, not academic freedom. Lincoln did not mollycoddle traitors in the name of "understanding the Other." He did not insist that those opposing national interests be allowed to control the universities and the courts and the media. Lincoln's war against treason did not make him a 19th century Haaretz columnist but rather the moral ally of all those who despise Haaretz and who oppose the anti-Israel Left in Israel.

Aside from those two most obvious characteristics of Lincoln, which make him the moral analogue of Jewish settler leaders in the West Bank, Lincoln had a few other features that will make the Left squirm. Lincoln abolished habeas corpus during wartime. He had traitors executed and deported, and had no hesitation about the use of capital punishment. Lincoln also imposed censorship on the press and suppressed treasonous journalism. Want to ponder how Lincoln would handle Haaretz? Then in Sherman's march to the sea, Lincoln conducted war against CIVILIANS, explicitly targeting and attacking the civilian population and its infrastructure to end rebellion and treason. With no Betselem and no Supreme Court interference.

Perhaps most notably, Lincoln also imposed an uncompromising blockade upon the Confederacy. The very same Israeli Leftists, who insist that lifting the "embargo" of Gaza is the highest form of humane morality so that the Hamas can more easily import weapons, will have an interesting challenge explaining the blockade imposed by the world's moral champion, Abraham Lincoln. Guess how Lincoln would have dealt with "Gaza Flotilla" blockade runners. Honest Abe used exactly the same tactic against the Confederacy over which the Israeli bedwetting Left is now sobbing its eyes out! And frankly my dear I don't give a damn!

Steven Plaut is an American-trained economist, a professor of business administration at Haifa University and author of "The Scout." He frequently comments — both seriously and satirically — on Israeli politics and the left wing academic community. Write him at splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il His website address is http://www.stevenplaut.blogspot.com.

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JIHADISTS BOMB HYDERABAD AND EVERYWHERE

Posted by Richard H. Shulman, March 05, 2013

Jihadists set off two bombs in Hyderabad, India, killing and wounding dozens of people. This follows the pattern:

2001: 3,000 killed at World Trade Center by Saudi Arabians;

2002: 2000 killed In Bali;

2004: 350 school children massacred in Beslan Russia;

2004: 190 killed in Spain.

2008: 160 murdered in Mumbai, India by Pakistanis;

2008: 14 killed in attack on India's Parliament by Pakistani and Indian Muslims; etc.

In addition, all the terrorists of Somalia and Afghanistan and many of the rebels in Philippines are Muslims.

Almost all terrorists are Muslims, these days. They attack innocent people, in the name of Allah and jihad. India is an inoffensive country, trying to be tolerant, but jihadists usually have no genuine grievances. They simply are bigoted. Their religious hatred impels them to mass-murder.

Nevertheless, the politically correct crowd pretends that jihad is benign and that terrorism is not based on Islamic imperialism. The politically correct do not acknowledge that the goal of jihad is to establish Islamic religious rule over the whole world. Instead, they think the solution is tolerance, though in already intolerant countries, jihad occurs anyway. Jihad takes place because Muslims, especially the Radicals, do not want to be treated as equals but as superiors. "Affirmative action" programs (really discrimination against the majority) facilitate Islamic penetration.

Nor is military jihad the sole method for dominating non-Muslim societies. Some Islamic organizations raise funds for jihad and for indoctrination. They exploit naïve non-Muslims, just as the Communists exploited naïve liberals. Some Muslims pretend to be secular and tolerant, but secretly support jihad.

In India, these people write articles and declare neutrality or tolerance, so as to head off investigation and opposition. (They encourage liberals to utter such irrelevant notions as "not all" Muslims, or not all Palestinian Arabs, favor terrorism.) This kind of deceit is a prime tenet of Islam. How unfortunate that for all that U.S. schools teach about religious practices of Islam, neither the schools nor the media explain about the political practices of Islam, and how powerful within the faith are Radical Muslims.

India is a particular target of jihad. Pakistan, Bangladesh, and much of Afghanistan were seized from India. Kashmir still in India is undergoing ethnic cleansing of Hindus and Sikhs by terrorists directed from Pakistan, which also directs much of the terrorism against Afghanistan and the U.S. forces that tried to rescue Afghanistan.

The real answer for India is to make a permanent separation of all Muslims from India, and then to guard the borders. This would complete the population exchange started by the Muslims separating from the rest of India, during the formation of Pakistan. This solution would preserve Hindu and Sikh culture and freedom from internal subversion.

There is a problem with that solution. Pakistan is both terrorist-ridden and nuclear bomb building (http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/Hyderabad-blasts-Dilsukhnagar-has-been-on-Indian-Mujahideen-radar-since-1999/articleshow/18618090.cms)

Most of this article comes from Narain Kataria's letters to the Times of India. Mr. Kataria is head of the Indian-American Intellectuals Forum katarian@aol.com.

Mr. Kataria shows that jihad is global, murderous, and religious. He might have added that Radical Muslims do not identify with nationality but with their ideological view of Islam. That explains the multi-national composition of jihadists in Syria and other countries.

Muslims are making suckers out of liberals. Liberals probably gasp at the suggestion that India expel its Muslims (and probably give sanctuary to Hindus and Sikhs from Pakistan and Bangladesh). But liberals don't gasp or rasp at Pakistan's expelling its Hindus or at Iraqis expelling their Christians. That liberal hypocrisy forfeits moral authority.

The proposal recognizes reality. It is the way to preserve lives and freedom. Europe, gradually being submerged by Muslim immigration, needs to adopt it soon. But Europe is confused about the issue. Europeans who propose solutions get denounced by the Left and stabbed by Islamists; the Left does not denounce the Islamists. Islamists attack civilization and the Left undermines it.

Richard Shulman is a veteran defender of Israel on several web-based forums. His comments and analyses are a regular feature on Think-Israel. He provides cool information and right-on-target overviews. He distributes his essays by email. To subscribe, write him at ricshulman@aol.com.


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ISRAELI BUSES & ALLEGED SEGREGATION

Posted by Richard H. Shulman, March 05, 2013

Some 50,000 day laborers commute from the P.A. to Israel. They were vetted before being given permits to enter. They used buses, on which they clashed with Jews, or private mini-buses. The news article presents opinions about the clashes, but not facts about whether the clashes were over seats or were ethnic.

At the suggestion of Jews from Judea-Samaria, special buses were set up for the Arabs. Arabs and Jews are not compelled to take separate means of transport. The new buses are more convenient and less expensive. They also avoid most of the clashes.

Sounds good all around. But it is not good enough for the Left. Leftists feel that the Arabs are not treated equally. They add this to a list of other differences in legal treatment of Jews and Arabs in the Territories.

Jews and Arabs in the Territories are governed under different legal systems. Jews fall under Israel's civilian legal system, Arabs, under military jurisdiction that draws heavily from Jordanian law. The Wall St. Journal cites the opinions of Peace Now, "a pro-peace group," and Haaretz, a "left-of-center" paper, that this is segregation (Charles Levinson, WSJ, 3/5/13, A9).

"Left-of-center" is a euphemism for Haaretz being anti-Zionist. Peace Now is not for peace but for appeasement of the Muslim Arabs, who want war. Appeasement brings war, and brings it under less favorable terms. These far leftists have supported Arab terrorism. They represent a very small proportion of Israelis, just as the Communists did in the U.S. during the Cold War. During the Cold War, it would have made no sense to have quoted the Communists' Daily Worker about whether American society was just.

My source article fails to explain that 93% of Arabs in Judea-Samaria are ruled by the P.A.. The Left does not complain about the P.A. system, which comprises arrests for shakedowns, lynching of dissidents, or trials often running no longer than it takes to read the charges and state the sentences.

The article also omits the fact that the Arabs are: an enemy people constantly indoctrinated to hate Jews; a people that considers Israel illegitimate and in need of liberation; a people that approves of terrorism morally and has been making thousands of attacks on Jews, especially on those in transit.

Therefore military courts do seem a reasonable one for Arabs in the P.A.. Those Arabs are not Israeli citizens. Hence Israel also left in place Jordanian law, but it lets the P.A. establish its own law in areas over which it has jurisdiction. When, however, P.A. Arabs violate the rights of Israelis, as by attacking them, Israeli military law applies, just as the U.S. may apply U.S. military law against Islamic terrorists. Arabs citizens of Israel fall under Israeli law, indicating that Israel does not segregate them for being Arabs.

What's really the issue, here? Remember how hypocritical the Left is, not sincere about people's civil liberties. Leftist alleged grievances usually are phony. The real issue is that the Left uses any excuse to make propaganda for the Arabs against the Jews.

Richard Shulman is a veteran defender of Israel on several web-based forums. His comments and analyses are a regular feature on Think-Israel. He provides cool information and right-on-target overviews. He distributes his essays by email. To subscribe, write him at ricshulman@aol.com.


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UNDERSTANDING OBAMA: THE MAKING OF A FUEHRER

Posted by Midenise, March 05, 2013

The article below was written by Ali Sina who is an Iranian Ex-Muslim (apostate) and a strong critic of Islam. Founder of Faith Freedom International, which he describes as a grassroots movement of ex-Muslims. Born and raised in Iran, educated in Italy and Pakistan, and now living in Canada, he began debating with people in the 1990s. What bothered him, he tells The Jerusalem Post, was not the penchant for jihad and intolerance that certain fanatical Muslims displayed, but the foundation for such ills in the Koran and core Islamic texts. This article appeared October 22, 2008 on the FaithFreedom.org website and is archived at
http://www.faithfreedom.org/obama.html

understanding obama

This article has been published in more than 1000 sites, erroneously attributing it to Dr. Vaknin. One person even wrote to me accusing me of plagiarism (double whammy?). Those sites are in error. If you find this article attributed to anyone else but me please write to them and correct them. You are welcome to reproduce this article, or any of my articles on Obama, listed at the buttom, in part or in their entirety, but you must provide a link to the source in this site. Thank you.

I was not impressed by Sen. Barack Obama after the first time I saw him. At first I was excited to see a black candidate. He looked youthful, spoke well, appeared to be confident — a wholesome presidential package. It is so instinctive for most people to want to see blacks succeed. It is as if all humanity is carrying a collective guilt for what the ancestors of blacks endured. However, despite my initial interest in him, I was soon put off, not just because of his shallowness but also because there was an air of haughtiness in his demeanor that was unsettling. His posture and his body language were louder than his empty words.

It is surreal to see the level of hysteria in his admirers. This phenomenon is unprecedented in American politics. Women scream and swoon during his speeches. They yell and shout to Obama, "I love you." Never did George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt. Martin Luther King Jr. or Ronald Reagan arouse so much raw emotion. Despite their achievements, none of them was raised to the rank of Messiah. The Illinois senator has no history of service to the country. He has done nothing outstanding except giving promises of change and hyping his audience with hope. It's only his words, not his achievements that is causing this much uproar.

When cheering for someone turns into adulation, something is wrong. Excessive adulation is indicative of a personality cult. The cult of personality is often created when the general population is discontent. A charismatic leader can seize the opportunity and project himself as an agent of change and a revolutionary leader. Often, people, tired of the status quo, do not have the patience to examine the nature of the proposed change. All they want is change. During 1979, when the Iranians were tired of the dictatorial regime of the late Shah, they embraced Khomeini, not because they wanted Islam, but because he promised them change. The word in the street was, "anything is better than the Shah." They found their error when it was too late.

Khomeini promised there would be separation between religion and state. He lied and they did not care to look into his past to see whether he actually meant what he said. Had they done that they would have seen that he always believed in caliphate and the rule of Islam. People gobbled everything he told them uncritically. They wanted to believe and therefore closed their eyes so they did not see what they did not want to see. Eyes welled when he spoke. Masses poured into the streets by the millions, screamed and shouted to greet him. People kissed his pictures. Some saw his portrait reflected on the Moon.

Listening to Obama ... it harkens back to when I was younger and I used to watch Khomeini, how he would excite the crowd and they'd come to their feet and scream and yell.

I was amused to hear a listener calling Fox News Radio's Tom Sullivan Show, (Feb 11) and saying: "Listening to Obama ... it harkens back to when I was younger and I used to watch those deals with Hitler, how he would excite the crowd and they'd come to their feet and scream and yell." (Videos of Hitler's speeches are available on Youtube. They are worth a look.)

Equating anyone to Hitler by highlighting the similarities between the two is a logical fallacy. This fallacy, known as reductio ad Hitlerum is a variety of both questionable cause and association fallacy. I believe it is wrong to trivialize the holocaust and the horrors of Nazism by comparing our opponents to Hitler.

However, Hitler, prior to coming to power had not killed anyone. He was insane, but few could see that. Far from it, he was seen as a gifted man and hailed as the savior of Germany. He was admired throughout the world. He appealed to the masses of people — the working class and particularly to women, and did not just inspire them, he "elevated" them. Thousands rallied to listen to his passionate speeches. They shed tears when he spoke. Women fainted during his speeches. To Germans, he was not a politician, but a demigod, a messiah. They envisioned him as truly a magical figure of majestic wisdom and glory. They worshiped him. They surrendered their wills to him. He restored their national pride. He projected himself as their savior. He ran on the platform of change and hope. Change he delivered all right, but hopes he shattered.

I think it is fair to say that the Illinois senator puts the same passion in his speeches that Hitler used to put in his, and he evokes similar raw emotions in his audience. This much we can agree. Okay, we can also agree that both Hitler and Charlie Chaplin wore square moustaches. So what?

The Cult of Personality

There are other disturbing similarities. Like Hitler and Khomeini, Obama also likes to create a cult of personality around himself. As stated above, when a large number of a population is discontent, a charismatic leader can seize the opportunity and present himself as the agent of change. He can create a cult of Personality by associating himself with the idea of change. He convinces everyone that things are terrible and a drastic change is needed. He then casts himself as the only person who can deliver this revolutionary transformation that everyone is waiting for. He portrays himself as a benevolent guide; the only one who cares about people and their needs and can pull them out of their alleged misery. In reality, they have no clue about how to address the problem - have no experience, no track record. But they are convincing because they are self assured.

These revolutionary leaders need foes. They exaggerate the problems. They make everything look gloomy. They lie, cheat and slander their opponents while casting themselves as the saviors of the nation. Hitler chose the Jews to blame for everything that was wrong in Germany. Khomeini made the Shah and his westernization plans his scapegoats. Obama has chosen President George W. Bush to smear. He can rally people around himself, as long as he can instill in them the dislike of Bush and equate his rival, McCain to him. Sigmund Freud wrote, "It is always possible to bind together a considerable number of people in love, so long as there are other people left over to receive the manifestations of their aggressiveness" (Civilization and Its Discontents).

A cult of personality is excessive adulation, admiration and exaltation of a charismatic leader, often with unproven merits or achievements. It is similar to hero worship except that it is created specifically for political leaders.

unequivocal

Let us read a few of the comments Obama's fans have made about him. Their unbounded adulation of this totally unknown figure is proof of my claim.

Jon Robin Baitz is the creator of the ABC series "Brothers & Sisters." He writes:

Today we saw and heard a preview of our brightest possible American future in Senator Barack Obama's glorious speech. This, then, is what it means to be presidential. To be moral. To have a real center. To speak honestly, from the heart, for the benefit of all. If there was any doubt about what we have missed in the anti-intellectual, ruthlessly incurious Bush years, and even the slippery Clinton ones, those doubts were laid to rest by Barack Obama's magisterial speech today. A speech in which he distanced himself from a flawed father figure, Reverend Wright, and did so with almost Shakespearian dignity and honor.

For twenty years Obama was part of Jeremiah Wright's racist church and listened to all the hate which that man spewed against the Jews and the "rich White America." Obama did not object to any of those hateful comments and even donated $20,000 dollars to his Trinity United Church of Christ. Baitz is willing to overlook all that and, mesmerized by Obama's speeches, he embraces a man who up until yesterday supported the racist views of his spiritual mentor. He calls Obama's speech "glorious," and concludes he is honest and moral. How did he come to that hasty conclusion? There is no evidence of that except his "gut feeling." That observation is subjective. We have not seen any evidence of Obama's honesty yet. On the contrary, he has been caught with a litany of lies.

Clearly Sen. Obama has a charming effect on his audience, who after listening to him are so moved that they willingly give up their reason and follow their hearts. Let's see how Baitz adulates Obama to the point of worship.

Barack Obama's speech, perhaps one of the most important in modern political history pushed us as a people to move beyond race and gender, beyond Democrat and Republican, beyond politics and into reviving the spirit of the nation itself. To talk, to talk at home, at work, at the dinner table. To really finally talk. What a great day, and where else in the world but in the United States? Today I am very proud to be an American.

Remembering the reaction of Iranians to Khomeini's speeches, this is all deja vu for me.

There is an old adage that says, "Tell me who your friends are and I will tell who you are." Don't the quality of Obama's friends and associates tell us about the man? Shouldn't we look at the history of this man to ascertain his truthfulness? One characteristic of cult of personality is that people become ready to close their eyes. They find excuses and rationalize the sins of their leader.

Another Obama worshipper is Ezra Klein. He is an associate editor at The American Prospect. Klein wrote:

Obama's finest speeches do not excite. They do not inform. They don't even really inspire. They elevate. They enmesh you in a grander moment, as if history has stopped flowing passively by, and, just for an instant, contracted around you, made you aware of its presence and your role in it. He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh, over color, over despair. The other great leaders I've heard guide us towards a better politics, but Obama is, at his best, able to call us back to our highest selves, to the place where America exists as a glittering ideal, and where we, its honored inhabitants, seem capable of achieving it, and thus of sharing in its meaning and transcendence.

Obama is not seen by his admirers as a politician but as something holy. Klein says "He is not the Word made flesh, but the triumph of word over flesh." The truth is that Obama is nothing but words! What is scary is that so many smart people are willing to fall for his empty words. Interestingly the same Ezra Klein had earlier said:

Obama is a cipher, an easy repository for the hopes and dreams of liberals everywhere...But if Obama avoided being battle-tested in 2004 by the grace of God, it's his own timidity that has kept his name clean since. Given his national profile and formidable political talents, he could have been a potent spokesman for Democratic causes in the Senate. Instead, he has refused to expend his political or personal capital on a single controversial issue, preferring to offer anodyne pieces of legislation and sign on to the popular efforts of others...Indeed, Obama is that oddest of all creatures: a leader who's never led. There are no courageous, lonely crusades to his name, or supremely unlikely electoral battles beneath his belt. He won election running basically unopposed, and then refused to open himself to attack by making a controversial but correct issue his own."

Quite a shift I would say. What did exactly Obama do, for Klein to change his views so drastically? Nothing! Obama has won this man's heart only by the power of his mesmerizing words. he is making his conquests, through the sheer power of his oratory. That is how Hitler won the hearts of the Germans. As Obama's life story shows, his words don't have any bearing on reality. Words are powerful, but when they are not backed by any substance they are empty rhetoric.

Todd Gitlin, is professor of journalism and sociology at Columbia University. He is another worshipper of Obama. This is what he says about his leader.

This speech was a triumph on so many levels, does one dare hope it will turn the trick for hordes of parsing skeptics and listeners whose eyes did not water? First, Obama took the high road, which is also the long and demanding road. He refused to "move on" with a cursory acknowledgment that "mistakes were made." He did not acknowledge. He preached and he reasoned."

Let us pause here and examine what this professor of journalism and sociology says. Obama was a close friend of Rev. Jeremiah Wright and listened to his racist sermons for twenty years. Wright is a man who has intense hatred for the Jews, for whites and for America. This clip shows some of his remarks made from the pulpit. Here is a gleaning from his sermons:

  • We [The White controlled America] have supported state terrorism against Palestinians and Black South Africans ... Because of the stuff we have done overseas is now brought back to our own home front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost.
  • No, no, no! Not God bless America. God damn America. That is in the Bible, for killing innocent people. God damn America.
  • Government lied about Pearl Harbor. They knew that Japanese are going to attack.
  • They [Government] purposely infected African-American men with syphilis!
  • What is going on in White America, U.S. of KKK?
  • Black men turning on Black men? That is fighting the wrong enemy. You both are primary targets in an oppressive society that sees both of you as a dangerous threat.
  • What we [America] is doing is the same thing Al Qaida is doing, under a different flag.
  • Oh I am so glad, that I got a God who knows what it is to be a poor Black man living in a country and a culture that is controlled by and run by rich White people.
  • Yes, 911 happened to us, and so did slavery happen to us. Yes the World Trade Center happened to us, and so did White supremacy happen to us.
  • "Barack knows what it means to be a Black man living in a country and a culture that is controlled by rich White people."

When all these came to light, at first the Illinois senator denied having heard them. That excuse was not believable. Wright was Obama's spiritual mentor and the most influential man in his life. And yet he expects us to believe he listened to his sermons for 20 years but did not pay attention to what he was saying? So he changed his position and admitted to having heard them, but he categorically condemned them. Obama went one step further. He did not just condemn the racist remarks of his Pastor, but he preached and he sermonized how bad are they are. Now, this requires some audacity that only a narcissist can muster. Instead of apologizing and recognizing his error, Obama turned the table and preached to others.

How can we understand this? The man himself is the sinner but instead of acknowledging his sins, he preaches to others about the vices of those sins. The answer can be found in the description of narcissistic personality disorder (NPD). Narcissists will never admit being wrong. They are always one step ahead of you.

Those who remember Rev. Jimmy Swaggart know that he was one of the most popular and successful televangelists of all times. During the 1980s, he had millions of fans all over the world. He mesmerized his audience. He was more than a rock star, he was a phenomenon. Swaggart was a preacher of "morality." He was so against promiscuity and unlawful sex that he went after two other televangelist magnates, Marvin Gorman and Jimmy Baker, exposed their adultery and brought their empires down.

However, what narcissists preach and what they do are two different things. Soon after exposing Gorman's adultery, Swaggart himself was photographed with a prostitute in a motel room. He was banned from giving sermons for three months. But he could not stay away from the church that provided him with adulation and the people who fed his narcissistic need. He said, "If I do not return to the pulpit this weekend, millions of people will go to hell." So he returned to the pulpit and after shedding a few crocodile tears of repentance, he went right on preaching morality, chastising adultery and sermoning to others, how THEY should live a chaste life.

This requires audacity. How one who has been caught with a prostitute, literally with his pants down, could have the cheek to preach to others about the very thing he is guilty of? NPD provides the answer to both Swaggart and Obama's responses, when caught red handed. The narcissist will not apologize for his own sins; he will go on preaching to you about the evilness of those sins. If Professor Gitlin had read a book or two on narcissism, he would have not been hoodwinked by Obama's preaching about racial harmony after being caught with his proverbial pants down in his racist church. Giltin is not alone; millions of Americans have fallen for this narcissist's mind games.

Prof. Gitlin continues:

"The Reverend Jeremiah Wright," he [Obama]said, "had spoken in an 'incendiary' manner," but Obama offered himself as the man who rises from flames and invites you to rise from your own. He took a grievous embarrassment and moved his lesson to the plane of prophecy. Talk about hope; talk about audacity. Tears came to my eyes. I don't think I'm especially hard-hearted, but I cannot think of another time when the speech of a presidential candidate watered me up.

It is amazing to see to what extent people are willing to go to eulogize another human being. It is this excess that constitutes the cult of personality. The difference between admiration and cult of personality is in the degree of adulation. Is it not fair to say that Obama has the same effect on his fans that Hitler, Khomeini or other famous demagogues such as Joseph Stalin or Mao Ze Dong had? I am not equating Obama to those mass murderers. Obama has not killed anyone (at least not yet). I am only comparing their effects on their audience, particularly prior to their rise to power.

Obama's speeches are unlike any political speech we have heard in American history. Never a politician in this land had such a quasi "religious" impact on so many people. The fact that Obama is a total incognito with zero accomplishment, makes this inexplicable infatuation alarming.

Obama's speeches are grandiose. They are other worldly. He may talk about the war in Iraq, taxes or social security. It does not matter how mundane is the subject, he makes them sound transcendental and his audience is moved to tears. His worshippers do not go to listen to his plans. He has yet to offer any that is workable and different. They go to bask in his glory, to get high. Obama presents himself as someone with a unique vision and grasp of the entire problems affecting, not just the nation but the world, a pretense that is incomensurate with his track record. When in a meeting with House Democrats waxing lyrical about his trip to Europe, he concluded, "this is the moment, as Nancy [Pelosi] noted, that the world is waiting for." The world is waiting for Obama, according to Obama. In one of his rallies he reiterated this delusion of grandiosity and said, "We are the ones we've been waiting for." This sentence is logically absurd. What actually Obama wanted to say, which he masked with fake modesty is "I am the one the world has been waiting for."

When you fall for someone to the extent that Obama's followers have fallen for him, you surrender your reason and individuality to him willingly. When millions of people surrender their hearts and their minds to one person the result can be catastrophic. This is what happened in Germany with Hitler, in China with Mao, in the Soviet Union with Stalin, in Cuba with Castro, in Iran with Khomeini, and so on and so forth. Today, we think these men were monsters, but that was not what millions of their worshipers thought. Those people loved them. Dictators can't dictate, unless peole are willing to be dictated.

Here is what Wikipedia says about Cult of Personality:

"A cult of personality or personality cult arises when a country's leader uses mass media to create a heroic public image through unquestioning flattery and praise. Cults of personality are often found in dictatorships but can be found in some democracies.

"A cult of personality is similar to general hero worship except that it is created specifically for political leaders. However, the term may be applied by analogy to refer to adulation of non-political leaders."

Who is Obama?

Obama is not an ordinary man. He is not a genius. In fact he is quite ignorant on most important subjects. Barack Obama is a narcissist. Dr. Sam Vaknin, the author of the Malignant Self Love, also believes, "Barack Obama appears to be a narcissist."

Vaknin is a world authority on narcissism. He understands narcissism and describes the inner mind of a narcissist like no other person. When he talks about narcissism everyone listens. Vaknin says that Obama's language, posture and demeanor, and the testimonies of his closest, dearest and nearest suggest that the Senator is either a narcissist or he may have narcissistic personality disorder (NPD).

Vaknin explains: "Narcissistic leaders are nefarious and their effects pernicious. They are subtle, refined, socially-adept, manipulative, possessed of thespian skills, and convincing. Both types [cerebral and somatic] equally lack empathy and are ruthless and relentless or driven." These were the very traits that distinguished Hitler and Khomeini. Many of these traits can be seen in Obama. As for his ruthlessness, perhaps his support of legislation to let babies die if they survive abortion, gives a glimps into his soul, that he may lacks empathy, does not value life, and if in the position of power can be ruthless. Narcissists need power to show their ruthlessness. Considering the fact that Obama neglected his own half brother, George Hussein Obama, who lives on one dollar per month in Kenya, we can't vouch for Obama's empathy or say he is a caring person.

What is Narcissism?

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) describes narcissism as a personality disorder that "revolve around a pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, and sense of entitlement. Often individuals feel overly important and will exaggerate achievements and will accept, and often demand, praise and admiration despite worthy achievements."

The third and fourth editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual(DSM) of 1980 and 1994 and the European ICD-10 describe NPD in similar language:

An all-pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behavior), need for admiration or adulation and lack of empathy, usually beginning by early adulthood and present in various contexts. Five (or more) of the following criteria must be met:

  • Feels grandiose and self-important (e.g., exaggerates achievements and talents to the point of lying, demands to be recognized as superior without commensurate achievements)
  • Is obsessed with fantasies of unlimited success, fame, power or omnipotence, unequalled brilliance (the cerebral narcissist), bodily beauty or sexual performance (the somatic narcissist), or ideal, everlasting, all-conquering love or passion
  • Is firmly convinced that he is unique and, being special, can only be understood by, should only be treated by, or associate with, other special, unique, or high-status people (or institutions)
  • Requires excessive admiration, adulation, attention and affirmation, or failing that, wishes to be feared and notorious (narcissistic supply)
  • Feels entitled. Expects unreasonable or special and favorable priority treatment. Demands automatic and full compliance with his expectations
  • Is "interpersonally exploitative" i.e., uses others to achieve his or her own ends
  • Is devoid of empathy. Is unable or unwilling to identify with or acknowledge the feelings and needs of others
  • Is constantly envious of others or believes that they feel the same about him or her
  • Is arrogant, has haughty behaviors or attitudes coupled with rage when frustrated, contradicted, or confronted

Pathological narcissism, is not akin to typical narcissism—someone with a hedonistic or self-centered sense of self —but rather someone with a very weak sense of self. Obama's narcissism is pathological.

Narcissists seek power. That is the whole purpose of their existence. Power for them is the elixir of life. Those who know about NPD can't help but notice it in Obama's posture, the tone of his voice, his demeanor and particularly his grandiose claims and unscripted adlibs.

Narcissim has degrees. When it is extreme it shows in the posture and the way the narcissist walks and talks. Obama's posture, exudes haughtiness. He is all puffery. Compare his posture to those of Hitler, Stalin and Saddam.

According to Vaknin, Obama displays the following behaviors, which are among the hallmarks of pathological narcissism:

- Subtly misrepresents facts and expediently and opportunistically shifts positions, views, opinions, and "ideals" (e.g., about campaign finance, re-districting). These flip-flops do not cause him overt distress and are ego-syntonic (he feels justified in acting this way). Alternatively, refuses to commit to a standpoint and, in the process, evidences a lack of empathy.

- Ignores data that conflict with his fantasy world, or with his inflated and grandiose self-image. This has to do with magical thinking. Obama already sees himself as president because he is firmly convinced that his dreams, thoughts, and wishes affect reality. Additionally, he denies the gap between his fantasies and his modest or limited real-life achievements (for instance, in 12 years of academic career, he didn't publish a single scholarly paper or book).

- Feels that he is above the law.

- Talks about himself in the 3rd person singluar or uses the regal "we" and craves to be the exclusive center of attention, even adulation

- Has a messianic-cosmic vision of himself and his life and his "mission".

- Sets ever more complex rules in a convoluted world of grandiose fantasies with its own language (jargon)

- Displays false modesty and unctuous "folksiness" but is unable to sustain these behaviors (the persona, or mask) for long. It slips and the true Obama is revealed: haughty, aloof, distant, and disdainful of simple folk and their lives.

- Sublimates aggression and holds grudges.

- Behaves as an eternal adolescent (e.g., his choice of language, youthful image he projects, demands indulgence and feels entitled to special treatment, even though his objective accomplishments do not justify it).

Can Obama be trusted as the leader of the free world?

Narcissists project a grandiose but false image of themselves. Jim Jones, the charismatic leader of People's Temple, the man who led over 900 of his followers to cheerfully commit mass suicide and even murder their own children was also a narcissist. David Koresh, Charles Manson, Joseph Koni, Shoko Asahara, Stalin, Saddam, Mao, Kim Jong Ill and Adolph Hitler are a few examples of narcissists of our time. All these men had a tremendous influence over their fanciers. They created a personality cult around themselves and with their blazing speeches elevated their admirers' souls, filled their hearts with enthusiasm and instilled in their minds a new zest for life. They gave them hope! They promised them the moon, but alas, invariably they brought them to their doom. When you are a victim of a cult of personality, you don't know it until it it too late.

One determining factor in the development of NPD is childhood abuse. "Obama's early life was decidedly chaotic and replete with traumatic and mentally bruising dislocations," says Vaknin. "Mixed-race marriages were even less common then. His parents went through a divorce when he was an infant (two years old). Obama saw his father only once again, before he died in a car accident. Then, his mother re-married and Obama had to relocate to Indonesia: a foreign land with a radically foreign culture, to be raised by a step-father. At the age of ten, he was whisked off to live with his maternal (white) grandparents. He saw his mother only intermittently in the following few years and then she vanished from his life in 1979. She died of cancer in 1995."

In Vaknin's words, "Pathological narcissism is a reaction to prolonged abuse and trauma in early childhood or early adolescence. The source of the abuse or trauma is immaterial: the perpetrators could be dysfunctional or absent parents, teachers, other adults, or peers."

The pathological narcissist has a very weak sense of self. He compensates his devalued and injured self with pomposity and by projecting a false image of majesty and authority. He retreats into a bubble universe of fantasy, in which he is loved, respected and omnipotent. All children create such a world. Narcissists simply don't leave it. They carry this world of pretence into their adulthood. With the passage of time, this world becomes to them as real as the real world, to the point that they can't tell the difference. When Obama acts presidential, he is simply acting out his childhood fantasy of omnipotence and grandeur. Emotionally, he is still a little hurt boy, neglected and unloved in the body and mind of a grown up man. Such people can be dangerous. Narcissists have the emotional maturity of a child, or even an animal, but the intellect of a man. They feel like a beast, but think like a human.

If we look into the childhood of all narcissists, we can see that invariably they were abused. Saddam was born to a widow who after losing her husband and her 12 year old son was so distressed that she attempted suicide. Before his birth, she would pull out clumps of her hair and pummel her pregnant abdomen with her fists. Saddam Hussein in his own official biography recounts his unhappy childhood. Hitler was the son of a very abusive man who would beat him regularly. From Saddam to Osama, to Hitler, to Stalin, to Khomeini, to Mao and to Kim Jong Ill, it is wounded childhood that causes NPD. Obama's chaotic childhood and his continuous struggle to find his identity make him a prime candidate for NPD.

Hitler was confused about his identity. His father was an illegitimate son of a Jew. He chose to be in denial of that part of himself and his response was the genocide of the Jews. Obama's search for his identity led him to a racist church that preached "Black Power." He changed his given name Barry to Barack, in an atempt to rid himself of the only vestige he had with his white heritage.

Narcissists have only one issue. They want power and will do and say anything to get it. Their words mean nothing to them. They do not intend to keep them. They look into your eyes and swear on a stack of Bibles that they are not going to do something when that is exactly what they intend to do. They break their promises when it suits them and annul their treaties when they can get away with it. They lie, and lie, and lie, and lie, and lie, and lie, and lie, and lie, and lie, and lie, and lie, and lie, and lie, and lie.

Narcissists are pathological liars. They lie even to themselves. Ironically, they are the first to believe their own lies. When normal people lie, they show signs of distress. Narcissists don't. They can pass any polygraph test with flying colors. It is this conviction that fools people around them making them believe in their truthfulness and sincerity. In a twisted way they are sincere because, although they are conscience that they are not truthful, they believe in their own lies. This is difficult to understand and even more difficult to explain, but for a narcissist fantasy and reality are intertwined. The narcissist's delusional thoughts of grandiosity are real to him.

absorbed

Narcissistic Society

Germans are not particularly an evil race. They are no better or worse than any other nation. And yet, despite their advanced culture and civility they committed the most hideous crime in modern history. They murdered up to ten million people, because those unfortunate souls did not meet their "Master Race standards of ethnic purity." Hitler did not kill anyone; the Germans did.

So the question is: What made these smart and highly civilized people commit such horrendous acts of savagery?

According to Vaknin, "The narcissistic or psychopathic leader is the culmination and reification of his period, culture, and civilization. He is likely to rise to prominence in narcissistic societies."

Is America a narcissistic society? Vaknin believes "Pathological narcissism is a ubiquitous phenomenon because every human being - regardless of the nature of his society and culture - develops healthy self esteem early in life [which he calls healthy narcissism]. Healthy narcissism is rendered pathological by abuse - and abuse, alas, is a universal human behavior. By 'abuse, we mean any refusal to acknowledge the emerging boundaries of the individual - smothering, doting, and excessive expectations - are as abusive as beating and incest."

The emergence of so many cults in America is proof that America is not an exception to the norm. If demagogue narcissists, like Jim Jones, David Koresh or Jimmy Swaggart can find a fertile ground in America, why not one with a political message?

The Power of Manipulation

Narcissists are manipulative and extremely resourceful. They know how to the play their game, and how to get what they want, by using others. Obama is the least experienced senator among the Democrats. His political views are the most foolish of them all. He opposed the surge in Iraq saying it will make the situation worse and he was wrong. He thinks the solution to terrorism is to sit with terrorist states without precondition and negotiate with them. When Russia invaded Georgia, all this genius did was to urge both sides to "exert restraint". Everything this man has said so far reveals his ignorance in economical, political and military matters. Despite that, this junior senator has managed to rally the seasoned senators of the Democratic Party around himself and, not withstanding his ineptitude, he has emerged as the leader de facto of his party and their presidential candidate.

This is a remarkable feat. One must never underestimate the manipulative genius of pathological narcissists. They project such an imposing personality that it overwhelms those around them. Charmed by the charisma of the narcissist, people become like clay in his hands. They cheerfully do his bidding and delight to be at his service. The narcissist shapes the world around himself and reduces others in his own inverted image. He creates a cult of personality. His admirers become his co-dependents.

Anyone can be fooled by narcissists. Just as experienced and smart senators of the Democratic Party have surrendered to the charisma of Obama, a man who is inferior to them all in every sense; many members of the media also have fallen for his charm hook, line and sinker. The American media is soft on Obama, but extremely harsh and deceitfully unfair on Governor Palin. The "rich White Americans," the very people he despised for twenty years are swooning for him. The Jews whom he opposed all his life are backing him. They are opening their wallets and supporting his campaign in an unprecedented way. He has managed to charm even the Kennedys. Ted Kennedy, the lion in Winter, passed the Kennedy mantle unto Obama. That was hugely symbolic. As for the great Clintons, he made them submissive, and for whatever reason, incomprehensible to me, they are playing his game. Think about it. Obama is a cipher. In reality, he is nobody. And yet, thanks to his overbearing display of authority, the very mask that he is wearing to hide his devalued and injured self, he has overwhelmed all the giants of the Democratic party. Cults are full of smart people who have been hoodwinked by mentally sick needy people.

Could all this phenomenal support and unbounded adulation erupt into violence? All the abuses and killings in Nazi Germany were done by the Germans, ordinary people who loved Hitler and believed in the glorious tomorrow that he was promising them. Hitler was insane, but those who did his bidding were not. Despite being smart, they did not hesitate to fulfill their fuehrer's wishes and commit the most heinous crimes. The same thing happened in Iran. Ordinary people, once under the spell of Khomeini, acted like beasts. This is what happens when sane people follow insane people.

Could the same happen in America? Why not? Look how millions of people literally worship Obama. With some people I cannot even talk about Obama. They cannot tolerate any criticism of him. They get angry and, not only they want to end the conversation but threaten to end the friendship. I am familiar with this kind of religious devotion to a person. The reaction that I get from Obama worshippers is similar to that of Muslims when their prophet is criticized. They are even prone to insult you. See how they overlook Obama's blatant lies and are willing to forgive his major sins such as racism. Note how the mainstream media bends the rules, twists the facts, exaggerates Obama's little virtues, absolves his sins, and even lies to sell him to the public. Compare the royal treatment that the liberal press has given to Obama to how unfairly they treat Governor Palin; how they smear her character and belittle her experience and achievement. ABC's Charlie Gibson's interview with Governor Palin was a stain on journalistic integrity. Is it more important that Palin has not traveled the world and has not shaken hands with heads of states, or the fact that Obama has lied so many times? Under what pretext should an ordinary citizen visit heads of foreign states? The question itself is preposterous.

While not shaking hands with foreign heads of states does not disqualify one to run for any office, The Logan Act (est. 1799) makes it a crime for a citizen to confer with foreign governments against the interests of the United States. Specifically, it prohibits citizens from negotiating with other nations on behalf of the United States without authorization.

That is exactly what Obama did during his trip to Iraq, a charge that Obama's national security spokeswoman Wendy Morigi confirmed, while trying to deny it. She said, "In fact, Obama had told the Iraqis that they should not rush through a 'Strategic Framework Agreement' governing the future of US forces until after President George W. Bush leaves office."

This is high treason. Ordinary citizens have no right to enter into negotiations with foreign countries and make deals against the interest of their Government. Obama tells the Iraqis not to let the American soldiers go, so he can call them in January, supposedly when he is the president and claim victory for himself. Will Mr. Gibson or anyone in the liberal media question Obama for this crime?

Gibson's questions were tricky. He asked the Governor, "what do you think of Bush's doctrine," and then, instead of explaining himself, he insisted that his interviewee define what he meant. After letting the Governor look puzzled, Gibson explained what he understands of "Bush Doctrine," which according to him is preemptive strike.

Assuming this is a "Bush doctrine," is it his only doctrine? Isn't being pro life also a Bush doctrine? Isn't Christianity or creationism a Bush doctrine? Bush believes in a multitude of things and they change as his thinking evolves over time. How can one know what Gibson has in mind? Do you see the trickery?.

Many members of the media have been hoodwinked by the charm of the rising fuehrer. They have become his extensions, act deceitfully and dishonestly to make their beloved leader's rise to power a reality.

How can smart people let themselves be manipulated by a psychopath to such an extent that they become quasi zombies? Recall what the smart Germans did under the spell of Hitler. Bear in mind what the Soviets did under the influence of Stalin. Consider what the Japanese did during WWII when they believed in the divinity of their emperor. Evoke how the Chinese Red Guard massacred millions of their own countrymen when they were blinded by their love for Mao and his faux notion of equality. Look at the Islamic terrorists. Can't we say the same about them? Isn't Islamic savagery the result of Muslims' uncritical devotion to a long deceased narcissist? If you don't know what I am talking about, I invite you to read my book, Understanding Muhammad. When sane people fall for the lies of an insane man, they act insanely.

No one is born a terrorist. Terrorists are ordinary people who do the bidding of a pathological narcissist whom they love and worship as their liberator. They are so enamored with him that they stop thinking and act like automatons. To prove their love and devotion they can commit murder and even suicide. They can kill their own children, as the followers of Jim Jones did in Guyana. The narcissist encourages all of this behavior because it validates his delusion of omnipotence. It reassures him that he is loved, respected, counted, taken seriously. Did you hear the song played during the Democratic convention? It said, "This is the church." And who do you think is the head of that church? Americans are as fallible and as gullible as everyone else. It is foolhardy to say "it won't happen to us." Just as today, Obama's supporters happily engage in intellectual dishonesty, deceitful reporting, and even hooliganism, I predict they will soon, merrily commit the same crimes other nations committed under the spell of their narcissistic leaders.

His majesty condescendingly looks down at his scullions

The Sick Symbiosis

Narcissists need their narcissistic supply to fuel their narcissism. They get it through adulation from people around them. These people are often also needy people. They are known as co-dependants. The narcissist and his co-dependent therefore, form a sick symbiosis in which both benefit. Let me give you one example to explain this mechanism.

David Sirota is a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist. In December 2006, in an article entitled "The Ridiculousness & Danger That Is Obama '08" Sirota lambasted the Democrats who wanted Obama, an incognito junior senator, to run for presidency.

Sometimes, you really just have to sit back and laugh at the ridiculousness of the celebrity-obsessed political culture we now live in." wrote Sirota in his column. "Take this Chicago Sun-Times article by Lynn Sweet in which she predicts Illinois Sen. Barack Obama (D) will run for president. She goes through what he has to do to prepare for his run, and this is the one that just makes you chuckle: "Develop signature legislative initiatives: Once the Democrats control Congress come January, there's a chance to pass legislation. Watch for Obama to focus on alternative energy measures, health care and ethics reform legislation that stalled earlier this year."

Think about it. The national media is swooning over Obama, begging him to run for president. Yet, at the same time, they are implicitly acknowledging that he has actually not "developed significant legislative initiatives." In other words, we are to simply accept that the Obama for President wave has absolutely nothing to do with anything that the man HAS DONE and further, that whenever he does decide to use his enormous political capital to do something, it is all in pursuit of the White House - not any actual sense of DOING SOMETHING for the people who elected him to the Senate.

I don't blame Obama for not having accomplished much - he's been in the Senate for two years. As I wrote in the Nation, the main concern about him is that he doesn't actually seem to ASPIRE to anything outside of the Washington power structure (other than maybe running for another higher office), and doesn't seem to be interested in challenging the status quo in any fundamental way. Using his senate career as a guide, it suggests that any presidential run by him is about him, his speaking ability and his fawned over talent for "connecting" (whatever the hell that means)." (Read the rest of Sirota's comment in his own blog.)

I could not say it better. Sirota understood the problem with Obama. He realized that not only this man has zero experience; he is actually a power hungry charlatan that aspires to nothing other than running for another higher office. He then expressed his outrage at the fellow Democrats who tried to make a leader out of this quack.

These Democrats laid all their hopes on Obama. They were captivated by his charm. They could not see that this man is wearing a mask of authority to cover his inner feeling of insecurity; that he is a fraud, a narcissist. When approached, Obama at first confessed to his inexperience, but the sycophants in the Democratic Party, were so desperate to find a charismatic leader that they could not let go of their prize. It does not take much to persuade a narcissist that he can do anything. He is already convinced that he is smarter and better than everyone else. So, despite his own confession of lack of experience, Obama could not resist the temptation.

To nurture his narcissism, the narcissist needs narcissistic supply. It is always people around him who provide that supply and encourage him in his psychosis. If it were not for Khadijah who reassured her husband that his hallucinations were not demonic, as he had thought, but divine revelations, Muhammad may never have started his prophetic career. It was she who encouraged him to launch a new religion, instead of calling an exorcist.

This is called co-dependency. The co-dependent, who also suffers from low self esteem, seeks his or her grandeur and narcissistic supply in the greatness of a narcissist of whom she seeks to become a part.

According to Wikipedia, "a 'codependent' is loosely defined as someone who exhibits too much, and often inappropriate, caring for persons who depend on him or her. A 'codependent' is one side of a relationship between mutually needy people. The dependent, or obviously needy party(s) may have al, physical, financial difficulties, or addictions they seemingly are unable to surmount. The "codependent" party exhibits behavior which controls, makes excuses for, pities, and takes other actions to perpetuate the obviously needy party's condition, because of their desire to be needed and fear of doing anything that would change the relationship."

The Democrats were desperately in need of a charismatic leader. They saw their hope in a needy man, a narcissist who portrayed himself as self assured, eloquent and authoritative and had sex appeal. It was love at first sight and they set on to polish him as their candidate. In this relationship the Democratic Party became the co-dependant of the narcissist Obama. They needed someone to shine so they can bask in his splendor. And Obama needed them to fulfill his delusions of grandiosity. This is how codependency works. It is a sick symbiosis of two needy parties. Behind every successful narcissist, there is always a co-dependent.

When the co-dependent and the narcissist team-up the result can be catastrophic. Now we have folie à deux. The delusional belief of the narcissist about himself is transmitted and shared by another needy, but ostensibly smart person. The codependent validates and encourages the narcissist's delusion. As the result, the narcissist becomes bolder, more assertive, more authoritative and more confident. The partnership of the narcissist and the codependent dons their delusion with the mantle of credibility. The codependent will then do everything to persuade others as well. The narcissist's cause is himself. The codependent will champion that cause. By recruiting others, they find validation for their own belief about the narcissist. Soon the folie à deux becomes folie à trois, then folie à quatre, and when you are a presidential candidate and are followed by a hoard of journalists and cameramen, before you blink there will be folie à plusieurs (madness of many). Recent psychiatric classifications refer to the syndrome as shared psychotic disorder.

The masses of people have no first hand knowledge of the narcissist, but they jump on the bandwagon thanks to a very human trait, misnomered as "herd mentality." They reason, how can so many people be wrong and satisfied by this fallacy blindly join the cult of personality worship.

Like gasoline being poured on a fire, the sycophants around the narcissist provide him with an abundance of narcissistic fuel to feed upon. The unbounded adulations poured at his feet further reinforce and escalate the unique and divine self-image of the narcissist. The larger the narcissistic fuel supply becomes, the more inflated becomes his ego, and the more firmly set in his own mind becomes the conviction of his own invincibility and superiority. The narcissist reaches a stage that he will claim to be a revolutionary leader, an agent of change, a renascence man, the hand of God, even a messenger or prophet of God. Just as a fire can grow infinitely large as long as it receives its fuel, there is no limit to the delusional belief of a narcissist. When millions of people yell and scream and shout "I love you," an ordinary narcissist is prone to believe that he is God. If the narcissist happens to be a person with power and authority, in a position of high leadership commanding armies and weapons of mass destruction, the result too often leads to the horrific slaughter of millions of innocent souls in the gulag, gas chambers, or killing fields.

Unbounded adulation reconfirms the narcissist that he is right and that anyone who disagrees with him is evil and therefore it is just to punish him. Narcissists do not understand the concept of the Golden Rule. Right is what benefits them and wrong is what harms them. They fight for their own interest and are convinced that this is justice. Human rights and human lives are important only to the extent that they meet their narcissistic needs. They are worthless, and can be disposed of, if they don't.

Ayatollah Montazeri, the man who was originally chosen to succeed Khomeini, recalled when Khomeini ordered the execution of 3000 youths who were captured during a demonstration against him. Montazeri protested and Khomeini angrily told him, "I will respond for my actions in the Day of Judgment." Khomeini was a man of God. However, as a narcissist, he was convinced that because he was a superior being and a chosen one, a delusional belief that was reconfirmed by millions of people when they cheered for him, anyone who opposed him was opposing God and therefore by killing them he was doing the maker of the universe a favor.

There is no cure for narcissism. However, deprived of adulation, the disorder will remain dormant. The narcissist, without the narcissistic supply, may become grumpy and complain that the world does not understand them or appreciate their importance. They will continue to cheat and lie when they can get away with it, but the damage that they can cause is not earth shattering. However, when a narcissist becomes the focus of unlimited narcissistic supply, where millions of people scream at his feet, he goes insane.

As narcissism maturates, the narcissist becomes more demanding for respect and compliance and more intolerant of criticism. He becomes paranoid, and divides the world into "us" vs. "them". He casts himself and his minions as victims and instills in them the distrust of the "others".

When criticized, Obama's soul can be seen in his eyes.
When criticized, Obama's soul can be seen in his eyes.

The narcissist's anger and intolerance is projected on his servile followers who also become angry and intolerant of criticism of their leader. Remember the sick symbiosis between the narcissist and his codependents? The followers get their narcissistic supply by elevating the status of their leader. The greater he looks, the better they feel. They see their glory is his glory. Conversely, when the narcissist is criticized, his followers become offended. They take those criticisms personally and their instinct of self defense is triggered. They will become vigilantes and will silence their critics through intimidation, bullying, mocking, threats and violence (like calling those who disagree with Obama, racists).

This paragraph is a later addition. About a week after I wrote the above, Missouri sheriffs and top prosecutors formed Obama "Truth Squads" and threatened libel charges against Obama critics. I am no prophet, but see how my predictions are coming to pass. This is only the beginning. Narcissists are intolerant of criticism and create a reign of terror to silence their critics.

Sirota was no fool. He saw what is wrong with Obama and was right on the money when he described him. But, as I have repeated many times, narcissists are gifted manipulators. Sirota is an influential man. Obama needed his support and called him.

It's not every day that God calls your cell phone," wrote Sirota, sarcastically speaking of Obama, 'This is Barack Obama.' Thinking it was a good friend playing a joke, I said I didn't believe him. But no, the voice insisted with a laugh, it was Illinois Senator Barack Obama, otherwise known in cult-of-personality political circles as a deity, a rising Democratic star or, as George W. Bush recently called him, "the pope."

Narcissists are relentless and very convincing. They tell you exactly what you want to hear. They are full of promises. Their talent to manipulate is phenomenal. Well, not this time! Sirota apparently was not ready to sell his conscience (at least not yet) and endorse a man who according to him did not "aspire to anything outside of the Washington power structure (other than maybe running for another higher office.)" This is the kind of patriot America needs more of — citizens of integrity and conscience.

Where does David Sirota stand today? Errr!... Amm!... Why do you want to know? Emm!... How can I put it? Mr. Sirota..., Errr!..., Ah! Yes! Mr. Sirota has had an epiphany - a Pauline sort of experience. As he neared Damas... I mean Denver, on his journey to the Democratic Convention, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice on his cell phone say to him, "David, David, why do you persecute me?" "Who are you, Lord?" David asked. "I am Barack, whom you are persecuting," he replied. "Now get up and go into the city, and you will be told what you must do." That is how David Sirota became a believer of Obama. He stopped blaspheming his Lord by calling him inept and opportunist. Guess what? He has even defended Jeremiah Wright. Hallelujah! Surely "God" (the emerging one) can transform the hearts of his enemies.

Narcissists have an almost surreal power to manipulate others. They can literally charm their adversaries and turn them into cheerful scullion, who will even thank them for giving them the privilege to slave for them.

You see! The narcissist and the codependent need each other. Many members of the Democratic Party may know what Sirota knows, but they need Obama. They have to keep up appearances (think Hillary, who once said "shame on you, Barack Obama" because of his flip flopping and lies and now supports him).

Narcissists are amoral. They consider themselves to be above the law. Once in power, they will try to strengthen their hold by surrounding themselves with equally amoral people. A good example of what we should expect in Obama's administration is the infamous NAFTA gate scandal. This is what happened:

A senior member of the Obama campaign called the Canadian government to say that "when Sen. Obama talks about opting out of the free trade deal, the Canadian government shouldn't be worried; that it is just campaign rhetoric and shouldn't be taken seriously."

Isn't it amazing? Obama tells the Ohio voters, who are unhappy with NAFTA that he is going to kill it, when actually he does not mean to do any such thing. For a narcissist, ends justify means. He feels warranted to lie and deceive in order to accomplish what he has to accomplish.

This story was denied by Obama, but confirmed twice by sources at the highest level of the Canadian government. This is how a narcissist operates. Obama will lie to Americans and he will surround himself with equally unethical people. With a Congress and Senate controlled by Democrats, and his ability as president to replace retiring Supreme Court judges, nothing will stop him from abusing his power.

The Cause of the Narcissist

The cause of the narcissist is himself. Everything else is a tool, a stepping stone for the narcissist to ascend to power. Narcissists don't have any ideology. They champion the cause that has a better chance of making their ascent to power easier.

Vaknin writes: "Narcissists use anything they can lay their hands on in the pursuit of narcissistic supply. If God, creed, church, faith, and institutionalized religion can provide them with narcissistic supply, they will become devout. They will abandon religion if it can't."

Therefore, the question whether Obama is a Muslim or a Christian, whether he is pro Palestine, as he has been all his life or whether he is pro Israel, whether he is a black supremacist or an agent of racial harmony, are moot. Obama is anything you want him to be and situation dictates. He takes the side that is more expedient to his cause. To communists he is a comrade, to Islamists he is their man, to Palestinian fighters he is their hope and to the Jews he is a staunch Zionist. The narcissist's creed is himself. Everything else is negotiable.

The best description of Obama comes from himself. "I serve as a blank screen," he wrote in The Audacity of Hope, "on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views." This is the key to Obama's personality. He will do and say anything as long as it suits him. He will embrace any cause, will align himself with anyone, and will shift his position wherever the wind blows. Narcissists are chameleons.

Obama will do and say anything as long as it suits him. He will embrace any cause, will align himself with anyone, and will shift his position wherever the wind blows. Narcissists are chameleons.

Obama voted "present" in the Senate most of the time, (130 times to be precise) not because they were too difficult decisions, as Rudy Giuliani said at the GOP convention, but because those issues were not relevant to his cause.

Narcissists have no interest in things that do not help them to reach their personal objective. They are focused on one thing alone and that is power. All other issues are meaningless to them and they do not want to waste their precious time on trivialities. Anything that does not help them is beneath them and do not deserve their attention. If an issue raised in the Senate does not help Obama in one way or another, he has no interest in it. The "present" vote is a safe vote. No one can criticize him if things go wrong. Why should he implicate himself in issues that may become controversial when they don't help him personally? Those issues are unworthy by their very nature because they are not about him.

Obama's election as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review led to a contract and advance to write a book about race relations. The University of Chicago Law School provided him with a fellowship and an office to work on his book. The book took him a lot longer than expected and at the end it devolved into..., guess what? His own autobiography! Instead of writing a scholarly paper focusing on race relations, for which, he had been paid, Obama could not resist writing about his most sublime self. He entitled the book Dreams from My Father .

Not surprisingly, Adolph Hitler also wrote his own autobiography when he was still nobody. So did Stalin. For a narcissist no subject is as important as his own self. Why would he waste his precious time and genius writing about insignificant things when he can write about such an august being as himself?

Narcissists are magical thinkers. They live in a world of fantasy; fantasies of grandiosity and unlimited power. But they are convinced that those fantasies will become reality because they are special and destined for greatness. That is why Obama already sees himself as president and acts presidential. The very fact that he travelled abroad and visited with several heads of states is another sign of this man's delusions of grandiosity. He is not representing the government. Under what pretext he visited those heads of states and entered into negotiations with them?

Vaknin explains, "Bragging and false autobiography — The narcissist brags incessantly. His speech is peppered with 'I', 'my', 'myself', and 'mine'. He describes himself as intelligent, or rich, or modest, or intuitive, or creative — but always excessively, implausibly, and extraordinarily so."

Narcissists Are Dangerous.

Narcissists are often callous and even ruthless. As the norm, they lack conscience. This is evident from Obama's lack of interest in his own brother who lives on only one dollar per month. A man who lives in luxury, who takes a private jet to vacation in Hawaii, and who has raised nearly half a billion dollars for his campaign (something unprecedented in history) has no interest in the plight of his own brother. Why? Because, his brother cannot be used for his ascent to power. A narcissist cares for no one but himself.

Compare this to what the McCains did. They brought a child from Bangladesh with facial deformities - a little girl with no chance for a normal life — and with plastic surgery restored her beauty and adopted her as their daughter. Millions of ordinary people, who are not even wealthy, have fostered children of total strangers in third world countries and give about a dollar a day for their education and upbringing.

Narcissists can be very generous, but never without an ulterior motive. They are generous when their display of generosity is noticed and elevates them in the eyes of others. Obama donated $20,000 to his racist and anti-Semitic church, but neglected his brother who could get some education and live a lot better if only he had one dollar per day.

Narcissism is all about image. Vaknin says, "The narcissist is shallow, a pond pretending to be an ocean. He likes to think of himself as a Renaissance man, a Jack of all trades. The narcissist never admits to ignorance in any field — yet, typically, he is ignorant of them all. It is surprisingly easy to penetrate the gloss and the veneer of the narcissist's self-proclaimed omniscience."

Obama's gaffes in history and world affairs are proof of that. This man does not even know the number of states in the USA, or that Canada does not have a president. That is why Vaknin says a narcissist is a shallow pond that pretends to be an ocean. Obama's ignorance about what should be common knowledge is mind boggling.

Narcissists have a profound sense of call, as they believe they have a "special purpose" or a "high calling." In his autobiography Hitler wrote, "I believe today that my conduct is in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator." Politics and religion offer irresistible lure for the narcissist.

And this is what Obama said about his "calling:" "Kneeling beneath that cross on the South Side of Chicago, I felt I heard God's spirit beckoning me," he said of his walk down the aisle of the Trinity United Church of Christ. "I submitted myself to his will and dedicated myself to discovering his truth."

At least one mental health professional believes that about 6% of Americans are pathological narcissists. The percentage in countries where child abuse is more prevalent is a lot higher. Although all narcissists are cunning, and bereft of conscience, not all of them have the wits to rise to power. A narcissist with smarts can be dangerous.

Hitler was smart, and so is Obama. Hitler would not have become the monster he became had he not risen to power and had he not received so much narcissistic fodder to feed on. One man who saw Khomeini prior to rising to power recalled he would gently push flies out of his window, but would not kill them. The same man massacred tens of thousands of Iranians. It is power that brings madness out of the narcissist.

America is at a crucial moment in its history. I cannot think of any disaster greater than putting a pathological narcissist in control of the world's most powerful military machine.

Narcissists are empty in substance but full on promises. Obama has not proposed a single concrete workable plan, but he has raised the hopes and expectations of millions of people with his promises. The glorious tomorrow that he offers is no more real than the Styrofoam Greek columns that adorned his image during his acceptance speech.

Vaknin says, "The narcissistic leader prefers the sparkle and glamour of well-orchestrated illusions to the tedium and method of real accomplishments, His reign is all smoke and mirrors, devoid of substances, consisting of mere appearances and mass delusions. In the aftermath of his regime - the narcissistic leader having died, been deposed, or voted out of office - it all unravels. The tireless and constant prestidigitation ceases and the entire edifice crumbles. What looked like an economic miracle turns out to have been a fraud-laced bubble. Loosely-held empires disintegrate. Laboriously assembled business conglomerates go to pieces. "earth shattering" and "revolutionary" scientific discoveries and theories are discredited. Social experiments end in mayhem."

The narcissist who regards himself as the benefactor of the poor, a member of the common folk, the representative of the disenfranchised, the champion of the dispossessed against the corrupt elite - is highly unlikely to use violence at first."

The pacific mask crumbles when the narcissist has become convinced that the very people he purported to speak for, his constituency, his grassroots fans, the prime sources of his narcissistic supply - have turned against him. At first, in a desperate effort to maintain the fiction underlying his chaotic personality, the narcissist strives to explain away the sudden reversal of sentiment. "The people are being duped by (the media, big industry, the military, the elite, etc.)", "they don't really know what they are doing", "following a rude awakening, they will revert to form", etc.

When these flimsy attempts to patch a tattered personal mythology fail - the narcissist is injured. Narcissistic injury inevitably leads to narcissistic rage and to a terrifying display of unbridled aggression. The pent-up frustration and hurt translate into devaluation. That which was previously idealized - is now discarded with contempt and hatred.

This election is like no other in the history of America. The issues are insignificant compared to what is at stake. What can be more dangerous than having a man bereft of conscience, a serial liar, and one who cannot distinguish his fantasies from reality as the leader of the free world?

I hate to sound alarmist, but one must be a fool if one is not alarmed. Many politicians are narcissists. They pose no threat to others. They are simply self serving and selfish. Obama evinces symptoms of pathological narcissism, which is different from the run-of-the-mill narcissism of a Richard Nixon or a Bill Clinton, for example. To him reality and fantasy are intertwined. This is a mental health issue, not just a character flaw. Pathological narcissists are dangerous because they look normal and even intelligent. It is this disguise that makes them trecherous.

Vaknin says, "When the narcissist reveals his true colors, it is usually far too late. His victims are unable to separate from him. They are frustrated by this acquired helplessness and angry at themselves for having failed to see through the narcissist earlier on."

Today the Democrats have placed all their hopes in Obama. But this man could put an end to their party. The great majority of blacks have also decided to vote for Obama. Only a fool does not know that their support for him is racially driven. Brendan Farrington, reported, evidence indicates that some black Republicans are switching parties to vote for Obama. He wrote, "Florida has 81,512 more black Democrats compared to a loss of 784 black Republicans; Louisiana has 34,325 more black Democrats, while the number of black Republicans dropped by 907; North Carolina has 92,356 more black Democrats and 2,850 fewer black Republicans. The only three states that track voting registration by party and race show black Republican registration dropping slightly since the beginning of the year."

Let us call a spade a spade. This is racism, pure and simple. The truth is that while everyone carries a misconceived collective guilt towards the blacks for wrongs done centuries ago by a bygone people to a bygone people, the blacks carry a collective rancor, enmity or vendetta towards non-blacks and to this day want to "stand up" to the Whiteman. They seem to be stuck in 19th century.

Geraldine A. Ferraro was right when she said that Senator Barack Obama had received preferential treatment because he is a black man. I can testify to that myself. Despite not favoring the Democrats political views, my very first inclination was to like Senator Obama. At that moment I had no knowledge of this man's political views or his character. All I could see was the color of his skin and that gave me enough emotional incentive to favor him. I got over that kneejerk reaction soon, after discovering that Obama is nothing but an empty suit full of hubris. A good indication that ex-vice presidential candidate is right is the fact that when in 1979, Ahmadinejad and his fellow Islamist militants took the American embassy workers as hostage, they released the blacks and the women, but kept the white men for 444 days.

The majority of people base the most important decisions on emotions, rather than on rationality. The first impression is often the lasting one. First impressions can be wrong. When I prove to Obama devotees that all their arguments to support him are logical fallacies, they tell me that they know Obama is the right man, because that is what their intuition tells them and they trust their intuition. That is yet another fallacy. If a belief is not backed by logic, it is not intuition but blind faith. The followers of Jim Jones cheerfully committed suicide because they relied on their blind faith that they mistook as intuition.

The downside of this is that if Obama turns out to be the disaster I predict, he will cause widespread resentment among the whites. The blacks are unlikely to give up their support of their man. They are in a state of trance. They truly believe Obama is their messiah. He is the fruition of their long quest for black power. Cultic mentality is pernicious and unrelenting. They will dig their heads deeper in the sand and blame Obama's detractors of racism. This will cause a backlash among the whites. The white supremacists will take advantage of the discontent and they will receive widespread support. It is unlikely that Whites would ever devolve to racism, but all it takes is a substantial number of disaffected people to fuel the flames of racial tension. I predict that in less than four years, racial tensions in America will increase to levels never seen since the turbulent 1960s. Obama will set the clock back decades. Despite his campaign rhetoric he has been a racist all his life. He will interpret any dissent as a rejection of his racial identity. As resentment towards him increases, so will his paranoia. He will grow distrustful of the whites and will surround himself with the blacks and other yesmen with whom he identifies himself. America's near future is bleak.

America is the bastion of freedom. The peace of the world depends on the strength of America, and its weakness translates into the triumph of terrorism and victory of rogue nations. It is no wonder that Ahmadinejad, Hugo Chavez, the Castroists, the Hezbollah, the Hamas, the lawyers of the Guantanamo terrorists and virtually all sworn enemies of America are so thrilled by the prospect of their man in the White House. America is on the verge of destruction. There is no insanity greater than electing a pathological narcissist as president.

Psychiatric Test

When a narcissist is running for the highest office in the world, the stakes cannot be higher. Did it matter what were Hitler's views on abortion, economy, environment, education, old age pension, gay rights, social security, jobs or housing? With Hitler, the only thing that really mattered was his mental sanity.

I urge all Americans to make this a pivotal issue in this electoral campaign. Time is running out. Please spread the word. Talk about it with your coworkers, friends and relatives. Invite everyone in your address book to sign this petition. Publish it in your blog. Write about it. This is the most vital issue. If a presidential candidate is mentally unfit, nothing else matters. If you are an Obama fan, please sign too, so you can vote with confidence that the man you are putting in the White House is not going to be your nightmare.

I have started the petition, below linked to this article. I ask everyone to demand that all presidential and vice-presidential candidates in this election submit to mental health examinations prior to Election Day. Please sign the petition and ask others to do the same.

Contact Midenise at midenise@zahav.net.il


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TIME REPORT SLANTED ON GAZA

Posted by Richard H. Shulman, March 05, 2013

INTRODUCTION: Everybody makes the exceptional mistake, even reporters. When mistakes predominate, are they inadvertent? Dozens of false and misleading statements in "The Gaza Problem" (Karl Vick, Time Magazine, Sept. 2012, p.34) all favor the Arabs. That makes the article less a journalistic report than an anti-Zionist screed.

Perhaps such reporters do not know the underlying facts and context of the Arab-Israel conflict. They misperceive the dispute as territorial, restricted to a tiny portion of the Mideast, and a matter of liberating an underdog Palestinian Arab nationality. My framework is of a Mideastern front within a powerful and growing international jihad in behalf of which the "Palestinian" nationality was contrived.

Should one care about errors written a few months ago? Yes. The Arab-Israel conflict's causes, problems, and misinformation about it have not materially changed in decades.

Now for the errors in the article.

ISRAEL BELONGED TO WHOM? The article describes Israel in relation to Gaza as "the land the enclave's residents remember as their own." Of the several million Palestinian Arabs, only about 30,000 living souls had resided in what became the State of Israel. Rather dispersed now, few in Gaza were old enough in 1948 to remember those events.

How could they remember Israel "as their own?" Palestinian Arabs never had sovereignty. In 1948, they angrily denied they were Palestinian. Some of them owned land there, but so did Jews; the government owned the most.

Before modern Zionists bought property there, Arab landlords and money lenders had wrested ownership from many Arab peasants. The peasants became tenants. Now they express nostalgia, but then their forbears mostly were fellahin.

The author's statement is inconsistent with the facts but consistent with the unwarranted perpetuation of those Arab families' status as refugees with grievances against Israel. The misimpression he gives unfairly boosts Arab territorial claims.

The author has quoted one side's sentiment, as if factual and pertinent. Should such emotions determine our evaluation of the Arabs' case? The author tries to back up that notion with its apparent endorsement by "Israeli military hero General Moshe Dayan." Brilliant as Gen. Dayan was in that 1956 war, he proved timid and appeasement-minded afterwards. Therefore, his endorsement should carry no weight. It's an old propaganda trick to quote appeasement-minded Israelis against national security policies for Israel.

Gen. Dayan was speaking at the funeral of a kibbutznik "killed by Arabs who had sneaked out of the coastal strip already brimming with people and hard feelings." That is misleading. Hard feelings existed before Arabs became refugees. Palestinian Arabs and foreign Arab armies had attempted to turn the Jews into refugees, mostly over religion.

Gen. Dayan refers to Gaza Arab jealousy and resentment, as they watched Jews develop what had been their property. Some had been their property, and some had not been.

HOW EGYPT GOT GAZA: The article states how Egypt came to control Gaza: "and the coastal strip became a holding pen administered by Egypt's military." It just became? In that war, Egypt seized the Gaza strip by aggression. Egypt kept Gaza trade down, unemployment up. It paid and organized Gazans into terrorist forces, which it dispatched against Israel. Is the author sanitizing Egyptian and Palestinian Arab war crimes? History and facts matter in determining right and wrong in a conflict.

WHEN REFUGEES CAME TO GAZA: After "losing their land to Jewish armies in 1948...Many defeated Arab landowners fled to Gaza..." Actually, most of the Arab ruling class fled in 1947, partly out of fear of coming war and partly to escape Arab terrorists. Many other Arabs fled later, at the orders of invading Arab generals, or after having come to believe the false atrocity propaganda against Zionist forces, or at the approach of Zionist militias.

HOW JORDAN GOT JUDEA-SAMARIA: Likewise, "The West Bank was annexed by Jordan." Jordan had seized Judea-Samaria through aggression, which the article does not mention. (After that, Jordan devised and popularized a name for those provinces, "West Bank," that, unlike the official name, "Judea" and "Samaria," belies their connection to Jewish history.) Jordan did not annex the area; it attempted to, but had no legal basis for doing so. Also not stated, Jordan mistreated the people in Judea-Samaria.

Here are some pertinent questions whose absence from the article impoverishes it. Why didn't the Palestinian Arabs make genuine peace? Israel offered it. Answer: jihadists don't make peace, not beyond truces to give them a respite until ready to resume combat. Besides, they felt that the U.S., which often upheld their immediate territorial claims, would force Israel to surrender the Territories.

Why didn't the Arabs develop the land in Gaza they now had? We are encouraged to feel sorry for genocidal fanatics who prefer whining and warring to working.

Why didn't the Arabs who fled to Gaza resent Egypt and Jordan for repressive rule? Apparently they blame according to religious ideology, not justice.

The article fails to be reflective. For example, it fails to ask what would happen if Israel could and would bring in the descendants of refugees now living in Gaza. Considering the years of indoctrination of Palestinian Arabs by their religious and political leaders in the intolerance, hatred, and murder typifying jihad, we could expect civil war. Seen from that vantage, the so-called "right of return" is a license for war and ethnic cleansing.

CYCLE OF VIOLENCE? The author frames combat there as within a "cycle of violence." That turn of phrase implies that if Israel didn't respond, the violence would end. Actually, Israel often does not respond, but the violence continues. This is not a cycle but steady jihad. Muslims keep attempting to murder Jews. Sometimes Israel retaliates, usually insufficiently to eradicate terrorist organizations. The euphemism gives the wrong impression, making Israel seem partly culpable.

If Hamas ceased firing, Israel would not invade, but the ceasefire would last "Until next time." The author's correct implication here is that the ceasefire did not advance peace.

The author also calls rocket attacks on Israel "punching back." By de-emphasizing jihadists aggression, "punching back" seems even-handed but it falsely implies equal or (for implicitly throwing the first punch) greater Israeli guilt. That comforts the aggressors.

The Islamists initiate combat. They "punch" and punch, until the Israeli public demands that its government make the raids stop. So Israel retaliates. Israel also hunts down certain wanted terrorists. There may be collateral casualties, but IDF targets always are military. The Muslim side, which had signed a peace agreement and which pledged to negotiate a final settlement but doesn't, has no right to fight at all. When it does fight, it targets Israeli civilians. The author's tactic, common in the media, of equating the two sides (when not weighing in against the Israeli side) is unfair.

EMOTIONAL PHRASING: Israelis often coin colorful phrases that sound infelicitous in English. Repeating one such phrase, the author sarcastically pegs Israeli military operations against Gaza as "cutting the weeds." That means cutting down terrorists when their menace has grown too grave to neglect. No shame in doing that. But the article makes light of terrorists whose organizations keep attacking Israel and do commit murder and war crimes. Clever use of English by the journalist, but improper manipulation of readers' emotions.

MILITANTS OR TERRORISTS? The writer calls those Muslim terrorists "militants." Martin Luther King, Jr. was a militant, but no terrorist. "Terrorist" has a specific meaning: one who by military means deliberately targets civilians for a political reason. To label certain Muslims, whom the State Dept. has officially declared terrorist, as "militants," is misleading.

Rocket attacks on Israel are discussed without mentioning that those are terrorist acts -- war crimes. For an article that insinuates inhumane policies by Israel, its ignoring of actual inhumane policies by Gazans renders the insinuations suspect.

CASUALTY FIGURES & RESPONSIBILITY: The next paragraph asserts that the fighting is far worse for Gazans. The IDF bombed a lot, so despite Israel's attempts at precision, civilian casualties have risen. "According to Gazan authorities, more than 100 Palestinians have been killed in the operation thus far." Are the figures reliable? What do they mean?

Of course the IDF had to bomb a lot. Hamas had accumulated thousands of rockets! If the fighting is far worse for Gazans, that is just, for they are the aggressors. After WWII, many Germans pretended to be innocent victims of the war that they had overwhelmingly supported. Americans scorned that attitude. Well the Arab people in Gaza and in Judea-Samaria overwhelmingly support jihad against Israel by any effective means. But the author treats them as victims.

The author cites various groups as authority for his statistics. Just as science statistics these day may be mistaken and faked, so are many of the casualty statistics kept by human rights groups. Those groups use the banner of human rights to conduct vicious defamation and de-legitimization of Israel. In other words, they conduct a form of jihad against Israel. The group that provided the casualty figures for children is Defence for Children International. It makes vicious propaganda, extortionate demands, and distorted statistics (http://www.ngo-monitor.org/).

It may have exaggerated the number of children it claims were shot by IDF troops for approaching Israel. But, in the usual propaganda ruse, it certainly omits half the story, thereby slanting the tale. The other half is: (a) NGOs regularly call younger terrorists "children;" (b) Terrorist organizations use children to carry weapons and plant bombs near Israel (which use of civilians is a war crime); and (c) Usually Israeli troops warn Arabs, but often the Arabs continue advancing. The responsibility for the deaths of Arabs committing terrorism is the Arabs', not Israel's. That is the plain thrust of international law.

Journalists and supposed human rights organizations accept the figures from jihadists, who believe in deceit. Hamas and the Palestinian Authority have described many slain terrorists as civilians. The figure of 100 comes with no attempt to differentiate terrorists from civilians.

As wars go, 100 is paltry. Hamas actually arranges for there to be civilian casualties. Like Hizbullah, it emplaces heavy weapons on schools and hospitals, stores munitions in private houses, and opens fire from civilian areas, so it can either deter Israeli attacks or complain about civilian casualties if Israel does attack. Hamas methods are war crimes. If the author explained that Hamas fights mainly by criminal methods that endanger both Arab and Israeli civilians, who would sympathize with the Muslim side?

OBAMA'S BLESSING FOR BOMBING: We are reminded that Presidential candidate Obama gave Israel's air campaign his blessing. Yes, but he did not give the proposed ground war his blessing, rather, he disapproved. Without a ground war, Hamas cannot be eradicated; terrorism recurs. So what was the President really doing?

EGPYT A PEACEMAKER? Egypt tried to (and later did) negotiate a ceasefire. Left unexplained, this implies something constructive by Egypt's Islamist government. Indeed, the online supplement to the article calls Egypt's President Morsi a peacemaker. That is nonsense. Egypt's purpose was, besides gaining prestige, to spare Hamas. Truces are an old jihadist trick. Truces give decimated Islamists time to regroup, then break the truce. Hamas has broken a number of ceasefires. Egypt violates its treaty with Israel, especially the provisions for normalization. So does Jordan. The Palestinian Authority broke its agreements with Jordan, Lebanon, and Israel. It behooves reporters to learn that background.

EGYPT AN ALLY? The online supplement calls Egypt an ally of the U.S.. Everybody calls countries allies of the U.S. or of Israel without defining "ally." Some countries get called a U.S. ally apparently merely for accepting U.S. subsidy. Egypt has been working to undermine U.S. influence. Mubarak was called an ally of Israel, even though he led the international diplomatic effort against Israel and winked at arms smuggling into Gaza.

WORLD OPINION VS. ISRAEL: The prior Gaza war "won Israel much opprobrium." Yes, but from biased sources that miscast international law and apparently equate both sides when they do not outright favor the aggressors. Israel had better act in its national interest despite the automatically hostile international public opinion. The first Holocaust should have taught the Jewish people not to expect decency from international public opinion. Urging Israel to subordinate self-defense to world opinion is of dubious morality.

"PALESTINIAN" A NATIONALITY? "Gazans are emphatically Palestinian, a national identity forged from the trauma of losing their land to Jewish armies in 1948, the year Israel was established." Not forged, but fabricated. Not in 1948, but in the 1960s. Not genuine, but for propaganda. Arabs there have the same religion, language, culture, nationality, and history as the surrounding countries from which most of their families immigrated. After 1948, Arab states controlled Gaza and Judea-Samaria without any noticeable objection and demand by Palestinian Arabs for another state. How nationalist were they really?

ARE PALESTINIAN ARABS REFUGEES? The article states that most residents of Gaza are classified as refugees. Yes, they are, but UNRWA redefined millions of Palestinian Arabs as refugees contrary to how the UN defines all other populations of refugees. That's politics. A genuine refugee is someone who lived in another country or territory, from which he was forced out. As indicated earlier, only about 30,000 really are refugees. Their descendants are not. Temporary residents were not. Long-circulating welfare benefits cards of deceased Arabs are not.

FALSE & PEJORATIVE USE OF "OCCUPYING": In 1967, "Israel took control as an occupying power." Why doesn't the magazine use the term, "occupying," for the Arab states that had seized the Territories first? Bias?

Like many misleading statements, the statement "as an occupying power," is phrased vaguely. Israel did not consider itself an occupying power. Nor was it. There was no sovereign territory there for it to occupy.

WHAT ARAB "MODERATES?" A journalistic sleight-of-hand is the false distinction between moderates and extremists. Thus Mr. Vick writes, "...even Israel regards Hamas as a moderating influence in Gaza." Actually, Hamas fights when ready, and makes a truce when it is not. By contrast, Salafis in Gaza want to fight all the time. Suddenly that makes Hamas a moderating influence? That is misleading. It would be fair to declare that Hamas is extreme but Salafis are even more extreme. Hamas tries to manage jihad for surer success. Hence Hamas is more dangerous

Fatah also fights when combat is opportune and uses more diplomacy to gain militarily when diplomacy is opportune. But its leader, Abbas, admits having the same goals as Hamas: conquest of Israel and expulsion of the Jews. Yet he is called "moderate." He is not moderate but is more practical than Hamas.

Abbas was willing to reconcile with Hamas, but Hamas didn't accept his terms. Doesn't that indicate that Abbas has an ideology similar to Hamas' and hates Israel more than Hamas? Thus the author, himself, provides some of the evidence against his and the prevailing rationalization that Abbas is moderate.

By pretending Abbas's faction is moderate, Western leaders and media can demand that Israel make concessions to the allegedly moderate faction, either to strengthen it or to make peace with it. Even if Abbas were moderate, it would be foolish to make a peace agreement with one faction that would be disavowed by the other faction. Besides, Abbas' faction continually violates its agreements with Israel, as by not eradicating terrorist organizations.

WHY IS ABBAS WEAK? Mr. Vick depicts Abbas as "weak," without examining the important implications. Abbas is weak politically because his people favor more military action, less diplomacy than he, and they dislike his corrupt rule. Many refuse to pretend, as he does, they are compromising and making peace. They are fanatical jihadists.

Gazans ask why didn't Abbas visit Gaza during or after Israel's recent bombardment of missile sites. A fanatic does not visit his rival and expect to live.

HAMAS' ROCKET RUSE: The article refers to Israel retaliating against Hamas for "failing to prevent more radical militants from launching missiles." There is a half-truth there. The other half of the story is that Hamas has given missiles to other terrorist organizations, so when they fire them at Israel, Hamas can deny having fired any. Actually, Hamas fires many, anyway.

MISTAKEN ABOUT BLOCKADE: P.36 states that Egypt's former Pres Mubarak kept Gaza's "door to Egypt mostly shut." On p.37, the author writes about Gaza, "Its economy depends significantly on tunnels from Egypt, through which come not just missiles and arms, but also consumer goods and commodities. The tunnels became Israeli targets in the current fighting." Thus Mubarak only pretended to keep arms from terrorists. Page 37 refutes the popular but erroneous myth on p.36.

After a violent uprising, Israel largely closed itself off from Gaza, and large numbers of Gazans no longer could come to work in Gaza. Like many anti-Zionist writings, the article fails to draw a conclusion for the reader that the Arabs caused their own misery.

The author introduces historical background. Then why did he omit the fact that even in the strictest period of the blockade, Israel let into Gaza food and medicine and let medical patients out? Israel supplied Gaza with electricity. Unfortunately for the people, with whom the author purportedly sympathizes, Hamas stole some of the supplies for itself and sometimes bombed the gates when supplies were coming in. The author omits those and many other negative aspects of Arab rule.

ISLAMIST DEMOCRACY? Egypt is called "ostensibly a democracy." Any expectation that Islamists would allow democracy was short-sighted in September, when the article was written. Since then, Pres. Morsi has been assuming more dictatorial powers, as have the rulers of Islamist Turkey. Our major media long refused to acknowledge that. They view Radical Islam through Western tinted glasses.

SHOULD EGYPT TAKE GAZA? Going further, the writer suggests that "Israel would have fewer problems if Egypt annexed Gaza and Cairo became responsible for keeping the peace." Is he kidding? Egypt repressed Gazans when it ruled there; Egypt has made several wars on Israel and promoted terrorism against it. Thanks to U.S. subsidy, Egypt has a first class military. Egyptian military doctrine long has had the objective of invading Israel. If Egypt took over Gaza, its army would get closer to Tel Aviv and it would be more able to redirect terrorists against Israel.

Again expecting decency from fanatics, Mr. Vick finds a commonality of interest between Hamas and Israel in wanting a normal border. He is confusing long-term jihadist strategy with temporary expediency. Iran isn't ready to have Hamas attack Israel, so Hamas has to restrain itself for now. But leading Egyptian religious figures have made plain that they do not care about prosperity; fighting for Islam, i.e., aggressive jihad, takes priority. Hamas is part of the same Muslim Brotherhood. Western elites keep making the naïve assumption that dictators share our rational or material values.

Likewise, the author asserts that practical considerations keep Egypt from being aggressive, now, although Egypt upholds the Palestinian cause. Granted that Morsi is worried that Egypt's economy would collapse, but the logical conclusion is to keep Egypt weak and to keep Egypt away from Israel, instead of giving Egypt money.

Do foreign Arab states that made war on Israel care about the Palestinian Arabs? Except in Jordan, foreign Arabs treat Palestinian Arabs badly. (Palestinian Arabs later earned that enmity by trying to overthrow not only Israel but also Jordan and Lebanon, and helped Saddam conquer Kuwait.) As for the Palestinian Arabs, they have no legitimate cause in their jihadist aspirations to seize Israel as well as the Territories.

ARAB RAGE VS. ARAB FAULTS: "The siege transformed Gaza into a man-made ecosystem of outrage and despair." The propaganda techniques here are: (a) Pretend that the outrage is newly generated and by some Israeli action, whereas the outrage originated hundreds of years ago, when an intolerant Islam was founded, and was exacerbated in the 1920s under British rule with eventual Jewish majority foreseen; Muslims are outraged when ruled by non-Muslims; (b) Start with Israeli reaction to Arab aggression, rather than with the initiating Arab attacks; and (c) Blame Israel for the problems that Muslim Arabs bring on themselves. A typical example is Arab terrorism against Israel going on for months without international protest. Then, as soon as Israel finally retaliates, the world demands "restraint on both sides," or chides Israel for "escalating."

When Israel ruled the Arabs in the Territories, life expectancy and the standard of living multiplied. When Israel stopped, the Arab standard of living in the Territories dropped. The tone of the article is to blame Israel for poor economic condition of Gaza and to exaggerate that poverty. Luxury houses and stores and bustling market places are not photographed. Such photos would undermine the theory that Israel makes Gazans suffer.

What harms the Palestinian Authority economy: (a) Lawlessness as by thugs with official sanction shaking down businesses; (b) Cronyism and corruption; (c) War spending; (d) Excess government hiring for patronage; and (e) Overdevelopment of real estate instead of productive investment. You wouldn't know that from Time magazine's presentation of one long lament against Israel.

When Israel was about to withdraw its citizens from Gaza, it arranged to turn over to Arabs the thriving hothouse industry that Israelis had built. What did the Arabs do with it? Arabs looted or destroyed most of it. Neither the Arabs nor their foreign sympathizers hold the Arabs responsible for their problems and for the problems they inflict on others. How will these Arabs ever reform and make peace?

CONCLUSIONS: The many, unmentioned instances of Israeli decency toward the Arabs make the presentation further unbalanced. Did the magazine do fact-checking, or is it satisfied with a host of half-truths?

Here's the irony. Media people ostensibly indicating sympathy for Palestinian Arabs, present false notions in behalf of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, which harm their own people. The people's religious intolerance, which their rulers have been reinforcing for decades, keeps them always in strife, always outraged. Real sympathy for those people would prompt writers to tell us and them the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. They need to reform. Peace needs them to reform.

Richard Shulman is a veteran defender of Israel on several web-based forums. His comments and analyses are a regular feature on Think-Israel. He provides cool information and right-on-target overviews. He distributes his essays by email. To subscribe, write him at ricshulman@aol.com.


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ISRAELI LEFTISTS & FREE SPEECH

Posted by Richard H. Shulman, March 05, 2013

Sen. Joe McCarthy harmed democracy and, in the long run, helped the Left. Pres. Truman had gotten the subversives out of the government, so there was no need for Sen. McCarthy's investigation. McCarthy abused his power by intimidating people, many who were innocent. Now the Left: (1) Implies there never was Communist infiltration; (2) Exaggerates McCarthy's power; and, most important, (3) Gives the Left an excuse for calling all law enforcement against subversion or even criticism of it and of Radical Islam as McCarthyist.

Prof. Plaut finds that the real oppressors of freedom of opinion in Israel (and, I say, in the U.S.) is the Left. Here is a fraction of the evidence he has steadily reported.

Hanin Zoabi is an Israeli Arab MK who advocates terrorism and the destruction of the Jewish state. MK Zoabi has assaulted Israeli commandos boarding the Turkish blockade-running ship. The Elections Commission banned her from running for re-election.

Radical anti-Zionists rallied in her behalf. Her petitioners posture as if they so much believe in free speech, that even that violent person should be permitted into the Knesset.

Their posture is hypocritical. Those leftists do not protest against real violations of free speech in Israel. Such people did not protest against the banning of the Kahana party. They did not object to the campaign accusing right-wingers' objections to PM Rabin as having led to his murder.

The Left complains that although Zoabi was banned, other "convicted felons" are allowed to run for Knesset. They cite candidate Moshe Feiglin, a candidate for Likud. They explain that Feiglin was "convicted of sedition and imprisoned in the wave of incitement that produced the Rabin murder." They lied. He was not convicted of that. He was convicted of blocking a road. Leftists block roads, too, usually without much penalty.

The fact that the Left still blames the Right's speech for Rabin's murder shows the Left still to be against free speech.

Another case cited as proof that criminals are allowed to run is that of Avigdor Lieberman. But Lieberman was not convicted, not even indicted. What he is accused of committing is no crime. He is accused of failing to inform police when a diplomat told him that the government of Israel had asked a foreign government for Lieberman's financial records. Not telling about that is no crime.

Who signed the petition against "criminals" running for Knesset? One signer running for Knesset is Hebrew U. Prof. Amiram Goldblum, a founder of Peace Now. A few years ago, Goldblum admitted having violated Israeli campaign finance laws. Although he claims to favor free speech, he files frivolous SLAPP lawsuits to discourage free speech by non-Leftists.

Also having signed are some Communist professors and authors. Tel Aviv U. Prof. Daniel Bar-Tal demands the suppression of Isracampus.com, a group that monitors and exposes the anti-Israel Left. Again, the Left tries to repress opponents' speech.

Another signatory is Prof. Chaim Gans of Tel Aviv U. law school, who organized a petition to bar a colonel from lecturing there, because he does not like her political views. Another is former Haifa U. Prof. Gabi Salomon, who used his classroom to indoctrinate youth in leftist notions. That violates free speech or abuses academic freedom.

Israeli Fascists Espouse Free Speech?

Sen. Joe McCarthy harmed democracy and, in the long run, helped the Left. Pres. Truman had gotten the subversives out of the government, so there was no need for Sen. McCarthy's investigation. McCarthy abused his power by intimidating people, many who were innocent. Now the Left: (1) Implies there never was Communist infiltration; (2) Exaggerates McCarthy's power; and, most important, (3) Gives the Left an excuse for calling all law enforcement against subversion or even criticism of it and of Radical Islam as McCarthyist.

Prof. Plaut finds that the real oppressors of freedom of opinion in Israel (and, I say, in the U.S.) is the Left. Here is a fraction of the evidence he has steadily reported.

Hanin Zoabi is an Israeli Arab MK who advocates terrorism and the destruction of the Jewish state. MK Zoabi has assaulted Israeli commandos boarding the Turkish blockade-running ship. The Elections Commission banned her from running for re-election.

Radical anti-Zionists rallied in her behalf. Her petitioners posture as if they so much believe in free speech, that even that violent person should be permitted into the Knesset. Their posture is hypocritical. Those leftists do not protest against real violations of free speech in Israel. Such people did not protest against the banning of the Kahana party. They did not object to the campaign accusing right-wingers' objections to PM Rabin as having led to his murder. The Left complains that although Zoabi was banned, other "convicted felons" are allowed to run for Knesset. They cite candidate Moshe Feiglin, a candidate for Likud. They explain that Feiglin was "convicted of sedition and imprisoned in the wave of incitement that produced the Rabin murder." They lied. He was not convicted of that. He was convicted of blocking a road. Leftists block roads, too, usually without much penalty.

The fact that the Left still blames the Right's speech for Rabin's murder shows the Left still to be against free speech. Another case cited as proof that criminals are allowed to run is that of Avigdor Lieberman. But Lieberman was not convicted, not even indicted. What he is accused of committing is no crime. He is accused of failing to inform police when a diplomat told him that the government of Israel had asked a foreign government for Lieberman's financial records. Not telling about that is no crime. Who signed the petition against "criminals" running for Knesset?

One signer running for Knesset is Hebrew U. Prof. Amiram Goldblum, a founder of Peace Now. A few years ago, Goldblum admitted having violated Israeli campaign finance laws. Although he claims to favor free speech, he files frivolous SLAPP lawsuits to discourage free speech by non-Leftists. Also having signed are some Communist professors and authors. Tel Aviv U. Prof. Daniel Bar-Tal demands the suppression of Isracampus.com, a group that monitors and exposes the anti-Israel Left. Again, the Left tries to repress opponents' speech. Another signatory is Prof. Chaim Gans of Tel Aviv U. law school, who organized a petition to bar a colonel from lecturing there, because he does not like her political views. Another is former Haifa U. Prof. Gabi Salomon, who used his classroom to indoctrinate youth in leftist notions. That violates free speech or abuses academic freedom.

Richard Shulman is a veteran defender of Israel on several web-based forums. His comments and analyses are a regular feature on Think-Israel. He provides cool information and right-on-target overviews. He distributes his essays by email. To subscribe, write him at ricshulman@aol.com.


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WEST LEGISLATING ISLAMIC CURBS ON FREEDOM

Posted by Richard H. Shulman, March 05, 2013

Russia is not the only country posing problems for Westerners wanting to adopt children. So does Morocco. The government of Morocco, now Islamist, demanded that Spanish families that adopt children from Morocco must make sure that those children remain culturally and religiously Muslim. Spain will enable Moroccan religious authorities to monitor the children until the age of 18, to make sure they haven't become Christians. One means may be annual trips to Morocco. That's adoption?

France has similar laws.

When a British mother allowed a Muslim foster child teenager to be baptized, the child was taken away from her, until she won in court.

Now Turkey is seeking to gain control over European's foster children who come from Turkey.

In England, the Moseley School in Birmingham has mostly Muslim students. It serves only halal food, giving the non-Muslims no choice. One day some pork got into the food. The woman who runs the kitchen was fired. Some parents called this mistake an "insult," and demanded that more people be fired. The Birmingham City Council apologized to them. Muslims have started all sorts of cafeteria boycotts and lawsuits.

At the University of Manchester, a student asked a speaker whether it is proper to execute a gay man. The speaker said, yes. She denied that such executions, including stoning adulterers, are inhumane (David J. Rusin, 5/4/13 http://www.islamist-watch.org/blog/2013/03/iw-news-brief-adoption-jihad-halal-hysteria).

We've reported other creeping instances of the creeping Islamization of Europe and the U.S.. Civilization is at stake there. This is not tolerance; it is all one way; it is intolerance of non-Muslims. This is appeasing subversion of society. It is not justified.

Non-Muslims are being indoctrinated in subservience. They are being indoctrinated in barbarism.

This is dangerous an contemptible.

Richard Shulman is a veteran defender of Israel on several web-based forums. His comments and analyses are a regular feature on Think-Israel. He provides cool information and right-on-target overviews. He distributes his essays by email. To subscribe, write him at ricshulman@aol.com.


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HATRED OF CHRISTIANS UNLEASHED IN LIBYA

Posted by Raymond Ibrahim, March 06, 2013

Last Thursday, a Coptic Christian church located in Benghazi, Libya, was attacked by armed Muslim militants. Initial reports indicate that at least one priest, Fr. Paul Isaac, was injured, as well as his assistant. It is the second church in Libya to be attacked in two months. Earlier, on Sunday, December 30, an explosion rocked a Coptic Christian church near the western city of Misrata, where a group of U.S. backed rebels hold a major checkpoint. The explosion killed two people and wounded two others, all Egyptians.

Such attacks rarely if ever occurred under Col. Gaddafi.

Ansar al-Sharia (

There are currently few details. Based on countless examples from past experience—including centuries of demonstrable continuity—there were likely loud cries of "Allahu Akbar!" with an exuberant sense of Islamic supremacism in the air. As for motivation, it was likely sheer anti-Christian sentiment. For where else are Christians being Christians than in church—where they are being as apolitical as they are being spiritual, simply trying to worship their God in peace, only to be attacked yet again.

At any rate, here is one more piece of solid evidence to validate my observation from last week—that the recent spate of arrests of Christians in Libya on the accusation that they are "missionaries" is a pretext for simple, good old-fashioned Christian hate. After all, this armed attack on a Christian church in Benghazi occurred right around the same time 100 Christian Copts were arrested and tortured, their heads shaven and their tattooed crosses burned off with acid.

Libya's Islamists had no problem arresting and torturing these Copts, indeed, boasting of it by posting a video of them on the Internet. Libyan law makes it illegal for any Christian to display their Christianity or, worse, preach it. Thus the Islamic militias are off the hook, as they were merely performing the equivalent of a "citizen's arrest" when they abducted and trapped all those Egyptian Christians because they had crosses, Bibles, and religious icons.

Ironically, whereas the Libyan government has not condemned the arrest and abuse of Christians accused of proselytizing—how can it when its own laws ban non-Muslim missionary activities?—it has "voiced its concern" and "expressed regret" for this latest attack on Christians, the Benghazi church raid. On Sunday, Libya's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation said that the attack was "contrary to the teachings of our Islamic faith and customs and as well as international covenants on human rights and fundamental freedoms and respect for the monotheistic religions." The statement further called on "all Libyan citizens to respect those from friendly and sister countries living in Libya and to respect their beliefs."

Such benevolent assertions are contradictory on many levels. Do Libyan authorities really think that enforcing a ban on Christian preaching—that is, banning Christian free speech according to the Muslim belief that Christianity is a false religion that cannot be given a platform to spread—would not further prompt or at least validate fierce anti-Christian sentiment among the average Libyan? In other words, if Christianity is portrayed by Muslim authorities as a religion that must be denied utterance because it is false, is it not natural that anti-Christian sentiment would metastasize to the average Libyan Muslim, leading to things like attacks on churches, which are then seen as breeding grounds of falsities or—as the jihadi terrorists who slaughtered nearly 60 Christians in the 2010 Baghdad church attack put it—"nests of paganism"?

How, then, can the Libyan government call on Libyans to "respect their [Christians'] beliefs"? How can it invoke "international covenants on human rights and fundamental freedoms"—covenants which permit free speech, including religious proselytism, which Muslims in the West routinely exercise? Is this not just mere talk?

And that's just it; Libya's more fervent Muslims know better. If Christian churches are not (currently) banned by Libyan law, their construction on Muslim soil is banned by Islamic Sharia law, which, incidentally, also happens to be the source for the ban on Christian proselytism. (According to Muslim tradition, in the 7th century Caliph Omar ordered conquered Christians not to build new churches and not to preach Christianity around any Muslim.)

Such is the interconnectivity of Islam's teachings. Where one anti-Christian law is upheld, many manifestations of anti-Christian sentiment—along with justifications and rationalizations—will follow.

Such also is the interconnectivity of Benghazi: where American embassies are attacked and diplomats killed, so too are Christians and their churches unwelcome. They are all infidels—false, to be despised and denied. The only Benghazi-related incongruity is that the United States government helped empower the jihadis and the Obama administration continues to support them.

Raymond Ibrahim is a Middle East and Islam specialist and author of Crucified Again: Exposing Islam's New War on Christians (2013) and The Al Qaeda Reader (2007). His writings have appeared in a variety of media, including the Los Angeles Times, Washington Times, Jane's Islamic Affairs Analyst, Middle East Quarterly, World Almanac of Islamism, and Chronicle of Higher Education. He was born and raised in the U.S. by Coptic Egyptian parents born and raised in the Middle East, which has provided him with equal fluency in English and Arabic. His understanding of the two the Western and Middle Eastern mindsets positions him to explain the Middle Eastern culture to the West. This article appeared March 05, 2013 and is archived
at http://www.raymondibrahim.com/from-the-arab-world/hatred-of-christians-unleashed-in-libya/


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LINCOLN AS JEWISH SETTLER

Posted by Steven Plaut, March 06, 2013

An interesting trend has emerged in recent weeks. The Israeli Left, along with most of the world's pseudo-intellectual classes, has suddenly discovered Abraham Lincoln. Obviously it is thanks to the new Hollywood movie. Leftists do not read books; they form their moral evaluations mainly based on fashionable movies, like the abominations that Israel sent to the Oscar ceremonies this year or like the movies produced by Michael Moore.

The Israeli Left has embraced Lincoln because it is convinced that, if Lincoln is regarded as a moral champion, clearly identification with Lincoln must lead one to support the political agenda of the Israeli Left. First and foremost this would mean supporting Palestinian demands and aggression against Jews. And of course the "social justice" economic and social bolshevism of the Left.

Take the column by Bradley Burston, the English-language columnist for Haaretz, that Palestinian newspaper printed in Hebrew, from a few days ago. You can read it here: http://www.haaretz.com/blogs/a-special-place-in-hell/as-lincoln-abolished-slavery-israel-must-abolish-occupation.premium-1.505908

The title pretty much tells you what you need to know:

'As Lincoln abolished slavery, Israel must abolish occupation." Bradley opines: 'I realize now that I am an abolitionist and that occupation is slavery. I also realize that I need to pay more attention to Abraham Lincoln, in his ability to remind us all of the wisdom hidden in the obvious.' If you have a strong stomach, read the whole article.

Then today (March 5) we have a column in Haaretz by one Ithamar Handelman Smith, who claims to be a writer and journalist, one who is so anti-Israel that the Likud government is likely to grant him a governmental subsidy to make some Bash-Israel flicks. His column is here: http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/what-do-you-know-of-lincoln-ms-livnat.premium-1.507280

It is titled ' What do you know of Lincoln, Ms. Livnat? He opines: 'The culture minister couldn't see the parallels between the Academy Award-winning story she loved (Lincoln -- SP) and the stories behind the Israeli documentaries she shunned.'

You will like this excerpt from Smith: 'Israel is a democracy to be proud of? Maybe, if you're extremist-right-wing-Jewish settlers. But everyone else − Arabs, Haredim, African refugees, leftists − live here under one of the least democratic regimes in the Western world. And no, a democracy doesn't get defensive about movies like "The Gatekeepers" and "5 Broken Cameras." A democracy learns from films like these about what's wrong with it and what can be fixed.'

Not of course from any books!

SO what do we make of this new "Lincoln as Leftist Pro-Palestinian social democrat" campaign by Israel's Left and by Haaretz?

Well, even someone with only the shallowest familiarity with American history would know that the two most important principles represented by Lincoln would make him for all intents and purposes the ethical analogue of the Jewish settler leaders in the West Bank.

Lincoln fought the American Civil War first and foremost in to order to prevent the division of his homeland, and he was fully prepared to use massive military force to achieve that goal. This makes him the moral brother of every Jew in the world who is OPPOSED to partition of the Land of Israel and carving out from it any Palestinian state. Those proposing such a "two-state solution" are the 21st century's copperheads.

Second, Lincoln had no reluctance about using the word "treason," and throughout the Civil War he made it clear that he considered the Union war against the Confederacy and its supporters to be a campaign against treason. Those who supported secession or the Confederacy were consistently described by Lincoln as "traitors." Those who opposed the Union's national interests were engaging in treason, not academic freedom. Lincoln did not mollycoddle traitors in the name of "understanding the Other." He did not insist that those opposing national interests be allowed to control the universities and the courts and the media. Lincoln's war against treason did not make him a 19th century Haaretz columnist but rather the moral ally of all those who despise Haaretz and who oppose the anti-Israel Left in Israel.

Aside from those two most obvious characteristics of Lincoln, which make him the moral analogue of Jewish settler leaders in the West Bank, Lincoln had a few other features that will make the Left squirm. Lincoln abolished habeas corpus during wartime. He had traitors executed and deported, and had no hesitation about the use of capital punishment. Lincoln also imposed censorship on the press and suppressed treasonous journalism. Want to ponder how Lincoln would handle Haaretz? Then in Sherman's march to the sea, Lincoln conducted war against CIVILIANS, explicitly targeting and attacking the civilian population and its infrastructure to end rebellion and treason. With no Betselem and no Supreme Court interference. Lincoln also sponsored the Homestead Act of 1862, perhaps the greatest settlements construction effort in history.

Perhaps most notably, Lincoln also imposed an uncompromising blockade upon the Confederacy. The very same Israeli Leftists, who insist that lifting the "embargo" of Gaza is the highest form of humane morality so that the Hamas can more easily import weapons, will have a an interesting challenge explaining the blockade imposed by the world's moral champion, Abraham Lincoln. Guess how Lincoln would have dealt with "Gaza Flotilla" blockade runners. Honest Abe used exactly the same tactic against the Confederacy over which the Israeli bedwetting Left is now sobbing its eyes out! And frankly my dear I don't give a damn!

Steven Plaut is an American-trained economist, a professor of business administration at Haifa University and author of "The Scout." He frequently comments — both seriously and satirically — on Israeli politics and the left wing academic community. Write him at splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il His website address is http://www.stevenplaut.blogspot.com. /i>


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AND NOW THEY'VE BURNED THOSE BUSES

Posted by Lori Lowenthal Marcus, March 06, 2013

Whoever actually burned the buses, the fire was lit by the anti-Israel - or just lazy - media and their fans. So now no Israeli public buses will serve the Arab towns.

burnt buses

The fire burned the buses, but the flames — fueled by latent and actual anti-Semitism — burned so much more.

As reported yesterday in The Jewish Press, this week Israel instituted two new bus lines to provide bus service from Arab towns in the territories into different parts of Israel.

The new bus service started yesterday, March 4. It also may have ended yesterday.

There were riots Monday morning at the Eyal Crossing because there weren't enough buses — which Transportation Minister Israel Katz said would be rectified. But too late, because Monday night someone set fire to two Afikim buses which were parked in the Arab town of Kfar Qassem. The bus company has now removed all their buses from the area because of the violence and destruction.

So thanks to the media hysteria and the quick-on-the-draw haters, there are no Israeli public buses to serve the Arab towns in the territories. Proud of yourself yet?

Maybe it was Arabs who set the fire, whipped into a frenzy at the nerve of the Jewish State to provide bus service into Israel from Arab towns. Or perhaps Jews set the fire, enraged by the response of Jewish State-haters who criticize Israel whether it does something positive or negative for Arabs. Or maybe either one of them did it, but driven by some other combination of hatred and irrationality. At bottom, though, the fault lies with all those who were so eager to hoist the racism card high enough in the air that no one could see any anything else.

The list of media outlets that stated or implied in their headlines that Israel was instituting a form of racial segregation reached from as far right on the spectrum as The Jerusalem Post and Fox News, to the centrist Washington Post, USA Today and YNet, to The Times of Israel, to the predictable haters on the far left, like Huffington Post and beyond, like The Daily Kos. None of them seemed to care about the full story, because none of them reported it. And the comments from readers then reinforced the fires of hatred.

A "Palestinian only" bus line, or an Israeli public bus company serving Arab towns — two ways to look at it, one sounds evil, the other at least plausibly helpful. But virtually none of the many dozens of articles written on the topic provided more than the sinister side of the story with any plausibility. And of course the fires will continue to burn.

An informed source who spoke on condition of anonymity told The Jewish Press that Arab Israelis are most likely the ones who set the fire. But why? "Just to keep the issue in the headlines."

Lori Lowenthal Marcus is the US correspondent for The Jewish Press. She is a recovered lawyer who previously practiced First Amendment law and taught in Philadelphia-area graduate and law schools. You can reach her by email: Lori@JewishPressOnline.com The article above appeared March 05, 2013 in the Jewish Press.com and is archived at
http://www.jewishpress.com/news/you-know-who-destroyed-the-israeli-buses-for-arab-towns/2013/03/05/


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ISRAEL'S RITA ROCKS THE U.N.

Posted by UN Watch, March 06, 2013

The article below was written by Chemi Shalev who is an Israeli journalist. Shalev is the US editor and correspondent for the Haaretz newspaper in both Hebrew and English. He publishes an English-language blog called "West of Eden" dealing with US-Israeli relations and the American Jewish community. Previously, Shalev was deputy editor and diplomatic commentator for the Israel Hayom newspaper. He has also served as diplomatic correspondent for Jerusalem Post, Davar and Ma'ariv. Shalev was the Jerusalem correspondent for the New York-based Jewish Weekly. In 2007, he returned from a four-year stay in Australia, where he was associate editor of the Australian Jewish News. The article appeared March 6, 2013 in Haaretz and is archived at
http://www.haaretz.com/blogs/west-of-eden/israeli-singer-rita-a-hit-at-un-general-assembly.premium-1.507612

UN Ambassador Prosor has pulled off one of the most unusual diplomatic achievements ever: a full-fledged UN-sponsored Farsi-Hebrew musical event full of goodwill and sympathy towards Israel.

Rita performing in front of the United Nations in New York City
Rita performing in front of the United Nations in New York City

Inside the hall of the General Assembly at the United Nations building in New York, it seemed at times that either the messiah had arrived or the world had turned inside-out Bizarro, like in the Superman comics: Rita, one of Israel's most popular performers, was singing in Farsi and Hebrew; Israelis were dancing in the aisles: diplomats from around the world were clapping and begging for more; Israeli Ambassador Ron Prosor was the hero of the day; Secretary General Ban Ki Moon said "shalom" and General Assembly President Vuk Jeremic, it turned out, hails from a family of Righteous Gentiles.

It was, without a doubt, a night to remember, a memory to cherish, an Israeli-made spectacle the likes of which hadn't been seen in the General Assembly since Ambassador Herzog tore apart that Zionism is Racism resolution in 1975. Only this time, it was the other way around: "Why is this night different than all other nights?" an elated and season conscious Prosor asked me, "Because on this night, contrary to all previous nights, the United Nations is united behind Israel and resides under the wings of Rita."

The wings that Prosor was referring to come from Haim Bialik's song "Hachnisini Tahat Knafech" — "Under Your Wing" — a popular Israeli song which was featured in Rita's "Tunes for Peace" concert performed at UN headquarters Tuesday night. The famous platform underneath the giant olive-colored UN symbol was turned into a rock concert stage, including a smoke machine, strobe lights, and a rocking and raucous 9-piece ensemble that played Persian-Israeli music with light touches of Klezmer to boot.

The auditorium, which for most Israelis and Diaspora Jews has come to be associated with harsh anti-Israeli rhetoric, cold diplomatic isolation, and humiliating political defeats at the hands of the "automatic majority," suddenly had a warm ambiance and an admiring audience comprised of Iranian expatriates, Israeli diplomats, UN employees, and representatives of 140 UN delegations who begged their Israeli colleagues for invitations to the show and to the experience.

Prosor came upon the idea for the UN concert when he saw Rita perform in New York in Farsi and in Hebrew seven months ago. He lobbied Ban Ki Moon and Jeremic until he secured their agreement, but then had to ward off countless attempts by UN Secretariat workers to scuttle the concert for fear that "it would set a precedent" or that it would upset other delegations. Having removed the last remaining obstacles, Prosor fixed the date for the concert with Rita after sponsorships had been secured from the LA-based Y&S Nazarian Family Foundation, the Iranian American Jewish Federation of New York, and the UJA Federation of NY.

Ban Ki Moon opened the evening with the word "shalom" and described Rita as "a cultural ambassador". Then came Jeremic, who announced that he would soon be the first sitting President of the General Assembly to visit Israel, during which he will participate in a Yad Vashem ceremony in which members of his grandmother's family in Belgrade would be recognized as "Righteous Among the Gentiles" for saving Jews during the Holocaust.

Then, Introducing Rita, Prosor said "I always hoped that I would one day be the opening act for Rita at a major venue in New York City. Although, I'll admit, I never expected that it would be in the form of the Three Tenors: "Ban, Prosor, and Jeremic."

UN Watch is an independent human rights group founded in 1993 in Geneva, Switzerland, receiving no financial support from any organization or government. Contact UN Watch at briefing@unwatch.org


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BRENNAN NOMINEE FOR CIA DIRECTOR

Posted by Richard H. Shulman, March 06, 2013

Nominated to head the CIA, John Brennan has been Pres. Obama's chief adviser on counter-terrorism. How has Mr. Brennan been doing? Ditto for the President he advises.

1. In the July 2008 edition of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science: Brennan blamed the bad relations between Iran and the U.S on "Iran-bashing."

2. Brennan criticized Pres. Bush for not accepting the now obviously false U.S. National Intelligence Estimate that Iran had ceased its nuclear program in 2003 (Steven J. Rosen, 'Does Brennan's influence at NSC extend to Iran?,' Obama Mideast Monitor, February 28, 2009).

3. In 2009, he defended his and the Administration policy of refusing to refer to use accurate terms such as "Radical Islam" and "Jihad," though Radical Muslims were waging jihad against the U.S. and allies. He said that referring to enemies religiously would make al-Qaeda seem plausible when it falsely accuses the U.S. of warring on Islam. As for jihad, it is a legitimate holy struggle within Islam to purify oneself (Rowan Scarborough, 'Obama at odds with Petraeus doctrine on "Islam,"' Washington Times, July 11, 2010).

4. In August 2009, he said that Hezbollah started out as terrorist, but now its members are in the government and include professionals. Hamas developed extremism, "that, I think, has unfortunately delegitimized it in the eyes of many."

5. Although British intelligence had warned U.S. intelligence about the underwear bomber by name, and so had the man's father, the terrorist was not put on the U.S. no-fly list. The House and Senate Intelligence committees called for Brennan's resignation.

6. The underwear bomber was treated as an ordinary criminal suspect. He was Mirandized and tried in civilian court, instead of in a military one as a enemy combatant. In February 2010, Brennan defended that policy. He also supported trying al-Qaeda operations chief Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in federal court (Joel Gerstein, 'Brennan, unruffled, talks terror at NYU,' Politico, February 28, 2010).

7. In the same speech, he referred to Jerusalem by its Arabic name and then its international name: "In all my travels the city I have come to love most is al-Quds, Jerusalem" ('Counterterror Adviser Defends Jihad as 'Legitimate Tenet of Islam,' Fox News, May 27, 2010).

8. He described violent extremists as victims of "political, economic and social forces" but said that those plotting attacks on the U.S. should not be described in "religious terms" ('Counterterror Adviser Defends Jihad as 'Legitimate Tenet of Islam, Fox News, May 27, 2010).

9. As I reported before, Brennan was in charge when an unindicted co-conspirator, U.S. Hamas official was given a tour of the top-secret National Counterterrorism Center, FBI headquarters and the FBI training academy. The Hamas man joined in singing about violence, being in Hamas, and killing Jews ('National Security Hawks Call for Brennan's Resignation,' Fox News, September 28, 2010).

10. In 2012, Brennan was implicated in a leak that forced the U.S. to withdraw a double agent from al-Qaeda during a counterterrorism operation ('Exclusive: Did White House "spin" tip a covert op?,' Reuters, May 18, 2012). (ZOA press release, 2/1/13).

Bad U.S relations with Iran did not come from Iran-bashing. Khomeini had pretended to be a reformer, but as soon as he got to Iran, he started repressing non-Radicals and seeking to impose Islam upon the world. The U.S. was his chief obstacle, hence he made war on the U.S., mostly by proxy.

The national security assessment whose conclusion declared Iran's nuclear development no longer ongoing, was contradicted by the body of the report. It was obvious at the time that the assessment was made to sabotage U.S. action against Iran. I was wondering why Pres. Bush didn't point that out, declare his policy undisturbed, and fire the subversives who risked U.S. national security.

How qualified is an adviser on terrorism who falls for the minor meaning of jihad and ignores the historical record of its major meaning of holy war by combat, conversion, and propaganda?

What a feeble excuse for ignoring holy war, to worry that jihadists will claim that when we refer to them as following a religious ideology, they will claim we are warring on Islam in general. Mr. Brennan should have realized that one of his prime tasks was to differentiate between Radical Islam and regular Islam. We have rescued regular Muslims from Radical Muslims. Muslims subjected to Radical rule have suffered from it and turned against the Radicals, as in Anbar, Iraq, and in Afghanistan. We need to get their endorsement, possible only if we make clear that we will not occupy their country.

Yes, Hezbollah started as terrorist, but doesn't Mr. Brennan know that it remains terrorist? Hitler and Stalin did likewise. They used terrorism to gain power, and they used power to further terrorize. That is basic history.

Calling terrorists "victims" is upside down. It is a pretext for ignoring their religious motivation. Ignore the enemy motive, and fail to counteract their terrorism. The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) states that a big failure in our combating Islamists is not acknowledging that their extremism stems from their religious interpretation. We want Muslim allies but must recognize which are our enemies. Unfortunately, the Obama Administration still denies this. It refuses to recognize the religious ideology that motivates their war on the U.S.. It hobbles our intelligence agencies about this. In fact, in 2011, the Administration eliminated all references to Islam, after U.S. Radical Muslim organizations protested.

Obama's supporting the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, his nominating John Brennan to head the CIA, his nominating John Kerry the foolish anti-American as Sec. of State, and his nominating Iran's fan, Chuck Hagel as Sec. Defense, and his weakening of the military, the economy, and our civil liberties (dissent to his policies being vital), the Obama Administration is undermining national security.

Richard Shulman is a veteran defender of Israel on several web-based forums. His comments and analyses are a regular feature on Think-Israel. He provides cool information and right-on-target overviews. He distributes his essays by email. To subscribe, write him at ricshulman@aol.com.


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OBAMA WILL NOT BRING GLAD TIDINGS

Posted by Roberta Dzubow, March 06, 2013

The article below was written by Victor Sharpe who is a freelance writer and author of volumes one and two of Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish state. The books may be purchased on line from the publisher www.lulu.com or from www.Amazon.com This article appeared March 05, 2013 in Renew America and is archived at
http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/sharpe/130305

In an, as yet, unconfirmed report appearing in World Tribune, anonymous Israeli sources claim that, "U.S. President Barack Obama has demanded a timetable for an Israeli withdrawal from Judea and Samaria," — the name given to the tiny territory between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea, which has been the ancestral and biblical Jewish heartland for over 3,000 years.

glad tidings

But regrettably and cynically, a hostile world prefers to call it by the name given to it by its Jordanian Arab occupiers, who illegally held it for a mere nineteen years from 1948 when they invaded the territory, expelling its Jewish inhabitants, until 1967 when it was finally liberated by Israel in its defensive Six Day war of June, 1967.

According to sources in the report, "Obama has made it clear to Netanyahu that his visit is not about photo-ops, but the business of Iran and a Palestinian state," a source said. "The implication is that if Israel won't give him something he can work with, then he'll act on his own."

The sources noted that "Obama aides" have stressed that Congress supports the establishment of a Palestinian state as a U.S. priority and the Obama people are making this a litmus test of Netanyahu's leadership and credibility," the Israeli source added. "Obama supporters in Congress have sent Netanyahu a similar message."

This is what I and many others feared was to be the real and sole reason Obama was visiting Israel. And President Shimon Peres, by planning to award President Obama with an Israeli medal, may well be committing an appallingly inappropriate act. But Shimon Peres is not known as Simple Simon for nothing.

The question is, will Netanyahu cave under what may well be Obama's brutal pressure? I, for one, believe so. Notice that Secretary of State, John Kerry, did not visit the Jewish state during his present Mid-East tour but is meeting with the Palestinian Authority's Mahmoud Abbas in Saudi Arabia. Priorities?

Then we just heard Vice President Joe Biden's empty rhetoric, on the Iranian existential nuclear threat to Israel, which he gave at the AIPAC conference, and his insistence and assurance that President Obama, arguably the most anti-Israel president in American history, will support the Jewish state. Heartbreaking was the shameful applause he received from many of the delegates yet with no protests heard. Polite deference is one thing but deafening silence can be as deep as death.

How horribly sad that so few Jewish organizations and leaders in the United States have expressed justifiable outrage at the cold treatment Israel is receiving from this president or with the nomination of the unfriendly Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense.

And there are reports that Obama's CIA nominee, John Brennan, secretly converted to Islam when he was stationed in Saudi Arabia. For far too many Jewish organizations and politicians what matters above all else is the Democrat party, even though it has swung far to the Left and harbors in its midst many with an animus towards the Jewish state. It is deeply tragic that for many Jews and Christians in America, liberalism has become their new religion.

But there still are outstanding Jewish and Christian organizations that remain as principled opponents to the growing anti-Israel hostility which is inveigling itself into both the Obama Administration and the body politic, whether it be the Hagel appointment or the enmity of the anti-Israel president himself. One of the most outstanding supporters of Israel is Morton A. Klein, National President of the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), founded in 1897 and the oldest pro-Israel group in the U.S. He stands in honorable and marked contrast to the Jewish Democrat politicians in the House and Senate.

The Wall Street Journal described the ZOA as "heroic and the most credible advocate for Israel on the American Jewish scene today and we should snap a salute to those who were right about Oslo and Arafat, including Morton Klein who was wise, brave, and unflinchingly honest. When the history of the American Jewish struggle in these years was written, Mr. Klein will emerge as an outsized figure."

Along with the ZOA is, of course, the great work done on behalf of Israel by Americans for a Safe Israel (AFSI) and Christian evangelical organizations like Christians United for Israel (CUFI). Like Morton Klein's organization, they too support the reconstituted Jewish state and promote the Jewish pioneers who are restoring, in the face of great adversity, the ancestral and biblical heartland of Israel, namely Judea and Samaria (again known as the West Bank by all who are ignorant of or who spit in the face of Jewish faith and history).

Meanwhile, only yesterday on Fox News, the previous Israeli Ambassador to the U.S., Dan Gillerman, who is now a Fox News contributor, was upbeat about Obama's March 20, visit to Israel and what he, Gillerman, hoped would be the advent of the "two-state-solution" — what Gillerman seems not to care is that hundreds of thousands of Jewish men, women and children will be driven from their homes in Judea and Samaria and neighborhoods of Jerusalem because the Muslim Arabs will never accept Jews living in what they demand will be their Islamic territory: And if that is not Apartheid, what is?

I have previously written that the "TWO STATE SOLUTION" is a horrible euphemism which may spell the eventual destruction of the Jewish state and the slaughter of its 6 million plus Jewish population. There is a sinister and diabolical similarity between that synonym and the German Nazi euphemism, "THE FINAL SOLUTION" which spelled the murder of 6 million Jews during the Holocaust.

It seems that for so many of us, history teaches us nothing. I pray that I will be proven wrong, but I'm not holding my breath.

Contact Roberta Dzubow by email at Roberta@adgforum.com


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WESTERN REACTION TO ANTI-ISLAM FILM

Posted by Richard H. Shulman, March 06, 2013

Radical Muslims were inciting heir followers to violence, again, shortly before the anti-Islam film, "Innocence of Muslims," was screened. When the film was distributed, the violence was attributed to anger over the film. Some Western governments reacted by trying to punish those associated with the film. These governments disregard the right to free speech.

The film's producer was a Pakistani Muslim, converted to Christianity, and sought asylum in Spain. He already was known for criticizing Islam and for his website, World Without Islam. His work opposes Islam, not just its Radical offshoot.

Mr. Firasat thought that some Islamist riots were over his film, even before it came out. The riots stiffened his resolve to go ahead with it. He felt the answer to Islamist riots is more information about Islam. After he expressed this to a Belgian newspaper, the government of Belgium raised its national security threat level.

The government of Spain challenged his Spanish residency as a danger to national security. It also threatened to prosecute him for violating Spanish hate speech codes. If Spain finds his residency unlawful, he could be deported to Pakistan and execution for blasphemy against Islam. Either the government of Pakistan would execute him or mobs of Muslims would.

He was surprised by the hostility of the Spanish government over the film, because it knew his reputation when it granted him asylum. He has asked Spain to prohibit the Koran in Spain. He gave numerous interviews and articles to the media.

Mr. Firasat is worried about being persecuted by the U.S., too. After all, the U.S. punished Rev. Terry Jones, who distributed the film, for parole violations. This punishment does not seem like coincidence but like a way to punish his free speech without officially stating that as the reason. Pres. Obama told the UN that the "future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam." (Adam Turner, The Blaze, 12/31/12 http://www.meforum.org/3421/imran-firasat-islam-film).

Slander is wrongful. It should be subject to civil suit. But truthful defamation is permissible free speech in the U.S.. For all the criticism of the film, the critics, who want to repress it, have not to my knowledge shown any falsity to it.

What exactly did Pres. Obama mean? Muslims, and he was one, consider any criticism of their religion to be slander. One wonders how much Pres. Obama cares about free speech, as that Constitutional lawyer violates the Constitution and rule of law and has curbed the free speech of doctors? Barack Obama has other anti-American views, too. As the car insurance ad puts it, "Are you in good hands?"

Hate speech laws seem to be an excuse for repressing non-violent people who annoy violent people. Has anybody any examples of hate speech laws enforced against Muslims who really do express hatred against non-Muslims and demand their deaths?

Mr. Firasat wants freedom of the press for himself, but not for people who want to read the Koran.

I endorse his prescription of more information as an answer to riots, until the rioters find they cannot repress us in our own countries. If the film is accurate, then Islam greatly menaces national security. If so, the film is vital to national security.

Other answers to riots are changes in immigration law, law enforcement against rioters, inciters to riot, and conspirators, including deportation.

Richard Shulman is a veteran defender of Israel on several web-based forums. His comments and analyses are a regular feature on Think-Israel. He provides cool information and right-on-target overviews. He distributes his essays by email. To subscribe, write him at ricshulman@aol.com.


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AMERICA' S BILLION DOLLAR GIVE-AWAY TO THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD

Posted by Barbara Sommer, March 06, 2013

The article below was written by Arnold Ahlert who was an op-ed columist with the New York Post for eight years, currently writing for JewishWorldReview.com and FrontPageMag.com. Ahlert can be reached at: atahlert@comcast.net. This article appeared March 05, 2013 on the Right Side News and is archived at
http://www.rightsidenews.com/2013030532118/world/terrorism/obamas-billion-dollar-giveaway-to-the-muslim-brotherhood.html

In the past few weeks, Americans have been subjected to a barrage of doomsday predictions regarding the disaster that would befall us should the sequester come to pass. Many were rightly incensed, then, that last Thursday, only one day before the "devastating" sequester cuts were scheduled to kick in, newly appointed Secretary of State John Kerry announced that the Obama administration will be giving $60 million to a group of Syrian rebels fighting Bashsar Assad.

This hypocrisy was quickly followed up with an announcement on Sunday by Kerry that the administration will be giving Egypt's increasingly anti-democratic Muslim Brotherhood government $250 million in return for promises of economic reform — which will rise to $1 billion if that reform is deemed successful.

Kerry made the first announcement, on Syrian rebel aid, while attending an international conference on Syria in Rome. After asserting that Syrian President Bahsar Assad is "out of time and must be out of power," Kerry revealed that the United States will be sending food rations known as M.R.E.s, as well as medicine to the rebels, via their central military headquarters. American advisors will supervise the distribution. Other countries will send additional aid, and Kerry is convinced the "totality" of that effort will impress Assad.

The rationale behind the funding is that something must be done to counter the extremist rebel factions who have better-organized networks for providing political and humanitarian services to Syrians resisting the Assad regime.

The aid will be given to the Syrian Opposition Coalition, the ostensible counter-weight to the Islamist al-Nusra Front, deemed a terrorist organization by the United States. "We need to help them to be able to deliver basic services and to protect the legitimate institutions of the state," said Kerry. "You have a vulnerable population today that needs to be able to resist the pleas to engage in extremism."

Despite Kerry's announcement, such resistance isn't costing American taxpayers a total of $60 million. That money is earmarked for essential services, such as sanitation and education, in areas currently controlled by rebels. Another $50 million dollars has already been spent providing assistance, such as communications equipment, to activists and local councils. Both amounts are in addition to the $385 million this administration has provided in humanitarian aid to the war-weary Syrian population.

Despite their newfound largesse, some of the rebels were disappointed by the outcome of their meeting with Kerry. "It is obvious that the real support is absent," said Walid al-Bunni, a spokesman for the anti-Assad coalition. Al-Bunni insists weapons are priority number one. "What we want is to stop the Scuds launched on Aleppo, to stop the warplanes that are bombing our towns and villages," he said.

At this point, that isn't going to happen. Britain is supplying the rebels with militarily useful items, such as vehicles, bulletproof vests, and night vision goggles, but neither the U.S. nor the EU has any current intention of arming the rebels, for fear such weapons may end up in the wrong hands. The New York Times reports that the CIA is training Syrian rebels in Jordan, according to an official who wishes to remain anonymous. Yet neither weapons nor ammunition have been given to them either.

Former military intelligence officer and police detective Mike Snopes puts the timing and scope of the $60 million giveaway in proper perspective. "This is an amazing example of Obama's priorities," he contended. "He spouts gloom and doom for the American people many of whom suffer daily due to an awful economic picture, but he spouts hope to Syrian rebels, many of them members of al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups."

Unfortunately, Kerry was only getting warmed up. He more than quadrupled down on Sunday in Egypt. The $250 million given to Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi was based on Morsi's promise to enact economic reforms necessary to procure a $4.8 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). That loan had been agreed to in principle last November, but violent street protests in December drove Cairo to suspend the request, according to Reuters. Yet according to the Washington Post, loan negotiations were set back by Egypt's refusal to raise taxes last year. Complicating the issue even further was a downgrade of Egypt's debt rating by Fitch, who contends the IMF loan is unlikely to happen until Egypt holds its next round of parliamentary elections beginning in April, and running in four stages through June.

Kerry is obviously trying to jumpstart the process. "The United States can and wants to do more," Kerry said in a statement. "Reaching an agreement with the IMF will require further effort on the part of the Egyptian government and broad support for reform by all Egyptians. When Egypt takes the difficult steps to strengthen its economy and build political unity and justice, we will work with our Congress at home on additional support."

The initial $250 million funding will be divided into two parts. First, $190 million is aimed at alleviating what Kerry characterized as Egypt's "extreme needs." It comes from a $450 million package of aid that had been frozen by Congress due to Egypt's instability and U.S. budget concerns. Apparently not enough concern: despite the objections of congressional Republicans disenchanted with Morsi's policies and past statements on Jews, the outlay was approved.

Another $60 million, for the creation of a fund aimed at "direct support to key engines of democratic change in Egypt, including Egypt's entrepreneurs and its young people" brought the total outlay to a quarter of a billion dollars.

Again in the context of the relentless doom-and-gloom campaign surrounding sequestration, such assistance is dubious enough. Yet Americans must also remember that while half the sequestration cuts are being endured by the military, the U.S. is still sending 200 state-of-the-art Abrams tanks and 20 F-16 fighter jets to Egypt as well. Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) attempted to block the deal, originally made in 2009 with then-president Hosni Mubarak, but his amendment was defeated 79-19 in the Senate. Only Republicans voted against the measure.

An Abrams tank costs $4.3 million. An F-16 fighter jet is $45 million. Thus, another $1.760 billion of taxpayer funding has been used to further enhance the Muslim Brotherhood's military capability. Yet when the amendment was defeated, Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) contended the alternative was far worse, including "a loss of thousands of American jobs," and "more than two billion dollars in contract-termination penalties for U.S. taxpayers." In other words, the arming of a nation dominated by Islamists with interests completely inimical to the United States is the "lesser of two evils."

John Kerry's giveaway is even worse because it has occurred despite the fact that Egypt has denied U.S. interrogators access to Abu Ahmed (also known as Mohammed Jamal), the only publicly known suspect tied to the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi. While not suspected of taking part in the attack, Ahmed allegedly established training camps in Eastern Libya for those who did. This is on top of fact that the Muslim Brotherhood, at the first opportunity, moved to crush the Egyptian democracy movement in its cradle by granting the president uncheck authority, and has faced extreme opposition from genuine voices for freedom. The Morsi government has also adopted a Sharia-based constitution, continues to harass its Coptic Christian minority, has paid thugs to sexually assault women protesting in Cairo's Tahrir Square and has reportedly begun to assemble a "morality police" force.

Promising upwards of a billion dollars to such a regime is bad enough in its own context. That the Obama administration is seemingly oblivious to the timing of this announcement, as well as one regarding the Syrian giveaway, borders on surreal. One is left to wonder how the laundry list of calamities we were assured would befall us — including cuts to education, small businesses, food safety, research and innovation, law enforcement, workplace safety, etc., etc., all of which would "threaten thousands of jobs and the economic security of the middle class" — fits in with our subsidizing the ludicrous fiction that so-called Arab Spring has become.

The most obvious answer is that this administration remains confident that few Americans will make the connection. Or, in the event that they do, the same media that invariably rises to defend this administration will do its best to assure the malcontents that such expenditures are "minuscule" in the context of $3.6 trillion dollar annual budget. That would be the same media that took the exact opposite position regarding the 2.4 percent cut in spending engendered by the sequester.

Perhaps someone in the media could ask President Obama to explain his administration's priorities, and why, so soon after warning us that doomsday was at hand, the interests of Islamic totalitarians apparently come ahead of American ones.

Contact Barbara Sommer by email at sommer_1_98@worldnet.at.net Contact Barbara Sommer by email at sommer_1_98@worldnet.at.net


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JEWISH IMAGES IN THE COMICS

Posted by Asaf Romirowsky, March 06, 2013

The article below was written by Frederick Stromberg who is journalist and author, writing mostly about comics. He is the chairman of Seriefrämjandet (the Swedish Comics Association), the editor for Bild & Bubbla and the headmaster for a comics art school. Strömberg started his professional career as a freelance journalist in 1994, and he has since then written for a large number of publications including the Swedish Dagens Nyheter, the Danish Strip!, the Dutch Stripschrift and the American International Journal of Comic Art. He was also one of the driving forces behind the establishment of Seriecenter (the Comics Art Centre) in Malmö and Seriearkivet (the Swedish Comics Archive) in Lund. The article appeared December 12 and is archived at
http://www.romirowsky.com/13023/jewish-images-in-the-comics

Jewish humor and folklore have always been an integral fabric of Jewish survival throughout the centuries, affording the Jewish community another tool to rationalize the environment they found themselves in. A clear testament to this is the amount of Yiddish jokes and idioms that entered the American lexicon at the beginning of the 20th century.

Jewish folktales characters like the golem and the dybbuk were used to showcase the community's challenges and sensibilities. The folklore took on a new spin when it began to appear in the pages of comic books; as most newspapers and ad agencies would not hire Jews and most of the comic book publishers were Jewish, these books became a fertile ground for Jews to get out their message. Consequently, many of the creators of the most famous comic books, such as Superman, Spiderman, X-Men, and Batman, as well as the founders of Mad magazine, were all Jewish. This is illustrated in the TV show Mad Men, set in an ad agency during the 1960s. The Jewish aspect in the show emerged following the hiring of the first Jewish copywriter, named Ginsberg, in Season 4, which caused a great deal of brouhaha. Then of course there was Gregory Peck's masterful portrayal in Gentleman's Agreement of a journalist who goes undercover as a Jew to conduct research for an expose on antisemitism in New York City.

The above serves as the background for why Jews found a natural home in comics. Enter Fredrik Stromberg and his book Jewish Images in the Comics, in which the author traces Jewish history through comics looking at history, culture, antisemitism, the Holocaust, and Israel—all out of the lens of comics. Stromberg defines comics as "juxtaposed images in deliberate sequence." Others, like comic writer William Erwin "Will" Eisner, defined the entire art as "the arrangement of pictures or images and words to narrate a story or dramatize an idea." Both, however, agree that dramatizing and sequence are what tell the story. There is no doubt that much of Jewish history needs to be told, which Stromberg illustrates so well.

Furthermore, the uniqueness of this medium is that it allows the message to cascade without personal offense per se, as Stromberg demonstrates by lining up this historical visual while showing the Jewish values, aspirations, and anxieties that are sometimes deeply encoded in comic book characters.

Antisemitism in all its many forms, from the blood libel and Nazism to Islamism, has embraced cartoons as part of its soft-power campaign to propagate the notion that Jews are demonic and the root cause of all evil in the world. Stromberg here skillfully arranges the cartoons to depict the historical sequence and makes the message vivid and pertinent. From what he has done, it can be seen how antisemitism takes on different forms and continues to arise over and over with radicalizations through religion, genocide, or a combination of both. The identification of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a primary source is significant, because when one wants to track antisemitism, all one has to do is look for references to this pamphlet. Ayatollah Khomeini, Hitler, pre-eminent Islamist intellectual Sayyid Qutb, Arafat, and today Abbas are all graduates of the school of modern antisemitism, where they learned to circulate as many variations of the Protocols.

Despite all the use of cartoons to promote an antisemitic message, Stromberg concludes that he did find that Jewish artists are not any different from other comic artists, but rather an integral part of the long tradition of storytelling that has deep roots in the culture of comics. But above all, the author agrees that Jewish humor has had a tremendous effect on the field at large.

What is so evergreen about comics is that even more so in the age of social media, visuals speak louder than words, so the ability to capture moments and events in history and display them in a few slides carries a great deal of weight—more than any other historical text. Thus, as visual history continues to dominate the way history and culture are seen, it would serve all those who observe Jewish history to note how this history is depicted through eyes of the comic artist.

Asaf Romirowsky is a Middle East researcher. He is an adjunct scholar at the Foundation for Defense for Democracies and the Middle East Forum. Asaf Romirowsky served in the Israel Defense Forces as an international relations liaison officer in the West Bank and Jordan. He holds a BA from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and master's degrees from Villanova University and West Chester University of Pennsylvania. He received his PhD from King's College London. He is the acting executive director of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East. Contact him at list@pundicity.com


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WORRISOME

Posted by Arlene Kushner, March 06, 2013

Nothing concrete to report yet on the coalition, as, again, there are mostly rumors. Based on what I'm reading, however, I confess to a great unease that Lapid sees himself as a reformer upon whom formation of the coalition depends -- and who thus can, with his demands for entry into that coalition, instantaneously restructure much of Israeli society. Whether he's right or wrong on specific issues, I fear a heavy-handed audacity that is only going to tear the society apart.

Not that the haredi parties are behaving in a manner that is going to bring our society cohesiveness, either.

Reports have it that the formation of the coalition is being held up because Lapid demands the foreign ministry and Netanyahu is saying he promised it to Avigdor Lieberman and intends to keep that promise.

~~~~~~~~~~

I hope they were listening:

General James Mattis, head of US Central Command and the top US commander in the Middle East, in a briefing before the Senate Armed Services Committee, said that the current regime of sanctions and diplomatic relations is not working to stop Iran, which is enriching uranium beyond any plausible peaceful purpose.

"I think we have to continue sanctions, but have other options ready," he explained, saying that these other options don't necessarily entail open conflict, but a military operation is "one of the options that I have to have prepared for the president."

~~~~~~~~~~

That's all well and good, except for the fact that the new US secretary of state has just undercut the option of a military operation with his recent remarks. At an ABC News interview in Doha, Qatar, John Kerry said:

"I'm not going to get into red lines and timing publicly except to reiterate what the president has said again and again, which is he prefers to have a diplomatic solution.

"He would like to see the P5+1 process, the negotiation process, be able to work, and avoid any consideration of any military action."

http://www.jta.org/news/article/2013/03/05/3121231/kerry-obama-would-prefer-to-avoid-considering-iran-strike

Excuse me, but the head of the US Central Command said this wasn't working and yet Obama would prefer to continue with the "P5+1 process"?

If you were running Iran, would you be afraid that Obama might order a military hit?

Rhetorical question.

But the fact that Iran's leaders are not afraid of this severely weakens the potential impact of the sanctions and diplomacy. It's not -- agree or else. It's more like -- golly gee, I really want this to work.

Kerry's refusal "to get into red lines and timing publicly" is quite deliberate. But the whole point, which he chooses to evade, is for the Iranians to be informed quite openly that there's a line beyond which their behavior will not be tolerated.

~~~~~~~~~~

I feel positively schizoid as I write this, for Netanyahu's internal political conduct has been making me crazy, and yet I must continue to recognize him as the most forthright of all national leaders on the issue of Iran. Forthright in words, at any rate -- in how he paints the situation; how he will act, remains to be seen.

Netanyahu was supposed to attend the recent AIPAC Conference in Washington, but could not because the coalition is not yet formed. And so, two days ago, he addressed the Conference by audiovisual hook-up. With regard to Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons -- which he maintains will be the first topic of his conversation with President Obama -- he said this:

"...Iran has made it clear that it will continue to defy the will of the international community. Time after time, the world powers have tabled diplomatic proposals to resolve the Iranian nuclear issue peacefully. But diplomacy has not worked. Iran ignores these offers. It is running out the clock. It has used negotiations to buy time to press ahead with its nuclear program.

"...The sanctions have hit the Iranian economy hard. But Iran's leaders grit their teeth and move forward. Iran enriches more and more uranium. It installs faster and faster centrifuges Iran has still not crossed the red line I drew at the United Nations last September. But they are getting closer and closer to that line.

"And they are putting themselves in a position to cross that line very quickly once they decide to do so.

"Ladies and Gentlemen, To prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons, we cannot allow Iran to cross that line. We must stop its nuclear enrichment program before it will be too late. Words alone will not stop Iran. Sanctions alone will not stop Iran. Sanctions must be coupled with a clear and credible military threat if diplomacy and sanctions fail. I deeply appreciate something that President Obama has said repeatedly. And you've just heard Vice President Biden say it again. Israel must always be able to defend itself by itself against any threat to its existence. The Jewish people know the cost of being defenseless against those who would exterminate us. We will never let that happen again...We have our place under the sun. And ladies and gentlemen, we shall defend it."

http://www.algemeiner.com/2013/03/04/full-text-of-netanyahu-speech-to-aipac-2013/

~~~~~~~~~~

An AIPAC panel discussion on the Iranian issue highlighted the serious divisions between Israel and the US on the matter of stopping Iran, divisions often masked by feel-good rhetoric about how both countries want the same thing.

Amos Yadlin, former head of IDF Military Intelligence, said it clearly:

"We all share the same data, the same intelligence. We are also on the same page on the strategic goal to prevent Iran from being nuclear. But between the floor and the ceiling of the problem, there are doors and windows where we're not in the same place. We should be much closer on how to prevent Iran to go nuclear.

"The time is running out in 2013. The difference between the United States and Israel on the question could be summed up by 'three 'T's': a different trauma, a different trigger (this would be the red line), and maybe not enough trust.

"We, the Israelis, come [to the issue] with the Holocaust. We are six million Israeli Jews listening to Ahmadinejad calling for Israel's destruction. You come with a different trauma, Iraq. You don't want another war, understandably.

"But this is not a war, this is a one-night operation, and we should speak about it."

http://www.timesofisrael.com/aipac-panel-hints-at-deep-us-israel-divide-on-iran/

~~~~~~~~~~

One last, important, word on AIPAC. Please read what Daniel Pipes has to say in "When AIPAC went AWOL":

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=3613

~~~~~~~~~~

Yuck! Locusts, some millions that constitute part of the huge swarm that first hit Egypt, have arrived in the Negev. This is the worst infestation in Israel in perhaps 50 years.

locusts

The Ministry of Agriculture made preparations for their arrival, with aerial and land spraying done to minimize the damage to crops.

~~~~~~~~~~

To demonstrate that not everything is worrisome, I'd like to backtrack just a bit and end with something good that happened last Friday: The International Jerusalem Marathon

marathon

The city was shut down, with roads closed to traffic, but the event was one that garnered good will for the city and excellent PR. There were multiple running courses of different lengths -- from professional to amateur -- that were designed to take participants through various historical layers of the city.

Some 20,000 participants joined the run, including people from 52 different countries. The race was won by won by Abraham Kabeto Ketla of Ethiopia, who set a new time.

ethiopia

In the women's division, the winner was Mihiret Anamo Anotonios, also of Ethiopia.

~~~~~~~~~~

Of course, an international event that tracked Jerusalem's Jewish history, and brought considerable good will for the united city's Jewish administration, did not sit well with the PA. The Arabs attempted -- with precious little success -- to get people to withdraw from the marathon and -- with absolutely no success --warned the municipality not to allow participants to run in eastern "occupied" Jerusalem, and definitely not near the Temple Mount, which, they said, belongs only to them.

~~~~~~~~~~

Contact Arlene Kushner at akushner18@gmail.com and visit her website: www.ArlenefromIsrael.info


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GATEKEEPERS CLUB OF LOSERS

Posted by Sergio Hadar Tezza, March 06, 2013

The article below was written by Moshe Dann who is a writer and journalist with a Ph.D. in History who lives in Jerusalem. The article appeared March 01, 2013 in Arutz Sheva and is archived at
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/12953#.VW8qZbyVsWN

If one wants to know how Israel lost the war against Arab Palestinians during the last 3 decades, one might look at the leaders of the Shin Bet (Shabak, ISA).

This period includes the first uprising (Intifada)(1988), the Oslo Accords (1993) which brought the PLO terrorist network to power, gave them territory and an army, terrorist attacks and violent riots that swept through the country during the 1990's, the withdrawal from South Lebanon in 2000 which gave Hizbullah territory and power, the terrorist war launched by Arafat in 2000, the withdrawal from the Gaza Strip 2005 which gave Hamas territory and power, and the ongoing struggle against terrorism, Hamas and Hizbullah.

All of the of the leaders of the Shabak who appear in the film "The Gatekeepers" were in charge during this critical period. All opposed building Jewish communities over the "Green Line," and all backed unilateral withdrawal. No wonder they failed in their mission, not only to prevent terrorist attacks, but to block the establishment of a terrorist infrastructure that was linked to a terrorist state.

One of these "experts" was so incompetent that he allowed PM Rabin to be assassinated; others were clueless as Israeli buses were being blown up. All were actively complicit with characterizing religious Zionists as responsible for Rabin's assassination and those that lived in settlements as "obstacles to peace."

Carmi Gillon's incompetence was so extraordinary that some have suggested that he was involved in a conspiracy to kill PM Rabin.

His successor was not much better. He sent a hit team to assassinate the head of Hamas, Khaled Mashaal, in Jordan, by placing poison in his ear. They succeeded in their task, but someone noted the unusual license plate of their getaway car: it was from the Israeli embassy! This fiasco included reviving Mashaal with an antidote, and the arrest of the Shabak agents who were eventually exchanged for Hamas terrorists.

Ami Ayalon and Avi Dichter who headed the Shabak in 2000 knew or should have known that Arafat had planned and ordered the Second Intifada. Their failure to plan for the wave of terrorist attacks is a bloody testament to their failure.

Meanwhile, a special unit of the Shabak was focused on "Jewish terrorists" and make-believe conspiracies intended to discredit religious Zionists and especially settlers. That unit is still notoriously active and even engages in provocations, like dressing up as Arabs to confront Jews, arresting Jews and ordering long periods of administrative detention and house arrest with little or no evidence of a crime.

As an astute observer of the Israeli scene commented, "The story of the Gatekeepers is the story of the Shin Bet shadow state that would like to replace Israeli democracy with its own oligarchy and return it to the 1950s. Menachem Begin said it should have been abolished. The Shin Bet and its leaders are personally responsible for an untold number of crimes and the fact that this film makes them heroes for peace is just another example of the moral failing and idiocy of this country. "

Israel does not need a secret police, especially not one that is virtually independent, without oversight or control. It is blight on Israeli democracy and principles of open, transparent and responsible government.

Threatened by terrorist attacks, Israel needs an effective security force. Unfortunately, the"Gatekeepers" and its director did not explain or explore this challenge and are therefore responsible for perpetrating the lies and distortions of Israel's enemies.

Sergio Tezza can be reached at Hadar-Israel@verizon.net


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MUSLIMS ASSERT SENSE OF SUPERIORITY IN THE WEST

Posted by Richard H. Shulman, March 06, 2013

Islamists impose their rule in various ways, some by violence, some not. Islamist Watch presents these examples of non-violent methods.

Abusing Welfare to Free Time for Jihad

A Muslim cleric in Britain, Anjem Choudary, urged Muslims to forego jobs and take welfare, so they have time to wage jihad. He set an example, receiving 25,000 pounds for housing, council tax allowance, income support, and child benefits. Bomb plotters and hate preachers in Britain and a suicide bomber in Sweden did likewise.

Proselytizing for Islam at an American Public School

At Terre Haute's Dixie Bee Elementary school, last February 8, Mohammed Alharbi and three students there, all his daughters, distributed religious messages during the school day. They gave the teacher in each room a flower and a card stating that "Mohammed is a Prophet of Mercy" and advising: "Do not defame people lest you make them your enemies."

School administrators permitted this on the grounds that this is a history lesson. [What history in that message?] The school's attorney warned against "viewpoint discrimination."

No viewpoint discrimination? Would a Christian bearing cards about Jesus have been allowed to circulate his propaganda throughout the school?

Remember the case of a woman in a niqab pretending to be a student's mother, taking a girl from a Philadelphia school, and nobody asked for photo ID? Apparently, Americans are afraid to challenge purported Muslims.

Fort Hood Case

Major Nidal Malik Hasan got to the point of mass-murder, after his superiors repeatedly had excused his obvious radicalism. Now survivors complain that the Obama administration has declared the attack just "workplace violence." As a result, they don't get compensation for terrorism-related injuries.

The survivors are suing. Members of Congress are demanding that this episode of jihad be labeled properly.

The Army claims that re-labeling of the incident would complicate their prosecution. Meanwhile, the trial was delayed for months, after Maj. Hasan asserted a religious right to grow a beard for appearance in court.

Islam Really Takes Over British Neighborhoods

It was one thing for long-time Acton neighborhood resident, Jane Kelley, to see the food shops turning halal and the women turning to veils. It was another thing when people gave her unsolicited advice that she should don a veil and when a store sign banned alcohol not only inside but also on the street.

Think that assimilation would resolve all this? No, immigration has mushroomed, so that such communities in London need not interact with non-Muslims. Ms. Kelly will be moving out of London, soon.

Then there is Birmingham, where a priest's wife reports seeing truckloads of illegals, cockfighting, and verbal abuse by immigrants against native Britons. She left that city (David J. Rusin, 2/22/13 http://www.islamist-watch.org/blog/2013/02/iw-news-brief-welfare-jihad-public-school-dawa).

Richard Shulman is a veteran defender of Israel on several web-based forums. His comments and analyses are a regular feature on Think-Israel. He provides cool information and right-on-target overviews. He distributes his essays by email. To subscribe, write him at ricshulman@aol.com.


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THE DIFFERENCE TWO LETTERS MAKE...

Posted by Gerald A. Honigman, March 06, 2013

A friend of mine passed away several years ago who was a great, old fashioned "Liberal." In many ways, many of us could fall into that same category when you really think about it. But things today just ain't what they used to be. For one thing, somehow I just can't see Jews as the new Nazis and Arabs as the new Jews--as too many current "Liberals" proclaim.

I had much affection for this man, and he was one of the folks who joined me when I very reluctantly accepted the request from a leader in my local Jewish community to form a "media watch" committee. I feared the "yenta factor," and sure enough, it bit me on the behind not long afterwards.

Over the years, I had built up a reluctant respect by the local Florida newspaper folks--to the point of having some key editorial staff attending my own presentations on the Middle East. Keep in mind that the paper was like a mini New York Times in those days--so this was no small feat.

Like I had often done earlier with many other editors and media folks when serving as a professional consultant while doing my doctoral studies, the result translated into numerous published, in-depth, op-eds (not "letters") written by myself over the years. This continued until soon after I agreed to form that committee; before long, another member of the committee either accidentally--or accidentally on purpose--gave the editorial brass an excuse to blackball me. The yenta factor...

One of the few good results of forming the committee, however, was meeting my late friend. Marvin used to like to gently remind me that you can catch more flies with honey than you can with vinegar.

Again, I had much affection for this man--but disagreed with him.

No, I'm not an idiot. I don't believe that one should be deliberately impolite or aggressive in promoting or defending one's position. And I never was.

But I also do not believe that one should have to cower or grovel for simply asking for fairness--in the above case, a more balanced reporting by the newspaper powers that be.

To give an example of the problem, the only time the word "barbarism" regarding the Middle East had come out of the paper's editorial staff was when one of its key writers wrote about Israeli checkpoints designed to stop Arab suicide bombers from blowing up more Jewish kids in pizza parlors, night clubs, and the like. "Barbarism Under Israel's Boot" was the title of that particular essay. Think about that for a moment...

The committee carefully monitored and held important meetings with the newspaper brass over the years--and we did see some results. But things only really got better after the old owners lost control to a new team. While there are still some issues, there is more balance in reporting these days for sure--on all issues. And I was more than a bit satisfied when one of the former owners of the paper later bought my book during my author event at the local Barnes and Noble. I gladly personalized his own copy--right after doing so for a Saudi Arabian engineering student at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University as well.

So, what's my point?

Honey should never take the place of honesty. And folks should neither demand nor expect that.

Reasonable people should be able to discuss issues on which they disagree without one expecting the other to grovel in order to be heard or for their cause to be handled in a just manner. Please keep this in mind as we proceed...

A few weeks ago, in some ways my late friend's counterpart, Shimon Peres, apparently decided to pre-empt President Obama's upcoming visit with a bit of honey.

The Israeli leader announced that Obama will be awarded one of Israel's highest honors, the Presidential Medal of Distinction, when Mr. Obama visits in March. The medal recognizes Mr. Obama's "unique and significant contribution to strengthening the state of Israel and the security of its citizens."

Like Peres's frequent derriere-kissing of the late Egyptian ghoul, Yasser Arafat, such sweetness will only be laughed at and used against him--and Israel--later on down the road.

Honesty being sacrificed for the sake of honey...

I will not, of course, reiterate the tens of thousands of words I've already offered on this subject, but suffice it to say that no matter how much military assistance and economic aid any American administration offers to Israel, this will not make up for forcing it to return to the suicidal conditions which existed prior to the June 1967 War.

As I and others have often noted, those conditions only invited repeated attacks by Israel's enemies who still refuse to recognize a state of the Jews in the region--regardless of its size. Additional fighter aircraft, ineffective promises about Iran, the Iron Dome, or whatever cannot make up for Israel not receiving the territorial compromise and buffer that it was promised by the final draft of UNSC Resolution 242.

Given such honesty, no amount of honey will make any difference.

Mr. Obama has likely saved his first presidential visit to Israel to play hardball by forcing it to abandon 242's call for the establishment of more secure and defensible borders (what the settlement issue and building in Jerusalem and the rest of Judea and Samaria are largely all about) to replace the travesty of 1949's United Nations' imposed armistice lines. Earlier American leaders, such as Johnson, Reagan, and Bush II, are on record endorsing 242's promise.

Let's talk tachlis here...brass tacks, the crux of the matter, etc.

One should not be able to both force Jews to return to their ultra-vulnerable, nine to fifteen-mile wide zipper of a state existence and receive the Presidential Medal of Distinction for strengthening the security of Israel's citizens.

Who do folks like my late friend and Israel's Peres think that they are kidding by indulging in such demeaning endeavors and behaviors?

All that occurs is that we lose respect among those who don't and won't expect Israel to prostrate itself and sacrifice its own critical concerns this way.

A 22nd Arab nation--and second, not first, in the original April 25, 1920 Mandate of Palestine (Jordan created in 1922 on almost 80% of the total land) should not be created by grossly endangering the sole resurrected, minuscule state of the Jews. To reasonable minds, this should be a no brainer.

Yet, the above is precisely what both the latter day Arafatians of Abbas and the folks of Hamas have come to expect--especially with the advent of the Obama Administration. Recall that the first phone call Obama made to a foreign leader after his election in 2008 was to Mahmoud Abbas, and that he has repeatedly stated that Israel would be crazy--exact words--to not accept the alleged Saudi Peace Plan--which calls for a total withdrawal of Israel to the '49 Auschwitz/armistice lines.

In just one of too many other nauseating examples of the pitfalls of choosing honey over honesty, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak recently had a chance to sit across a table from the Turkish Foreign Minister, Ahmet Davutoğlu (http://www.todayszaman.com/news-308676-davutoglu-refused-to-shake-hands-with-israels-ehud-barak.html).

And just as Peres was repeatedly played the fool by the Arabs' Arafat, Peres's Lefty soul brother, Barak, looked beyond pathetic pleading for acceptance from none other than a representative of perhaps the biggest hypocrites in the entire Middle East--the Turks. He whimpered because Davutoglu refused to shake his hand.

While I still consider myself a friend of Ataturk's Turkey (which has since been replaced by Islamists), despite its serious, deadly faults, please keep in mind that these are the same Turks who have slaughtered--regardless of whatever excuses may be offered--some two million various non-Turkic peoples over the years in the name of their own national interests. Dare I mention the "A-" words (Armenians and Assyrians)? What's Cyprus all about, anyway? And why are Hamas members considered heroes but PKK members terrorists?

Get my drift?

As Arabs did elsewhere, Turks have outlawed the languages and cultures of other native peoples' (who have lived in Anatolia and adjacent areas long before a Turk ever invaded from Central Asia) in attempts to forcibly Turkify them. They have conquered other peoples' lands and repeatedly take any and all steps deemed necessary to defend Ankara's interests.

The latest official count of the Turkish Statistical Institute published the birth records of its citizens. It showed some twenty-three million Kurds...over a quarter of Turkey's population. Over the years, they have been re-named "Mountain Turks" by their subjugators.

Why no "roadmap" for Kurdistan while Ankara feels free to demand yet additional state for Arabs? All together, there are about forty million truly stateless Kurds in the region...

Imagine if Israel did such things to its Arab citizens. While its record isn't perfect either (what nation's is?), by any objective study, there is simply no comparison between how Kurds are treated in Turkey (and elsewhere) and how Arabs are treated in Israel. Yet, folks like the Turkish Foreign Minister get Jews like Ehud Barak to whine and beg for acceptance.

Disgracefully, when Israel is forced to take measures to defend itself against those who openly declare intent to destroy it, Jews like Peres and Barak feel the need to bend over backwards to appease.

Perhaps even more worrisome, along these same lines, the thinking behind Prime Minister Netanyahu's recent courtship of folks like Tzipi Livni in his coalition-building in the days leading up to President Obama's visit become suspect as well. Like Peres and Barak, Tziporah is also more "flexible" when it comes to issues Team Obama holds dear--like getting Jews to cave to his demands to stay within their 1949 oversized ghetto.

Nations which have fought wars, acquired territories, proclaimed sovereignty, and so forth in and over lands hundreds or thousands of miles away from home have no right to dictate suicidal concessions to Jews.

The Muslim Brotherhood's Egypt, a likely twin replacing Assad's Syria, and so forth are but a few frightening hints at what can be expected down the road.

Given such honesty, shame on those who pressure Israel so unfairly.

In the days which lie ahead--with even more nightmares of the "Arab" Spring," Iran, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and so forth unfolding in this most volatile region of the world (and who knows what will yet become of Iraq)--the gap between honey and honesty goes far beyond a mere two missing letters.

Honey and honesty must both be Israel's guidelines--not one instead of the other.

Gerald A. Honigman is an educator who has done extensive doctoral studies in Mid-East Affairs and has conducted counter-Arab propaganda programs for college youth. He gives lectures and participates in debates around the U.S. Read his new book to be found at http://q4j-middle-east.com.


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FATWAS, SALAFISTS AND MORSI: DESECRATING EGYPT'S ART AND HISTORY

Posted by FSM Security Update, March 07, 2013

The article below was written by Ashraf Ramelah who is founder and president of Voice of the Copts, has recently given testimony to the Canadian Parliament on the revolution taking place in Egypt. The article appeared March 07, 2013 in Family Security Matters and is archived at
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/fatwas-salafists-and-morsi-desecrating-egypts-art-and-history?f=must_reads

morsi

The self-inflicted wounds of an Islamic state begin with words that impound the soul. Issue upon issue upon issue thickens the air and lays heavy on the human spirit suffocating potential. The unpredictability of the fatwa, random and lunatic, holds the populace captive, shackling minds and hearts. This is the terror of state religion.

Often authored on the whim of a solitary, unknown sheik, absurd rulings stand firm and absolute with power to shape and control behavior. These societal taunts when placed on sheets of paper stack up skyscraper tall after centuries of pronouncements.

Generations of Egyptians have suffered impositions and cruel dictates by imams who mine their rough from the deep pits of narcissism and chisel out their next colorful gem for the subjects of Allah to obey. Better the grinding poverty under the pasha's rule of an earlier century than this modern network of Islamists, the Muslim Brotherhood, channeling the religious obliteration of freedom.

Convincing the world of their Goodness and superior contribution to humanity, Egyptian Islamists ask for F-16s and get them. And when Condoleezza Rice in Cairo a few years back suggested that just maybe our aid should be contingent on evidence of human rights, Egyptian President Mubarak knew then he would snuff the idea with his cloak of charm and deceit. With the same purpose in mind, Morsi has now retracted almost every declaration he has made since becoming President -- backing down from his decisions at the least resistance from Copts and human rights advocates in order to demonstrate his democratic bent.

He compromised himself from the beginning and had to base his campaign on falsehoods to support a false premise - I am for democracy. Morsi is a puppet, plain and simple, attached to the Muslim Brotherhood "morshed" or spiritual leader who is principally responsible for his ascendancy to office. This is why Morsi made power grabs to begin with, maneuvers he then had to reverse to maintain the present charade.

The chaos of the day infected by overbearing religious authorities and the governing Muslim Brotherhood now antagonizes Egypt's citizenry into lashing out against Egypt's ancient and modern historical sites. Apparently stirred by religious intolerance against the pyramids in a fatwa calling for their destruction (issued by Salafi Al-Gohari in November 2012), one man was recently arrested for pounding a hammer into the head of the Sphinx.

He didn't act alone. Under Morsi, Muslim-owned TV channels announced a fatwa stating that the pyramids and sphinx are pagan idols and therefore must be demolished. By such instigation, petty aggressive acts are committed with the fervor of religious obedience and larger schemes are never out of the question - a license to run roughshod across the ancient land as if to challenge the spirit world of its dynasties entombed within.

His attempt is laughable until we remember the response to a similar dictate which eventually led to the explosions of the great Buddhas in Afghanistan after the Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated mullah issued the fatwa to destroy them in 2005. Not only were the Buddhas ancient, erected in the sixth century BC, but annihilating them served as a catalyst to ravage all other statues in the country. (Coincidently, by divine order one year later, Egyptian Mufti Ali Gumah heard from Allah on this front and fashioned a fatwa prohibiting Egyptians from having statues in their homes. He later retracted it due to objections by the people and the media.)

Now this is occurring in Egypt where in fact two statues were vandalized this month in cities north and south of Cairo. Each memorial was an important modern figure from the era of King Farouk and rose to fame at a time when Islam's mark on Egypt was a constrained presence vying with the King's penchant for European culture.

One was the representation of Umm Kulthum, a legendary Egyptian singer known worldwide, erected in the city of Al-Mansura which one day suddenly donned a veil covering her face. Photos of the hijabed-statue subsequently distributed by Muslim Brotherhood members testified that after all these years Umm Kulthum's stone image had found religion.

In the city of Minya, the likeness of Taha Hussen, a former dean of Alexandria University and Professor of History as well as Greek and Roman Literature at Cairo University and later Minister of Education in 1950, was less fortunate but just as telling of the vandals. It suffered decapitation.

Call FSM Security Update at info@familysecuritymatters.org


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SEN. MENENDEZ SPEECH AT AIPAC

Posted by Ted Belman, March 07, 2013

The article below was written by Arsen Ostrovsky who is an international human rights lawyer and freelance journalist. He writes for a number of major publications, both in Israel and overseas, on topics including: Arab-Israeli conflict, Middle East foreign policy and national security, international human rights law, Israeli—European relations and various issues relating to the Jewish community, Diaspora and anti-Semitism. He is currently also the Director of Research at The Israeli-Jewish Congress (IJC), an Israeli not-for-profit organization which seeks to strengthen relations between Israel and Jewish communities in Europe, while also combating anti-Semitism and supporting Israel. This article appeared March 06, 2013 in Israpundit and is archived at
http://www.israpundit.com/archives/53332#more-53332

The entire speech was brilliant. But I wanted to highlight a particular section, starting at 31.10 mins in. It is quite possibly the single most passionate, eloquent justification I have ever heard for Israel's existence and the Jewish people's historical and biblical connection to the land of Israel.

This quote was not in his original prepared remarks (I've double checked). He said it on the spot and clearly spoke from the heart. It is not just the words which are important, but also the manner in which he delivered them. I would strongly urge you all to watch.

Full quote above (starts at 31.10 min in the video link below):

http://www.4kmoviesclub.com/signup?b=1&ad_domain=ads.ad-center.com&ad_path=/smart_ad/display&prod=139&ref= 4965521&spid=55707924e152420e748c28d3&seed=4121694324&sf=green_buttons&adserver= 0.16.0-rc1&m=movies&sid=46&bt=1433434408447&bh=3062060798

"While the Shoah has a central role in Israel's identity, it is not the reason behind its founding, and it's not the main justification for its existence. That extreme characterization of that mistaken view is that Western powers established Israel in 1948 based on their own guilt; at the expense of Arab peoples who lived there. Therefore the current state is illegitimate and should be wiped off the face of the map. This flawed argument is not only in defiance of basic humanity dignity, but in plain defiance of history. It is in defiance of ancient history as told in biblical texts and through archaeological evidence. It ignores the history of millennia. Several thousand years of history leads to an undeniable conclusion: the establishment of the State of Israel in modern times is a political reality with roots going back to King David and the time of Abraham and Sarah. The argument for Israel's legitimacy does not depend on what we say in any speech. It has been made by history; it has been made by the men and women who made the desert green; by Nobel prizes earned; by ground-breaking innovations and enviable institutions; by lives saved; by democracy defended; by peace made; by battle won. There can be no denying the Jewish people's legitimate right to live in peace and security in a homeland to which they have a connection for thousands of years."

Ted Belman is a retired lawyer and the Editor of Israpundit. He made aliya from Canada last year and now lives in Jerusalem, Israel. Contact him at tedbel@rogers.com


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THE PARALLEL REALITY OF PROFESSOR ILAN PAPPE

Posted by IAM e-mail, March 07, 2013

Ilan Pappe is a historian and socialist activist. He is a professor in the College of Social Sciences and International Studies at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, director of the university's European Centre for Palestine Studies, and co-director of the Exeter Centre for Ethno-Political Studies. Pappé was born in Haifa, Israel. Prior to coming to the UK, he was a senior lecturer in political science at the University of Haifa (1984—2007) and chair of the Emil Touma Institute for Palestinian and Israeli Studies in Haifa (2000—2008). He is the author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine (2006), The Modern Middle East (2005), A History of Modern Palestine: One Land, Two Peoples (2003), and Britain and the Arab-Israeli Conflict (1988). He was also a leading member of Hadash, and was a candidate on the party list in the 1996 and 1999 Knesset elections. A recent article is archived at
http://israel-academia-monitor.com/index.php?type=large_advic&advice_id=8636&page_data[id]=4338&cookie_lang=en

Editorial Note:

Following the Arab Spring of 2010, the radical left rushed to welcome the long- awaited arrival of democracy in the region. The rejoicing was especially loud as the events were said to finally end the "Arab exceptionalism," a name coined by political scientists puzzled by the fact that Arab countries failed to join the wave of democratization after the end of the Cold War. Indeed, radical scholars were also quick to point out that the new Arab democracies can teach Israel a few things about "real"democratic governance.

As the Arab Spring turned into an Islamist winter, even liberal stalwarts like the New York Times admit that there is little to rejoice. Egypt is convulsed in violence as the Muslim Brotherhood government of Mohammed Morsi has usurped more and more power. In a new move the government banned YouTube. The Salafists in Tunisia instituted a brutal campaign of terror, including the assassination of the leader of the secularist opposition. Christians and homosexuals are being persecuted and killed and there is an alarming rise of violence toward women.

Faced with this reality, most radical faculty fell into silence. However, Ilan Pappe is not deterred. Applying his unique brand of alternative reality -first demonstrated in his writings as a New Historian - to the present, he gushes with enthusiasm about the democracy in the region. To hear Pappe tell it, nothing is wrong with the Arab Spring, and the references to an Islamic Winter are a malicious fabrications of the Israeli propaganda machine. Needles to say, his interpretation of the coming of the new international order are as fanciful (posted below).

Those who marvel at his performance, should be reminded that Pappe, a veteran Communist, has simply adopted practices pioneered by the Soviet Union. As well known, denying reality was key; when things could not be totally denied, accusations that "capitalist," "imperialist" and "Zionist" agents are behind malicious efforts to misrepresent aforesaid events. Although the Soviet Union collapsed, eliminating the propaganda machines and the illusions it spun, Pappe is not expected to follow suit.

Contact IAM e-mail at e-mail@israel-academia-monitor.com


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SYRIAN REBELS IN GOLAN REGION HOLD U.N. PEACEKEEPING TEAM

Posted by Daily Alert, March 07, 2013

The article below was written by Rick Gladstone and Alan Cowell. Gladstone is a reporter and editor, at the foreign desk at New York TimesNew York Times. Since 2008 he has been senior correspondent for NYTimes.com based in Paris. This article appeared March 06, 2013 in the New York Timesand is archived at http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/07/world/europe/syria-developments.html?_r=0

A United Nations vehicle crossed from Syria into Israel on the Golan Heights.
A United Nations vehicle crossed from Syria into Israel on the Golan Heights.

Insurgent fighters from Syria seized a group of United Nations troops on patrol in the disputed Golan Heights region between Syria and Israel on Wednesday and threatened to treat them as prisoners of war, an abrupt escalation in the Syrian conflict that entangled international peacekeepers for the first time.

As the war has worsened, the Golan region has been periodically disrupted by armed clashes and occasional artillery or mortar bombardments that have become a source of concern to Israel. But United Nations officials said that members of the Golan peacekeeping mission, officially known as the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force, had never before been taken by any of the combatants in the conflict.

Josephine Guerrero, a spokeswoman for the department at the United Nations that oversees the Golan operation, said about 20 peacekeepers were detained near an observation post that had been evacuated over the past weekend after what she called "heavy combat in proximity" in the southern part of the area they control. The peacekeepers, in a convoy of trucks, had returned to investigate damage to the post when they were taken by about 30 armed rebels.

A video posted online Wednesday showed a member of the Martyrs of Yarmouk claiming responsibility for the abduction of a group of U.N. peacekeepers
A video posted online Wednesday showed a member of the Martyrs of Yarmouk claiming responsibility for the abduction of a group of U.N. peacekeepers

Ms. Guerrero said that the peacekeeping mission was "dispatching a team to assess the situation and attempt a resolution," and that the Syrian authorities had been asked to help.

She said she had no further information on the insurgents involved or the nationalities of the detainees. But the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition group based in Britain with a network of contacts inside Syria, said they were Filipino, and the Philippine government said Thursday that it had been told by the United Nations that 21 of its peacekeepers were detained.

The government statement said that the peacekeepers were "reported to be unharmed" and that negotiations were under way to secure their release.

A video uploaded on YouTube by a group that identified itself as the Martyrs of Yarmouk claimed responsibility on Wednesday and said the peacekeepers would be held until Syrian government forces withdrew from the area around Al Jamlah, the site of the weekend clashes. The video does not show any of the captives, but United Nations vehicles are visible.

A speaker in the video warns in Arabic: "If the withdrawal does not take place within 24 hours, we will deal with those guys like war prisoners. And praise to God."

The threat underscored the widening risk that the Syria conflict is destabilizing the Middle East, and raised new concerns about the agendas of some Syrian insurgent groups, just as Western nations, including the United States, were grappling over whether to arm them.

The seizure of the peacekeepers was the second serious war-related Syria border problem this week. On Monday, more than 40 Syrian soldiers who had sought temporary safety in Iraq were killed in an ambush as the Iraqi military was transporting them back to the Syrian border. At the United Nations, Eduardo del Buey, a spokesman for Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, suggested that officials had long feared the possibility of harm to the peacekeepers. "As the secretary general has said repeatedly, the spillover effects of the Syrian crisis pose a danger to the region as a whole and to the countries and the areas in the neighboring states around it, and Undof is no exception," he said, using the acronym for the Golan peacekeeping mission. "They are in a zone where the spillover could be of consequence."

Ambassador Vitaly I. Churkin of Russia, which holds the monthly presidency of the Security Council for March, said that members had been briefed about the Golan situation but that he could provide no further information on what precisely had happened. Mr. Churkin, whose government is a main supporter of the Syrian government in the conflict and a strong critic of the armed rebels, urged the captors to release the peacekeepers immediately. "They should stop this very dangerous course of action," he told reporters.

undeployment

Linking the Golan situation to the Iraq killings two days earlier, Mr. Churkin said: "Some people are trying very hard to extend the Syrian conflict. Today there is this incident. This is no man's land between Syria and Israel. Somebody is trying very hard to blow this crisis up."

With a force of 1,011 troops contributed by Austria, Croatia, India and the Philippines, the United Nations observer force in the Golan is responsible for maintaining the fragile calm between Israeli and Syrian troops at the demilitarized zone along Syria's Golan frontier, established after a cease-fire ended the 1973 Arab-Israeli war.

The detention of the peacekeepers came less than a week after Croatia announced it was withdrawing its soldiers from the Golan force, following reports that Croatia was selling weapons funneled to Syrian rebels by Saudi Arabia, a main supporter of the insurgency. The Croatian government denied the reports but said they had put the safety of its peacekeepers at risk. It is unclear which country or countries will replace the departing Croatians.

News of the peacekeepers' seizure came on a day of other precedents in the two-year Syrian conflict, which has left more than 70,000 people dead.

Antigovernment fighters battling military forces in the north-central city of Raqqa, where fighting has raged for days, released a video on YouTube corroborating their earlier claims that they had arrested the provincial governor and the provincial secretary general of President Bashar al-Assad's Baath Party, who activists said were the two highest-ranking Assad loyalists captured so far. The video showed both men seated uncomfortably on an ornate couch, apparently in the governor's palace, surrounded by insurgents.

Also on Wednesday, the United Nations refugee agency in Geneva said the number of Syrians who had fled to neighboring countries surpassed the one million mark, coupling the announcement with a renewed appeal for more aid. "Syria is spiraling towards full-scale disaster," the United Nations high commissioner for refugees, António Guterres, said in a statement.

In Cairo, officials at the Arab League announced that it had formally awarded Syria's seat to the Syrian opposition coalition, a symbolically important step aimed at further disenfranchising Mr. Assad's government. The opposition was asked to send a representative who could occupy the seat provisionally until the formation of a new Syrian government. How soon such a representative could be chosen, however, remained unclear. The opposition coalition, representing a broad array of anti-Assad groups, has continually postponed decisions like choosing a provisional prime minister.

In London, Foreign Secretary William Hague said Wednesday that Britain was prepared to supply armored all-terrain vehicles, body armor and other "nonlethal military equipment" to the Syrian opposition, apparently nudging his government's support for the rebels beyond the food and medical supplies pledged last week by the United States.

"Diplomacy is taking far too long," Mr. Hague said, stressing that the promised new support was designed to protect civilian foes of Mr. Assad, not to arm rebel soldiers. "Each month of violence in Syria means more death, wider destruction, larger numbers of refugees and bloodier military confrontation," Mr. Hague told Parliament.

Reporting was contributed by Hania Mourtada from Beirut, Lebanon; David D. Kirkpatrick from Cairo; Nick Cumming-Bruce from Geneva; and Liam Stack from New York.


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"HAGGADAH FOR J STREET FOLLOWERS

Posted by Philly AFSI, March 07, 2013

The article below was written by Moshe Phillips who is a member of the executive committee of the Philadelphia Chapter of Americans for a Safe Israel / AFSI. The chapter's website is at: www. phillyafsi. com and Moshe's blog can be found at phillyafsi. blogtownhall. com. This article appeared March 07, 2013 in Arutz Sheva and is archived at
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/12979#.VXCSMryVsWM

On one hand, there stand the ancient rabbis who compiled the Haggadah with its multilayered sophistication and overwhelmingly positive, energetic, highly visible and impactful style, that has served as a key to the puzzle of how to actively engage Jews and their children.

On the other hand, there stands Edgar Bronfman, Sr. and the fans of his radical, new Haggadah. The heir to the Seagram's fortune and president of the World Jewish Congress for well over 25 years did not rise to his position in the WJC due to his Jewish scholarship, his self-sacrifice on behalf of Jewish causes or his piety and adherence to Jewish observance -- he brought none of these things to the table. Bronfman was asked to lead the WJC because of his immense personal wealth.

Now he has produced a new Haggadah for himself and other American Jews who rush to criticize how Israel defends itself against its enemies. One Bronfman fan of the Haggadah is Rabbi Arthur Green.

Green is listed by as an Advisory Council member of J Street, the controversial and George Soros funded Jewish pressure group that was created to lobby for a Palestinian state. Green is a former dean of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College (RRC) and was a prominent member of Breira. J Street is a direct descendant of Breira which itself was a 1970s effort by the radical left to erode popular support for Israeli policies in the American Jewish community.

"The beautifully produced Bronfman Haggadah is a daring and creative re-reading of the traditional text," Green says. Green is the author of "Radical Judaism: Rethinking G-d and Tradition", but he and Bronfman are obviously not just in favor of "rethinking" the Haggadah, but fully destroying the goals of its original writers.

Bronfman rewrites the standard, family favorite "Dayenu" song stating "And if we deliver peace between ourselves, the Palestinians, and our Arab neighbors ... that will be enough!"

He concludes his work with such statements as "commit ourselves to supporting every idea, every effort, and every carefully crafted plan that seeks to lead Palestinians and Israelis, Jews and Arabs—indeed all of the world's clashing people—out of the dark and narrow straits of fear and violence, out of the strictures of hatred and war, and into the spiritual Jerusalem—the true Promised Land—an open and peaceful place flowing with the milk and honey of justice, compassion, and freedom for all."

Bronfman casts Jews and their Arab enemies as morally equivalent.

Green has also said about Bronfman's book that it "is a daring and creative re-reading of the traditional text. It will make for a seder like you never had before, and is sure to cause lots of questioning and discussion."

Yes, "a seder like you never had before" - because it is an abrupt break with Jewish tradition.

Even after a very quick read through of the ancient text of Haggadah, it should be plain to see that a more pro-Israel, pro-Zionist and Pro-Jerusalem group of authors was never assembled than the anonymous rabbis of antiquity responsible for the original, classic guide to the Passover Seder. The passion of these ancient rabbis for the rebuilding of the Holy Temple permeates the work.

Let's pause for a moment and take a look at the "political" views of the Haggadah, in contrast to Bronfman's ideas.

There is much more here than just "Let My People Go!" and "Next Year in Jerusalem!"

The tragedy here is that far too many Jews miss the "political" ideas embedded inthe Haggadah in the rush to get to the meal or because they using Haggadahs that break with the traditional text and ideas such as Bronfman's.

What are these ideas?

Anti-Semitism exists and yet the People of Israel survive:

"For not just one alone has risen against us to destroy us, but in every generation they rise against us to destroy us; and the Holy One, blessed be He, saves us from their hand!"

Jerusalem is holy to the G-d of Israel and is under His Divine protection:

"And with an outstretched arm," this refers to the sword, as it is said: "His sword was drawn, in his hand, stretched out over Jerusalem."

The climax of the Exodus story is the construction of the Holy Temple in Jerusalem:

"If He had brought us into the land of Israel, and had not built for us the Beit Habechirah (Chosen House; the Beit Hamikdash i.e. the Holy Temple) Dayenu, it would have sufficed us!"

The central importance of the Holy Temple in the Passover story and in Judaism must never be forgotten:

Thus did Hillel do at the time of the Bet HaMikdash: He would combine the Passover lamb, Matzah and Maror and eat them together, as it said: "They shall eat it with Matzah and bitter herbs."

The nexus of the City of Jerusalem, the Holy Temple and the Kingdom of Israel in Judaism must never be forgotten:

"Have mercy, L-rd, our G-d, upon IsraelYour people, upon Jerusalem Your city, upon Zion the abode of Your glory, upon the kingship of the house of David Your anointed, and upon the great and holy House which is called by Your Name."

Jerusalem will be fully rebuilt:

"Rebuild Jerusalem the holy city speedily in our days. Blessed are You, L-rd, who in His mercy rebuilds Jerusalem. Amen".

G-d has indicated just one place on earth forthe construction of His Holy Temple:

"I will pay my vows to the L-rd in the presence of all His people, in the courtyards of the House ofthe L-rd, in the midst of Jerusalem".

The future of Jerusalem belongs to the Jewish People:

"Next Year in Jerusalem!"

Just in case the essential lessons of the evening were not clear enough the Adir Hu song is sung towards the very end of theevening to remind everyone:

May He soon rebuild His House [the Holy Temple in Jerusalem]

Speedily, speedily and in our days, soon

G-d, rebuild! G-d, rebuild!

Rebuild your house soon!

One is left to wonder which epithets the J Street crowd and their ilk would hurl at the authors of the Haggadah if they published it our time: Racists, Extremists, Far-Rightists, Militants, Religious Extremists...

That an emphasis on the authentic Jewish ideas of the Haggadah has been lost should really come as no surprise. After all, the authentic Jewish political concepts handed down in the Tanach (the Jewish Bible) remain unknown to most contemporary Jews -- an even greater tragedy with far more powerful side effects.

How did this happen? How did the Jewish people become so indifferent to the eternal "political" lessons the rabbis sought to have taught to every generation that a Bronfman Haggadah could be published and there is no outcry?

There is no easy answer.

Some of the blame must fall on the radical left. Since the 1960s segments of the American Jewish left, many of whom had a firm hand in influencing the initiation of J Street, such as Arthur Waskow and Tikkun Magazine's Michael Lerner, have perverted the seder. For decades they linked Passover to civil rights, South Africa, nuclear freeze, feminism and most appallingly to the mythical "Palestinian People."

What would the ancient Rabbis responsible for the Haggadah think Bronfman's heresy? Of the Obama Administration's policies toward Israel and Jerusalem? What would they tell J Street?

The Rabbis response is in the Haggadah.

Contact Philly AFSI at phillyafsi@gmail.com


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REPUBLICANS PLAYING OBAMA'S 2014 ENDGAME

Posted by The Patriot Post, March 07, 2013

The article below was written by Mark Alexander who is Executive Editor and Publisher of The Patriot Post the Web's "Voice of Essential Liberty". His strong academic vitae in constitutional government and policy combined with his real-world occupational experience ensure his contributions as an essayist and analyst reflect the grassroots conservatism of the heartland, rather than the ubiquitous Beltway news and opinion. This article appeared March 07, 2013 in the Patriot Post and is archived at
http://patriotpost.us/alexander/17100

"Necessity, especially in politics, often occasions false hopes, false reasonings and a system of measures, correspondently erroneous." —Alexander Hamilton (Federalist No. 35)

Ahead of the implementation of sequestration on March 1st, I provided Beltway Republicans and pundits with a comprehensive analysis of Obama's sequestration strategy and objective under the title, "Obama's 'Republican Sequester' Setup." Unfortunately, Republican "leaders" have yet to comprehend how they have been set up to fall.

Shhhh! They are asleep!

Yes, most Republicans and conservative analysts recognize that for Obama, politics always trumps people, so the focus of his never-ending campaign is now the 2014 midterm election, which will determine, in large measure, his second-term legacy. But they're still unwitting pawns in Obama's sequestration game.

Republican and columnists have devoted endless airtime and print to how sequestration was Obama's idea, how small the sequester cuts are compared to the budget and deficits, how overstated Obama's dire economic warnings have been, and how Obama's sequestration cuts in defense are grossly disproportionate.

These politicos and pundits are right on all counts, but they're so focused on tactics that they've completely missed Obama's macro sequestration strategy — and have done so at great peril to the future of Liberty. While they acknowledge that Obama is intent on winning a socialist Democrat House majority in 2014, none have connected the dots on the role of sequestration in that strategy — and it is a leading part.

While I offer below a few tangible examples of how Republicans should respond to Obama's high profile cuts in services and personnel "mandated by the Republican sequester," let me first lay out Obama's 2014 strategy again and see if it can break through the Beltway gauntlet against grassroots solutions.

1. Despite feigning dramatic opposition to the "Republican sequester" in his national "Chicken Little" tour, both Obama and his congressional Democrats wanted sequestration to occur as it is key to their strategy to use it as a noose to hang Republicans ahead of the 2014 midterm elections. To ensure the implementation of the "Republican sequester," Obama made Republicans an offer — more taxes and no spending cuts — that they could only refuse. If there remains any doubt that Obama intends to hang Republicans with this strategy, just consider an internal memo picked up by the Washington Times this week, in reply to an agency director who inquired about spreading sequester cuts to lessen their impact. The White House response: "However you manage that reduction, you need to make sure you are not contradicting what we said the impact would be."

2. Now that sequestration has been implemented, Obama and his NeoCom cadres will blame the "Republican Sequester" for any and all economic, national security and social ills near term. Obama knows that the net effect of his January $150 billion payroll and income tax hikes, on top of $489 billion in defense cuts already enacted, and estimates that ObamaCare premiums and taxes will add up to more than $500 billion, is a formula for sustained economic recession. Thus, from sequester forth, every negative economic GDP or jobs report, which in reality demonstrates the planned failure of Obama's socialist "recovery stimuli," will be blamed on the "Republican Sequester."

3. Though Obama dramatically overstated the immediate effect of sequester, that exaggeration was intentional. It got the attention of all of his most reliable government plantation constituents, and tens of millions of others who are in any measure dependent on the government for their welfare or income. In the coming weeks and months, when the burden of Obama's massive tax increases and continued unabated accumulation of debt shows up in poor economic reports, his constituents won't remember the pre-sequester hyperbole. They will only recall that he warned the nation about the terrible "Republican sequester." And when Obama employs his classist "politics of disparity" playbook to blame sequester "cuts" for every runny nose in America, with the full support of his public relations network, the Leftmedia and their MSM propaganda machinery, he may well lay the foundation for substantial Democrat victories in 2014.

Thus, Obama's strategic objective is the evisceration of what's left of the Republican Party in order that his Socialist Democratic Party can control the Executive and Legislative branches, and most of the Judicial branch, effectively rendering the constitutional pretense of checks and balances null and void. That one-party control is a necessary component of his macro political strategy — breaking the back of free enterprise under the weight of increased taxes, regulations and trillion-dollar annual deficits, and "fundamentally transforming the United States of America."

The Blame Shift Game

For the record, I also warned Republicans that before last Friday's meeting with Obama, he would use it "to tell the nation Friday afternoon that the Democrats did their best to avert the economic trauma caused by the 'Republican sequester.'" (No doubt he will use the follow-up meeting this week for the same purpose.)

Indeed, that afternoon, Obama called a press conference and cemented his sequester strategy.

Obama: "As you know, I just met with leaders of both parties to discuss a way forward in light of the severe budget cuts that start to take effect today. I told them these cuts will hurt our economy. They will cost us jobs. All of this will cause a ripple effect throughout our economy. It's happening because of a choice that Republicans in Congress have made. They've allowed these cuts to happen because they decided to protect special interest tax breaks for the well-off and well-connected, and they think that that's apparently more important than protecting our military or middle-class families from the pain of these cuts."

Obama softened the hyperbole: "Now, what is absolutely true is that not everybody is going to feel it. Not everybody is going to feel it all at once. ... That is real. That's not — we're not making that up. That's not a scare tactic, that's a fact."

Then Obama set up his 2014 slam dunk: "Even though most people agree that I'm being reasonable; that most people agree I'm presenting a fair deal; the fact that [Republicans] don't take [the sequester deal] means that I should somehow do a Jedi mind-meld with these folks and convince them to do what's right. ... The majority of the American people agree with me, including a majority of Republicans. We just need Republicans in Congress to catch up with their own party and their country on this [when] members of Congress start hearing from constituents who are being negatively impacted, as we start seeing the impact that the sequester is having. ... What I can't do is force Congress to do the right thing. The American people may have the capacity to do that."

In other words, between now and the 2014 midterm election, he will blame the "Republican sequester" for everything that might otherwise be blamed on his own planned economic policy failures, in order to crush Republicans ahead of that election.

Obama's 2014 objective was aptly summarized by The Washington Post this week, which noted that Obama is "executing plans to win back the House in 2014, which he and his advisers believe will be crucial to the outcome of his second term and to his legacy as president. The goal is to flip the Republican-held House back to Democratic control, allowing Obama to push forward with a progressive agenda on gun control, immigration, climate change and the economy during his final two years in office, according to congressional Democrats, strategists and others familiar with Obama's thinking."

The National Debt Clock

So what should House Speaker John Boehner and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell do?

First, short of resigning in disgrace for dereliction of duty, they should get their heads out of their, uh, I mean shake off that Potomac fever and stop playing Obama's game. Call out his sequester strategy and hang it around HIS neck. Obama's strategy can backfire on him, but only if Republicans start lighting their own brushfires. Thus far, Boehner and McConnell seem lost in Obama's smoke.

Republicans had better get those brushfires burning in order to obtain political high ground ahead of the Continuing Resolution renewal due March 27, and the debt ceiling debate that will follow. The House has already approved a measure to fund government operations through the end of fiscal 2013 — 267 to 151 with Democrats voting against — but forcing a "Republican government shutdown" may be part two of Obama's 2014 strategy — if he thinks he can get away with it.

In both cases, Obama is counting on negative economic news to support his position for more taxes, spending and debt.

In the meantime, Republicans and conservative commentators should go for the throat of Obama's strategy blaming "Republican sequester" for high profile cuts, like suspending White House tours — which, by the way, are conducted by volunteers.

Republicans and pundits should hit all the sequester softballs Obama is throwing their way, out of the park!

For example, Obama's civilian budgeteers at DoD have cancelled all high profile appearances of military precision flying teams at air show events for the remainder of 2013. Fact is, those events are key recruiting tools for the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corp, and every hour of flight is a training hour for the pilots.

In response, Republicans should very publicly demand that Obama cancel all political and recreational junkets on Air Force One. Every time Obama and Michelle LaVaughn, and their entourage, jet around the nation and world for political junkets and exotic vacations — they do so at enormous expense to taxpayers and Air Force resources. He condemns corporate executives for using private aircraft, while he has frivolously used one of DoD's most expensive military assets, Air Force One ($228,288 per flight hour), with the added and much larger expense of all the backup aircraft, Air Force cargo planes airlifting limousines and support vehicles, helicopters, security and support personnel, and their political entourage, all with first class accommodations.

Of course the quick rebut is, "Bush did too," and for the record, I have always objected to presidents of ANY party wasting tax dollars for vacations and political junkets. However, Obama has used these assets more than any president, all the while spewing his class warfare rhetoric against the one-percenters. Writing about the opulence of the Obama administration in "Presidential Perks Gone Royal," author Robert Keith Gray notes that $1.4 billion in taxpayer funds was spent on the Obamas last year, including "the biggest staff in history at the highest wages ever" and Air Force One "running with the frequency of a scheduled air line." Notably, all of the support costs for travel are not included in that $1.4 billion.

It's time to sequester Air Force One! Additionally Congress should demand that all senior administration officials use commercial transportation for official business rather than the large expensive fleet Boeing executive jets. All savings should be reallocate as offset sequester cuts to vital national security operations.

If Obama really wants to impress America with painful sequester cuts, he should start by canceling vacations and Demo-stumping events on the world's biggest political platform, Air Force One.

Oh, and Republicans might also want to mention that Obama's record 20 percent first term increase in government spending dumped more than $6 trillion in debt on the backs of our children and our grandchildren, but that the $253.5 billion increase in national debt in February alone is nearly SIX TIMES the total $44 billion fiscal 2013 sequestration cuts.

Just saying...

PS: This just in from Obama's Deputy Press Secretary Josh Earnest: "We are certainly concerned — I think you could even say, very concerned, about...Republicans in Congress, who repeatedly are throwing up obstacles to a recovery that's starting to gain traction." Stay tuned for more...

Contact the Patriot Post at no-reply@patriotpost.us


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THE NEW HOLOCAUST DISCOVERIES

Posted by GWY123, March 07, 2013

The article below was written by Rabbi Benjamin Blech who is an internationally recognized educator, religious leader, author, and lecturer. Rabbi Blech is the author of twelve highly acclaimed and best selling books, In a national survey, (www.jewsweek.com) Rabbi Blech was ranked #16 in a listing of the 50 most influential Jews in America. He is a frequent lecturer in Jewish communities as far-flung as Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, Bangkok, Singapore, Hong Kong, Tokyo and Israel. Closer to home, he has served as Scholar-in-Residence at hundreds of synagogues throughout the United States and Canada and been active on behalf of countless Jewish causes. This article appeared in the Aish.com and is archived at
http://www.aish.com/ci/s/The-New-Holocaust-Discoveries.html

With more than 42,000 ghettos and concentration camps scattered throughout Europe, almost everyone had to know what was happening.

The latest revelation about the Holocaust stuns even the scholars who thought they already knew everything about the horrific details of Germany's program of genocide against the Jewish people.

It's taken more than 70 years to finally know the full facts. And what is almost beyond belief is that what really happened goes far beyond what anyone could ever have imagined.

For the longest time we have spoken of the tragedy of 6 million Jews. It was a number that represented the closest approximation we could come to the victims of Hitler's plan for a Final Solution. Those who sought to diminish the tragedy claimed 6 million was a gross exaggeration. Others went further and denied the historicity of the Holocaust itself, absurdly claiming the Jews fabricated their extermination to gain sympathy for the Zionist cause.

But now we know the truth.

The reality was much worse than whatever we imagined.

It wasn't just the huge killing centers whose very names — Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau, Majdanek, Belzec, Ravensbruck, Sobibar, Treblinka — bring to mind the ghastly images by now so familiar to us. It wasn't just the Warsaw ghetto. It wasn't just the famous sites we've all by now heard of that deservedly live on in everlasting infamy.

Researchers at United States Holocaust Memorial Museum have just released documentation that astounds even the most informed scholars steeped in the previously known statistics of German atrocities. Here is some of what has now been conclusively discovered:

  • There were more than 42,500 Nazi ghettos and camps throughout Europe from 1933 to 1945.
  • There were 30,000 slave labor camps; 1,150 Jewish ghettos; 980 concentration camps; 1000 prisoner of war camps; 500 brothels filled with sex slaves; and thousands of other camps used for euthanizing the elderly and infirm, performing forced abortions, "Germanizing" prisoners or transporting victims to killing centers.

  • The best estimate using current information available is 15to 20 million people who died or were imprisoned in sites controlled by the Germans throughout the European continent.

Simply put, in the words of Hartmut Berghoff, Director of the German Historical Institute in Washington, "The numbers are so much higher than what we originally thought; we knew before how horrible life in the camps and ghettos was, but the actual numbers are unbelievable."

And what makes this revelation so important is that it forces us to acknowledge a crucial truth about the Holocaust that many people have tried to ignore or to minimize — a truth that has profound contemporary significance: The unspeakable crime of the 20th century, more than the triumph of evil, was the sin of the "innocent" bystander.

For years our efforts to understand the Holocaust focused on the perpetrators. We looked for explanations for the madness of Mengele, the obsessive hatred of Hitler, the impassive cruelty of Eichmann. We sought answers to how it was possible for the criminal elements, the sadists and the mentally unbalanced to achieve the kind of power that made the mass killings feasible.

That was because we had no idea of the real extent of the horror. With more than 42,000 ghettos and concentration camps scattered throughout the length and breadth of a supposedly civilized continent, there's no longer any way to avoid the obvious conclusion. The cultured, the educated, the enlightened, the liberal, the refined, the sophisticated, the urbane — all of them share in the shame of a world that lost its moral compass and willingly acceded to the victory of evil.

"We had no idea what was happening" needs to be clearly identified as "the great lie" of the years of Nazi power. The harsh truth is that almost everyone had to know. The numbers negate the possibility for collective ignorance. And still the killings did not stop, the torture did not cease, the concentration camps were not closed, the crematoria continued their barbaric task.

The "decent" people were somehow able to rationalize their silence.

Just last year Mary Fulbrook, a distinguished scholar of German history, in "A Small Town Near Auschwitz "wrote a richly and painfully detailed examination of those Germans who, after the war, successfully cast themselves in the role of innocent bystanders.

"These people have almost entirely escaped the familiar net of 'perpetrators, victims and bystanders'; yet they were functionally crucial to the eventual possibility of implementing policies of mass murder. They may not have intended or wanted to contribute to this outcome; but, without their attitudes, mentalities, and actions, it would have been virtually impossible for murder on this scale to have taken place in the way that it did. The concepts of perpetrator and bystander need to be amended, expanded, rendered more complex, as our attention and focus shifts to those involved in upholding an ultimately murderous system."

Mary Fulbrook singled out for censure those who lived near Auschwitz. But that was before we learned that Auschwitz was replicated many thousands of times over throughout the continent in ways that could not have gone unnoticed by major parts of the populace. Millions of people were witnesses to small towns like Auschwitz in their own backyards.

And so Elie Wiesel of course was right. The insight that most powerfully needs to be grasped when we reflect upon the Holocaust's message must be that, "The opposite of love is not hate, it's indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it's indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it's indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it's indifference."

That remains our greatest challenge today. If we dare to hope for the survival of civilization we had better pray that the pessimists are wrong when they claim that the only thing we learn from history is that mankind never learns from history.

Contact 123@aol.com at GWY123@aol.com


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OF ALL US AL QAEDA LINKED TERRORIST ATTACKS 54% WERE AMERICAN CITIZENS

Posted by Dr. Richard Swier, March 07, 2013

attacks

A new report by the Henry Jackson Society reveals that the Islamist terrorist threat comes significantly from within the United States, not just from without.

According to the new report, Al-Qaeda in the United States, of the 171 al-Qaeda or al-Qaeda-inspired terrorists who either committed acts of suicide terrorism in the U.S. or were convicted in U.S. civilian or military courts from 1997 to 2011, 54% were American citizens, and more than a third were born in the United States.

The researchers found, "Among those residing in the U.S., the state of New York featured most prominently, with 14% of individuals living there. Outside of New York, the two most common states of residence were Florida (11%) and New Jersey (9%)."

Two of the three most common states — Florida and New Jersey — were the place of residence for a significantly high amount of non-U.S. born individuals (18% and 14% respectively). Conversely, the most common state, New York, had a higher proportion of U.S. born AQRO perpetrators residing there than non-U.S. born individuals.

"Moreover, 36% of all individuals were U.S. born, indicating that these were citizens who had grown up in the U.S. rather than having moved there later in life. Therefore, this statistic dispels the myth that the terrorist threat is primarily external."

The conclusions include:

  • The majority of individuals who committed AQROs were young, educated men. 57% of perpetrators were aged under 30, and were most likely to have been aged between 20 and 24 years (33% of perpetrators). A total of eight women (5%) were convicted of AQROs between 1997 and 2011, two for their roles supporting their partners in the commission of AQROs.
  • Of all 171 individuals responsible for AQROs, nearly a quarter (23%) were known converts to Islam. As a proportion of their overall involvement, converts committed more AQROs than non-converts in eight of the fifteen years studied.
  • Of offenses committed by religious converts, 31% were by Active Participants, compared to 39% of offenses committed by non-religious converts.
  • The vast majority (97%) of the 155 AQROs that have led to successful convictions (the total of 174 AQROs excluding the nineteen suicide hijackers from September 11, 2001) were prosecuted in federal courts. 3% of all convictions have taken place in a military court. Nearly two thirds (65%) of those convicted of AQROs pleaded guilty, and the single most common category was a sentence of between 10 and 14 years.
  • Nearly half (47%) of those who committed AQROs attended training camps for terrorist purposes. Of those who received training, the most popular location was Afghanistan (68% of those who trained did so here), followed by Pakistan (29%). Therefore, 97% of individuals who had received terrorist training had trained in either Afghanistan, Pakistan, or both.

The article above was written by Dr. Richard Swier who is Publisher of www.DrRichSwier e-Magazine. He holds a Doctorate of Education from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, CA, a Master's Degree in Management Information Systems from the George Washington University, Washington, D.C., and a Bachelor's Degree in Fine Arts from Washington University, St. Louis, MO. Richard is a 23-year Army veteran who retired as a Lieutenant Colonel in 1990. He was awarded the Legion of Merit for his years of service. This article appeared March 07, 2013 in Watchdogwire and is archived at
http://watchdogwire.com/florida/2013/03/07/of-all-us-al-qaeda-linked-terrorist-attacks-54-were-american-citizens/


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EGYPT VS. ITS COPTS: HOW JIHAD OPERATES THERE

Posted by Richard H. Shulman, March 07, 2013

Americans take their major news media seriously. Big mistake. They think they know what's going on, but their awareness is boxed in by presenters' bias. So they don't realize that jihad is global, how it operates, and how much help it gets from the West.

They see some reports of violence, but the media, as for example the New York Times presents it as a "clash" between two groups, rather than as the usual Islamist aggression. Where does the violence come from? No clue for those who've heard of Islam as a religion of peace.

Jihad is mostly underground and subversive in Western countries. Radical Muslims make public statements that are moderate for Western ears and incendiary to their followers. Some Westerners excuse the extreme statements as mere political rhetoric. But since the followers riot, murder, and make war as a result, judge those Radical Muslims by what they tell their followers. What they tell us is mere P.R...

It doesn't take much to deceive supposedly educated Westerners, especially European ones whose culture is antisemitic. Britain, France, and the U.S. have appointed Islamist leaders to advise them on how to combat Radical Islam. No kidding! Universities fill U.S.-government supported Middle East Studies centers with jihadists and far leftist sympathizers. (What's that about the federal government solving America's problems?) President Obama appoints Radical Muslims to represent our country. He also pulls them into his administration's less publicized important posts, and appoints fellow travelers such as Kerry, Hagel, and Brennan, for whom naivety and ignorance and perhaps anti-Americanism seem to be their main qualifications.

President Obama helped push Mubarak out of the way of the Islamists. Then he pretended that Islamist demagogic popularity was democratic, rather than the prelude to crushing democratic tendencies. When the new President Morsi made conciliatory statements, Western media and politicians believed he was moderate. But he was gaining time to fasten further control. Israel, whose intelligence agencies are reputed to know what is going on, felt or acted as if Morsi were going to honor the peace treaty with Israel. Upon discovering antisemitic speeches of Morsi, the West was shocked. It didn't know how thoroughly rabid the Muslim Brotherhood is, nor how deceitful. The West still doesn't question the wisdom of its leaders, the ability of its intelligence agencies, and the media's failure to explain what is going on. Information should direct government and popular ideology and politics, but ideology and politics direct the media.

Everywhere jihadists indoctrinate in religious intolerance. In Muslim countries not yet Islamist, other religions are repressed and somewhat persecuted. That is the Islamic basis which Radical Islam carries further. When Islamists take over, the government becomes more totalitarian. Radical Muslims feel more encouraged to attack Christians and other minorities.

In Egypt, the government not only is arrogating more and more totalitarian power to itself, it and its media carry out jihad against its millions of remaining Christians, as explained in the summary below of an article by (Raymond Ibrahim, Gatestone Institute, 11/2/12 http://www.meforum.org/3376/egypt-christian-copts).

In Egypt, the media libels the Copts, while the President lies about protecting them. Mr. Ibrahim cites an example of two Christian boys arrested for allegedly blaspheming a Quran.

Having their cake (Christian prisoners) and eating it too, the Muslim Brotherhood claimed that Pres. Morsi ordered the two boys released. The Egyptian media dutifully reported that. The Western media parroted the line.

The boys' lawyer disagrees. He said that the boys were brought to a quieter place, away from riots, and that Pres. Morsi was not involved..

In the Sinai, Coptic families got death threats in Rafah, so they fled. Morsi visited Sinai. The Western media believed that he was committing himself to protect Copts.

Coptic bishop Qazmaan of Sinai disagrees about any such commitment. He and his fellows were kept away from Morsi, just were allowed to hear Morsi's platitudes about all Egyptians being equal.

Came the anniversary of the Maspero Massacre, in which Egypt's military ran over Christians protesting the constant attacks on their churches, and the Egyptian media claimed that Copts were killing the soldiers, the Western media accepted the Egyptian media's story, and the court found for the military. Copts assembled in Maspero to memorialize. Egypt's media again libeled the Copts.

A TV anchorman called the anniversary old hat, and showed non-violent scenes from Maspero a year earlier, as if the massacre did not happen. He claimed that Coptic demonstration benefits Israel. [He presented the Christian minority seeking equality as traitors.

Rather than disloyal troublemakers cared for by the government, the government oppresses them.

Comment: Part of Islamic antisemitism is to blame the Jews as being behind most of their problems. The Jewish people and the State of Israel neither could do such things nor want to.

In the West, the crime of blasphemy went out centuries ago. In Muslim countries, not only is it enshrined by law, but accusations are made by rumor and masses of Muslim men take the law into their own hands.

Tolerance is prohibited in Egypt. Westerners don't understand that Islam does not permit religious equality, regardless of what Pres. Morsi says. Islam and his Muslim Brotherhood believe Islam must dominate.

Richard Shulman is a veteran defender of Israel on several web-based forums. His comments and analyses are a regular feature on Think-Israel. He provides cool information and right-on-target overviews. He distributes his essays by email. To subscribe, write him at ricshulman@aol.com.


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POLLARD DIDN'T DESERVE TO RECEIVE A LIFE SENTENCE

Posted by Barbara Sommer, March 07, 2013

Lawrence Korb, who was Assistant Secretary of Defense during the Jonathan Pollard affair, says it's time to let Pollard go.

Lawrence Korb, who served as Assistant Secretary of Defense during the Jonathan Pollard affair, told a news conference on Tuesday that Pollard did not deserve a life sentence.

Korb noted that the usual sentence for offenses similar to those made by Pollard is only seven years, adding that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu raised the issue during his first term in office with former U.S. President Bill Clinton, and almost managed to get Pollard freed.

Now, he said, is the time to release Pollard from prison.

VIDEO: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/165918#.VXHOkryVsWP

"Jonathan did not plead guilty nor was he convicted of treason," said Korb. "He pleaded guilty to providing information to a friendly country. Jonathan didn't have a trial. He spared [the government] a trial, he pleaded guilty and was not supposed to get a life sentence."

He added that what led the judge in Pollard's case to break the plea agreement and sentence Pollard to life was the fact that he gave an interview to the media from prison.

"The judge was left with the impression that this was unauthorized, but as you well know, you don't show up in a prison and just walk in with a photographer and your notepad without government permission," said Korb, adding that the interview "was authorized by the government, but the judge was led to believe that wasn't the case."

"Jonathan did not provide anything to the Israelis that would compromise American security," Korb stressed.

The former Assistant Secretary of Defense arrived in Israel on Saturday night in order to aid the efforts on Pollard's behalf.

Korb has said publicly and written a letter to the effect that Pollard has been punished more than enough, and has held meetings and talks over the past few months with various officials in the U.S. on the subject.

On Monday, Korb, along with Jonathan's wife Esther Pollard, met with both Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and President Shimon Peres. Both leaders have indicated they plan to ask President Barack Obama to release Pollard when he visits Israel later this month.

Over 100,000 thousand people have already signed onto an online petition calling for Pollard's release.

The petition circulating online advocating for Jonathan's release has been signed by tens of thousands of Israelis, including a number of MKs such as Yair Lapid, Eitan Cabel (Labor), Elazar Stern (Hatnua) and Avishai Braverman (Labor). Former President Yitzchak Navon has signed the petition as well.

Contact Barbara Sommer by email at sommer_1_98@worldnet.at.net


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"SHARING"

Posted by Arlene Kushner, March 07, 2013

Mostly a bit of news and a variety of materials that are worthy of being shared.

Let me begin with a brief update on the little boy I've been tracking -- Zakkai. He's making good progress in his recovery and is becoming more like himself. But all is not smooth: he's clingy, which is understandable considering the trauma he's had; wants to be carried on stairs, which he finds difficult to navigate; and still has some discomfort. Since his balance isn't good and he has other problems connected to the surgery on his spine, he has rehabilitation specialists working with him to help him regain his former mobility.

Please God, a matter of time. The family prays for a return to normalcy.

~~~~~~~~~~

The Center for Near East Policy Research, which has produced a variety of materials on UNRWA over the years, has just put out a new video on the "Right of Return" as taught in the UNRWA schools.

See this and understand why UNRWA is part of the problem, and why peace is not possible while the Palestinian Arab kids in its classrooms continue to be taught to kill Jews in order to regain "their" land. This is stunning documentation -- you get it from the mouths of students, teachers and administrators themselves (with subtitles). What the kids say is most stunning of all:

http://israelbehindthenews.com/bin/content.cgi?ID=5381&q=1

This is one of those things that everyone should know about. UNRWA would have people believe that it is a "humanitarian" organization benignly serving a population disenfranchised by Israel.

Please spread this around broadly.

~~~~~~~~~~

Lawrence Korb, who served as Assistant Secretary of Defense during the Jonathan Pollard affair, was here this week. You can find here (scroll down a bit) a video clip from his news conference on Tuesday, making the case for Jonathan's release. He provides important background information:

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/165918#.UThAAzd5dae

~~~~~~~~~~

Unreal. Incredible. But no surprise in this unreal and incredible world. John Brennan, who by all accounts makes Chuck Hagel look good, has been confirmed by the Senate as the next CIA head.

What is there to say that hasn't already been said?

~~~~~~~~~~

Barry Rubin, whom I cite often because of his sharp analyses, gave me a laugh today. And when I can laugh about Secretary of State Kerry, I think it's worth sharing:

Said Rubin:

"In practically his first outing as secretary of state abroad, John Kerry made some remarkable statements in a meeting with young Germans. The main thing being widely quoted is this:

"'In America, you have a right to be stupid if you want to be,' he said. 'And we tolerate it. We somehow make it through that. Now, I think that's a virtue. I think that's something worth fighting for."'

"Of course, there's a right to be stupid in America! Indeed, just this week it's been expanded into having a right to be simultaneously stupid and secretary of defense!"

http://www.gloria-center.org/2013/02/what-john-kerry-doesnt-know-about-democracy-and-also-about-islam/

Rubin also quoted Kerry saying something else so incredibly insensitive and impolitic that I did a double-take:

"You know, education, if you make the most of it, if you study hard and you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, uh, you, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq."

For those of us who might doubt that even Kerry would really say anything quite so obtuse, we are provided with a video clip:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MPYVdV6WzwM

America is in a heap of trouble.

~~~~~~~~~~

It was announced yesterday that Obama has decided to skip a planned speech in the Knesset when he's here, opting for a more "politically neutral" venue instead. Apparently he's afraid of being interrupted by right wing MKs.

MKs Avi Wurtzman (Habayit Hayehudi) and Tzipi Hotovely (Likud-Beiteinu) have written to the president urging him to reconsider.

US "sources" are saying that rumors that the president will be demanding a timetable for withdrawals from Netanyahu are not true -- that he intends to present a "general framework" for peace and no more. Do not ask me what a "general framework" means, or how it differs from the 100 previous frameworks that failed.

~~~~~~~~~~

Who knows, by the time I next write, there may be a coalition. There was no way Netanyahu was going to miss that March 16 deadline set by Obama, upon which his coming would depend.

For a while now it's been a question of who blinks first and according to latest rumors, it's Yair Lapid who has, surrendering his demand for the Foreign Ministry (which is being saved for Lieberman). Apparently agreement is now close.

There's a great deal yet to discover.

Contact Arlene Kushner at akushner@netvision.net.il and visit her website: www.ArlenefromIsrael.info


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RADICAL ISLAM & RAPE

Posted by Richard H. Shulman, March 07, 2013

When the Muslim Brotherhood took power in Egypt, Egyptian and foreign women reported a huge increase in rape. Arabic and Western media reported this.

Egyptian women are not taking this in silence. Hundreds protest at Tahrir Square and against the Muslim Brotherhood and President Morsi. They resent having to endure sexual harassment and assault whenever they leave their homes.

The protests became another opportunity for rapists. As it was growing dark during a protest on January 25, one group heard that the area was getting dangerous. Separated from her group, a woman was duped by a man who purported to show her the way to safety. He led her to a few dozen men. They surrounded her, stripped her, called her dirty names, and gang-raped her for about 20 minutes.

The November before, many Egyptians protested against the Brotherhood attempt to impose Islamic law. The Brotherhood paid gangs to rape female protestors.

A female journalist from Britain was dragged from her escort into a mob of hundreds. They were scratching her, putting their fingers inside her, leering, sneering, and jeering. Popular Salafi preacher Abu Islam said, "They tell you women are a red line. They tell you that naked women—who are going to Tahrir Square because they want to be raped—are a red line! And they ask Morsi and the Brotherhood to leave power!" And by the way, 90 percent of them are crusaders [i.e. Christian Copts] and the remaining 10 percent are widows who have no one to control them. You see women talking like monsters."

He was backed up by Parliament's Shura Council's human rights committee, which held the women responsible and called them prostitutes. Maj. Gen. Adel Afify, of the committee representing the Salafi Asala Party, blamed the women for their involvement in such circumstances and for not sufficiently protecting themselves.

The Egyptian Center for Women's Rights find that 62% of men admit harassing women and 53% blame the women for inducing the attacks. 83% of Egyptian women experienced sexual harassment. 98% of female tourists have. Even fully veiled women are harassed. Sarah A. Topol calls it an epidemic.

"All this is yet another indicator of the true nature of the Obama-supported "Arab Spring." (Raymond Ibrahim, FrontPageMagazine.com, 2/15/13

http://www.meforum.org/3450/egypt-rape-sexual-harassment).

The women weren't naked, and even veiled women were attacked. Salafists will say anything to buttress their position. But their position is vicious. They defend rape. Then they blame the women for it, although the women are dragged away and painfully abused so that it is not sex but misogyny and Islamist intimidation.

The quoted statistics show that most Egyptian men abuse women. That fact indicates that rape may characterize Egyptian Islam, not just Radical Islam.

Many times Muslim men contend that women should not tempt men by weaning more modern clothes than a sack, and that women need a male escort for their own protection. Protection from whom? Why, protection from the men. What does that say about Muslim men?

Do Western tour operators and media have a responsibility to warn women against touring certain Islamic countries?

The statistics of rape do not put American culture in a good light. But most women are able to walk the streets of American cities in safety.

Richard Shulman is a veteran defender of Israel on several web-based forums. His comments and analyses are a regular feature on Think-Israel. He provides cool information and right-on-target overviews. He distributes his essays by email. To subscribe, write him at ricshulman@aol.com.


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ISRAEL'S ONGOING PUBLIC DIPLOMACY FIASCO

Posted by Shmuel Katz, March 07, 2013

The article below was written by David Isaac who is a former executive director of American for A Safe Israel and currently is editor of the Shmuel Katz website: www.shmuelkatz.com. Contact him at david_isaac@shmuelkatz.com. This article appeared March 09, 2013 in Family Security Matters and is archived at http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/israels-ongoing-public-diplomacy-fiasco

Caption Text flags

On Feb. 28, at a meeting of something called the U.N. Alliance of Civilizations, Turkey's Prime Minister Tacip Erdogan called Zionism "a crime against humanity." Another day, another vicious slur on Israel, in this case from the leader of a country that only yesterday had been its strategic ally in the region. All that was unusual was that this one actually drew a comment from Secretary of State John Kerry - "objectionable" - after it was exposed by the private monitoring group U.N. Watch, awkwardly for Kerry at the very time he was visiting Turkey. The episode underscores the worldwide no-holds-barred attack on Israel's legitimacy and how little push-back this meets from Israel herself.

A number of articles have appeared recently lamenting Israel's public relations failures. Rabbi Shmuley Boteach writes in The Jerusalem Post on Jan. 7, "What good is having Apache helicopter gunships, or Merkava tanks, to defend your citizens against attack if you can't even use them because the world thinks you're always the aggressor?" On Jan. 11, in the same paper, Barry Shaw, author of "Israel -- Reclaiming the Narrative," says, "government-wise, we are barely on the battlefield for hearts and minds, while the Palestinians and their supporters seem to have endless resources and are succeeding to win the world away from us."

Martin Sherman, executive director of the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies, also writes in The Jerusalem Post on Feb. 14: "Israel's greatest strategic challenge, its gravest strategic failure, its grimmest strategic danger is the (mis)conduct of its public diplomacy."

Such complaints are nothing new. Decades ago, Shmuel Katz, who thought of himself primarily as an "information man," returned repeatedly to this subject, as readers of this blog well know. He called for a response against the assault on Israel's legitimacy, what Shmuel described as the "many-faceted campaign of denigration throughout the world, openly aiming at the demonization of Israel as a state and of the Jews as a nation."

In "A Crying Need" (The Jerusalem Post, August 6, 1982) Shmuel wrote:

How long must the battle for a sane and rational policy on information go on? ... [F]or years Jews and other friends throughout the world, specifically in the U.S. and Europe, have been complaining bitterly that attacks on Israel go unanswered. There simply is no permanent, established machinery adequate for the task and ready to handle the very special problems faced by Israel.

Nothing has changed except the extent to which the campaign of demonization has succeeded. Sherman, in his op-ed, says the criticisms of Israel's public diplomacy are found only in the English press, "revealing what appears to be an alarming lack of awareness of, and/or interest in, the topic among the Hebrew-reading public."

There have been valiant civilian efforts made outside of Israel. The media watchdog group CAMERA is a striking example. It was founded in 1982 and under the tireless leadership of its chairman Andrea Levin, has exposed media bias around the world. "Stand with Us" focuses its energies on educating about Israel on college campuses, which have become a frontline in the propaganda war against Israel. Palestinian Media Watch and MEMRI offer a window into what Arab media and governments say in their own language.

The Internet has opened up the field to the efforts of individuals. Marcella Rosen, a former ad agency executive, has created the site "Untold News," which creates short videos on Israel's positive contributions to science. This writer has made his own efforts at Zionist education with the website Zionism101.org, created at the behest of Herbert Zweibon, the late chairman of Americans for A Safe Israel. The very number of groups and websites advocating for Israel indirectly points an accusatory finger at Israeli governments for failing to do the job themselves.

In Sherman's view, the job may not be up to the government, but civil society elites. He writes that battling Israel's delegitimization "requires a far greater, wide-ranging and concerted intellectual effort -- much of which the government can only help facilitate but not execute, certainly not on its own."

While Shmuel would have applauded Sherman's attention to the issue, he would have felt the government could and should do much more. One reason was that representatives speaking for the Israeli government have more authority than the collection (no matter how admirable) of self-appointed representatives who do battle now.

Shmuel had argued for an entire ministry dedicated to Israel's public diplomacy fight. He referred to the case of Great Britain in World War II, which created a Ministry of Information, second in size only to the Ministry of War.

Shmuel felt that Israel was at war no less than England in World War II. As he wrote in "Countering Propaganda" (The Jerusalem Post, Sept. 26, 1984):

Israeli governments have evidently not come to grips also with the nature of the war. It is not designed to achieve a change in this or the other policy of the Israeli government. Its aim is to put an end to the Zionist entity, to delegitimize Israel -- by the assertion, endlessly repeated, that the Jewish people has no right to Palestine, and the Jewish State has no right to exist at all, that the land is Arab territory usurped by the Zionists with the aid of the imperialists.

And Shmuel felt that to properly counter the Arab propaganda juggernaut, Israel must have a juggernaut of its own, that its public relations efforts must have a focus. Shmuel described how he stopped the outburst of propaganda against Prime Minister Menachem Begin in the U.S. in the immediate aftermath of his election. Begin first asked Shmuel to go, but then Begin was advised to send a whole team. Shmuel said the team could go, but without him. There needed to be a focus. Begin acceded and Shmuel stopped the onslaught within 10 days of his arrival in the U.S.

The need for focus brings up another problem - that leadership of the effort be in the right hands, lest it prove counterproductive. For example, a focus on Israel's desire for peace and willingness to do just about anything to obtain it - a focus that no doubt some elements in Israel would find appealing - could only lead to even greater denigration of Israel for failing to achieve it.

Nor can an information campaign be conducted divorced from public policy. For example, in his effort to cobble together a governing coalition, Benjamin Netanyahu has offered to put Tzipi Livni, head of the Hatnua party, who made "peace" the focus of her platform, in charge of negotiations with the Palestinian Arabs. Aaron Lerner of IMRA (Independent Media Review and Analysis) points out some of the pitfalls. From day one, Livni will be making every effort to lay the failure of the talks on Netanyahu. One possibility is that Livni makes backdoor, unauthorized concessions to the Palestinian Arabs, putting overwhelming international pressure on Netanyahu to accept them. Or negotiations fail and Livni could have her staff prepare reams of working papers supporting concessions Netanyahu refused to approve that she would leak to the international press. Finally, Netanyahu might fire Livni leading her to launch a dangerous campaign along these lines against him.

No information campaign can counter the enormous damage stemming from the policy decision to put Livni in charge of negotiations with the Palestinians. But this also underscores how consideration of the strategic importance of public diplomacy could protect Israeli leaders from making policy decisions convenient in the short term but harmful both to themselves and Israel in the long-run.

Decades have passed, and despite the continuing outcry to do something, Israel has ignored the public relations front in the Arabs' war against her. If Israel took seriously her public relations - including the impact of her policy decisions on them - it could have a transformative effect, empowering her existing friends as well as gaining her new allies.

Contact Shmuel Katz website at David_Isaac@shmuelkatz.com


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THE SO-CALLED 'KLAN' INFILTRATION OF OBERLIN COLLEGE

Posted by Steven Plaut, March 08, 2013

The news media have been buzzing for several days about the supposed appearance on the campus of Oberlin College in Ohio of a person dressed in a Ku Klux Klan robe. Supposedly this was just the latest twist in an upsurge of "hate speech" on the ultra-liberal campus, manifested in graffiti and other expressions.

Oberlin College is an elite liberal arts college that is so far Left that it is in the same league as Bard and Amherst. In the 19th century the town of Oberlin was an end station for the underground railway smuggling slaves to the north, and the college likes to pretend it is still part of some grand political action movement. A sculpture celebrating the town's role in freeing slaves is still an important feature.

Leftwing agitprop is common in many of the college's departments. I know. Years back I was on the faculty of Oberlin. A while later I was on the faculty at Berkeley, and can make comparisons. At Berkeley the townies are leftist nuts but the students are mainly hard -working conservative Asians and the faculty are surprisingly conservative, with exceptions in the usual departments of dingbatocracy. At Oberlin, in contrast, almost all of the students and faculty make Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky look like Republicans. I was one of only two faculty members there who voted for Reagan. The other was a rightwing professor of German history. We got along famously and loved mocking the hardcore members of the Communist Party who had offices down the corridor from us. The other faculty members just passed us clicking their tongues in pity.

For decades Oberlin has hosted the annual conventions of the Trotskyite "Socialist Workers Party." In spite of the name "Socialist Workers" you should not presume that members of this party have jobs. In any case, whenever they are in town, the college turns over "security" on the campus to the Trots. When I was teaching there, the SWP's NKVD squad tried to prevent me from entering my office building. When I complained to the administration, I was told that the Trots were granted control of campus security because they had legitimate fears of FBI infiltration, and so had the right to prevent me from entering my office. In other words, the SWP did not have to wait for the Revolution to create a police state, since Oberlin was already letting them do it there. SWP party missionaries would roam the campus and stop students to convert them to Trotskyism. "What is a Trotskyite?" one student asked, and the cadre responded, "Well you have heard of Stalinism, right? and if you are not a Stalinist then you must be a Trotskyite." An Oberlin student that year asked me what the difference was between a Trotskyite and a Trotskyist. I replied that it was roughly the same as the difference between cow manure and bull manure.

News of the "Klan assault" against Oberlin spread immediately to the international news media. In the aftermath of the "assault," all classes were shut down for a day by the Oberlin administration, so that students could attend a 60s-style "teach-in" about the horrors of bigotry and learn to be sensitive. The local police were also called onto the campus to investigate "hate speech." The college president, Marvin Krislov, issued an official apology on behalf of the college to "students who felt threatened." The college claims a series of "hate crimes" has taken place on campus, many involving graffiti and one involving a student getting mugged near the campus. But the trigger for the campus shutdown was a dubious "report" that someone was seen on campus near the "Afrikan Heritage House" dressed in Ku Klux Klan robes.

There were a number of problems with this Klan report, even assuming the "perp" was not someone simply protesting the misspelling of the word African. Slate and others claim the "person in Klan robes" was merely a woman who stepped out into the cold wrapped in a blanket. Even if it was someone wearing a Klan robe, why assume it was anything other than some sort of frat prank? Why turn it into an international headline revealing the underlying racism in Obama's Amerika? (Yes, that is how lots of Oberlin people spell America.)

Not surprising for a college consisting of people still living in the 1960s, Israel bashing is more common than sleet at Oberlin. There is a boisterous group of "Students for a Free Palestine" (founded three decades back) and "Students for Justice in Palestine," groups that make little effort to hide their support for Hamas, Palestinian terrorism, and atrocities against Jews. Oberlin has hosted more than its fair share of "Israel Apartheid Week" events, in which students call for the annihilation of the only country in the Middle East that is NOT an apartheid regime. Back when I was on its faculty a "Palestinian Human Rights Watch" organization operated on campus. It was promoting boycotts and divestment from Israel, which it claimed resembled apartheid South Africa.

The most noteworthy aspect of the "Klan assault" story involving Oberlin is the hypocrisy regarding anti-Jewish campus hate speech. The same administration so upset by a fictional Klan robe has nothing at all to say about campus events openly endorsing murderous attacks against Israeli Jews or celebrating genocidal Palestinian movements. Oberlin had a long romance with Edward Said, hosting him on numerous occasions for events that triggered Bash-the-Jews rhetoric and even granting him a special award of honor in 1996. The college has its own chapter of the anti-Israel "J Street." Oberlin president Krislov, who is Jewish and was once a member of a Zionist youth movement, has done nothing about these anti-Semitic campus events thinly disguised as support for Palestinians.

The same Anti-Defamation League liberals who congratulated Oberlin College for taking decisive steps against the imaginary Klansman on campus has never had a word to say about the malicious anti-Semitic defamations by the "Students for Justice for Palestine," the "Israel Apartheid Week" hoodlums, and the other groups that bash Jews on campus. Neither do the other liberal postureurs against racism and bigotry.

The one question no one is asking regarding the "Klan incident" is this: Suppose someone really HAD strolled about the Oberlin snowdrifts in Klan uniform. Why is THAT not protected speech? Why is that a crime? And before answering that, it behooves us to recall that dressing up as Hamas terrorists and smearing Jews in campus "street theater" is not only considered protected speech on most Western campuses these days, but "Let's Destroy Israel" conferences and rallies are held openly every week.

The make-pretend free speech absolutists insist that nothing at all should be allowed to interfere with the right of students to call for annihilation of Israel and mass murder of its population. But a snide comment about blacks or homosexuals is considered "hate speech," and it justifies calling in the police and shutting down the entire campus while the perps of "hate speech" are hunted down. Speech codes proliferate, which make it an expellable offense to say "I disapprove of homosexuality." Denouncing Israel as an "apartheid" regime that must be obliterated, celebrating suicide bombings against Israelis, or denouncing Jews as racists is all just nice clean academic discourse.

Steven Plaut is a native Philadelphian who teaches business finance and economics at the University of Haifa in Israel. He holds a PhD in economics from Princeton. He is author of the David Horowitz Freedom Center booklets about the Hamas and Jewish Enablers of the War against Israel. Contact him at stevenplau@gmail.com.

This article appeared March 8, 2013 in Frontpage Magazine and is archived at
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/steven-plaut/the-so-called-klan-infiltration-of-oberlin-college/


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WHAT THE BDS ORGANIZERS SHOULD HAVE TOLD US BUT DIDN'T

Posted by Maurice Ostroff, March 08, 2013

With "Israel apartheid week" (IAW) currently spreading its hate message around the world, it is timely to consider some little-known facts about the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS) that very successfully promotes these activities. IAW is a well-funded highly professional annual series of events that take place in over 250 cities.

But did you know that BDS leaders oppose the Palestinian Authority?

Well-intentioned supporters of BDS will be shocked to learn the real attitude of BDS organizers to the Palestinian Authority. Omar Barghouti is a founder and leader of BDS and this is how he described the PA in a 2004 article in The Electronic Intifada

"In the West Bank you have a largely quisling [traitor] government that is completely supporting Israel in anything it wants to do. They get immediate support from the Palestinian Authority (PA) in Ramallah, which is an unelected authority imposed by an American general"

On October 2009 he wrote in Electronic intifada

"The PA government there has illegally appropriated the PLO's authority to conduct Palestinian diplomacy and set foreign policy, conceding Palestinian rights and acting against Palestinian national interests, without worrying about accountability to any elected representatives of the Palestinian people".

And did you know that BDS opposes the two-state solution

Many well-intentioned people believe the BDS movement is worthy of support because they mistakenly believe that BDS advocates the common goal to which the UN, the US, the EU and Russia as well as Israel all subscribe, namely two states, Israel and Palestine, existing side by side within agreed borders. But these supporters will be shocked to learn that in reality the BDS organizers actually oppose the two state solution.

Omar Barghouti disclosed in an article in The Electronic Intifada in 2004, that the true aim of BDS in his words is "euthanasia" for Israel. The objective of BDS, he said, is one state to which all Palestinian refugees and their descendants will "return".

Barghouti is not referring to the original number of approximately 700,000 to whom the word "return" may apply but to the estimated 4.7 million presently defined by UNRWA as Palestinian refugees so as to kill the two-state solution. In his words

"The two-state solution for the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is really dead. Good riddance"

While most well-intentioned BDS supporters consider calls to end the occupation as meaning adjustment of the 1967 lines in terms of resolution 242, Barghouti rejects this concept outright. He doesn't recognize Israel's right even to the pre-'67 borders.

It is evident that well-meaning members of the public deserve to know a lot more about organizations and popular movements before giving them full support.

BDS use of the apartheid weapon

The word "apartheid" is widely used as a pejorative propaganda epithet in the full knowledge that the description is unjustified. As with every country in the world, there is much about Israel that justifies criticism, but apartheid is not among its warts.

Even Omar Barghouti, the most vocal critic of Israel admits that the apartheid description is inaccurate. In an interview with Electronic Intifada on May 31, 2009, he said,

" We don't have to prove that Israel is identical to apartheid South Africa in order to justify the label "apartheid."

Labeling Israel as an apartheid state comparable with the old South Africa is the most potent weapon in the armory of BDS promoters. The argument goes like this. Sanctions were justified against South Africa because of apartheid. Therefore if we merely associate Israel with apartheid, no matter that the appellation is unjustified, the world will simplistically support sanctions against apartheid Israel.

In fact, real apartheid enforced by legislation is currently practiced in many countries including Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, but not in Israel.

See http://www.2nd-thoughts.org/id289.html

Even the new South Africa has been criticized for apartheid by none other than Al Jazeera. In a TV program titled "South Africa''s new apartheid" Riz Khan asked

"Is class-based discrimination South Africa''s new apartheid?" http://english.aljazeera.net/programmes/rizkhan/2010/11/2010112362142630788.html

In the Guardian of June 24, 2010, American Palestinian writer Ahmed Moor wrote that the vast majority of the 400,000 Palestinian refugees born and raised in Lebanon don't have anything approaching the privilege that he enjoys in the US. He said Lebanon is the most hostile country to Palestinian refugees after Israel.

"They are second-class citizens here. Racism is so widespread that African and Asian guest workers are openly barred from attending the beaches where Lebanese people frolic. And that''s saying nothing of the often inhumane working conditions they are subjected to on a daily basis".

See http://www.2nd-thoughts.org/id289.html

Former US Ambassador to the UN, Daniel Patrick Moynihan declared categorically that the situation in Israel is not apartheid. He added that racism under apartheid was skin color. "Applied to Israel that''s a joke: for proof just look at a crowd of Israeli Jews and their gradations in skin-color from the blackest to the whitest".

In "The apartheid analogy: Lessons for Israel" (Jerusalem Post Feb. 20, 2011), Professor Gideon Shimoni, an acknowledged expert on the subject, wrote

"While Israel''s democratic constitution is certainly flawed, only hostile prejudice explains the ever-growing trend of comparing it with apartheid South Africa ..in the propaganda war against Israel an equation is fabricated insidiously between the present State of Israel and the former apartheid state of South Africa. This must be exposed as a malicious slander, and utterly refuted".

Maurice Ostroff is a founder member of the international Coalition of Hasbara Volunteers, better known by its acronym CoHaV, (star in Hebrew), a world-wide umbrella organization of volunteers active in combating anti-Israel media and political bias and in promoting the positive side of Israel His web site is at http://www.maurice-ostroff.org


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BARACK OBAMA DIES, LEAVING SHARP DIVISIONS IN THE COUNTRY

Posted by FSM Security Update, March 08, 2013

The article below was written by Daniel Greenfield who is an Israeli born blogger and columnist, and a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. His work covers American, European and Israeli politics as well as the War on Terror. His writing can be found at http://sultanknish.blogspot.com/ These opinions do not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Jewish Press. This article appeared March 8, 2013 in Family Security Matters and is archived at
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-arab-street-is-still-angry?f=must_reads

boycott

Much like Festivus, American diplomacy to the Middle East usually begins with an airing of grievances. These are not the American grievances over decades of terrorism and acts of violent hatred. These are the grievances that are supposedly infuriating the Arab Street. The list begins with Israel, continues on to the "Arab Dictators" supported by America and concludes with warnings to respect Mohammed by not making any cartoons or movies about him.

During his first term, Obama kept his distance from Israel, locked up a Christian who made a movie about Mohammed and withdrew his support from the Arab Dictators. The street should have been happy, but now it's angrier than ever. And much of that anger is directed at America.

Mohamed El Baradei, once the administration's choice to take over Egypt, has refused to meet with Secretary of State John Kerry. Joining him in this boycott is much of Egypt's liberal opposition.

When Mubarak was in power, the "Arab Street" of Islamists and Egyptian leftists was angry at America for supporting him. Now the "Arab Street" of Egyptian leftists, Mubarak supporters and some Anti-Brotherhood Islamists is angry at America for supporting the Muslim Brotherhood.

The American foreign policy error was to assume that the political grievances of the Arab Street could be appeased with democracy. They can't be. The various factions are not truly interested in open elections. What they want is for America to elevate their faction and only their faction to power. When that doesn't happen, they denounce the government as an American puppet and warn of the great and terrible anger of the Arab Street if America doesn't make them its puppet instead.

Democracy is no solution, because none of the factions really wanted democracy for its own sake. They wanted it only as a tool to help them win. Now that the tool has failed most of them, they don't care for it anymore. And the Islamists who benefited from democracy have no enduring commitment to it. Like all the other factions, they see it as a tool. A means, not an end.

While the West views democracy as an end, the East sees it as only a means. The West believes in a system of populist power rotation. The East however is caught between a variety of totalitarian ideologies, including Islamists and local flavors of the left, who have no interest in power rotation except as a temporary strategy for total victory.

Contact FSM Security Update at info@familysecuritymatters.org


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ROCKS AND FIREBOMBS ON THE TEMPLE MOUNT

Posted by Arutz Sheva, March 08, 2013

The article below was written by Ernie Singer who is a newscaster and editor of written and audio material. This article appeared March 08, 2013 in the Temple Institute website and is archived at
http://templeinstitute.org/archive/08-03-13.htm

Worshippers started throwing rocks at security forces, Friday afternoon, at the end of Muslim prayers at Temple Mount mosques in Jerusalem's Old City.

Police stationed at the Mughrabi gate broke in and began to throw stun grenades to disperse the stone throwers.

The rioters responded with firebombs. One policeman was lightly injured and taken to hospital. A number of demonstrators were also injured.

Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said that about 100 protesters, many of them masked, attacked police, who fired stun grenades in response.

"Petrol bombs were thrown at police," he told AFP. "Several police officers were injured by stones that were thrown and were evacuated to hospital."

An AFP journalist at the scene said the clash was triggered by Palestinian media allegations that a policeman at the compound, one of Islam's holiest sites, on Sunday kicked a holy book and trampled on it.

"That's completely incorrect," Rosenfeld said, adding that the Koran in uestion was being held by one of a group of women seeking to block a visit to the compound by Israelis when the book fell by accident. "They blocked them with a bench and one of the women who was sitting on the bench was reading a Koran," he said.

"When the bench was removed from the area the Koran fell on the floor. The Koran was picked up and returned to the lady and there was no misconduct by any of the police."

Contact Arutz Sheva at news@israelnationalnews.com


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PHILIPPINES: SYRIAN REBELS REMAIN FIRM ON HOSTAGE DEMANDS

Posted by Arutz Sheva, March 08, 2013

hostages

The 21 UN peacekeepers taken hostages in the Golan are expected to be freed on Saturday after the Syrian regime agreed to observe a ceasefire in deal with the United Nations, a watchdog said.

In New York the United Nations said efforts to secure the Filipinos would resume on Saturday after they were halted on Friday amid intense shelling of the area by regime forces.

"An agreement has been reached between the Syrian regime and the United Nations to stop the bombing between 10:00 am (0800 GMT) and noon (1000 GMT) on Saturday, in order to allow the evacuation of the 21 peacekeepers," Syrian Observatory for Human Rights director Rami Abdel Rahman told AFP.

"A Red Cross delegation should accompany the UN team to the area," to evacuate the peacekeepers."

The Observatory is in contact with the Yarmuk Martyrs battalion, the Syrian rebel group that on Wednesday captured the peacekeepers.

Earlier UN peacekeeping spokeswoman Josephine Guerrero said efforts to secure their release will resume Saturday.

"Arrangements were made with all parties for the release of the 21 peacekeepers," she said "but due to the late hour and the darkness it was considered unsafe to continue the operation. Efforts will continue tomorrow."

UN peacekeeping chief Herve Ladsous said Jamla village where the soldiers are being held came under "intense shelling" on Friday.

That was denied by Syrian UN Ambassador Bashar Jaafari, who said Syrian forces were doing "everything in order to bring back safely the peacekeepers."

Abdel Rahman said a UN convoy entered Jamla to collect the peacekeepers on Friday but the army shelled the area.

"When the UN vehicles entered into Jamla, the Syrian army shelled a nearby village. The UN cars then withdrew from Jamla," he said.

Ladsous expressed hope that a possible ceasefire would lead to the freeing of the peacekeepers, who have been held by Syrian rebels since Wednesday.

"There is perhaps a hope, but it is not done yet... that a ceasefire of a few hours can intervene which would allow for our people to be released," adding that they were held in different locations within the village.

US State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland accused the Syrian regime of "making it impossible for UN negotiators to get in there and try to resolve it."

The Filipinos, members of the UN Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) monitoring the armistice line between Syria and Israel that followed the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, were abducted just a mile to the Syrian side of the line.

The rebels are demanding that Syrian troops move 20 kilometres (12 miles) back from Jamla, an area at the southern end of the armistice zone in the Golan, Philippine foreign affairs spokesman Raul Hernandez said.

"We are trying to intensify our negotiations with the rebel groups," he said adding that the hostages were nonetheless being treated well.

The Observatory said the rebels had added a fresh demand.

"They are now demanding a new condition -- that the International Committee of the Red Cross guarantees the safe exit from the strife-torn area of Jamla of civilians," Abdel Rahman said.

In Manila, Xy-son Meneses, whose brother Captain Xy-rus Meneses is among the peacekeepers held in Syria, issued a televised appeal for the peacekeepers' release.

"They are not there to cause trouble but to help maintain peace in Syria so I ask if they can release them," he said.

Concern has been mounting that the abduction might prompt more governments to withdraw troops from the already depleted UN mission.

Israeli officials warned that any further reduction in its strength risked creating a security vacuum in the no-man's land between the two sides on the strategic Golan Heights, which it seized in the 1967 Six-Day War.

The Israeli army revealed that it helped eight other UN peacekeepers redeploy through Israeli-held territory overnight from an isolated post in the area where the hostages are being held.

An army spokeswoman said Israeli troops escorted them north to another UN base.

World powers remain at loggerheads over the way forward, with Western governments firm in their demand for President Bashar al-Assad to quit, and China and Russia equally firm in their opposition to any imposed regime change.

"You know that we are not in the regime-change game," Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov reiterated on Friday. "We are against interference in domestic conflicts," he told the BBC.

On Friday the Syrian army pounded rebel areas in the central city of Homs with warplanes and tanks, the Observatory said, as protesters demonstrated against the army offensive.

A total of 121 people were killed in the Syrian conflict on Friday, the Observatory said.

This article was written by Arutz Sheva Staff and it appeared March 08, 2013 in Your Middle East and is archived at
http://www.yourmiddleeast.com/news/philippines-says-syrian-rebels-firm-on-hostage-demands_13502


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ORTHODOX JEWS AND THE ALIYA CRISIS

Posted by Michael Freund, March 08, 2013

It is time for American, Canadian, Australian, British and other Orthodox Jews to set an example for their brethren, leave behind the exile and finally come home.

nefesh

Last week, the Central Bureau of Statistics published a report that should have provoked an outpouring of public sentiment but was instead greeted with little more than a collective yawn.

According to the CBS, in 2012, just 16,557 people from around the world made aliya, which is slightly more than one-tenth of one percent of world Jewry.

At that rate, it would take nearly 1,000 years for the entire Jewish people to return to the Land of Israel. This lack of enthusiasm hardly bodes well for our nation's ageold hope "to be a free people in our own land," as the national anthem puts it.

Consider the following: last year's figure was the lowest recorded since 2009 and the third-lowest in the past two decades.

Indeed, in 2002, 33,567 Jews moved to the Jewish state, which means that the immigration rate has dropped more than 50% in the past 10 years.

No less disturbing is the fact that aliya from the West, where the bulk of Diaspora Jewry resides, managed to contribute barely one-third of the 2012 total.

Out of the five to six million American Jews, a paltry 2,290 members of the tribe made the journey home to Zion last year according to the CBS.

I've been to New York Knicks basketball games at Madison Square Garden with more Jews in attendance than that.

While aliya from France in 2012 was a respectable 1,653 strong and 569 Jews from the UK moved here, these numbers are still tiny when compared with the size of their respective communities.

Clearly, the appeal of aliya in recent years has begun to lose steam.

Despite the 2008 economic crisis and uncertainty over the future of the EU and America, the Jews of the United States and much of the West are quite comfortably ensconced where they are and don't appear to be moving to Israel any time soon.

It is difficult to overstate the gravity of this situation. The steady and continuing decline in Jewish immigration to Israel is no less an issue of national security than borders, terrorism or missile defense.

Aliya is the lifeblood of Zionism, a source of ongoing strength to the state as it develops and prospers. It is also the surest guarantee of a vibrant Jewish future — one free of assimilation, intermarriage and cultural decay. And that is why it is so crucial that a concerted effort be made to revitalize aliya from the Diaspora and especially from America and the West.

Just imagine the impact that an influx of a few hundred thousand American Jews would have on Israeli society. With their energy and activism, skills and talents, they could reshape this country and its civic life and have an enormous impact on various fields ranging from politics to business to the arts.

But thus far, this remains in the realm of fantasy because they simply are not coming here in droves.

It would be easy to try and pin the blame for this sorry state of affairs on groups such as Nefesh B'Nefesh, the Jewish Agency or even the Israeli government.

But such censure would largely be misplaced.

Those who bear direct responsibility for the lack of Western aliya are first and foremost Western Jews themselves, and especially their leadership and organizations, which make little to no effort to encourage emigration to the Jewish state.

Just surf the web and visit the homepages of various prominent American Jewish organizations and see if you can find something — anything! — about aliya.

Sure, there is plenty of material about pro- Israel advocacy and combating anti-Israel media bias. And if you are looking for ways to fight bigotry, help the poor in Rwanda or lower greenhouse gas emissions, you won't be disappointed.

But seeking information about leaving the exile behind and fulfilling the dream of generations by returning to the land of our ancestors? Fat chance! Even my fellow Orthodox Jews in America, who are committed to living according to Halacha, are just as guilty in this regard.

Take, for example, the Orthodox Union.

Surely, a venerable organization such as this, I told myself, one that is committed to Torah values and Judaism, would highlight the mitzva of settling the Land of Israel and give it pride of place on its website.

But when I went to its homepage, I could find no mention of aliya. Instead, I was greeted by a "Kashrus Alert: Tootsie Roll Large Pops" (in case you are wondering, some bags were printed without indicating that the product is dairy).

Now don't get me wrong. I love a good Tootsie Pop just as much as the next guy and I am certainly all in favor of the meticulous observance of Jewish law, by which I have chosen to live my life.

But this says a lot about American Orthodoxy, which in recent years has taken on greater levels of observance even while failing to appreciate the centrality of aliya in Jewish thought.

The Sifrei on Deuteronomy, for example, states unequivocally that "dwelling in the Land of Israel is the equivalent of all the mitzvot in the Torah." And the Talmud in tractate Ketubot declares that "he who lives in the Land of Israel is akin to one who has a God, while he who lives outside the Land is similar to one who has no God."

Centuries later, Nahmanides, the great medieval commentator, ruled unambiguously that the commandment to live in Israel is incumbent upon every Jew and applies even if the land is under foreign control.

The Pit'hei Teshuva, in his 19th century commentary on the Shulhan Aruch, notes that all the earlier and later authorities agree with Nahmanides that there is a positive Torah commandment to live in Israel.

Israel is described in the Bible (Deuteronomy 11:12) as the land "which the Lord your God cares for; the eyes of the Lord your God are always upon it, from the beginning of the year even unto the end of the year."

And, as the Or Hahaim noted in the 18th century, "There is no joy other than in residing in the Land of Israel."

On all sorts of issues, religious Jews seek halachic guidance from their local rabbi in order to ensure that their behavior conforms to Jewish law. A dairy fork was used to eat meat? Call the rabbi! A certain kind of medicine needs to be taken on Shabbat? Ask the scholar! But how many Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn, New York, or Golders Green, London, or Marais in Paris have bothered to ask their rabbi a similar question about whether they are obligated to make aliya? My intention is not to cast aspersions on anyone or their personal decisions. But if people are concerned enough about Halacha to ask questions about what they put in their mouths, shouldn't they also ask for guidance about where they choose to live their lives? AT A time such as this, precisely when aliya is dwindling, it is incumbent upon each and every Orthodox Jew in America and elsewhere to look in the mirror and ask himself with unadorned honesty: Where do I really belong? A surge of Orthodox aliya from the West could potentially light a spark, setting an example for other Jews to follow.

It would make headlines, bolster Israeli society and remind Jews everywhere — including a number of our fellow Israelis — that our destiny as a people is in this Land and this Land alone.

As people of faith, Orthodox Jews have a special responsibility to put aliya back on the international Jewish agenda.

For two millennia, observant Jews have turned to face Jerusalem three times a day every day, pleading with the Creator to "gather us in from the four corners of the earth."

Now that we have a sovereign Jewish state, moving to Israel is easier than ever before.

So no more excuses! The call of Jewish destiny and the cry of previous generations must no longer be ignored. It is time for American, Canadian, Australian, British and other Orthodox Jews to set an example for their brethren, leave behind the exile and finally come home.

The article above was written by Michael Freund who served as an adviser to former Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. This article is appeared March 08, 2013 in the Jerusalem Post and is archived at
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Orthodox-Jews-and-the-aliya-crisis


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THE TRUTH ABOUT GOVERNMENT AMMO PURCHASES

Posted by The Patriot Post, March 08, 2013

"There is but one straight course, and that is to seek truth and pursue it steadily." --George Washington

ammunition

The last few months have seen troubling news of massive government purchases of ammunition. Agencies from the Social Security Administration to the Department of Agriculture to the Department of Homeland Security have purchased millions of rounds. But is the whole thing more hype than substance?

Ever since Barack Obama was first elected in 2008, he has been selling guns and ammunition at a faster clip than any gun salesman could hope for. And since his re-election, citizens have been faced with severe shortages of both. This can only be exacerbated by large government purchases. The Social Security Administration (SSA), for example, purchased 174,000 rounds and the Department of Agriculture (USDA) bought 320,000 rounds. More understandable in purpose but also perhaps more staggering in scale, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) put in a request for 450 million rounds, while the FBI intends to purchase 100 million.

The headlines are ominous, but some of the hype can be put in perspective by doing a little math. National Review's Charles C. W. Cooke does just that. The SSA's request for 174,000 rounds amounts to just 590 rounds for each of its 295 inspector general agents "who investigate Social Security fraud and other crimes." Some of us might go through 590 rounds in an afternoon at the range. As for the USDA, 320,000 is enough to provide the same number of rounds for 542 agents, and, through the Forest Service, those agents have an area the size of Pakistan to cover.

When it comes to the bigger orders, Cooke writes, "The FBI and DHS's apparently vast orders are deceptively presented by the conspiracy theorists. It is true that in 2011, the FBI ordered up to 100 million bullets for its 13,913 special agents (which works out to 7,187 per agent). And, yes, the Department of Homeland Security -- a composite department that oversees USCIS, Customs and Border Protection, FEMA, ICE, the TSA, the Coast Guard, the Secret Service, and the National Protection Directorate -- placed a request for up to 450 million rounds for its 65,000 armed personnel (which works out to 6,923 per agent). But in the real world, ammunition is not divided up and handed out on such a basis. What is bought is stockpiled and then allocated on the basis of need. The DHS's order is expected to last for at least five years, and it was placed up front primarily as a cost-saving measure." Indeed, DHS is not even bound to buy that much; they merely have a tab on which to order more rounds as needed.

That certainly doesn't mean there aren't questions or that we should simply shrug and look the other way. For starters, the Department of Education recently placed an order for "27 Remington Brand Model 870 police 12-gauge shotguns." This might lead any reasonable person to ask, as Cooke does, "Whether it is in possession of one bullet or 1 million bullets, should the federal Department of Education be armed in the first place? If so, why?" We would add, should there even be a Department of Education? But that's a topic for another day. The DoE has been known to botch raids when it was the wrong enforcement vehicle from the start.

The same questions could be asked of any number of bureaucracies. Does the Social Security Administration really need an armed enforcement division? We've known some unruly seniors in our day, but that seems to be overkill.

Then there's the information that's just plain false. Reports have been circulating that DHS has procured 2,717 Mine Resistant Armor Protected (MRAP) vehicles. The truth is, DHS has had retrofitted MRAPs since 2008, and now has 16 of them for serving "high-risk warrants." The figure of 2,717 comes from a delivery to the Marine Corps, not DHS. None of that, however, takes away from the problem that these are more properly military vehicles for war zones, not law enforcement tools. The militarization of law enforcement is undeniably troublesome. Furthermore, DHS is the same bureaucracy that claims right-wing extremists pose a threat, and it's run by an administration that thinks that "weapons of war" shouldn't be on our streets. Unless they're the ones driving them, apparently.

There are certainly troubling trends here and very real threats to our Liberty, but we must be careful not to exaggerate. While readers know that we never minimize the outrageous growth of government beyond its constitutional bounds, it also doesn't seem to us that the government is, as some have put it, "stockpiling bullets in case of civil unrest." Questions about procurements and functions? Absolutely. Apocalypse? Not yet.

Contact Patriot Post at no-reply@patriotpost.us


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PERSPECTIVE OF A RABBI

Posted by Margarte601, March 08, 2013

Please take a moment to digest this provocative article by a Rabbi from Teaneck, N.J. It is far and away the most succinct and thoughtful explanation of how our nation is changing. The article appeared in The Israel National News, and is directed to Jewish readership. 70% of American Jews vote as Democrats. The Rabbi has some interesting comments in that regard.

Rabbi Steven Pruzansky is the spiritual leader of Congregation Bnai Yeshurun in Teaneck, New Jersey.

The most charitable way of explaining the election results of 2012 is that Americans voted for the status quo — for the incumbent President and for a divided Congress. They must enjoy gridlock, partisanship, incompetence, economic stagnation and avoidance of responsibility.

And fewer people voted.

But as we awake from the nightmare, it is important to eschew the facile explanations for the Romney defeat that will prevail among the chattering classes. Romney did not lose because of the effects of Hurricane Sandy that devastated this area, nor did he lose because he ran a poor campaign, nor did he lose because the Republicans could have chosen better candidates, nor did he lose because Obama benefited from a slight uptick in the economy due to the business cycle.

Romney lost because he didn't get enough votes to win.

That might seem obvious, but not for the obvious reasons. Romney lost because the conservative virtues — the traditional American virtues — of liberty, hard work, free enterprise, private initiative and aspirations to moral greatness — no longer inspire or animate a majority of the electorate. The simplest reason why Romney lost was because it is impossible to compete against free stuff.

Every businessman knows this; that is why the "loss leader" or the giveaway is such a powerful marketing tool. Obama's America is one in which free stuff is given away: the adults among the 47,000,000 on food stamps clearly recognized for whom they should vote, and so they did, by the tens of millions; those who — courtesy of Obama — receive two full years of unemployment benefits (which, of course, both disincentivizes looking for work and also motivates people to work off the books while collecting their windfall) surely know for whom to vote. The lure of free stuff is irresistible.

The defining moment of the whole campaign was the revelation of the secretly-recorded video in which Romney acknowledged the difficulty of winning an election in which "47% of the people" start off against him because they pay no taxes and just receive money — "free stuff" — from the government.

Almost half of the population has no skin in the game — they don't care about high taxes, promoting business, or creating jobs, nor do they care that the money for their free stuff is being borrowed from their children and from the Chinese.

They just want the free stuff that comes their way at someone else's expense. In the end, that 47% leaves very little margin for error for any Republican, and does not bode well for the future.

It is impossible to imagine a conservative candidate winning against such overwhelming odds. People do vote their pocketbooks. In essence, the people vote for a Congress who will not raise their taxes, and for a President who will give them free stuff, never mind who has to pay for it.

That engenders the second reason why Romney lost: the inescapable conclusion that the electorate is ignorant and uninformed. Indeed, it does not pay to be an informed voter, because most other voters — the clear majority — are unintelligent and easily swayed by emotion and raw populism.

That is the indelicate way of saying that too many people vote with their hearts and not their heads. That is why Obama did not have to produce a second term agenda, or even defend his first-term record. He needed only to portray Mitt Romney as a rapacious capitalist who throws elderly women over a cliff, when he is not just snatching away their cancer medication, while starving the poor and cutting taxes for the rich.

During his 1956 presidential campaign, a woman called out to Adlai Stevenson: "Senator, you have the vote of every thinking person!"

Stevenson called back: "That's not enough, madam, we need a majority!"

Truer words were never spoken.

Obama could get away with saying that "Romney wants the rich to play by a different set of rules" — without ever defining what those different rules were; with saying that the "rich should pay their fair share" — without ever defining what a "fair share" is; with saying that Romney wants the poor, elderly and sick to "fend for themselves" — without even acknowledging that all these government programs are going bankrupt, their current insolvency only papered over by deficit spending.

Similarly, Obama (or his surrogates) could hint to blacks that a Romney victory would lead them back into chains and proclaim to women that their abortions and birth control would be taken away. He could appeal to Hispanics that Romney would have them all arrested and shipped to Mexico and unabashedly state that he will not enforce the current immigration laws.

He could espouse the furtherance of the incestuous relationship between governments and unions — in which politicians ply the unions with public money, in exchange for which the unions provide the politicians with votes, in exchange for which the politicians provide more money and the unions provide more votes, etc., even though the money is gone.

Obama also knows that the electorate has changed — that whites will soon be a minority in America (they're already a minority in California) and that the new immigrants to the US are primarily from the Third World and do not share the traditional American values that attracted immigrants in the 19th and 20th centuries.

It is a different world, and a different America. Obama is part of that different

America, knows it, and knows how to tap into it. That is why he won.

Obama also proved again that negative advertising works, invective sells, and harsh personal attacks succeed. That Romney never engaged in such diatribes points to his essential goodness as a person; his "negative ads" were simple facts, never personal abuse — facts about high unemployment, lower take-home pay, a loss of American power and prestige abroad, a lack of leadership, etc.

As a politician, though, Romney failed because he did not embrace the devil's bargain of making unsustainable promises. It turned out that it was not possible for Romney and Ryan — people of substance, depth and ideas — to compete with the shallow populism and platitudes of their opponents.

Obama mastered the politics of envy — of class warfare — never reaching out to Americans as such but to individual groups, and cobbling together a winning majority from these minority groups.

If an Obama could not be defeated — with his record and his vision of America, in which free stuff seduces voters — it is hard to envision any change in the future.

The road to Hillary Clinton in 2016 and to a European-socialist economy — those very economies that are collapsing today in Europe — is paved.

For Jews, mostly assimilated anyway and staunch Democrats, the results demonstrate again that liberalism is their Torah. Almost 70% voted for a president widely perceived by Israelis and most committed Jews as hostile to Israel. They voted to secure Obama's future at America's expense and at Israel's expense — in effect, preferring Obama to Netanyahu by a wide margin.

A dangerous time is ahead. Under present circumstances, it is inconceivable that the US will take any aggressive action against Iran and will more likely thwart any Israeli initiative. The US will preach the importance of negotiations up until the production of the first Iranian nuclear weapon — and then state that the world must learn to live with this new reality.

But this election should be a wake-up call to Jews. There is no permanent empire, nor is there an enduring haven for Jews anywhere in the exile.

The American empire began to decline in 2007, and the deterioration has been exacerbated in the last five years. This election only hastens that decline. Society is permeated with sloth, greed, envy and materialistic excess. It has lost its moorings and its moral foundations. The takers outnumber the givers, and that will only increase in years to come.

The "Occupy" riots across this country in the last two years were mere dress rehearsals for what lies ahead — years of unrest sparked by the increasing discontent of the unsuccessful who want to seize the fruits and the bounty of the successful, and do not appreciate the slow pace of redistribution.

If this election proves one thing, it is that the Old America is gone. And, sad for the world, it is not coming back.

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Contact Margarte601 at margarte6012comcast.net


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ANOTHER TACK: WHY IT MATTERS

Posted by Borntolose, March 08, 2013

This article was written by Sarah Honig who is a veteran columnist and senior editorial writer who joined The Jerusalem Post while still in her teens. She served for many years as The Post's political correspondent (a position she also held on the now-defunct but once-influential Davar), headed the Tel Aviv bureau at thePost and wrote daily analyses of the political scene, along with in-depth features. Honig is a mother, an artist and an avid collector of antique and vintage dolls. View Sarah's website at www.sarahhonig.com This article appeared March 08, 2013 on the Sarah Honig's Blogsite and is archived at
sarahhonig.com/2013/03/08/another-tack-why-it-matters/

There might not be any point to responding if it were only Shaul Mofaz who wondered why we need harp on Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish state.

implausible jewish state

Mofaz has just barely managed to cross the Knesset entry threshold (having started out not too many months back with a 28- member parliamentary contingent). Since he nearly failed to hold on to his own seat, it's safe to conclude that he doesn't represent a powerful or even a relevant political camp. Therefore, what does any of his kibitzing matter?

Ordinarily it indeed wouldn't, except that Mofaz's professed failure of comprehension might reflect the intellectual indolence of others, alongside the trendy heedlessness popularized by assorted opinion-molders.

To hear them, it's perfectly fine to embrace this particular incomprehension — be it expediently feigned or an actual inability to grasp the basic cause for the war waged against Israel.

The premise for the apparent incomprehension is that demanding recognition for Israel's legitimacy as a Jewish state is all much ado about not very much. As Mofaz put it, "Do we need a seal of approval from the Palestinians? We know we are a Jewish state and we shall remain so eternally, whether or not the Palestinians recognize us as such."

This pretty much echoes Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas's oft-reiterated mantra, averring that the Israelis "can call themselves what they will."

But Abbas goes on: "We will not recognize Israel as a Jewish state. We have rejected, and will reject, this demand. We know what Netanyahu's intention is. He wants to undermine the Palestinian-Arab presence inside Israel and prevent the return of refugees."

Yet what is Abbas's intention? His refusal to recognize the Jewish state's legitimacy means that he reserves for himself the right to Arabize the de facto entity provisionally known as Israel by overrunning it with millions of so-called refugees.

In other words, rather than be accepted as rightfully a Jewish state, Israel is regarded at most as a multinational temporary entity and a candidate for impending Arabization. It wouldn't be left in peace unless it submits meekly to said Arabization and the eradication of its Jewishness.

This is a surefire recipe for perpetuating the conflict (albeit by mutating means) rather than ending it, as presumed pursuers of peace would ostensibly wish to do. The refusal to accept the legitimacy of a Jewish state is tantamount to affirming an enduring Arab aspiration to obliterate the Jewish state, subsequent to an arrangement that would falsely parade as peace.

This goes right to the very heart of the conflict between Jews and Arabs — a conflict which had long predated Israel's birth. This conflict isn't and never was about a Palestinian state. There would have been no strife were the establishment of such a state the ultimate objective of the Arab world. A Palestinian Arab state could have been declared independent in 1948 — together with Israel — but no Arab would hear of it.

This country's Jews cheered the 1947 UN Partition Resolution aimed at creating a Jewish and an Arab state. That resolution, however, was ferociously rebuffed by the entire Arab world. Hence it's inherently dishonest to deny that the feud is and always was about the creation and continued existence of the Jewish state.

The Palestinians and the entire Arab/Muslim realm demand strategic sacrifices of Israel that plainly jeopardize its survival prospects. All Israel demands in return is that the war against it cease. That can only happen when the initial pretext for the attacks on Israel is annulled. Since Israel was attacked because the very notion of a Jewish state was anathema to its Arab neighbors, then discontinuing the state of war must start with recognition of the very legitimacy of a Jewish state that was rejected from 1947 onward.

Now, gallingly, the demand for recognition of the right of Jews to a state is extensively portrayed as an obstructionist tactic. That tactic moreover is portrayed as Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's own personal negotiation-paralyzing pet ploy. Such spurious spins serve both in-house political rivals doggedly snapping at Netanyahu's heels and foreign detractors whose automatic point of departure is that Israel can never be right.

Nonetheless, the still blatant refusal to concede the legality of Jewish sovereignty isn't a semantic quibble. True, we know who we are regardless of Arab acknowledgement but that acknowledgement is not inconsequential.

To understand this we need to set aside the acquired postmodern contempt for history. The past isn't insignificant. The present is a direct, ongoing attempt to resolve what was started yesteryear.

Without historical context there can be no valid evaluation of Israel's existential predicaments — certainly not of crucial continuities. That's why those who seek to obfuscate and skew do their utmost to erase telltale fundamental perspectives and portray whatever they focus upon as vital, isolated concerns. Disinclination to retrace the steps which, for better or worse, brought us hitherto messes with our perceptions and dictates profound misperceptions.

Those whose time count begins on the morning of June 5, 1967, invariably seek to advance a predetermined agenda, whereby all that preceded Israeli "occupation" is discarded, as is everything that triggered the direct outbreak of hostilities.

Their bottom line is to persuade the uninitiated that Israelis woke up one sunny day, and overtaken by uncontrollable and inexcusable territorial appetites, invaded their peace-loving neighbors' homes and usurped them arbitrarily. The cruel conquistadors then illegally settled in their neighbors' property, which impelled the downtrodden natives to resist the interlopers.

The propagandist logic here is unmistakable. Justice demands a return to the status quo ante — in other words to the situation as it was on June 4, 1967 (while failing to mention that on that date Israel was existentially vulnerable, surrounded and threatened with extinction by the aforementioned neighbors who blusterously bayed for Jewish blood).

An equally popular distortion is that all regional misery resulted wantonly out of the blue from Israel's birth in 1948. Everything which led up to that turning point is assiduously ignored. Tendentious rewriters of history prefer we forget that the conflict didn't begin in 1948 but reached its culmination then.

Forgotten quite expediently are recurrent pre-1948 massacres by Arabs shouting "Itbach el-Yahud" ("Slaughter the Jews"), denial of asylum to Jews fleeing the Holocaust and, not least, active and avid Arab collaboration with Nazi Germany.

The logic of this misrepresentation too is unmistakable. It inescapably leads to Israel's utter delegitimization. If Israel's inception is the original sin, then the only rightful long-term remedy can be Israel's termination.

But while Israel's independence formally began in 1948, its struggle didn't. The Arabs brutally opposed the Jewish community which existed in this country pre-World War II and which was ripe for statehood before the Holocaust. The "Great Arab Revolt" of 1936-39 — fomented by the still-revered Haj Amin al-Husseini and financed by Nazi Germany — delayed Jewish independence.

The Arabs denied asylum here to desperate Jewish escapees from Hitler's hell. Thereby they doomed these refugees to death. The blood of these exterminated Jews indelibly stains Arab hands.

But that's not all. Husseini, in the role of pan-Arab prime minister, spent the war years in Berlin, where he chummily hobnobbed with his financers and hosts — Hitler, Himmler, Eichmann et al. He broadcast Nazi propaganda, recruited Muslims to the SS and actively foiled the rescue of any Jews, even children, during the Holocaust.

This country's Arabs were avidly pro-Nazi, saluted each other with Heil Hitler, flaunted the swastika, hoarded arms, harbored German spies and planned to heartily welcome Rommel's invading Afrika Korps.

The war which the entire Arab world launched against newborn Israel, three years post-Holocaust, was explicitly geared to complete Hitler's unfinished mission. Not only was there no attempt to camouflage this genocidal goal, but it was broadcast boastfully for all to hear and be intimidated.

Its declared aim was to thwart UN General Assembly Resolution 181, adopted on November 29, 1947. That resolution called for the partition of western Palestine into two economically integrated states — one Jewish and one Arab.

Eastern Palestine, comprising nearly 80 percent of the total, was arbitrarily ripped off by the British Mandate in 1922 and handed over to a princeling from what has since become known as Saudi Arabia. Emir Abdullah's gift-package was artificially dubbed Transjordan, a country entirely unheard of in human history and whose bogus nationality is today known as Jordanian. It is, in fact, the product of the first division of Palestine.

Although on paper Jews received 54% of the remainder, they actually got three non-contiguous slivers, the largest of which included the Arava, eastern Negev and the Negev's far south (down to then-nonexistent Eilat). Most of the moonscape terrain wasn't arable and was certainly unsuitable for large-scale urban habitation. Another bit was wedged in the eastern Galilee around Lake Kinneret. The most densely populated mini-slice was an unimaginably narrow noodle along the Mediterranean, where most Jews congregated and which was chillingly vulnerable. Within it was enclosed the Arab enclave of Jaffa, while Nahariya was left outside the Jewish state.

Jerusalem and Bethlehem were to comprise a "corpus separatum," an international zone, this notwithstanding the fact that Jerusalem had an undeniable Jewish majority going back at least to the beginning of the 19th century (there were no censuses beforehand). But organized Christianity couldn't abide the affront of Jewish dominion in the holy city.

Untenable and implausible though this hodgepodge partition was, Jewish multitudes rejoiced in the streets. At that point it didn't matter how nightmarish and absurd the disjointed territorial splinters assigned to them were.

What mattered was that for the first time in 2,000 years Jewish self-determination — if even on a ridiculously diminutive and fragile geographical fragment — appeared increasingly like a viable reality, despite immediate Arab venomous denunciation of any compromise whatever with any Jewish entity.

This is what it was all about then. This is what it's still about. This is why it still massively matters. This is why Mofaz is so fundamentally wrong.

All Israel asks is that the Arabs belatedly accept 1947's UN Partition Resolution, which they violently violated merely because it provided for a Jewish state. That Jewish state became the Arab casus belli. The Jewish state still is the Arab casus belli.

Peace cannot begin to be made before the malignant characterization of Jewish statehood as a casus belli is recanted convincingly and comprehensively once and for all.

Contact Borntolose3 at borntolose3@charter.net


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SPOT ON!! EMAIL OF THE YEAR.

Posted by Midenise, March 09, 2013

Food for Thought

If you can get arrested for hunting or fishing without a license, but not for being in the country illegally ... you might live in a country founded by geniuses but run by idiots.

If you have to get your parent's permission to go on a field trip or take an aspirin in school, but not to get an abortion ... you might live in a country founded by geniuses but run by idiots.

If the only school curriculum allowed to explain how we got here is evolution, and the government stops a $15 million construction project to keep a rare spider from evolving to extinction ... you might live in a country founded by geniuses but run by idiots.

If you have to show identification to board an airplane, cash a check, buy liquor, or check out a library book, but not to vote who runs the government ... you might live in a country founded by geniuses but run by idiots.

If the government wants to ban stable, law-abiding citizens from owning gun magazines with more than ten rounds, but gives 20 F-16 fighter jets to the crazy new leaders in Egypt ... you might live in a country founded by geniuses but run by idiots.

If, in the largest city, you can buy two 16-ounce sodas, but not a 24-ounce soda because 24-ounces of a sugary drink might make you fat ... you might live in a country founded by geniuses but run by idiots.

If an 80-year-old woman can be stripped searched by the TSA but a woman in a hi jab is only subject to having her neck and head searched ... you might live in a country founded by geniuses but run by idiots.

If your government believes that the best way to eradicate trillions of dollars of debt is to spend trillions more ... you might live in a country founded by geniuses but run by idiots.

If a seven year old boy can be thrown out of school for saying his teacher is "cute," but hosting a sexual exploration or diversity class in grade school is perfectly acceptable ... you might live in a country founded by geniuses but run by idiots.

If children are forcibly removed from parents who discipline them with spankings while children of addicts are left in filth and drug infested homes... you might live in a country founded by geniuses but run by idiots.

If hard work and success are met with higher taxes and more government intrusion, while not working is rewarded with EBT cards, WIC checks, Medicaid, subsidized housing, and free cell phones ... you might live in a country founded by geniuses but run by idiots.

If the government's plan for getting people back to work is to approve NOT working with 99 weeks of Unemployment checks and no requirement to prove they applied but can't find work ... you might live in a country founded by geniuses but run by idiots.

If you pay your mortgage faithfully, denying yourself the newest big screen TV while your neighbor buys iPhones, TV's and new cars, and the government forgives his debt when he defaults on his mortgage ... you might live in a country founded by geniuses but run by idiots.

If being stripped of the ability to defend yourself makes you more "safe" according to the government ... you might live in a country founded by geniuses but run by idiots.

Contact Midenise at midenise@zahav.net.il


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LINCOLN AS BLEEDING HEART PEACENIK?

Posted by Steven Plaut, March 09, 2013

An interesting trend has emerged in recent weeks. The Israeli Left, along with most of the world's pseudo-intellectual classes, has suddenly discovered Abraham Lincoln, and is proclaiming him an honorary member of "Peace Now." Obviously it is thanks to the new Hollywood movie. Columnists in the Israeli media are claiming that Israel needs to follow the ethical leadership of Lincoln. Just as Lincoln freed the slaves, or so their mantra goes, so Israel must "free" the Palestinians from "occupation."

The Israeli Left has embraced Lincoln because it is convinced that, if Lincoln is regarded as a moral champion, identification with Lincoln must clearly lead one to support the political agenda of the Israeli Left. First and foremost this would mean supporting Palestinian demands and "resistance."

So what should we make of this new "Lincoln as Leftist Pro-Palestinian" campaign?

Well, even someone with only the shallowest familiarity with American history would know that the two most important principles represented by Lincoln would make him for all intents and purposes the ethical analogue of the Jewish settler leaders in the West Bank, and not a Peace Now whiner.

Lincoln fought the American Civil War first and foremost in to order to prevent the partition or division of his homeland, and he was fully prepared to use massive military force to achieve this goal. Lincoln was in favor of peace but not under all conditions or at any price. Those in Israel proposing such a "two-state solution" are the 21st century's Copperheads.

Second, Lincoln had no reluctance about using the word "treason," and throughout the Civil War he made it clear that he considered the Union war against the Confederacy and its supporters to be a campaign against treason. Those who supported secession or the Confederacy were engaging in treason, not academic debate. Lincoln did not mollycoddle traitors in the name of "understanding the Other." He did not insist that those opposing national interests be allowed to control the universities and the courts and the media.

Those who are trying to deconstruct Lincoln as the ultimate opponent of "occupation" will have to explain why his party imposed a severely harsh occupation on the member states of the Confederacy, one that continued for years. The analogue to the PLO and Hamas in the occupied Confederacy was the Ku Klux Klan, and it was suppressed mercilessly in actions that included Union militias acting as anti-Klan death squads. There were thousands of arrests of KKK "militants" and "activists," and martial law was imposed upon counties with Klan activities. No one proposed seeking peace by granting the Klan its own country.

Aside from the two most obvious characteristics of Lincoln, which make him the moral analogue of Jewish settler leaders in the West Bank, Lincoln had a few other features that will make the Left squirm. Lincoln abolished habeas corpus during wartime. He had traitors executed and deported, and had no hesitation about the use of capital punishment. Among those executed, William Bruce Mumford was convicted of treason and hanged in 1862 for tearing down a United States flag. Some 500 people were executed by hanging or by firing squad during the War, some for desertion. At least one of those hanged was a woman, Mary Surratt (executed for her role in the assassination of Lincoln). Lincoln had no patience for terrorists, known in the Civil War as "bushwhackers," and ordered them to be executed by firing squad. "Bridge burners" were given the same treatment. He believed there was ONLY a military solution to the problems of terrorism.

Lincoln also imposed censorship on the press and suppressed treasonous journalism. Want to ponder how Lincoln would handle the pro-Hamas radical Left in Israel? Then in Sherman's march to the sea, Lincoln conducted war against CIVILIANS, explicitly targeting and attacking the civilian population and its infrastructure to end rebellion and treason. With no Betselem and no Supreme Court interference. Lincoln also sponsored the Homestead Act of 1862, perhaps the greatest settlements construction effort in history.

Perhaps most notably, Lincoln imposed an uncompromising blockade upon the entire Confederacy. The very same Israeli Leftists, who insist that lifting the "embargo" of Gaza is the highest form of humane morality so that the Hamas can more easily import weapons, will have a an interesting challenge explaining the blockade imposed by their new-found moral champion, Abraham Lincoln. It was a policy proudly described by Lincoln as "starving the South." Food and civilian commodities were prevented from passing through the blockade. Guess how Lincoln would have dealt with "Gaza Flotilla" blockade runners?

Honest Abe used exactly the same blockade tactic against the Confederacy over which the Israeli Left is now sobbing its eyes out! And frankly my dear, I don't give a damn!

Steven Plaut is an American-trained economist, a professor of business administration at Haifa University and author of "The Scout." He frequently comments — both seriously and satirically — on Israeli politics and the left wing academic community. Write him at splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il His website address is http://www.stevenplaut.blogspot.com.


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WHITE HOUSE SUSPENDS PUBLIC TOURS, BUT FIRST FAMILY TRIPS IN FULL SWING

Posted by Hadar-Israel, March 09, 2013

The article below was written by Barnini Chakraborty who is currently a broadcaster in Fox News Channel in Washington, DC and previously at Fox Business Network, Fox News Radio and Dow Jones Newswires.

WASHINGTON — Visitors to the nation's capital looking for a White House public tour are out of luck starting this weekend, courtesy of what the Secret Service says is its own decision to deal with the sequester cuts.

But while the agency said it needed to pull officers off the tours for more pressing assignments, the budget ax didn't swing early or deep enough to curtail a host of recent Secret Service-chaperoned trips like President Obama's much-discussed Florida golf outing with Tiger Woods and first lady Michelle Obama's high-profile multi-city media appearances.

Obama's pricey golf outings have been a particular target for Republicans who see them as examples of what they say are the administration's rather selective concerns with running up the tab of Secret Service resources. On March 5, Texas Rep. Louis Gohmert filed an amendment to a House resolution that would prohibit federal funds from being spent on Obama's golf trips until public tours of the White House resumed.

Gohmert referenced press reports pegging the cost of a recent Florida golf outing Obama took with Tiger Woods at $1 million. He also cited press reports saying 341 federal workers could have been spared furloughs if Obama had stayed home.

"The president's travel expenses alone, for the golfing outing with Tiger Woods, would pay for a year of White House visits," Fox News contributor Charles Krauthammer said Thursday. "So I suggest that perhaps he curtail the travel."

The price tag and draw on Secret Service resources involving promotional campaigns like Michelle Obama's "Let's Move" initiative is less clear.

The Secret Service does not usually reveal how many agents and other resources are assigned to protective missions so it's not known just how much it cost taxpayers to ferry the first lady to events like her dance routine on Jimmy Fallon's show -- the highlight of a Feb. 22 media blitz in New York -- or her Feb. 27-28 visit to Mississippi, Missouri and her hometown of Chicago.

Those trips would all have involved Secret Service details traveling with the first lady, as well as advance work by teams of agents on location.

When asked by FoxNews.com if the first lady's office or schedule would be affected by the sequester, the White House issued a 100-word statement that made no mention of any specific cuts that might affect Michelle Obama's activities -- while making a generic reference to cuts affecting the "Executive Office of the President," which houses the first lady's office.

Deputy Press Secretary Josh Earnest, asked how the White House was cutting back, on Friday said there would be furloughs and pay cuts.

On the decision to close the tours, Press Secretary Jay Carney a day earlier said "the President and the first lady have throughout the time that they've been here made extraordinary efforts to make this the people's house, and it is extremely unfortunate that we have a situation like the sequester that compels the kinds of tradeoffs and decisions that this represents."

It's also not clear what Secret Service resources were dedicated to a recent New York visit by 14-year-old Malia Obama, who was spotted dining with a group of friends at a New York restaurant shortly after President Obama signed off on the sequester. There were Secret Service agents in the restaurant, according to reports that said they stayed behind the group.

How much overtime these types of assignments cost the Secret Service may be an area of concern. Donovan told FoxNews.com that overtime costs factored into the decision to shut down the White House tours. By taking the 30 officers involved in the tours and assigning them to high-priority security posts, officers normally on those duties can log fewer hours -- in turn saving the Secret Service money.

"It reduces overtime costs overall for us," Donovan said.

The tours will not be rescheduled and will stay frozen until further notice.

That's bad news for groups like the sixth graders at St. Paul's Lutheran School in Iowa, who had been planning to take the White House tour on March 16. Fourteen students from that group and their teacher on Thursday took their frustrations to Facebook. In a web video, they held up handmade posters and chanted, "The White House is our house."

Some Republicans in Congress expressed their displeasure with the cuts more forcefully. "Canceling all self-guided White House tours is the latest shameless political stunt by the president, who is twisting basic government efficiency into an extreme consequence," Rep. Tom Graves, R-Ga., said in a statement March 5.

Contact Hadar-Israel at hadar-israel@verizon.net


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THE SAD TRUTH ABOUT IMMIGRATION AND THE SEQUESTER

Posted by Hadar-Israel, March 09, 2013

The article below was written by David Bossie who is an American political activist. Since 2000 he has been President and Chairman of conservative advocacy organization Citizens United. This article appeared March 09, 2013 in Breitbart and is archived at
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2013/03/09/a-little-honesty-about-the-fence/

enforcement

Out of President Obama's sequestration doomsday predictions, the one which best encapsulates what famed Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward described as "madness" involves illegal immigration. And it is no laughing matter.

As Fox News reported, a few hundred illegal immigrant detainees were released by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, which probably led to the early "retirement" of ICE's Enforcement and Removal Operations Director Gary Mead. ICE plans to let loose between 5,000 and 10,000 additional illegal immigrants to meet the terms of the sequester. Confirming the story this week was The Washington Examiner.

But don't worry: Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has informed us that the illegals being released are "very low-level, low-risk detainees." According to this New York Times profile, that can also be defined as illegals with convictions for "simple assault, simple battery, and child abuse." Are you comforted yet?

I have studied our porous Southern border closely. In 2006, I produced the award-winning documentary Border War: The Battle Over Illegal Immigration. Since that time, the situation and the drain on our social services and entitlement programs have become even more dire.

With President Obama rushing to give every illegal immigrant a pathway to citizenship, what he and our leaders in Congress should do is tell the truth about the state of the fence at our southern border and asking: Why hasn't the border fence been built?

To get that answer, we must look back to the Secure Fence Act of 2006, which was signed into law by President George W. Bush. While it authorized the construction of hundreds of miles of "at least two layers of reinforced fencing," the law was subsequently amended heavily by then-Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas and others who gave DHS bureaucrats the ability to use less secure fencing at their discretion.

As Senator Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) 80%of Alabama pointed out during a February 13 Judiciary Committee hearing, with more than $600 million in appropriations, and out of the 700 miles of fence we were promised, only 36 miles of doubled-layered fence actually exist. The rest of the fencing consists of single-layer fence or just small "vehicle barriers" designed to stop cars, which any pedestrian could easily hop over. This is an outrage and one of the reasons Washington politicians are so unpopular.

Now, while the border fence construction has essentially stopped, Mexican cartels continue to smuggle weapons, drugs, and illegals into our country who are more likely to commit crimes and fill our prisons. The United State Attorney General's office has released statistical reports showing crime rates along the southern border is increasing, with drug smuggling posing a serious organized crime threat for the country. And throughout the border, desperate Southern states have erected signs warning citizens to avoid certain federal lands because of the high levels of human and drug trafficking.

Before Congress discusses comprehensive immigration reform, we must enforce the laws on our books, finish building a legitimate and effective fence for the 21st century, and further secure our border with boots on the ground. With enemies throughout the world who do not wear uniforms, our liberty can only be secure if we know exactly who is coming into the country. If we are a nation of laws, we cannot reward lawbreakers while punishing those who wait in line to find a better life. And if we are to cut the size of government while reducing the burden placed on law enforcement and social services, conservatives must unite and finally get our border secured first.

Contact Hadar-Israel at hadar-israel@verizon.net


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HEBREW UNIVERSITY'S AMIRAM GOLDBLUM AS INTERNATIONAL DEFAMER OF ISRAEL AND JEWS

Posted by Steven Plaut, March 10, 2013

The article below was written by Ben-Dror Yemini who is an Israeli journalist. He has worked for the daily newspaper Maariv, and in Spring 2014 began writing for the daily Yedioth Ahronoth. This article appeared March 08, 2013 in IsraCampus.Org.il and is archived at
http://www.isracampus.org.il/third%20level%20pages/HebrewU%20-%20Ben%20Dror%20Yemini%20denounces%20Amiram%20Goldblum.htm

And so the parade marches on. Amiram Goldblum, who was the initiator of the "Survey" about Israeli attitudes about annexation, managed to manufacture for himself a front-page headline in "Haaretz" claiming that most Israelis endorse apartheid. This is a lie long ago debunked. Even "Haaretz" itself publicly repudiated the claim, if only on an inside page. But Goldblum is not giving up. He is setting up his own new organization. It is not trying to battle against apartheid. To the contrary, Goldblum is trying to convince anyone and everyone that Israel is ALREADY an apartheid regime. Here is Goldblum: "Israel's holding the territories between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, whether these are formally annexed or not, makes Israel a de facto apartheid regime." Oh really? [Isracampus wonders why the US and Canada holding territory between the Atlantic and the Pacific does not make THEM apartheid regimes!]

Israel's control over territories is the direct consequence of Palestinian intransigence. Let's put aside the three infamous "NOs" of Khartoum, issued after the Arab states tried and failed to annihilate Israel. It seems we need to apologize for not being destroyed. Let's go to recent history. The Palestinians were offered their own state by Bill Clinton. They responded with rejectionism and an "intifada" of violence. Then they were granted Gaza by Ariel Sharon. They responded to this with Hamas, rockets, and their hate industry. Then from Ehud Olmert they got an offer that was at the furthest extreme reach of what even the Israeli radical Left was willing to offer. It did not matter. The Palestinians responded with a demand for their so-called "right of return" to all of Israel.

The Goldblums have eyes that simply are incapable of seeing. They have ears that can hear nothing. Instead of struggling for peace and reconciliation and mutual recognition, he and his ilk prefer to smear Israel and Zionism. ...

(Yemini then cites published surveys about the extent of racism in Britain, France and other parts of Europe)

What would happen if there were similar surveys with similar findings about Israel? Why, our Goldblums would be running off to the International Court of Justice in the Hague to file indictments against Israel for crimes against humanity!

But rest assured that no such group like Goldblum's will arise in Britain, France or Germany to fight against racism and apartheid. While the situation there is grave, those countries are not part of any conflict, they have no Hamas to deal with, no terrorism, and no campaign of unceasing incitement and demonization. Taking such things into account, there is no question that Israel is by far the more sane country, compared to those European states.

Ah but the facts simply do not matter. After all, we have our Goldblums to fabricate a danger of impending apartheid! The contributions to their budgets will already be on their way, perhaps even from the EU itself. Maybe from countries where hostility towards aliens and foreigners is FAR worse than in Israel.

Goldblum's lying "apartheid survey" has been thoroughly discredited and debunked. But lies retain their own feet, as the Hebrew saying goes. Goldblum's survey has enjoyed international popularity and "success." That is because those forever seeking to paint Israel as a monstrosity and abomination never forego any new ammunition. Donations are assured. Perhaps even from the New Israel Fund [on whose board Goldblum sits -- Isracampus]. Maybe also from Europe.

So we should have no delusions. Goldblum's new initiative, like so many others in his same industry, will do nothing to promote human rights and will not be engaging in any legitimate criticism. It will just be one more assault weapon in the campaign of demonization against Israel.

Steven Plaut is an American-trained economist, a professor of business administration at Haifa University and author of "The Scout." He frequently comments — both seriously and satirically — on Israeli politics and the left wing academic community. Write him at splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il His website address is http://www.stevenplaut.blogspot.com.


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DESTRUCTIVE FANTASIES RELATIVE TO RADICAL ISLAM

Posted by Israel Commentary, March 10, 2013

The article below was written by Victor Davis Hanson who is an American military historian, columnist, former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He has been a commentator on modern warfare and contemporary politics for National Review and other media outlets. This article appeared February 15, 2013 in the Washington Times and is archived at
http:www//israel-commentary.org/?p=6066

Most things that we read in the popular media about radical Islam are fantasies. They are promulgated in the mistaken belief that such dogmas will appease terrorists, or at least direct their ire elsewhere. But given the recent news — murdering in Algeria, war in Mali, the Syrian mess, and Libyan chaos — let us reexamine some of these more common heresies.

Such a review is especially timely, given that Mr. Brennan believed that jihad is largely a personal quest for spiritual perfection; Mr. Kerry believed that Bashar Assad was a potentially moderating reformer; and Mr. Hagel believed that Iran was not worthy of sanctions, Hezbollah was not deserving of ostracism, and Israel is equally culpable for the Middle East mess. (Huh!)

1. Contact with the West moderates Radical Muslims

In theory, residence in the West could instruct young Muslim immigrants on the advantages of free markets, constitutional government, and legally protected freedoms. But as we saw with many of the 9/11 hijackers, for a large subset of Muslim expatriates, a strange schizophrenia ensues: they enjoy — indeed, seek out — the material bounty of the West. But in the abstract, far too many either despise what wealth and affluence do to the citizenry (e.g., gay marriage, feminism, religious tolerance, secularism, etc.) or try to dream up conspiracy theories to explain why their adopted home is better off than the native one that they abandoned.

Foreign students, journalists, and religious expatriates tend to congregate around American campuses and in liberal big cities. There, they are more often nursed on American race/class/gender critiques of America, and so apparently believe that their own anti-Americanism must naturally be shared by millions of Americans from Bakersfield to Nashville.

Take Mohamed Morsi, Egypt's new theocratic president. He should appreciate the US. It gave him refuge from persecution in Egypt. It allowed unfettered expression of his radical anti-American views. It schooled him in meritocratic fashion and offered him secure employment at the CSU system, despite his foreign national status. It gave citizenship to two of his daughters (apparently retained). But the result is that Mr. Morsi is an abject anti-Semite ("apes and pigs") and anti-American. He does not believe terrorists caused 9/11. He wants the imprisoned, murderous blind sheik, who was the architect of the first World Trade Center bombing, sent home to Egypt. And he is pushing Egypt into a Sunni version of Iran.

2. The West Must Atone for Its Past Behavior

I have noted elsewhere both the fantasies found in Barack Obama's Cairo speech and their general irrelevance to the Muslim world. Polls from Pakistan to Palestine — both recipients of massive US aid — show that the US is as unpopular under Obama as it was under Bush. All small nations have writs against large ones, especially the globally ubiquitous US. But America must be seen in comparison to ... what? Russia's artillery and missile barrage that leveled Muslim Grozny (which the UN declared the most destroyed city in the world)? China, which outlaws free expression of Islam and persecutes Muslim minorities? Both are largely left alone by al Qaeda, due to their unapologetic attitudes, possible unpredictable response, and inability to offer attackers a globalized media forum.

In contrast, no single nation lets in more Muslim immigrants than does the US. No non-Muslim nation gives more foreign aid than does the US to the Muslim world — Pakistan, Jordan, Egypt, and Palestine. No nation has so sought to save Muslims from dictatorial violence — whether bombing European Christians to save Muslims in the Balkans; jawboning Kuwaitis to spare Palestinian turncoats in 1991; trying to feed starving Somalis; aiding Muslims fighting Russians in Afghanistan; freeing Kuwaitis from Saddam; rebuilding Iraq; rebuilding Afghanistan from Taliban terror; trying to free Libyans from Gadhafi; and on and on.

The sources of radical Islamic rage are thus not past US actions. Read The Al Qaeda Reader to chart all the bizarre excuses that bin Laden and Dr. Zawahiri alleged were the roots of their anger at the US. So why exactly does radical Islam hate us?

Mostly because of the age-old wages of insecurity, envy, and a sense of inferiority — and the hunch that such gripes win apologies, attention, and sometimes money. In a globalized world, Muslims see daily that everyone from South Koreans to North Americans are better off. Why? In their view, not because of market economies, meritocracies, gender equality, religious pluralism, consensual government, and the Western menu of personal freedom.

To draw that conclusion would mean to reject tribalism, gender apartheid, religious intolerance, anti-Semitism, statism, authoritarianism, and conspiracy theory — and to admit indigenous rather than foreign causation. Instead, it is far easier to blame "them" for turning the majestic Islamic empire of old into the chaos of modern Islam — as well as to fault Arab secularists whose lack of religious zealotry allowed the West to move ahead. All antidotes to these deductive beliefs — foreign aid, democratization, outreach, better communications — have so far proved ambiguous at best.

3. Israel Is the Source of Muslim Rage

Note two facts about the current mass killing in the Muslim world, in Afghanistan, Algeria, Libya, Mali, Syria, and Yemen. First, it has nothing to do with Israel. Second, the Muslim world is largely silent about the carnage that dwarfs the toll of an Israeli response to missiles from Gaza. The Muslim world cannot do anything about Muslim-on-Muslim violence, but apparently thinks others can do a great deal about Israeli-on-Muslim violence, which is sporadic at best.

Why, then, do Westerners so often scapegoat Israel? A number of very human considerations, apart from the most obvious of anti-Semitism, the Arab world's oil wealth, and the vast demographic fact of 1 billion persons versus 7 million. We have influence with Westernized and liberal Israel, none with Mr. Morsi or the Libyan assassins or the Algerian hostage-killers.

Symbolic pressure is a psychological mechanism to excuse factual impotence. The Arab world is so complex and so torn by tribalism, religious schisms, and embedded pathologies that the Western mind seeks a simple sword stroke to Israel to cut such a complex Gordian knot. For now the problem is supposed to be Mr. Netanyahu, who in appearance and speech seems like an easily demonized American neocon.

Yet every writ against Israel is elsewhere in the world commonplace and mostly ignored: our drone killings trump their targeted assassinations; a divided Nicosia trumps Jerusalem; occupied islands off Japan or Tibet trump the West Bank; a million ethnically cleansed Jews from Arab capitals or 13 million Germans cleansed from Eastern Europe trump the Arab flight from Palestine. For a displaced German now to speak of a right of return to "Danzig" is creepy; for a Palestinian to demand residence in Haifa after a similar seven decades of absence is appropriate.

4. The US Can Solve the Muslim World's Problems

I supported the war in Iraq as a way of getting rid of a long-term enemy of the US, Saddam Hussein, in accordance with the 23 writs of action approved by the US Congress. We did that, ended the 12-year containment and no-fly-zones, and defeated a huge Islamist coalition that flocked to Iraq to wage jihad. That said, Iraq is more stable than Syria or Libya largely because a US presence baby-sat democratic change. To the degree that Iraq will revert to the usual Arab paradigm is probably contingent on the fact that the US refused to leave even a small garrison and simply pulled out lock, stock, and barrel.

Elsewhere, I don't think the Western intervention in Libya led to much of an improvement over Gadhafi's nightmarish dictatorship. Morsi may make the kleptocratic Mubarak look good in another year. Take your pick in Syria: the murderous security of the Assad secret police or the murderous chaos of Islamist gangs. I am sure that there are Google execs among all the dissidents, but I am also sure that none will come to power — and most will soon flee their respective countries.

No one now is pressuring 8th-century Saudi Arabia to become a 21st-century "democratic" Egypt. Eastern Europe — warped by a half-century of Soviet-imposed communism, torn by past wars between Russia and Europe, with a baleful legacy of Ottoman occupation in the southeast, and distant from the Renaissance, Reformation, and New World exploration — was saved by its Western heritage and its incorporation into Europe, at least for now. As far as the Muslim world, I see no such heritage or possible like-minded interventions from the West. Perhaps someday, globalization or Westernized oil-fed elites in the manner of a Dubai may make a difference — or perhaps not.

In this regard, the Obama administration's therapeutic approach (and deliberate media orchestrated delusion upon US citizens) — jihad is a personal journey; Major Hasan committed workplace violence and endangered the Army's diversity program; terrorism is a man-caused disaster; anti-terrorism is an overseas contingency operation; there is no war on Islamic terror; trying KSM in a civilian court; loud talk of shutting down Guantanamo; reading Miranda rights to terrorist suspects; loudly inventing under appreciated Islamic discoveries and inventions — is not just silly and embarrassing, but dangerous. The therapeutic approach sends the message to the young terrorist that we are in some way culpable for the violence that he intends to commit, that there may not be dangerous repercussions to his terrorist acts, or that we do not believe in the values of our culture as much as he does in his own.

5. We Are Largely Safe from Islamic Upheavals

While we are largely impotent in terms of modernizing the Arab and larger Islamic world, and while many of its conflicts do not involve any major US interests, I'm afraid we cannot simply wash our hands of radical Islam. September 11 taught us that premodern killers can still reach postmodern Westerners. Oil revenues will give Iran not just the bomb, but in ten years the ability to rocket it to Europe and perhaps the US. If there is to be a Persian nuke, there may well be soon an Egyptian or Saudi one as well. Pakistan at any moment could lose its warheads to al Qaedists. Rising Muslim populations in Europe — the embryo of the Holocaust — are already changing its geo-politics. Over forty terrorist plots have been uncovered in the US since 9/11. A characteristic of radical Islam is nihilism, the morbid desire to destroy all that it cannot create.

In short, we must continue our anti-terrorism vigilance, maintain our military strength, speak honestly to the public, and seek alliances with sympathetic nations who share our views about radical Islam.

What Then?

More importantly, it is time to reassess our posture in the Muslim world. Giving billions of dollars in aid to Mr. Morsi's Egypt is unsustainable, logically and morally. We should quietly chart a five-year plan to reach zero aid, a cut-off that could be reassessed should Morsi prove a reformer (fat chance). Ditto diminishing aid to Pakistan, and the Palestinians. The key is not loud lecturing, but just a quiet yet steady twist of the spigot in the off direction. If anti-Americanism earns US money (Pakistan and Palestine just polled the most anti-American of all nations), then perhaps no US money might earn a little pro-Americanism.

Our immigration policy in general is wrecked. But we should radically reassess granting visas to those from non-democratic countries in the Middle East. This hiatus need not be permanent, but again can send a quiet message that there are wages to anti-Americanism.

Oil and natural gas self-sufficiency are now possible in a way undreamed of just four years ago. In other words, there are now real answers to our age-old worries: a stop to predicating our national security on the Persian Gulf; an end to the Arab League holding our foreign policy hostage; a stop to berating Israel and courting Hamas; a curtailing of our disastrous imbalance of payments caused by importing over-priced oil — as well as the possibility of exchanging coal for clean-burning natural gas, creating millions of new jobs at home, and earning revenues to help pay down the deficit. Not developing new wells on public lands and canceling the Keystone pipeline are not just mistaken, but mistaken to the degree of lunacy.

To the degree that the administration quietly kept in place most of the Bush-Cheney anti-terrorism protocols that it had in campaign-mode so opportunistically derided, and to the degree that its own loud new initiatives either were shelved or faced a storm of opposition in Congress, we have been kept safe for another four years. But if we believe any of the above five truisms, we won't be for long.

Contact Israel Commentary at israelcommentary@comcast.net


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THE VIOLENCE OF THE LAMBS

Posted by Tabitha, March 10, 2013

Sheep are usually valued as an excellent source of food and fiber, but what about the sheep at Brooklyn College, particularly the psychology and philosophy departments? Although these predisposed, mindless sheep of academia differ somewhat from their quadruped counterparts, they are also of value because, as a veterinarian noted, both can be worked on a year-round basis.

To another anti-Israel forum, add supportive pro-Palestinians who claimed their right to free speech, boot out the non-disruptive pro-Israel students who were denied the same free speech, and we have the makings of a lynch mob. Their head ram, gay activist Sarah Schulman who was trained to be ashamed of her heritage, takes the rank of herding sheepdog. Although history has proven that no matter how Jews assimilate and harbor hate against their own, they, themselves, will never escape antisemitism.

Following the political science department's Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions (BDS) rally against the State of Israel, the psychology and philosophy departments are using City University of New York (CUNY)'s Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality to continue the assault. They will supplement Schulman's claim of "Homonationalism and Pinkwashing," a bogus assertion that Israel is intentionally promoting their own gay rights to deflect from their violating Palestinian rights, when Israel has long provided freedom for all its citizens, including welcoming gays into the military. But the more bizarre the accusation and propaganda, the more it appeals to the ill-informed, those inclined to blame their lot in life on others, and to an extreme liberal academia whose ultimate intent is to deny America's exceptionalism, and the morality born of the Biblical Commandments and American Constitution. These activists prefer dictatorial officials, dishonesty, discord, and divisiveness, and to destroy the pillars of freedom and democracy inherent in Israel and the United States. If Ms. Schulman and her sheep can betray her Jewish heritage of ethics and morality, how long before she'll seek to betray her country, America, a beacon for freedom and opportunity around the world.

The truth has no place in their agenda, for they would then have to confront life for the Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Transgender (LGBT) community under Islam. They would have to admit that gays have no rights in Islam, that they're treated as criminals in Iran, that they undergo severe forms of corporal punishment, flogging, imprisonment, and even execution. In any Islamic country, homosexuals are subject to brutal forms of torture and violence, mob assaults, lynching, and even being burned alive.

Schulman and her sheep would be compelled to confront the rights denied Muslims by their own culture — the right to live a happy, creative, productive life regardless of their sexual identification.

To begin with, Islamic women are victims of one of the most hideous, barbaric rituals — female genital mutilation. Treated no better than sheep, these untermenschen are forever demoralized and deprived of education, have no equality to men under the law, play no formal role in government, may take no action against spousal abuse or other forms of gender violence, and may receive no medical treatment without a man's consent. Women may not undertake domestic or foreign travel alone, qualify for inheritance equal to her brothers, expect a monogamous marriage to the man of her own choosing, keep her children in the event of divorce or widowhood, drive a car or sit in the front seat.

The everyday insults to women are to be constantly imprisoned in a shroud, never to feel the warmth of the desert sun or a light zephyr on her skin, and confined to wearing clothing that hampers her ability to run from the frequent attacker or rapist. Any breach of the repressive rules may result in her admonishment, a beating, or being stoned to death, because the man's strength and status are deemed divinely ordained. And, adding insult to injury, how best to show the value of their women and children than when they are positioned as shields at a rocket-launching pad to be included in the body-count accusation against Israel's retaliatory efforts.

Because of Islamic decrees of severe segregation for women (apartheid), many older men "of status" engage in homosexual sex while denying their homosexuality — "Women are for children, boys are for pleasure." This is prevalent, and what could be more damaging and frightening for a prepubescent young boy ("who do not have facial hair") than having to yield to rape and sodomy by a male adult, and relinquishing his childhood of play, creativity and independent thinking to an indoctrination of hate and militaristic exercises that may lead to his own death by explosion?

The more females and sexuality are demonized, and the amicable, respectful interaction between the sexes suppressed, the greater the increase of homosexuality between men and the abuse of boys by older men. Gender apartheid fosters a vicious misogyny where men may become physically ill at the sight of women, and rape young boys who experience deep humiliation and emasculation, which explains why terrorists sexually mutilate their male victims and attack women worldwide. Living without harmony, affection or equality, they surrender their humanity and willingly mutilate and violate others as they have been violated, their rage increasing, and they lust for death, when they will finally receive what they are forbidden in life.

Behind Schulman's rhetoric, encouraged by her flock of "willing executioners," she seeks to dissolve the rights of Israelis and delegitimize the sovereign State of Israel. Whatever lies behind her warped thinking, she pursues Israel's destruction by advocating citizens' rights for malevolent non-citizens. She would rather see these murderous Arabs enter Israel freely to continue their deadly stone-throwing Intifadas and bloody slaughter of peaceful families. But just as she hopes that Palestinians will overrun Israel, she agrees to a Judenrein Islamic Palestine. Schulman considers one small state for Jews, surrounded by 1.6 billion Muslims in a land mass a thousand times its size, as one too many. It is inexplicable that her plans are also self-destructive, when she works for the deligitimization and annihilation of the only country in the Middle East where she could live happily and without fear.

I am reminded and marvel at Yale's Whiffenpoof Song, written in 1909, and the relevancy of its lyrics now, more than a century later (2013), for Brooklyn College:

We are poor little lambs who have gone astray ...

Off on a spree,

Doomed from here to eternity,

God have mercy on such as we,

Baa, baa, baa.

Tabitha Korol began her political writing with letters to the editor, earning an award from CAMERA (Committee on Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America) "in recognition of outstanding letter-writing in 2009 to promote fair and factual reporting about Israel." Her op-eds have appeared in Arutz Sheva (Israel National News) and she posts at Right Truth, NewMediaJournal, RenewAmerica, JewishIndy, NeverAgainIsNow, and others. Contact Tabitha Korol at unsopiro@sbcglobal.net


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MUSLIMS TO BUILD MOSQUE ON MT. SINAI?

Posted by GWY123, March 10, 2013

Of the many hundreds of towns on Long Island, NY, where do Muslims want to build a big mosque?

In a town called Mt. Sinai, named for the mountain ascended by Moses, from which he brought forth the Ten Commandments, Muslims are fighting to construct a mosque.

Evidence of how much Muslims are dying to get into Mr. Sinai, 2 years ago they petitioned for Muslim-only cemetery in Mt. Sinai: of-all-places-in-long-island-to-put-a-muslim-only-cemetery-they-have-to-choose-a-place-called-mount-sinai/

Moses ascended Mount Sinai, and G-d spoke to him the following words (Exodus 3-6): "So shall you say to the house of Jacob and tell the sons of Israel. You have seen what I did to the Egyptians, and [how] I bore you on eagles' wings, and I brought you to Me. And now, if you obey Me and keep My covenant, you shall be to Me a treasure out of all peoples, for Mine is the entire earth. And you shall be to Me a kingdom of princes and a holy nation."

moses

Newsday The 6,500-square-foot mosque would be on a 3.44-acre property owned by applicant Mohammed Sameen — specifically, inside his renovated backyard barn at Mount Sinai-Coram Road and Hamlet Drive, near the Willow Creek golf course. "My client looks forward to becoming an important part of the fabric of the community," said Sameen's attorney, Timothy Shea Jr. of Hauppauge.

At a meeting held by the Mount Sinai Civic Association last week, nearby residents spoke of concerns about traffic and congestion, according to civic association board member Deirdre DuBato. "People did not want to see anything change," she said of some commenters at the civic meeting.

community

Residents are arguing that a mosque in the community would disrupt the quality of life. They say their main concern is traffic, adding that a synagogue, church or any other house of worship in a residential area would have the same effect. According to residents, roads in the area are narrow, have no shoulders or lights and have already led to a high number of accidents. Dr. Mohammed Sameen and his attorney say that the mosque will only be used on Friday and Sundays.

VIDEO: http://www.barenakedislam.com/2013/03/09/of-the-many-hundreds-of-towns-on-long-island-ny-where-do-muslims-want-to-build-a-big-mosque/

Many who died in the Muslim terror attacks on 9/11 were residents of Long Island, who made the daily commute to the Twin Towers on the Long Island Rail Road. So it's no wonder that Long Islanders are more wary than most about Muslims in their midst.

NY Times Muslims on Long Island say, they have been waging jihad. And they are saddened, but not surprised, when non-Muslims misunderstand what that means. "We do not believe in jihad the way suicide bombers do," said Bushra Butt, the president of the Ladies' Auxiliary at the Bait ul-Huda mosque in Amityville. "We teach other people who are not Muslims what the truth of Islam is. That is our real jihad."

The word literally means struggle, but properly used, it connotes a struggle for spiritual improvement, not a holy war born of hatred, said Dr. Faroque Khan, the president of the Islamic Center of Long Island, in Westbury. The name Islam itself means peace. (DING DING DING! Islam means submission, NOT peace)

Continuing terror attacks since 9/11 (more than 20,000 to date) committed in Islam's name by Al Qaeda and others keep renewing Islamophobia anti-Islamism, the obsessive justified fears, suspicions and prejudices that many people of other backgrounds harbor toward Muslims, religious leaders on the Island say.

And though a similar term has not yet been coined for it, (Yes there is, "Infidelophobia) many Muslims on the Island respond with a collective fear and suspicion of those outside their faith, and of the motives behind some of the post-9/11 security efforts that seem aimed at Muslims.

infidelophobia

As a result, many of the estimated 75,000 Muslims on Long Island keep as low a profile as they can. Of the 20 or more mosques on the Island, only 4 list their telephone numbers in the Yellow Pages and other directories. Most of the Island's mosques did not respond to letters and repeated phone calls seeking comment for this article.

Many non-Muslims on the Island expressed intolerance, and more willingness to suspect all Muslims of complicity in terrorism. "Why couldn't they find a sleeper cell on Long Island — they found one in Queens, they found one in New Jersey," said Cathy Costello, 63, a Hampton Bays legal secretary. "We should loosen up our laws just the way they do in other countries. They don't worry about the A.C.L.U. — they shoot first and ask questions later. Which is what I think we should do here."

courage

Margie Miller of Baldwin, whose husband, Joel Miller, worked for Marsh & McLennan on the 97th floor of One World Trade Center and died in the 9/11 attack, said she struggled to feel compassion for Muslims. "As a Jew, I should be more sensitive to the victimization that the Muslims say they are experiencing, but Pollyanna has left the building," said Mrs. Miller, 55, a recently retired Hebrew-school teacher. "If your house is burglarized, you change the locks so the burglars can't get in again. But I don't see that we've done that."

Muslim leaders on Long Island say, "We see our religion being hijacked," said Ahmed Yuceturk, 26, an imam who lives at the United American Muslim Association mosque in Dix Hills. "How many terrorists are there who are Muslim?"Islam cannot be used in the same sentence as terrorists," Mr. Yuceturk said. "They are opposites to each other, like fire and water in the same place."

imam

Mr. Imam, who emigrated from Pakistan in 1982, lives with his wife and family in Mount Sinai. He operates a pharmacy in Coram and serves as a trustee of his mosque in Selden. He frequently gives talks about Islam in schools, houses of worship and community centers in Suffolk. "The more we educate people, the more we will be better off," he said. "I give police officers who are graduating from the academy a copy of the Quran in English."

cair

Five women from Bait ul-Huda mosque in Amityville, were flying back to New York from a convention in Chicago. "We were sitting in the front rows of the plane, and it was time for our evening prayer," she said, but when they began to pray, "a couple of people got uneasy, and the attitude of the air hostess was hostile."

The flight attendant refused to serve them for the rest of the flight, she said, and a woman with a young child who was seated nearby moved to another part of the plane.

flight prayer

Mr. Alladin, 31, a project manager for Symbol Technologies who lives in North Babylon, remembered attending a function soon after Sept. 11. "A friend was playing with my PalmPilot, and 90 percent of the names in my address book were Muslim," he said. "And this person, whom I knew very well, said, 'If I ever find out you're a terrorist, I will kill you.' "

Judy Grimner of Baldwin, 53, who teaches sixth grade in Westbury lost her husband on 9/11, Dave Grimner, who worked on the 98th floor of One World Trade Center. "Everyone knew my husband had been killed," she said. "About one month after 9/11, a Muslim sixth grader came up to me and said he was happy the terrorists had blown up the World Trade Center. I was shocked and upset." Mrs. Grimner said she had heard that the student's father had taken him to Pakistan for a month over the summer.

Contact GWY123@aol.com


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LAUGHTER IN THE CEMETERY

Posted by Hebron, March 10, 2013

The article below was written by David Wilder who is spokesman of The Jewish Community of Hebron. You can contribute directly to The Hebron Press, POB10, Kiryat Arba-Hebron 90100, hebron@hebron.org.il, 972-2-9965333 or write to The Hebron Fund, 1760 Ocean Ave., Brooklyn, NY 11230, hebronfund@aol.com This article appeared March 10, 2013 in Hebron, City of the Patriarchs and is archived at
http://www.hebron.com/english/article.php?id=840

cemetary

At about 5:00 this afternoon an Arab sniper shot and killed a 10 month old baby girl, Shalhevet Techiya Pass, and wounded her father, Yitzhak Pass, with two bullets in the legs. They were shot at the entrance to the Avraham Avinu neighborhood. The baby was in the mother's arms at the time of the shooting and was hit in the head. Emergency medical teams arrived immediately. The father was treated and evacuated to hospital. The doctors were not able to save the baby.

shalevet

A Hebron spokesman issued the following statement: For seven months the Hebron community has been shot at from Abu Sneneh and Harat a'Shech hills surrounding Hebron. Before the hills were transferred to Arafat, 4 years ago, we warned that the hills would be a source of Arab gunfire, directed at the community. We were laughed at. Following the beginning of the war, seven months ago, we again warned that if the hills were not recaptured by the Israeli army, blood would be spilled. Several times, Arab snipers have barely missed hitting soldiers and civilians in the Avraham Avinu neighborhood. This afternoon the sniper hit two people - a 10 month old baby in her mother's arms, and her father. If Ariel Sharon does not fulfill his promise to provide security for Hebron's residents - if he does not give orders to the army to retake the hills, Hebron's community will have no choice but to take appropriate action. Ariel Sharon promised security. Since he was elected, two innocent people have been killed. If Sharon does not react to today's shooting, why was he elected?

"We walked with Shalhevet in her stroller in the direction of the Avraham Avinu neighborhood, her grandparents, my wife's parents, and when we reached the entrance to the neighborhood, then, I remember the blast I felt in my legs, at the first moment I didn't understand what had happened, and when I turned around and saw that my legs were hit, I realized that I'd been shot. I lay down on the ground behind the soldier's station, my wife took Shalhevet from the stroller in the direction of a wall that could block them from the shooting, and when she held her head, she discovered that Shalhevet had been shot in the head. The soldiers started arriving, there was shooting, until I was evacuated. I remember it like it was yesterday." (Itzik Pass, two years ago, on the 10th anniversary of the murder).

shooting

Terrorist shooting update:

Hebron's leadership held an emergency meeting tonight following the sniper shooting which left Shalhevet Techiya Pass, 10 months old, dead, and her father, Itzik Pass, wounded. He was hit in the legs and is presently undergoing surgery at Hadassah hospital in Jerusalem. Hebron's leadership has demanded that the hills surrounding Hebron be retaken by the Israel Defense forces. During the meeting is was decided that the Hebron community would stage a 24 hour a day protest in the Arab market, next to the Avraham Avinu neighborhood, until the hills are again under Israeli control.

It was decided to name the hills, (presently called Abu Sneneh), the Shalhevet hills, in memory of the murdered baby. (Shalhevet means "flame" in Hebrew.) Presently several Hebron leaders are meeting with Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in Jerusalem, demanding that he fulfill his campaign promise to provide security for Jews in Judea, Samaria and Gazza. Should Sharon refuse, it is expected that massive protest demonstrations against the Sharon administration will begin throughout Israel. Funeral plans are still pending.

shalhevet

Q. Shalhevet was your first born and at that time, only child. Since then your wife has given birth several times.

When Shalhevet was killed she was towards the end of her pregnancy. A few months later she gave birth to another daughter, Renana Nechama, and since then, thank G-d, we have two sons and three daughters, the last one was born two weeks ago and thank G-d, we see comfort in the children. This is one of the things that gives strength. We know that we still have reasons to continue and for what to aspire.

Q. What do you teach them, what do you tell them?

We tell them what happened, without hiding anything. I think that it's important that children, as soon as they are able to comprehend, should understand the reality and know that Hebron isn't like every other place in the world, that there are the complexities here. The children understand it, they live here and they know we're not in Tel Aviv, that here there are soldiers and Arabs, that sometimes we get hit by rocks. Sometimes they feel the realities and complexities, but the bereavement is part of our life. I don't think it should be blurred. It's important that the children should know that, first of all, there is a price for our faith, for what we think and what we do, and that we gave our most valuable possession for the sake of Eretz Yisrael, for the sake of settling the land. (Itzik Pass, two years ago, on the 10th anniversary of the murder).

memorial

Before the short memorial service began this afternoon, some of the Pass children were running around in the cemetery. Itzik picked up one of his children, laughing. His father, standing next to him, seemed very surprised to see his son laugh, and so remarked. Itzik replied, 'a cemetery is a funny place.'

Thinking about this statement, I realized that Itzik has what to laugh about. True, he and his wife Oriya lost their first child. But the sniper's bullet was not meant to kill only Shalhevet. It was aimed at all Hebron, at all our men, women and children. For some reason, it hit and killed a tiny baby. But, in the end, Itzik and Oriya Pass defeated both the sniper and all those who sent him to perform his evil deed. For they are still here in Hebron, thriving in Hebron, raising their children in Hebron. Their victory is triumphal example to all, of dedication, determination, and self-sacrifice. Sure, tears can still be shed; the feeling of the loss is still tangible. But the Pass' conquest over evil, over terror, is too, tangible.

seating pretty

Q. Itzik, why did you stay here in Hebron?

First of all, we are stubborn. The Jewish people are stubborn, a stiff-necked people. We are enrooted in this land. Both in our personal family, and in a more general way, this is everything. There is nothing, not murder, not Arabs, which can uproot us from here, because we are a stiff-necked people. Despite what the Jewish people have experienced, we have been able to hold our heads high. We have to understand how they lived in Galut where anyone could do whatever he wanted to Jews, and here, and here, in Eretz Yisrael, we hold our heads high, standing straight and tall, no one will ever get us out of here. (Itzik Pass, two years ago, on the 10th anniversary of the murder).

interview

VIDEO: http://www.hebron.com/english/article.php?id=840

Contact Hebron at hebron@hebron.com


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CBC'S OSCAR-WORTHY PALLYWOOD PERFORMANCE

Posted by Honest Reporting Canada, March 10, 2013

The article below was written by Mike Fegelman who is executive director of HonestReporting Canada, a non-profit organization which ensures fair and accurate Canadian media coverage of Israel. This article appeared March 10, 2013 in Honest Reporting Canada and is archived at
http://www.honestreporting.ca/cbcs-oscar-worthy-pallywood-performance/6744#.UTzSn2EkrnY

And the Oscar for best actor goes to... the CBC for refusing to atone for broadcasting unverified footage depicting a Palestinian man faking injuries allegedly sustained in an Israeli air strike.

At the height of the recent conflict between Israel and Hamas, CBC's flagship news program "The National" broadcast a report on November 14 by its Mideast correspondent Sasa Petricic showing dramatic footage of an apparently injured Palestinian man being picked up off the ground and carried away by other Palestinians.

Based on this dubious footage, CBC viewers were left to conclude that the man had been injured by Israeli ordnance, coupled with the CBC reporter's description in a voice-over commentary that "Many explosions shook Gaza killing 10 Palestinians including 3 children according to Hamas' health ministry. Israeli leaders are unrepentant." This reporter's characterization that Israeli leaders have no remorse for the alleged killing of innocents, specifically several Palestinian children, was inflammatory and without merit. Equally troubling was the CBC's reliance on Palestinian casualty statistics straight from a terrorist organization's own "health ministry".

But there was no blood, wounds, or damage visible on this individual's body and clothing. Importantly, the BBC also aired this same footage of the Palestinian man being carried off, only the BBC's version included additional footage showing the man staging a remarkable recovery, all caught on camera, as he was later shown walking around apparently unscathed.

Contact Honest Reporting Canada at info@honestreporting.ca


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THE DAY MY SON KILLED THE LION

Posted by Ted Roberts, March 10, 2013

Deep in the Northern Malaysian jungles there's a maturity rite in which the young Malaysian male must track down and kill by hand the giant Poison Quilled Porcupine, an irritable creature cursed by nature with a one-day mating season. And this ceremonial kill must take place on THAT day. A day of intense concentration for the Poison Quilled Porcupine.

Sociologists tell us that this custom only exists among the inhabitants of the Northwest. Further south they do the "lion thing". Armed only with his flimsy, 6-foot, Balsa wood spear, the challenged adolescent must bring home a lion skin. And it better not have a price tag from one of those tourist shops. The victory announces the maturity of the youngster. These kinds of rites, sociologists tell us, are found in every society; metaphorically, the dive into the blue lagoon for the perfect pearl.

The young Swiss male must eat four pounds of milk chocolate at a single sitting. Natives of Taiwan must assemble twelve VCRs with no defects. Honduran youths must knit a gross of plaid shirts with a maximum of three irregulars. And of course we Jews have the traditionally honored Bar Mitzvah ceremony.

In the US, for non-Jews, there's no formal ceremony. But after tithing for my kids' meals and entertainment for twenty years, I decided that the day my son bought me and his modestly-dressed mama (due to years of parental sacrifice) a meal - well, - forget the lion skin, that would symbolize his admission to adulthood.

You parents know how it goes. When the family goes out to eat, Papa pays. That's nature's way. The eagle brings the tender pigeon, untouched, to his nesting fledglings. The mighty lion lugs home gazelle burgers. Even the scaly and psoriasis-cursed crocodile brings home the catch of the day for it's young.

As I say, that's nature's way. And it also seems to operate in our urban society; because here I am at the head of a large table at the ritziest restaurant in town. It's a Roman banquet scene out of a Dino DeLaurentis movie and I'm buying the spiced wine and roasted peacocks. One child at the end of the table - who I dimly recognize through my tears as a grandchild - is talking directly to the waitress - without any parental control - about entrees. Frightening! His sister playfully sips a five-dollar bowl of soup with her Coca Cola straw. Those numbers on the right side of the menu might as well be written on their play blocks.

Glasses full of cola, milk, and unidentifiable, but expensive liquids crowd the table. My God, is that 7-up in front of my oldest grandson or a triple champagne cocktail? MY glass contains water, which I need to flush down aspirins between each course. Nobody's paying any attention to the right side of the menu.

Everybody's talking. Ordering, or even worse, replenishing their initial order with seconds. But when the check arrives - as thick as a paperback of Gone With The Wind - a hush falls over the room. The waitress, who lugs in the book with both hands, is reverential. But her eyes seem to say, "Here you are Sucker".

It's that final dramatic moment of the auction when chatter and sneezes and coughs stop - for fear any sound can mean "over here".

So, my smiling messenger of financial death brings the bill to me. How strangely this circus contrasts with the last meal I enjoyed with my oldest son.

I'll never forget that shining occasion. The stage for our father-son drama was an elegant establishment with a menu full of high-blown descriptions. We were having a great time reading the menu when finally we were aware of the waitress awaiting our pleasure. I hope she's rude, I'm thinking. There's nothing like a shrew of a waitress to make a man feel good about a lousy tip.

We were at a trendy new restaurant near Five Points. My son and his new wife ordered first. And with abandon - unlike their usual modest taste and tender concern for my retirement years. Then when I ordered - he even urged upgrading. And his thoughtful wife, when the meal was over, suggested a cordial for her loving and long-suffering father-in-law. (Why hadn't I noticed before how beautiful she was? A splendid addition to our family.)

It was only then, that I noticed the strange new light in my son's eyes. Ah, the day had come - it was time for the ceremony. The maturity rites - the Lion hunt - the dive into the blue lagoon seeking the perfect pearl. It was graduation day and he was valedictorian of the wallet.

As the waitress approached with the check, A document so thick it began with a table of contents — ended with an index. I kept both hands on the table. The check - a document of many pages - came to rest in front of my son. Instead of hiding in the men's room, he had preinstructed the waitress!

Somewhere over the chatter of the dining room conversation I could hear a lion roar - mortally wounded. And it was only ten years since his Bar Mitzvah

Ted Roberts is the Founder of PD and the Director of Clinical Treatment. Dr. Ted has been a leader in Pastoral Ministry since 1982, and has counseled individuals in sexual bondage since 1988. Dr. Ted is the author or co-author of several books including: Pure Desire, Living Life Boldly, Going Deeper, Sexy Christians, and Top Gun. Dr. Ted worked directly with IITAP and Dr. Patrick Carnes to create an officially recognized designation for pastors (PSAP) who work in the field of sex addiction treatment. This article appeared in the Scribbler on the Roof and is archived at
http://www.scribblerontheroof.typepad.com/


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U.S. BETTING ON THE WRONG EGYPTIAN HORSE

Posted by ACD/EWI, March 11, 2013

betting
Ultras attack Cairo police officers club

The Muslim Brotherhood continues the process of destroying Egypt with one ideologically driven catastrophic error in judgment after another. This weekend's involves yet more violence in Port Said. Riots there have been going on for months now and the latest episode is detailed below by James Dorsey. As has been the case, the riots are not about football, but the Egyptian regime's character and policies.

Mohamed Morsi et al. have mishandled the protest over soccer riot convictions so badly that now the police are on strike in more than a third of Egyptian provinces, including not only Port Said, where they've abandoned their posts, but also parts of Cairo. More than 50 people have died in Port Said in the past month.

According to the Guardian UK,

"Police have also refused to protect President Mohamed Morsi's home in the Nile delta province of Sharqiya. Among several seemingly contradictory grievances, police demand better weapons. But conversely, they also claim the Morsi regime is using them as unwilling pawns in the suppression of protesters who demand the regime's downfall."

The Guardian also reports that the government is trying to "Ikhwanise" the police according to junior police officers who don't approve of that.

That the Morsi government has bungled things in the Port Said protests is further attested to by rumors that the protesters, who hate the military more than anything because of repression during the Mubarak years, are starting to think maybe the military would be better than the Muslim Brotherhood.

According to the New York Times, the Port Said protesters are saying "Military rule was bad, but they would be better. Where is the state? Where is the Interior Ministry, the government? Where are the decisions to protect the interests of the people? The military should take over until the police are ready."

Despite this and other distressing news out of Egypt, the U.S. is charging forward with what looks to the Egyptian opposition and observers from all over as a wholesale sellout to the Muslim Brotherhood. John Kerry's recent visit's gift of $250 million in U.S. assistance, would surely help the Morsi government.

If that we're enough, Kerry engaged in talks abut the Qualifying Industrial Zones accord, including negotiations regarding reducing the required proportion of Israeli components in Egyptian textiles granted tariff-free access to the United States. This, according to Al-Akhbar, which is critical of the extent to which Morsi acquiesced to U.S. demands.

Geopolitical analyst F. William Engdhal sums it up: "The U.S. Bet their money on the wrong horse by backing the undemocratic Muslim Brotherhood: "The US is wrong to cooperate with the current Egyptian authorities as the Muslim Brotherhood has a 'dictatorial authoritarian' agenda, with no intention to make democratic changes in Egypt."

As Engdhal sees it: "Some people around president Obama have the delusion that they could control what's basically a political Islamo-fascist movement. It's not a movement for democracy by any stretch of the imagination. And that's what this Brotherhood is — it's a secret society. They have a public agenda that sounds lovely, and they have a private agenda that we're seeing unfold in Egypt now."

Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld is the Director of the New York-based American Center for Democracy (ACD) and the Center for the Study of Corruption & the Rule of Law, www.acdemocracy.org). She is an authority on the shadowy movement of funds through international banking systems and governments to fund terrorism. Rachel Ehrenfeld and Ken Jensen host the ACD Economic Warfare Institute website. Contact them Email at info@acdemocracy.org. This article appeared March 10, 2013, on the American Center for Democracy (ACD) website and is archived at
http://acdemocracy.org/u-s-betting-on-the-wrong-egyptian-horse-exclusive/


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THE "ROYAL" COUPLE OF THE UNITED STATES

Posted by Nurit Greenger, March 11, 2013

royal

People know I do not like the Obamas'. I am an Obamaphobe! of the "Royal" American couple

People tell me to keep my sentiments about the Obamas' to myself. If you have not realized yet, today in the United States you cannot express openly how you really think; you cannot object or agree to disagree. Political correctness, which is simply lying tactic, has shut us up, unless you agree with those who disagree with you. Even in public debates the moderator controls the debate and the public can only participate by listening, or, if one has a question one can submit it on paper but if the question is not to the liking of the moderator it is thrown into the waste basket, to never be heard or be answered.

Remember the debates Obama held with Romney, the moderator worked for Obama...

People think that my dislike of the Obamas' is personal, not policy related. It is both!

The truth is I do not like the Obamas' because of the way they behave, what they represent, their ideology, and certainly I dislike and disagree with Obama's policies and legislation. I make no secret of my contempt for the Obamas'; unlike many others who agree with me but do not express it as I do, I am certain I am right in having these sentiments expressed.

I don't like the Obamas' because they are committed to the fundamental change of my / our country turning into what can only be regarded as a Marxist - Communist state.

I don't hate the Obamas' by definition, but I see right to condemn them for they are the worst kind of racialists; they are elitist Leninists with contempt for the traditional, exceptionalist America. Obama displays total swagger disrespect for the sanctity of the office he holds, and for those who are willing to admit this, Michelle Obama's raw contempt for white America is rather translucent.

I don't like the Obamas' because they now convince me they think they are and conduct themselves as monarchs, we are the one and only one. I expect and demand respect for the Office of President; from the leader who was entrusted with its governance, I expect and demand genuine love of our country and her citizenry. I see none of this in the Obamas'.

President Ronald Reagan and Mrs. Nancy Reagan displayed an unparalleled love for the country and her people. The Reagans' made Americans feel good about their country, themselves and what we, as a nation and individually, can accomplish.

Obama's arrogance of appointing 32 Leftist czars (http://www.glennbeck.com/content/articles/article/198/29391/) who do not answer to anyone but him, and him constantly bypassing congress is an impeachable offense.

Obama's Attorney General, Eric Holder is probably the MOST incompetent, unwise and arrogant DOJ head to have ever hold this job. Do you recall any other president who instructed his Justice Department to act like jack-booted thugs?

Presidents are politicians; all politicians are known, and pretty much expected, to manipulate the truth, if not outright lie. But even when using that low standard, the Obamas' have taken the lies, dishonesty, deceit, mendacity, subterfuge and obfuscation to new heights and depths. They are verbally dismissive and abusive to the citizenry, and they display an enmity for civility.

I do not like the Obamas' because they both, overtly, display bigotry, as in the case of Harvard Professor Louis Gates, who accused the Cambridge Police of acting stupidly and Obama sided with him and Madam Obama admitted she has never been proud of America till her husband became a president (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LINt1Px9mFY). I view this statement and this mindset as an insult to all those who died to provide us with a country where a Kenyan, his illegal alien relatives and his alleged progeny could come to America and not only live freely and be well educated, but rise to the highest, most powerful, position in the world, the president of the Unites States.

Indeed, Michelle Obama is free to hate and disparage white people because Americans, of every description, paid with their blood to ensure her right to say what she says and feel what she feels.

There is a saying, "the only reason a person hides things, is because they have something to hide." Right? No president in our 236 years history has spent over a million dollars to keep his records and his past concealed.

And what Barack, or Barry, and Michelle have shared has been proven to be a bunch of lies (http://citizenwells.wordpress.com/2012/06/28/us-supreme-court-declares-obama-a-liar-obamacare-is-a-tax-obama-lied-about-tax-increases-obama-fraud-and-taxes-have-devastated-economy-and-job-market/). Among many lies, which is hard to keep up with, Barack lied about when and how he met Michelle; he also lied about his mother's death and the problems she had with her medical insurance. Michelle lied to a crowd pursuant to nearly $500,000 bank stocks they inherited from Barack's family. Barack lied about his father's military service, about the civil rights movement, ad nausea; in one of his State of the Union addresses he lied to the world about the US Supreme Court and he berated and publicly insulted a sitting Congressman.

Barack has surrounded himself with the most rabidly, radical, socialist academicians today; he opposes rulings that protected women and children that even Planned Parenthood will not go along with him. Barack is openly hostile to business and also aggressively hostile to that Jewish state, Israel, one of USA only allies; he is hostile to America's allies and friendly to all her foes.

Barack and his wife Michelle spend tax payer's money as if it is their personal American Express Black Card, arguably the most prestigious credit card in the world. I condemn them for that because, while people are suffering, losing their homes, their jobs, their retirements, their dignity and confidence the Obamas' are arrogantly showing off their extravagant life style of entitlements — while Barack goes on creating and fomenting class warfare.

I want people to join me with this public condemnation of the Obamas' and Barack's policies. We, the people, should condemn them for the disrespect they have shown and are showing us, the people; for Barack's willful and unconstitutional actions, disobeying the Constitution's parameters he is bound by, and his willful disregard for Congressional authority.

My dislike for the Obamas' has nothing to do with the color of their skin; it has everything to do with their behavior, attitudes, and policies; with the way they run the country. But I do have total disapproval and open scorn for the Obamas' constantly playing the race card and class warfare.

Four years have passed and I have see nothing positive in Obama's presidency. I could go on scolding and complaining here. Instead allow me to conclude with this: I condemn, in the strongest possible term, the media for not doing its job; for refusing to investigate the Obamas', as they did President Nixon and the Watergate scandal that brought him down, President Bush and President Clinton, and for refusing to label them for what they truly are, NO GOOD presidential couple for the entire America.

The Obamas' have received a pass simply for being dark skin people. The guilt the American society still carries from the days of slavery is profound. The question is why do children born in the 21st century, already having a $50,000 debt at birth, have to suffer for what happened over 200 years ago when the white man enslaved the black in the New Country?

There is no scenario known to man, whereby a white president and his wife could ignore the law, parading and flaunting their position, and lord over the people, as these two are permitted to do out of fear for if not it will be translated as racism. They get a pass simply for being dark skin persons, hired in the Affirmative Action system frame.

Politics is known to be a dirty game in all aspects and I accept it, however, I never thought I will witness such dishonesty, rudeness and fecklessness in a political leader. Barack Obama is the most mendacious political figure America has ever had and I have ever witnessed.

Even by the low standards of his presidential predecessors, Obama's narcissistic, recalcitrant and arrogance is unequalled. Using Obama as the bar, Roman Emperor Nero, who is infamously known as the Emperor who "fiddled while Rome burned", would have to be elevated to sainthood...

Many in America simply wanted to be proud to elect the first person of dark color skin for their president, this without doing the required due diligence. So, instead, they have been and are witnessing a person unfit for the job, a congenital liar, a first lady who has been ashamed of America her entire life, failed policies, intimidation, disrespect and indignant behavior hitherto not witnessed in any political leader.

I once said that the Obamas' wake up each morning, look at each other and ask, how can we best waste the money the stupid people who elected us to office have given us. The Obamas' view their life at White House paid but us, the people, as an entitlement, not as a privilege and duty to best serve the people — while, WE, the people, the citizenry, struggle, lose jobs and businesses, perhaps live with the threat to become homeless and hungry.

What have you done to yourself America?

Why do you accept to suffer because of Obama's ailed policies? Why you do not dissent?

I suggested and I suggest again for 5 million Americans to arrive to Washington and stay there until Obama resigns and Washington swears to sign on to uphold the Constitution the way our Founding Father meat it to be held.

Contact Nurit Greenger by email at 4nuritg@ca.rr.com. Visit her blog: http://ngthinker.typepad.com. This article appeared March 10, 2013 in her own blog. Contact Nurit Greenger at nurit.nuritg@gmail.com


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URGENT CALL-EMAIL ORTHODOX UNION, "SAVE THE TEMPLE MOUNT": NEWS - ARAB FIREBOMBS ON MOUNT

Posted by Yosef Rabin, March 11, 2013

The article below was written by Gil Ronen, writer for Arutz Sheva. It was published today in Arutz-Sheva (www.Israel National News.com) This article is archived at
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/166085#.VXnVS7yVsWN

Jewish Temple groups demand inquiry as videos show policeman's uniform alight after he was struck by a fire bomb.

Jewish Temple organizations demanded Sunday that the Prime Minister immediately establish an official commission of inquiry into Friday's events on the Temple Mount and the way the Temple Mount police handled them.

Friday's events were worse even than those that took place during the Great Terror War that began in 2000, the groups said. For the first time ever, they said, fire bombs were thrown at police on the Mount, and one policeman caught fire and miraculously suffered only slight wounds.

Police knew in advance of the intention to carry out severe violence but did not limit the age of worshipers allowed to enter or stay on the Mount, even after violence had broken out, the groups charged.

Videos posted by Muslims show police refraining from quelling the violence, the Temple groups said. In private conversations, policemen described feelings of humiliation and betrayal by their commanding officers, the temple activists added.

Contact Yosef Rabin at tmount.intl@gmail.com


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GOV. MIKE HUCKABEE MESSAGE TO PRESIDENT OBAMA UPON HIS UPCOMING VISIT TO ISRAEL.

Posted by Robin Ticker, March 11, 2013

Well first let me say thanks for the wonderful frank reminder of Gush Katif... It has been a delight getting to share a fellowship with you, to share a mutual passion with you, for the protection of the security of Israel. And I was asked earlier, "Why would a Goy, a Christian, be interested in Israel?" Sometimes I feel that my passion for the goodness of Israel, maybe exceeds even my Jewish friends — and I tell people, I say, "you have to understand — It is entirely possible to be Jewish and not have a complete relationship to Christians - but it is impossible to be Christian and not have a complete relationship with Judaism - because it is in fact the foundation upon which every Christian believes and every Christian understands - that Israel is G-d's Chosen Land! And we recognize that, and respect it and understand that the Nations Who Bless Israel Will Be Blessed And Those Who Curse Israel Will Be Cursed!

My first trip to Israel was exactly forty years ago this year, when in July 1973 just a couple of months before the Yom Kippur war, I made my first trip to Israel when I was just a teenager. I've been going back to Israel ever since 1973 for 40 years! You know Moses had the children in the wilderness for 40 years...There has got to be some connection there...

When I visited the Gush Katif Museum just a couple of years ago, it was a brutal reminder of what happens when politicians make decisions that don't involve their brains! Because in a way, when you ask people - no, when you demand that people abandon their homes, when you do it because you somehow believe you can trust radical Islamic fascists to keep their word and make nice if you make nice, then it shows a level of naiveté that make Chamberlain look like Churchill.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

It is time we recognize you don't negotiate with people who do not believe you have a right to exist -much less live next to you! I cannot understand why the Secretary of State visited Egypt and handed over a check of 250 million dollars when we are closing the White House to tours? That makes no sense at all! Why did he give F16's and Abram tanks to a country whose elected President is associated with a terrorist organization who has openly and publicly called Jews bloodsuckers and the descendants of apes and pigs. Why would you reward someone with that kind of behavior? And even in his Senate confirmation hearing, Mr. John Kerry said they will be held accountable. I got to wondering, "Is accountability being given F16's, tanks and 250 million dollars?" Dear Mr. Secretary. Please hold me accountable 'cause I'd like 250 million dollars. And if that's what it takes, to make radical, ridiculous, offensive and inexcusable statements like this, then we should all share in the spoils.

This is absurd!

And now word is that when the President visits Israel later this month, that he will ask not the Israeli gov't leaders - because it would be seen as bad form to lecture them (although he's been willing to do it before) - but it is reported he will ask the Israeli people to make sacrifices for peace. If that is the case, I would like to escort him personally to the Gush Katif Museum and say, "Mr. President, the Israelis have made many sacrifices for peace, and show me one sacrifice that the Palestinians have made for peace! I have yet to see it!" I would say "Mr. President, I believe the Israelis have given and given and given and so far have received nothing in return!"

And every trip I make to Israel, I always venture into the Old City. I go into some of the shops where one can purchase a Palestinian map. This past month, in February, I had two hundred people that I took with me, most of whom were Christians, most of them had never been there before. I wanted them to understand what is unique about this situation. And I get one of these maps and I said. "By the way - Open the map up and show me where Israel is." And they opened it up and they didn't see it. And I said, "Interesting isn't it? And somehow the people of Israel are asked to make peace with a people who even in their published maps refuse to acknowledge even so much as the existence of the Nation of Israel?"

And that's why if our President makes the absurd suggestion that Israel should go back to the Pre '67 borders, I'm thinking "Well, if they are going to roll back, let's just roll all the way back to Abraham and let's let the borders be the borders that originally were established which goes far back as we can go!"

The Gush Katif Museum is a stark reminder that sometimes things happen in our past that we need to commemorate not because they were pleasant but because they are sobering reminders of the mistakes that have been made in the past.

We should not forget that Bull Conner turned the fire hoses on African Americans in the 60's. We should not forget the James Meredith who was not allowed to attend the University of Mississippi. We should not forget that the Little Rock Prime was blocked from the door of Little Rock High School by the Governor of the State in 1957.

These are not pleasant things, but they are important things because they remind us of what happens when politicians make the wrong decisions and how it affects people and how long it takes to come from beyond it.

And so I say tonight that the reason that I wish that the President - and I wish he would be accompanied by as many of the Israeli officials as is possible - would attend the Gush Katif Museum while he's there and watch those films, and talk to the people like Rivka (Rivka Goldschmidt) who is here tonight, who personally experienced it. I wish that, that could happen. So that the next time he suggests that the Israelis stop building bedrooms for their children, in the Land that is theirs, that instead he would spend his time not asking the Israelis to stop building bedrooms, but that he would demand that the Iranians stop building bombs pointing at Israel and the rest of the free world!

Israel often gets criticized for the acts that it takes to protect its citizens. The construction of the security wall which I have flown over almost in its entirety in a helicopter and personally have seen that security wall, and I tell you today, and you already know, that until that security wall was erected, it was a common occurrence for people to strap bombs to their bellies and board a bus and kill innocent children and citizen. And with the construction of that fence, those acts stopped immediately and permanently.

Shall we be critical of those who wish to protect their babies? Shall we truly be critical of those who wish to have peace in their neighborhoods, allow their children to play in a park or for their wives to be able to go to a Café or a supermarket without the fear of being blown up by a terrorist?

We would never tolerate in our own cities what the people of Sderot have been asked to tolerate. And I have been to Sderot and I have seen the thousands of Katyusha rockets stacked up behind the Police Station. I stood there with Dov Hikind and Joe Frager and Paul Brody and others who are in this room tonight and I can tell you that it is an absolute sobering experience to understand that people have fear every day that a Katyusha rocket would land on their children's bedroom, land in the park where they play, in the schools they attend, in the Synagogues where they worship. And we would not tolerate that!

And I'll ask Americans, "How many Katyusha rockets fired from Toronto into Buffalo NY, do you think it would take before Americans would demand that we do something and absolutely stop it? Five thousand? Four Thousand? Three Thousand? One hundred? NO! One Katyusha rocket. We would demand it STOP! And the Israeli's have been asked to let it go after thousands of them? I say NO! One is enough. Thousands are too many and it's time for the Israeli's to quit apologizing to the world and to say "We have a right for the secure and safe homeland — Not just for us but for those grandchildren and great grandchildren of our descendants and who come after us - a place that is a safe place, a haven."

And if anybody would wonder why that is so necessary - well it was brought back to me, not only by those repeated visits to Yad Veshem, but this past holiday. In January, my wife and I travelled to Poland. We went to Schindler's factory and then we went to Auschwitz and Birkenau. And I stood in the very room where 1.1 million of your relatives and your friends and your ancestors, were marched into that very room and were murdered in cold blood — and I stood there as the chills came over me as I realized what had happened in that room - and I prayed, "May the world never forget what happened". Because if we forget what did happen, it can happen yet again! And when people ask why it is important for Israel to have secure borders and safety, I would love to take them to Auschwitz, stand them in that room, and ask them, "Do you think for one moment that if these had been your parents and your grandparents that you would be a bit uneasy about being told that if would be all right for people who avow to exterminate and kill every one of you, to live as close as nine miles in a border? I think NOT!

And that's why I believe with all my heart that when the President goes to Israel, it is important that the American people give him the message - rather than him give Israelis a message! And the message is, "Mr. President, Americans stand with Israel because they are a mirror image of our freedom and our democracy in this country. And we suggest that before you make any demands of the Israeli's to give anything, you set down and look the Palestinians in the face and ask them 'What have they given up?' And tell them - as I would love to do if I was making that trip as the Chief Executive : Rather than say to the Israeli's "Stop Building in Judea and Samaria". I would suggest that YOU BUILD AS RAPIDLY AS YOU CAN, AND AS MUCH AS YOU CAN, AND AS MANY HOUSES AS YOU CAN! And tell the Palestinians that if they don't like that, the way they can fix it is to sit at the peace table and sign an agreement that they recognize Israel's right to exist within the borders that G-d gave them and to exist with safety and security!

That my friend will probably never happen!

So I say, "POUR THE CONCRETE, BUILD THE HOUSES AND LET ISRAEL BE STRONG!"

That is the message we need to give to the world!

Thank you and G-d Bless You

Contact Robin Ticker at faigerayze@gmail.com


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RELEASING POLLARD. MY LETTER PUBLISHED BY THE JERUSALEM POST MARCH 10.

Posted by Falkson, March 11, 2013

The Letters Editor,
The Jerusalem Post
letters@jpost.com

Sir,

I spent a difficult afternoon listening to Israeli members of the Knesset speaking out against the continued incarceration of Israel's spy, Jonathon Pollard, for the past 27 years. (March 7.)

Speakers reminded listeners that Pollard never spied on the U.S. Nor did Israel instruct him to do so. The information he imparted was material he believed should have been passed on to Israel because she had a right to know.

I suppose Netanyahu does not have the diplomatic gall to ask President Obama as they face the TV cameras when they meet soon, whether he can publicly say that the U.S. has never spied on Israel. It would be a fair question, since it is no secret that its multi-storied US Embassy in Tel Aviv houses dozens, if not scores, of intelligence officers.

Obviously all these guys are not handling visa or green card applications.

A positive PR suggestion: the Speaker of the Knesset should introduce each daily session by announcing the number of days Pollard has been in prison.

Yours truly,

Jock L. Falkson

Contact Falkson at falkson@013.net


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THE BAKUM INITIATION

Posted by Sergio HaDar Tezza, March 11, 2013

The article below was written by David M. Weinberg who is a lead columnist for The Jerusalem Post and Israel Hayom newspapers, writing on Israeli diplomacy, defense and politics; on religion and state; and on Israel-Diaspora relations. In addition to writing his widely-read newspaper columns (which are syndicated across the Jewish world) and to public speaking, Weinberg serves as director of public affairs at Bar-Ilan University's Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies; Israel office director of Canada's Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs; and senior advisor of the Tikvah Fund in Israel. This article appeared March 11, 2013 in Israel Hayom and is archived at
http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=3673

I've lived in Israel for 23 years. I speak polished Hebrew, live in an Israeli neighborhood with very few Anglo neighbors, work for several major national institutions, write a regular diplomatic column in two Israeli newspapers, and have held a senior position in the Israeli Prime Minister's Office. Five of my six kids were born in Israel, and I have an Israeli-born son-in-law who is an officer in IDF Military Intelligence.

But it wasn't until today that I became a real Israeli.

Today I drove my eldest son, Dovi, to the "Bakum," the IDF's main induction center at Tel Hashomer, where he joined a frontline, elite infantry combat unit for mandatory military service.

I cried, a lot. Now I am an Israeli.

It is amazing how the oldest clichés sometimes turn out to be true. That the core difference between being an Israeli Jew and a Diaspora Jew is that Israeli Jews literally put their lives on the line for the State of Israel. Or that the difference between Israeli Jews who serve in the army and those who don't is "madad ima" — the concerned mother index.

This index contrasts mothers (and fathers) with sons in the IDF who lie awake at night wondering where their sons are, what they are doing, what danger they are in, and when and whether they will be coming home; with mothers whose sleep is undisturbed by such existential worries.

I can tell you that last night, my wife didn't sleep much, and Dovi is just starting out on his first tour of duty!

Dovi and I had a private talk after morning prayers on Sunday, in which he asked me if I had any pre-draft advice. Since my military career is gloriously close to non-existent (I served in the IDF for a grand total of one week!) there wasn't a lot of practical advice I could give him, except to take care of himself physically, guard himself spiritually and religiously, protect his platoon buddies and the country to the best of his ability, and to try to call home every day.

I also told him that when in doubt and in direct personal danger from apparent enemy combatants, shoot first and ask questions later. He should worry more about his own safety and that of the country, than Human Rights Watch or Amnesty investigations. If necessary, I'll get him a good lawyer.

But mainly Dovi and I had an in-depth conversation about Jewish identity, destiny, mission and responsibility. He didn't really need the talk, but I did.

To Dovi, the task resting on his shoulders was, and is, clear: To defend his family and the country, to do so in the most moral way possible, and in the process to bring about a "kiddush Hashem," a sanctification of G-d's name in the world. Also, he said: To rectify thousands of years of Jewish defenselessness and victimhood.

My need for the conversation was primitive. I needed to refortify and remind myself why it was that I was sending my son off into danger; why I was propelling him into a playground filled with Tavor automatic rifles and sniper scopes; and why I ought to be proud that he'll be spending the coming years lying in ambush on the Syrian or Sinai borders instead of studying medicine in university or Torah in yeshiva.

This, of course, is so strange, because I'm the one constantly lecturing people on the grand historical drama of the Jewish return to Zion and the unique privilege that our generation has to rebuild the People of Israel in the Land of Israel in accordance with the Torah of Israel. I'm the guy always hectoring my haredi (ultra-Orthodox) relatives about the nobility and religious obligation involved in military service. I'm the speaker at pro-aliyah events explaining to prospective immigrants how their children, and Jewish history, will thank them for making the move to Israel. And yet, here I was searching for reaffirmation to assuage my fears and doubts.

But then I reminded myself of the day my wife and I came on aliyah, during the first days of the first Gulf War. At the airport, they handed us our Israeli identity cards and a set of gas masks, and welcomed us to Israel. So it's not like I didn't know from the get-go what I was getting myself into by moving to Israel. Then I remembered my time in hesder yeshiva during the first Lebanon War, when my Israeli roommate was called-up for active military service in the middle of the night and ran off to the pay phone to call his mother, while I, then a "golus Jew," went back to sleep. So, again, it's not like I didn't know from the get-go what I was getting myself into by moving here.

The Bakum initiation

I've lived in Israel for 23 years. I speak polished Hebrew, live in an Israeli neighborhood with very few Anglo neighbors, work for several major national institutions, write a regular diplomatic column in two Israeli newspapers, and have held a senior position in the Israeli Prime Minister's Office. Five of my six kids were born in Israel, and I have an Israeli-born son-in-law who is an officer in IDF Military Intelligence.

But it wasn't until today that I became a real Israeli.

Today I drove my eldest son, Dovi, to the "Bakum," the IDF's main induction center at Tel Hashomer, where he joined a frontline, elite infantry combat unit for mandatory military service.

I cried, a lot. Now I am an Israeli.

It is amazing how the oldest clichés sometimes turn out to be true. That the core difference between being an Israeli Jew and a Diaspora Jew is that Israeli Jews literally put their lives on the line for the State of Israel. Or that the difference between Israeli Jews who serve in the army and those who don't is "madad ima" — the concerned mother index.

This index contrasts mothers (and fathers) with sons in the IDF who lie awake at night wondering where their sons are, what they are doing, what danger they are in, and when and whether they will be coming home; with mothers whose sleep is undisturbed by such existential worries.

I can tell you that last night, my wife didn't sleep much, and Dovi is just starting out on his first tour of duty!

Dovi and I had a private talk after morning prayers on Sunday, in which he asked me if I had any pre-draft advice. Since my military career is gloriously close to non-existent (I served in the IDF for a grand total of one week!) there wasn't a lot of practical advice I could give him, except to take care of himself physically, guard himself spiritually and religiously, protect his platoon buddies and the country to the best of his ability, and to try to call home every day.

I also told him that when in doubt and in direct personal danger from apparent enemy combatants, shoot first and ask questions later. He should worry more about his own safety and that of the country, than Human Rights Watch or Amnesty investigations. If necessary, I'll get him a good lawyer.

But mainly Dovi and I had an in-depth conversation about Jewish identity, destiny, mission and responsibility. He didn't really need the talk, but I did.

To Dovi, the task resting on his shoulders was, and is, clear: To defend his family and the country, to do so in the most moral way possible, and in the process to bring about a "kiddush Hashem," a sanctification of G-d's name in the world. Also, he said: To rectify thousands of years of Jewish defenselessness and victimhood.

My need for the conversation was primitive. I needed to refortify and remind myself why it was that I was sending my son off into danger; why I was propelling him into a playground filled with Tavor automatic rifles and sniper scopes; and why I ought to be proud that he'll be spending the coming years lying in ambush on the Syrian or Sinai borders instead of studying medicine in university or Torah in yeshiva.

This, of course, is so strange, because I'm the one constantly lecturing people on the grand historical drama of the Jewish return to Zion and the unique privilege that our generation has to rebuild the People of Israel in the Land of Israel in accordance with the Torah of Israel. I'm the guy always hectoring my haredi (ultra-Orthodox) relatives about the nobility and religious obligation involved in military service. I'm the speaker at pro-aliyah events explaining to prospective immigrants how their children, and Jewish history, will thank them for making the move to Israel. And yet, here I was searching for reaffirmation to assuage my fears and doubts.

But then I reminded myself of the day my wife and I came on aliyah, during the first days of the first Gulf War. At the airport, they handed us our Israeli identity cards and a set of gas masks, and welcomed us to Israel. So it's not like I didn't know from the get-go what I was getting myself into by moving to Israel. Then I remembered my time in hesder yeshiva during the first Lebanon War, when my Israeli roommate was called-up for active military service in the middle of the night and ran off to the pay phone to call his mother, while I, then a "golus Jew," went back to sleep. So, again, it's not like I didn't know from the get-go what I was getting myself into by moving here.

This morning, Dovi and his friends danced together in the IDF induction courtyard, singing "Am Yisrael Chai" (the People of Israel live) and "Am Hanetzach lo mefached" (The Eternal People is not afraid of a long and arduous journey). Then I gave him the traditional priestly blessing, and he boarded a bus headed for a tent base on the Egyptian border.

The Bakum initiation is a great refresher course in, and a test of, raw Zionist ideology and commitment. I'm sure that Dovi is up to the test. I hope that I am too.

Sergio Tezza can be reached at Hadar-Israel@verizon.net


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SIGNED IN ICE; NOT CARVED IN STONE

Posted by Yoram Ettinger, March 11, 2013

The Middle East is burning. The façade of the Arab Spring has long since fallen away, and it has become apparent that this is simply another round of the type of turmoil that has long defined the region.

"We have not experienced an Arab Spring or a March to Democracy or a Facebook Revolution," former Israeli Ambassador Yoram Ettinger told Israel Today. "What we have experienced is typical, endemic intra-Arab violence in our region."

Alan Baker, a former Israeli diplomat who worked on the peace treaties with Egypt, Jordan and the Palestinians, concurred: "I laugh when I hear 'Arab Spring' because I think it's wishful thinking on the part of the Europeans. There's no such thing as an Arab Spring. It's a tragic Arab Winter."

Ettinger says Western leaders need to learn the lessons from current events: "The riots in Tunisia and in Egypt, the ongoing tribal war in Libya, and the civil war in Syria all shed light on the reality of the Middle East, which for the past 1,400 years has consisted of unpredictability, violent intolerance, instability, unreliability and fragmentation."

So the regime changes across the region don't signal a transformation to democracy. "Any new arrangement in the Arab countries will be subjected to the above tenets of the Middle East," Ettinger continued. "In other words, any arrangement by definition would be provisional. Agreements in the Middle East are signed in ice, not carved in stone."

Even the moderate and relatively stable Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan will not be immune. "Jordan has already been impacted by the surge of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, will be affected by the civil war in Syria and has felt the effects of the fragmentation of Iraq, which is becoming an Iranian outpost," Ettinger said. "The Hashemite Kingdom will be swept away. The only question is when, not whether."

In the midst of all of this, Israel has emerged as an island of stability. Yet Israel is still singled out as the source of the region's troubles and the one that must make concessions to restore calm.

"How can President Obama and the Europeans come along and say to the Israelis, 'Oh, ignore what's happening all around you. You have to show more willingness to compromise with the Palestinians!'" asked a bewildered Baker. "Why? Why do we have to do this? If the whole area is crumbling, why do we have to place ourselves in a riskier situation?"

Ettinger argued that it's time for the international community to stop zeroing-in on the Israeli-Palestinian issue. "Those gullible observers or policy makers who refer to the Arab-Israeli conflict as the Middle East conflict should reassess because it has never been the main conflict," he noted. "Over the past two years, none of the seismic events from the Atlantic to the Persian Gulf have had any relevance to the Palestinian issue."

Baker says Israel cannot safely sign a peace agreement in this atmosphere without substantial Western guarantees, but it's still an enormous risk. "If after 34 years the peace treaty that has been the most stable element of Arab-Israeli peace in the Middle East is being destabilized by the Egyptian leadership, what hope would anybody have of achieving genuine, lasting agreements with the Syrians or the Lebanese or the Palestinians?" he wondered.

Ettinger agrees: "If the Arabs have so easily and violently violated domestic and regional agreements among themselves, can anybody reasonably expect them to handle agreements with the Jewish state in a more peaceful manner?"

Therefore, the safest bet for Israel is to hold on to vital territorial assets. "Logically speaking, the more unpredictable, the higher the security threshold," stated Ettinger. "And a higher security threshold underlies the importance of Israel maintaining control of the strategically important mountains of Judea and Samaria."

Ambassador Yoram Ettinger is an editor and consultant who lives in Jerusalem. Contact him at yoramtex@netvision.net.il


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HOW TO WEAKEN AN ECONOMY

Posted by Sergio Hadar Tezza, March 11, 2013

The article below was written by Victor Davis Hanson who is an American military historian, columnist, former classics professor, and scholar of ancient warfare. He has been a commentator on modern warfare and contemporary politics for National Review and other media outlets. He was a professor of classics at California State University, Fresno, and is currently the Martin and Illie Anderson Senior Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He has been a visiting professor at Hillsdale College since 2004. Hanson is perhaps best known for his 2001 book, Carnage and Culture. Hanson was awarded the National Humanities Medal in 2007 by President George W. Bush. Hanson is also a farmer, growing raisin grapes on a family farm in Selma, California, and a critic of social trends related to farming and agrarianism. This article appeared March 11, 2013 in PJMedia and is archived at
http://pjmedia.com/victordavishanson/how-to-weaken-an-economy/

It is not easy to ruin the American economy; doing nothing usually means it repairs itself and soon is healthier than before a recession.

But don't despair: there are plenty of ways to slow down even an inherently strong economy. History offers plenty of examples. But as more contemporary models, take your pick of successfully ruined economies — the Venezuelan, the Cuban, the North Korean, the Greek, the Italian, the Portuguese, or pretty much any from Mediterranean Africa to the Cape of Good Hope. There are certain commonalities about why and how they fail. Let's review some of them.

Government

The state can never be too big. Ensure that it is unaccountable and intrusive, in constant need of more money and more targets to regulate. The more government, the more people are shielded from the capital-creating, free-market system. Think the DMV or TSA, not Apple. The point is for an employee to spend each labor hour with less oversight, while regulating or hampering profit-making, rather than competing with like kind to create material wealth. Regulatory bodies are a two-fer: the more federal, union employees, the more regulations to hamper the private sector. The more federal mandates, like new health-care requirements and financial reporting, the less employers profit and the fewer employees they can hire. Washington should be a growth city, absolutely immune from the downturn elsewhere, a sort of huge and growing octopus head with decaying tentacles. State jobs should be redefined as something partisan — whose expansion is noble and helps the helpless, and whose contraction is evil and the design of a bitter and aging white private-sector class.

On the other end of the equation, ensuring 50 million on food stamps, putting over 80,000 a month on Social Security disability insurance, and extending unemployment insurance to tens of millions all remind the jobless that life is not too bad (thanks to the government), and certainly a lot better than working at a "low-paid" job that equates to giving up federal support. To paraphrase Paul Krugman, the more and the longer the jobless receive, the less likely they are to take chances looking for a job. That too might be again a good thing if you wish to slow down the economy. In general, even Arnold Toynbee, a man of the Left, acknowledged that the greedy drive of the scrambling private sector was not as pernicious to civilizations as the collective ennui produced by vast cadres of lethargic and unaccountable public "servants" doing supposedly noble work.

The Law

To ensure capriciousness and unpredictability for both suspect employers and investors, make the law malleable, even unpredictable from day to day, in the style of an Argentina or Venezuela. Redefine the law as what is deemed socially useful. For federally subsidized bankrupt auto companies, creditors should be paid back on the basis not of contractual law, but of nobility — why borrow to give a rich man a return on his superfluous investment, when a retired auto worker might have to pay a higher health care premium? Boeing wants to open a non-union plant in South Carolina? Have the NLRB try to stop it (and illegally staff the NLRB with recess appointments). Illegal aliens? They are neither illegal nor aliens, as federal immigration law is itself a capricious construct. Does the Senate really have to present a budget? Do presidents need to meet budget deadlines? Who said there is a Defense of Marriage Act?

What law says that gays cannot serve overtly in the military or women cannot fight at the front — some reactionary construct? The point is to restore a simulacrum of popular sovereignty: the law is what 51% of the people are perceived by technocrats to want on any given day. I would hammer away at legal fictions like the very idea of borrowing and paying back loans and debts. Soon the popular culture would respond in kind, and run ads constantly on radio, TV, and the Internet in a way rare just a generation ago: how to renegotiate IRS debt, how to renegotiate mortgages, how to renegotiate credit card debt, and how to renegotiate student loan debt.

The man who owes $50,000 has been taken advantage of; the man who is owed $50,000 already has enough without being paid back. The aim is to create a general climate where when one borrows, one does not necessarily have to the pay back the full sum for a variety of legitimate considerations. The more bubbles — housing, student loan, credit card — the more avenues for government intervention and relief. Do all that and perhaps lending itself might slow down, again not a bad thing for our purposes. The debtor, not the lender, is the true American success, as our collective debt underscores.

Sergio Tezza can be reached at Hadar-Israel@verizon.net


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THE GREAT SABBATH

Posted by Barbara and Chaim Ginsberg, March 11, 2013

This article comes from the Jewish Virtual Library and is archived at https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/kahane.html

It is the necessary, the indispensable preface and introduction to Passover. It is the explanation that cries out the ultimate message of the holiday, the basic lesson of the feats of our freedom. It is the foundation of foundations that raises Passover from an insipid, saccharine social custom beginning and ending with recipes printed in the New York Times women's section; from a golden opportunity for Manischewitz to return to Jewishness through capitalist Passover profits even as the truly frum, raise their level of religiosity by raising the level of prices; from a Jewish people that marches on its Seder stomach even as it moves on to the annual national lie. "Next Year in Jerusalem." It is the Great Sabbath, which attempts to save Judaism from myopic ritualism, to make the Jew, Jewish and the Orthodox, religious.

Sabbath Hagadol, the great Sabbath. The Sabbath preceding the Passover, the Sabbath that cries out the basic, the ultimate message of the enormous Exodus from Egypt, of Passover itself. Sabbath Hagadol that gives us the lesson without which Passover, the Jewish people itself, lose all reason for being. Sabbath Hagadol commemorating the basic lesson of Judaism: Faith, real faith, faith in G-d who really is greater than the mighty Pharaoh, or the regal Reagan or the burningless Bush — Sabbath Hagadol. The great Sabbath, that began more than 3,000 years ago on a Sabbath in Imperial Egypt.

"Speak unto all the congregation of Israel, saying: In the tenth day of this month, they shall take to them every man a lamb..."

It is a special, an awesome commandment, one that is given to every Jew, hence the unique words "Speak unto all the congregation." Take a lamb and bind it up for four days.

You believe that this is a simple commandment. Hardly. The lamb is more than an animal; it is the very god of Egypt. It is a deity, a hallowed creature before whom the Egyptian bows and whose meat dare not touch his mouth. And the Jews, "every man" thereof, are commanded to take this lamb, this Egyptian god, the deity of their masters, and tie it to their beds, to their posts, bind it up. And when the astonished and outraged Egyptian masters will ask: "What are you doing? The answer shall be: We shall soon slaughter this lamb, the deity, your god, and eat it.

Do you still think this is a simple, bland commandment? It is a commandment fraught with danger to life, a commandment that surely sent fear down the spines of the Jewish slaves, that, without a doubt, led scholars to rush and ponder whether pikuach nefesh, danger to life might perhaps demand the postponing of the dangerous commandment.

Nor does the Almighty stop there. He insists on a policy of extremism, of goading the gentile. Not content with a commandment that cries desecration of the Egyptian god, that taunts him with the sight of his deity bound up, the G-d of Israel insists that the Jew add salt to the wound.

"And they shall eat the flesh in that night, roasted with fire... eat it not partially cooked, nor boiled in water, but roasted with fire, its head with its legs and with its insides complete."

Awake and consider! This is what Passover is all about; only this! This is Judaism what Judaism is all about; only this! This is what the duty and the role and the essence of the Jew is all about; only this! To affirm to the world, but first to ourselves that the L-rd, the G-d of Israel, is. That He truly does exist, that He is the One, the only One, that He, only He, directs the world, the fate of man, the destiny of His people. That whatever will be for the Jew will be only because He so decrees. That the gentile has no relevance to the Jewish fate, that the Pharaohs of all time, the ones in Egypt and the ones in Washington are utterly irrelevant to what will be with the Jew.

On the Great Sabbath in Egypt, the L-rd taught us the lesson that we trampled in the dust, the dust of secularism and the dust of the yeshiva world alike: The lesson that the Jew must raise high, must flaunt the glory and Omnipotence of his G-d. That the world must be compelled to see their deities, their gods and idols, bound up and humiliated and destroyed. That one must goad the gentile in order to raise high the banner of the L-rd. That Kiddush Hashem, the sanctification of the Name of the G-d of Israel, demands an open, fearless, flaunting sacrifice of the idols and deities of the gentiles that deny the uniqueness of the G-d of Israel, His exclusiveness, His Oneness! The lamb is openly tied and those who tremble and whisper: "But we dare not goad the gentile," are silenced with thunderous contempt. The lamb is slaughtered and roasted whole and fully and openly. It cannot be hastily covered in a pot where it will not be seen. Its identity cannot be disguised by cutting its body into pieces. We cannot escape the danger of the gentile by avoiding confronting and goading him. No. Precisely the opposite!

The same gentile who thundered and thunders: "Who is the L-rd? I know not the L-rd and will not let Israel go!" must be taught the eternal lesson of: "The L-rd is G-d, the L-rd is G-d!" The gentile does not wish to "know" G-d, to acknowledge His exclusive kingship. He must be taught that lesson in an open and bold and humiliating way. He and his idols must be humbled and broken. The lamb is taken openly. The lamb is slaughtered openly. And those who cringe in populism and whisper: "But one dare not goad the gentiles..." are silenced by the thunder of the L-rd, whose commandment is eternalized by the Rabbis of the Great Sabbath, Sabbath Hagadol. So, let that Sabbath be understood and appreciated and embraced. For without it, there cannot be a Passover, an understanding of what that Passover really is. And without that, when the Jewish child asks for the meaning of this night, the pathetic father who knows not what to tell him will doom his child to become a pathetic as he: practitioner of Jewish ritual, but never, never a religious Jews.

Contact Barbara and Chain Ginsberg at barbaraandchaim@gmail.com


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A VIOLENT KIND OF SILENCE

Posted by GWY123, March 11, 2013

The article below was written by Mary Nicholas who is Associate Professor of Russian in the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures at Lehigh University. She is the author of Writers at Work: Russian Production Novels and the Construction of Soviet Culture (Bucknell University Press, 2010)., as well as numerous articles on Soviet and post-Soviet art, prose, and poetry. This article appeared March 10, 2013 in the American Thinker and is archived at
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2013/03/a_violent_kind_of_silence.html

Remember the feminists of the '60s? Women's liberation? Remember the women who made feminism the issue of the day? They demanded roles in government, careers, independence, and the right of women to control their reproductive lives. They marched and formed NOW, which describes violence against women as one of their core issues.

The book that started the second wave of feminism was The Feminine Mystique, by Betty Friedan, the doyenne of feminism, who described the bored housewife in the suburbs as the "problem that has no name."

On the other side of the world, we can see many problems for women in Muslim societies. But contrary to Friedan, these problems "have names": honor-killing, stoning for adultery, rape, child marriage, sex slavery, and female genital mutilation (FGM). FGC/FGM (pictured at right) refers to all procedures involving partial or total removal of the external female genitalia or other injury to the female genital organs for cultural or other non-medical reasons. Type 2 is the excision of the clitoris, with partial or total excision of the labia minora. Most girls and women are traumatized from this; many die of infection, and those who survive suffer complications during pregnancy and childbirth.

FGM is a barbaric practice widespread in many countries, but the vast majority are either Muslim-majority or home to a large number of Muslim immigrants. Those who claim that it is "cultural" fail to link the approval given to it by Reliance of the Traveler, a manual of Islamic jurisprudence certified as "reliable" by Egypt's Al-Azhar University.

Child marriage is another problem in Muslim countries, following the example of Mohamed himself, who at 53 married Aisha, a six-year-old, and consummated the marriage when she was a child of nine. Yet Muslims believe that Mohamed provided a "beautiful pattern of conduct." The number of child brides is on the rise -- the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, Sheikh Abdul Aziz bin Abdullah, recently issued a fatwa authorizing marriage to girls as young as 10 years old, and in 2011, a similar fatwa by Salafi preacher Sheikh Mohamed al-Maghrawi permitted girls as young as nine to marry. So here you have children subjected to the destruction of their innocence and sold for abuse. The New York Times reported on this phenomenon in Yemen, where a nine-year-old ran away from her husband and demanded a divorce because of sexual abuse. And in Britain, authorities are now reporting the forced marriage of girls as young as nine on British soil. By contrast, Betty Friedan was outraged that young women of 19 and 20 chose to drop out of college to get married.

Rape of women is not uncommon. The reporter Lara Logan was viciously raped in Egypt during the "Arab Spring." In fact, sexual harassment and rape have increased dramatically since Morsi's rise to power. Recently, to quell the opposition, Morsi's Muslim Broherhood paid gangs and thugs to rape protesting women in the streets. Also, an Egyptian Salafi preacher described the Coptic Christian women who protest at Tahir Square as "crusader prostitutes who go there to be raped on purpose."

This presents a unique problem for women in the Muslim world, since they are often afraid to report sexual assaults for fear of reprisals from their families. Some women are blamed for the rape, and others who are married end up being divorced if their husbands find out. For example, in 2009, a Saudi woman who had been gang-raped was sentenced to six months in jail and 200 lashes. And John Kerry, our new secretary of state, just announced a package of $250 million in American aid to support Egypt's "future as a democracy."

Another issue for women and girls is sex slavery. It is estimated that 27,000,000 people throughout the world are enslaved in the sex trade today, and 2,000,000 of these are children. Not all are Muslims -- indeed, the majority probably are not -- but Islam condones sex slavery. Muhammad captured slaves in battle, had sex with them, and instructed his men to do the same. The Qur'an contains numerous verses assuring Muslim men that they can keep women as sex slaves.

Salwa-al-Mutairi is a female activist from Kuwait who wants to "revive the institution of sex slavery." In 2011, she asked a mufti in Mecca: "What is the law of sex slaves?" His reply: "With the law of sex slaves, there must be a Muslim nation at war with a Christian nation, or a nation which is not of the religion, not of the religion of Islam. And there must be prisoners of war."

As a matter of fact, sex slaves in Islam are under a different law from those of the free woman. The free woman must be completely covered except for her face and hands. But the sex slave can be naked from the waist up. While the free woman requires a marriage contract, the sex slave does not -- she needs only to be purchased by her husband, and that's it. Therefore the sex slave is different than the free woman.

But these examples are all in the far-off lands of the Arabian Nights, right? No. Lars Hedegaard, president of the Danish Free Press Society, who recently ducked a bullet to his head, was initially tried in Denmark because of private remarks he made about sex abuse in Muslim families. Theo van Gogh was assassinated in Holland for making the film Submission, which highlights the repression of women in some Islamic cultures. In the U.K. just last month, three Muslims were found guilty of abducting a 13-year-old infidel schoolgirl in London, where she was kept as a sex slave. In another incident in the U.K., a group of Muslim men sexually exploited and raped six girls between the ages of 11 and 15 from 2004 to 2012.

Closer to home, Muzzammil Hassan, from Buffalo, NY, beheaded his wife in 2009. This was not simple domestic violence; it was an honor-killing, defined as "a murder carried out as a commission from the extended family, to restore honor after the family has been dishonored. As a rule, the basic cause is a rumor that any female family member has behaved in an immoral way."

In 2008, there was the tragic killing of Amina and Sarah, 18 and 17, respectively, in Texas by their father because the daughters had adopted "Western ways." While honor-killings are just a minority of total domestic violence in the United States and Canada, according to a study of 50 instances in North America, Phyllis Chesler concluded that they represent a distinctive phenomenon and can be differentiated from domestic violence.

Some interpret the punishment in Islam for adultery as death by whipping or stoning, while many deny this. A brief study of the question reveals that it depends on the particular country and its interpretation of sharia law. Stoning still exists in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. This YouTube shows a stoning from 2010.

So here we "have names": honor-killing, rape, stoning, child marriage, sex slavery, and FGM. Never in the history of the United States have we had such powerful women in office: Hillary Clinton; Nancy Pelosi; Valerie Jarrett, who drags the title of chair of the White House Council on Women and Girls; Susan Rice; Kathleen Sebelius; Human Abedin. Yet the radical feminists have been strangely silent on the oppression of Muslim women. Granted, "Global Women's Issues" by the State Department has taken a strong position against female genital mutilation. But we need more than just words. Action must be taken.

These practices constitute violence, plain and simple. They continue to leave scars on women and children -- and now we have documentation of a group in the U.K. that stopped the forced marriage of a two-year-old! The inherent dignity of women has been a part of the Judeo-Christian culture in the West, and women are treated with honor. And civilized countries have always given protection to the innocent. Is a woman held in sex slavery "controlling her reproductive life"?

Nonie Darwish, who left Islam, in commenting on a movie she saw on marriage, says she was struck at the "holiness of the marriage vows, especially when the husband promised to love, honor, and cherish his one and only wife 'till death do us part[.]' ... [M]y innocent mind was touched ... by the way a Christian woman was honored and elevated by her husband and society[.]"

Think of the young girl in Yemen who ran away from a marriage. When asked why, she said, "I thought about it...I thought about it." Anyone who does give it thought realizes that the body and the sexual act have more than just a physical meaning. Through it we see the face of "another," someone outside pure biology and anatomy. Something within us, our inner being, recognizes that the body has a deeper existential meaning.

But these practices which have names reflect the stranger's body as a "thing" to be used, to be borrowed like a car. The radical feminists in their utilitarian pursuits of control over their reproductive lives seem not to have given this much thought. We're waiting to hear them break their silence.

Contact GWY123 at GWY123@aol.com


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PA PLANS TO PROSECUTE ISRAEL VIA INTERNATIONAL GROUPS

Posted by GWY123, March 11, 2013

The article below was written by David Lev who is a writer, radio producer and radio presenter, and media consultant. He is both founder and chief executive officer of Say Yay Media, having previously founded and headed the consulting branch of Lev David Media.

David studied economics at the University of Natal (now the University of KwaZulu-Natal), before working for the regional radio station East Coast Radio as executive producer of the "Morning Drive Show" in 2001. Having resigned from East Coast Radio in 2005 to pursue other interests, David is now involved in the development of television series, radio features for several radio stations and various new media initiatives. He continues to write humour for the print media. This article appeared March 11, 2013 in Arutz Sheva and is archived at
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/166072#.UT28ftaYL0c_

PA officials are clamoring to enhance the Authority's position in the international community as a tactic to pursue Israel.

Caption Text
Mahmoud Abbas

Issa Karaka, the Palestinian Authority's Minister for Prisoner Affairs, is urging PA chief Mahmoud Abbas to enroll the PA in as many international organizations as possible as quickly as is feasible, in order to capitalize on the recognition the PA received at the United Nations last year and use its standing in the international community to sue and prosecute Israel.

At a press conference in Ramallah Sunday, Karaka said that the PA should join the Geneva Convention, and once admitted, use the Convention's provisions to prosecute Israel in the International Criminal Court for "crimes against the Palestinian nation," he said.

Speaking at the press conference, the head of the Al-Haq organization, Shawan Jabrin, said that international law was an excellent tool for the PA to pursue its agenda against Israel. "All the issues that are outstanding, such as settlements, the security fence and prisoners, can be used to achieve the rights of the Palestinians," he said.

Last week, speaking at the AIPAC convention, Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird said that the PA was planning a massive legal assault on Israel. "The PA's aim is to take Israel to the International Criminal Court in the Hague," said Baird. "This will certainly have implications for Canada's relationship with the PA."

Baird expressed hope that the PA would keep to its agreements and refrain from taking Israel to court over these issues.

Contact GWY123 at GWY123@aol.com


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"NOT QUITE"

Posted by Arlene Kushner, March 11, 2013

I was going to send this posting out yesterday. It was substantially written. But, I saw that there had been progress in the negotiations on the coalition -- it was looking more rational, more hopeful. That is, according to credible rumors. And so I thought if I held off a bit I might be able to announce a government. Silly me.

From rumors of "very close" we suddenly moved to an announcement of a breakdown in the negotiations. At this point I am pointing my finger at Lapid. Likud is accusing him of reneging on an agreement that had been reached, and Bennett is saying that what Lapid is now demanding with regard to draft regulations would hurt nationalist yeshivas and is unacceptable to him (i.e., Bennett). There have been round the clock negotiations aimed at coming to a final agreement, but as I write, still no resolution. More talks are scheduled for tonight.

I had pegged Lapid from early on as someone too sure of himself, too arrogant -- exhibiting neither a willingness to compromise (which is what politics is often about), or to understand that changes don't happen all at once. He's about "fixing" everything immediately (as he perceives the need to do fixing) because he got 19 mandates.

It is likely that a coalition will come together in short order. Netanyahu has only until this Shabbat and he's out of time. What we must wonder, however, is how long a coalition that has such tensions built into it can remain stable.

~~~~~~~~~~

What I will mention here is that the names being floated for various ministries have me more hopeful than I had expected to be at this point. All specifics will follow when the assignments are announced. It's being said that Lapid wants to be Finance Minister. That would be regrettable, for as far as I can discern, he knows zilch about financial management; Yuval Steinitz (Likud) has done a fine job in that department and really would like to retain the post. And there's talk about dissension over the education ministry, which Gideon Sa'ar (Likud) has managed exceedingly well.

The issues of the Finance and Education Ministries are two instances of a problem that has arisen: As members of other factions are being considered for a number of major posts, members of Likud are disgruntled and feeling left out, ironically even as theirs is the ruling faction. The problem of ministry assignment is exacerbated by the fact that part of the coalition negotiations involves reducing the number of portfolios.

To add to the problem, some of the younger members on the Likud list, serious vote-getters (I have in mind Tzipi Hotovely, pictured), are being passed over by Netanyahu for old guard cronies. This is not sitting well with those whom the prime minister would ignore.

international news

What a business this is!

~~~~~~~~~~

As the clock on the coalition negotiations ticks away, Netanyahu surely has the coming visit of Obama in mind. Meanwhile, the president is making his own preparations for coming. Significant among those preparations is an off-the-record meeting he had with close to 24 American Jewish leaders last Thursday, during which he assured them that he wouldn't be bringing a peace plan with him.

~~~~~~~~~~

According to reports from participants of that meeting, when asked what actions he will take to stop Iran, Obama said:

"I'm not going to beat my chest to prove my toughness on this."

A snide and decidedly non-reassuring comment.

He then provided a quote, frequently attributed to a Chinese military tactician, regarding the need to give "a golden bridge" to a "proud people" in order to provide them with a face-saving way to retreat to a diplomatic solution.

So...Obama's still being Obama, still clinging to his fantasies. His refusal to beat his chest, figuratively, comports with his routine refusal to be tough, insisting that enemies can be won over better with kindness.

Why he imagines that the Iranian leaders are looking for a face-saving way to retreat to diplomacy is beyond me, and what I worry about is what "golden bridge" he hopes to offer them.

~~~~~~~~~~

About the same time that Obama was talking about giving the Iranians a chance to step down to negotiations, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was declaring that Western nations had only acknowledged a "fraction" of Iran's nuclear rights. "Western nations did not accomplish anything that can be construed as a concession" -- which, of course, he insists Iran is entitled to.

http://iranprimer.usip.org/blog/2013/mar/07/khamenei-tweets-iran-needs-more-concessions

~~~~~~~~~~

Barry Rubin has just written about Obama's foreign policy approach, hardly for the first time:

"On the eve of President Obama's first visit to Israel as chief executive, I have just returned from briefing a high-ranking official of country x about the Middle East. We kept coming back to a vital theme: the incredibly shrinking power of the United States. Try to explain American behavior to neutral, open-minded third parties for whom U.S. policy activities have become just plain bizarre!

"...there's been for all practical purposes a profound—albeit possibly temporary—transformation in the governance of the United States. Regarding foreign policy, all the old rules don't apply—credibility; punishing enemies and rewarding friends..."

http://www.gloria-center.org/2013/03/why-as-president-obama-is-a-disaster-and-why-as-a-country-israel-should-applaud-obama/

~~~~~~~~~~

The Palestinian Arabs in PA areas are also preparing for the Obama visit to the region. Activists associated with a group called "Palestinians for Dignity" are calling for "huge demonstrations" because Obama's policies are "supportive of the occupation." They said he was "persona non grata in Palestine" because of US support for Israel. And they are calling for "demonstrations against the idea of returning to the negotiations."

Will Obama also offer them a "golden bridge"?

~~~~~~~~~~

For his part, Hamas leader in Gaza Ismail Haniyeh has declared Obama's visit a "trap" and calls upon Abbas not to fall into it:

"We are convinced that Obama's visit will not produce the necessary breakthrough for our people."

Obama's visit "will focus on regional developments and will only address our cause in a way to undermine Palestinian national reconciliation efforts and to relaunch the absurd so-called negotiations."

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/166045

~~~~~~~~~~

Haniyeh's assessment of Obama's intentions is, of course, on the mark. What's noteworthy here is that this statement by a Palestinian Arab leader with whom Abbas is supposed to be negotiating "unity" makes it harder for Abbas to accept Obama positively. He will be labeled a traitor, one who sacrifices the good of the people in order to please the American president.

In other words, radical is "in."

~~~~~~~~~~

On Friday, the Muslim Sabbath, following afternoon prayers at the mosques on the Temple Mount, worshippers began throwing rocks at the Israeli officers stationed at the Mughrabi Bridge -- this is the bridge that runs between the Western Wall Plaza and the Mughrabi Gate, the only gate available for non-Muslims to enter the Mount.

When Israeli police entered the Mount, rioters not only threw rocks at them, but also two fire bombs. Six of the police required hospitalization for treatment.

Police -- calling the situation a "new escalation" -- used stun grenades and tear gas to disperse the crowd.

Situations such as these are not only enraging but remind us how badly we have lost sovereignty over what is rightfully ours.

~~~~~~~~~~

The situation in Syria, right at our border, is escalating. IDF soldiers can hear guns firing, and see the battles.

Last Wednesday, 21 Philippine peacekeepers were kidnapped by the Martyrs of Yarmouk rebel forces in an attempt to force Assad forces to withdraw from the Jamla area. The peacekeepers were part of the UN Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) that has been monitoring a ceasefire line between Syria and Israel in the Golan Heights since 1974. They have now been released to Jordan, but there is talk of the UN force withdrawing.

Now rebels operating near the Golan border have vowed to "liberate" the Golan from Israel after Assad has been taken down. Assad, they have declared, is severely remiss for not having done this a long time ago.

~~~~~~~~~~

According to Ayal Zisser, former director of the Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies:

"A significant number of the rebels in the Golan Heights area belong to the al-Nusra Front, an al-Qaeda affiliate, but alongside that group are a whole host of other armed militias. These groups lack a central leadership and are mainly composed of outlaws and bandits out for a fight. These gangs seek control of the rural regions and the Syrian periphery."

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=3635

~~~~~~~~~~

There is a reasonable anticipation not simply of trouble on the Golan border with Syrian rebels, but with Hezbollah, which is surely acquiring advanced weapons from Syria in the midst of the current turmoil.

What I repeat here has been said before, and I consider it of the utmost importance in terms of Israeli policy. Last week a senior IDF officer, who declined to be identified, said:

We want to preserve the quiet, and we want the other side to know that if they take a step that necessitates we exact a price, they will pay dearly.

"The way they behave will have repercussions on the population and infrastructure of southern Lebanon.

I don't in any way expect the casualty ratio to be similar. I want things to be as bad as possible for the other side and as good as possible for us."

The officer said Israel would try to give Lebanese non-combatants time to evacuate, but recognized that there would be non-combatant casualties.

~~~~~~~~~~

This is all about the despicable, the immoral, habit -- engaged in by Hezbollah and Hamas equally -- of deliberately storing weaponry and establishing rocket launching sites in civilian areas, assuming that Israel will be afraid to hit those areas. But the more Hezbollah has sophisticated weaponry that can do serious damage to the Israeli population, the more important it becomes for the Israeli military to take out that weaponry before many Israelis can be killed. Intentions are to act very fast indeed.

The moral responsibility for this situation falls on Hezbollah shoulders. Israel responsibility is to the lives of Israeli citizens. Bad press cannot be a factor here.

~~~~~~~~~~

We know full well how quickly the world points a finger at Israel.

During Operation Pillar of Defense in November, two of the Palestinian Arab dead were the baby son of a BBC Arabic Service journalist and his 19-year-old sister-in-law.

A Times of Israel reports,

"Images of the bereaved father tearfully holding the corpse of his 11-month-old baby went around the world."

And Human Rights Watch declared that according to "news reports and witnesses," Israel was responsible.

Well, guess what? A UN report now says that it was a Palestinian Arab rocket that killed the child and the woman. The UN.

http://www.timesofisrael.com/un-clears-israel-from-charge-it-bombed-11-month-old-baby/

Contact Arlene Kushner at akushner@netvision.net.il. And visit her website at www.arlenefromisrael.info


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ANTI-ISRAEL PROPAGANDA FOILED BY THE FACTS

Posted by UCI, March 11, 2013

The article below was written by David Ha'ivri who is an Israeli settler and political activist. He emigrated with his family from the United States to Israel at the age of 11 and served in the IDF. Ha'ivri lives with his wife and eight children in Kfar Tapuach in the West Bank. This article appeared May 6, 2013 in Your Middle East News and is archived at
http://www.yourmiddleeast.com/opinion/david-haivri-antiisrael-propaganda-foiled-by-the-facts_11911

Social media, university campuses and newspapers around the world overflow with statements by self-proclaimed "human rights activists." They tweet day and night, labeling Israel as a racist apartheid state which discriminates against Arabs based on their ethnic background.

They call Israel's security barrier an "apartheid wall," in spite of the fact that both Jews and Arabs live on both sides of it. They call roads in Judea and Samaria "apartheid roads," in spite of the fact that both Jews and Arabs drive on them freely. They call on Jewish residents of the region to move out, while at the same time, they accuse Israel of racist policies. Is there a better definition of hypocrisy and lies? From their disinformation, you would never learn that Israel manages constant security threats from internal and external terrorist operations. Israel goes to great effort to ensure security considerations don't affect the lives of the civilian population, regardless of those citizens' ethnic affiliation.

This past week, Jerusalem witnessed a new level of this hypocrisy. Egyptian blogger/dissident Maikel Nabil came to Israel to give a speech at the Hebrew University. This invitation, in itself, should challenge to the racism claim. But there is more. Nabil, who has been jailed in Egypt for being a conscientious objector, when asked by the press if he came to Israel in support of Netanyahu, said that on the contrary he "came to Israel to convince people not to vote for Netanyahu." He refused to be interviewed by Israel's army radio, posting to his Twitter timeline: "I refused to give interview to IDF Radio today; I want soldiers to leave the army and become farmers and artists." If you think that that might put into question claims that Israel limits freedom of expression to Arabs who oppose its policies, consider the following.

News services reported that Palestinian students at Hebrew University staged a protest against Nabil's talk there. They heckled his speech by shouting out that he brings shame on the Egyptian revolution by calling for peace with Israel. So much for the "apartheid" claim. It turns out that during the time Palestinian students achieve their academic accreditation at Israel's flagship university (while enjoying Israeli subsidies for their studies), they are free to not only openly criticize the policies of the State of Israel, but to openly mock those who call for peace between Israel and the Arab states.

It is about time that the anti-Israel propaganda movement get their story straight. If Arab students study and are free to voice their opinions in Israeli universities, what are they talking about when they call Israel "apartheid"?

To quote Mandy Patinkin in The Princess Bride: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

Contact UCI at unitycoalitionforisrael.org


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JOINT JEWISH-ARAB YOUTH PROGRAMS: GIVE IT UP ALREADY!

Posted by Ya'aqov Ben-Yehudah, March 11, 2013

The article below was written by Elhanan Gruner who is a hardline violent settler from Yitzhar, visited the prosecutor to complain about a restraining order. This article appeared March 10, 2013 in Esser Agaroth and is archived at
http://esseragaroth.blogspot.co.il/2013/03/joint-jewish-arab-youth-programs-give.html

(Translated) Last week, students from a school in Yoqne'am attended an activity day, with the atmosphere of "coexistence" with students from an Arab school in Sakhnin. At the end of the activities, the bus carrying the Jewish students was pelted with rocks by their Arab "friends" from the joint activity. (cont.)

rockthrowers

The Ministry of Education, the of the promoter of the joint operation has thus far refused to respond to inquiries into the affair by the media.

This is not really news. HaKol HaYehudi should be commended for reporting this event. But, it is a mistake to think of it as news.

From where did they acquire those masks? At what age are they trained to make makeshift ones so quickly out of the scarves and bandanas they just "happen" to have on them? Pretty young, I would imagine.

Even as far back as 1991, during the First Gulf War, the joint activities attempted in Yaffo were a disaster, as the Arab children cheered every time an Iraqi scud rocket hit Israel.

Almost a year ago, I was in Nazareth, visiting a school for work. I saw that in one of the classrooms, there was a drawing which incorporated the flag of the Palestinian Liberation Organization [PLO], with the English words "Palestine will be free!" interspersed amongst the Arabic.

This Nazareth Municipality school had just won an award for the teaching of "coexistence."

displayingmap

Since the "Palestinians" want all of what is Israel, and want to push the Jews out. they have said over and over again, that Jews will never reside within a "Palestinian" State. We Jews have very short memories. The Palestinian authority sees ALL of Israel as an eventual "Palestinian" State.

Some "coexistence," huh?

Ya'aqov Ben-Yehudah was born and raised in San Diego, CA. With an M.S. in Counseling/Clinical Child Psychology from California State University; he worked as a school psychologist, until making aliyah in 1997. For most of his Israeli life he lived and taught school in the Shomron (Samaria). He now lives and works in Jerusalem, where he writes about life in Israel and on being Jewish.


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THE MAN I THOUGHT I KNEW

Posted by Borntolose3, March 11, 2013

The article below was written by Jonathan Rosenblum is the director, spokesperson, and founder of Jewish Media Resources, an organization which attempts to clarify journalists' understanding of Haredi Jewish society. This article appeared February 28,2013 in the Jewish Media Resources and is archived at
http://www.jewishmediaresources.com/1593/ki-sisa-5773-the-man-i-thought-i-knew

I thought I knew Reb Meyer Birnbaum, zt"l, who passed away last Friday in his 95th year. But I didn't know him at all.

Nearly twenty years ago, Rabbi Meir Zlotowitz, who had been a long-time neighbor of Reb Meyer's and often travelled with him on his morning drive to the Kosel for the haneitz minyan, had the idea of a book based on stories he had heard from Reb Meyer over the years. Reb Meyer would dictate his life story onto tapes and I would transform those tapes into a book.

Rabbi Zlotowitz envisioned the book centering on Reb Meyer's experiences during World War II as a frum soldier and officer — the Normandy landing, liberating Buchenwald, and then remaining in the DP camps for six months after he was entitled to return stateside and be discharged.

Reb Meyer initially resisted the idea of a first-person memoir. But Rabbis Zlotowitz and Nosson Scherman persuaded him that by talking about what he had witnessed and the great people he had known he would be removing the focus from himself, whereas a third-person book would suggest that he was someone of inherent distinction.

Next, certain members of his family opposed the book, but by now Reb Meyer was enthusiastic about the project. "If I can be mechazek one person," he told a son who objected to an autobiography in his lifetime, "it will be worth it." In the end, he was mechazek tens of thousands, and his son admitted that he had been wrong.

WHEN I FIRST MET REB MEYER, he was already 75-years-old. A tall man, he still stood fully erect, and would continue to do so into his '90s. At that first meeting, he told me to pretend I was trying to stab him, and showed me a few judo moves from his days in U.S. army. His grip was still vise-like.

Unfortunately, his financial condition was not equally good. He had once been the successful proprietor of Mauzone Foods, but the business had gone bankrupt, through no fault of his own. He did not even own a life insurance policy, and still had a number of children left to marry. His only marketable skill, at that point in life, was his recipe for an unrivalled, unsalted herring and delicious pickles. Though he lectured annually on his wartime experiences at a few seminaries, most prominently Rebbetzin David's BJJ, these were non-remunerative.

Then Lieutenant Birnbaum appeared, and opened another chapter of his eventful life. On the basis of the book, Reb Meyer was launched on an international speaking career. For the next fifteen years, until he was close to ninety, he held audiences across the globe transfixed for four hours or more, as he related his experiences.

For the rest of his life, Reb Meyer was known everywhere as Lieutenant Birnbaum. The name appeared in English on the Hebrew notices of his petirah, and the hapless fellow announcing the levaya going through Jerusalem's religious neighborhoods struggled mightily to pronounce the word lieutenant.

The title Lieutenant Birnbaum captured something essential about Reb Meyer. He was Hashem's soldier, in chapter after chapter of his life: as one of a group of idealistic youth in the impoverished New Lots/East New York neighborhood, in whom a passion for Yiddishkeit burned, despite their lack of any yeshiva education; in the DP camps after the war; and in his critical role ending the scourge of totally unnecessary autopsies in Israeli hospitals in the '60s. Before entering the hospital for the last time, he told his son Rabbi Akiva Birnbaum, "This may be my last fight. But I'm going to fight all the way."

Lieutenant Birnbaum struck a chord and quickly became one of ArtScroll's all-time best-sellers. Readers recognized a "normal" person like themselves, placed in extraordinary circumstances. Reb Meyer's life had not been a bed of roses. He experienced hunger as a youngster, the loss of a younger brother in the Normandy landing, divorce, and bankruptcy. Yet his simchas chayim, in the words of his daughter-in-law Rebbetzin Blimie Birnbaum, was palpable. He could put any problem on the shelf and not just carry on, but do so with boundless gratitude to whom Hashem. He felt himself to be the Ribbono shel Olam's beloved "ben yachid."

People in pain, wrote to him from around the globe. He kept thousands of letters from readers who had been uplifted by Lieutenant Birnbaum, and tried to answer all of them. Something about his story moved and gave hope to many who were suffering — abused wives, off-the-derech children — just as he had once given hope to those in the DP camps who thought they had nothing left to live for.

In the later capacity, said the renowned Mashgiach Rabbi Don Segal in his eulogy, he "blew ruach chayim (the breath of life) into those who were nothing but bones." He assured despondent survivors that he was a rich man and would provide them with jobs when the arrived in America. Though the first part was far from true, the great figures of that era, such as Irving Bunim and Mike Tress, made good on the promise. Wherever he went in his later years, he was accosted by survivors who remembered the tall American soldier who had delivered thousands of letters and packages to survivors sent through the Army Post Office.

The fame from Lieutenant Birnbaum allowed him to fulfill his favorite role — that of a loving father giving to his children. (He had sixteen children of his own.) In the heyday of Mauzone Foods, it was a factory of chesed. He used to put a long finger under the scale to hold it up, while measuring out the orders of widows and wives of talmidei chachamim. Only Rabbi Aharon Kotler's rebbetzin, ever caught him doing so.

For more than thirty years, he packed his car and later a Mitsubishi van in a manner that would have done credit to any college fraternity for his morning drive to the Kosel, where he had special permission, in his last years, to drive all the way to the entrance to the men's section. Later in the day, he would cruise the streets looking for people in distress to transport. Every Shabbos, the Birnbaum home was filled with either yeshiva bochurim or seminary girls eager to soak up his joy and hear his stories first-hand.

DESPITE ALL I KNEW ABOUT LIEUTENANT BIRNBAUM, nothing prepared me for the sight of hundreds of talmidei chachamim at his levaya just before Shabbos. Besides his son Rabbi Akiva Birnbaum, the maspidim included Rabbi Yitzchak Ezrachi of Mirrer Yeshiva, a long-time neighbor; Rabbi Tzvi Cheshin, the recognized ari shebe'chabura of Mirrer Yeshiva for four decades; and Rabbi Don Segal. Other major Torah figures wanted to be maspid, but time did not allow. Rabbi Ezrachi expressed his kinas sofrim for Reb Meyer's portion in the World to Come, and said that he did not know if there was another person in the generation with as many zechuyos (merits) as Reb Meyer.

In the midst of the hespedim, a very old man entered the hall sobbing. He kissed the niftar's feet, and then cried out, "These are the same tefillin."

This old Jew and two friends had escaped from a Nazi prison camp in the last days of the War. Freezing in their skimpy prisoners uniforms, they put on the uniforms of slain Nazi soldiers whom they found lying in the woods. The Jew in question subsequently encountered an American convoy wearing the uniform of a high German officer. When he reached into his pocket, the American soldiers thought he was grabbing a grenade. They were about to shoot him, when he cried out, "Ich bin a Yid" Fortunately for him, Lieutenant Birnbaum understood what he was saying, and ordered his men not to shoot. In the Jew's pocket was a pair of tefillin that he had been moser nefesh to guard throughout the war.

Gedolei Torah recognized greatness in Reb Meyer. He exemplified the temimus (simplicity/purity) that Reb Shraga Feivel Mendlowitz used to say characterized his generation of Americans. His kavod for rabbonim was without limit. Reb Meyer and friends like the late Reb Moshe Swerdloff gathered around Rabbi Yitzchak Hutner upon his arrival in New York from Europe, and later did everything possible to help Rabbi Leib Malin and other great survivors of the Mirrer in Shanghai establish Yeshivas Bais HaTalmud.

Rabbi Beinisch Finkel, the late Rosh Yeshiva of the Mir, was famous for never accepting a favor from anyone. Yet he accepted a ride from Reb Meyer, from the very first day the latter started driving to the haneitz minyan at the Kosel, and would even ask Reb Meyer to drive him to various simchos. He knew that he was giving Reb Meyer boundless joy by doing so.

Every morning at the Kosel, Reb Meyer would read through pages of names of people in tzar before the start of davening. Once, in his last years, he exclaimed, "Ribbono shel Olam, I have no more strength, You have to bring Mashiach." His Rosh Hashanah berachah to his fellow mispallelim at the Kosel this past Erev Rosh Hashanah was: "Next year, may we be zocheh to gather on the other side of the Kosel."

May he continue to implore Hashem, Whom he always addressed as a beloved son speaking to his Father, on behalf of Klal Yisrael, from his high place on the other side.

Contact Borntolose at borntolose3@charter.net


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NETANYAHU IS A GUTLESS POLITICIAN * TURKEY IS THE ENEMY OF ISRAEL * JEWISH TOWN ALEPPO IS LOST FOREVER

Posted by Steven Shamrak, March 11, 2013

Netanyahu is a Gutless Politician!

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu met President Shimon Peres and asked him for a two-week extension in which to put together a coalition of parties and form a new government, and received the extension.

If Netanyahu fails to cobble together a coalition within a fortnight, however, he will be in serious trouble. Peres could decide to task someone else with creating a coalition, or new elections could be called.

We are, therefore, entering the "money time" of coalition crafting.

There is anger and a feeling of vindication in the Bayit Yehudi party, following reports in at least two major news sources that Likud/Yisrael Beytenu has promised Yesh Atid to tear down Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria if it joins a coalition without Bayit Yehudi.

Together with reports that Likud made contradictory overtures to Bayit Yehudi, they portray Netanyahu in an unflattering light and are no cause for pride, for supporters of Likud/Yisrael Beytenu.

MK Orit Strook said: "It is very sad that Likud continues to make every effort to establish the Livni-Abu Mazen government instead of establishing the social government for the people of Israel , in line with the way the public voted." (Netanyahu systematically betrays the Zionist charter of the Likud party and brings political enemies into his government. But the saddest part of the story is that the party apparatus and membership allow him to conduct this shameful treachery of Jewish national aspiration!)

It's not Their Business Where Israel Builds

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/165782#.VXsYULyVsWM

Senator Rand Paul, a Republican from Kentucky, spoke about his trip to Israel and how much he enjoyed being there. He told the crowd how he sang Hebrew songs together with a group of rabbis at the Western Wall, even though he had no idea what the words meant. However, the statement that received thunderous applause was, "It is not our job to tell Israelis where they can or cannot build." (It is nobody's business - Israel has historic and legal rights to all Jewish ancestral land, Eretz-Israel, known as the Palestinian Mandate!)

No-man's Land is up for Grabs

https://warsclerotic.wordpress.com/2013/03/03/syrian-no-mans-land-bordering-israel-and-jordan-is-up-for-grabs-2/

The four Syrian mortar shells exploding on the Israeli side of the Golan on Saturday, March 2, flashed a signal to Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu that the moment is at hand to step in and decide how to dispose of the expanse of southern Syrian bordering on northern Israel. The collapse of Bashar Assad's defense lines on the Israeli and Jordanian borders has left a large Syrian expanse of no-man's land and generated a new strategic situation of major importance for both Israel and Jordan. There is still time to pre-empt developments that would be detrimental to Israel's security. (The fact is that thousand of dunams of Jewish land, purchased by the Jewish Agency since the Leage of Nations allocated as Jewish land, Eretz-Israel, are still occupied by Syria. It is time to reclaim our land!)

Food for Thought by Steven Shamrak

In the age of a current fake political correctness and international anti-Israel smear campaign confusion and many unresolved problems have been created about the question - Who is a Jew? Not long ago, most of those Jews who married out denounced their Judaism. They and their children were hiding their 'shameful' Jewish origin - their Jewishness. At the same time there were not many courageous gentiles who would be interested to become a "righteous convert"! Under the Jewish law marriage is not a legitimate reason for conversion to Judaism. Conversion must have a spiritual component - a need to "return"!

It is Clear - Turkey is the Enemy of Israel

http://www.jpost.com/Middle-East/Erdogan-says-Zionism-crime-against-humanity

In attempt to restore its relationship with Turkey, Israel sent messages to Ankara over the last few weeks that it is interested in creating a more "positive dynamic" in its badly strained relationship with Turkey so the two countries can work together to further common interests. The messages were sent prior to John Kerry's maiden trip abroad as US secretary of state, a trip that will take him to nine countries in 10 days, including Turkey. Response from Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan was prompt and clear - at the Vienna forum of the Alliance of Civilizations, a UN forum for West-Islam dialogue. He called Zionism a "crime against humanity" likening it with anti-Semitism, fascism, and Islamophobia. (The saddest part of this story is that he was not kicked out from this so-called "Alliance of Civilizations". It would be more appropriate to call it "Alliance of International anti-Semites" - it has no moral integrity!)

The Holocaust Just Got More Shocking

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/sunday-review/the-holocaust-just-got-more-shocking.html?_r=4&adxnnl=1&adxnnlx=1362236748-5jy69MPKaw0svfJWxthXZQ&

Thirteen years ago, researchers at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum began the grim task of documenting all the ghettos, slave labor sites, concentration camps and killing factories that the Nazis set up throughout Europe. The researchers have cataloged some 42,500 Nazi ghettos and camps throughout Europe, spanning German-controlled areas from France to Russia and Germany itself, during Hitler's reign of brutality from 1933 to 1945.

PA Students do not Want to Hear about Peace

Scores of violent Arab students forced the British Consul General, Sir Vincent Fean, to make a hasty departure from a university in Ramallah, where he came to deliver a lecture on Britain's policy in the Middle East and the prospects for peace. A consulate official confirmed that Fean was unable to deliver his prepared address due to the riots. In February 2000, Arab protesters at Bir Zeit threw stones at then visiting French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin, demanding he leave the university over a speech he delivered at Tel Aviv University in which he called Hizbullah a terrorist organization.

Washington: Hezbollah has got Chemical Weapons

http://beforeitsnews.com/alternative/2013/03/washington-hizballah-has-got-hold-of-chemical-weapons-2585026.htm

For the first time in many years, voices in the US administration were criticizing the Israeli defense forces for under-reacting and, in this case, also underestimating the chemical weapons threat emanating from Syria and neglecting to pursue counter-measures. Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak heard when he met US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel at the Pentagon that intelligence estimates confirmed for the first time by an American official that Hezbollah has been able to procure a quantity of chemical weapons from Syria. (Israel is criticized when it acts and when it does nothing!)

Must the West Help Islamic Terrorists in Syria?

The Islamist Martyrs of Yarmouk command kidnapped 21 UN observers close to the Golan village of Jamla near Israel. So-called rebels demand the withdrawal of Assad regime units from the village: "If no withdrawal is made within 24 hours, we will treat the 20 hostages as prisoners." (The UN observers offered no resistence to terrorists - greate security for Israel! Islamists tried to use UN observers as a human shields, violating international laws. Help - not condemnation - is still flowing to the terrorists even from democratic countries. The same democracies have been supporting the PA terrorists in their objective to destroy Israel!)

US Finances Islamization of Egypt

During his visit to Cairo the US Secretary of State John Kerry talked at length to Egyptian President Morsi about Egypt's calamitous economic straits, relations with Israel, democratization and essential reforms. Morsi nodded politely but was completely wrapped up in the ongoing plan he and the Muslim Brotherhood had hatched for Islamizing Egypt and seizing 100 percent of parliament in the next election - April or June. (Hundred million of the US taxpayer dollars are given to support this endeavor!)

PA Unity is a Joke

As unity talks failed, the Palestinian Authority security forces arrested 66 Hamas supporters in the West Bank during the month of February. Hamas said that among those arrested were 32 former prisoners (held by Israel), three university students, a journalist and a teacher. (Ideological foes, Hamas and Fatah, will never come to any political agreement. Only common hate for Israel keeps them from mutual annihilation!)

Quote(s) of the Week:

"If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If not now, when?" (Ethics of the Fathers 1:14).

Jewish Town Aleppo is Lost Forever

by Joseph Dana

The northern Syrian city of Aleppo, once a pillar of Jewish existence worldwide, is slowly being destroyed by the fighting that has engulfed Syria. A Free Syrian Army rebel warned that soon "there will be nothing left to destroy in Aleppo."

What made Jewish existence in Aleppo so unique and vibrant? For thousands of years, Aleppo was an unofficial capital of the Sephardic Jewish world. Fueled by wealth from international trade and waves of Jewish immigration, the city's Jews sustained a pious community revered for educational excellence and as a guardian of traditions with roots in ancient Israel. Aleppine folklore - some even say that one of Kind David's generals personally laid the foundation for its great synagogue - hints at the prestige of the city in Jewish history.

Starting in the late 10th century, Aleppo grew to serve as a passageway between the Jewish communities of the Babylonian center and Israel. Its geographic position and impressive sphere of influence bridged the divide from Persia to the lucrative markets of southern Europe.

Aleppo was the center of Jewish life for many centuries. Distinguished rabbis studied there and it was a center of significant Torah learning. Among the reasons for Aleppo 's importance in Jewish learning is a document known as the Aleppo Codex. It is believed that a member of the famous Ben-Asher family wrote the Aleppo Codex over 1000 years ago. The text shows the final vocalization and punctuation of the Biblical text. Some believe it is the Biblical text which Rambam refers to in his Hilchot Sefer Torah.

Steven Shamrak was born in the former Soviet Union (USSR) and participated in the Moscow Zionist "refusenik" movement and currently lives in Melbourne, Australia. He publishes internet editorial letters on the Arab-Israeli conflict. He can be reached by email at StevenShamrak.e@gmail.com


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TUNISIA IN CHAOS

Posted by Darlene Casella, March 11, 2013

Tunisia sits between Algeria and Libya in North Africa on the Mediterranean Sea. She has enormous history which includes Hannibal the 2nd century Tunisian General, one of the greatest strategic military commanders in history. He defeated the Roman Army which had invaded Tunisia at Carthage. The Romans reclaimed it a century later. Carthage remained one of the three most important cities in the Roman Empire until the Muslim Conquest destroyed it in the 6th Century. This was followed by the Ottoman Empire and then protectorate disagreements with France and Italy. General George Patton led the Tunisia Campaign in WWII; the Battle of El Guettar was the first battle in which US forces defeated the experienced German tank units. Patton believed in reincarnation and wrote that he had been in Carthage; speculating that he had been with Hannibal and those brave warriors.

Habib Bourguiba was the first president when Tunisia became an independent state in 1956. He suppressed Islamic fundamentalism and established women's rights. In 1987 he was replaced in a bloodless coup by Zine el Abidine Ben Ali who respected the secularist position. In spite of corruption during Ben Ali's autocratic regime, he was an important ally of the United States; and a large middle class with liberal social norms and gender equality for women had evolved.

A Tunisian street vendor set himself on fire protesting the confiscation of his wares and harassment by government officials; Mohamed Bousazizi died before his 27th birthday. With the death of Bousazizi, the January 2011 Jasmine Revolution began. The torch of Arab Spring was lit. Within days dozens of protestors were dead; President Ben Ali and his wife fled to Saudi Arabia.

The cosmopolitan capital of Tunis, the ancient ruins of Carthage, the Muslim and Jewish quarters of Jerba , the sands stretching south to the Sahara, and the coastal resorts of Monastir had beckoned adventurous tourists prior to the Arab Spring.

An assembly was appointed to govern until parliamentary elections would be held. The Ennahda Islamist Party campaigned on a moderate pro democracy stance comparing itself to Turkey's Justice and Development Party (AKP). They claimed victory in the October 2011 elections with 41% of the vote.

Moncef Marzouki of the Islamist Ennahada became the interim president and reassured secularists that the new constitution would respect women's rights and would not impose a Muslim moral code on society. He appointed Hamadi Jebali as Prime Minister; and Ali Larayedh as Interior Minister. Each Minister has since resigned.

Anti Islamist Ennahda Party demonstrations were led by Chokri Balaid of the Popular Front and the General Tunisian Workers Union. Poverty, economic and social problems remain, especially unemployment; which is around 30%. Political promises have not been kept. Smuggling is rife. Milk, tomatoes, pasta, other foods, and mineral water are frequently exported to Libya to be sold for more than in Tunisia. This causes shortages. Gulf States are not loaning or giving money to Tunisia. Foreign investments are down. Taxi drivers and petrol stations strike to protest increased petrol prices.

Chokri Balaid was murdered last month. It is speculated that he was killed by Islamic Salafists, whose influence has grown. His killing plunged the nation into deeper political crisis and sparked the largest demonstrations in more than a year. Protesters demand the dissolution of the Ennahda militia which they accuse of brutal acts. They accuse Ennahda of violence which include the attack on the US embassy and on Sufi Shrines. The country remains in turmoil since Balaid's death.

Since Ben Ali fled office, Tunisia has been in a state of emergency, Parliament remains divided over the future political system, Ennahda announced that their government will step down; a new coalition government headed by Islamist Ali Larayedh will be formed with a new cabinet. It is estimated that new elections will take place in 2014. Chaos prevails.

Thomas Jefferson wrote that democracy requires an informed educated electorate. Plato posited that a benevolent dictator was the best government. Arab Spring has deposed dictators. Lives are not improved. Protests and riots have become the norm for unhappy citizens that crave a better life; and are angry at the corruption of leaders, at the western world, and especially the US. The Islamists use this to win elections and take control. The countries of Arab Spring burn; the US Administration fiddles.

Darlene Casella is a former English teacher, stockbroker, and president/owner of a small corporation. She lives with her husband in La Quinta, California and can be reached at darlenecasella@msn.com


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TERRORISM IN CYBERSPACE

Posted by ACD/EWI, March 12, 2013

Out of site in Afghanistan's caves, or hiding in clear sight in Pakistani digs, Osama bin Laden wasn't easy to catch, but was detectable, as are Iran's nuclear facilities. Technological development, however, are rapidly changing cyberspace's virtual reality into the new battle ground for terrorist and criminals alike. This is how it works:

IN A SCENE IN THE 1990 MOVIE DIE HARD 2, TERRORISTS TAKE CONTROL OF COMPUTER, TRAFFIC CONTROL, AND AERIAL COMMUNICATIONS SYSTEMS, IMPERSONATE RIGHT INSPECTORS, AND FEED IN FALSE DATA, THUS LEADING THE PILOT AND PASSENGERS TO THEIR DEATH IN THE MIDST OF A SNOWSTORM WITH THE PLANE CRASHING ON THE RUNWAY. SECURITY PERSONNEL ARE HELPLESS, INCAPABLE OF PROVIDING A RESPONSE; THE MOVIE'S HERO, JOHN MCCLANE (PLAYED BY BRUCE WILLIS), LACKS THE MEANS TO SAVE THE DOOMED RIGHT AND IS LEFT STANDING POWERLESS IN THE FOG ON THE LANDING STRIP, WAVING TWO IMPROVISED BEACONS AT THE APPROACHING AIRCRAFT.

At first it would seem that the movie is nothing but another Hollywood fantasy, dismissible as a wild exaggeration carriedto yet further extremes in the sequel, Die Hard 4. However, the events of 9/11 and the changes in the nature of security threats over the last decade indicate that even the most far-fetched scenarios crafted in Hollywood studios are liable to and real-life expression in the public and security sphere in this day and age.

The use of cyberspace as a primary warfare arena between enemies or hostile nations has always been fertile ground for fantasy and lurid scenes on the silver screen. However, cyberspace is rapidly becoming a genuine central arena for future wars and hostile actions undertaken by various types of adversaries. These may include terrorist organizations, although until now they have relied primarily on physical violence to promote their own goals and those of their sponsors. In light of such threats, many nations in the West have in recent years established special authorities to use innovative technological means to prepare for war-like actions against strategic infrastructure targets.

The Cyber Threat from Terrorist Groups-

Today there are some main groups that use or have the potential for future use of cyber-attack tools:

1)states developing offensive and defensive capabilities as a growing part of their force capabilities;

2)criminal elements motivated primarily by illegal commercial interests;

3)commercial companies, primarily in the defensive mode (as the scope of cyber-attacks in the commercial context is significantly growing), though some may resort to offensive moves against competitors;

<4)terrorist organizations, out of cost-benefit considerations and other inherent advantages, are liable to try to carry out cyber-attacks; and

5)anarchists opposed to the existing establishment who are interested in undermining it from within and without, and who endeavor to attack the entire system of computerization, which today is the basis for managing life as we know it, in order to disrupt or even destroy states' current social order and their fabric of life.

Cyber offense has the potential to change society's balance of power because it empowers those engaged in asymmetrical conflicts that operate from a position of inferiority, especially terrorist organizations. Capabilities in this sphere may enable them to attack installations, systemic processes, and sites while causing heavy physical damage and wielding a

significant psychological impact on the society and public under attack. They thus acquire capabilities other than those familiar from conventional terrorist attacks, such as suicide bombings, booby traps, hostage situations, hijackings, and kidnappings.

Cyber offense affords several advantages;

First, it removes the necessity of physical presence at the target. It is possible to damage communications networks and control systems of installations and processes from afar and thus avoid physical barriers and human systems.

Second, it affords a wider scope of damage. Cyber-attacks occur not only in the physical space but also carry the potential for severe and sustained damage to control and infrastructure systems. Thus, while most conventional terrorist attacks are limited in time and space, a cyber attack monies terrorism's psychological impact through fear and intimidation.

Third, it is easier to conceal the identity and source of the attack; in cyberspace, identities and boundaries between states are more easily blurred. Terrorists attacking in cyberspace can not only conceal their identity but can also feed false information as to the source of the attack, for example, by attacking a site inside the target state using addresses of a friendly nation.

Fourth, cyberspace attacks are cost effective. Using the cyber platform for attacks maximizes the cost-benefit ratio from the perspective of a terrorist organization, endowed with fewer resources and capabilities than the states it targets. Assuming that terrorist organizations would prefer less defended targets rather than well-protected ones, they presumably would be able to gain access and insert malicious code into target sites, or use technologies that are becoming ever more accessible to wider audiences.

Fifth, cyber terrorism can be non-lethal. It can cause signicant damage without direct fatalities or physical injury, granting terrorists success by means of intimidation and disruption of the routine. This gives the perpetrators the ability to devise a defense and logical explanations for their deeds, which after all did not spill blood but were only an indirect cause of lost lives. The innovativeness represented by such action would also garner terrorist organizations widespread media coverage and enable them to engage in non-lethal threats in which a price would be extorted in exchange for removing the threat of a cyber-attack.

It has been claimed that terrorist organizations are not interested in cyberspace because they prefer showcase attacks with much higher visibility rather than the anonymity that supposedly is conferred by attacks in this domain.

However this claim does not take into account the basic rationale of terrorism strategy, which holds that terrorist activity should focus on minimizing the power differential in the struggle against a stronger enemy with more powerful means, carry out destructive actions while identifying the weaknesses in the enemy's defense, and achieve a position of superiority at tolerable costs given the relatively poor means at the disposal of the perpetrators. Already today global jihad terrorist organizations are making use of cyberspace, though still in limited and relatively undeveloped fashion, to realize these advantages.

A study examining the cyberspace warfare capabilities of jihadist organizations identied a number of major features that serve to build and improve the organizational and operational infrastructures of terrorist organizations in the following ends:

Propaganda: using the web to disseminate ideas, decrees, directives, speeches, and opinion pieces by clergy and terrorist leaders.

Recruitment and training: using the web to identify and recruit potential members as well as to transmit instructional and training materials.

Fund raising and financing: using the web to fundraise under the guise of charities and aid organizations as well as to steal identities and credit cards.

Communications: using the web for operational communications while employing a range of tools, including accessible encryption tools.

Identifying targets and intelligence: using information available on the web to identify targets and gather intelligence.

It is thus clear that an essential upgrade of cyberspace tools available to terrorist organizations, from logistical and propaganda tools to actual operational tools, is liable to generate an innovative, dramatic, and relatively cheap type of attack with the power to effect severe damage, even if carried out with a low signature or in total anonymity. Therefore every terrorist organization, especially one seeking fame and wanting to affect the public psyche and morale in the targeted enemy, sees such an attack as an important and worthy challenge. Innovation would also guarantee the perpetrators international fame and transform them into role models.

Thus, sub-state entities with more limited technological capabilities than the nations with which they are at war are liable to join the trend of using advanced technology needed for cyber warfare for their own benefit, either by receiving assistance from supportive nations or by acquiring such capabilities themselves in the future, by recruiting and operating individuals with the necessary skills in this end.

As for states supporting terrorism, cyberspace is very attractive for use of proxy organizations because of the anonymity afforded by the domain, the difficulty in proving the identity of the perpetrator, the high level of deniability by states about their involvement, and the satisfaction of causing severe damage to the enemy. Even if suspicions are aroused, it is still hard to prove guilt. Furthermore, the public under attack may perceive a cyber-attack to be less outrageous than a terrorist attack that employs rearms and causes direct death and destruction — even if the damage caused is greater, more destructive of property, and takes more lives than a violent terrorist act.

Despite these advantages of cyber-attacks, to date no such attack has been traced to a terrorist organization. Development of significant capabilities in this old requires surmounting a considerable intelligence and technological threshold. At this stage one may assume that terrorist organizations and it hard to identify, harness, and maintain such high technological capabilities and access that would allow them to cross that bar.

It is true that this limitation can be partially overcome through the assistance of state supporters of terrorism, but at least for now this is not enough to give terrorist organizations the significant, stable technological platform required for maintaining effective cyber-attack capabilities. In addition, terrorist organizations face limitations posed by cyber surveillance and state intelligence and technological capabilities that enable them to identify suspicious conduct on the web, identify attempts at organization, and mount a defense against them and against threats to specific targets.

Weaknesses and Responses

Although to date terrorist organizations have not been able to overcome the difficulties in achieving offensive cyber capabilities, civilian systems and routine civilian life presumably remain their preferred targets, because these are much more difficult to protect than security systems. Strengthening defenses of critical national infrastructures such as electric, water, and communications supply networks would likely encourage terrorists to seek out less protected targets in the civilian and commercial sectors. Even though systems in these sectors are usually not included in the rubric of critical and protected infrastructures, from the terrorist perspective an attack against them could be effective, by breaching ordinary citizens' basic sense of security and enhancing the terrorists' image by instilling fear.

A significant part of constructing a defense against cyber-attacks is general and independent of the source of the threat, whether terrorist, state or criminal. This is rejected organizationally — consider Israel's Information Security Authority and ministries specializing in cyber defense in various nations — and also in certain components of defense from the fields of information systems and general security. In contrast, in fighting terrorist organizations it is also necessary to activate two designated components that require sustained development and improvement.

The first is intelligence. Effective gathering of accurate, high quality intelligence requires using a range of sources including open sources and material from the terrorists' own computers and networks.

To this end it is necessary to develop capabilities of infiltrating these systems covertly and inserting information effectively and continuously. The challenge that must be overcome is the widespread global deployment typical of terrorist organizations that use many chat rooms and transmit messages using unique code words. Intelligence agencies must be able to intercept these transmissions and decode them within the relevant timeframes and at the same time provide cyber defense systems with the tools needed to protect against and even disrupt the planned actions.

The second component is disruption. Unlike defense systems, which do not try to prevent an attack but rather obstruct its success once it has already been launched, the goal of disruption is to thwart the execution of the attack or to hamper its progress. Establishing an effective disruption structure against cyber-attacks by terrorist organizations requires intelligence monitoring and control that can identify the organization of an attack before it takes place and operate effectively to foil it. This aspect relies primarily on tactical intelligence gathering capabilities, both from computers and from communications networks used by terrorist organizations.

Disruption attempts can also be directed towards damaging the organizational infrastructures of the organization. An example of this occurred in England when British intelligence hacked the online issue of the British al-Qaeda magazine Inspire. In addition, in recent years the various components of the electronic jihad have been targeted for occasional cyber-attacks largely attributed to Western governments: the Taliban's website has been hacked time and again, as have exclusive jihadist forums and high profile fundamentalist websites. Meanwhile, American, Saudi Arabian, and Dutch authorities have extracted valuable information about potential Islamic terrorism from jihadist websites serving as honey traps for high quality intelligence.

At the same time, it is necessary to deepen the defenses of civilian systems that represent the greatest weakness and therefore are also preferred terrorist targets. For example, the British government began taking legislative steps that include authorizing the use of invasive techniques such as telephone wiretaps, surveillance of emails in police unless connected to crimes of terrorism, torpedoing internet radicalization processes, and specialized training of police units to confront cyber threats. Nonetheless, in most states the defense of civilian systems is still in its infancy.

Most states' cyber defense resources are allocated to security systems and to what are considered critical national infrastructures. Deepening the defense of civilian systems requires radical changes on a national scale that must be supported by appropriate regulation.

Conclusion:

"In December 2001, at a meeting in New York shortly after the 9/11 attacks, the philosopher Jacques Derrida presented his understanding of the changes generated in the world as a result of those events. According to Derrida, the attacks were still part of the "archaic theater of violence," the real, visible world, in which events are still conducted in "clear and great order." However, according to him, cyberspace presents us with a more potent threat to our political and physical world; the dangers inherent in it change the relationship between terrorism, in the psychological and historical sense of a violent attack, and the concept of territory.

Now, in the new techno- scientific world, the threat we knew in the past as real has become an invisible, quiet, and swift threat, devoid of bloodshed, which, according to Derrida, is worse than the 9/11 attacks, which at least were directed against a known location at a particular point in time. Now we are facing a challenge that threatens the social and economic fabric of life that connects all of us and upon which all of us depend in every place and at every moment.

The rapid technological developments and innovations of recent years in the domain of cyberspace have indeed created a battlefield that simultaneously brings together many varied populations, local and international, representing a desirable target and fertile ground of activity by sub-state entities.

Since thus far there has been no known cyber-attack perpetrated by a terrorist organization, the threat does not seem acute. The challenge facing those who would try to use cyberspace for malicious purposes is three-pronged: attaining high level intelligence, the ability to crack computerized systems protected with advanced technology (or accessibility to such ability), and very high levels of calculation and computerization skills.

However, the advantages afforded by attaining cyberspace capabilities as described in this essay are liable to serve as an incentive for terrorists to develop, acquire, or harness such capabilities in the future. Gaining control of the advanced technological and intelligence capabilities required in cyberspace is likely to give these elements who seek to seriously damage their enemies by causing massive destruction and sowing terror and intimidation in the public at large the ability to disrupt the normal routine of civilian life, undermine civilian trust in their governments, and of course gain valuable prestige and media stature.

Therefore, Western nations must work diligently to meet this threat and improve the effective intelligence and defensive capabilities of civilian systems; while at the same time construct accurate intelligence gathering capabilities and the ability to disrupt cyberspace organization and attack by terrorists. Neglecting the civilian cyberspace domain, which is an attractive target for terrorists, is liable to prove disastrous in the future and place security personnel, when the time comes, in the same position as that fictional Hollywood hero of Die Hard 2 trying to save airplanes from crashing using nothing other than improvised beacons."

Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld is the Director of the New York-based American Center for Democracy (ACD) and the Economic Warfare Institute (EWI). She has authored hundreds of articles and several books on terrorist financing and political corruption. This article appeared March 12, 2013 on the American Center for Democracy (ACD) website and is archived at
http://acdemocracy.org/terrorism-in-cyberspace/


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DO THESE STATISTICS BOTHER YOU AT ALL?

Posted by Fred Reifenberg, March 12, 2013

Hey it's only money, and we won't have to pay .... but the next generations have to, but won't be able. A real mess bu the Oybamas had a ball, and the so did the free loaders, many of whom put him there. ENJOY !!

Re-redistribution of $1.4 billion each year

What can you buy for $1.4 billion a year? You can buy the most luxurious and costly royal presidency in history. Taxpayers spent $1.4 billion dollars on everything from staffing, housing, flying and entertaining President Obama and his family last year, according to the author of a new book on taxpayer-funded presidential perks.

In comparison, British taxpayers spent just $57.8 million on the royal family.

Author Robert Keith Gray writes in "Presidential Perks Gone Royal" that Obama isn't the only president to have taken advantage of the expensive trappings of his office. But the amount of money spent on the first family, he argues, has risen tremendously under the Obama administration and needs to be reined in.

Gray told The Daily Caller that the $1.4 billion spent on the Obama family last year is the "total cost of the presidency," factoring the cost of the "biggest staff in history at the highest wages ever," a 50 percent increase in the numbers of appointed czars and an Air Force One "running with the frequency of a scheduled air line."

Perspective: $1.4 billion is equal to spending seven times Mitt Romney's entire net-worth every year. If Romney had to pay for Barack and Michelle's lifestyle this year, he would have been bankrupted by the third week in February.

Now, can we please get back to talking about the evil, freeloading rich people, who didn't build anything and who need to "pay a little bit more."

Contact Fred Reifenberg by email at freify@netvision.net.il.


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ARROGANCE AND APPEASEMENT

Posted by Michael Travis, March 12, 2013

Ilana Freedman is Editor of GerardDirect.com. She has been an intelligence analyst in defense and counterterrorism for over twenty-five years. This article appeared March 10, 2013 in the Gerard Direct and is archived at
http://gerarddirect.com/2013/03/10/uss-f-35-and-f-22-americas-costly-boondoggles-the-victims-of-arrogance-and-appeasement/

F-22 and F-35: America's Costly Boondoggles Are the Victims of Arrogance and Appeasement

appeasement

If you thought that canceling the White House tours in order to save the Federal Government $74,000 per week was desperate, what do you think about the $40 billion that we have already spent on a 'state of the art' fighter plane that was designed by an international committee and can't fly!

The development of the latest US fighter planes over the last several decades has been one of the most costly examples of bad military spending in US history. In these days of fiscal crisis and sequestration, the story of the $120 billion development fiasco of the the F-22 and F-35 jet fighter plane is particularly egregious. The F-22 was less than expected, and in a recent report from the US Department of Defense, leaked to the public last week, the F-35 was considered unfit to fly. The report, called "F-35A Joint Strike Fighter: Readiness for Training Operational Utility Evaluation," was released by the Office of the Secretary of the in February 2013, and a declassified version was posted on March 6, 2013.

Three reasons stand out for this colossal and costly fiasco:

1. The decisions to move forward with the development of these two fighter jets have been political, not military;

2. The idea that a fighter jet can be designed by committee in order to accommodate bad foreign policy in a 'global economy' is patently absurd; and

3. In order to placate Muslim (particularly Turkish) objections, the one country whose technological expertise and experience in building what are arguably the best equipped fighter jets in the world — Israel — was shut out of all development.

Background

The F-22 Raptor entered the fleet of the US Air Force in December 2005. A product of Lockheed-Martin aircraft, it was reputed to be the best overall fighter in the world. It was characterized by its supposed stealth, speed, agility, precision and situational awareness, combined with air-to-air and air-to-ground combat capabilities. However,the aircraft's stiff price tag, cost overruns, development and production delays, a Congressional ban on Raptor exports, and the ongoing development of the F-35 which was considered more versatile, resulted in demands that F-22 production be ended. Production was halted on December 13, 2011.

In the summer of 2012, at the international Red Flag Alaska training exercise where the planes were matched against Australian, German, Japanese, Polish and [NATO] aircraft, the "most advanced stealth fighter jet in history, the F-22 Raptor" proved that while the plane excels at modern long-range air combat, it is only "evenly matched" with cheaper, foreign jets when it comes to old-fashioned dogfights.

In the meantime, back in October 2001, Lockheed Martin won the contract to the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter to replace the F-16, A-10, F/A-18, and AV-8B tactical fighter aircraft. The government planned to buy a total of 2,443 aircraft for an estimated US$200 billion. The purchase was to provide the centerpiece of the US armed services tactical air power to the US military.

According to the DOD report, the F-35 was intended to be a "multi-service, multi-national program consisting of a single-seat, single-engine aircraft built in three distinctly different variants intended to perform a wide array of missions to meet an advanced threat (year 2010 and beyond). The variants include a conventional take-off configuration (F-35A), a short take-off/vertical landing configuration (F-35B), and an aircraft carrier-compatible configuration (F-35C). "The international market included Canada, the United Kingdom, Norway, Denmark, Italy, the Netherlands, Australia, and Turkey, who were invited to join in the development program. The aircraft was also to be sold to Singapore, Japan, and Israel, although they were not invited to participate in its development.

Ironically, the same optics, avionics, and software packages that have kept the F-15, F-16, and F-18 Hornets as well as the Apache and Cobra helicopters flying long after their 'sell-by' date of 1984, could have easily been applied to the F-22 and F-35 projects. However, in the interest of appeasing Islamic sensibilities, because these technologies were developed by Israeli companies such as Elbit, Elisra, and Raphael, they were not consulted and their technology was not utilized.Instead, the F-35 was designed by a committee of manufacturers from the US, Canada, and Europe.

As a possible result, the F-35s now represent such a danger to pilots that according to the leaked report , they are not even fit for training purposes. A comparison between the 1960s designed F-16, which Israeli technology has continually upgraded since 1984, and the F-22 and F-35, which have failed to meet their promised potential, demonstrates how using the best technological advances can — in the case of the F-16, they have enabled it to maintain its well-earned reputation as the finest fighter jet in the world — still. The US has employed all of these Israeli modifications into their entire fleet. Until the development of the F-22, when Israel was cut out of the development loop.

The fact that Congress and not the military made the decision to develop the F-35, that the program used a committee approach to the F-35′s development, that the development team relied on computer models to make key decisions in the final design before flight testing, and that the lack of Israeli know-how in critical areas, all contributed to the failure of the F-35 project. It failed to meet even minimum performance standards although billions of dollars were thrown at the project. Complications during the development included huge cost overruns, delays in development, and international espionage in which several terabytes of data related to the aircraft's design and its electronics systems were stolen.

The aircraft has been haunted by what the report calls "fatal flaws" that make even the first configuration. An operational evaluation of the F-35A "Joint Strike Fighter" by the Department of Defense's Director of Operational Test and Evaluation, the aircraft was considered "unacceptable for combat" and even "unfit for training".

USAF test pilots have noted a lack of visibility from the F-35 cockpit during evaluation flights and said that this will get them shot down in every combat. Defense spending analyst Winslow Wheeler concluded from the flight evaluation reports that the F-35A "is flawed beyond redemption".

On 22 February 2013, the U.S. fleet of F-35s was grounded after a routine inspection of a F-35A at Edwards Air Force Base found a crack in an engine turbine blade.

The report also identified a host of additional problems, including:

  • Aircraft software is inadequate for even basic pilot training.
  • Ejection seat may fail causing pilot fatality.
  • Multiple pilot-vehicle interface issues exist, including feedback failure on touch screen controls.
  • The radar performs poorly, when it works at all.
  • Engine replacement takes an average of 52 hours, instead of the two hours specified.
  • Maintenance tools do not work.
  • Elements of the helmet made it harder, not easier, to see outside the aircraft

In short, the F-35 is a failure of enormous proportions, and the colossal waste of money is difficult to justify. The $40 billion cost for just the F-35 alone, which has been termed "flawed beyond redemption", might well have been saved, but for the arrogance and willful extravagance of those who put this program into action.

The Loss of Israeli Input

Over 4,500 General Dynamics F-16 have been built since production was first approved in 1976. Israel has been involved in the evolution of the F-16 since it received its first planes four years later, and quickly adapted the aircraft to its own specific requirements, adaptations which were shared with the US. In 1981, Israel had its first success in air-to-air combat against a Syrian Mi-8 helicopter over Lebanon. In that same year, eight Israeli F-16s, escorted by F-15s, executed Operation Opera, the raid that took out Saddam Hussein's nuclear reactor at Osirak near Baghdad.

Despite Israel's leading position in avionics and weapons development, an illusion remains that Israel is dependent on the United States for the qualitative advantage of its weapon systems. In fact, quite the opposite is true. Over the years, Israel has made hundreds of modifications to the F-16, which is still the mainstay of its air fleet. Israeli technology improved nearly every system with the most advanced avionics, weapons, and radar technology for which Israel is famous.The US has benefited greatly from this technology and in the past has depended on Israeli input for many critical technological upgrades. Israel's technological expertise and ingenuity has continued to keep the F-16 at the head of the pack, where it still remains the finest jet fighter in the world.

Conclusion

It is possible that Israeli input into the development of the F-35 could have made a significant difference in the outcome of its development. These decisions, in which the lives of our finest pilots are on the line, should not be made on the basis of politics or foreign policy. They should be made on the basis of how the finest technology available should be applied to provide the safest and most effective product for our military personnel. Here, we have failed miserably and, $120 billion later, the F-22 and F-35 debacle is the proof. In particular, the abysmal failure of the F-35 needs to be assessed carefully, without political prejudice, and a new set of priorities needs to be established before billions more are spent on sloppy and wasteful development projects.

Contact Michael Travis at michaelmgr1@gmail.com


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DON'T CRY FOR CHÁVEZ

Posted by Dave Alpen, March 12, 2013

The article below was written by Ayelet Ben Naim who is a writer at Israel Hayom. This article appeared March 7, 2013 in Israel Hayom and is archived at
http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=3633

Living in Venezuela, we had everything — a large family, a thriving business, a circle of friends both within the Jewish community and outside it, and a general feeling that we were at a good place in life. All of this was turned upside down when Hugo Chávez was elected president.

I was not among the Venezuelans who shed tears of sorrow over the president's death. As someone who lived in the country's capital of Caracas for 12 years, I felt that Chávez's reign was in direct opposition to freedom, democracy, human rights, and above all — my Jewish identity.

I came to Venezuela in 1991 to be with my husband, who was born there and whom I met while he was living and studying in Israel. In Caracas he worked as a fashion designer and managed a chain of clothing stores. The family business prospered, as did many other local Jewish businesses. Of course, the regime that preceded Chávez was not lacking in corruption, but at least it did not treat Jews with a heavy hand and allowed us to conduct our lives in peace. All this changed in 1999 when Chávez was elected president.

Chávez's many anti-Jewish statements in the media, like calling Jews pigs, denying the Holocaust and accusing Israel of genocide against the Palestinians, contributed to an atmosphere of anti-Semitism that grew worse year by year. Suddenly it became frightening to walk down the street after dark, for fear of being harassed. Our synagogues and Jewish community buildings were spray-painted with swastikas and anti-Semitic slogans and there was a feeling that Chávez was egging on the populace and speaking the "people's language" against the Jews.

He was always quick to say that Venezuela's large businesses are controlled by Jews "stealing the nation's money," and we felt the results directly in our bottom lines. Everyone in the Jewish community felt their financial situation decline over time. I particularly remember the closing of a large Jewish-owned shopping mall in Caracas. Chávez decided to nationalize the property for the benefit of the state. Because many of the mall's shop owners were Jewish, we felt that the motive was anti-Semitism, pure and simple.

The Jewish community did not merely suffer from economic harassment. Government operatives would frequently follow children from rich Jewish families in order to kidnap them and demand ransom. In other instances, after Chávez had gained control of the police and the army, the defense forces would occasionally place a closure on the Jewish community schools, with the children inside and their parents unable to gain access to them. The pretext was that the Jews had hidden weapons inside and that searches had to be conducted to confiscate them.

The harassment, restrictions and overall atmosphere made my life as a Jew in Venezuela unbearable. But I hoped that the nation would have its say and replace Chávez with another leader. What finally broke my resolve and "persuaded" me to leave everything behind and accede to my husband's urgent pleas to leave was a law passed by Chávez concerning children. This law stipulated that children up to the age of 3 belong to their parents, afterward until the age of 10 they move to a school that is under control of the government, and from 10 until age 18 they study in a military boarding school. From that moment I understood that my future and the future of my children lies elsewhere. Almost all of our family agreed to come to Israel with us, and the rest fled to the United States, Spain, Peru and other countries.

Contact Dave Alpern at daveyboy@bezeqint.net


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THE SHAME OF ISRAEL APARTHEID WEEK

Posted by Laura, March 12, 2013

The article below was written by Matthew M. Hausman who is a trial attorney and writer who lives and works in Connecticut. A former journalist, Mr. Hausman continues to write on a variety of topics, including science, health and medicine, Jewish issues and foreign affairs, and has been a legal affairs columnist for a number of publications. This article appeared March 13, 2013 in Arutz Sheva and is archived at
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/13007#.VX863byVsWM

Israel is not an apartheid state under any definition of the term, and to argue otherwise requires the repetition of odious lies and the denial of historical facts.

The blood libel seems to have gained respectability in the halls of academia now that Israel Apartheid Week has become an annual rite on college campuses across North America. Characterized by hate-speech promoted as political discourse, Israel Apartheid Week ("IAW") proclaims its goal "is to educate people about the nature of Israel as an apartheid system and to build Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaigns as part of a growing global BDS movement." Its architects contend they are not antisemitic. However, Israel is not an apartheid state under any definition of the term, and to argue otherwise requires the repetition of odious lies and the denial of historical facts. Because the claim of Israeli apartheid is a malicious fiction, the antisemitic motivations underlying Israel Apartheid Week cannot be minimized or ignored.

The International Criminal Court's Rome Statute of 2002 defines "apartheid" as a crime consisting of acts similar to crimes against humanity "committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime." Though the term evokes images of South Africa under Afrikaner rule, it just as easily could describe any country in which racial and ethnic minorities are systematically segregated and discriminated against by operation of law. An argument could be made that Sharia states qualify insofar as they subjugate and isolate "infidels" in accordance with their interpretation of Islamic doctrine. The past confinement of Jews in the mellah in Morocco or in ghettos and separate towns in Iran offer apt examples.

In contrast, Israel is a democracy in which Jews and Arabs have equal rights under the law. The Arab-Muslim world and its left-wing allies accuse Israel of apartheid despite the absence of any Israeli laws or policies creating such a system. Israeli Jews and Arabs generally live where they choose and benefit from the same health, welfare and infrastructure policies and programs. The only difference is that Israeli Arabs are exempt from military service, whereas all other Israelis, including Jews, Druze and Circassians, are not. Thus, Arab citizens receive the same governmental benefits as other Israelis without being required to bear any of the national cost. Although the promoters of IAW contend that Israeli Arabs are second-class citizens, they in fact enjoy the highest standard of living, highest rates of longevity and literacy, and lowest rate of infant mortality of any Arab-Muslim population in the Mideast.

Israel also has an open political system in which Arabs vote, run for office, and serve in government. Moreover, they have freedom of speech to a degree not tolerated in the Arab-Muslim world — as demonstrated by those Arab Knesset members who openly identify with Israel's enemies and engage in seditious conduct that would not be countenanced in other countries. Whereas American law requires all who serve in Congress to swear an oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution, Israel presently requires no similar pledge of loyalty. Clearly, Israel does not practice apartheid, and in fact does not even employ the same kinds of safeguards against sedition and treason that are taken for granted in the United States and other western democracies.

When the canard of Israeli apartheid is deconstructed, it clearly resembles the "Big Lie" preached and perfected by the Nazis, who believed that the constant repetition of audacious lies would promote their acceptance by the public and facilitate the spread of propaganda. The Nazis believed that the most brazen lies would resonate most deeply because of the common perception that unbelievable stories would not be repeated if they weren't true. Thus it is with the slander of Israeli apartheid, for which there would seem to be no greater proof than the endorsement of academia. Given the leftist orientation and pro-Islamist bias of many university faculties, college campuses have become natural staging grounds for anti-Israel agitprop.

Brooklyn College in New York was the site of IAW activity this year with a program entitled, "BDS (Boycott, Divestments, and Sanctions) Movement against Israel," which was co-sponsored by the political science department. Despite public criticism against allowing the event on campus, and though the college administration disclaimed any official endorsement, it would not bar the program or condemn it in any meaningful way. The program featured speakers who denied Israel's right to exist, praised Islamist terrorists who attack civilians, and called for the blacklisting of Israeli academics.

The college took the position that co-sponsorship by one of its departments did not imply institutional support for the program, but the hollowness of this explanation was exposed by the failure to provide equal time to opponents wishing to voice their opposition. Supporters denied antisemitic bias and claimed that the event implicated free speech. However, the program featured speakers who advocated conduct, i.e., the blacklisting of Israeli professors, that is intended specifically to discourage free and open discourse. If Brooklyn College truly cared about speech rights, it would have provided a forum for those wishing to address the event's factual distortions and expose it as propaganda. The failure to do so indicates only a fair-weather commitment to freedom of expression, and raises the question of whether the college in fact endorsed the program through its conduct despite its disclaimers.

Furthermore, allowing such a blatantly provocative program on campus seems inconsistent with the institution's own "Commitment to Pluralism and Diversity," which provides:

Brooklyn College is committed to values and policies that enhance respect for individuals and their cultures. In fact, the college's cultural, racial, and ethnic diversity-our pluralism-is one of our distinguishing characteristics. Our student body and our workforce are notably composed of people of color, of women, of immigrants, of older adults, and of persons with disabilities. Students at the college can trace their ancestry to more than 120 different countries. To reap the rewards of diversity, the college has developed and will continue to develop programs that combat bigotry and other biases in all their forms and will build on the strengths offered by our multicultural, multiracial, and multigenerational campus.

(http://www.brooklyn.cuny.edu/bc/offices/diversity/commit.php.) It is difficult to see how providing a forum for anti-Israel and antisemitic speech, while denying equal time to opposing viewpoints, shows a commitment "to values and policies that enhance respect for individuals and their cultures" or is consistent with the college's pledge to "develop programs that combat bigotry and other biases in all their forms..." Indeed, Brooklyn College's failure to acknowledge the program as hate-speech suggests that its diversity statement is applied only selectively.

The malicious intent of Israel Apartheid Week is clear considering its connection to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. The conceit of BDS is that it feigns kinship to the movement that helped bring about the end of apartheid in South Africa through coordinated efforts to turn that country into a pariah state. It uses terms like "occupation" and "colonialism" to perpetuate the falsehood that Israel is a colonial state and that the Palestinians are an ancestral people whose country was dismantled by foreign Jewish interlopers. In so doing, the BDS movement disparages Jewish national claims that are a matter of historical record and not based, as are Palestinian claims, on myth, polemic and doctrinal hatred.

In truth, the Jews are indigenous and have the longest record of habitation in their homeland. At no time was there ever a sovereign nation called Palestine or an ancient Palestinian society that created any touchstones of nationality or unique culture in the Jewish homeland. As the late Zahir Muhsein famously stated in the Dutch newspaper Trouw in 1977, "[t]he 'Palestinian People' does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the State of Israel." Arafat made similar admissions in his autobiography. Thus, in pretending that Israel is a colonial creation and that Jews are strangers to the Mideast, the BDS movement engages in the same deceit and dishonesty.

If BDS partisans were truly concerned about forcing change in repressive regimes, one must wonder why they ignore Saudi Arabia, where women are suppressed, freedom of religion is unknown, and money flows to support terrorism abroad; or Iran, where religious minorities are harassed and discriminated against, Jews fear for their lives and gays are put to death. Why are they not concerned about Egypt, where Copts are slaughtered and their churches desecrated, or Sudan, where Arab Muslims engage in genocide against African Christians? The BDS movement's pernicious intent is exposed by its pathological focus on Israel, which has the only open society in the Mideast where all citizens are free to live where they choose, speak as they will and worship as they please. By claiming Israel to be what she clearly is not, the movement perpetuates a colossal fabrication evocative of the Big Lie. And by actively promoting the BDS farce, those who sponsor, support or enable Israel Apartheid Week do the same.

Reasonable minds can disagree over specific policies of any government, including Israel's. However, those who deny her right to exist and accuse her of apartheid when she actually has the only democratic society in the Mideast are not engaging in neutral criticism. They are promoting antisemitism. The singular focus on Israel for imagined offenses such as ethnic cleansing and apartheid, coupled with the refusal to target countries where such atrocities actually occur, constitutes antisemitism purely and simply. Not surprisingly, the demonization of Israel has become de rigueur on the political left. Unfortunately, it has also found an audience among members of progressive Jewish groups, such as J Street and the New Israel Fund, whose commitment to left-wing ideals causes them to rationalize, support or provide forums for those who impugn the Jewish State.

There is also a disturbing trend on college campuses of progressive student groups protesting mainstream Jewish organizations that oppose the BDS agenda. The Harvard College Progressive Jewish Alliance, for example, recently organized a protest against the campus Hillel's ban on partnering with organizations that support BDS programs. Ironically, although progressives and their supporters typically invoke free speech principles to shield Israel bashers, they are quick to brand dissenting opinions as hate-speech in order to silence those with whom they disagree. Likewise, they jump to label any critical discussion of political Islam as "Islamophobia," but remain silent regarding the doctrinal antisemitism that is so prevalent in the Muslim community.

Ironically, Gentile supporters are often quicker and more willing to come to Israel's defense, as they have done in Canada with Israel Truth Week, a conference dedicated to combating the dissimulation of Israel Apartheid Week. Israel Truth Week has become an annual event in Hamilton, Ontario, drawing speakers, academics and legal experts from Canada, the United States and Israel. Though the event was created by a dedicated group of Jews and non-Jews working together, it would not have grown so quickly without the commitment of Gentiles who support the Jewish State for reasons of history, justice and equity.

The inspiration for this conference came from Mark Vandermaas, a Canadian whose family history made him acutely aware of the horrors of antisemitism. Vandermaas was adopted and raised by Dutch parents who lived through the German occupation of the Netherlands, where they saw their Jewish neighbors deported for slaughter and where his father was interred in a Nazi work camp from which he escaped. Vandermaas was motivated to act upon hearing of unrestrained antisemitism roiling the campus of the University of Western Ontario, where Jewish students were physically abused and harassed, and his indignation gave rise to Israel Truth Week. What started as a grassroots program has grown and begun attracting the attention of major Jewish organizations in Canada.

Although Israel Apartheid Week is now in its ninth year, mainstream Jewish organizations have yet to formulate a unified, systematic response. Some organizations have issued strong denunciations while others have resolved not to work with progressive groups that support the BDS movement. Still others have displayed timidity in choosing to ignore it. But ignoring it lends credence through silence. Instead, Israel Apartheid Week should be answered with thoughtful, coordinated counterprograms. Though Israel Truth Week is only in its second year and has not yet ventured beyond the borders of Ontario, the breadth of its agenda and the diversity of its speakers should provide a model for Jewish organizations to follow. If some Gentiles can be so assertive in advocating on behalf of Israel, there is no reason why Jews cannot do the same.

Contact Laura at lel817@yahoo.com


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WHEN CHRISTIANS REPENT

Posted by Michael Freund, March 12, 2013

The underground bomb shelter in the hotel at Kibbutz Ramat Rachel hardly seems like a place where history might be made.

Located on the second floor beneath street level, it is a large rectangular room in which the air conditioning does not work and the interior design appears to have been copied from the Soviet Union's pre-Brezhnev era: drab, dull and dreary. Appearances aside, though, the confined space served as the improbable venue last week for a remarkable scene, as dozens of Christian leaders from 40 countries on five continents gathered together to discuss... Jews.

The occasion was the fourth bi-annual leadership forum of Christians for Israel, a non-denominational Christian organization that was established in Holland in the 1970s by Karl van Oordt and which has grown to boast hundreds of thousands of members around the world.

The group lobbies European parliamentarians in Brussels on Israel's behalf, supports soup kitchens in places such as Beit Shemesh, assists Diaspora Jews to make aliya and even partnered with the Jerusalem Foundation to restore the Montefiore Windmill in Jerusalem's Mishkenot Sha'ananim neighborhood.

Their goals are sincere and unequivocal: "Christians should repent of the treatment of the Jewish people by the Church over the centuries, fight anti- Semitism in all its forms and guises, pray for the peace of Jerusalem, and comfort the Jewish people."

No missionizing, no proselytizing, no hidden agendas.

It says a lot about the way in which relations between Christians and Jews have evolved in recent years that we have come to take such things almost for granted.

Christians supporting the Jewish state? It hardly seems like news anymore.

But let's put things in perspective. Several centuries ago, a similar gathering of worldwide Christian leaders would surely have devoted its energies to finding new ways to harm the people of Israel.

Nowadays, they come together to help.

But what really set this event apart, and underlined the sea-change taking place, was the keynote speaker for the evening: the Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of the State of Israel, Rabbi Yona Metzger.

In a rousing and emotional address, Rabbi Metzger surveyed relations between the two faiths, neither shying away from the darkness of the past nor ignoring the challenges we collectively face. He described how Adolf Hitler and the Nazis had not invented the idea of a Jewish ghetto, but rather had adopted the practice from the medieval model created by Christians.

At one point, as he related a story about Holocaust survivors, the rabbi choked up, prompting many in the audience to shed tears of their own.

Rabbi Metzger also vigorously defended Israel and condemned the culture of hate of our foes, messages which resonated with the audience and met with their accord.

"I want to give you our thanks for your support and to say that you are truly the sons of Abraham and our brothers," he told them. Before concluding, the rabbi added an important final point, telling the audience: "If you know of someone who wants to come here to try and convert Jews, tell them not to do it," pointing out that such proselytization efforts damage relations between Jews and Christians.

As I watched the chief rabbi address the Christian leaders, I could not help but think how extraordinary this scene was. Just 20 or 30 years ago it would have been unthinkable for such a thing to occur.

Moreover, the rabbi's remarks were like those between friends, without a hint of antagonism or enmity.

Afterwards, Andrew Tucker, the Christian group's executive director, presented Rabbi Metzger with framed copies of a document in English and Hebrew entitled, "A Call to Repentance, A Word of Hope." As Tucker began to read the text aloud, he too grew emotional and had to pause to compose himself before continuing.

"We acknowledge with deep shame," he said, "that the Church for centuries has rejected, persecuted and murdered the Jewish people in the name of Christ. We repent of the supersessionist theologies of the Church which have claimed all of G-d's blessings for themselves, and have denied any continuing place for the nation of Israel in G-d's plan of redemption for the world. We cut the root and stole the fruit."

Tucker, along with the group's international chairman, Harald Eckert, and its president, Rev. Willem Glashouwer, all reaffirmed their commitment to remorse for the past and resolve for the future.

Now I know that there are many Jews who are still skeptical about Christians and their intentions. And we certainly must be vigilant against those who seek to convert Jews, an act which cannot and must not be tolerated. But we must also learn to differentiate between them and those who truly wish to forge bonds of amity and goodwill. Not all Christians are out to get us, and to suggest otherwise is simply fatuous and misleading.

To be sure, we can neither forgive nor forget what was done to our people over the past 2,000 years in the name of Christianity, the persecution, pogroms, massacres and forced conversions, expulsions and blood libels. But when Christians nowadays take responsibility for the actions of their forefathers, seek atonement and extend a hand of friendship, it behooves us to respond in kind.

Michael Freund served as Deputy Communications Director in the Israeli Prime Minister's Office under Binyamin Netanyahu. He is the founder and chairman of Shavei Israel/Israel Returns -- www.shavei.org and www.IsraelReturns.org -- a Jerusalem-based organization that searches for and assists the Lost Tribes of Israel and other "hidden Jews" seeking to return to Zion. In addition, Freund is a correspondent and syndicated columnist for The Jerusalem Post. A native New Yorker, he is a graduate of Princeton University and holds an MBA in Finance from Columbia University. He has lived in Israel for the past 16 years and remains an avid New York Mets fan. Email Michael at msfreund@earthlink.net. View Michael's website at www.shavei.org

This article appeared March 11, 2013 in the Jerusalem Post and is archived at
http://www.michaelfreund.org/13047/christians-repent


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A "PEACE PROCESS"? OR A ....

Posted by lademain, March 12, 2013

death spiral. We believe it's not a "peace process," it's a "death spiral" ... so we recommend referencing it for what it is.

It is a carefully thought out "death spiral" and has been so from the very beginning. You might ask: "Who fashioned it?". We believe the scheme originated with the British Foreign Office (BFO) the arm of the British government that befouled the middle east the instant they set foot in the region last century and thereafter during the days of "Lawrence of Arabia." (A myth further expanded beyond reality in such cinematically gorgeous films as "Lawrence of Arabia.") A myth of the BFO aristocracy planted in the young mind of the impoverished and socially ambitious Rhodes scholar who later became POTUS: Bill Clinton. The British have always assumed the deserve to be omnipotent throughout the middle east and have therefore used their myths to buttress their support for the arab tribes who used terrorism to gain control over the lands that became Saudi Arabia and its oil fields. The Britz performed these self-serving acrobatics whilst Jews, who had the sole legitimate claim to the region then known as "Palestine" were rounded up and exterminated. The Jews who survived the massive genocide, which, in our opinion, had been silently supported by the Britz (or, not opposed) had been taught a savage lesson, and the smug Britz knew how to "exploit their shame of survival" after millions of other Jews had been betrayed, tortured, and slaughtered.

It is our considered opinion that Israel's leadership, from the very beginning and even before 1948, behaved as if they were either ignorant of British intellectual cunning or as time passed, far too eager to be perceived as a "light unto the world" and therefore "willing to sacrifice themselves for peace." Anti-Jew propaganda bubbled up once again and thrived because the men occupying Israel's high places were gulled into buying into what eventually crystallized into the "peace process" scheme. Many were ghetto Jews who remained mute because they were more concerned about being perceived as "holier than thou" and thus they remained impervious to the vast body of international law that supported Israel's claim to the entire region then known as "Palestine". It is our opinion that many of them were either pathologically anxious or confused or deranged as a consequence of the horrors they had witnessed or survived. Singular individuals amongst them apparently believed they could best the British at their game by going along to get along, imagining that they were so innately intelligent they could win this perverse game. But they lacked the essential language skills and semantic tools necessary to quash the propaganda war churned out by the BFO. So putting a finger upside their nose, these Jews behaved as if they were know-it-alls, when in fact, they were unwitting foils in a game designed to guide Israel into committing suicide in the name of "peace." Only a few of them dared to say: "Hell NO! How DARE you!" The rest of the Jews in Israel and the US squabbled with each other in their effort to portray themselves as as every good thing to every bad person, hence they never learned how to unite in order to save their new nation from "the death spiral" attack being sold to Israel as a "peace process."

The Muslims around the world have already employed the semantic tactic of repeating their lies until their lies were taken for the truth, a la Herr Goebbels, writ large. For example, it was not for nothing that Hanan Ashrawi attended the U. of VA to study language skills and propaganda, emerging with a PhD in literature and thereafter serving as Arafat's propagandist. To Israel's great shame, instead of promptly and tersely speaking truth to Islamist lies, Israel merely complained about anti-Semitism and was swiftly portrayed as a whiner, or, in Hanan's words: "the oppressor" of Muslims who were for the most part nothing more than arab emigrants that she and the British had reinvented as "palestinians." We do not aid Hanan in her quest to delegitimize Israel's sovereign rights, and thus we refer to the anti-Israel and anti-US Muslims occupying the Jewish Homeland as "arab invaders." Israel allowed Hanan and her sponsors to get away with this stuff. There are some Jews in Israel who even encouraged these arabist-Muslim propagandists to strut throughout the Jewish Homeland and to step on Israel's flag, the very symbol of Israel's legitimacy. And don't ever forget how the Soddies took the lead and picked up Arafat's tab.

Well, here's some sound advice: Just because Muslims and arabs did this to the Jews need not under any circumstances bar Jews from doing exactly the same. (Far too many Jews exhibit a knee-jerk reaction to arab cunning by "out-stupiding" them, or worse still, by behaving as if Israel were a princess too lofty and pure to dirty her petticoats.) A propaganda war fashions the creation of future political realities and thus Israel, the intended the victim of the propaganda war, must fight it with both water and fire. Remaining silent in the face of false accusations and verbal abuse in a propaganda war and in lieu of resistance, swallowing insult after insult by offering apologies and concessions is naught but a fool's bargain. A vain and wish to be perceived as "clean" and "above the fray." Thirty years of un-rebutted anti-Israel and anti-Jew propaganda ought to have taught all of Israel that the "princess-stance" is a FAIL. Be not fools! If a ploy works for the Muslim invaders, it damn well will work for the Jews. Combatting false propaganda with terse retorts and strongly-worded accusations and ridicule and loud mockery will sanitize the bad odor of moral weakness emanating from Israel. Israel must repeatedly speak truth to Islamist lies. The strongest and bravest Jews amongst you must unite and fashion your own "Israel First" narrative and repeat it over and over and over again. Ignore the quavering, rheumy eyed rabbi who wrings his hands and, expecting blows, runs back under a bridge to scribble reams of worrisome prose. Call out the British for their crimes against Jews. Expose French avarice and French ambition to regain at least some control over the Algerian oil fields. If you are met with internal resistance, point out how Israel's antagonists (political and otherwise) picked off whom we believe are some key members of Israel's Jewish leadership with false and empty promises and other shameful devices. Not all Jewish leaders, of course, but some, and Israel cannot afford even one weak link in its chain. Remove the weak links from the chain.

Good luck and fight for what's right for your nation. We here in the US do not think Soddies are allies. Soddies are users. Always have been. They are Vendors. Nothing more---and regrettably, much less. Israel is an ally, and must cease allowing itself to be treated as a disposable tool.

Contact Lademain at lademain@verizon.net


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JUDEA AND THE FALKLANDS...

Posted by Gerald A. Honigman, March 13, 2013

The following was the headline of NBC's World News report on March 12th... "Message ... to the world: 99.8 percent of Falkland Islanders vote to retain British rule."

No matter how many times this subject comes up, the irony never dissipates nor ceases to amaze. It would be funny if not so downright duplicitous.

It appears that the history of human habitation of Las Islas Malvinas, aka the Falkland Islands, was intermittent and goes back at least five centuries. Serious exploration and colonization of the archipelago did not take place until the 18th century, and arriving Europeans encountered no native population. At various times in history, the islands, off the Argentine coast, have been claimed by France, Great Britain, Spain, and Argentina. With the exception of latter, they sit thousands of miles away from those other claimants--in Great Britain's case, over 8,000 miles from home.

It boggles the mind how imperial, colonial powers from afar can repeatedly stake claims to lands where they have no prior historical connections while at the same time taking Jews to task who assert that they have rights in lands in which their forefathers have called home for some four millennia.

The very word "Jew" comes from the land of Judea--and that, originally, from Judah, one of Jacob/Israel's twelve sons.

No, this is not Zionist propaganda--unless the Roman conquerors of the land were Zionist propagandists. Open http://q4j-middle-east.com to see a Judaea Capta coin issued by Rome after the first revolt of the Judaeans--Jews--for freedom in 66-73 C.E. Here's one of my favorite quotes from a contemporary Roman historian explaining this connection further:

It inflamed the emperor's (Vespasian's) ire that the Jews were the only nation who had not yet submitted...Titus was appointed by his father to complete the subjugation of Judaea...he commanded three legions in Judaea itself...To these he added the twelfth from Syria and the third and twenty-second from Alexandria...amongst his allies were a band of Arabs, formidable in themselves and harboring towards the Jews the bitter animosity usually subsisting between neighboring nations (Vol. II, Book V, The Works of Tacitus).

Not that British imperialism was worse than that of the French or Spanish (it was much more extensive), but Las Islas Malvinas became known as the Falkland Islands the same way that Judea and Samaria became renamed the "West Bank"...as a result of British imperial shenanigans.

As I am forced to remind too many folks who either simply don't know or choose to remain ignorant, soon after the Ottoman Turkish Empire (which ruled most of the region for over four centuries) was defeated in World War I, in order to distinguish the western part of the original 1920 Mandate of Palestine from the Emirate of Transjordan which the Brits created in 1922 for their Arab allies on the east bank of the Jordan River (some 80% of the Mandate's total area), the name "West Bank" came into use. This was further reinforced after Transjordan grabbed that non-apportioned area of the Mandate for itself after it invaded a re-born Israel in 1948. Holding both banks of the river, the Emirate renamed itself Jordan soon afterwards.

If there is a difference between such things as the Brits' recent referendum and declaration of sovereignty over the Falklands and the Jews' connections and claims elsewhere, it's that long before there was a France, Spain, Argentina, or Great Britain, Jews were living, making history, and changing the world forever in the moral and spiritual legacy they left behind in Judea and Samaria.

A thousand years before Yeshua (Jesus), David was born in Bethlehem, was crowned King of Israel in Hebron, and had children there. He would later make Jerusalem his capital—over three millennia ago.

And a thousand years before David, Abraham made Hebron known to the world in the first place by purchasing a burial plot there for many of the patriarchs and matriarchs of the Jewish people.

Hannah dedicated her son, Samuel, to the service of G_d in the care of the High Priest, Eli, in Shiloh, and G_d renewed the promise of the Promised Land to Abraham's grandson, Jacob, at Bethel.

In one of the most moving stories in the Hebrew Bible, Jacob would later make peace with his brother, Esau, at Penuel and by doing so was thus transformed by G_d into his higher moral self—Israel—in the process.

The oldest known version of Biblical scripture ever found was located in the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran in the Judean Wilderness, and the Jews held off the mighty Roman Empire for years at the fortress of Masada.

Regarding my Christian friends, does the Gospel of Matthew say that Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea or Bethlehem of the West Bank?

The list goes on and on...

All of those places above are in Judea--where much of the world now insists that no Jew may live. Over one million Arabs can live without fear in Israel--the freest Arabs anywhere in the Middle East--but no Jew may live in Judea. Is there not something wrong with this picture?

Keep in mind that we are talking about Jews who indeed owned land and lived on the "West Bank" clear up until they were massacred by Arabs in the 1920s and 1930s. This is not just ancient history, and recall that the land in question was/is indeed non-apportioned territory of the original 1920 Mandate--where all the Mandate's inhabitants had the legal right to live, regardless of Arab claims to the contrary.

When Jews dig in the soil of Judea, Samaria, and Israel—despite their forced exile, Diaspora, and Arabization of the land and its people after the Jihadi invasions of Muhammad's successors in the 7th century C.E.—Jews continuously find their own roots and history. They are indeed home...

What do the Brits find when they dig on the Falklands? Where is the British Qumran, Hebron, Temple Mount, or Masada?

Okay, it's true that, unlike the Falklands, the land in dispute between Jews and Arabs has been inhabited continuously for millennia, and the mix of peoples has varied over time. So, a territorial compromise is in order.

But, the plain fact is that the Falklands sit a few hundred miles off the coast of Argentina—and over eight thousand miles away from Great Britain. Yet the latter acquired them a third of Planet Earth's circumference from London in the name of its own sovereignty, fought a war to retain them, and just conducted a referendum in which the Islanders' loyalty to Great Britain was almost unanimously proclaimed.

Judea and Samaria are in Israel's very backyard and have been an integral part of Jewish history for most of man's recorded history.

Keep all of this in mind as more and more pressure is exerted upon Israel--even (or especially) by its friends--to make Judea and Samaria Judenrein.

The new Israeli government, being formed just as the American leader gets ready to make his first trip as President to the Jewish State, must insist upon a more just solution.

The framework for that solution has already been provided...decades ago. If followed, it will allow for a reasonable compromise over the lands in question.

In the wake of the June '67 War, the architects of the final draft of UNSC Resolution 242 spent much time constructing this fair and balanced piece of wisdom. Israel's leaders must have the backbone to insure that the justice built into it will not be abandoned.

Gerald A. Honigman, a Florida educator, has created and conducted counter-Arab propaganda programs for college youth, has lectured on numerous campuses and other platforms, and has publicly debated Arab spokesmen. His articles and op-eds have been published in both the print media and on websites. Contact him at honigman6@msn.com or go to his website: http://geraldahonigman.com/blog.php


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WORSE AND WORSE IN SYRIA

Posted by David Hornik, March 13, 2013

assad.redcross.jpg

One doesn't know what to make of murky reports this week about the U.S., Britain, and France training a small force of purportedly moderate Syrian rebels in Jordan—especially with the Obama administration taking the official line that it does not directly aid the Syrian opposition.

If there was ever a time to build a coherent, more or less trustworthy, genuinely moderate Syrian opposition to replace the Assad regime—and it is a questionable proposition—that time would appear to have passed, as the Syrian chaos worsens and the radicals gain strength by the day.

How badly the situation has deteriorated was evident from a report in Israel Hayom on Monday that "Syrian rebels...near the border with Israel threatened...to fight to regain the Golan Heights from Israel following the toppling of Syrian President Bashar Assad."

The report includes a video in which a "rebel fighter" in the Syrian part of the Golan—just across from the Israeli part—declares:

These lands are blessed and the despicable Assad family promised to liberate them, but for 40 years the Syrian army did not fire a single bullet. We will open a military campaign against Israel. We will fire the bullets that Assad did not and we will liberate the Golan.

The report also quotes Yigal Palmor of the Israeli Foreign Ministry acknowledging Israel's "great concern that uncontrolled elements at the service of extremist ideas will manage to take over smaller or bigger separate territories inside the Syrian borders.... The 'Somalization' of Syria is a great concern...."

That the worries go to the top of the Israeli defense establishment was clear from an Israel Hayom report on Tuesday about a talk given by Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz.

Gantz told the prestigious annual Herzliya Conference that

the threat of the situation in Syria spiraling out of control is quite high.... Every week there is an incident that has the potential to...ignite a regional conflagration....

The situation in Syria has become...extraordinarily dangerous. Even though the probability of a conventional war with Syria is low, the terrorist organizations fighting against Assad could see us as their next challenge. The Syrian army's substantial arsenal of strategic weapons could fall into the hands of terrorist organizations.... What we have here is a strategic detonator that could blow up at any moment.

A few days earlier—while 21 Filipino UNDOF soldiers were still being held by rebels on the Golan—David Schenker and others warned that UNDOF was in trouble. Though the 21 have since been released, Schenker and colleagues noted that their abduction was only "the latest in a series of assaults on the UN peacekeepers" and that

Already, the deterioration in security has prompted Japan, Canada, and Croatia to withdraw their longstanding personnel contributions from UNDOF. If the trend continues, the remaining contributors are all but certain to curtail their commitments as well, ending the only effective international monitoring mechanism along the Israel-Syria border.

UNDOF—the UN Disengagement Observer Force—has been in place since just after the 1973 Yom Kippur War. For those claiming that international forces were one of the keys to solving Israel's conflict with its neighbors, UNDOF was about the only purported success story they could point to.

Israel, for its part, while it has never had illusions about the Assad (père et fils) regime, knew it was a rational actor that had been deterred for forty years. Since the Syrian revolt broke out exactly two years ago, the Israeli authorities' attitude has ranged from skepticism to trepidation. Of late, fears threaten to materialize.

For that matter, Israel was never optimistic about the revolution in Egypt or the "Arab Spring" generally. Going back to President George W. Bush's first term ten years ago, Israel was deeply skeptical about democratizing Iraq and warned that Iran posed a much greater threat.

President Obama will be visiting Israel in exactly a week. He should try respecting its knowledge of the region it inhabits and stop treating its prime minister as an annoying fool.

P. David Hornik is a freelance writer and translator living in Beersheva and author of the book Choosing Life in Israel. Contact him at hornikd@actcom.co.il


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COME TO EGYPT — WE'LL TAKE YOUR BREATH AWAY & TERROR TOURISM

Posted by ACD/EWI, March 13, 2013

Come to Egypt — We'll Take your Breath Away.... Literally.

Walking out of the sparsely occupied once luxurious hotel in Cairo, you may consider buying a 6,000 to 20,000 volt tazer, or an electric shock baton to protect yourself from robbery, sexual harassment, or even rape. However, there is a good chance that strong anti-American sentiments could entice the vendor who sold you the tazer to accuse you of stealing or spying. Your newly acquired tazer would do little to prevent the vendor, jihadist militias, or members of the Moral Police -all armed with their own tazers and electric shock batons — from exercising their newly decreed power to carry out"judiciary policing" (citizen's arrest). The chances are you'll never make it to Giza, Abu-Simbel temples, Luxor, or Sharm el-Sheikh.

Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood rule has left the pyramids and the great sphinx of Giza, deserted. While the government claim 30 percent decline in tourism, industry experts figures are closer to 90 percent. And as if the rampant violence wasn't enough, police stations across Egypt are on strike — even refusing to protect Morsi's residence. They protest the Minister of the Interior's "Brotherhoodstion" of the police.

Adding fuel to the fires, the interior ministry announced it will, "carry out its full obligations... through the use of all powers... and the gradual use of force."

How could Egypt's tourism Industry survive?

J. Millard Burr,ACD/EWI Senior Fellow and regular contributor to the Blog, has an intriguing idea:

TERROR TOURISM-

A few years ago I was please to attend a California Historical Society of San Francisco exhibition of my great-aunt's photography. Of especial interest was a film taken somewhere in East Africa while she was on Safari with her sister sometime in the second decade of the 20th Century. It was rather exotic scenery in a pre-King Solomon's Mine milieu, even though most scenes were taken from the backseat of a huge convertible touring car that sped along on huge balloon tires and sported an in-house cocktail lounge.

My great-aunt, and her sister, were to my way of thinking, the first of the "terrorist tourists." They were always looking for trouble. Earlier, they had sped off to Cananea, Mexico, to photograph a bloody strike at a copper mine. And after numerous South Seas adventures, they had been kidnapped in southern Yugoslavia and held for a $10,000 ransom. When the cable sent by a Balkan bandit demanding payment for their release arrived in San Francisco, the reply by their exasperated father was a succinct: "You got 'em You keep 'em."

I was reminded of my great aunt when a few days ago I read Egypt's Ahram Online article, "Enactment of citizens arrest deals blow to Egyptian tourism," A recent decision taken by Egypt's prosecutor-general had just empowered citizens to arrest citizens who were deemed to have committed a crime. This led a coalition of tourist organizations to condemn the decision, arguing, "it raises many worries among tourists." In reality, it raised many worries within Egypt's tourist industry including one leader who warned: "the decision "could lead to a civil war in Egypt if the citizens are given the right to arrest each other." Another analyst worried that "if a tourist rebuffed an Egyptian merchant, refusing to buy something, the merchant might accuse the tourism of spying and arrest him." Anyone who has ever visited a bazaar in Cairo knows this concern is not far-fetched.

Egypt is now ranked no, 137 among 140 countries surveyed for safety and security in the World Economic Forum Travel and Tourism competitive index released in March 2013. Egypt's ranking behind Pakistan, Chad and Yemen, calls for desperate measures to revive the Egyptian tourist industry, which has lost more than three million visitors a year since the beginning of the Arab Spring. A new approach is needed to draw the tourists back to Egypt:

The answer: TERROR TOURISM (Perhaps a new Reality Show?)

Egypt should challenge the jaded world traveller. He or she should be enticed to avoid the jejune tourist package and instead book passage on an Egyptian terrorism tour. Such tours could include, but are not limited to:

Attempt to cash a check anywhere in the Sinai; Book a room in the Semiramis Hotel, Cairo. Attempt entering the Egyptian Museum located just off Tahrir Square. Take a taxi from Cairo to the pyramids at Giza. Take a balloon ride in Luxor. Spend a weekend in a beach hotel in the Salafist stronghold of Mersa Matrouh. Spend a day shopping in Port Said, amidst thousands of demonstrators clashing with the police; . Go to soccer game or ant other public sporting event anywhere in Egypt. Visit the Islamist watering-hole of Assiut and ask for a Stella beer. Join the rioters in their daily revelries in Alexandria. Take your topless bathing girlfriend to the beach at El Arish. Race a car from Rafa, Sinai along the border with Israel to the Sharm el Sheikh dive-spot. Join the Libyan crazies in a drive from Mersah Matruh to the ancient Siwa Oasis. Meet the locals by joining a queue in the hope of purchasing a few liters of diesel. Then Join a queue in the hope of purchasing a few pounds of flour. Join a queue Again...and again....

Well, you get the point. However, if you are the subject of a citizen's arrest, be aware that neither NBC nor ABC will come to your rescue. The U.S. Embassy's likely response to the Egyptian government/militias will be: You got 'em. You keep 'em.

Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld is the Director of the New York-based American Center for Democracy (ACD) and the Economic Warfare Institute (EWI). She has authored hundreds of articles and several books on terrorist financing and political corruption. This article appeared March 14, 2013 on the American Center for Democracy (ACD) website and is archived at
http://acdemocracy.org/come-to-egypt-well-take-your-breath-away-terror-tourism-exclusive

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LONELY IN THE CLASSROOM

Posted by Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, March 13, 2013

The article below was written by Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff who is a the daughter of an Austrian diplomat, and was partly educated in Iran, where she was present during the Islamic revolution of 1979. She worked at the Austrian embassy in Kuwait during the Iraqi invasion in 1990. She subsequently worked as assistant to the Vice Chancellor of the Republic of Austria, Mr. Wolfgang Schüssel (1995-1997), at the Austrian Embassy Kuwait, Visa Section (1997-2000) and the Austrian Embassy Tripoli, Libya (2000-2001). Since 2001, she has been an ESL and TOEFL teacher at an English language institute in Vienna. In 2010 Sabaditsch-Wolff was a speaker at a conference sponsored by the Freedom Defense Initiative at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, DC, entitled: "Jihad: The Political Third Rail -- What They Are Not Telling You." This article appeared March 11, 2013 on Gates of Vienna and is archived at
http://gatesofvienna.net/2013/03/lonely-in-the-classroom/


This week marks a sobering anniversary for Austria: seventy-five years since the Anschluss of March 1938. The occasion prompted Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff to express some thoughts about what happened back then, and the parallels with what is happening now across Europe and the entire West.

sovereignty.oldpix

This week we Austrians commemorate one of Austria's darkest days: on March 12, 2013 we remember the 75th anniversary of the so-called Anschluss. Adolf Hitler's triumphant return to his native country marked the end of Austria's sovereignty and one of the culminating points of the rampant appeasement politics of the time — for which Neville Chamberlain was the premier example.

I am not going into the historical details, which may be found here. I will discuss the significance of the Heldenplatz, and the Hofburg surrounding the Heldenplatz. It was here, from that famous balcony, that Hitler delivered his famous speech, cheered by 200,000 Austrians, saying:

"The oldest eastern province of the German people shall be, from this point on, the newest bastion of the German Reich" followed by his "greatest accomplishment" (completing the annexing of Austria to form a Greater German Reich) by saying "Als Führer und Kanzler der deutschen Nation und des Reiches melde ich vor der deutschen Geschichte nunmehr den Eintritt meiner Heimat in das Deutsche Reich." Translation: "As leader and chancellor of the German nation and Reich I announce to German history now the entry of my homeland into the German Reich." Hitler later commented: "Certain foreign newspapers have said that we fell on Austria with brutal methods. I can only say: even in death they cannot stop lying. I have in the course of my political struggle won much love from my people, but when I crossed the former frontier (into Austria) there met me such a stream of love as I have never experienced. Not as tyrants have we come, but as liberators."

1. Liulevicius, Vejas Gabriel (2009). The German Myth of the East: 1800 to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press. p. 184.

2. Educational|accessdate=2007-03-11

3. Educational|accessdate=2007-03-11

As official Austria commemorates this terrible date by looking back and finally coming to grips with the fact that Austria was not just a victim, but that many — too many — Austrians marched alongside the "invading" army, we should never forget that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

Learning from history does not only mean looking back, but also doing everything to prevent evil from happening again.

balcony  same as prev pix

Every time I walk across the Heldenplatz, on my way to another conference — be it an OSCE gathering or the recent one sponsored by the Alliance of Civilizations — I glance up to the balcony and remind myself why I do what I do. I think about the millions of people who were blinded by a mad dictator. I think about the many weak politicians who appeased this madman to secure "peace in our time", most likely without ever bothering to take a look at either the NSDAP's party program or Mein Kampf. I think about the hatred spewed against "the other" by the National Socialists and the many Austrians who either supported or were indifferent to the incorporation of Austria into the Third Reich.

And as I look at the balcony from which Hitler mapped out his plans and was rewarded by cheers, I ponder the tragedy unfolding before our very eyes, today, 75 years later.

We have not one Chamberlain, but thousands.

We have another Hitler in the making, there is appeasement on a never-before-seen level (we need more funding for more dialogue!)

And we are once again discussing this appeasement on the Heldenplatz, in the Hofburg.

Like 75 years ago, there is open hatred for the "other", there are Jews fleeing many European cities, and Europeans are threatened into silence about what they see every day.

In so many ways, the current situation is more worrying than what our forefathers witnessed more than seven decades ago. The indifference among Austrians, but especially an the part of the politicians, with regard to the many immigrants who do not share our values — it is truly, staggeringly maddening.

But — God help me if I become complicit in this history-repeating-itself exercise. I will continue to be warned by that famous balcony every time I pass it. I will continue to be vigilant. I will continue to speak out. I will not be silenced by bullies and thugs.

I have learned my lesson from what transpired in 1938, and will continue to do so.

Sometimes I feel very alone in the classroom.

[To the left of whoever is standing next to Adolf Hitler is the entrance to today's OSCE headquarters.]

Contact Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors at doris@cjhsla.org

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THE SHAME OF ISRAEL APARTHEID WEEK

Posted by Israel_politics2, March 13, 2013

The article below was written by Matthew M. Hausman who is a trial attorney and writer who lives and works in Connecticut. A former journalist, Mr. Hausman continues to write on a variety of topics, including science, health and medicine, Jewish issues and foreign affairs, and has been a legal affairs columnist for a number of publications.

The blood libel seems to have gained respectability in the halls of academia now that Israel Apartheid Week has become an annual rite on college campuses across North America. Characterized by hate-speech promoted as political discourse, Israel Apartheid Week ("IAW") proclaims its goal "is to educate people about the nature of Israel as an apartheid system and to build Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaigns as part of a growing global BDS movement."

Its architects contend they are not anti-Semitic. However, Israel is not an apartheid state under any definition of the term, and to argue otherwise requires the repetition of odious lies and the denial of historical facts. Because the claim of Israeli apartheid is a malicious fiction, the anti-Semitic motivations underlying Israel Apartheid Week cannot be minimized or ignored.

The International Criminal Court's Rome Statute of 2002 defines "apartheid" as a crime consisting of acts similar to crimes against humanity "committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime."

Though the term evokes images of South Africa under Afrikaner rule, it just as easily could describe any country in which racial and ethnic minorities are systematically segregated and discriminated against by operation of law. An argument could be made that Sharia states qualify insofar as they subjugate and isolate "infidels" in accordance with their interpretation of Islamic doctrine. The past confinement of Jews in the mellah in Morocco or in ghettos and separate towns in Iran offers apt examples.

In contrast, Israel is a democracy in which Jews and Arabs have equal rights under the law. The Arab-Muslim world and its left-wing allies accuse Israel of apartheid despite the absence of any Israeli laws or policies creating such a system. Israeli Jews and Arabs generally live where they choose and benefit from the same health, welfare and infrastructure policies and programs. The only difference is that Israeli Arabs are exempt from military service, whereas all other Israelis, including Jews, Druze and Circassians, are not. Thus, Arab citizens receive the same governmental benefits as other Israelis without being required to bear any of the national cost. Although the promoters of IAW contend that Israeli Arabs are second-class citizens, they in fact enjoy the highest standard of living, highest rates of longevity and literacy, and lowest rate of infant mortality of any Arab-Muslim population in the Mideast.

Israel also has an open political system in which Arabs vote, run for office, and serve in government. Moreover, they have freedom of speech to a degree not tolerated in the Arab-Muslim world as demonstrated by those Arab Knesset members who openly identify with Israel's enemies and engage in seditious conduct that would not be countenanced in other countries. Whereas American law requires all who serve in Congress to swear an oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution, Israel presently requires no similar pledge of loyalty. Clearly, Israel does not practice apartheid, and in fact does not even employ the same kinds of safeguards against sedition and treason that are taken for granted in the United States and other western democracies.

When the canard of Israeli apartheid is deconstructed, it clearly resembles the "Big Lie" preached and perfected by the Nazis, who believed that the constant repetition of audacious lies would promote their acceptance by the public and facilitate the spread of propaganda. The Nazis believed that the most brazen lies would resonate most deeply because of the common perception that unbelievable stories would not be repeated if they weren't true. Thus it is with the slander of Israeli apartheid, for which there would seem to be no greater proof than the endorsement of academia. Given the leftist orientation and pro-Islamist bias of many university faculties, college campuses have become natural staging grounds for anti-Israel agitprop.

Brooklyn College in New York was the site of IAW activity this year with a program entitled, "BDS (Boycott, Divestments, and Sanctions) Movement against Israel," which was co-sponsored by the political science department. Despite public criticism against allowing the event on campus, and though the college administration disclaimed any official endorsement, it would not bar the program or condemn it in any meaningful way. The program featured speakers who denied Israel's right to exist, praised Islamist terrorists who attack civilians, and called for the blacklisting of Israeli academics.

The college took the position that co-sponsorship by one of its departments did not imply institutional support for the program, but the hollowness of this explanation was exposed by the failure to provide equal time to opponents wishing to voice their opposition. Supporters denied antisemitic bias and claimed that the event implicated free speech. However, the program featured speakers who advocated conduct, i.e., the blacklisting of Israeli professors, that is intended specifically to discourage free and open discourse. If Brooklyn College truly cared about speech rights, it would have provided a forum for those wishing to address the event's factual distortions and expose it as propaganda. The failure to do so indicates only a fair-weather commitment to freedom of expression, and raises the question of whether the college in fact endorsed the program through its conduct despite its disclaimers.

Furthermore, allowing such a blatantly provocative program on campus seems inconsistent with the institution's own "Commitment to Pluralism and Diversity," which provides:

Brooklyn College is committed to values and policies that enhance respect for individuals and their cultures. In fact, the college' s cultural, racial, and ethnic diversity-our pluralism-is one of our distinguishing characteristics. Our student body and our workforce are notably composed of people of color, of women, of immigrants, of older adults, and of persons with disabilities. Students at the college can trace their ancestry to more than 120 different countries. To reap the rewards of diversity, the college has developed and will continue to develop programs that combat bigotry and other biases in all their forms and will build on the strengths offered by our multicultural, multiracial, and multigenerational campus.

(http://www.brooklyn .cuny.edu/ bc/offices/ diversity/ commit.php.) It is difficult to see how providing a forum for anti-Israel and antisemitic speech, while denying equal time to opposing viewpoints, shows a commitment "to values and policies that enhance respect for individuals and their cultures" or is consistent with the college' s pledge to "develop programs that combat bigotry and other biases in all their forms…" Indeed, Brooklyn College' s failure to acknowledge the program as hate-speech suggests that its diversity statement is applied only selectively.

The malicious intent of Israel Apartheid Week is clear considering its connection to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. The conceit of BDS is that it feigns kinship to the movement that helped bring about the end of apartheid in South Africa through coordinated efforts to turn that country into a pariah state. It uses terms like "occupation&qu ot; and "colonialism&q uot; to perpetuate the falsehood that Israel is a colonial state and that the Palestinians are an ancestral people whose country was dismantled by foreign Jewish interlopers. In so doing, the BDS movement disparages Jewish national claims that are a matter of historical record and not based, as are Palestinian claims, on myth, polemic and doctrinal hatred.

In truth, the Jews are indigenous and have the longest record of habitation in their homeland. At no time was there ever a sovereign nation called Palestine or an ancient Palestinian society that created any touchstones of nationality or unique culture in the Jewish homeland. As the late Zahir Muhsein famously stated in the Dutch newspaper Trouw in 1977, "[t]he 'Palestinian People' does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the State of Israel." Arafat made similar admissions in his autobiography. Thus, in pretending that Israel is a colonial creation and that Jews are strangers to the Mideast, the BDS movement engages in the same deceit and dishonesty.

If BDS partisans were truly concerned about forcing change in repressive regimes, one must wonder why they ignore Saudi Arabia, where women are suppressed, freedom of religion is unknown, and money flows to support terrorism abroad; or Iran, where religious minorities are harassed and discriminated against, Jews fear for their lives and gays are put to death. Why are they not concerned about Egypt, where Copts are slaughtered and their churches desecrated, or Sudan, where Arab Muslims engage in genocide against African Christians? The BDS movement' s pernicious intent is exposed by its pathological focus on Israel, which has the only open society in the Mideast where all citizens are free to live where they choose, speak as they will and worship as they please. By claiming Israel to be what she clearly is not, the movement perpetuates a colossal fabrication evocative of the Big Lie. And by actively promoting the BDS farce, those who sponsor, support or enable Israel Apartheid Week do the same.

Reasonable minds can disagree over specific policies of any government, including Israel's. However, those who deny her right to exist and accuse her of apartheid when she actually has the only democratic society in the Mideast are not engaging in neutral criticism. They are promoting antisemitism. The singular focus on Israel for imagined offenses such as ethnic cleansing and apartheid, coupled with the refusal to target countries where such atrocities actually occur, constitutes antisemitism purely and simply. Not surprisingly, the demonization of Israel has become de rigueur on the political left. Unfortunately, it has also found an audience among members of progressive Jewish groups, such as J Street and the New Israel Fund, whose commitment to left-wing ideals causes them to rationalize, support or provide forums for those who impugn the Jewish State.

There is also a disturbing trend on college campuses of progressive student groups protesting mainstream Jewish organizations that oppose the BDS agenda. The Harvard College Progressive Jewish Alliance, for example, recently organized a protest against the campus Hillel's ban on partnering with organizations that support BDS programs. Ironically, although progressives and their supporters typically invoke free speech principles to shield Israel bashers, they are quick to brand dissenting opinions as hate-speech in order to silence those with whom they disagree. Likewise, they jump to label any critical discussion of political Islam as "Islamophobia, " but remain silent regarding the doctrinal antisemitism that is so prevalent in the Muslim community.

Ironically, Gentile supporters are often quicker and more willing to come to Israel's defense, as they have done in Canada with Israel Truth Week, a conference dedicated to combating the dissimulation of Israel Apartheid Week. Israel Truth Week has become an annual event in Hamilton, Ontario, drawing speakers, academics and legal experts from Canada, the United States and Israel. Though the event was created by a dedicated group of Jews and non-Jews working together, it would not have grown so quickly without the commitment of Gentiles who support the Jewish State for reasons of history, justice and equity.

The inspiration for this conference came from Mark Vandermaas, a Canadian whose family history made him acutely aware of the horrors of antisemitism. Vandermaas was adopted and raised by Dutch parents who lived through the German occupation of the Netherlands, where they saw their Jewish neighbors deported for slaughter and where his father was interred in a Nazi work camp from which he escaped. Vandermaas was motivated to act upon hearing of unrestrained antisemitism roiling the campus of the University of Western Ontario, where Jewish students were physically abused and harassed, and his indignation gave rise to Israel Truth Week. What started as a grassroots program has grown and begun attracting the attention of major Jewish organizations in Canada.

Although Israel Apartheid Week is now in its ninth year, mainstream Jewish organizations have yet to formulate a unified, systematic response. Some organizations have issued strong denunciations while others have resolved not to work with progressive groups that support the BDS movement. Still others have displayed timidity in choosing to ignore it. But ignoring it lends credence through silence. Instead, Israel Apartheid Week should be answered with thoughtful, coordinated counterprograms. Though Israel Truth Week is only in its second year and has not yet ventured beyond the borders of Ontario, the breadth of its agenda and the diversity of its speakers should provide a model for Jewish organizations to follow. If some Gentiles can be so assertive in advocating on behalf of Israel, there is no reason why Jews cannot do the same.

The blood libel seems to have gained respectability in the halls of academia now that Israel Apartheid Week has become an annual rite on college campuses across North America. Characterized by hate-speech promoted as political discourse, Israel Apartheid Week ("IAW") proclaims its goal "is to educate people about the nature of Israel as an apartheid system and to build Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaigns as part of a growing global BDS movement."

Its architects contend they are not anti-Semitic. However, Israel is not an apartheid state under any definition of the term, and to argue otherwise requires the repetition of odious lies and the denial of historical facts. Because the claim of Israeli apartheid is a malicious fiction, the anti-Semitic motivations underlying Israel Apartheid Week cannot be minimized or ignored.

The International Criminal Court's Rome Statute of 2002 defines "apartheid" as a crime consisting of acts similar to crimes against humanity "committed in the context of an institutionalized regime of systematic oppression and domination by one racial group over any other racial group or groups and committed with the intention of maintaining that regime."

Though the term evokes images of South Africa under Afrikaner rule, it just as easily could describe any country in which racial and ethnic minorities are systematically segregated and discriminated against by operation of law. An argument could be made that Sharia states qualify insofar as they subjugate and isolate "infidels" in accordance with their interpretation of Islamic doctrine. The past confinement of Jews in the mellah in Morocco or in ghettos and separate towns in Iran offers apt examples.

In contrast, Israel is a democracy in which Jews and Arabs have equal rights under the law. The Arab-Muslim world and its left-wing allies accuse Israel of apartheid despite the absence of any Israeli laws or policies creating such a system. Israeli Jews and Arabs generally live where they choose and benefit from the same health, welfare and infrastructure policies and programs. The only difference is that Israeli Arabs are exempt from military service, whereas all other Israelis, including Jews, Druze and Circassians, are not. Thus, Arab citizens receive the same governmental benefits as other Israelis without being required to bear any of the national cost. Although the promoters of IAW contend that Israeli Arabs are second-class citizens, they in fact enjoy the highest standard of living, highest rates of longevity and literacy, and lowest rate of infant mortality of any Arab-Muslim population in the Mideast.

Israel also has an open political system in which Arabs vote, run for office, and serve in government. Moreover, they have freedom of speech to a degree not tolerated in the Arab-Muslim world as demonstrated by those Arab Knesset members who openly identify with Israel's enemies and engage in seditious conduct that would not be countenanced in other countries. Whereas American law requires all who serve in Congress to swear an oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution, Israel presently requires no similar pledge of loyalty. Clearly, Israel does not practice apartheid, and in fact does not even employ the same kinds of safeguards against sedition and treason that are taken for granted in the United States and other western democracies.

When the canard of Israeli apartheid is deconstructed, it clearly resembles the "Big Lie" preached and perfected by the Nazis, who believed that the constant repetition of audacious lies would promote their acceptance by the public and facilitate the spread of propaganda. The Nazis believed that the most brazen lies would resonate most deeply because of the common perception that unbelievable stories would not be repeated if they weren't true. Thus it is with the slander of Israeli apartheid, for which there would seem to be no greater proof than the endorsement of academia. Given the leftist orientation and pro-Islamist bias of many university faculties, college campuses have become natural staging grounds for anti-Israel agitprop.

Brooklyn College in New York was the site of IAW activity this year with a program entitled, "BDS (Boycott, Divestments, and Sanctions) Movement against Israel," which was co-sponsored by the political science department. Despite public criticism against allowing the event on campus, and though the college administration disclaimed any official endorsement, it would not bar the program or condemn it in any meaningful way. The program featured speakers who denied Israel's right to exist, praised Islamist terrorists who attack civilians, and called for the blacklisting of Israeli academics.

The college took the position that co-sponsorship by one of its departments did not imply institutional support for the program, but the hollowness of this explanation was exposed by the failure to provide equal time to opponents wishing to voice their opposition. Supporters denied antisemitic bias and claimed that the event implicated free speech. However, the program featured speakers who advocated conduct, i.e., the blacklisting of Israeli professors, that is intended specifically to discourage free and open discourse. If Brooklyn College truly cared about speech rights, it would have provided a forum for those wishing to address the event's factual distortions and expose it as propaganda. The failure to do so indicates only a fair-weather commitment to freedom of expression, and raises the question of whether the college in fact endorsed the program through its conduct despite its disclaimers.

Furthermore, allowing such a blatantly provocative program on campus seems inconsistent with the institution&# 39;s own "Commitment to Pluralism and Diversity," which provides:

Brooklyn College is committed to values and policies that enhance respect for individuals and their cultures. In fact, the college' s cultural, racial, and ethnic diversity-our pluralism-is one of our distinguishing characteristics. Our student body and our workforce are notably composed of people of color, of women, of immigrants, of older adults, and of persons with disabilities. Students at the college can trace their ancestry to more than 120 different countries. To reap the rewards of diversity, the college has developed and will continue to develop programs that combat bigotry and other biases in all their forms and will build on the strengths offered by our multicultural, multiracial, and multigenerational campus.

(http://www.brooklyn .cuny.edu/ bc/offices/ diversity/ commit.php.) It is difficult to see how providing a forum for anti-Israel and antisemitic speech, while denying equal time to opposing viewpoints, shows a commitment "to values and policies that enhance respect for individuals and their cultures" or is consistent with the college' s pledge to "develop programs that combat bigotry and other biases in all their forms…" Indeed, Brooklyn College' s failure to acknowledge the program as hate-speech suggests that its diversity statement is applied only selectively.

The malicious intent of Israel Apartheid Week is clear considering its connection to the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. The conceit of BDS is that it feigns kinship to the movement that helped bring about the end of apartheid in South Africa through coordinated efforts to turn that country into a pariah state. It uses terms like "occupation&qu ot; and "colonialism&q uot; to perpetuate the falsehood that Israel is a colonial state and that the Palestinians are an ancestral people whose country was dismantled by foreign Jewish interlopers. In so doing, the BDS movement disparages Jewish national claims that are a matter of historical record and not based, as are Palestinian claims, on myth, polemic and doctrinal hatred.

In truth, the Jews are indigenous and have the longest record of habitation in their homeland. At no time was there ever a sovereign nation called Palestine or an ancient Palestinian society that created any touchstones of nationality or unique culture in the Jewish homeland. As the late Zahir Muhsein famously stated in the Dutch newspaper Trouw in 1977, "[t]he 'Palestinian People' does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the State of Israel." Arafat made similar admissions in his autobiography. Thus, in pretending that Israel is a colonial creation and that Jews are strangers to the Mideast, the BDS movement engages in the same deceit and dishonesty.

If BDS partisans were truly concerned about forcing change in repressive regimes, one must wonder why they ignore Saudi Arabia, where women are suppressed, freedom of religion is unknown, and money flows to support terrorism abroad; or Iran, where religious minorities are harassed and discriminated against, Jews fear for their lives and gays are put to death. Why are they not concerned about Egypt, where Copts are slaughtered and their churches desecrated, or Sudan, where Arab Muslims engage in genocide against African Christians? The BDS movement' s pernicious intent is exposed by its pathological focus on Israel, which has the only open society in the Mideast where all citizens are free to live where they choose, speak as they will and worship as they please. By claiming Israel to be what she clearly is not, the movement perpetuates a colossal fabrication evocative of the Big Lie. And by actively promoting the BDS farce, those who sponsor, support or enable Israel Apartheid Week do the same.

Reasonable minds can disagree over specific policies of any government, including Israel's. However, those who deny her right to exist and accuse her of apartheid when she actually has the only democratic society in the Mideast are not engaging in neutral criticism. They are promoting antisemitism. The singular focus on Israel for imagined offenses such as ethnic cleansing and apartheid, coupled with the refusal to target countries where such atrocities actually occur, constitutes antisemitism purely and simply. Not surprisingly, the demonization of Israel has become de rigueur on the political left. Unfortunately, it has also found an audience among members of progressive Jewish groups, such as J Street and the New Israel Fund, whose commitment to left-wing ideals causes them to rationalize, support or provide forums for those who impugn the Jewish State.

There is also a disturbing trend on college campuses of progressive student groups protesting mainstream Jewish organizations that oppose the BDS agenda. The Harvard College Progressive Jewish Alliance, for example, recently organized a protest against the campus Hillel's ban on partnering with organizations that support BDS programs. Ironically, although progressives and their supporters typically invoke free speech principles to shield Israel bashers, they are quick to brand dissenting opinions as hate-speech in order to silence those with whom they disagree. Likewise, they jump to label any critical discussion of political Islam as "Islamophobia, " but remain silent regarding the doctrinal antisemitism that is so prevalent in the Muslim community.

Ironically, Gentile supporters are often quicker and more willing to come to Israel's defense, as they have done in Canada with Israel Truth Week, a conference dedicated to combating the dissimulation of Israel Apartheid Week. Israel Truth Week has become an annual event in Hamilton, Ontario, drawing speakers, academics and legal experts from Canada, the United States and Israel. Though the event was created by a dedicated group of Jews and non-Jews working together, it would not have grown so quickly without the commitment of Gentiles who support the Jewish State for reasons of history, justice and equity.

The inspiration for this conference came from Mark Vandermaas, a Canadian whose family history made him acutely aware of the horrors of antisemitism. Vandermaas was adopted and raised by Dutch parents who lived through the German occupation of the Netherlands, where they saw their Jewish neighbors deported for slaughter and where his father was interred in a Nazi work camp from which he escaped. Vandermaas was motivated to act upon hearing of unrestrained antisemitism roiling the campus of the University of Western Ontario, where Jewish students were physically abused and harassed, and his indignation gave rise to Israel Truth Week. What started as a grassroots program has grown and begun attracting the attention of major Jewish organizations in Canada.

Although Israel Apartheid Week is now in its ninth year, mainstream Jewish organizations have yet to formulate a unified, systematic response. Some organizations have issued strong denunciations while others have resolved not to work with progressive groups that support the BDS movement. Still others have displayed timidity in choosing to ignore it. But ignoring it lends credence through silence. Instead, Israel Apartheid Week should be answered with thoughtful, coordinated counterprograms. Though Israel Truth Week is only in its second year and has not yet ventured beyond the borders of Ontario, the breadth of its agenda and the diversity of its speakers should provide a model for Jewish organizations to follow. If some Gentiles can be so assertive in advocating on behalf of Israel, there is no reason why Jews cannot do the same.

Contact Israel_politics2@yahoogroups.com


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AND I SHALL TAKE YOU TO ME FOR A NATION

Posted by B'Ahavat Yisrael, March 13, 2013

As we approach the joyous holiday of Pesach (Passover) and we prepare for the festive seder, we are reminded of the verse in the Torah in which G—d tells the offspring of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, "And I shall take you to Me for a nation" (Shmot 6:7).

After many years on foreign soil, subject to mistreatment and persecution by others, G—d miraculously releases the descendants of our forefathers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and forges them into a nation to be guided to the Holy Land promised by G—d to our forefathers many years beforehand.

It is during this holiday that we celebrate our independence as a nation and as a people, with our own unique characteristics and customs — the Nation of Israel.

Being a part of a nation, G—d reminds us throughout the Torah, brings with it a responsibility towards fellow members of that nation and an obligation to care for and sympathize with them.

In fact, as we begin to recite the hagada, the description of the exodus from Egypt and G-d's precepts commemorating that glorious event as well as an expression of thanksgiving for our liberation, we read "This is the bread of affliction that our fathers ate in the land of Egypt. Whoever is hungry, let him come and eat; whoever is in need, let him come and join in celebrating the Passover festival." Caring for others of our nation who are hungry or in need is part and parcel of commemorating this holiday. As we give thanks for our liberation, we are to consider fellow members of our nation who need to be liberated from their hardships too.

Along these lines, is an intriguing anecdote reported from the life of the renowned latter day Torah scholar R. Yosef Dov Soloveitchik. One day before Pesach, a man came to his house to ask a question. He asked the famous rabbi of Brisk if a person could fulfill the obligation of drinking the four glasses at the Pesach seder with milk. R. Yosef Dov asked the man if he was ill, to which the man responded that he was healthy but wine was too expensive this year for him to afford. The rabbi, being both wise and generous, took out 25 rubles but the man was proud and did not want to accept it. "I did not come for charity; I came to ask a question." The rabbi told him to consider it a loan, only to be paid back when G-d affords him the opportunity. After the man left, the rabbi's wife asked why R. Yosef Dov gave the man 25 rubles when 2 or 3 rubles would be enough for wine, to which the rabbi retorted, "If he ate meat then he would not be able to drink the milk; therefore he did not have enough money for meat and all that is necessary for Pesach." R. Yosef Dov Soloveitchik demonstrated that one should not only care for his fellow Jew but should be attuned to his fellow Jew's heart and mind — especially for the special holiday of Pesach.

Moreover, the great medieval Torah giant Maimonides stresses (Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Yom Tov 6:18): "And when one eats and drinks [at the holiday meal] he is obligated to feed the stranger, the orphan, and the widow, along with other unfortunate poor. However, one who locks the doors of his courtyard, and eats and drinks with his wife and children, and does not feed and provide drink for the poor and suffering people, this is not a celebration of G-d's commandment, but rather a celebration of his stomach...and this type of celebration is a disgrace."

Also, in the very first of the laws of Pesach found in the Shulchan Arukh (Orach Chaim 429:1), R. Moshe Isserles (1520 — 1572), known as the Rama, points out "the custom to buy wheat and distribute them to the poor for the purposes (needs) of Passover." And, R. Yisrael Meir Kagan, famous as the Chafetz Chaim, notes in his Mishna Brurah, ad locum, the grave consequences awaiting those who stand by and avoid helping those in need as the holiday of Pesach approaches.

As in previous years, B'Ahavat Yisrael will be doing its part in helping to liberate our fellow Jews from their hardship. But this can only be done if our fellow Jews open their hearts and minds, like R. Yosef Dov Soloveitchik. And this can only be done if, as Maimonides tells us, we do not lock the doors of our courtyards and think only of ourselves.

As we give thanks for our liberation and our establishment as a nation, we must consider fellow members of our nation who need to be liberated from their hardships too. In the spirit of R. Yosef Dov Soloveitchik, we must open our hearts and minds to our fellow Jews' needs. We dare not, as Maimonides instructs us, make our celebration a disgrace.

Please take a few minutes to browse the contents of the packages that B'Ahavat Yisrael will be preparing for the needy amongst our beleaguered brethren in the Shomron region of Israel to help them share in a meaningful holiday with fellow members of the Jewish nation.

May we, in merit of truly caring for fellow members of our nation and opening our hearts and minds to them, have a very safe, healthy and joyous Pesach holiday.

Contact Rabbi Yisrael Associate Director, B'Ahavat Yisrael at bahavatyisrael@yahoo.com


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EGYPT'S ARMY WILL NOT INTERVENE

Posted by Besa Center, March 13, 2013

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Hopes or expectations that the Egyptian military will intervene in the deteriorating political and security crisis are probably misguided. The army is loath to take on the well-organized and powerful Muslim Brotherhood because the majority of its soldiers support the Islamist government. It also wants to avoid losing financial backing from the US, which would not support a military coup.

Those calling for the Egyptian army to intervene, or believe that it will do so to avert growing unrest, range from former Egyptian justice officials and minor Egyptian politicians to journalists both within and outside Egypt. However, such hopes or expectations are probably misguided. The probability that the Egyptian army will be willing to retake the reins of power — or is even capable of doing so, after Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi unceremoniously sent its leaders back to their barracks in August 2012 — is highly unlikely, if not impossible.

Taking over the reins of power means, above all, removing Egypt's first elected president, as well as confrontation with the Muslim Brotherhood, by far the most disciplined and organized political force in the country. Such a move would inevitably spur massive urban demonstrations and, further down the line, wide-scale urban guerrilla warfare.

This is where the lessons gleaned from the American experience in Iraq and the two-year standoff between Bashar Assad's Alawite-led army and the Free Syrian Army come into effect. Both experiences demonstrated that even well-trained, well-equipped, and motivated armies cannot control dense urban areas. The Americans and their Iraqi allies never totally subdued the Sunni guerrilla movements, and Assad's Alawites have proven to be even less successful in their confrontation with Syrian rebels. These forces operated in urban areas ranging between 2.5-3.5 million people, while the Egyptian army has a megalopolis of 12 million inhabitants to contain. At best the Egyptian army would face a long war of attrition. Unlike the US force manned by motivated volunteers and a Syrian army composed mostly of loyal Alawites who fear the fall of an Alawite regime, the Egyptian higher command can only be worried about the loyalty of its rank and file in backing them in such a move.

For starters, the Egyptian army has never been indoctrinated to defend the home front. Under former presidents Anwar Sadat and Hosni Mubarak it was the Central Security Forces (CSF), Egypt's gendarmerie, which was allotted the task. These leaders balked at using the armed forces against the jihadist threat that plagued Egypt in the 1980s and mid-1990s partially because of the successful penetration of Islamists into army ranks. The leader of the team that assassinated Sadat was a lieutenant-colonel.

The problem is hardly a matter of a small number of infiltrators. At least half of the army recruits, it must be assumed, are supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafis, who comprise 30 percent of the Egyptian electorate. The Egyptian army hardly recruits Copts or the Sunni Egyptian upper class that equals roughly 20 percent of the population. The implications of such a recruitment pattern are that the secular and liberals are severely underrepresented in the army and the Islamists overrepresented. It is only a small section of the former group that would support the army's intervention in the political crisis.

Both the nature of indoctrination and the army's composition explain why the army, neither during Mubarak's ouster or ever since, has not been willing to confront demonstrators, and why the scene of junior officers and soldiers joining protesters became so common.

A most recent example was the city of Port Said, where protesters have been involved in widespread violence protesting the harsh sentences meted out to supporters of the local football team for their role in the killing of 72 Cairo football fans during a match last year, and which has since taken a political turn against the Muslim Brotherhood government. As headlines from the world's newspapers informed their readers that the army intervened to quell unrest, the photos showed troops joining forces with demonstrators against the CSF. Since Mubarak's ouster, only very small units within the army, the military police, or its naval counterpart have confronted demonstrators. In those cases, officials were protecting public buildings and had wide-scale public backing to do so.

An additional reason why the military has not intervened in the political crisis is the carrot that Morsi's new constitution offered the military — budgetary autonomy — and a recent hefty salary rise. One can therefore hardly expect the military to intervene politically and even less to act effectively once it intervenes.

Finally, the army realizes that the United States is strongly opposed to military intervention almost anywhere, and especially so against the Morsi government it presently backs. In toppling the Morsi government the army would be jeopardizing United States aid amounting to over one-fifth of the Egyptian military's budget ($1.3 billion out of a total $5.85 billion), a considerable transfer of technology, and spare parts and replacements its American-equipped forces inevitably need.

Resolution of Egypt's political problems rests solely on Egypt's politicians and citizens. Morsi is counting on his ability to complete his constitutional takeover of power with the running of parliamentary elections in April. The liberal and secular opposition is banking on continued instability and economic hardship to tarnish the image and popularity of the Morsi government and force it into making a grand bargain with them.

The whole situation is fraught with danger and worries that the bargaining process will get out of hand and degenerate into civil war. At least one scenario is unlikely: the return of the army to the corridors of political power.

Prof. Hillel Frisch is a professor of political studies and Middle East studies at Bar Ilan University, and a senior research associate at the Begin Sadat Center for Strategic Studie


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ISRAELI CHIEF RABBI GREETS NEWLY ARRIVED BNEI MENASHE IMMIGRANTS

Posted by Shavei Israel, March 13, 2013

Last Thursday, Israel's Sephardic Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar, along with members of his staff, paid a special visit to Shavei Israel's Absorption Center in Givat Haviva to congratulate the 274 Bnei Menashe immigrants from India who arrived in the Jewish state in recent months as part of a renewed wave of aliyah.

The meeting between the Bnei Menashe and the Chief Rabbi was by all accounts remarkable. As the Chief Rabbi's car approached the absorption center, the Bnei Menashe literally ran out to meet it, singing and dancing along the way until the car could drive no further. The Bnei Menashe then escorted Rabbi Amar into the center where their enthusiasm continued.

We have the whole story here, plus some fabulous videos from the event. Here's one of a group of Bnei Menashe children reciting the Shema Israel prayer and the entire text of the 10 Commandments.

Contact Shavei at info.shavei@gmail.com http://www.shavei.org


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ISRAEL'S BOLD NEW QUEEN

Posted by Daily Alert, March 13, 2013

The article below was written by Daniel Estrin who is a print and radio journalist. His stories have been featured in outlets including The Associated Press, The Atlantic, NPR and Public Radio International. This article appeared March 13, 2013 in the Tablet and is archived at
http://tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/126845/israels-bold-new-queen

aynaw

For anyone familiar with the saccharine judges of America's prime-time beauty pageants, it might be jarring to hear how the director of Israel's national competition describes Yityish "Titi" Aynaw, the Ethiopian-born 21-year-old who was just crowned Miss Israel. "I think she was not the most beautiful, by classic beauty," said director Iris Cohen, comparing her to the 19 other finalists in this year's competition. But she does give Aynaw this: "She stands on the stage and you cannot ignore her."

The new Miss Israel is just as blunt. Sitting with her last week in the green room at the Tel Aviv offices of La'Isha magazine—the Israeli equivalent of Vogue and sponsor of the annual pageant—I told her about the stereotypical American beauty queen who seeks to impress the judges with her earnest hopes for world peace. "To say a sentence like that, in my opinion, is to sound retarded," Aynaw replied. Then she stopped and wondered out loud if she should have said that. She changed "retarded" to "stupid," and barreled on. "Iran is trying to develop a nuclear weapon, China is trying to become a superpower," she said. "To say that I want world peace, of course I want it. It's a dream. But I don't think it will happen now."

Israelis are better known for their grit than their grace, but Aynaw's got both. Almost 30 years since the first clandestine Israeli airlift of Ethiopian Jews—the fabled descendants of the lost biblical tribe of Dan—to the Promised Land, the Jewish state has finally anointed one of them Israel's most beautiful woman. Asked by judges why she deserved the title, Aynaw said it was about time that a black woman wore the crown.

I met Miss Israel a day after one of her first solo photo shoots. Aynaw was wearing a blue sleeveless dress with silver studs lining the shoulders. She teetered a bit in gold-strapped heels, but confidently strutted down the hallways of the magazine offices, one slender leg cutting across the other like scissors. Measuring in at 5 foot 9, not including her bun, she towered over the rest of the magazine's editorial staffers, who congratulated her as she walked past their offices. She attributes her beauty to her Ethiopian heritage. "We have these chiseled faces. Everything is in the right place," she said. "I never saw an Ethiopian who was stuck with some big nose." She looks like a fiercer version of Tyra Banks, one of two role models she named in the competition. The other one was Martin Luther King.

The Miss Israel pageant has been held uninterrupted for the last 63 years. That's a startling feat in a country only 65 years old, in a culture that typically rejects pomp and circumstance, and where most long-standing annual events commemorate tragedy and war. The late Hemda Nofech-Mozes, who married into the country's most powerful media family, founded La'Isha magazine a year before Israel's war of independence in 1948 and instituted the competition two years later. "Everyone was talking about war, everyone was talking about settlement. She said, wait a minute, there is a nation here ... there are beautiful women," said Cohen, the current pageant director.

You can learn a lot about the face Israeli society has tried to put forward by the faces its judges choose each year. In 1952, at the height of tensions between Israel's European veterans and Middle-Eastern Jewish newcomers, Yemen-born Ora Vered became the first Miss Israel of Middle-Eastern Jewish descent. In 1993, in the midst of Israel's tidal wave of Soviet immigration, Kiev-born Jana Khodriker won, and in 1999, the peak of Israel's optimism that Arab-Israeli peace was imminent, judges crowned Rana Raslan the first Arab Miss Israel.

In the early days of the competition, each Miss Israel cast away her ethnic name for pure Hebrew ones; Israel's first beauty queen, Miriam Yaron, was born in Germany as Giselle Freilich, while Ora Vered's original last name was the Yemeni name Jamili. Similarly, in the last 30 years, many Ethiopian newcomers have adopted Hebrew names.

Not Aynaw, whose given name is connected to the circumstances of her birth. "I was born sick, but my mom believed I had a future," she told me. Yitayish is Amharic for "look," or as Aynaw explains it, "looking toward the future."

"I'd never change my name," said Aynaw. "Ever."

Aynaw's biography is, as she calls it, a Cinderella story. Born in a small township near Gondar in northwest Ethiopia, she was orphaned by age 10. Her father died a year after she was born—she never found out how—and a decade later her mother died of a sudden illness. Her mother's parents, who had already uprooted to Israel in 2000, arranged for her and her brother to move, too.

Aynaw grew up like many Ethiopian Jews, dreaming of going to Israel. "I was told this was the land of milk and honey," she said, laughing. "That I'd go on the street, bend down, and pick up golden coins. I'd open the faucet and milk would pour out."

In March 2003, Aynaw and her brother flew via Kenya to Israel. Her grandparents, whom she had hardly remembered, brought them to their hardscrabble immigrant neighborhood in the seaside town of Netanya. Without knowing a word of Hebrew, she was shuffled off to a religious Jewish boarding school in Haifa catering to new immigrants. Today her Hebrew is accentless and expressive. "They threw me into the deep water. But that's how you learn to swim the best," she said.

In fact, Aynaw stood out from the pack from the beginning. She became student council president, excelled in track and field, and won first place in a national student film competition. Her short feature film, which she wrote and directed, told the story of an Ethiopian immigrant girl in Israel who tried to ignore her heritage—a character she says was based heavily on her classmates. When Aynaw would show up in a traditional Ethiopian white kamis as her costume for the Purim holiday, or when she brought homemade injera bread to school, her Ethiopian-born peers became embarrassed. "We immigrants want to integrate into society. And we forget where we come from," she said.

After graduation, Aynaw, then 19, joined an army course that trains talented Ethiopian-born Israelis to be military commanders. She missed the cutoff date to be in Karakal, Israel's co-ed combat unit, so she ended up a military police commander responsible for 90 rowdy soldiers. In their three-month training, she taught her soldiers how to fire a weapon, perform security checks at checkpoints, and detect bombs. "For three months, they would never see my smile," she said, flashing a grin that's hard to imagine she once concealed.

"I taught them to be human," Aynaw said of her soldiers, who checked Palestinians driving through military checkpoints. "My soldiers would ask, 'How can I be so nice when there were instances of a 9-year-old kid or a pregnant woman blowing themselves up at a checkpoint?' " She'd tell them: "There are many Palestinians who have a wife waiting at home, a family waiting for dad to bring bread home."

In October 2012, while most of her friends traveled to popular post-army destinations in India and Thailand, Aynaw spent the savings she'd earned in the army on a ticket to Addis Ababa. She wanted to come to terms with her mother's death and face her history. "I never looked at her photos, I never talked about her. I decided to erase everything," she said. It was a defense mechanism: "I needed to succeed," she added. "I don't have parents that I can crash with till I'm a 40 year old."

A distant relative brought her to the Jewish graveyard where her mother is buried. She was shocked by the condition of the cemetery: Headstones were cracked, and rainwater would flow in streams around the graves. She hired the groundskeeper to cover her mother's grave with marble, to add a Hebrew verse from Psalms next to the Amharic inscription, and to encase the grave in a roofed structure. She waited three weeks in Addis until it was completed. Aynaw showed me photos of the refurbished grave on her cracked iPhone screen.

"Poor thing, I'm upsetting you with my stories," Aynaw said to me suddenly. She adjusted the large sunglasses on her head, and we switched topics to a recent photoshoot in the Mediterranean sea, when photographers struggled to make her hair look drenched. "How do you give me a wet look? I have an Afro!" she said.

Aynaw's win comes after a year of rekindled accusations of racism toward Israel's Ethiopian Jewish community. Ethiopian Jews took to the streets in January 2012 to protest after Israeli landlords in a low-income southern town refused them rent. And a month before, Ethiopian Jewish spiritual leaders made noise after Israel's rabbinate announced it would phase them out because their customs run against normative Orthodox Judaism. Aynaw's victory certainly has its critics; some say she won because of her skin color alone. Others have posted derogatory jokes on Facebook, like calling her "toffee queen," instead of yoffee (Hebrew for beauty) queen, or saying that it was too bad her poor family couldn't watch the pageant because they don't own a television. "Tell me I'm ugly. That would hurt less," she said of the racist jokes.

And yet, these past few years have been trailblazing ones for Ethiopian-born Israeli women. In 2011, Hagit Yaso was the first Ethiopian-born winner of the Israeli version of American Idol. In 2012, Belaynesh Zevadia was appointed Israel's first Ethiopian-born ambassador, sent to represent the Jewish state in her native Addis Ababa. And in January, Pnina Tamano-Shata became the first Ethiopian-born woman to be elected to parliament. "There is hope that Israeli society has gotten a little bit more open," said Semai Elias, a spiritual leader in the Ethiopian Jewish community, about their accomplishments. "The community has been given a chance."

Still, there are virtually no black faces on Israeli billboards and in magazine ads. That should change with Aynaw's expected appearances in ads by Israeli casual-wear line Golf and high-end jewelry seller H. Stern, co-sponsors of the pageant. Aynaw also wants to make a social impact during her tenure: She wants to institute dance and drawing activities for Ethiopian kids like those in her immigrant neighborhood who roam the streets after school. Someday, she wants to be an Israeli diplomat.

Aynaw will get a taste of foreign relations this year: This week she flies to New York to address a gala at the Waldorf Astoria for the Friends of the Israeli Defense Forces. This winter, she'll be in Paris. And pageant director Cohen says organizers of this year's Miss World competition in Indonesia—a country with which Israel shares no diplomatic relations—are working on securing a visa for her to compete.

If Aynaw makes it to the international competition, she'll be asked to strut down the runway wearing her national dress. Japan has kimonos, and Brazil has carnival costumes. But what gown represents the melting pot of Israel?

This year, that decision will be easy for Israeli fashion designer Berta, said Cohen. "Berta will go with an Ethiopian theme," she said.

Contact Daily Alert at dailyalert@list-dailyalert.org


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WILL PRESIDENT OBAMA PRESS ISRAEL TO AGREE TO A POLICY OF CONTAINMENT?

Posted by Dr. Richard Swier, March 13, 2013

The article below was written by Saul Loeb, an international news as a staff photographer. Saul has had assignments in over 55 countries on 6 continents and his work has been honored by the White House News Photographers Association and Pictures of the Year International.

In college he worked as the editor in chief of the 17,000 circulation Arizona Daily Wildcat, the student-run newspaper. After freelancing in Phoenix for several years, Loeb made the move to Washington, where he had previously spent two summers interning for the Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Service. His photos have appeared in nearly every major national and international publication including USA Today, The New York Times, International Herald Tribune, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Sydney Morning Herald, Toronto Globe & Mail, Stern, Le Monde, Time Magazine, Newsweek and others. This article appeared March 5, 2012 in Two-Way and is archived at
http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2012/03/05/147964848/u-s-israel-stand-together-on-iran-issue-obama-and-netanyahu-say

oval office

With Iran and its nuclear program looming over the discussions, President Obama said this morning that "the United States will always have Israel's back." The president's comment came with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is at the White House for talks today, by his side.

For his part, Netanyahu told reporters that the U.S. and Israel stand together on policy toward Iran, The Associated Press reports.

The two leaders just held something of a photo op. Other reports on what they had to say:

— "At start of mtg w/ Netanyahu, Pres Obama reaffirms 'unbreakable' 'rock solid' commitment to Israel. Says US will always have Israel's back. ... On stopping Iran's nuclear pgm., Pres Obama says US policy is prevention not containment. Says all US options on the table: 'I mean it.' ... Pres Obama says there is still a window for a diplomatic solution with Iran & that both US and Israel prefer to resolve it diplomatically." (Tweets from CBS News' Mark Knoller.)

— After referring to the "terrible bloodshed" in Syria and the upheaval elsewhere in the Arab world, Obama said that 'In the midst of this we have an island of democracy and one of our greatest allies in Israel. ... The bond between our two countries is unbreakable." (From the "pool" audio.)

— "Both the prime minister and I prefer to resolve this diplomatically," Obama added, referring to the Iran issue. "We understand the costs of any military action." (From the "pool" audio.)

— Netanyahu said that "Americans know that Israel and the United States share common values, that we defend common interests and that we face common enemies. Iran's leaders know that too. For them you're the Great Satan, we're the Little Satan. For them, we are you and you are us. And you know something, Mr. President? At least on this last point I think they're right. We are you and you are us. We're together. ... Israel and America stand together."

While the two leaders spoke of unity and common interests, the talks between Obama and Netanyahu are complicated because of Iran and the issue of its nuclear ambitions. As The New York Times has reported:

"Mr. Netanyahu ... is hoping to prompt more clarity from Mr. Obama on how he sees increasingly tough sanctions and diplomacy with Iran playing out in the coming months.

"He also wants to press Mr. Obama on where his red line lies: how and when the United States will decide whether sanctions are succeeding or failing, and how committed he is to the use of force, officials and analysts following the discussions on both sides said in recent days.

"For Mr. Obama, the challenge is to deliver two competing messages. He wants to join Mr. Netanyahu in warning Iran to abandon its nuclear program or face military action, but also to press him to give time to sanctions and diplomacy and hold back his military."

And as The Washington Post writes, 16 years after first raising the specter of a nuclear-armed Iran, Netanyahu "seems to have finally rallied the West to his cause, successfully thrusting Tehran's nuclear ambitions to the top of the international agenda. And in his second term as prime minister, he faces what could prove to be the most critical decision of his career, weighing whether to strike Iran's nuclear facilities, possibly over the objections of his staunchest ally in Washington."

For its part, Iran says it is pursuing nuclear power for peaceful purposes.

Update at 1:50 p.m. ET. Some Early Analyses:

— "While the two leaders struck a tableau of shoulder-to-shoulder solidarity, the differences in their approach to Iran were on display. Mr. Netanyahu said nothing about diplomacy and the economic sanctions that Mr. Obama promoted. And while the president repeated his vow that "all options are on the table" to halt Iran's pursuit of a weapon, he did not explicitly mention military force, as he did on Sunday." (The New York Times)

— "The United States and Israel agree that diplomacy is the best way to resolve the crisis over potential Iranian nuclear weapons, President Barack Obama said Monday, an optimistic view that Israel's leader declined to publicly endorse." (The Associated Press)

Contact Dr.Richard Swier at drswier@gmail.com


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UC RIVERSIDE STUDENTS CALL FOR DIVESTMENT FROM ISRAEL

Posted by Medicine Hat, March 13, 2013

The article below was written by James Grant who is an American writer and publisher. The founder of Grant's Interest Rate Observer, a twice-monthly journal of the financial markets, he is the author of Money of the Mind (1992), The Trouble with Prosperity (1996), John Adams: Party of One (2005), Mr. Speaker: The Life and Times of Thomas B. Reed, The Man Who Broke the Filibuster (2011), and The Forgotten Depression (2014) among other works. Contact him by e-mail at james.grant@ucr.edu. This article appeared on the UC Riverside University California website and is archived at
http://ucrtoday.ucr.edu/22068

RIVERSIDE, Calif. — Recently UC Riverside's student government, Associated Students of UCR, passed resolution No. 18 which calls for the University of California and the UCR campus to divest of any holdings with select companies that do business with Israel.

It is important to note that such divestment is not the policy of the University of California system nor of UC Riverside. Moreover, The UC Board of Regents requires this action only when the U.S. government deems it necessary. No such declaration has been made regarding Israel.

To quote a statement issued in May 2010 by the University of California Regents' Chair and Vice Chair along with the UC President:

"The overarching question of the University of California divesting from any company is a complex one and any action considered must conform to State and federal laws, as well as to the University's fiduciary responsibilities as a public entity to protect the security of its pension and endowment funds. In 2005, the Regents stated that a policy of divestment from a foreign government shall be adopted by the University only when the United States government declares that a foreign regime is committing acts of genocide. It was also noted at the time that divestment is a serious decision that should be rarely pursued."

The campus looks forward to continued constructive exchanges that benefit our students, faculty and community.

Contact Medicine Hat at pswc@shaw.ca


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OBAMA BLAMES ISRAEL, CONGRESS FOR LACK OF PEACE PROGRESS

Posted by GWY123, March 13, 2013

The article below was written by Lori Lowenthal Marcus who is the US correspondent for The Jewish Press . She is a recovered lawyer who previously practiced First Amendment law and taught in Philadelphia-area graduate and law schools. You can reach her by email at Lori@JewishPressOnline.com. This article appeared March 13, 2013 in the Jewish Press and is archived at
http://www.jewishpress.com/news/u-s-arabs-obama-blames-israeli-govt-u-s-congress-for-lack-of-peace-progress/2013/03/13/

Obama blames Israel

Most reports about the meeting between U.S. President Barack Obama and several representatives of various Arab American organizations which took place on Monday, March 11, have been fairly sketchy.

But at least some participants at that meeting provided three rather startling revelations to an Arabic news source.

First, they said the U.S. president blamed the stalled peace process on the Israeli government for refusing to offer concessions, and second, that he blamed the U.S. congress for providing cover to the Israelis whenever the president tries to apply pressure on the Jewish State. The implication the sources came away with was that Obama said he will get around those problems when he is in Israel by bypassing the Israeli government and going directly to the Israeli people.

The third surprising revelation from the meeting was that President Obama plans to hand over half a billion dollars in additional aid to the PA during his visit.

As with Obama's meeting with representatives of Jewish organizations a week ago, his get together with Arab and Muslim leaders was not part of the president's public schedule, and participants had been asked not to comment about the confidential conversations which took place.

As was also the case with the Jewish representatives' meeting, there were some Arab American participants who discussed some details of the meetings, a few with attribution and others on condition of anonymity. Several sources at each meeting told members of the media that the president told their group that he was not going to attempt to kickstart a new Arab-Israeli peace initiative.

But one story in an important Arab media outlet quoted participants as having provided a reason for the U.S. president's unwillingness to push a peace initiative during this trip. That anonymous Arab and/or Muslim participant told Al Arabiya.net reporters that Obama said to the group: "since the Israeli government has not been willing to make concessions, there is no point in pushing [for negotiations] right now."

In addition, the U.S. president expressed solidarity with the plight of the Arab Palestinians. "'The only people more frustrated than me,'" Obama was quoted by a source as saying, are the '"Palestinians living in West Bank and Gaza — it's a legitimate frustration,'" Al Arabiya's source said.

The U.S. congress also came in for criticism by the U.S. president. "Every time the pressure gets to the Israelis, they go to Congress."

The message understood by that source who was present at the March 11 meeting was that Obama believed he could get around the interference of the U.S. congress and the obstructionist Israeli government by speaking directly to the Israeli people. The source said, "He wants to find a way around that, that's why he wants to talk to the Israeli public directly."

In other words, the Israeli elected government should be sidelined because President Obama believes he knows what is best for Israel, and he will deal directly with the Israeli people this time, rather than with their elected government. At least that is the message some meeting participants either believed or want others to believe.

There was one additional piece of information in the Al Arabiya article that was not reported elsewhere.

President Obama, who has been railing against what he describes as the Republican-imposed sequester, "will take with him a cash infusion of $500 million — which Congress will soon release — of much needed financial aid to the Palestinian Authority."

A condition-free gift to the PA of half a billion dollars in additional aid from the U.S. is hard to imagine given all the cuts being imposed because of the sequester. For one thing, several hundred million dollars is due to be cut from Israel's portion of the defense budget, but more importantly, as this is U.S. taxpayer money, are the statements made by the president that the U.S. is reducing naval warpower in the Persian Gulf because of the sequester. This came up recently in the context of a dust-up between the White House and liberal journalist Bob Woodward of the Washington Post.

Contact GWY13 at GWY123@aol.com


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US ARMY AWARDS BRONZE STAR

Posted by GWY123, March 13, 2013

This article below was written by David Wood who is an American evangelical missionary and philosophy lecturer. He is currently head of the Acts 17 Apologetics Ministry. He has degrees in philosophy and biology, and is pursuing a Ph.D. in the philosophy of religion. This article appeared March 12, 2013 in Answering Muslims and is archived at
http://www.answeringmuslims.com/2013/03/military-chaplain-jon-trainer-receives.html

Yes, the military is now awarding medals to servicemen who pander to Muslim sensitivities. So if you're in the military and you'd like a prestigious Bronze Star, just encourage your fellow soldiers to submit to Sharia.

trainer

SPRINGFIELD — After the accidental burning last year of Qurans by U.S. troops in Afghanistan sparked deadly rioting, an Air National Guard chaplain from Springfield stepped in and potentially saved countless American lives.

For his effort, Lt. Col. Jon Trainer received the prestigious Bronze Star — a medal given for heroic or meritorious achievement in connection with operations against an armed enemy. And he did it with a PowerPoint presentation.

Trainer, who's now in the running to be named Chaplain of the Year for the entire Air Guard, was in the third month of his voluntary deployment to Afghanistan last February when U.S. troops at Bagram Airfield mistakenly burned copies of the Muslim holy book.

The ensuing outrage claimed more than 30 lives, including two U.S. troops and two U.S. military advisers. Within 48 hours, Trainer developed a PowerPoint presentation on the proper handling and disposal of Islamic religious material that was seen by every American — military and civilian alike — in Afghanistan. The presentation then was distributed to the U.S. for use in all pre-deployment training.

"This entire mission," Trainer said from his office at the Springfield Air National Guard Base, "could be undermined by an action like that.

"All that good work. You realize how quickly that work can be undermined."

Trainer, a Westerville resident and nondenominational Christian pastor who's been chaplain of the local 251st Cyber Engineering Installation Group since 2000, also sought to prevent any future problems by covering what constitutes Islamic religious material in the first place.

"When a Muslim writes down even a few verses from the Quran on a piece of paper," he explained, "that immediately gets that same protected status."

Ultimately, he said, it became an opportunity to demonstrate the importance of culture to U.S. troops and to show Afghanis that the U.S. could respond swiftly to their sensitivities.

"It's pretty unusual for a chaplain to receive the Bronze Star," said Col. Wade Rupper, Trainer's acting commander at the Springfield Guard base. "He was a vital guy at the right time."

Trainer, 51, will find out on April 1 if he'll be named Chaplain of the Year. (Continue Reading.)

I wonder if any Muslim chaplains received medals for creating PowerPoints designed to show their fellow Muslims that they shouldn't go on killing sprees whenever someone offends their sensitivities.

Contact GWY123 at GWY123@aol.com


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GORE'S AL JAZEERA DEAL NOW A MAJOR SCANDAL

Posted by GWY123, March 13, 2013

The article below was written by Cliff Kincaid, who serves as president of America's Survival. Inc., (ASI), a U.N. watchdog group, and as editor of the Accuracy in Media (AIM) Report. Through ASI (www.usasurvival.org), Cliff publishes reports and holds conferences critical of the United Nations. ASI led a national educational campaign about the U.N.'s Law of the Sea Treaty, exposing how the measure affects American sovereignty and access to resources. Cliff's articles on this matter appeared in the Washington Times and Human Events.

A veteran journalist and media critic, Cliff concentrated in journalism and communications at the University of Toledo, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree, and came to Washington through a national journalism program headed by conservative author and journalist M. Stanton Evans. At his college newspaper, Cliff won an award for editorial writing from the Society of Professional Journalists. He can be contacted at cliff.kincaid@aim.org. This article appeared March 12, 2013 in Family Security Matters and is archived at
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/gores-al-jazeera-deal-now-a-major-scandal

While the lawsuit over the sale of Al Gore's Current TV to Al Jazeera is making headlines, a close reading of the legal complaint provides additional evidence that a congressional investigation into the curious transaction is urgently needed and necessary.

The media executive who claims to have arranged the sale says the idea was to make the Terror TV channel "palatable to U.S. lawmakers," a formulation that suggests foreign lobbying on Capitol Hill in order to protect the $500 million payoff to Gore and other owners and investors in Current TV.

The suit says that media executive John Terenzio also proposed smoothing things over with "pro-Israel factions, cable operators and, most importantly, the American public."

The other controversial aspect of the deal, as noted by Fox News contributor Lisa Daftari, is that "Al Jazeera America" has announced plans for bureaus in eight cities, including Detroit, Michigan, and that "Detroit, Michigan is a large ex-pat community of Muslim-Americans where [Jihadist] sleeper cells have been detected."

Detroit has been called the Arab capital of North America.

Because of the danger of inciting Arabs and Muslims into anti-American violence, Accuracy in Media has called on the House Homeland Security Committee, under the chairmanship of Texas Republican Michael McCaul, to investigate the sale and look at the evidence that the channel is a foreign terrorist entity that can be outlawed on U.S. soil. He has refused to do so.

The Al Gore lawsuit constitutes another reason why Congress has to investigate. If Al Gore had paid Terenzio for his services, as the suit alleges, it is likely that the nature of the deal and the private discussions that went into it would never have been made public. Now, however, all of this is on the public record and more damaging details, if Gore doesn't settle the lawsuit, will almost certainly come out.

The revelations demonstrate how sensitive the deal was in the first place. Terenzio says one of his objectives was to develop "strategies to overcome Al Jazeera's negative image and make Al Jazeera acceptable to American viewers." Many members of the public associate Al Jazeera with the videos of Osama bin Laden, the architect of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America. Al Jazeera aired those videos, as well as interviews with bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders, and is today still regarded as the voice of the pro-terrorist Muslim Brotherhood.

In short, the plan was for a massive propaganda campaign to play down the channel's ties to al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, and its financing by the pro-Jihadist Arab government of Qatar.

Terenzio says he came up with "Al Jazeera America," a name obviously designed to mask the foreign and Arab nature of the propaganda channel.

The revelations in the suit follow reports that the new channel has been feverishly hiring expensive K Street lobbying firms to stop Congress from investigating the deal, and is hiring dozens of American journalists.

Terenzio says in his lawsuit that he "created a sophisticated PowerPoint presentation" describing the deal and that the structure was "based in large measure on the strategies developed by Terenzio in adapting CCTV [China Central television] for American distribution."

CCTV is the Communist-government funded Chinese state TV channel that has also penetrated the U.S. media market, although in a more limited manner than Al Jazeera.

It appears that Terenzio is an acknowledged expert at getting media access for foreign propaganda channels. His background is quite impressive, as reflected in his official biography. A graduate of the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University, he is described as "a visiting lecturer at the Syracuse University Newhouse School of Public Communications graduate program in Los Angeles, and at the Tsinghua University School of Journalism in Beijing."

In the case of Current TV, his idea was to get Al Jazeera into 40-50 million homes through the acquisition of an existing cable channel, Current TV, an unprecedented development that Terenzio maintains he was not compensated for. It is because of this media coup and the failure of Al Gore and the other owners and investors to pay him for his services that Terenzio has launched his lawsuit demanding at least $5 million in damages.

While the suit proceeds in the courts, the legal questions about the deal provide another opportunity for Congress to exercise oversight and investigate the curious transaction. But the fact that prominent Democrats are involved makes it politically sensitive for Republicans who want to avoid confrontations.

The suit says Terenzio made his presentation to Richard Blum, husband of Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein, and an investor in Current TV. The suit says that Blum and others involved in Current TV were "concerned about the prospect of losing their shirts" and wanted to find a buyer for their little-watched channel.

The suit says that it was believed that Al Gore would find a sale to Al Jazeera "politically unappealing" but that Blum promised to present it to him.

"Plaintiffs are informed and believe that Gore was adamant in his rejection of the proposal to sell his liberal environmentally friendly network to the oil rich Qataris who owned Al Jazeera," it says.

Al Gore apparently changed his mind. Perhaps the $500 million price tag, with $100 million going to him personally, was a factor.

When the sale was announced, Terenzio says he was caught off-guard and that he had not been informed in advance about it, even though he devised the sale and conceived the name "Al Jazeera America." He says Current TV "insiders" concede his role in the transaction.

Jerry Kenney, a critic of Al Jazeera, says, "I have requested a copy of that PowerPoint presentation from his lawyer. I would love to see his game plan of how to make propaganda from a country that denies free speech to its own citizens and possibly provides material support to terrorists, 'palatable' to Congress and the American public."

Kenney says Congress should request a copy of this PowerPoint as well.

The new developments add impetus to the effort by Rep. Tim Murphy for answers as to what the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) did or did not do regarding the deal.

Contact GWY123 at GWY123@aol.com


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TRAINING SYRIAN REBELS TO CONQUER THE GOLAN HEIGHTS AND SHOOT DOWN ISRAELI AIRCRAFT

Posted by Jewish Policy Center, March 13, 2013

No, they don't say it quite like that. But after years of hypocrisy, the Obama administration has admitted that while it declined to arm Syrian rebels directly for fear that weapons would end up in the hands of al-Qaeda forces, it has been quietly vetting and training anti-Assad forces while others provided weapons all around. Now the training is out in the open, and Secretary of State Kerry has pledged $60 million in "non-lethal aid" to the rebels. (Plus $250 million to Egypt, while Israel may take a hit of $150 million from sequestration -- makes you wonder.)

American assistance is supposed to go only to "moderate" rebels, but arms have been flowing freely, paid for by American "allies" Qatar and Saudi Arabia and moving through Turkey. Recently, a source with ties to Israeli intelligence claimed that a supply line has been running from Bosnian extremist groups, outside the control, influence, or even vision of the U.S. and its allies. Libya and al-Qaeda in Iraq have also been conduits for weapons to rebel militias, and last week, 48 Syrian government soldiers and officials were killed in Anbar Province, an al-Qaeda stronghold.

Israel expects to see any and all weapons, including some of the estimated 15,000 surface-to-air missiles the U.S. admits "disappeared" from Libya, aimed in its direction.

More than a year ago, Maj. Gen. Avi Kochavi, chief of IDF Intelligence, warned that al-Qaeda had moved into the buffer zone that separates Israel and Syria, which had been at least nominally in the hands of U.N. peacekeepers since 1974. Last week, Syrian rebel groups captured 21 Filipino peacekeepers from their Golan Heights enclave and caused others to flee into Israel. Croatia announced that it is removing its 100 soldiers, and Israel fears that others may follow. Kochavi said that should Assad fall, the rebels would aim straight at Israel; Syrian rebel groups agree.

It was Israeli intelligence reports that Assad was moving his chemical weapons that first brought American Special Forces to Turkey and Jordan in 2012, hoping to train Syrian rebels to secure the arsenal before Assad or Hezb'allah moved it to Lebanon or used it. The irony of planning to entrust chemical weapons capability to rebels to whom they wouldn't give guns appears to have escaped the Americans.

British papers report that the U.S., Britain, and France are now working together with high-ranking Syrian defectors at the King Abdullah II Special Operations Training Center near Amman. EU guidelines on the Syrian arms embargo allow military training as long as the aim is "the protection of civilians." This is nebulous at best, harking back to "Responsibility to Protect" (R2P), the announced basis of American intervention in Libya. Only this time, we're apparently training Syrians to do the protecting, raising the question of what weapons they will use, since the U.S. doesn't yet admit to providing any.

The Guardian (U.K.) quotes an EU official in Brussels acknowledging, "It's deliberately hazy. When it comes to technical assistance, what it means in practice depends on whom you ask. The Brits and the French, for example, are much more forward leaning than others. The principle is that the assistance should be for the protection of civilians, but as we saw in Libya, that can be interpreted in different ways."

In Libya, "technical assistance" was interpreted by the Western allies to include bombing government assets and permitting militias, including known al-Qaeda militias, to oust Gaddafi and take control of the government's arsenal. The arsenal was then distributed. Some went to Tuareg militias and their al-Qaeda partners, resulting in the war in Mali. Some traveled through Sinai, headed for Hamas in the Gaza Strip. Some went to Syrian rebels. Shortly after Gaddafi's death, Libyan rebel leaders met with Syrian rebels under Turkish auspices and offered them arms. It wasn't a secret; Abdel-Hakim al-Hasidi of the al-Qaeda-related Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIF) was interviewed in Il Sole and the U.K. Telegraph. Throughout 2012, weapons shipments from Libya to Syria via Turkey or Lebanon were openly reported in the press (here and here, for example).

The United States, France, and Britain claim to be training their own Syrian rebel force, either to help overthrow Assad or to help ensure a peaceful transition after he's gone. But there's that pesky weapons question again. Whether the rebels are supposed to kill government soldiers, or be prepared to kill "jihadists" after the war to prevent a jihadist government, with what are they supposed to do it?

Is the U.S. honestly sure our "moderate" rebel friends aren't using the al-Qaeda pipeline on the side? Or are we cynically sure they are? If the former, what makes us believe they will be able to defeat al-Qaeda-related groups after the revolution? And if the latter, what makes us think they will want to?

Israel, not for the first time, will be left to cope with a situation born of the inability of its neighbors to fashion a tolerant society and the failure of the West to understand and protect its interests and its friends.

Shoshana Bryen is Senior Director of The Jewish Policy Center. This article appeared March 13, 2013 in the American Thinker. It is archived at
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2013/03/training_syrian_rebels_ to_conquer_golan_heights_and_shoot_down_israeli_aircraft.html


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OBAMA MEETS WITH PRO-HEZBOLLAH GROUPS AHEAD OF MIDDLE EAST TRIP

Posted by AFSI, March 13, 2013

This article appeared March 12, 2013 and was written by Ryan Mauro who is a fellow with the Clarionproject.org, the founder of WorldThreats.com and a frequent national security analyst for Fox News Channel. He can be contacted at ryanmauro1986@gmail.com. It appeared in Frontpage Magazine and is archived at
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/ryan-mauro/obama-meets-with-pro-hezbollah-groups-ahead-of-mideast-trip/

President Obama's upcoming trip to Israel theatens to be a dangerous one. The Arabs are putting out warnings against any actions recognizing Israel's sovereignty. Even a visit to the Temple Mount, Israel's holiest site, claimed by the Arabs, is framed in countless threats by the Arabs. In preparation for the trip, President Obama has met with a delegation of Jewish leaders. The following report describes President Obama's meeting with Muslim Hezbollah leaders. The background of these leaders does not bode well for the advice they offered. One might rightly ask why "moderate Muslims" weren't consulted. After reading this report, you might want to call the White House and question the President's judgment in consulting with these proponents of the Muslim Brotherhood and Hezbollah who are filled with hatred for Israel: 202-456-1414; 202-456-1111

obama

On Monday, President Obama prepared for his trip to the Middle East by meeting with around 10 Muslim and Arab officials that provided him with "recommendations." The attendees included representatives from the Muslim Public Affairs Council and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, two anti-Israel groups with a record of pro-Hezbollah advocacy. The meeting came four days after his meeting with Jewish leaders.

A joint press release by the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), American Task Force for Palestine, American Federation of Ramallah Palestine and the Arab-American Institute boasted of the meeting. Separately, the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) alerted its supporters that the director of its Washington D.C. office, Haris Tarin, also attended. He was previously thanked by President Obama in a personal phone call for his activism on July 13, 2011. The ADC earlier tried to get President Obama's attention by helping to organize an interfaith "No Blank Check for Israel" rally in the capital near Inauguration Day.

The meeting took place in the Roosevelt Room near the Oval Office and also involved unidentified national security officials and Valerie Jarrett, the senior adviser who was a keynote speaker at the 2009 annual convention of the Islamic Society of North America, a group with Muslim Brotherhood origins. The meeting apparently wasn't all good news for the invitees. The president of ADC, Warren David, complained that President Obama has let down many Arab-Americans with his Middle East policy and said he left with a "bittersweet feeling."

The ADC was founded by the first Arab-American Senator, who praised Hezbollah during its war with Israel in 2006. He also has stated that Zionists were secretly behind the 9/11 attacks. The ADC leadership opposed its designation as a Foreign Terrorist Organization. In 2000, an ADC spokesperson called Hezbollah a "responsible liberation force." The ADC also honored Helen Thomas after she said the Jews in Israel should "get the hell out of Palestine" and go to Poland.

Similarly, MPAC stood against the designations of Hamas and Hezbollah as terrorist groups in a 2003 policy paper. On the other hand, it called Israel a state sponsor of terrorism in 2001. It said that the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon did not qualify as terrorism. In 2006, MPAC explained it was only stating a "highly relevant fact" and did not support the attack. In 1998, MPAC co-founder and senior adviser Maher Hathout said Hezbollah's attacks on armed forces are "legitimate" and the following year, MPAC president Salam al-Marayati said that its attacks on Israeli soldiers are "legitimate resistance."

On 9/11, al-Marayati said that Israel should be considered a suspect. Hathout similarly entertained suggestions of a 9/11 conspiracy. In 2000, Hathout referred to Israel as "butchers" and "an apartheid state" and predicted that the Arab governments would be "flushed down in the cesspools of history of treason" by a "general intifada."

Hathout and his brother, another MPAC co-founder, are disciples of Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood and formerly served in his organization. They continued to promote al-Banna's Islamist preaching in the 1990s. However, Hathout has stated that he opposes the Muslim Brotherhood's power grab in Egypt and that Sharia's penal code is not applicable anymore. He recently expressed a tolerant view of homosexuals. Regardless of what his views on Sharia Law may be, MPAC's record on Israel and Hezbollah is undeniable.

This meeting is the latest entry in the Obama Administration's record of ties to the ADC and MPAC. Kareem Shora, who was appointed to the Department of Homeland Security's Advisory Council and then served as a community engagement liaison for the DHS, was an ADC official since 1999 and was its national executive director.

In September 2009, MPAC celebrated that it participated in a dozen Iftar dinners with government agencies. In 2010, the State Department asked al-Marayati to speak in Europe. The Department of Defense apologized to MPAC in February 2012 for the accidental burning of a Koran in Afghanistan. On February 8, 2012, MPAC, ADC, the Islamic Society of North America and other groups met with the director of the FBI to discuss its counter-terrorism training content. Afterwards, the FBI said it would consider forming a panel with them to help with the review.

The meeting with President Obama to provide policy "recommendations" is unsettling. Were their records even considered? What type of advice are they given to the President, his administration and elected officials? And why aren't more moderate voices being asked for their assistance in combating Islamism, anti-Semitism and the other causes of the ongoing conflict?

Monday's chat shows the influence these groups have had in the past and, most importantly, the influence they will have for the next four years.

Helen Freedman is executive director of Americans For a Safe Israel/AFSI. She can be contacted at afsi@rcn.com.


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"OUTRAGE"

Posted by Arlene Kushner, March 13, 2013

Actually, outrage upon outrage upon outrage. What a day.

Let's start with the coalition formation and Lapid. With all of the concessions Netanyahu had made for him, it was not enough. Lapid wanted Rabbi Shai Piron, second on the Yesh Atid list, to be Minister of Education and Netanyahu wanted Gideon Sa'ar to retain that position.

There were several issues at stake, beyond the matter of which party controlled that important ministry:

Netanyahu was concerned that the yeshivas, which are under the umbrella of the ministry, would not get a fair shake from Yesh Atid; to that end, Bennett, whose party, it seems likely, will control Ministry of Religious Affairs, petitioned for the yeshiva budgets to be moved to its jurisdiction.

Meanwhile, Lapid was going on about how the future of the country depended on control of the Ministry of Education. He's not wrong, and that's just what I'm worried about. What future for the country does this arrogant man have in mind?

Oh, and we should not forget that he had promised Rabbi Piron that, if he joined the Yesh Atid list, he would be Minister of Education. Excuse me? How did he make such a promise?

And so, yes, I found the situation outrageous in several particulars.

The high drama went on over the course of the day.

bibi drama

Needless to say, the prime minister was greatly irked. "Take what you have or leave it!" he reportedly said to Lapid at one point. Calling him "inflexible," he warned, "You're not getting the Ministry of Education."

Reports went out about Netanyahu beginning negotiations with Shas, assuming that Lapid might well be out of the coalition.

Bennett did shuttle diplomacy, trying to bridge the differences and counseling compromise. But from a Habayit Hayehudi source came the quote:

"All hell is breaking loose. Lapid thinks Bibi will fold, but Bibi won't. It's a game of chicken gone wrong."

~~~~~~~~~~

But guess what? Bibi DID fold. And as far as I am concerned, that too is outrageous. It seems to be his MO. Perhaps Shas was holding him up for too much, imagining the coalition would depend on them. Perhaps Netanyahu was beside himself because he had no government, time was almost up, and Obama was coming. Perhaps there are compromises in other areas that are not yet clear.

Perhaps. Perhaps. But dearly do I wish the prime minister had not caved before Lapid. I don't like what I see coming down the road with him.

What seems to be the case is that there will be 68 mandates in the coalition, with Mofaz not included. All agreements are not finalized yet, and so at this point there is little more to report. A government will be announced soon enough and particulars will become clear.

~~~~~~~~~~

One of the things we apparently do know now is that MK Uri Ariel (Habayit Hayehudi) will be Minister of Housing, which is most welcome information. (There indeed will be some things to celebrate in the new coalition.)

serry.jpg

But here's the outrage: Robert Serry, a UN envoy, and really bad news, publicly made a statement about how regrettable this was, for it would mean more housing in Judea and Samaria and cause Israel international condemnation.

Someone asked his opinion? Would he do this with any other sovereign nation? MK Ariel's assumption is that Serry made this statement before ministry assignments were announced in hopes of reversing the situation.

~~~~~~~~~~

And this is even more outrageous, by far:

Obama, during his visit here, will be addressing students in the International Convention Center (Binyanei Ha'uma) in Jerusalem. Students from every university in Israel were invited, except from Ariel University.

Why? Clearly because Ariel, a very fine university and fully accredited, is -- shock and horrors! -- over the Green Line.

MK Yoni Chetboun (Habayit Hayehudi) met with students from the university, who expressed their anger, and then wrote a letter of protest to US Ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro.

If the Embassy action on behalf of the president is not reversed, Ariel students intend to go into Jerusalem and protest outside during Obama's talk.

~~~~~~~~~~

Tzipi Livni, who has been pegged by Netanyahu to do negotiations with the PA, spoke yesterday at the Herzliya Conference. She said:

It is "critical for us to reach a final status agreement" [with the Palestinian Arabs]...

"In the negotiation room we need to stop talking about who has the greater right to be here."

And this, my friends, is probably the greatest outrage of all.

~~~~~~~~~~

Tomorrow is another day.

Contact Arlene Kushner at akushner@netvision.net.il and visit her website: www.ArlenefromIsrael.info


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SOME QUICK THOUGHTS - ALTALENA LIST

Posted by Errol Phillips, March 13, 2013

You really can't believe much of what the Washington Post reports on ... especially Israel

This Moochelle Woman lowers the bar to the floor on Class ! - Absolutely Pathetic. Why don't the Obama's Moochelle's 50th Party and donate the money to the Salvation Army ? It's more than the money .... They haven't a clue or care about the Country. The Beverly Hillbillies have more class than the Obama's.

It was the Politics that made Obama Cancel the Award to Samira Ibrahim . In his heart he wants her to receive the Awards.

Ted Cruz is the real deal ...

The disastrous mistake that Obama is making now is his attempt to engage the "wrong" Republicans. McCain and Graham are not the Leaders of the Republican Party nor are they any part of the Citizens Conservative Movement.

Time to take McCain out to pasture and euthanize him before he does any more damage.

Let's Nationalize Sean Penn and Oliver Stone and confiscate all their assets to help the poor.

Unfortunately, most of our Citizens cannot comprehend that we have a Gangster Government!

Contact Errol Phillips at ep@pinehurst2.com


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UN READIES SYRIAN-SPONSORED RESOLUTION CONDEMNING ISRAEL FOR "VIOLATING HUMAN RIGHTS IN THE GOLAN"; UN WATCH TAKES THE FLOOR

Posted by UN Watch, March 13, 2013

Surreal UN text ignores mass atrocities of Assad regime, demands Israel hand control of Golan to merciless Syrian army

At the UN Human Rights Council on Friday, Syria accused Israel of violating human rights of children in the Golan, while diplomats met in another chamber on the same day to discuss a Syrian-drafted resolution, to be adopted next week, entitled "Human Rights in the Occupied Syrian Golan." There will be five other resolutions targeting Israel, and about the same number on the rest of the world combined.

While this year Syria did not officially present the text, its delegate sat on the dais next to his Pakistani colleague who chaired the session on behalf of the Islamic group. Not a single diplomat called out the sheer lunacy of the exercise. Rather, the EU commented that it was "committed to the protection of all, including those in the occupied Golan." It was willing to "constructively engage on the text," even as it noted that its proposals last year were not implemented. Egypt said it aligned itself with the Islamic group.

Later in the day, UN Watch had occasion to take the floor in the plenary:

Testimony by executive director Hillel Neuer delivered before the UN Human Rights Council plenary, March 8, 2013.

Mr. President,

This Council is charged with promoting and protecting the guarantees enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Today we ask: is the Council fulfilling its mission?

Let us consider the most basic right: the right to life.

As we heard this week from Amnesty International, Saudi Arabia is preparing imminently to execute seven alleged child offenders including Sarhan Al Mashayekh—who was also sentenced to be crucified over three days. Why is the Council refusing to address this in any resolution, urgent session, or even debate? [Ed. note: the Saudis executed them today by firing squad.]

Three other countries known to execute juvenile offenders are Yemen, Sudan and Iran—yet none of these situations is being addressed by any resolution.

And while there is a resolution on Iran, it is silent on child executions—and indeed the text is devoid of any documentation whatsoever of the regime's other massive abuses, including against women, religious and ethnic minorities, and dissidents.

Finally, the Council must do far more about the thousands of children subjected to violence and death in Syria.

Now, today we just heard from the Syrian representative about human rights in the Golan Heights. This was a transparent attempt to change the subject from the dire, catastrophic human rights situation in Syria.

Sadly, this has been going on for decades. The United Nations has allowed Syria to present itself as a champion of human rights.

Indeed, a resolution was circulated today—presented by Syria—the same one that has been adopted each year by this Council, on purported human rights violations in the Golan Heights.

This text embodies all that is wrong with giving Syria a free pass. Year after year, the UN enabled Syria to portray itself as a champion of human rights.

- While Hafez al-Assad was murdering 20,000 people in Hama, in 1982, Syria was sitting here, as an elected member of the human rights commission. Two years later, it was reelected.

- A year and a half ago, Syria was elected to two human rights committees of UNESCO.

- A few weeks ago, Syria was elected Rapporteur of the decolonization committee dealing with human rights.

Mr. President,

Let us be clear: the situation in Syria today was allowed to develop, and the Syrian regime was allowed to remain in power, in part because the United Nations granted false legitimacy to this murderous regime.

Thank you, Mr. President.

Contact UN Watch at briefing@unwatch.org


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HOW "MISS PIGGY" BECAME A BEAR...AND YASSER ARAFAT BECAME A "PALESTINIAN"

Posted by Roberta Dzubow, March 13, 2013

"The Muppets", a popular children's program, has an assortment of wonderful puppet characters. One of the regulars on the show, "Miss Piggy," with her well-coiffed hair, meticulous dressing, and distinctive voice, is known and beloved by viewers around the globe. When "The Muppets" was to be broadcast in Arabic on Egyptian television, however, "Miss Piggy" presented the producers there with two unique problems.

First, her name ('Piggy') cannot be pronounced by speakers of Arabic, as the Arabic language does not have a 'P' sound. For foreign words with the letter 'P', the sounds 'F' or 'B' are used in its place. The result is that "Piggy", for Arabic speakers, becomes either "Figgy" or "Biggy". The Egyptian broadcasters went with "Biggy".

Second, there is the matter of her species. The religion of Islam harbors an intractable loathing for pigs. In fact even in the western world, in deference to the Muslim objection to all things pig, banks in England have been forced to stop providing 'piggy banks' as promotional gifts, and public schools are banned from serving traditional English lunches featuring pork. In the US, some supermarkets have "pork free lines" to accommodate Muslim checkers, and customers buying bacon, ham, pork chops or lard must go to other check-out counters. Muslim Egypt could not feature a likeable character who was a pig.

Saudi Arabia solved this problem by banning poor Miss Piggy altogether. The Egyptians, however, came up with something more inventive: they declared that "Biggy" (as they called her) was... a bear. So rather than having to call her al-Hanzira Biggy ("Biggy the Sow"), they named her al-Dibba Biggy -- "Biggy-the-She-Bear". In Egypt, a country with over 80 million people (but virtually no pigs), thousands of children may well believe the pink, snout-nosed muppet is an image of a bear.

This creative license with identity, in the Arab world, isn't limited to puppet characters of an inconvenient species. The same semantic sleight-of-hand has also been done, to more serious effect, in creating a new identity for a nationality that has always (up until very recently) simply been called "Arab".

The designation "Palestinian" creates the same initial problem for speakers of Arabic that "Miss Piggy" does: as there is no 'P' sound in Arabic, Arabs would never have named themselves "Palestinians". This name has, in fact, referred to the Jews--from all the way back to the time the Romans quashed Jewish independence in 63 BCE and renamed the area in order to obscure its Jewish origins. The Romans never succeeded, however, in breaking the connection between the Jews and their ancestral land.

There are many examples throughout history of the name "Palestinian" referring to the Jewish inhabitants of the disenfranchised Jewish State of Israel/Judea. Jewish soldiers who fought alongside the British during World War II were called "The Palestine Brigade". The "Palestine Post" (now "The Jerusalem Post"), the "Palestine Electric Company" (now the "Israel Electric Company") the "Palestine Philharmonic" (now the "Israel Philharmonic"), the "Bank of Palestine" (now "Bank Hapoelim") are all evidence of the Jewish identification with their historical name.

 

In 1967, however, Yasser Arafat -- having learned a thing or two at the world's premier training ground for propaganda, Patrice Lumumba University in Moscow -- co-opted the name 'Palestinian' in order to claim the title for Arabs, regardless of whether they came from Syria, Lebanon, Jordan... or even, like Arafat himself, Egypt.

It takes a very gullible world to believe that a pig is a bear, and that a nation that hails originally from Arabia has--simply by saying it's so-- replaced the Jewish nation on their land and claimed both land and title as their own.

The article above was written by Roberta E. Dzubow and Alexis J. Worlock. Contact Roberta Dzubow by email at Roberta@adgforum.com or roberta731@comcast.net


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THOUSANDS OF LOCUSTS SWARM OVER ISRAEL, EGYPT — JUST IN TIME FOR PASSOVER

Posted by ACD/EWI, March 14, 2013

The article below was written by Carol Kuruvilla who is an Associate Editor of Huffington Post Religion. Prior to joining The Huffington Post, Carol was a reporter at the New York Daily News covering a range of topics. She started the Religion beat at the Daily News and continues to pursue her passion for religious issues atHuffington Post. This article appeared March 06, 2013 in the New York Daily News and is archived at
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/locusts-swarm-egypt-israel-passover-article-1.1281267

locusts 7n1

A 'plague' of locusts have descended on Egypt and southern Israel this week, arriving with biblical timing just three weeks before Passover.

A giant swarm of locusts was the eighth plague that God unleashed on the Egyptian Pharoah to convince him to let Moses' people go, according to Exodus.

The locusts of the Bible covered "all the ground until it was black" and devoured "everything growing in the fields and the fruit on the trees." This year's attack hasn't been nearly as catastrophic, although damage to crops in the region is a worry.

The grasshopper-like bugs crossed over on east winds from Egypt into Israel on Monday. Nearly 2,000 acres of desert were covered overnight, officials said. Israeli authorities sprayed pesticides over farming fields in the early morning, trapping the locusts on the ground before the dew could dry on their wings.

locusys7n2

Miriam Freund, director of plant protection in the Agriculture Ministry, called it a "medium-sized swarm." Still, "just because they aren't many doesn't mean we are ignoring them," a spokeswoman for the Agriculture Ministry told The Associated Press.

locusts7n7

The Israeli ministry set up an emergency hotline and asked Israelis to be vigilant in reporting locust sightings.

locusts7n4

Despite the precautions, some Israeli farmers are worried that the locusts might have a devastating effect on their crops this year.

locusts7n3

"(The locusts) may not have ruined Pharaoh, but they could ruin us," Tzachi Rimon, a farmer, told Israel's Channel 10 TV.

locust7n6

Egypt's state news agency MENA said more than 17,000 locusts were exterminated in an area of more than 84,000 acres. However, no significant losses were reported in that country.

Caption Text

By Wednesday, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization predicts that additional swarms will be directed away from Israel and Jodran due to a shift in wind direction.

The last major locust outbreak in the region happened in 2004.

Some Israeli bloggers have taken a light-hearted, yet nutritious, approach to this year's invasion. The critters are apparently kosher. A blog on the Jerusalem Post suggests a couple of ways to fry and eat the creepy crawlers. Some local chefs have incorporated them onto their menus.

"Often they're killed in boiling water, in the stove, or the freezer," Rabbi Dr. Ari Zivotofsky told The Jerusalem Post. "Traditionally they were caught, or more accurately rounded up when they were stationary on the ground in the cool desert night. Those who are used to eating them think they taste really good."

Adventurous eaters can also take a page out of John the Baptist's book. According to the Bible, the saint used wild honey to sweeten the crunchy taste of locust.

Rachel Ehrenberg is the director of the New York-based American Center for Democracy. She is author of "Funding Evil, How Terrorism Is Financed." This article appeared in theNew York Daily News and is archived at
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/locusts-swarm-egypt-israel-passover-article-1.1281267


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FROM OUR GREAT FRIEND AND A REAL AMERICAN PATRIOT — MIKE HUCKABEE ADDRESSING BARACK OBAMA

Posted by Israel Commentary, March 14, 2013

Well, first let me say thanks for the wonderful frank reminder of Gush Katif. (a group of Israeli communities in the Gaza Strip deliberately destroyed by Arik Sharon while giving all of Gaza to the Arabs in a self-serving gesture of insanity for which Sharon was visited with a devastating stroke and now remains maintained, for some questionable reason, in a permanent vegetative state — jsk)

It has been a delight getting to share a fellowship with you, to share a mutual passion with you, for the protection of the security of Israel. And I was asked earlier, "Why would a Goy, a Christian, be interested in Israel?" Sometimes I feel that my passion for the goodness of Israel, maybe exceeds even my Jewish friends — and I tell people, I say, "you have to understand — It is entirely possible to be Jewish and not have a complete relationship to Christians — but it is impossible to be Christian and not have a complete relationship with Judaism — because it is in fact the foundation upon which every Christian believes and every Christian understands — that Israel is G-d's Chosen Land! And we recognize that, and respect it and understand that the Nations Who Bless Israel Will Be Blessed And Those Who Curse Israel Will Be Cursed!

My first trip to Israel was exactly forty years ago this year, when in July 1973, just a couple of months before the Yom Kippur war, I made my first trip to Israel when I was just a teenager. I've been going back to Israel ever since 1973 for 40 years! You know Moses had the children in the wilderness for 40 years. There has got to be some connection there.

When I visited the Gush Katif Museum just a couple of years ago, it was a brutal reminder of what happens when politicians make decisions that don't involve their brains! Because in a way, when you ask people — no, when you demand that people abandon their homes, when you do it because you somehow believe you can trust radical Islamic fascists to keep their word and make nice if you make nice, then it shows a level of naiveté that make Chamberlain look like Churchill.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

It is time we recognize you don't negotiate with people who do not believe you have a right to exist—much less live next to you! I cannot understand why the Secretary of State visited Egypt and handed over a check of $250,000,000 when we are closing the White House to tours? That makes no sense at all! Why did he give F16's and Abram tanks to a country whose elected President is associated with a terrorist organization who has openly and publicly called Jews bloodsuckers and the descendants of apes and pigs?

Why would you reward someone with that kind of behavior? And even in his Senate confirmation hearing, Mr. John Kerry said they will be held accountable. I got to wondering, "Is accountability being given F16's, tanks and $250 million?"

Dear Mr. Secretary please hold me accountable 'cause I'd like $250,000,000. And if that's what it takes, to make radical, ridiculous, offensive and inexcusable statements like this, then we should all share in the spoils.

This is absurd!

And now word is that when the President visits Israel, he will not ask the Israeli gov't leaders (because it would be seen as bad form to lecture them although, he's been willing to do it before) — but, he will ask the Israeli people to make sacrifices for peace. If that is the case, I would like to escort him personally to the Gush Katif Museum and say, "Mr. President, the Israelis have made many sacrifices for peace, and show me one sacrifice that the Palestinians have made for peace! I have yet to see it!" I would say, "Mr. President, I believe the Israelis have given and given and given, and so far have received nothing in return!"

And, every trip I make to Israel, I always venture into the Old City. I go into some of the shops where one can purchase a Palestinian map. This past month, in February, I had two hundred people that I took with me, most of whom were Christians, most of them had never been there before. I wanted them to understand what is unique about this situation. And I get one of these maps and I said. "By the way — Open the map up and show me where Israel is." And they opened it up and they didn't see it. And I said, "Interesting isn't it? And somehow, the people of Israel are asked to make peace with a people who even in their published maps refuse to acknowledge even so much as the existence of the Nation of Israel?"

The Gush Katif Museum is a stark reminder that sometimes things happen in our past that we need to commemorate — not because they were pleasant, but because they are sobering reminders of the mistakes that have been made in the past.

And so, I say tonight that I wish that the President — I wish he would be accompanied by as many of the Israeli officials as is possible — would attend the Gush Katif Museum while he's there and watch those films, and talk to the people like Rivka (Rivka Goldschmidt) who is here tonight, who personally experienced it. I wish that, that could happen. So, that the next time he suggests that the Israelis stop building bedrooms for their children, in the Land that is theirs, that instead, he would spend his time not asking the Israelis to stop building bedrooms, but that he would demand that the Iranians stop building bombs pointing at Israel and the rest of the free world!

We would never tolerate in our own cities what the people of Sderot have been asked to tolerate. And I have been to Sderot, and I have seen the thousands of Katyusha rockets stacked up behind the Police Station. I stood there with Dov Hikind and Joe Frager and Paul Brody and others who are in this room tonight, and I can tell you that it is an absolute sobering experience to understand that people have fear every day that a Katyusha rocket would land on their children's bedroom, land in the park where they play, in the schools they attend, in the Synagogues where they worship. And we would not tolerate that!

And I'll ask Americans, "How many Katyusha rockets fired from Toronto into Buffalo, NY, do you think it would take before Americans would demand that we do something and absolutely stop it? Five thousand? Four Thousand? Three Thousand? One hundred? NO! One Katyusha rocket." We would demand it STOP! And the Israeli's have been asked to let it go after thousands of them? I say NO! One is enough. Thousands are too many, and it's time for the Israeli's to quit apologizing to the world and to say "We have a right for the secure and safe homeland — Not just for us, but for those grandchildren and great grandchildren of our descendants and who come after us — a place that is a safe place, a haven."

And, that's why I believe with all my heart, that when the President goes to Israel, it is important that the American people give him the message — rather than him give Israelis a message! And the message is Mr. President, Americans stand with Israel because they are a mirror image of our freedom and our democracy in this country. And, we suggest that before you make any demands of the Israeli's to give anything, you set down and look the Palestinians in the face and ask them 'What have they given up?' And tell them, as I would love to do, if I was making that trip as the Chief Executive.

Rather than say to the Israeli's, "Stop Building in Judea and Samaria," I would suggest that YOU BUILD AS RAPIDLY AS YOU CAN, AND AS MUCH AS YOU CAN, AND AS MANY HOUSES AS YOU CAN! And tell the Palestinians that if they don't like that, the way they can fix it is to sit at the peace table and sign an agreement that they recognize Israel's right to exist, within the borders that G-d gave them and to exist with safety and security!

That my friend will probably never happen!

So I say, "POUR THE CONCRETE, BUILD THE HOUSES AND LET ISRAEL BE STRONG!"

That is the message we need to give to the world!

Thank you and G-d Bless You!

Contact Israel Commentary at israelcommentary@comcast.net. This article appeared March 9, 2013 in Israel Commentary and is archived at
http://israel-commentary.org/?p=6102


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SUPERSKANK

Posted by Steven Plaut, March 14, 2013

The Israeli Left continues its metamorphosis from idiocy to treason.

Noa Shaindlinger, an Israeli PhD student at the University of Toronto (Near and Middle East Civilizations), is one of the most openly treasonous Israeli Far Leftists. This week she is being discussed in the media thanks to her publishing a call for celebration when two Israeli chopper pilots were killed in an accident (http://www.algemeiner.com/2013/03/13/israel-peace-activist-and-hamas-celebrate-death-of-israeli-pilots/noa-shaindlinger/).

The two pilots were superheroes of the Jewish people. Shaindlinger is superscum. She is a regular writer for this anti-Israel web site financed by European anti-Semites: http://972mag.com/?s=shaindlinger.

As it turns out, the very same Shaindlinger has long been a regular stalwart on the "ALEF" chat list that continues to operate under the auspices of the University of Haifa. The "ALEF" list is a forum for disseminating anti-Israel and anti-Semitic materials, and its "members" include jihadniks, Neo-Nazis, and other anti-Semites.

Here are some citations from that list, after which is the contact information for the President of the University of Haifa. You might want to send him your comments about all this.

An ALEF Sampling of Noa Shaindlinger:

ALEF List is used as a vehicle to smear an Israeli army officer and attempt to get him targeted for violent "retaliation" by defaming him as a murderer - posted on ALEF on 09 December 2012

From: "Noa Shaindlinger"
To: "1 in our name" ,
"alef@list.haifa.ac.il"

[alef] Activists expose the name of the soldier who killed Mustafa Tamimi

According to the IOF, investigation is still ongoing. The name of the soldier who shot and killed Tamimi in cold blood exactly a year ago has been kept a secret by the army. A group of Israeli solidarity activists managed to identify him and launched a social network campaign calling for accountability.

[link to website naming soldier included in the original message not re-posted by Isracampus]

This Hatred is Disseminated via the University of Haifa

For Noa Shaindlinger (mhfan25@yahoo.com) Israel does not exist any more, only "Israel" - posted on ALEF on 03 June 2009

Petition: UC Davis summer abroad in "Israel"

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/petition/583176589

This Hatred is Disseminated via theUniversity of Haifa

Noa Shaindlinger (mhfan25@yahoo.com) posted this on ALEF on 16 March 2009

Re: [alef] Israeli peace movement The entire "peace" discourse is misleading. "Peace" is what the colonizer want - no resistance, pacification of the colonized and final subjugation. Hence pax romana and pax americana: all is peaceful at the other end of the gun.The Zionist "peace" movements are part and parcel of the hegemonic apartheid regime. In fact, the existence of the "peace" and "humanitarianism" discourses allow for occupation and suppression to exist and feed into the colonizer's violence ("the most humane and moral army in the world", "humanitarian ceasefire" and other gems)."Peace" should never be the ultimate goal - it's resistance. Resistance to occupation, to expulsions, land seizures. Resistance to racist state apparatus everywhere, to hegemony and domination, to muzzling of dissenting voices, to cultural appropriation, to economic marginalization and to imperial intervention. Resistance should be the basis of transnational (rather than international) anticolonial movements, and not naive reiteration of John Lennon's "give peace a chance". We just can't afford to.

This Hatred is Disseminated via the University of Haifa

Noa Shaindlinger posted this on ALEF on 23 November 2008

Of course the majority of Zionists would be satisfied with the two state solution as it legitimizes their conquest and depopulation of Palestine. The majority of Palestinians are forced into submission and acceptance of that "solution" by their Zionists occupiers, their US ally and the collaborative Abbas regime. But that so called solution leaves out the majority of Palestinian - those in the refugee camps, the diasporas and those living inside the Zionist state as second class citizens. The one state solution (in which Israel ceases to exist) isn't something concocted by a "bunch of confused intellectuals", but is common sense, compliance with international law and human sense of justice.
Noa

This Hatred is Disseminated via the University of Haifa

Taken from http://www.isracampus.org.il/ALEF%20Watch.htm

To tell the president of Haifa University what you think of all this, contact:
President of the University of Haifa Mr. Amos Shapira

Tel: 972-4-8240101
Fax: 972-4-8288110
E-mail: a.shapira@univ.haifa.ac.il

Steven Plaut is an American-born Israeli associate professor of Business Administration at the University of Haifa and a writer. Contact him by e-mail at splaut@univ.haifa.ac.il


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NEW YORK TIMES

Posted by Yoram Fisher, March 14, 2013

New York Times articles are not attacking the "occupation" anymore, but the very idea of a Jewish state.

The New York Times has become the official paper of Israel's Western would-be eradicators.

Joseph Levine's latest oped argued that Israel has no right to exist and that history should be reversed: "I conclude, then, that the very idea of a Jewish state is undemocratic, a violation of the self-determination rights of its non-Jewish citizens, and therefore morally problematic". The New York Times' relentless attacks could well play out in ways that indeed attempt to put an end to Israeli sovereignty.

According to Levine's racist belief, "native species" originate in a certain place and that is where they "belong." Hence, Israel's "colonization" threatens the "original" Arab environment. This is pure and simple Nazism. The New York Times' Israel-bashers use a style similar to the language used by anti-Semites the world over: Israel is inferior and must not enjoy the rights accorded to other peoples.

TheNew York Times articles are not attacking the "occupation" anymore, but the very idea of a Jewish state. The Times' incitement against Zionism is compulsive, full of half-baked truths and ill-disguised hysteria. The Times just hosted an oped by Rashid Khalidi, the PLO supporter and anti-Zionist militant from Columbia University. In his latest column, he charges Israel of being an alien, settler entity, comparing its existence to South Africa's apartheid.

At theTimes there are also those who do not advocate eradicating Israel, but work to remove any shred of justification for supporting it by following some elementary rules: promoting the myth of Palestinian "moderation", whitewashing terror groups and demonizing the "settlers".

As in the 1930's, when theNew York Times downplayed the Nazi genocide of European Jews in order to avoid being seen as a "Jewish" newspaper, today Thomas Friedman, Roger Cohen (the dupe of Tehran) and Nicolas Kristof are the Jewish journalists who have been leading the charge in demonizing Israel and unabashedly praising the "Arab Spring" and Iran's "pragmatism".

Thomas Friedman plays a major role in shaping Obama's plan for Israel's return to the pre-1967 armistice line, which the late Abba Eban dubbed the "Auschwitz borders". It was Friedman who wrote that the White House is "disgusted" with Israeli interlocutors. The famous Jewish columnist has always been a militant suporter of the Palestinian cause. According to the US columnist, Israeli settlers are a "cancer for the Jewish people" and those who "collaborate" in the building of settlements are "enemies of peace" and "enemies of America's national interest", no less.

"What Israeli settlers and Palestinian suicide bombers have in common is that they are each pushing for the maximum use of force against the other side", he wrote after the killing of young grade-schooler Kobi Mandell. For Friedman, building a home on disputed territory is apparently the moral equivalent of stoning Jews - even school age ones - to death. To equate the two, as Friedman always does, is to create moral mush. At age fourteen, Kobi was immobilized and stoned to death as was his friend, his body hidden in a cave. The terrorists soaked their hands in the boy's blood and smeared the walls of the cave with it.

Friedman also crossed the Rubicon when he opined that "Jewish money" (note not Israeli money) caused the standing ovations Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, gave the Prime Minister of Israel, Binyamin Netanyahu.

As far back as 1929, during the Arab riots, the local Timescorrespondent Joseph Levy boasted that he was a committed anti-Zionist. Eighty years later, when the Fogels were slaughtered in Itamar, theNew York Times chose not to cover that event on the front page, nor to comment it.

And how to forget the "Pharisees on the Potomac" headline by New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd on what she considers to be the moral hypocrisy of Republican Party?

Every morning, opening theNew York Times, the reader finds very accurate stuff about the Holocaust, the most extreme demonstration of Jewish powerlessness, (ignored and put on the back pages of theTimes while it was taking place) along with opeds like that of Peter Beinart titled "To Save Israel, Boycott the Settlements".

While remembering the death of 6.000.000 Jews, the New York

Times suggests collective punishment for 600.000 living Jews. Nothing is more likely to stimulate violence against "the settlers" than such Holocaust vacuity.

While remembering the death of 6.000.000 Jews, the New York Times suggests collective punishment for 600.000 living Jews.

TheNew York Times' avid PLO supporters and propagandists are the descendamts of one of the most celebrated journalists of his time, the firstNew York Times Pulitzer Prize winner, Walter Duranty, who in the thirties fed the American public instantly-rewritten history of the famine in the Ukraine. By persuading the world that Stalin's version of events was true, Duranty's fairy tales cost thousands,if not millions,of lives.

TheTimes consistently ignores the genocidal anti-Semitism that governs Hamas and Hizbullah, described therein as "militant" groups concerned with the social welfare of Palestinians and Lebanese. The Times' articles from Jenin, Nablus, Tulkarem and Bethlehem during the Second Intifada could have been written about the Taliban in the Afghan caves. These depicted the Palestinian terrorists as freedom fighters meeting their noble fate.

That favorable press in the New York Times encourages the Arabs to believe they can get away with murder is a given. By reinforcing the Islamic claim that those who died on the Temple Mount were martyred defenders of holy places, mowed down by savage, unprovoked Israeli authorities, the New York Times also helped inflame millions of Muslims against Israel. By calling the area "Muslim compound" and omitting any mention of the Temple Mount or its Jewish connection, the New York Times convinced the world that Ariel Sharon had intruded upon a site holy solely to Islam, helping to trigger the second Intifada.

As the latest Levine's oped shows, the New York Times is a crypto-Nazi publication whose message is, plain and simple, "Jews, go home, again". There is a Klezmer festival in Krakow this year.

Contact Yoram Fisher at yoramski@yahoo.com


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IRAN NUKE PROGRESS SLOW BUT STEADY, ASSUMES STRIKE 'NOT LIKELY'

Posted by Arutz Sheva, March 14, 2013

Iran is making slow but steady progress in its nuclear development program says Israel's military intelligence chief, with Tehran assuming a military strike on its facilities is "not likely."

The effort to move its nuclear technology forward is "advancing slower than Iran had hoped, but it is progressing," Military Intelligence chief Major-General Aviv Kochavi told the Herzliya Conference on Thursday.

"Iran will continue with its nuclear program, because it assumes the likelihood of a strike is not high," he added.

Despite growing economic pressure at home due to tightened sanctions from the international community, Iran appears determined to push ahead with its uranium enrichment activities, Kochavi said.

Unemployment in the Islamic Republic has skyrocketed over the past year, and the country is facing a 60 percent inflation rate. Vehicle manufacturing has dropped by 60 percent, and oil exports have been cut in half, he told policy makers at the annual conference.

"I believe the weight from the sanctions is becoming an increasingly decisive element in the process of decision making in Iran, but it has not yet caused them to change their [nuclear development] policy," he observed.

"We believe Iran will continue to develop its nuclear program and intelligently deal with pressure from the street and the international community," Kochavi said, adding that Iran will not offer any major concessions in talks with the international community this year.

"The regime believes there is not a high probability for an attack on it," he explained.

Chana Ya'ar is a columnist for Arutz-7 (www.think-israel.org).


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EXCLUSIVE: IRAN STEPS UP WEAPONS LIFELINE TO ASSAD

Posted by Daily Alert, March 14, 2013

The article below was written by Louis Charbonneau who is a writer and journalist who, after writing some radio plays at the end of the 1940s, took an MA at the University of Detroit and taught there for some years before beginning to publish sf novels, with No Place on Earth (1958), about a coercive Dystopia. He produced sf for several years thereafter, publishing: Corpus Earthling (1960), about invading telepathic Martian parasites who eventually pass on their ESP powers to mankind; - See more at:
http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/charbonneau_louis#sthash.I9vfPZXS.dpuf. This article appeared March 14, 2013 in Reuters and is archived at
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/14/us-syria-crisis-iran-idUSBRE92D05U20130314

damascus

Iran has significantly stepped up military support to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad in recent months, solidifying its position alongside Russia as the government's lifeline in an increasingly sectarian civil war, Western diplomats said.

Iranian weapons continue to pour into Syria from Iraq but also increasingly along other routes, including via Turkey and Lebanon, in violation of a U.N. arms embargo on Iran, Western officials told Reuters on condition of anonymity. Iraqi and Turkish officials denied the allegations.

Iran's acceleration of support for Assad suggests the Syrian war is entering a new phase in which Iran may be trying to end the battlefield stalemate by redoubling its commitment to Assad and offering Syria's increasingly isolated government a crucial lifeline, the envoys said.

It also highlights the growing sectarian nature of the conflict, diplomats say, with Iranian arms flowing to the Shi'ite militant group Hezbollah. That group is increasingly active on the ground in Syria in support of Assad's forces, envoys say.

The Syrian conflict started out two years ago as a pro-democracy movement. Some 70,000 people have been killed and more than 1 million refugees have fled the violence.

A Western intelligence report seen by Reuters in September said Iran was using civilian aircraft to fly military personnel and large quantities of weapons across Iraqi airspace to aid Assad. Iraq denied that report but later made a point of inspecting an Iran-bound flight that it said had no arms on board.

Much of the weaponry going to Syria now, diplomats say, continues to be shipped to Iran through Iraqi airspace and overland through Iraq, despite Baghdad's repeated promises to put a stop to Iranian arms supplies to Assad in violation of a U.N. arms embargo on Tehran over its nuclear program.

"The Iranians really are supporting massively the regime," a senior Western diplomat said this week. "They have been increasing their support for the last three, four months through Iraq's airspace and now trucks. And the Iraqis really are looking the other way."

"They (Iran) are playing now a crucial role," the senior diplomat said, adding that Hezbollah was "hardly hiding the support it's giving to the (Syrian) regime."

He added that the Syrian civil war was becoming "more and more sectarian," with Sunnis - an increasing number of whom come from Iraq - battling Shi'ites and members of Assad's Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shi'ite Islam.

Ali al-Moussawi, Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's media adviser, strongly denied the allegations, saying on Wednesday: "No, such a thing never happened. Weapons did not and will not be transferred from Iran to Syria through Iraq, whether by land or by air."

Russia, diplomats said, also remained a key arms supplier for Assad. Unlike Iran, neither Syria nor Russia is subject to a U.N. ban on arms trade and are therefore not in violation of any U.N. rules when conducting weapons commerce. But accepting Iranian arms would be a violation of the U.N. Iran sanctions.

Assad's ally Russia criticizes U.S., European and Gulf Arab governments for their aid to Syrian rebels seeking to topple Assad.

Russia has said repeatedly that its military support for Syria includes anti-missile air defense systems but no attack weapons such as helicopters.

Moscow says it is not wedded to Assad but that the rebels and government should talk and Assad's departure should not be a condition for a deal as the opposition and its supporters insist. Along with China, it has used its Security Council veto to block punitive U.N. measures against Syria's government.

ARMS SUPPLIES VIA TURKEY AND LEBANON?

Alireza Miryousefi, spokesman for Iran's U.N. mission, responded to a request for a comment by saying, "We believe Syria does not need any military help from Iran."

"Unfortunately the situation in Syria and the whole Middle East region is becoming more and more delicate and risky because of foreign interference and funneling of arms to the extremist groups," he said, repeating that Tehran wanted to end the conflict through dialogue between the government and opposition.

Syria's U.N. ambassador, Bashar Ja'afari, did not respond immediately to a request for comment.

The diplomats cited by Reuters made clear that the principal delivery route for arms to Syria still went through Iraq, despite the existence of alternative supply channels such as Turkish airspace. They also said that Iran Air and Mahan Air were well-known violators of the Iranian arms embargo.

Iran Air and Mahan Air were both mentioned in the intelligence report on Iranian arms shipments to Syria seen by Reuters in September. The U.S. Treasury Department has blacklisted Iran Air, Mahan Air and Yas Air for supporting the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.

One Western diplomat cited intelligence reports from his country that a new avenue for sending arms to Syria went on occasion through Turkish airspace to Beirut and from there to Syria by truck. There was no suggestion, he said, that Turkish officials were aware of the illicit arms shipments.

Once in Syria, he said, the arms were distributed to government forces and allied militia, including Hezbollah.

"The equipment being transferred by both companies (Iran and Mahan Air) ... ranges from communications equipment to light arms and advanced strategic weapons, some of which are being used devastatingly by Hezbollah and the Syrian regime against the Syrian people," said the Western intelligence report.

"The more sophisticated gear includes parts for various hardware such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), shore-to-sea missiles and surface-to-surface ballistic missiles (SSMs)," the report said. "Other weapons are being used by Syrian security forces, pro-Assad shabbiha militiamen, and Lebanese Hezbollah."

There are about 5 tons of arms per flight, which are occurring on a near weekly basis, hidden in the bottom of the planes' fuselages, the report said, adding that arms cargo was removed separately after civilian cargo was unloaded.

Other Western officials confirmed the findings in the report.

A Turkish diplomatic source denied the allegation. "This is a very sensitive matter for Turkey, and we are very certain that this is baseless," the source told Reuters.

Turkey has intercepted Iranian arms shipments in the past and reported them to the U.N. Security Council's sanctions committee. Ankara's aggressive campaign to stamp out Iranian arms smuggling via its airspace, Western diplomats say, was what led Iran to begin using Iraqi airspace instead.

Lebanon's U.N. ambassador, Nawaf Salam, said he was not in a position to comment. An official at Beirut's airport who requested anonymity rejected the allegations of clandestine Iranian shipments going to Syria via Beirut airport.

Lebanon has had a complicated relationship with neighboring Syria. Its population is deeply divided over the conflict. U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon last week urged Lebanon, which is hosting hundreds of thousands of Syrian refugees, to remain neutral.

Contact Daily Alert at dailyalert@list-dailyalert.org


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POST PASSOVER BLUES

Posted by Ted Roberts, March 14, 2013

I GOT THE POST-PASSOVER LEFTOVER BLUES

Let all who are hungry come and eat (but not three times). So says the Haggadah. But even more personally significant, my wife disagrees with that implication of a single meal. "Let all who are hungry come and eat - for a week." That's her motto. She defies the Haggadah, itself. Sacrilegious, I say. Naturally, we had company that first Seder night. Many hungry friends - men, women and children. A super mitzvah because these guys were the kind who make the oriental buffet owner quake with fear when they waddle through the door. If feeding friends at the Pesach table is a 5-point mitzvah, feeding the wolf pack we entertained is hundreds of credits on the scorecard upstairs.

And why should a child newly weaned scoop up the last rolled cabbage? (He'd have been equally happy with a slab of matzo.) Spare the dry matzo and spoil the child, it says in Proverbs. It is a horrible child-raising technique to spoil a kid with rolled cabbage lovingly cooked in raisiny tomato sauce when the host, himself, has just wolfed down his first piece and is eying the platter for more.

I thought, next year I'll instruct the wife to make more or we won't invite this selfish, spoiled, demanding child. I prefer the latter solution.

Anyhow, we did our duty. And as we cleared the table I smiled to note mounds of leftovers (except for the rolled cabbage basted in that delicious tomato sauce). But still piled up on the platter were many slices of tongue and beside it a small mountain of chopped liver awaiting my fork - not to mention enough soup, wherein matzo balls gaily floated, to feed Tel Aviv. All was not lost. I was guaranteed at least a week of leftover blessings. (Have you ever noticed that like stew it gets more flavorful as it sits? A great culinary mystery.)

But as I enjoy these visions of future feasts, my wife's voice is ringing through the kitchen - something about the Greenbergs, the Levys and her Hadassah chapter coming for supper the next night. "So many leftovers," I vaguely hear. I should be thankful she forgot the Israeli Army, Navy and Air Force.

We've had two Seders - fed twelve hungry Jews (and even two cats), given rolled cabbage treats to kids who don't know matzo balls from cannon balls - and she's planning a THIRD community feed. Even Rabbi Akiva only had two Seder. But we gotta have three.

"What about me?" I plaintively cry. "I love leftovers."

"Oh, you can come, too."

Great. I can imagine with agony what the Levys can do to a platter of tongue (boiled gently at low heat with onions, carrots and pickling spices). I can see them plunging their hungry forks into the tender bosoms of plump, but helpless, rolled cabbages. And salad wilting with fear at a third mob of assailants.

What's left for me? Matzo and peanut butter? Oops, nope can't have that. Well, I guess there's always that three day old chicken soup that by now is thick enough to wax down the furniture. And why not use the matzo balls for our family Post-Passover baseball game down at the playground.

I'll bet you my new illustrated Haggadah ("A pictorial Haggadah for Dummies") that Moses and Miriam and Aaron packed over their leftovers not for a hungry crew of guests, but for a snack - for at least the first week of their 40-year trip. You think there were "kosher for Passover" convenience stores in the Sinai peninsula?

There's a strategy here that the savvy "leftover lover" should always use. Trouble is it only works if you're the Seder superintendent - the conductor, the maestro - like me. You accelerate the epic event - the one we call "the festive meal". YOU DON'T WANT 'EM TO GET TOO HUNGRY - they'll eat you out of house and home. You could even do it first. "Hi Greenbergs, come on in, we're ready for the festive meal." Then later, lay on the ceremony.

Don't gasp - it is not heretical. Nowhere does our humash state the order of events. Only the Haggadah, which is built on tradition. You think the heavens will shake if you have the bitter herb - before the haroseth? So, feed them early. And if you're really a selfish devil, just as they try to spear a second rolled cabbage interrupt with, "Oh dear, I forgot the bitter herbs. Al, here, have the whole root. Put down that rolled cabbage".

Well, maybe you better not try it. It's only my reputation for scholarship that allows this disordered trickery to work..

Contact Ted Roberts at shirlr@hiwaay.net


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OBAMA TRIES NEW TACK WITH ISRAEL.

Posted by GWY123, March 14, 2013

The article below was written by Matt Spetalnick and Jeffrey Heller. Spetalnick is a "White House correspondent who has covered news on four continents for Reuters, from Latin American coups and drug wars to the O.J. Simpson murder trial in Los Angeles to the Balkans conflict to the second Palestinian Intifada to the Iraq war. He has covered George W. Bush and is now covering President Barack Obama." Heller joined Reuters from United Press International in Tel Aviv in 1984 and transferred to London in 1987. He returned to the Middle East in 1992 as a senior sub-editor on the Middle East and Africa desk before taking up a post as correspondent, Jerusalem a year later. He is currently editor-in-charge in the Jerusalem bureau." This article appeared March 14, 2013 in Reuters and is archived at
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/03/14/us-usa-israel-obama-idUSBRE92D06O20130314

Caption Text

After nearly four years of often testy relations with Benjamin Netanyahu, U.S. President Barack Obama is about to try a different tack - going over the head of Israel's prime minister and appealing directly to the Israeli people.

Obama's first presidential visit to Israel next week, while certainly including meetings with Netanyahu, will focus heavily on resetting his relationship with the country's wary public as he seeks to reassure them he is committed to their security and has their interests at heart.

All signs are that Obama hopes the strategy will give him more leverage with the right-wing Netanyahu - politically weakened by January's election in which centrists made surprising gains - to pursue a peaceful resolution with Iran and eventually address the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate.

But it will be no easy task.

Obama faces the challenge of overcoming Israeli suspicions that have lingered since his early days in office when he pressed Netanyahu for a freeze on settlement expansion and launched a short-lived outreach to Tehran, Israel's arch-foe.

On top of that, Obama - known for his cool, detached public persona - rarely comes across with the kind of "I feel your pain" diplomacy that Bill Clinton used to charm Israelis and Palestinians alike during his presidency.

Even so, some Middle East experts say Obama may be able to take advantage of an opening to build public confidence in Israel, the first foreign destination of his second term.

His visit comes at a time when U.S. and Israeli strategic concerns seem more closely aligned than they have been in years, with the West's nuclear standoff with Iran at a critical stage and Syria's civil war seen as a threat to regional stability.

"There's no substitute for actually being there," said Dennis Ross, Obama's former Middle East adviser. "It's an opportunity for him to connect with the Israeli psyche."

But there is also the risk of a disconnect.

Many Israelis will be looking to Obama for firmer reassurance of his resolve to do what is deemed necessary, including the use of military force, to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear bomb. Iran denies such ambitions.

The U.S. president does not appear likely, however, to go much further, despite Netanyahu's repeated calls for a stricter U.S. "red line."

Obama, who has insisted he is not bluffing about military action against Iran if all else fails, told American Jewish leaders privately last week he saw little value in extra "chest-beating" just to sound tough, participants said.

The White House believes Israelis have yet to reach a consensus on how to confront Iran, essentially putting on hold, at least for now, Netanyahu's threats of an attack on Tehran's nuclear sites, according to a source familiar with the administration's thinking.

Obama will stress with Netanyahu the need for patience with sanctions and diplomacy, the source said. But U.S. officials also hope a high-profile recommitment to Israel's security can increase public pressure on Netanyahu to avoid aggravating the situation while world powers negotiate with Tehran.

Iran has become the main source of friction in the relationship between Obama and Netanyahu, which Aaron David Miller, a former Middle East negotiator, called the "most dysfunctional" he has ever seen between an American president and Israeli prime minister.

He believes a thaw is still possible, especially if Obama hits the right notes in Israel. "He needs to say to them, 'I understand this is a tough neighborhood and you have a dark history. I'm not trivializing your fears.' This hasn't been adequately communicated by this administration," Miller said.

CHOREOGRAPHED VISIT

Obama's decision to skip Israel in 2009 when he went to Cairo, where he offered a "new beginning" with the Muslim world, remains a sore point with many Israelis and they wonder what took him so long to visit. Obama's Republican predecessor, George W. Bush, also waited until his second term to go there.

"He (Obama) has to speak to the emotions of people because there has been a loss of faith ... in our relations with the United States," said Itay Bar, a student at Ben-Gurion University, where tickets for a Jerusalem speech by Obama were distributed. Bar was speaking on Israel's Army Radio.

Obama's visit is being choreographed to present him as a good friend of Israel. The White House has yet to officially announce the dates, but Israeli media say he will arrive next Wednesday.

Photo opportunities are expected at sites evoking the country's biblical past, its founding Zionist movement and the Holocaust. Obama could also inspect an Iron Dome missile battery, a U.S.-funded system that protected Israel from Hamas rockets during a brief Gaza war in November, Israeli media reports.

But the centerpiece will be Obama's televised speech to university students, reportedly set for Jerusalem's convention center, which an aide said would be the president's chance to "have a conversation with the Israeli people."

To be sure, Obama has no intention of trying to cut Netanyahu out of the picture. With both leaders starting new terms, they may have come to the realization they are stuck with each other - and this is a chance for a new chapter.

Obama's decision to hold off on any new Israeli-Palestinian peace initiative will prevent the thorny issue from dominating the agenda at a time when negotiating prospects are dim and Israelis are more focused on what many see as a looming existential threat from Iran.

Some Israelis are still likely to bristle if Obama publicly challenges them to take "hard steps" for peace, as he told the American Jewish leaders he would.

READY TO TURN THE PAGE?

Netanyahu, who clinched deals on Thursday for a new coalition government, is on the same page with Obama about making a successful show of the president's trip, which will also include a brief visit to the occupied West Bank to meet Palestinian leaders and a final stop in Jordan.

Obama is looking to counter Republican opponents who accused him during the 2012 campaign of "throwing Israel under the bus."

Netanyahu wants to show Israelis, who like their leaders to be assertive with Washington but not on bad terms with it, that he can still do business with Israel's superpower ally.

Netanyahu made no secret of his preference for Republican challenger Mitt Romney before last year's U.S. election, and some Israelis wonder whether Obama may want to settle scores. But Netanyahu was not alone. A poll in October found Israelis preferred Romney by 57 percent to 22 percent.

Nonetheless, many Israelis regard Obama as a solid ally, especially after Washington backed them in the Hamas conflict and staunchly opposed recent Palestinian statehood bids at the United Nations.

Some Israeli lawmakers had called on Obama to address the country's parliament. But the Knesset is renowned for eruptions of heckling and shouting. The White House opted to steer clear.

Contact GWY123 at GWY123@aol.com


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THE LIBYA OBAMA HELPED LIBERATE

Posted by Richard H. Shulman, March 14, 2013

The Obama administration helped Libyan rebels oust Ghadaffi from power, to prevent him from persecuting his people. Pres. Obama referred to "our responsibilities to our fellow human beings," adding that not assisting them "would have been a betrayal of who we are." The rebels more than ousted Ghadaffi. They sodomized and murdered him.

Well known was Islamist participation in the rebellion, but Pres. Obama felt "responsibilities to our fellow human beings." Those Islamists murdered four Americans. Pres. Obama tried (without evidence and contrary to evidence) to blame the attack on a film that offended Muslims.

In this Libya, resulting partlly from Obama's responsibilities to our fellow human beings, former rebel troops attacked a Christian church in Misrata, in December. Again in February, Islamist troops attacked a Coptic church in Benghazi.

Same month, four foreign Christians, including an American citizen, were arrested as missionaries. Three days later, two more were arrested. Three days after that, another. Some of those arrested were Egyptians. On February 27, Benghazi forces raided another Coptic church, where they arrested about 100 Copts for being missionaries. Evidence? They had Bibles and other Christian articles. Many were tortured, one to death.

Coptic Solidarity noted that whereas the government of Egypt protested to the UAE for arresting a Muslim Brotherhood cell for endangering national security, Egypt did not protest to Libya for the false arrests of Egyptians for practicing their religion. To Islamists, nationality does not matter, religion does. After all, the Islamists want a global caliphate to rule us all.

But Pres. Obama continues helping rebels among whom Islamists are powerful, now in Syria (Raymond Ibrahim, Front Page Magazine.com, 3/13/13 http://www.meforum.org/3465/obama-new-libya).

I don't recall our President objecting to the sodomy of Ghadaffid. I don't recall him denouncing the Islamists for attacking the U.S. Ambassador as if he were responsible for the film, nor denouncing them for thinking that the way to deal wtih criticism is to murder somebody, rather than to refute it or to adopt it.

Islamists attack Christians for practicing their religion and only pretend that the Christians were doing something wrong. Naturally Christians in church have Bibles. Islamic law, the law that many Muslims want to impose everywhere, and have been getting parts adopted in the West, is intolerant.

President Obama has a selective code of morality.

Richard Shulman is a veteran defender of Israel on several web-based forums. His comments and analyses are a regular feature on Think-Israel. He provides cool information and right-on-target overviews. He distributes his essays by email. To subscribe, write him at ricshulman@aol.com.


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MISS ISRAEL TO ASK OBAMA, 'TO FREE POLLARD'

Posted by Roberta Dzubow, March 14, 2013

The article below was written by Lori Lowenthal Marcus who is Lori Lowenthal Marcus is the US correspondent for The Jewish Press. She is a recovered lawyer who previously practiced First Amendment law and taught in Philadelphia-area graduate and law schools. You can reach her by email: Lori@JewishPressOnline.com. This article appeared March 14, 2013 in the Jewish Press.com and is archived at
http://www.jewishpress.com/news/miss-israel-i-will-ask-obama-my-role-model-to-free-jonathan-pollard/2013/03/14/

Caption Text

President Obama's advance team insisted that Yityish Aynaw, the first Ethiopian Miss Israel, be included on the guest list for the official state dinner President Shimon Peres will host for the U.S. president. At the time, they probably did not think it was necessary to do extensive background checks on the young woman. What could be problematic about a beautiful African young woman who came to Israel as an orphan at the age of 12, and now reigns as the beauty queen of this Middle Eastern country?

But a potentially problematic YouTube video has surfaced. Unlike a video which tanked the former Miss Delaware, forcing her to relinquish her crown, Miss Israel's video is unlikely to harm her reputation within her domain. The former Miss Delaware's YouTube video confirmed rumors that she had made a pornographic movie, and it was later revealed that she was paid for her participation in that movie.

Miss Israel's YouTube video, which is a clip of an interview aired on Israeli Ch 2 news on Wednesday, March 13, reveals something quite interesting, but utterly non-salacious.

The interviewer asks Aynaw, "What will you tell Obama when you meet him?"

She answers, "That he is a role model for me, and second, that he should free Pollard."

Aynaw explains that she was very active while in high school — she was head of the student council — working on many different activities to help free Pollard. She explained to the interviewer that she knows the story very well, and that if she has the opportunity, "lama lo? (why not?)"

So far there has been no response from the White House.

Jonathan Pollard has been in prison since 1987. He was an American naval intelligence analyst in the early 1980's when he passed certain classified information to the Israeli government. No other person who was convicted of obtaining classified information for an ally of the U.S. has served in prison as long as has Pollard, and several who were convicted of spying for enemies of the U.S. were released after serving shorter sentences.

On Wednesday, March 13, Jonathan Pollard and his wife, Esther, released a statement calling on all Israelis to show the utmost respect to President Obama during his visit to the Jewish state, according to The Jerusalem Post. This statement was made in response to a call from an Israeli politician to boycott President Obama's speech if the president does not bring the Pollard home to Israel with him.

"Esther and Jonathan Pollard join the Committee to Bring Jonathan Pollard Home in urging the public to refrain from any action that may impugn the honor of the State of Israel by conveying, even inadvertently, any hint of disrespect or dishonor towards our official distinguished visitor," the Pollards said in a statement. "We call upon the Israeli public to welcome President Obama to our country and to behave at all times with all due respect and honor towards the president of the United States."

VIDEO: m/news/miss-israel-i-will-ask-obama-my-role-model-to-free-jonathan-pollard/2013/03/14/

Contact Roberta Dzubow by email at Roberta@adgforum.com


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CANDIDLY SPEAKING: MULLING OVER OUR NEW GOVERNMENT

Posted by UCI, March 14, 2013

The article below was written by Isi leibler who chairs the Diaspora-Israel relations committee of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs and is a former chairman of the governing board of the World Jewish Congress. He can be contacted by email at ileibler@netvision.net.il This article appeared today in the Jerusalem Post and is archived at
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Candidly-Speaking-Mulling-over-our-new-government

As anticipated, in this government, Netanyahu will be in a weaker position and far more dependent on his coalition partners than was the case in the past.

Caption Text

Bravo! Unless there is an unanticipated lastminute reversal, after six tortuous weeks of horse trading, spin and hypocrisy, Israel will have its 33rd government.

Most of us, not already having written off our politicians, were thoroughly distressed that even during this crucial period for Israel our elected representatives still spent so much time jockeying for personal or political benefit.

The principal beneficiaries were Yesh Atid and Bayit Yehudi who set aside their major political differences and made a pact to negotiate jointly toward the formation of the government. They succeeded and thus foiled Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's efforts to play them against each other, ultimately obliging him to concede to their core demands.

The principal losers were the haredi parties who, despite Netanyahu's extraordinary efforts to retain them, were excluded from the government. Reviled by most Israelis as extortionists willing to sell their votes to the highest bidder and seeking to impose the most stringent halachic interpretations on the entire nation, their exclusion was greeted with enthusiasm.

The outcome may have been different had they been more cooperative with respect to sharing the burden, in particular in relation to conscription and encouraging their youngsters to earn a livelihood, but they refused to concede an inch. Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, Shas's spiritual mentor, even outraged the national-religious Bayit Yehudi leaders by calling them "goyim." The haredi parties' subsequent behavior, extending to vile threats by United Torah Judaism to boycott settlement produce — alienated whatever lingering sympathy remained.

As anticipated, in this government, Netanyahu will be in a weaker position and far more dependent on his coalition partners than was the case in the past.

Yet, if he plays his cards properly, this may prove to be a blessing in disguise. It could even represent a new dawn and provide him with a unique opportunity to stabilize Israel's global position and implement crucial, overdue reforms in the social and economic arena that had been repeatedly vetoed by the ultra-Orthodox groups.

Netanyahu's ministerial team includes some stunning new talent, but unfortunately, in some cases, politics prevented the best people from assuming positions optimally suited for them. Thus, Yair Lapid's ascension to the Treasury is a huge risk. He has no financial or business background and it is a major gamble for a novice to take on such a role, especially when he must grapple with a massive opening deficit which will require resolute and unpopular cutbacks.

The choice of foreign minister, whose primary requirement must be to effectively promote Israel's image and articulate the government's policies, is also problematic, especially now as we confront such a hostile and biased world. Avigdor Liberman is a capable and talented politician who could take on any key ministry. But why does he insist on retaining the one portfolio in which, rightly or wrongly, he is regarded with hostility by most global leaders? The appointment of the respected former IDF chief of staff Moshe Ya'alon as defense minister will strengthen morale and signal to the Palestinians that they will pay a heavy price if they resume missile launches or terrorist attacks.

But despite such shortcomings, the presence of many talented young new faces augers well for the future if the parties concentrate on working for the betterment of the nation rather than scoring partisan political points.

Although the likelihood of being obliged to formulate major or controversial decisions in relation to the peace process is remote, the inclusion of Yesh Atid (and Tzipi Livni, who will now be marginalized) may somewhat ease the international hostility against Israel by demonstrating that the government is not an inflexible right-wing party but represents a broad cross-section of Israelis.

Yair Lapid is a genuine centrist committed to a twostate policy, but supports the retention of the settlement blocs, Ariel and a united Jerusalem. This would hardly qualify him as a left-winger and Netanyahu would find him a kindred spirit on most issues.

Besides, the Palestinians will undoubtedly maintain their intransigent attitude and refuse to negotiate or, if not, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas will remain unwilling to minimally compromise on any substantive issue.

The government's most urgent domestic challenge must be to introduce painful remedial measures to ensure that our economy does not suffer a meltdown and follow the disastrous example of many European countries.

It must take advantage of this historic opportunity to deal with outstanding issues relating to religion and state, especially the profoundly emotional issue of equalizing the burden in relation to the draft. In the latest compromise, national service will become universal in gradual stages over a five-year period.

Up to 2,000 yeshiva students will continue receiving exemptions and state subsidies.

More importantly, all subsidized education will be required to incorporate secular core studies of math, English, civics and history, creating constructive citizens who will seek gainful employment rather than subsisting on welfare. Although haredim should be treated with courtesy and respect, they will no longer be a law unto themselves and will be obliged to share the burden as well as benefits of citizenship.

Today, for the first time in decades, there are more religious Zionist than haredi MKs in the Knesset. Bayit Yehudi has the opportunity of reversing the tide of haredi domination of religious instrumentalities like the Chief Rabbinate and promoting Zionist rabbis to occupy state roles, making Judaism more attractive to non-observant Israelis by example rather than coercion.

They must ensure that conversion, marriage and divorce, and other life cycle events are conducted with compassion by enlightened rabbis who have the capacity to make Judaism more inclusive.

This government has the obligation to amend the electoral system and reduce the number of parties. It must also devise a new method of selecting MKs and eradicate the current system of primaries which is being abused and riddled with corrupt practices.

Despite the fact that Lapid has introduced some talented new personnel into the Knesset, a system must be devised in which Knesset candidates are not simply recruited according to the predilections of individual party leaders. There is no perfect democratic solution but a structure could be devised by which committees are elected which will subsequently preselect candidates and avoid the abuse and corruption associated with the primaries.

There should also be an arrangement whereby at least the majority of Knesset members are directly accountable to those who elected them rather than to party leaders.

Netanyahu must now set aside party politics and act as a national leader, solely focused on governing the country. He should not concern himself with the next election.

He has four critical years in which basic decisions affecting the future of Israel may well be determined.

If he convinces his coalition to set aside the past and concentrates on devising long-term strategies, both in terms of the peace process as well as implementing the long overdue domestic social, economic and electoral reforms, he will establish a legacy that could enable him to be regarded as one of the greatest leaders of the nation. But to achieve this he must resolve to set aside the sleazy political infighting and concentrate exclusively on serving the national interest. If he fails to do so, the new government's lifespan will be extremely limited.

Contact UCI at voices@unitycoalitionforisrael.org


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CUBA ATTACKS UN WATCH FOR EXPOSING ORWELLIAN "RIGHT TO PEACE" DECLARATION

Posted by UN Watch, March 14, 2013

Communist regime lashes out, accuses UN Watch of being "paid for and financed by the U.S government," says it "lacks credibility and legitimacy"

• The Washington Post editorial board reports today (see below) on UN Watch's clash with Cuba and its allies, and endorses the call for an inquiry—submitted by UN Watch with the signatures of more than 50 world figures—into the death of dissident Oswaldo Paya.

• In today's daily UN press briefing, the spokesman of Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon confirmed receiving UN Watch's appeal for an inquiry, and said that human rights officials will be following up with representatives of Oswaldo Paya's family.

• YouTube now has the video from yesterday's UNHRC debate where UN Watch exposed the phony "Right to Peace" initiative now being enshrined by the Human Righrs Council at the behest of Cuba and Syria's murderous regime. Transcipt below.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPMIK-g9pLk&feature=share&list=UU0BEdffpLEGzPtPD3O8-XgQ

Caption Text

"When Murderers Bring Us the Right to Peace"

Mr. President, at its 20th session, on 5 July 2012, the Human Rights Council adopted resolution 20/15 by which it established a working group to negotiate a draft declaration on "The Right to Peace."

Let us be clear: To promote peace, the international community does not need more resolutions; it needs resolution.

Article 1 of the United Nations Charter enshrines the maintenance of peace as its first purpose. That is why we were concerned to see the Council's scarce time and resources diverted from addressing urgent country situations in order to deal with this questionable exercise.

What does "the right to peace" mean?

Let us refer to the interpretation of one of the co-sponsors of last year's resolution, Syria.

In its statement to the working group three weeks ago, Syria said: "We all agree that the right to peace is not only a basic and necessary right, but is in fact inseparable from the most fundamental right, which is the right to life."

Mr. President, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has reported that over 70,000 men, women and children have been killed in Syria. If the contemplated Declaration on The Right to Peace is consistent with the Assad government's particular interpretation and implementation of the right to life, does it add or detract from the UN charter? Does it benefit or harm humanity?

Let us also refer to the chief sponsor of the resolution—Cuba—which said it "reaffirms the right to peace as a fundamental condition for the enjoyment of all human rights, in particular the right to life."

However, when this country spoke this week in defense of North Korea, they invoked that entity's "right to peace."

Mr. President, if the right to peace is equivalent to North Korea's particular interpretation of the right to life, will this benefit humanity? Will this add to the United Nations Charter?

If the countries committing the most egregious, gross, and systematic human rights violations known to mankind are the ones invoking the right to peace, do we need it? Thank you, Mr. President.

PRESIDENT: I was informed of the fact that the Cuban delegation has asked for the floor, in exercise of its right of reply. I therefore give the floor to Cuba.

UN Watch is an independent human rights group founded in 1993 in Geneva, Switzerland, receiving no financial support from any organization or government. We rely on the generosity of charitable donations. Contact UN Watch at briefing@unwatch.org


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MIGRANT DEPORTATIONS: HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH IS NOT A CREDIBLE SOURCE

Posted by Barbara Sommer, March 14, 2013

NGO Monitor (www.ngo-monitor.org), based in Jerusalem, was founded to promote critical debate and accountability regarding the political activities of non-governmental organizations claiming a human rights agenda that are active in the Arab-Israel conflict. NGO Monitor's independent research reports and analysis are quoted frequently in the press, academic publications, by NGO officials and donors, and in governmental and parliamentary discussions. This article appeared March 14, 2013 in Before It's News and is archived at
http://beforeitsnews.com/middle-east/2013/03/ngo-monitor-migrant-deportations-human-rights-watch-is-not-a-credible-source-2450168.html

Jerusalem — Human Rights Watch (HRW) has published many statements, reports, and condemnations on alleged Israel actions during the past decade. A large number of these allegations and condemnations have been shown to be inaccurate, resulting from the absence of a credible fact-finding methodology, distorted interpretations of international law, and HRW's obsessive focus on Israel. Journalists and other consumers are therefore advised to check all HRW claims regarding Israel on an independent basis in order to avoid repeating false statements.

NGO Monitor notes that HRW's lengthy statement/report today on "detained Eritrean and Sudanese nationals" erases the legal and factual complexities of the issue in order to portray Israel as violating international law. Instead of discussing the different legal obligations towards refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants, HRW misleadingly blurs these distinctions. Also, it does not appear that HRW contacted the Israeli government prior to issuing its statement. Instead, as is its standard practice, it relies simply on unverified anecdotal statements.

Previously, HRW blamed Israel for the death of a Palestinian infant during the November 2012 conflict in Gaza, repeating the claims of Palestinian "news reports and eyewitnesses." The details in a complex environment were unknown at the time, and months later, after an investigation, a UN report attributed the baby's death to "what appeared to be a Palestinian rocket that fell short of Israel."

Similarly, numerous allegations by HRW against Israel during the 2006 Lebanon War and the 2008-9 fighting in Gaza were shown to be definitively and factually incorrect, but HRW did not apologize or retract these claims.

HRW has also significantly and consistently distorted international law in condemning Israel (see "Pure Speculation: HRW Statements on Gaza and Prisoner X," NGO Monitor, February 13, 2013).

These methodological failures are amplified by HRW's consistent anti-Israel agenda, including participation in BDS (boycotts, divestment, and sanctions) and lawfare campaigns directed at the legitimacy of Israel. In contrast to these obessive condemnations, HRW has produced very few detailed reports on human rights violations in Syria, Egypt, and other Middle East countries. Biased officials with ideological agendas are responsible for helping "turn Israel into a pariah state," in the words of HRW founder Robert Bernstein.

Thus, HRW's reports and statements on Israel, regardless of the topic, must be reviewed carefully and independently verified before their "findings" and "analysis" are publicized, reprinted, or given credibility.

Contact Barbara Sommer by email at sommer_1_98@worldnet.at.net


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THERE ISN'T A COUNTRY IN THE WORLD THAT WOULD ALLOW ITS BORDERS TO BE ABUSED ..EXCEPT FOR ISRAEL... DURING 6 OR MORE YEARS...

Posted by K, March 14, 2013

Members of Anti-Jewish organizations the likes of 'Himan Rights Watch' and 'Hotline' should be made to accompany the Eritreans and Sudanese...back to Africa. Neither they or the African intruders belong in Israel.

Open letter... To the Israeli antiquated Judicial system, A.G Yehuda Weinberg.,P.M. Netanyahu and Shelly Yacimovich...

How many more Jewish women have to be raped, how many more Jewish people have to be robbed, how many more Israeli's have to be accosted and beat up, how many more Israeli's have to come down with African borne diseases, before the outcry to rid the country of this pestilence....is finally implemented.

How many years if any, will the government realize that they made a mistake by allowing the African invasion to take place and simmer. How many years will it take ,if any, to end this plague upon the Jewish people of Israel and to once and for all rid the country of these despicable dredges of African society. They must be deported before it b comes a greater... epidemic.

These Africans come from societies where rape, murder, arson, rioting and pillaging are normal features of their culture. Israel must not be turned into an... Eritrea, Sudan, Congo, or Soweto.

Tel Aviv police report 45% increase in the number of criminal cases opened against Sudanese, and Eritreans.

There was a 53.2 percent increase in the number of Sudanese and Eritreans suspected in crimes and a 45% increase in the opening of criminal cases against them in 2012, according to figures presented by the Tel Aviv District Police on Wednesday.

The figures state that there were 1,048 Sudanese and Eritreans named in crimes in 2012, and 1,090 in major crimes.

The district, home to the majority of the more than 60,000 African migrants in Israel, released the figures as part of their annual statistical round-up on crime in the district.

The figures on African migrants were the most glaring on the list, which included a 65% rise in the number of arrests of juveniles for robbery.

The figures showed a total of 76,371 criminal cases opened in 2012,..

The district is responsible not only for the city of Tel Aviv but also for Ramat Gan, Givatayim, Bat Yam, Holon,

Bnei Brak, Herzliya and other cities in the Tel Aviv area. The African invaders are free to travel anywhere they desire.

Contact K at noahsworldtv@gmail.com


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LET'S DO SOME JEWISH MATH:

Posted by Manhigut Yehudit, March 14, 2013

The article below was written by Shmuel Sackett who is a religious Zionist leader. He co-founded both the Zo Artzeinu and Manhigut Yehudit ("Jewish Leadership") political movements in Israel. Sackett was born in the United States and studied at Touro College in New York. He was educated in both Talmudic scholarship and secular academic subjects. He had been involved in Jewish youth work and in Jewish educational outreach to secular Jews, some of whom became baal teshuvas ("returnees to Judaism") under his tutelage. He worked in Wall Street's Financial District before making Aliyah to Israel and settling in the West Bank in 1990. This article appeared March 14, 2013 in Manhigut Yehudit and is archived at
http://www.jewishisrael.org/lets-jewish-math/

As we approach the holiday of Pesach, I want each and every one of you to do some simple Jewish math. Don't worry; it is easy and won't take much time away from your cleaning and shopping.

Here it is: How many verses — in the ENTIRE Torah — deal with Pesach?

I don't know the exact answer but my educated guess would be about 20.

Now, how many verses in the Torah deal with the Mishkan/Bet HaMikdash?

Once again, I am not certain but I feel it is around 800.

Hmmm. Pesach 20 verses and the Mishkan/Bet HaMikdash 800.

Now, how long do you prepare to get ready for Pesach?

Add the times for cleaning the house, office and car.

Add the times shopping for food, Matza and wine.

Add the times shopping for clothes and other Pesach items.

Add the times for learning Hilchot Pesach, preparing for the seder, doing bedikat/biur/selling chametz, koshering/tovelling pots, doing all the cooking etc.

Using my guessing head, I would say that these times add up to at least 100 hours.

OK, almost done.

Now, based on my calculations above — that there are 40 times more verses in the Torah dealing with the Mishkan/Bet HaMikdash than Pesach — it should take you 40 x 100 hours to properly prepare yourself for the Bet HaMikdash.

According to my calculator, that equals 4,000 hours of prep time (which is over 166 days, working at this 24/hrs each day!!!)

Is that what you are doing???

I know what you're thinking. This guy is nuts. First of all, there is no Bet HaMikdash today so what is there to prepare for? Second of all, even if we do need to prepare, what is the comparison? Pesach is one thing and the Bet HaMikdash is something else. What is the connection?

Let me answer these two questions together. Sadly, it is true that there is no Bet HaMikdash today but that does not stop the obligation from studying, understanding and truly knowing every single thing that went on in that incredible House of Hashem. (Note: Even without having the Bet HaMikdash and with the entire nation being in a halachic state of impurity the overwhelming majority of opinions hold that the Korban Pesach can be brought in our day!) Unfortunately, however, many of us — Rabbis included — simply brush off anything to do with the Bet HaMikdash by saying, "These things don't apply today. We will learn these Halachot when Moshiach comes." With all due respect, this is absolutely wrong.

In many of his books, the holy Chofetz Chaim wrote about the need to, not only study, but actually master these concepts — today — even without the Bet HaMikdash. He said, over and over again, that if we truly want Moshiach to come, we need to be ready — and "being ready" does not mean preparing after his arrives. it means being ready NOW! This is similar to the analogy above about Pesach. Can you imagine cleaning, shopping and studying everything about Pesach only when Pesach is already here? Who would dare do such a thing?

But there's more. Pesach and the Bet HaMikdash are more than just a way to compare things. In reality, the two are deeply connected and — unfortunately — the Pesach we have today has almost nothing to do with the Pesach at the time of the Temple. During those 830 years, plus the 400+ years of the Mishkan, Pesach was celebrated differently than the way we do it today.

First of all, while cleaning is important, 90% of the Jews did not clean at all. Instead, they travelled — mostly by foot — from all over Israel to be in Jerusalem on time for Erev Pesach. Many of these Jews left their homes weeks before Pesach! They took their entire families with them, packed large quantities of food for the way and trekked across the country with their Pesach offering, Chagiga offering and many other Korbanot they chose to bring with them. These animals had to be watched carefully so they would not be blemished along the way. Then, on Erev Pesach, instead of what we are accustomed to doing, they entered the holy Bet HaMikdash in purity to offer the Korban Pesach. At night, they sat around a seder table and, after the usual reading and learning, ate an entire roasted lamb! After that, they went to sleep in the homes of complete strangers! The next morning, they, once again, had to go to the Bet HaMikdash to offer their Korban Chagiga. The next day it was back to the Bet HaMikdash to witness the Omer offering. In short, our Pesach commemoration is significantly different from what was — and from what WILL BE — when the Jewish people rebuild the third and final Bet HaMikdash in Jerusalem.

I am not saying that cleaning for Pesach is not important- it is! I am not saying that proper tovelling of dishes is not important — it is! What I am saying, however, is that we need to refocus and understand that being in the "Galut" means a lot more than we think. It is time for us to seriously plunge into the deep waters of what the future holds. The Jewish nation will soon return to Israel from the four corners of the globe. Very shortly after that we will have a Sanhedrin. After that comes the restoration of prophecy. That prophet will anoint a king. That king will build the Bet HaMikdash and then Jewish life as we know it will be changed back to what was originally planned.

And now for the good news: This process has already begun! 65 years ago Hashem gave the greatest gift to the Jewish nation in 2,000 years. He restored us to our Land! He gave us our inheritance and began the process of returning the exiles. This was not just some simple land swap or homeland for broken Jews from the Holocaust, it was the beginning of the process we have dreamed and prayed for since the first Tisha B'av! The children have returned home and our Father and King has welcomed us back into His palace. As you read these words, more than half of all halachic Jews are already living in Israel today!

This is what "Next Year in Jerusalem" means when we say it at the end of the seder. Therefore, before concluding this article, go back to the beginning and do that math once again. Figure out how much time and energy you — and I — need to invest into understanding what Hashem really wants from us and then — go and do it!

Contact Manhigut Yehudit at manhigut-yehudit@jewishisrael.org


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PIPES ON ERDOGAN'S DECADE AS PM OF TURKEY

Posted by Borntolose, March 14, 2013

The article below was written by Daniel Pipes who is an American historian, writer, and political commentator. He is the president of the Middle East Forum, and publisher of its Middle East Quarterly journal. His writing focuses on the American foreign policy and the Middle East. He is also an Expert at Wikistrat. After graduating with a PhD from Harvard and studying abroad, Pipes taught at a number of universities. He then served as director of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, before founding the Middle East Forum. His 2003 nomination by U.S. President George W. Bush to the board of directors of the U.S. Institute of Peace was protested by Islamists, Arab-American groups, and Democratic leaders, who cited his oft-stated belief that victory is the most effective way to terminate conflict. The Bush administration sidestepped the opposition with a recess appointment.

Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has served longer than any person as prime minister of the Republic of Turkey, today marks his completion of a full decade in that office, having entered it on March 14, 2003.

Born in February 1954, he is now 59 years old. And while he has a potentially long political career ahead of him, he reportedly suffers from some serious ailments that could cut it short.

The only comparable figure in modern Turkish history is Kemal Atatürk, the founder of the republic and dominant figure. It is reasonable to see Erdoğan as the anti-Atatürk, the leader who seeks to undo substantial parts of his predecessor's legacy, especially his rejection of Shari'a, or Islamic law. One can also see him as the politician who turns Islamism into a nearly viable political program.

Erdoğan's main challenges are three-fold: an electorate increasingly wary of his domineering ways, an ever-more restive Kurdish population, and a problematic regional alignment in which, as Ian O. Lesser put it in analysis published yesterday, "Ankara faces some troubling cold wars, new and old, that will shape the strategic environment and the nature of Turkey's security partnerships."

Westerners have been conspicuously slow in understanding just what a threat Erdoğan presents; one can only hope that his second decade will prompt more understanding than the first. (March 14, 2013)

Contact Borntolose at borntolose3@charter.net


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IS THE UNBREAKABLE BOND AN ABUSIVE RELATIONSHIP?

Posted by Borntolose3, March 14, 2013

Is the Unbreakable Bond an abusive relationship?

News item:

The US Embassy has excluded Ariel University, located in the West Bank [Samaria — ed.], from the invitation list for President Barack Obama's speech to Israeli students during his visit next week.

According to student union representatives, the embassy contacted the other seven accredited Israeli universities, all of which are located within the pre-1967 lines, but not the sole Israeli university located in the West Bank.

Ariel University Student Union head Shay Shahaf said he hoped the omission was an error that can be corrected rather than a political statement with respect to their location.

He noted that his school became Israel's eighth accredited university in December and that there still might be confusion over its students' status.

Shahaf is being polite. Don't hold your breath for a correction — this is the State Department that can only mumble when asked what the capital of the state of Israel is.

Which brings us to this:

U.S. President Barack Obama has decided not to address the Knesset during his visit to Israel next week. Senior U.S. officials said that, after long deliberations and discussions, the White House decided that the president will address students from universities in Israel at the ICC (Binyaney Ha'uma) in Jerusalem.

That initial snub did not go unnoticed. The Prime Minister's Office and a number of Knesset members passed messages to the White House saying they would be much happier if the speech took place in the Knesset. But senior U.S. officials have insisted that Obama decided to deliver his messages directly to the Israeli public, especially the younger generation, not just to politicians in the Knesset.

This is beyond weird. Where else but the Knesset, the seat of the government of Israel, would such an address be appropriate? When Netanyahu came to the US, he spoke in front of Congress, not at, say, Georgetown University.

But you just have to think like a state department official and it becomes clear: the Knesset is the seat of Israel's government, and the Knesset is located in ... Jerusalem! So speaking before the Knesset constitutes de facto recognition that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel. That wasn't hard, was it?

The message sent by these and numerous other incidents is that the US does not recognize Israel as a sovereign state, a state with the power to accredit universities, and to declare that the city which has been the seat of government for the 65 years since its founding is in fact its legitimate capital.

The case of the abused wife with a rich husband who gives her everything she wants except her autonomy is a cliché of fiction, but certainly exists in real life.

When does the Unbreakable Bond become an abusive relationship?

Contact Borntolose at borntolose3@charter.net This article appeared in FresnoZionism.org and is archived at
http://fresnozionism.org/2013/03/is-the-unbreakable-bond-an-abusive-relationship/


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BUYCOTT ISRAEL ACTION ALERT -

Posted by Roberta Dzubow, March 14, 2013

"Advocates for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement have set their sights on a new target — recording artist Alicia Keys.

Keys, a Grammy-winning singer, who is scheduled to perform in Tel Aviv this summer, is currently being urged by anti-Israel supporters to cancel her show via Facebook, letters, Twitter and a petition.

In response, a counter-petition was created by Creative Community for Peace which we urge you to sign and share widely.

"We, the undersigned, wholeheartedly support your upcoming tour in Israel and your dedication to your fans across the globe," the letter states. "We know you are hearing falsehoods about Israel being an apartheid state and unfair comparisons of Israel to apartheid South Africa. These messages are filled with distortions and untruths that seek to malign Israel and distort the discourse of those that seek peace."

The CCP petition asks Keys to stand up to Israel's detractors and join the ranks of superstars such as Rihanna, Elton John, Paul McCartney, Black Eyed Peas, Missy Elliot, Metallica, Lady Gaga, Madonna and many others who have used the power of music to help bring hope and peace to the region.

Additionally, it makes the important point that cultural boycotts such as these only serve to create division and not change. Singling out and blaming one party is detrimental to peace, which will only come about through dialogue, and when both the Israeli and Palestinian narratives are recognized.

Please join us, CCP and nearly 10,000 people (and counting!) who have signed this important letter. Click here to add your name."

Contact Roberta Dzubow by email at Roberta@adgforum.com


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ANSCHLUSS LEGACY

Posted by Robert Hand, March 14, 2013

The article below was written by Sarah Honig who is a veteran columnist and senior editorial writer who joined The Jerusalem Post while still in her teens. She served for many years as The Post's political correspondent (a position she also held on the now-defunct but once-influential Davar), headed the Tel Aviv bureau at the Post and wrote daily analyses of the political scene, along with in-depth features. Honig is a mother, an artist and an avid collector of antique and vintage dolls. This article appeared March 14, 2013 on the Sarah Honig's Blogsite and is archived at
http://sarahhonig.com/2013/03/14/anschluss-legacy/ View Sarah's website at www.sarahhonig.com

Caption Text

Forty-two percent of Austrians believe that "not everything was bad under Hitler," according to a poll conducted by the Viennese newspaper Der Standard. That's very telling, especially this week when Austria marks the 75th anniversary of the Anschluss — its merger with Nazi Germany.

In the postwar years, Vienna sought to shirk all responsibility for the Holocaust by pretending that it was merely another conquered and victimized European country, whose citizenry was forced against its will to endure German occupation. But not all truth can be conveniently rewritten.

The indisputable fact is that the homeland of both Adolf Hitler and Adolf Eichmann enthusiastically cheered what was later expediently portrayed as a hostile takeover. Hitler's so-called annexation was cause for rapturous celebration and no one — not even the Germans — matched the Austrian alacrity to rob the Jews, persecute them, humiliate and brutalize them. In many ways Berlin learned pernicious lessons from Vienna.

Given all that, the anniversary-eve poll exposes an old mindset that, much as it was once assiduously denied, appears to survive vibrantly among significant portions of the population.

Besides nostalgia for the Hitler era, other findings attest to lack of contrition. Thus 54% of respondents thought that neo-Nazi groups might succeed in Austrian elections, had they not been barred by law from running. In other words, over half the Austrians believe it probable that Nazis could today be elected if only allowed to campaign.

As far as 61% were concerned, Austria had already adequately dealt with its Nazi record. Presumably Austrians can put it all behind them and quite well out of mind.

But perhaps most disturbing was the finding that 61% of Austrian adults want to see their government headed by a "strong man." This relates not to perceptions of the past but to the here and now.

This is scary because it pertains to more than Austria, which anyhow is not anywhere near the power it was a hundred years ago. But Austria is still quintessential Europe and its moods reflect sentiments elsewhere on the continent, both east and west.

Austrian public opinion, which on par with other European countries has never spared Israel its stinging disapproval of our self-defense or national revival, can be regarded as a touchstone. It indicates just how fragile European democracy is, despite copious political correctness and seductive lip service to human rights.

Beneath the ostensibly civil and progressive surface, other passions seethe. Foremost, the yearning for a "strong man" at the helm is not a throwback peculiarity exclusive to Third World states. In many democracies, despite all their undoubted advantages, there lurks a wish that an omniscient and dominant leader would take things firmly and decisively in hand.

This predisposition becomes all the more dangerous in times of economic crisis, as the German-Austrian experience taught us all too traumatically. There is no denying that the world is again in the grips of recession and unpredictability that can unleash the worst in apparently very cultured nations.

True, historical analogies are never absolute. There are no breadlines lines in front of soup kitchens and no runaway inflation of the sort that provided such propaganda fodder for Hitler and assorted European fascists.

The world has changed a great deal since the 1930s.

For one thing, Europe has lost its crucial clout and is not threatened by homegrown tyrants who wait in the offing for their opportunity. But there is too much socio-political alienation and superficiality to afford us smug comfort.

Demagogues and hate-mongers are getting elected to European parliaments. Even if they do not threaten the status quo, they indicate deep disaffection.

Anti-Semitism among Europeans — to say nothing of Muslim immigrants — is on the rise as never before in the postwar era. Even if today's Judeophobia seems subtler, it is no longer concealed. It is furthermore especially treacherous, given its persistent and duplicitous pretexts of opposition to Zionism (the Jews' national liberation movement) or to the policies of Israel (the Jewish state).

Three-quarters of a century after the Anschluss, too much of its noxious legacy lingers.

Contact Robert Hand at borntolose3@att.net


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OBAMA'S VISIT TO ISRAEL

Posted by Yoram Fisher, March 15, 2013

Unlike Iraq or Afghanistan, a huge invasion is unnecessary to destroy Iran's nuclear facilities.

President Barack Hussein Obama's dangerous complacency and compromise with Iran has afflicted U.S. foreign policy for too long, causing incalculable damage to Israel's security and American interests in the region.

The truth speaks for itself: diplomacy does not work with states who sponsor and are purveyors of global terrorism and nuclear proliferation.

Only one result is certain: it gives the Iranians breathing space and time to continue their illicit program to achieve nuclear capability. In real sense, endless diplomatic talks and lifting off of sanctions—will not bring the long-awaited message of peace and security in the Middle East.

However, even worse, Obama's unprecedented betrayals make no sense at all.

Obama has selected the least qualified anti-Israel nominee for secretary of defense in a half century and forced out General James Mattis because the superb combatant commander took the Iranian threat seriously.

This self-flagellating nonsense seems deeply rooted on Obama's strange combination of extreme narcissism, Marxism and his Muslim upbringing.

It appeared innocuous at first, but the steady influence of Muslim Brotherhood -led Team Obama in every nook and corner of the Arab Spring led to theBenghazi-Gate cover up- and that is very difficult to ignore.

Obama is self-obsessed in reaching a diplomatic nuclear breakthrough with Iran, an ill-contrived concession that the mullah-led regime has denied. Behind the scenes, however, Obama's secret nuclear deal with Iran garnered a rebuke from the ruling ayatollah.

The diplomatic snub will certainly bring more repercussions, one way or another. This is upsetting at least to Obama, forcing him reluctantly to go for an 'urgent' visit to Israel.

Despite the onerous political and diplomatic fiascos in his first term, the narcissistic U.S. president should not be taken lightly. Why is that?

A great deal of extreme narcissists are embittered, vindictive, detached from reality and cannot accept responsibility. Perhaps, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is fully prepared to effectively deal with an egocentric president, knowing full well that Obama can spin a conversation so quickly that it keeps you off balance and you cannot challenge him.

Will it work? Egocentric demands upon the time and patience of others will be borne, but he will try to avoid fights when Israel is at its strongest moments. In short, what is good for Israel will be good for Obama's image, particularly at a time when the Nobel Peace Prize Committee , it is said, politely asked him to return the coveted peace prize.

While there is no question that diplomacy has to be the preferred path, Obama believes that there is still time for a diplomatic deal with Iran- and that illusion is dangerous nonsense.

Containing a nuclear armed Iran implies a de facto recognition. Since there is no absolute guarantee that Iran will not pursue nuclear weapons in the future, Israel's security becomes more untenable. This policy of containment is irresponsible. for it would only create a dangerous nuclear standoff that is enormously costly and unpredictable .

In any case, it is clear that Obama's misguided and feckless foreign policy is to blame.

It is inconceivable therefore, that despite western efforts to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, the Washington foreign policy establishment still wants to talk more when direct negotiation is not possible. It is the height of absurdity, that despite his alleged show of support, Obama is undermining Israel's military capabilities instead of Iran's - the country which represents a clear and present danger to Israel's existence and the national interest of the U.S.

Unfortunately, Iran is playing a dangerous catch- 22 diplomacy along with its mentor, North Korea. The problems with these two rogue states seem insurmountable, but in reality are not - if the U.S. changes its strategic course.

Enough time has been wasted on restraint and it seems that Israel is, indeed, determined to strike Iran when the time comes to fulfill its duty to defend itself.Moreover, Israel's restraint is in keeping with its desire not to cast itself unnecessarily as an aggressor . And for that matter, Israel does not need any Western assistance to attack Iran.

In any event, it is better for Israel to act like a fool than to be caught off guard by a nuclear detonation over Tel Aviv.

In any event, it is better for Israel to act like a fool than to be caught off guard by a nuclear detonation over Tel Aviv. At this stage of the nuclear brinkmanship, there is no doubt that a positive outcome is only possible if Israel takes out the nuclear facilities in Iran.

Unlike Iraq or Afghanistan, a huge invasion is unnecessary to destroy Iran's nuclear facilities.

It will be a tremendous success, however, if Syria and Hizbullah in Lebanon is dealt with permanently first. Whichever comes first is moot and academic since it is only a matter of time and opportunity.

Mindful of the almost complete destruction of Iranian military assets in Sudan and Gaza during the Operation Pillar of Defense , Hizbullah does not want to ignite a direct confrontation with Israel - for fear of wiping out thousands of smuggled Iranian-made missiles and chemical weapons inside Lebanon; at the time when Tehran is talking the talk and duping the West.

But know this: Israel, as the only undeclared nuclear armed state in the Middle East, can - theoretically - also be unpredictable. Once again, it is highly possible that a civilization-altering development may again stun the world into disbelief and mute Israel's enemies, sending a brief shockwave across the Middle East.

Yet despite the importance of this development, the mainstream media would be the last to cover the story after it happened. As former Military IntelligenceChief Brigadier-General (Res.) Amos Yadlin said at the AIPAC convention in Washington, a military action against the Iranian nuclear program "is not a war.It is a one-night operation."

Israeli officials also said Netanyahu would look for reassurances that the U.S. would prevent Syria's extensive stocks of chemical weapons - nicknamed "Arms R' Us " by Israeli intelligence - from falling into the hands of al-Qaeda or Hizbullah.

Incessant, anti-Semitic rhetoric and condemnation surely would follow, but consider what a one nighttime operation will do for regional peace and stabilizing oil prices about which the world's economy is so sensitive.

In the past, western media outlets enjoyed a monopoly on outrageous bashing of Israel. This time the information war is in Israel's favor in dealing with distorted information in almost all social media networks, including you tube.

Although the consequence of an imminent war with Iran is highly predictable, it will be difficult at first to accept, let alone believe, that Israel's high technological advantage makes success possible. Perhaps, it may be the main reason why Washington has been dilly-dallying around with regard to support of its staunch ally, Israel.

Israel knows this: the US will not act beyond what it perceives as its own national interests. And if Iran miscalculates the extent of Israeli resolve, the geo-political outcome is awfully predictable.

In the end, Israel's technological or military innovation could easily shift the balance of power back heavily into America's favor by altering the equation of the Iran nuclear game.

Something has to be done.

Contact Yoram Fisher at yoramski@yahoo.com


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TEN YEARS ON

Posted by Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi, March 15, 2013

SIR — Your briefing on Iraq ("The slow road back", March 2nd) claimed that Tariq al-Hashemi is a deputy prime minister. He is not. He is one of two vice-presidents.

On a broader note, I would say that your report misunderstood Muqtada al-Sadr's actions. Specifically, you claim that Mr Sadr, along with other Shia politicians, has "even voiced sympathy with Sunni demands". However, the notion that the demonstrators have some legitimate demands is a line taken by virtually all of Iraq's politicians, and the central government has even set up a committee to address those grievances deemed legitimate (such as innocent people being unjustly held as detainees).

Mr Sadr's criticisms of Nuri al-Maliki, the prime minister, such as alleging that pro-Maliki demonstrators are paid government agents, amount to nothing more than populist opportunism that ultimately reflects his goal to emerge as leader of the Shia community in Iraq.

While he may say the protesters have legitimate grievances, Mr Sadr has forbidden his followers from participating in demonstrations with FSA flags. He has also alleged the existence of a foreign agenda behind the protests on account of the demand to end the de-Baathification process (a policy that no Sadrist or other Shia politician can afford to drop).

Rather than seeing his followers organise rallies reflecting common grievances with the Sunni protesters, we find that Sadrists now organise demonstrations, generally consisting of no more than a few hundred protesters, in various parts of the country for the causes of Bahrain and Palestine (the latter taking place recently in Wasit province).

The main genuine show of solidarity from the Shia side has actually come from some tribal sheikhs in the far south who feel that the central government neglects provincial concerns and have sympathy for the autonomy movement around Basra. A delegation from them came to Anbar to show solidarity with the protesters, but sadly only encountered hostility and rejection on allegations of being agents for Mr Maliki.

Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi is a student at Brasenose College, Oxford University, and an intern at Daniel Pipes' Philadelphia-based think-tank, the Middle East Forum. This article appeared March 16, 2013 in the Economist and is archived at
http://www.aymennjawad.org/13054/ten-years-on


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WITH PRES. OBAMA'S PASSOVER VISIT TO ISRAEL

Posted by Gerald A. Honigman, March 15, 2013

A friend of mine passed away several years ago who was a great, old fashio ned "Liberal." In many ways, many of us could fall into that same category when you really think about it. But things today just ain't what they used to be. For one thing, somehow I just can't see Jews as the new Nazis and Arabs as the new Jews--as too many current "Liberals" proclaim.

I had much affection for this man, and he was one of the folks who joined me when I very reluctantly accepted the request from a leader in my local Jewish community to form a "media watch" committee. I feared the "yenta factor," and sure enough, it bit me on the behind not long afterwards.

Over the years, I had built up a reluctant respect by the local Florida newspaper folks--to the point of having some key editorial staff attending my own presentations on the Middle East. Keep in mind that the paper was like a mini New York Times in those days--so this was no small feat.

Like I had often done earlier with many other editors and media folks when serving as a professional consultant while doing my doctoral studies, the result translated into numerous published, in-depth, op-eds (not "letters") written by myself over the years. This continued until soon after I agreed to form that committee; before long, another member of the committee either accidentally--or accidentally on purpose--gave the editorial brass an excuse to blackball me. The yenta factor...

One of the few good results of forming the committee, however, was meeting my late friend. Marvin used to like to gently remind me that you can catch more flies with honey than you can with vinegar.

Again, I had much affection for this man-- but disagreed with him.

No, I'm not an idiot. I don't believe that one should be deliberately impolite or aggressive in promoting or defending one's position. And I never was.

But I also do not believe that one should have to cower or grovel for simply asking for fairness--in the above case, a more balanced reporting by the newspaper powers that be.

To give an example of the problem, the only time the word "barbarism" regarding the Middle East had come out of the paper's editorial staff was when one of its key writers wrote about Israeli checkpoints designed to stop Arab suicide bombers from blowing up more Jewish kids in pizza parlors, night clubs, and the like. "Barbarism Under Israel's Boot" was the title of that particular essay. Think about that for a moment...

The committee carefully monitored and held important meetings with the newspaper brass over the years--and we did see some results. But things only really got better after the old owners lost control to a new team. While there are still some issues,www.ekurd.net there is more balance in reporting these days for sure--on all issues. And I was more than a bit satisfied when one of the former owners of the paper later bought my book during my author event at the local Barnes and Noble. I gladly personalized his own copy--right after doing so for a Saudi Arabian engineering student at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University as well.

So, what's my point?

Honey should never take the place of honesty. And folks should neither demand nor expect that.

Reasonable people should be able to discuss issues on which they disagree without one expecting the other to grovel in order to be heard or for their cause to be handled in a just manner. Please keep this in mind as we proceed...

A few weeks ago, in some ways my late friend's counterpart, Shimon Peres, apparently decided to pre-empt President Obama's upcoming visit with a bit of honey.

The Israeli leader announced that Obama will be awarded one of Israel's highest honors, the Presidential Medal of Distinction, when Mr. Obama visits in March. The medal recognizes Mr. Obama's "unique and significant contribution to strengthening the state of Israel and the security of its citizens."

Like Peres's frequent derriere-kissing of the late Egyptian ghoul, Yasser Arafat, such sweetness will only be laughed at and used against him--and Israel--later on down the road.

Honesty being sacrificed for the sake of honey...

I will not, of course, reiterate the tens of thousands of words I've already offered on this subject, but suffice it to say that no matter how much military assistance and economic aid any American administration offers to Israel, this will not make up for forcing it to return to the suicidal conditions which existed prior to the June 1967 War.

As I and others have often noted, those conditions only invited repeated attacks by Israel's enemies who still refuse to recognize a state of the Jews in the region--regardless of its size. Additional fighter aircraft, ineffective promises about Iran, the Iron Dome, or whatever cannot make up for Israel not receiving the territorial compromise and buffer that it was promised by the final draft of UNSC Resolution 242.

Given such honesty, no amount of honey will make any difference.

Mr. Obama has likely saved his first presidential visit to Israel to play hardball by forcing it to abandon 242's call for the establishment of more secure and defensible borders (what the settlement issue and building in Jerusalem and the rest of Judea and Samaria are largely all about) to replace the travesty of 1949's United Nations' imposed armistice lines. Earlier American leaders, such as Johnson, Reagan, and Bush II, are on record endorsing 242's promise.

Let's talk tachlis here...brass tacks, the crux of the matter, etc.

One should not be able to both force Jews to return to their ultra-vulnerable, nine to fifteen-mile wide zipper of a state existence and receive the Presidential Medal of Distinction for strengthening the security of Israel's citizens.

Who do folks like my late friend and Israel's Peres think that they are kidding by indulging in such demeaning endeavors and behaviors?

All that occurs is that we lose respect among those who don't and won't expect Israel to prostrate itself and sacrifice its own critical concerns this way.

A 22nd Arab nation--and second, not first, in the original April 25, 1920 Mandate of Palestine (Jordan created in 1922 on almost 80% of the total land) sho uld not be created by grossly endangering the sole resurrected, minuscule state of the Jews. To reasonable minds, this should be a no brainer.

Yet, the above is precisely what both the latter day Arafatians of Abbas and the folks of Hamas have come to expect--especially with the advent of the Obama Administration. Recall that the first phone call Obama made to a foreign leader after his election in 2008 was to Mahmoud Abbas, and that he has repeatedly stated that Israel would be crazy--exact words--to not accept the alleged Saudi Peace Plan--which calls for a total withdrawal of Israel to the '49 Auschwitz/armistice lines.

In just one of too many other nauseating examples of the pitfalls of choosing honey over honesty, Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak recently had a chance to sit across a table from the Turkish Foreign Minister, Ahmet Da vutoğlu.

And just as Peres was repeatedly played the fool by the Arabs' Arafat, Peres's Lefty soul brother, Barak, looked beyond pathetic pleading for acceptance from none other than a representative of perhaps the biggest hypocrites in the entire Middle East--the Turks. He whimpered because Davutoglu refused to shake his hand.

While I still consider myself a friend of Ataturk's Turkey (which has since been replaced by Islamists), despite its serious, deadly faults, please keep in mind that these are the same Turks who have slaughtered--regardless of whatever excuses may be offered--some two million various non-Turkic peoples over the years in the name of their own national interests. Dare I mention the "A-" words (Armenians and Assyrians)? What's Cyprus all about, anyway? And why are Hamas members considered heroes but PKK members terrorists?

Get my drift?

As Arabs did elsewhere, Turks have outlawed the languages and cultures of other native peoples' (who have lived in Anatolia and adjacent areas long before a Turk ever invaded from Central Asia) in attempts to forcibly Turkify them. They have conquered other peoples' lands and repeatedly take any and all steps deemed necessary to defend Ankara's interests.

The latest official count of the Turkish Statistical Institute published the birth records of its citizens. It showed some twenty-three million Kurds...over a quarter of Turkey's population. Over the years, they have been re-named "Mountain Turks" by their subjugators.

Why no "roadmap" for Kurdistan while Ankara feels free to demand yet additional state for Arabs? All together, there are about forty million truly stateless Kurds in the region...

Imagine if Israel did such things to its Arab citizens. While its record isn't perfect either (what nation's is?), by any objective study, there is simply no comparison between how Kurds are treated in Turkey (and elsewhere) and how Arabs are treated in Israel. Yet, folks like the Turkish Foreign Minister get Jews like Ehud Barak to whine and beg for acceptance.

Disgracefully, when Israel is forced to take measures to defend itself against those who openly declare intent to destroy it, Jews like Peres and Barak feel the need to bend over backwards to appease.

Perhaps even more worrisome, along these same lines, the thinking behind Prime Minister Netanyahu's recent courtship of folks like Tzipi Livni in his coalition-building in the days leading up to President Obama's visit become suspect as well. Like Peres and Barak, Tziporah is also more "flexible" when it comes to issues Team Obama holds dear--like getting Jews to cave to his demands to stay within their 1949 oversized ghetto.

Nations which have fought wars, acquired territories, proclaimed sovereignty, and so forth in and over lands hundreds or thousands of miles away from home have no right to dictate suicidal concessions to Jews.

The Muslim Brotherhood's Egypt, a likely twin replacing Assad's Syria, and so forth are but a few frightening hints at what can be expected down the road.

Given such honesty, shame on those who pressure Israel so unfairly.

In the days which lie ahead--with even more nightmares of the "Arab" Spring," Iran, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and so forth unfolding in this most volatile region of the world (and who knows what will yet become of Iraq)--the gap between honey and honesty goes far beyond a mere two missing letters.

Honey and honesty must both be Israel's guidelines--not one instead of the other.

Gerald A. Honigman is a Florida educator who has done extensive doctoral studies in Middle Eastern Affairs. He has created and conducted counter-Arab propaganda programs for college youth, has lectured on numerous campuses and other platforms, and has publicly debated many Arab spokesmen. His articles and op-eds have been published in dozens of newspapers, magazines, academic journals and websites all around the world. This article appeared March 7, 2013 in the Ekurd Daily and is archived at
http://www.ekurd.net/mismas/articles/misc2013/3/article172.htm


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ISRAEL 16TH MOST PROSPEROUS COUNTRY

Posted by Aryeh Zelasko, March 15, 2013

UN: Israel 16th Most Prosperous Country

Israel ranked 16th out of 187 countries in the United Nations Human Development Index for 2012, released on Thursday. The ranking was one better than the country's ranking for 2011 from the standpoint of economy, education and health. Israel scored 900 out of a possible 1,000 points, as compared to top-ranked Norway's 995.

Israel was the highest-rated country in the Middle East. The closest Arab country was oil-rich Qatar at 36th place. The nearest immediate neighbor was Lebanon at No. 72. Only five of the 27 European Union members placed higher.

Israel ranked 16th out of 187 countries in the United Nations Human Development Index for 2012, released on Thursday. The ranking was one better than the country's ranking for 2011 from the standpoint of economy, education and health. Israel scored 900 out of a possible 1,000 points, as compared to top-ranked Norway's 995.

Israel was the highest-rated country in the Middle East. The closest Arab country was oil-rich Qatar at 36th place. The nearest immediate neighbor was Lebanon at No. 72. Only five of the 27 European Union members placed higher.

Contact Aryeh Zelasko at zelasko@actcom.co.il This article appeared March 15, 2013 in Arutz Sheva and is archived at
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/Flash.aspx/264453#.VYR2WLyVsWN


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AS PESACH APPROACHES...

Posted by Ari, March 15, 2013

Shalom Friends!

Many of you have been calling and writing, asking for updates about what is going on with us, the Bayit Yehudi, and with questions in general.

We are eager to share that with you once we finalize what will hopefully be the next exciting stage in our continued mission on behalf of Israel.

The purpose of this email is that with Pesach quickly approaching there is one redemption that is long overdue. Yet again we will be sitting at our Passover Seders as free men as our brother, Jonathan Pollard, continues to languish in jail despite the gross violation of justice and morality that his continued imprisonment represents.

Before we become immersed in our own spiritual and practical Pesach preparations, we wanted take a moment and share this inspiring video our dear friend Naftali Kalfa created to increase awareness of this open wound in the nation of Israel.

AS PASSOVER APPROACHES, A PLETHORA OF OU KOSHER EDUCATIONAL PROGRAMS ARE SET FOR FLATBUSH, WASHINGTON HEIGHTS, BOSTON, LAKEWOOD, AND OF COURSE, MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA

The weeks leading up to Passover are very busy in Jewish organizations, just as in Jewish homes, so it is no surprise that OU Kosher will present six rabbis participating in five kashrut education programs in six days, from Tuesday, February 26-Sunday, March 3. They will be followed by another program on March 19 involving a seventh rabbi. Rabbi Yosef Grossman, Senior Educational Rabbinic Coordinator of OU Kashrut, organized the shiurim.

The programs are made possible by a grant from the Harry H. Beren Foundation of New Jersey.

Rabbi Grossman explained, "OU Kosher is most gratified to be called upon by students of Torah and kosher consumers the world over to provide quality kashrut education given by our renowned experts. The Harry H. Beren ASK OU OUTREACH program is proud to partner with Yeshiva Torah Vodaath; the Kollel of Greater Boston; the Melbourne, Australia Beth HaTalmud Kollel; Mt. Sinai Synagogue in Washington Heights; and the world famous Torah citadel, the Lakewood community at Khal Lev Avos for Advanced Seminars in Kashrut. We are extremely pleased to be able to keep pace with the frenzied schedule of shiurim on Pesach and a broad range of other kashrut subjects which the public has requested from us in the hectic pre-Pesach period.

The programs are as follows:

.On Tuesday, February 26, a special ASK OU Outreach program comes to Yeshiva Torah Vodaath in Flatbush beginning at 7:00 p.m. as Rav Yisroel Belsky, Rosh HaYeshiva of Yeshiva Torah Vodaath and OU halachic decisor (posek) will speak in his own yeshiva on "The Mesorah of Kosher Birds," which will include the Machlokes Rosh and Rashba concerning one community accepting the mesorah of another community. His presentation will be followed by Rabbi Chaim Loike, OU Rabbinic Coordinator and bird expert, presenting a Lehavdil bein Hatameh Uven Hatahor Workshop, and by a Workshop on Making a Proper Shechitah Knife with expert shochtim. (Registration is required for this workshop.)

·In one of OU Kosher's most unique programs, "The World of Kashrus," on Thursday, February 28, Rabbi Moshe Klarberg, OU Senior Rabbinic Coordinator and Group Leader of the OU's Meat Division, will participate in the third of OU Kosher's skype programs to the Kollel Beth Talmud/Yehuda Fishman Institute in Melbourne, Australia, where it will already be the next day. His topic will be The Kashrus of Meat.

·An OU Kashrut Weekend at Mt. Sinai Jewish Center of Washington Heights, a program in the Harry H. Beren OU Outreach series, and the first two-day Beren Foundation program, will be held, March 2-3. March 2, Shabbat, Parshat Ki Tisa, there will be a Kashrut Q&A Session with Rav Hershel Schachter, OU Kosher posek and Rosh Yeshiva and Rosh Kollel of the RIETS seminary of Yeshiva University; the session will be held during Seudah Shlishit following Mincha at 5:20.

·On Sunday, March 3 at 7:30 p.m., in the same location, Rabbi Loike will speak on Preserving the Mesorah of Endangered Kosher Species of Birds: A Live Presentation (featuring his feathered friends). It will be followed at 8:30 p.m. by Proper Checking of Fruits and Vegetables with Rabbi Yosef Eisen, Rabbinic Administrator of the Vaad HaKashrus of the Five Towns and Rockaway and former OU Rabbinic Coordinator for food service. Both days' programs will have free admission and are open to both men and women.

·The Kollel of Greater Boston and Harry H. Beren ASK OU Outreach will present a Yom Iyun on Sunday, March 3 featuring Rabbi Nachum Rabinowitz, Senior Rabbinic Coordinator of OU Kosher, on the subject of The Kosher Production of OU Wine and Grape Juice. It will be held at the kollel, 62 Cummings Road in Brighton, MA beginning at 9:30 a.m. The program will feature chavrusa learning with kollel rabbis; a PowerPoint presentation on the Halachot of Kosher Wine and Grape Juice Production; and What's New for Pesach 2013?

That is not all.

As Passover, which will be observed from March 25 — April 2, approaches, OU Kosher will present a Harry H. Beren ASK OU Outreach Pre-Pesach shiur at Khal Lev Avos in Lakewood, NJ on Tuesday, March 19. Rabbi Nachum Rabinowitz will reprise his presentation on The Kosher Production of OU Wine and Grape Juice. Rabbi Moshe Elefant, COO of OU Kosher, will speak on What's New for Pesach 2013? The program, which will include a Q&A session, will extend from 12:00 noon to 2:00 p.m.

Contact Ari at ari@thelanddofisrael.com


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ISRAEL FORMS NEW COALITION GOVERNMENT

Posted by Daily Alert, March 15, 2013

The article below was written by Robert Berger who is an attorney and founder of the popular personal finance and investing blog, doughroller.net. He is also the editor of the Dough Roller Weekly Newsletter, a free newsletter covering all aspects of personal finance and investing, and the Dough Roller Money Podcast. This article appeared March 14, 2013 in Voice of America and is archived at
http://www.voanews.com/content/netanyahu-set-to-form-israeli-coalition-government/1621229.html

Caption Text

JERUSALEM— Israeli political parties have reached a coalition agreement, clearing the way for a new government and some top-level international diplomacy as U.S. President Barack Obama prepares to visit.

It took a weakened Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu nearly six weeks to form a new Israeli government, barely beating a Saturday deadline. Netanyahu won national elections in January, but his right-wing Likud party lost ground to moderate, secular parties which set down tough demands.

For the first time in years, ultra-Orthodox parties are out of the government. Israeli analyst Gerald Steinberg says that means a coalition with a more domestic agenda, led by ending military draft exemptions and stipends for the ultra-Orthodox.

"It's going to tackle those domestic issues, that's the goal at least, in terms of the distribution of the burden both military and financial. So it's going to be very much inward looking," said Steinberg.

But when Netanyahu announced the coalition deal, he noted that the broader Middle East is in turmoil.

He said the new government must tackle major security and political challenges. He did not elaborate, but in previous statements, he has named them as Iran's controversial nuclear program, the danger of Syria's chemical weapons falling into the hands of Islamic terror groups, and reviving peace talks with the Palestinians.

Netanyahu says Iran will top the agenda when U.S. President Barack Obama visits Israel next week. Iran says its nuclear program is for peaceful purposes, but Israel and the United States believe the Islamic Republic is developing nuclear weapons that could threaten the existence of the Jewish state.

Steinberg believes the prime minister will tell President Obama that if international diplomacy and sanctions fail, Israel is prepared to take military action against Iran on its own.

"As we get closer to the summer, and if we see progress towards an Iranian nuclear weapon, Netanyahu's going to say, 'If the Americans don't act, if there's no international military action, we're going to have to act unilaterally,' and he will get broad support from the Israeli public and most of the Israeli political system, including within his own coalition," he said.

Domestic issues and Iran have pushed the Palestinian issue to the back burner. But Netanyahu says reviving peace talks after a four-year stalemate is a priority.

Steinberg doesn't expect any breakthroughs.

"We're certainly going to go see some sort of negotiating effort because Obama is going to push for it; it's something that for PR reasons the Israelis have to show that they're interested," he said. "So we'll see some movement in that direction, but probably not much substance."

The Palestinians have refused to return to the negotiating table until Israel stops all settlement expansion, a demand rejected by the previous Israeli government. But there is speculation that with President Obama coming and a more moderate coalition in power, Israel might be willing to make concessions on the settlements.

Obama will discuss these issues with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas when they meet in the West Bank next week.

Contact Daily Alert at dailyalert@list-daily.org


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BLACK SMOKE

Posted by Hebron, March 15, 2013

The article below was written by David Wilder who is spokesman of The Jewish Community of Hebron. You can contribute directly to The Jewish Community of Hebron, POB10, Kiryat Arba-Hebron 90100, hebron@hebron.org.il, 972-2-9965333 or write to The Hebron Fund, 1760 Ocean Ave., Brooklyn, NY 11230, hebronfund@aol.com

Let's play a little name recognition game: Esther Ochana — ring a bell? Or Yehuda Shoham?

If we move forward in time: Asher Palmer and Yonatan Palmer?

All were killed because of Arabs throwing rocks at Jewish cars.

Esther Ochana, in Hebron, in January 1983, Yehuda Shoham, in June, 2001. And the Palmers, September, 2011.

Presently, three year old Adelle Biton is fighting for her life, following a rock attack on her mother's car last night, near Ariel, in the Shomron. And according to today's news reports, Arabs are continuing to try to kill people in the same way, from the same place where Adelle was injured, with others, last night.

Over the past few weeks Israeli leaders have been viciously assailing "Jewish nationalist' attacks against Arabs. A few cases of Jews throwing rocks at Arabs has been reported, including one such incident in Jerusalem. The assault against such episodes reached France, when President Shimon Peres told reporters in Paris, ""Attacking Arab citizens is a terrible thing, done by a handful of people but leaving a very large stain."

I'm not in favor of unprovoked rock-throwing, or any other kind of physical attack, against anyone, Arabs, Jews, or anyone else. But, as long as I can remember, at least since I've lived in the Hebron area, that being about 32 years, Jews have been targets of, at the least, rock attacks. On the road going north, between Hebron — Gush Etzion —Jerusalem. And going south, towards, Beer Sheva. And even the short distance between Kiryat Arba and Hebron.

During the 'first Intifada,' during the late 1980s, before buses had plastic windows, dozens, if not more, people were wounded when boulders hit glass windows on public transportation between Kiryat Arba and Jerusalem. Over the years these attacks grew, as a malignant cancer, throughout other places in Judea, Binyamin and Samaria. Even road 443, leaving Jerusalem towards Modi'in has become a favorite of attempted murder by rock.

Of course, these rock attacks culminated with massive shooting attacks during the Oslo War, aka the 2nd intifada, in the early 2000s.

For the past few years rock aggression has again reared its dangerous head. I recall, prior to the Palmer killing, being told that a senior officer, (now a very senior officer) instructed his troops not to get overly excited about rock-throwing. "It's sufferable," he was quoted as saying.

He visited the Palmers during the week of mourning, and I approached him as he left their home, querying him about this. Of course, he denied ever saying such words.

But I didn't believe him then. And I don't believe him today.

Rocks heaved at Jewish vehicles has almost become an Arab pastime, like baseball. And virtually nothing, but nothing, is done to stop it. The proof of that statement is that such ambushes continue, non-stop. Were proper action taken, they could be stopped. It's a question of will. It seems that there are those who aren't interested in preventing Jews, be they men, women, children or babies, from being injured or killed by projectiles flying through the air at moving vehicles.

Here in Hebron, for the past weeks, Arabs have continued throwing rocks at Beit Hadassah and at security forces, from the border area between the Jewish/Arab parts of the city. Tear gas and stink bomb odors have permeated our homes and streets, whenever the wind changes directions. But the attacks continue, and continue, and continue. And I don't remember hearing Peres talk about stains on the Arab population in Israel.

This is outrageous.

A couple of nights ago, international excitement seemed to be contagious. White smoke was seen pouring out of the Vatican chimney. Simultaneously, here in Israel, 'white smoke' was reported puffing out of the Prime Minister's office in Jerusalem, when coalition agreements were being finalized, paving the way to a new government early next week.

But, at the moment, I don't see any white smoke coming from anywhere. All I see is thick, ugly, smelly, black smoke, seemingly filling our skies. A black smoke, brought on by Jewish incitement, provoking Arabs, such as Peres' 'stain' remarks, and other politician's comments, people who are quick to the draw when a Jew looks cross-eyed at an Arab, but who remain speechless when Jews come under daily attack.

This kind of smoke is poisonous, and must be dispelled prior to its doing too much damage.

The firefighters today, Bibi, Boogie, Avigdor, Naftali, Yair, and the others, must take quick, firm action, leaving no questions in the minds of Arabs trying to kill Jews, that they will get back, in return, what they are attempting to do to us. That's why there are Israeli security forces. They must be ordered, on all levels, to put out the fire, now.

One of the ways that we can bring back the white smoke is, despite the issues, to continue driving the roads, visiting communities in Judea and Samaria. As Passover approaches, there will be plentiful activities throughout Jewish communities all over Yesha. I call upon all those in Israel during Pesach, to visit and support such communities.

Here in Hebron, our semi-annual music festival will take place on Thursday of Passover. Ma'arat HaMachpela, the tomb of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs, will be entirely open, including the Isaac Hall, on both Wednesday and Thursday. Our neighbors around us must see that their attacks will not scare us away; to the contrary, more and more people will visit, and populate these holy places. And our new government must know that we will not let them sit quietly in their air-conditioned offices in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv while Jews are bombarded by rocks and boulders on the roads.

The time has come to stop this black-smoke rock-terror, for once and for all./p>

Contact Hebron at hebron@hebron.com


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AMERICANS EXPECT A FRIENDLIER POLICY ON ISRAEL

Posted by Yorum Ettinger, March 15, 2013

On the eve of President Obama's visit to Israel, the American constituent is concerned about his attitude towards Israel, as reported by the March 4, 2013 issue of The Hill, one of the two newspapers on Capitol Hill.

According to The Hill, which features a Pulse Opinion Research poll, "The President's support for Israel was found wanting by many voters.... Three times as many voters believe that the Obama administration is not supportive enough of Israel [39%] as believe it is too supportive [13%]...."

Once again, American voters reaffirm their sustained and solid support of the Jewish State and Jewish sovereignty in the Land of Israel, which dates back to the 17th century Pilgrims and 18th century Founding Fathers, who considered themselves "the modern day Israelites." The Jewish State has never been considered as a typical foreign policy issue, but rather as an integral part of the cultural and moral foundations of the United States: Judeo-Christian values.

The proportion of voters who say that President Obama does not give strong enough backing to Israel is higher than it was in each of three similar surveys conducted for The Hill since May 2011. "Fewer voters find Obama's policy excessively supportive of Israel.... A slightly larger percentage of likely voters say Obama is generally anti-Israel [30%] than those who say that he is pro-Israel [28%]...." In the May and March, 2011 polls, 31% and 32% respectively said that the President was not supportive enough, while 27% and 25% respectively said that President Obama was too supportive of Israel.

Elected officials in the US — the Legislatures and Executives alike — are much more accountable and attentive to constituents' opinions and worldviews than any other Western democracy. The Federalist system highlights voters as the chief axis of the political process, and "We shall remember in November" reverberates powerfully — every two years - through the corridors of power on both sides of Pennsylvania Avenue. Voters' priorities and worldviews are reflected, most authentically, through both Chambers of Congress, which constitute the most potent legislature in the Free World, co-determining and co-equal to the US Executive.

The March 2013 Gallup Poll features Israel, once again, among the top 5-7 countries which are most favored by Americans. Israel is favored by 66%, while not favored by 29%. At the same time, the Palestinian Authority — which is not favored by the Arab regimes, but embraced by the "Palestine Firsters" in Washington, DC — is not favored by 77% and favored by a mere 15%. Once again, Mahmoud Abbas' and Salam Fayyad's Palestinian Authority joins Iran, North Korea, Pakistan, Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya as the least favorable entities.

According to Gallup, Israel is the only top ally of the US which is involved in a high-profiled conflict with its neighbors - the Palestinian Authority and the Arab World - who are supported by some Americans that automatically oppose Israel. Therefore, Israel's 66% favorability is quite significant, since its potential favorability is uniquely constrained.

Israel is perceived by most Americans as a democratic ally, a senior strategic partner in the battle against mutual threats such as Iran's nuclearization, Islamic terrorism and the raging Arab Street - a trustworthy beachhead in an area which is critical to vital US economic and national security interests. At the same time, the Palestinian leadership — which sided with the Communist Bloc, Khomeini, Saddam Hussein and Bin Laden - is identified with the increasingly hostile Muslim Street, totalitarian and corrupt regimes and the US' arch rivals, China and Russia.

The results of the aforementioned Gallup and Pulse polls are consistent with the December 27, 2012 Pew Research Center poll (Israel was favored over the Palestinian Authority by a 5:1 ratio), the November 18, 2012 CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll (a 59%:13% ratio), the September 17, 2012 Foreign Policy Initiative poll (70% favorability for Israel) and the March, 2012 Gallup poll (a 71%:19% ratio), etc.

At the time when the Arab Street is boiling, Israel is increasingly recognized as America's most reliable, stable, predictable, capable, democratic and unconditional strategic ally in the Middle East, and probably in the world. At a time when political polarization is intensifying in the US, support of Israel constitutes a rare common-denominator on, and off, Capitol Hill, reflecting shared values, mutual threats and joint interests.

President Obama's March visit to Israel constitutes an opportunity to prove to American constituents that the President shares their support of the Jewish State.

Ambassador Yoram Ettinger is an editor and consultant who lives in Jerusalem. Contact him at yoramtex@netvision.net.il


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ISRAEL HAS A GOVERNMENT, MR. PRESIDENT

Posted by Jewish Policy Center, March 15, 2013

That's something to remember when you arrive there next week. Israel has a government, elected by its people in a free, fair, open and democratic election. Multiple parties representing widely divergent points of view met a wildly diverse electorate through free media and open debate. This is no stultified two-party affair with a libertarian insurgency.

Israel will be the only country you visit in the region, this time or any other, that has a fully democratic system. Do not be swayed by the "apartheid" slander. Citizens of Israel are Jews, Moslems, Christians, and Druze, each with religious and non-religious elements. Their background is Ethiopian, Russian, North and South American, European, and derived from every country of the Arab world plus Persia; watch Rita before you go. There are left and right-wingers, socialists and capitalists. (Surprise: some of the socialists are right wing and some of the capitalists are left wing, since left and right in Israel are not only economic values, but relate to land and security. Some of the security hawks are economic leftists.) Every single one of them has a vote -- and they use it.

Remember, the Palestinians could have had that, too. Or could they? Abbas's single elected term ran out in January 2009; people who stay after that are dictators, not "elected leaders." Journalists and protests against PA corruption are stifled with an increasingly heavy hand. Hamas is overtly intolerant of the Christian minority in Gaza, and the West Bank's Christians are leaving as well; the brave ones talk about why. A key Palestinian demand is that territory they may one day have for a state must be Judenrein. Why would they think you would find that acceptable?

The new Israeli government will be without the Haredi parties, but don't mistake that for a government without religious members. The new government will be focused on income inequality, debt, unemployment, and the distribution of the burdens of citizenship, but don't mistake that for a government without red lines on security -- with the Palestinians, with Iran and increasingly with Syria/Lebanon. The new government contains many members who are skeptical of progress with the Palestinians, but don't mistake that for lack of interest in peace. There are members of the government who believe in a "two state solution," but don't mistake that for 1967 borders. Jerusalem is a point of consensus in a country where consensus comes hard.

Prime Minister Netanyahu is not your counterpart; he is Head of Government, you are Head of State. You, of course, know that. You also know that he is not of the same party as Israel's President. But do not mistake him for Senator McConnell -- minority leader in a Senate that holds part of one-third of American power -- or for Rep. Boehner, Speaker of a House that holds part of the same one-third. Power resides in the Knesset that Netanyahu leads. Your friend, Shimon Peres, is largely a ceremonial president, and he will represent the country, not the government or any party, when he presents you with your medal.

The Israelis you meet will be polite, Mr. President, because you represent the most successful experiment in democracy the world has known and because you represent the American people, considered by Israelis to be deep, lasting friends with shared core values. Your personal story is fascinating to them. (Was Yityish Aynaw really invited to dinner because she wrote about your influence on her life? If it was because she is fabulously beautiful, well, that's OK, too.) Just remember your personal story isn't why you're there.

At the same time, the Israelis will be nervous because your administration has the unenviable job of making sense of the Arab revolution that in some cases revealed fault lines going back to French-British colonial shenanigans after WWI, and in some cases resulted from the inability of the Arab states and Iran to fashion open and tolerant societies for their own people. Israel lives much closer to the results of that revolution than does the United States, and with much less margin for error. From Israel's perspective, if not yours, the U.S. has already made errors.

Limited government may not be your thing, sir, but to some extent Israelis voted for this particular governing constellation because there is a limit to what they believe they can control: a national school curriculum, fairer distribution of national service and income, and maybe economic progress. Every government has a responsibility to protect the citizens and most Israelis believe theirs did a reasonable job in the face of Hamas rockets last November.

On the other hand, Israelis can't make Iran give up its drive for nuclear capability, or make Palestinians understand that Israel is a legitimate, permanent part of the region, or make you change your mind about where Jews can build houses. They can't give themselves tolerant neighbors at peace internally or externally. They can't make Europe act on its understanding that Hezbollah is a terrorist organization or make the UN a friendlier place.

For all those things, Mr. President, they need and want your help. They would appreciate your understanding and they sincerely hope you aren't coming to tell them what to do.

Shoshana Bryen is Senior Director of The Jewish Policy Center. This article appeared March 15, 2013 in the American Thinker and it is archived at
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2013/03/israel_has_a_government_mr_president.html


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THE NEW ISRAELI CABINET

Posted by Steven Plaut, March 15, 2013

1. Well, you will happy to hear that the United Nations has at long last decided to step up and defend mistreated suffering Syrian civilians. The only itsy bitsy problem is that the ONLY "mistreatment" of "Syrian civilians" that the UN Human Rights Commission is concerned with is that of Golan Heights "Syrians" by Israel. A new UN report condemns the "mistreatment" of "Syrians by the Israeli "occupiers." The UN considers the Golan Heights, also known as the Biblical Bashan and Gilad, to be "occupied." Thus the "Syrians" living there, meaning mainly Druse, are victims of Israeli occupation.

Or to put this in different terms, with scores of Syrian civilians murdered every day by the Asad junta, the only "Syrian" people whose "mistreatment" the UN cares about the only ones who are NOT mistreated, the only ones who are NOT suffering or being murdered.

2. Well, the new Israeli cabinet is more or less in place. And we can now comment upon it.

I think the first important thing to do is emit a large sigh of relief. It could have been FAR worse. Sure, there are still reasons for worry and concern, there are some incompetent hacks in the cabinet, and there are the usual empty silly meaningless cabinet jobs, where a cabinet minister manages a de facto empty ministry (I call them Potemkin ministries). In addition, there are other ministries that should be shut down altogether because they do harm and simply need to be eliminated. In fact, in a moment I will issue an open invitation to Naftali Bennett to do just that.

But before that, the Defense Ministry is in the highly competent hands of Moshe "Bogie" Yaalon. He is one of the better political leaders in Israel and in fact I would prefer to see him replace Netanyahu as Prime Minister. Gideon Saar, who was doing a fairly good job in the last cabinet as Minister of Education and was fairly aggressive against the tenured Left and other manifestations of treason in pedagogic institutions, is now Minister of Interior, which is also an important and powerful post. He is in charge of Israel's local authorities (township governments), which are notoriously corrupt. So he has the chance to clean up the muck. We will see if he delivers. He can also evict the ISM "anarchists" and similar terrorists.

The Education Ministry will be run by one of the more interesting figures from Yair Lapid's party, although - like Lapid - he is a large unknown. Shai Piron is an Orthodox rabbi with liberal and moderate views, a humanist, and seems to be a decent guy. How he will handle the Tenured Left remains to be seen.

Lapid will be Finance Minister, generally a thankless job in Israel, the guy who gets blamed by everyone who thinks they deserve a larger handout. Lapid is a great unknown, but he has a great advantage in knowing nothing at all about economics and finance, but realizing that he knows nothing. Most of the boondoggles in Israel in economics were committed by politicians who imagined that they understood something about economics. His predecessor Steinetz was a professor of philosophy who also knew he knew nothing about economics, and so did a reasonably good job, maybe B minus level, although might have done better.

Gilad Ardan is one of the few Likud figures of intelligence and he will run the Ministry of Communications, in charge of electronic communications infrastrucure and its pricing. Steinetz has been demoted to the Ministry of Energy, a largely empty and meaningless post. Likud's Limor Livnat remains at the Ministry of Culture; she has been snarling at the subsidiztion programs that prop up anti-Israel leftist film-makers so she might do some good there. Bennett will run the Ministry of Commerce and Industry, a word about this follows.

Lieberman will remain the Foreign Minister, where he does not really make policy but has the power to annoy the Left and the anti-Israel urchins around the world. The semi-literate Amir Peretz will run the Potemkin Ministry of Tourism, also an empty post where he can do little mischief. Yael German, who had been a competent and popular mayor of Herzliya, will run health. The other cabinet ministers basically have honorary titles and little more than that, sitting in empty Potemkin ministries.

The one true disaster so far in the cabinet was Netanyahu's turning the Ministry of Justice over to Tzipi Livni, the head of one of the two factions left over from Kadima, which misgoverned Israel under Olmert and Sharon. The Minister of Justice is a powerful role and participates in selection of judges. The judicial system in Israel is already a disaster and allowing leftist birdbrained Livni ("Tzipi Livni" in Hebrew means White Birdie) to select judges is the worst decision so far by Netanyahu (well, other than his intention of turning the whole Negev over to the Bedouins). Bibi could have given her some meaningless post like minister of tourism or minister of the retired, but folded. Disaster is likely to follow.

Another piece of good news is that none of the religious or Chareidi parties will be sitting in the cabinet, for the first time since - well - since ever, as far as I recall. That means the new government can kick the butts of the Chareidim and slash back the extortion granted to them, end their wholesale exemptions from national or military service, and take them off welfare. We will see if the government delivers.

I have saved Naftali Bennett for last. As you recall, I supported Bennett before the election and still favor him and his party. Bennett is not just a principled Zionist, he is also a free-market-leaning entrepreneur, someone who has spoken out against "corporate welfare," handouts to corporations, tax exemptions and subsidies.

I have an open friendly challenge for Bennett. As the new Minister of Commerce and Industry, the test of your success in the post should be that when you LEAVE it in four years or whenever the next election is held, this Ministry should not exist any longer. Your challenge is to shut it down altogether. The Ministry is an anti-productive, anti-competitive, dirigiste monstrosity, a bureaucracy whose motivation is to preserve as many monopolies as possible, to obstruct imports, and to "plan and control" as much of the economy as possible in bolshevik Gosplan manner. In addition, the Ministry has made profits in corporate Israel something that bureaucrats ladle out, not something that hard work and entrepreneurial imagination earn. The Ministry is also the main force for interfering with imports and protecting special interests from import competition.

Naftali, prove that I was correct in placing my faith in you. Prove your commitment to principle and productivity.

After 65 years of interfering with the economy, close down this Ministry ALTOGETHER!

Steven Plaut is an American-trained economist, a professor of business administration at Haifa University and author of "The Scout." He frequently comments — both seriously and satirically — on Israeli politics and the left wing academic community. Write him at splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il His website address is http://www.stevenplaut.blogspot.com.


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THE NEW YORK TIMES IS A CRYPTO-NAZI PAPER

Posted by Dr. History, March 15, 2013

The article below was written by Giulio Meotti who is an Italian journalist with Il Foglio and writes a twice-weekly column for Arutz Sheva. He is the author of the book A New Shoah, that researched the personal stories of Israel's terror victims, published by Encounter and of J'Accuse: the Vatican Against Israel published by Mantua Books. His writing has appeared in publications such as the Wall Street Journal, Frontpage and Commentary. This article appeared March 14, 2013 in Israpundit and is
archived at http://www.israpundit.com/archives/53461

The New York Times has become the official paper of Israel's Western would-be eradicators.

Joseph Levine's test oped argued that Israel has no right to exist and that history should be reversed: "I conclude, then, that the very idea of a Jewish state is undemocratic, a violation of the self-determination rights of its non-Jewish citizens, and therefore morally problematic". The New York Times' relentless attacks could well play out in ways that indeed attempt to put an end to Israeli sovereignty.

According to Levine's racist belief, "native species" originate in a certain place and that is where they "belong." Hence, Israel's "colonization" threatens the "original" Arab environment. This is pure and simple Nazism. The New York Times' Israel-bashers use a style similar to the language used by anti-Semites the world over: Israel is inferior and must not enjoy the rights accorded to other peoples.

The New York Times articles are not attacking the "occupation" anymore, but the very idea of a Jewish state. The Times' incitement against Zionism is compulsive, full of half-baked truths and ill-disguised hysteria. The Times just hosted an oped by Rashid Khalidi, the PLO supporter and anti-Zionist militant from Columbia University. In his test column, he charges Israel of being an alien, settler entity, comparing its existence to South Africa's apartheid.

At the Times there are also those who do not advocate eradicating Israel, but work to remove any shred of justification for supporting it by following some elementary rules: promoting the myth of Palestinian "moderation", whitewashing terror groups and demonizing the "settlers".

As in the 1930's, when the New York Times downplayed the Nazi genocide of European Jews in order to avoid being seen as a "Jewish" newspaper, today Thomas Friedman, Roger Cohen (the dupe of Tehran) and Nicolas Kristof are the Jewish journalists who have been leading the charge in demonizing Israel and unabashedly praising the "Arab Spring" and Iran's "pragmatism".

Thomas Friedman plays a major role in shaping Obama's plan for Israel's return to the pre-1967 armistice line, which the late Abba Eban dubbed the "Auschwitz borders". It was Friedman who wrote that the White House is "disgusted" with Israeli interlocutors. The famous Jewish columnist has always been a militant suporter of the Palestinian cause. According to the US columnist, Israeli settlers are a "cancer for the Jewish people" and those who "collaborate" in the building of settlements are "enemies of peace" and "enemies of America's national interest", no less.

"What Israeli settlers and Palestinian suicide bombers have in common is that they are each pushing for the maximum use of force against the other side", he wrote after the killing of young grade-schooler Kobi Mandell. For Friedman, building a home on disputed territory is apparently the moral equivalent of stoning Jews — even school age ones — to death. To equate the two, as Friedman always does, is to create moral mush. At age fourteen, Kobi was immobilized and stoned to death as was his friend, his body hidden in a cave. The terrorists soaked their hands in the boy's blood and smeared the walls of the cave with it.

Friedman also crossed the Rubicon when he opined that "Jewish money" (note not Israeli money) caused the standing ovations Congress, both Democrats and Republicans, gave the Prime Minister of Israel, Binyamin Netanyahu.

As far back as 1929, during the Arab riots, the local Times correspondent Joseph Levy boasted that he was a committed anti-Zionist. Eighty years later, when the Fogels were slaughtered in Itamar, the New York Times chose not to cover that event on the front page, nor to comment it.

And how to forget the "Pharisees on the Potomac" headline by New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd on what she considers to be the moral hypocrisy of Republican Party?

Every morning, opening the New York Times, the reader finds very accurate stuff about the Holocaust, the most extreme demonstration of Jewish powerlessness, (ignored and put on the back pages of the Times while it was taking place) along with opeds like that of Peter Beinart titled "To Save Israel, Boycott the Settlements".

While remembering the death of 6.000.000 Jews, the New York Times suggests collective punishment for 600.000 living Jews. Nothing is more likely to stimulate violence against "the settlers" than such Holocaust vacuity.

The New York Times' avid PLO supporters and propagandists are the descendamts of one of the most celebrated journalists of his time, the first New York Times Pulitzer Prize winner, Walter Duranty, who in the thirties fed the American public instantly-rewritten history of the famine in the Ukraine. By persuading the world that Stalin's version of events was true, Duranty's fairy tales cost thousands,if not millions,of lives.

The Times consistently ignores the genocidal anti-Semitism that governs Hamas and Hizbullah, described therein as "militant" groups concerned with the social welfare of Palestinians and Lebanese. The Times' articles from Jenin, Nablus, Tulkarem and Bethlehem during the Second Intifada could have been written about the Taliban in the Afghan caves. These depicted the Palestinian terrorists as freedom fighters meeting their noble fate.

That favorable press in the New York Times encourages the Arabs to believe they can get away with murder is a given. By reinforcing the Islamic claim that those who died on the Temple Mount were martyred defenders of holy places, mowed down by savage, unprovoked Israeli authorities, the New York Times also helped inflame millions of Muslims against Israel. By calling the area "Muslim compound" and omitting any mention of the Temple Mount or its Jewish connection, theNew York Timesconvinced the world that Ariel Sharon had intruded upon a site holy solely to Islam, helping to trigger the second Intifada.

As the test Levine's oped shows, the New York Times is a crypto-Nazi publication whose message is, plain and simple, "Jews, go home, again". There is a Klezmer festival in Krakow this year.

Contact Dr. History at drhistory@cox.net


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AFTER HRC COMPLAINT, CBC REPORTS ON CHILD KILLED BY PALESTINIAN ROCKET

Posted by Honest Reporting Canada, March 15 , 2013

The article below was written by Mike Fegelman who is executive director of HonestReporting Canada, a non-profit organization which ensures fair and accurate Canadian media coverage of Israel. This article appeared March 15, 2013 in Honest Reporting Canada and is archived at
http://www.honestreporting.ca/after-hrc-complaint-cbc-reports-on-child-killed-by-palestinian-rocket/6783

baby omar

Last week, the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) released a report on the November hostilities between Israel and Hamas confirming that a Palestinian rocket and not an Israeli airstrike, had tragically killed 11-month-old Omar al-Masharawi, the infant son of BBC photographer Jihad al-Masharawi.

The UNHRC — an organization traditionally hostile to Israel — contended that a Hamas rocket fell short of its intended target (Israel) and landed in Gaza killing baby Omar instantly.

The UNHRC report said the following: "On 14 November, a woman, her 11-month-old infant, and an 18-year-old adult in Al-Zaitoun were killed by what appeared to be a Palestinian rocket that fell short of Israel.69 In addition, OHCHR received reports related to an incident in which two civilians, including a child, were killed, and five persons, including three children, were injured, as a result of what appeared to be a Palestinian rocket that fell short and hit a house in Al-Quds Street, near Khilla Gas Station, Jabalya, on 16 November."

At the time, many media outlets rushed to blame Israel for this Palestinian child's death. In Canada, CBC News published a report to its website on November 15 which carried unsubstantiated claims by unnamed Palestinian hospital officials who contended that the infant was killed in an Israeli airstrike. This UN report provided proper countenance to these claims which had lacked veracity.

In the interests of accuracy and fairness, on March 8, we asked CBC News.ca's Managing Editor, Ms. Marissa Nelson, and the CBC's Editor-in-Chief, Ms. Jennifer McGuire, to issue a story update to bring this new development to CBC reader's attention.

We are pleased to report that on March 11, CBC.ca issued the following story to its website: "Baby killed in Gaza likely died of Palestinian rocket, UN says":

OBAMA: I DO NOT INTEND TO FREE POLLARD IMMEDIATELY

Posted by Barbara Sommer, March 15, 2013

The article below was written by Hamodia Staff-Hamodia New York. It was posted March 15, 2013 and is archived at
http://www.jonathanpollard.org/2013/031513.htm

YERUSHALAYIM - As pressure in Israel for the release of Jonathan Pollard has mounted ahead of U.S. President Barack Obama's historic visit next week, the president addressed the issue in an interview with Israel media on Thursday in which he sympathized with pro-Pollard activists and explained his role in the case as president.

"We are talking about a man who committed a serious crime here, and he is paying the penalty. The justice system in America provides for periodic review of cases, and in the final analyis he may be released. My role as president in this system is to be sure that I have acted in accordance with legal rules and procedures.

"I do not intend to free Jonathan Pollard immediately. But I will make sure that---like every other American who serves a prison sentence---he will merit a review of the punishment meted out to him.

"I am well aware of the emotions that such a case generates. One of the sources of strength of Israel citizens is the concern for their welfare wherever they may be. I am aware of it and I identify with it. But I think that everyone has to understand that as president, my first commitment is to act according to the laws of the United States and to make sure they are assiduously enforced."

The Committee to Bring Jonathan Polard Home reacted optimistically to Obama's words, characterizing them as "a glimmer of hope."

Committee Chairman Effie Lahav said: "The entire Israeli public feels the pain of every additional day that Pollard wastes away in prison after suffering an unprecedented punishment in relation to the crime he committed.

"Having said that, we greatly appreciate President Obama's words, both in relation to the words of senior American officials who have determined that American justice demands Pollard's release, and in relation to the desire of the Israeli public to shorten his unprecedented punishment compared with anyone else who has committed comparable crimes.

"The feeling is that the president is coming to hear the voice of the Israeli public and its leaders. We call upon everyone to contniue to sign the petition for the release of Jonathan Pollard, which will be delivered to President Obama during his visit. Some 165,000 people have already signed. You can sign it at: www.PollardNow.org

Contact Barbara Sommer at lsommer_1_98@yahoo.com


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SMOKE FROM FOREST FIRE

Posted by Fred Reifenberg, March 15, 2013

Caption Text

Contact Fred Reifenberg at fred343@gmail.com.
View more of his graphic art at:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/from_by_fred/
http://nowthese.blogspot.co.il
http://denjanewhome.blogspot.com/
http://freifenberg-newblog.blogspot.com/
http://abstractsfromfred-fred343.blogspot.com/
http://reifyreadying.blogspot.com/


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ISRAELI APARTHEID WEEK - LEARN TO CRUSH IT

Posted by Borntolose, March 15, 2013

The article below was written by Charles Jacobs who is head of Americans for Peace and Tolerance, which he co-founded in late 2008. Jacobs also co-founded The David Project Center for Jewish Leadership in 2002, which he led until July 2008. Jacobs is also co-founder of the American Anti-Slavery Group (1994), which campaigns against slavery worldwide, and co-chairs The Sudan Campaign (2000), a coalition calling for an end to slavery in Sudan. Earlier in his career, beginning in 1989, Jacobs served as Deputy Director of the Boston chapter of the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America (CAMERA). Jacobs has appeared on the major U.S. television networks, on National Public Radio, and has been published in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The New Yorker, and The Wall Street Journal. This article originally appeared March 15, 2013 in the Boston Jewish Advocate and is archived at
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/charles-jacobs/israeli-apartheid-week-learn-to-crush-it/

apartheid"/

Spring's coming. Get ready for Israeli Apartheid Week on campuses across the nation. Here in Boston last week, Harvard got off to an early start: the college's Palestine Solidarity Committee placed mock eviction notices on students' doors, warning students that their rooms were "scheduled for demolition in the next three days." This was then likened to "the unlawful displacement of Palestinians."

That little psychodrama is just the prelim to a full program which will include anti-Israel films, the construction of an "apartheid wall" in the Science Center Plaza, and a talk by Hizbollah supporter, MIT Professor Noam Chomsky — who just may be the American Jew most proud to be ashamed that he's a Jew.

At Northeastern University, where Professors Denis Sullivan and Shahid Alam have proudly been working for decades to foment hatred of Israel (see www.shameonneu.com) the schedule is even more fulsome: From March 11-15, students will be shown two anti-Israel propaganda films, one even narrated by Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple. There will be a mock checkpoint constructed on the Centennial Commons, and all week long there will be a lighted sign flashing: "End Israeli Apartheid."

NEU President Aoun, who has finally come under pressure to do something about his radical, anti-Israel/anti-Semitic professors, might find it useful now to emulate Jason Kenney, the Canadian Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism, who condemned Israeli Apartheid Week as simple anti-Semitism. Aoun, who is Christian Lebanese, surely knows that Middle East Christians are the ones suffering from something pretty close to apartheid — in every one of the lovely Arab-dominated states they nervously inhabit. Condemning the lie about Israel while outing the real oppressors would be a double mitzvah. True, he'd have a tenured tantrum on his hands. Meanwhile, the silence of the Jewish Studies Department there continues to astonish.

At Boston University, there will be a sham conference on "The Right of Return." Several scholars who oppose the idea that Palestinians in vast numbers should be allowed to flood into Israel, thereby extinguishing the Jewish state, have submitted proposals to give papers. As of this writing the "conference" conveners have not responded to any of them, so any pretense that their panel is "academic" is a farce. Just more political theatre.

So what do we do about all this? The ADL has said it is "outraged" by the Harvard eviction notices. Nice, but then what?

I attended a workshop last week at the mammoth, yearly AIPAC Policy Conference which addressed the surge of anti-Israelism on the campuses. The two speakers representing Jewish organizations that work on campuses came to promote what has become the Jewish Establishment's only acceptable strategy; it's called "retail engagement." Responding to anti-Israel activity publicly with counter arguments, they say, has been shown to be ineffective. "Debate," they argued, "has no audience." A better approach is to get to know other students personally, especially student leaders, to build relationships with them, to "make friends, not arguments."

Much of this makes sense. Cold facts and logic don't win over most people. So much of politics is personal. Being popular and playing on emotion is often key. This sort of engagement is clearly necessary — but why would anyone think it's sufficient to win? Isn't the other side much larger? Can't they reach out to more leaders? To be truthful — aren't they often more charming?

And don't they have a big advantage? In our leftist-dominated culture which is obsessed with victimhood, the other side continually offers students what seems the high moral road — a victimhood campaign. In a low-information age, a picture of an Israeli tank next to a Palestinian child is enough to set people's judgment against us, sometimes for good.

Our problem is that they lie. Another reason that "retail engagement" alone won't win is that there is something more emotionally powerful than personal friendships at stake: In our world, people see themselves as good and moral people if they are for the underdog, and against oppression. If pro-Israel students, no matter how engaging, are seen to be supporting a cause that people fear taints them morally, friendship with charming Zionists will not often prevail.

No, friendship is not the magic bullet. To win, Jewish students will have to do harder things: They have to re-capture the emotional argument that counts most: Not that we are individually nice people, but that Israel is a decent nation that is being lied about. Jews are being victimized. That is the central truth of the matter, but exists now as the elephant in the PR room. Winning people to this central truth— that they are lying about us — means that pro-Israel students are going to have to do something the Jewish Establishment tells them not to do: they are going to have to call the campaign of lies what it is. They are going to have to talk to their friends about the people who are doing the defaming. They are going to have to "go negative." What we face is more than a social popularity contest: it's a political/ideological war; surely we know by now that it will take more than being charming if we mean to win.

It is time Jewish students stopped crowing that gays can march in Tel Aviv and started calling the propaganda crusade against us what it is: Bull! Lies! A hoax! The most inconvenient truth for our adversaries is that the horrors the Arab/Islamic world has falsely charged against Israel, are things they have actually done themselves — and are still doing.... While the "human rights" world keeps relatively mum. Land theft? The Arab world started out in Arabia and conquered the rest by jihad. Cruelty? Take a look at how women are treated, at how Sunnis treat Shias and vice versa. Is it now 70 or 80,000 dead in Syria? How many black slaves serve Arab masters across Arab north Africa?

Apartheid? Jewish students should say: "glad you brought that up. Because if you are truly interested in institutionalized subjugation in the Middle East, then talk to Simon Deng, an African who was enslaved by Arabs in Sudan; or to Mohammed Yahya, an African Muslim from Darfur, whose people are being massacred by Arabs for resisting Arabization; or to Caroline Doss, a Christian women from Cairo, whose people shiver to think what may soon happen to them because of the wonderful Arab spring. (They're all available.) Apartheid in the M.E. is not about Israel at all. That's a scam. The real apartheid is in the Arab/Islamic states.

If pro-Israel students can convince their classmates that anti-Israelism is based on lies — inversions, actually — Israel might just win on campus. Sure, it helps if pro-Israel students are likeable but only if they have the courage to state the truth and the wisdom not to listen to their establishment "leaders" might their efforts be decisive.

Contact Borntolose at borntolose3@charter.net


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WHY DENY THE ISLAMIC ELEMENT IN ISLAMIST TERRORISM?

Posted by Borntolose, March 15, 2013

The article below was written by Daniel Pipes who is an American historian, writer, and political commentator. He is the president of the Middle East Forum, and publisher of its Middle East Quarterly journal. After graduating with a PhD from Harvard and studying abroad, Pipes taught at a number of universities. He then served as director of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, before founding the Middle East Forum. His 2003 nomination by U.S. President George W. Bush to the board of directors of the U.S. Institute of Peace was protested by Islamists, Arab-American groups, and Democratic leaders, who cited his oft-stated belief that victory is the most effective way to terminate conflict. The Bush administration sidestepped the opposition with a recess appointment. Pipes has written a dozen books, and served as an adviser to Rudolph Giuliani's 2008 presidential campaign. He was in 2008—11 the Taube Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. This article appeard Spring 2013 in the Middle East Quarterly and is archived at
http://www.meforum.org/3466/islam-terrorism-denial

Over three years after Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan's massacre at Fort Hood, Texas, in November 2009, the classification of his crime remains in dispute. In its wisdom, the Department of Defense, supported by law enforcement, politicians, journalists, and academics, deems the killing of thirteen and wounding of forty-three to be "workplace violence." For example, the 86-page study on preventing a repeat episode, Protecting the Force: Lessons from Fort Hood, mentions "workplace violence" sixteen times.[1]

Indeed, were the subject not morbid, one could be amused by the disagreement over what exactly caused the major to erupt. Speculations included "racism" against him, "harassment he had received as a Muslim," his "sense of not belonging," "mental problems," "emotional problems," "an inordinate amount of stress," the "worst nightmare" of his being deployed to Afghanistan, or something fancifully called "pre-traumatic stress disorder." One newspaper headline, "Mindset of Rogue Major a Mystery," sums up this bogus state of confusion.[2]

In contrast, members of congress ridiculed the "workplace violence" characterization and a coalition of 160 victims and family members recently released a video, "The Truth about Fort Hood," criticizing the administration. On the third anniversary of the massacre, 148 victims and family members sued the U.S. government for avoiding legal and financial responsibility by not acknowledging the incident as terrorism.[3]

The military leadership willfully ignores what stares them in the face, namely Hasan's clear and evident Islamist inspiration; Protecting the Force mentions "Muslim" and "jihad" not a single time, and "Islam" only once, in a footnote.[4] The massacre officially still remains unconnected to terrorism or Islam.

This example fits in a larger pattern: The establishment denies that Islamism—a form of Islam that seeks to make Muslims dominant through an extreme, totalistic, and rigid application of Islamic law, the Shari'a—represents the leading global cause of terrorism when it so clearly does. Islamism reverts to medieval norms in its aspiration to create a caliphate that rules humanity. "Islam is the solution" summarizes its doctrine. Islam's public law can be summarized as elevating Muslim over non-Muslim, male over female, and endorsing the use of force to spread Muslim rule. In recent decades, Islamists (the adherents of this vision of Islam) have established an unparalleled record of terrorism. To cite one tabulation: TheReligionOfPeace.com counts 20,000 assaults in the name of Islam since 9/11,[5] or about five a day. In the West, terrorist acts inspired by motives other than Islam hardly register.

It is important to document and explain this denial and explore its implications. The examples come predominantly from the United States, though they could come from virtually any Western country—except Israel.

Documenting Denial

The government, press, and academy routinely deny that Islamist motives play a role in two ways, specific and general. Specific acts of violence perpetrated by Muslims lead the authorities publicly, willfully, and defiantly to close their eyes to Islamist motivations and goals. Instead, they point to a range of trivial, one-time, and individualistic motives, often casting the perpetrator as victim. Examples from the years before and after 9/11 include:

  • 1990 assassination of Rabbi Meir Kahane in New York: "A prescription drug for ... depression."[6]
  • 1991 murder of Makin Morcos in Sydney: "A robbery gone wrong."
  • 1993 murder of Reverend Doug Good in Western Australia: An "unintentional killing."
  • 1993 attack on foreigners at a hotel in Cairo, killing ten: Insanity.[7]
  • 1994 killing of a Hasidic Jew on the Brooklyn Bridge: "Road rage."[8]
  • 1997 shooting murder atop the Empire State Building: "Many, many enemies in his mind."[9]
  • 2000 attack on a bus of Jewish schoolchildren near Paris: A traffic incident.
  • 2002 plane crash into a Tampa high-rise by an Osama bin Laden-admiring Arab-American (but non-Muslim): The acne drug Accutane.[10]
  • 2002 double murder at LAX: "A work dispute."[11]
  • 2002 Beltway snipers: A "stormy [family] relationship."[12]
  • 2003 Hasan Karim Akbar's attack on fellow soldiers, killing two: An "attitude problem."[13]
  • 2003 mutilation murder of Sebastian Sellam: Mental illness.[14]
  • 2004 explosion in Brescia, Italy, outside a McDonald's restaurant: "Loneliness and depression."[15]
  • 2005 rampage at a retirement center in Virginia: "A disagreement between the suspect and another staff member."[16]
  • 2006 murderous rampage at the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle: "An animus toward women."[17]
  • 2006 killing by a man in an SUV in northern California: "His recent, arranged marriage may have made him stressed."[18]

This pattern of denial is all the more striking because it concerns distinctly Islamic forms of violence such as suicide operations, beheadings, honor killings and the disfiguring of women's faces. For example, when it comes to honor killings, Phyllis Chesler has established that this phenomenon differs from domestic violence and, in Western countries, is almost always perpetrated by Muslims.[19] Such proofs, however, do not convince the establishment, which tends to filter Islam out of the equation.

The generalized threat inspires more denial. Politicians and others avoid mention of Islam, Islamism, Muslims, Islamists, mujahideen, or jihadists. Instead, they blame evildoers, militants, radical extremists, terrorists, and al-Qaeda. Just one day after 9/11, U.S. secretary of state Colin Powell set the tone by asserting that the just-committed atrocities "should not be seen as something done by Arabs or Islamics; it is something that was done by terrorists."[20]

Another tactic is to obscure Islamist realities under the fog of verbiage. George W. Bush referred once to "the great struggle against extremism that is now playing out across the broader Middle East"[21] and another time to "the struggle against ideological extremists who do not believe in free societies and who happen to use terror as a weapon to try to shake the conscience of the free world."[22] He went so far as to dismiss any Islamic element by asserting that "Islam is a great religion that preaches peace."[23]

In like spirit, Barack Obama observed that "it is very important for us to recognize that we have a battle or a war against some terrorist organizations, but that those organizations aren't representative of a broader Arab community, Muslim community."[24] Obama's attorney general, Eric Holder, engaged in the following exchange with Lamar Smith (Republican, Tex.) during congressional testimony in May 2010, repeatedly resisting a connection between Islamist motives and a spate of terrorist attacks:

Smith: In the case of all three [terrorist] attempts in the last year, ... one of which was successful, those individuals have had ties to radical Islam. Do you feel that these individuals might have been incited to take the actions that they did because of radical Islam?
Holder: Because of?
Smith: Radical Islam.
Holder: There are a variety of reasons why I think people have taken these actions. It's one, I think you have to look at each individual case. I mean, we are in the process now of talking to Mr. [Feisal] Shahzad to try to understand what it is that drove him to take the action.
Smith: Yes, but radical Islam could have been one of the reasons?
Holder: There are a variety of reasons why people ...
Smith: But was radical Islam one of them?
Holder: There are a variety of reasons why people do things. Some of them are potentially religious...[25]

And on and on Holder persisted, until Smith eventually gave up. And this was not exceptional: An almost identical denial took place in December 2011 by a senior official from the Department of Defense.[26]

Or one can simply ignore the Islamist element; a study issued by the Department of Homeland Security, "Evolution of the Terrorist Threat to the United States," mentions Islam just one time. In September 2010, Obama spoke at the United Nations and, using a passive construction, avoided all mention of Islam in reference to 9/11: "Nine years ago, the destruction of the World Trade Center signaled a threat that respected no boundary of dignity or decency."[27] About the same time, Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security, stated that the profiles of Americans engaged in terrorism indicate that "there is no 'typical' profile of a homegrown terrorist."[28]

Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, rightly condemns this mentality as "two plus two must equal something other than four."[29] Exceptions to Denial

Exceptions to this pattern do exist; establishment figures on occasion drop their guard and acknowledge the Islamist threat to the civilized world. Gingrich himself delivered a uniquely well-informed speech on Shari'a in 2010, noting, "This is not a war on terrorism. Terrorism is an activity. This is a struggle with radical Islamists in both their militant and their stealth form."[30]

British prime minister Tony Blair offered a stirring and eloquent analysis in 2006:

This is war, but of a completely unconventional kind. ... What are the values that govern the future of the world? Are they those of tolerance, freedom, respect for difference and diversity or those of reaction, division and hatred? ... It is in part a struggle between what I will call Reactionary Islam and Moderate, Mainstream Islam. But its implications go far wider. We are fighting a war, but not just against terrorism but about how the world should govern itself in the early 21st century, about global values.[31]

The current British prime minister, David Cameron, gave a fine analysis in 2005, long before he reached his current office:

The driving force behind today's terrorist threat is Islamist fundamentalism. The struggle we are engaged in is, at root, ideological. During the last century a strain of Islamist thinking has developed which, like other totalitarianisms, such as Nazism and Communism, offers its followers a form of redemption through violence.[32]

In 2011, as prime minister, Cameron returned to this theme when he warned that "we need to be absolutely clear on where the origins of these terrorist attacks lie. That is the existence of an ideology, Islamist extremism."[33]

The former foreign minister of the Czech Republic, Alexandr Vondra, spoke his mind with remarkable frankness:

Radical Islamists challenge practically everything that our society claims to stand for, no matter what the Western policies were or are. These challenges include the concept of universal human rights and freedom of speech.[34]

George W. Bush spoke in the period after October 2005 about "Islamo-fascism" and "Islamic fascists." Joseph Lieberman, the U.S. senator from Connecticut, criticized those who refuse "to identify our enemy in this war as what it is: violent Islamist extremism"[35] and sponsored an excellent Senate study on Maj. Hasan. Rick Santorum, then a U.S. senator from Pennsylvania, gave a notable analysis:

In World War II, we fought Naziism and Japanese imperialism. Today, we are fighting against Islamic fascists. They attacked us on September 11th because we are the greatest obstacle to their openly declared mission of subjecting the entire world to their fanatical rule. I believe that the threat of Islamic fascism is just as menacing as the threat from Nazism and Soviet Communism. Now, as then, we face fanatics who will stop at nothing to dominate us. Now, as then, there is no way out; we will either win or lose.[36]

Antonin Scalia, an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, observed in an opinion that "America is at war with radical Islamists."[37] A New York Police Department study, Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat, discusses "Islamic-based terrorism" in its first line and never lets up. It contains explicit references to Islamism; it states, "Ultimately, the jihadist envisions a world in which jihadi-Salafi Islam is dominant and is the basis of government."[38]

So, reality does on occasion poke through the fog of denial and verbiage.

The Mystery of Denial

These exceptions aside, what accounts for the persistent denial of Islamic motives? Why the pretense that no elephant fills the room? An unwillingness to face the truth invariably smacks of euphemism, cowardice, political correctness, and appeasement. In this spirit, Gingrich argues that "the Obama Administration is willfully blind to the nature of our enemies and the forces which threaten America. ... it's not ignorance; it's determined effort to avoid [reality]."[39]

These problems definitely contribute to denial, but something more basic and more legitimate goes further to explain this reluctance. One hint comes from a 2007 Ph.D. dissertation in politics submitted by Gaetano Ilardi to Monash University in Melbourne. Titled "From the IRA to Al Qa'eda: Intelligence as a Measure of Rational Action in Terrorist Operations," it refers frequently to Islam and related topics; Ilardi has also been quoted in the press on the topic of radicalization. Yet in 2009, as acting senior sergeant of the Victoria police, he was the most vociferous of his twenty law enforcement colleagues insisting to this author that the police not publicly mention Islam in any fashion when discussing terrorism. In other words, wanting not to refer to Islam can come from someone who knows full well the role of Islam.

Confirming this point, Daniel Benjamin, the Obama administration's coordinator for counterterrorism in the U.S. State Department, explicitly refutes the idea that silence about Islam means being unaware of it:

Policymakers fully recognize how al Qaeda's ideologues have appropriated Islamic texts and concepts and fashioned them into a mantle of religious legitimacy for their bloodshed. As someone who has written at length about how al Qaeda and the radical groups that preceded it have picked and chosen from sacred texts, often out of all context, I have no doubt my colleagues understand the nature of the threat.[40]

Ilardi and Benjamin know their stuff; they avoid discussing Islam in connection with terrorism for reasons deeper than political correctness, ignorance, or appeasement. What are those reasons? Two factors have key importance: wanting not to alienate Muslims or to reorder society.

Explaining Denial

Not wanting to offend Muslims, a sincere and reasonable goal, is the reason most often publicly cited. Muslims protest that focusing on Islam, Islamism, or jihad increases Muslim fears that the West is engaged in a "war against Islam." Joseph Lieberman, for example, notes that the Obama administration prefers not to use the term "violent Islamist extremists" when referring to the enemy because using such explicit words "bolsters our enemy's propaganda claim that the West is at war with Islam."[41]

Questioned in an interview about his having only once used the term "war on terror," Barack Obama confirmed this point, stating that "words matter in this situation because one of the ways we're going to win this struggle is through the battle of hearts and minds." Asked, "So that's not a term you're going to be using much in the future?" he replied:

You know, what I want to do is make sure that I'm constantly talking about al Qaeda and other affiliated organizations because we, I believe, can win over moderate Muslims to recognize that that kind of destruction and nihilism ultimately leads to a dead end, and that we should be working together to make sure that everybody has got a better life.[42]

Daniel Benjamin makes the same point more lucidly:

Putting the emphasis on "Islamist" instead of on "violent extremist" undercuts our efforts, since it falsely roots the core problem in the faith of more than one billion people who abhor violence. As one internal government study after another has shown, such statements invariably wind up being distorted in the global media, alienating Muslim moderates.[43]

This concern actually has two sub-parts for two types of Muslims: Those who would otherwise help fight terrorism feel insulted ("a true Muslim can never be a terrorist") and so do not step forward while those who would not normally be involved become radicalized, some even becoming terrorists.

The second reason to inhibit one's talk about Islam concerns the apprehension that this implies a large and undesirable shift away from how secular Western societies are ordered. Blaming terrorist attacks on drugs gone awry, road rage, an arranged marriage, mental cases going berserk, or freak industrial accidents permits Westerners to avoid confronting issues concerning Islam. If the jihad explanation is vastly more persuasive, it is also far more troubling.

When one notes that Islamist terrorism is almost exclusively the work of Muslims acting out of Islamic convictions, the implication follows that Muslims must be singled out for special scrutiny, perhaps along the lines this author suggested in 2003:

Muslim government employees in law enforcement, the military and the diplomatic corps need to be watched for connections to terrorism, as do Muslim chaplains in prisons and the armed forces. Muslim visitors and immigrants must undergo additional background checks. Mosques require a scrutiny beyond that applied to churches and temples.[44]

Implementing such a policy means focusing law enforcement attention on a community that is defined by its religion. This flies in the face of liberal, multicultural, and politically correct values; it also will be portrayed as illegal and perhaps unconstitutional. It means distinguishing on the basis of a person's group characteristics. It involves profiling. These changes have unsettling implications that will be condemned as "racist" and "Islamophobic," accusations that can ruin careers in today's public environment.

Islam-related explanations may offer a more persuasive accounting than turning perpetrators into victims, but the imperative not to tamper with existing social mores trumps counterterrorism. This accounts for police, prosecutors, politicians, and professors avoiding the actual factors behind Islamist attacks and instead finding miscellaneous mundane motives. Those soothing and inaccurate bromides have the advantage of implying no changes other than vigilance against weapons. Dealing with unpleasant realities can be deferred.

Finally, denial appears to work. Just because law enforcement, the military, and intelligence agencies tiptoe around the twin topics of Islamic motivation and the disproportionate Islamist terrorism when addressing the public does not stop these same institutions in practice from focusing quietly on Islam and Muslims. Indeed, there is plenty of evidence that they do just this, and it has led to an effective counterterrorism effort since 9/11 with close scrutiny on everything from mosques to hawalas (informal Muslim financial exchanges). As a result, with rare exceptions (such as the Fort Hood shooter), Islamist terrorist networks tend to be stymied and successful assaults tend to come out of nowhere from perpetrators characterized by sudden jihad syndrome.

Arguing against Denial

While respecting the urge not to aggravate Muslim sensibilities and acknowledging that the frank discussion of Islam can have major consequences for ordering society, this author insists on the need to mention Islam. First, it is not clear how much harm talking about Islam actually does. Genuine anti-Islamist Muslims insist on Islam being discussed; Islamists posing as moderates tend to be those who feign upset about a "war on Islam" and the like.

Second, little evidence points to Muslims being radicalized by mere discussion of Islamism. Quite the contrary, it is usually something specific that turns a Muslim in that direction, from the way American women dress to drone attacks in Somalia, Yemen, and Pakistan.

Third, while conceding that discussion of Islam has costs, ignoring it costs more. The need to define the enemy, not just within the counsels of war but for the public, trumps all other considerations. As the ancient Chinese strategist Sun Tzu observed, "Know your enemy and know yourself and you can fight a hundred battles." Karl von Clausewitz's entire theory of war assumes an accurate assessment of the enemy. Just as a medical doctor must identify and name a disease before treating it, so must politicians and generals identify and name the enemy to defeat it.

To censor oneself limits one's ability to wage war. Avoiding mention of the enemy's identity sows confusion, harms morale, and squanders strengths. In brief, it offers a recipe for defeat. Indeed, the annals of history record no war won when the enemy's very name and identity may not be uttered; this is all the more so in modern times when defining the enemy must precede and undergird military victory. If you cannot name the enemy, you cannot defeat him.

Fourth, even though law enforcement et al. find that saying one thing in public while doing another in private works, this dishonesty comes at the high price of creating a disconnect between the high-flying words of politicians and the sometimes sordid realities of counterterrorism:

  • Government employees at risk: On the one hand, out of fear of being exposed, public servants must hide or lie about their activities. On the other, to do their work effectively, they must run afoul of studiously impartial government regulations, or even break the law.

  • A confused public: Policy statements piously reject any link between Islam and terrorism even as counterterrorism implicitly makes just such a connection.

  • Advantage Islamists: They (1) point out that government declarations are mere puffery hiding what is really a war against Islam; and (2) win Muslim recruits by asking them whom they believe, straight-talking Islamists or insincere politicians.

  • "Security theater" and other pantomimes: To convince observers that Muslims are not specifically targeted, others are hauled in for show purposes, wasting finite time and resources.[45]

  • An increase in resentments and prejudices: People keep their mouths shut but their minds are working. An open public discussion, in which one could condemn Islamists while supporting moderate Muslims, would lead to a better understanding of the problem.

  • Vigilance discouraged: The campaign of "If You See Something, Say Something" is fine but what are the costs of reporting dubious behavior by a neighbor or a passenger who turns out to be innocent? Although vigilant neighbors have been an important source of counterterrorism leads, anyone who reports his worries opens himself up to vilification as a racist or "Islamophobe," damage to one's career, or even a law suit.[46]

Thus does the unwillingness to acknowledge the Islamist motives behind most terrorism obstruct effective counterterrorism and render further atrocities more likely.

When Denial Will End

Denial is likely to continue until the price gets too steep. The 3,000 victims of 9/11, it turns out, did not suffice to shake Western complacency. 30,000 dead, in all likelihood, will also not suffice. Perhaps 300,000 will. For sure, three million will. At that point, worries about Muslim sensibilities and fear of being called an "Islamophobe" will fade into irrelevance, replaced by a single-minded determination to protect lives. Should the existing order someday be in evident danger, today's relaxed approach will instantly go out the window. The popular support for such measures exists; as early as 2004, a Cornell University poll showed that 44 percent of Americans "believe that some curtailment of civil liberties is necessary for Muslim Americans."[47]

Israel offers a control case. Because it faces so many threats, the body politic lacks patience with liberal pieties when it comes to security. While aspiring to treat everyone fairly, the government clearly targets the most violent-prone elements of society. Should other Western countries face a comparable danger, circumstances will likely compel them to adopt this same approach.

Conversely, should such mass dangers not arise, this shift will probably never take place. Until and unless disaster on a large scale strikes, denial will continue. Western tactics, in other words, depend entirely on the brutality and competence of the Islamist enemy. Ironically, the West permits terrorists to drive its approach to counterterrorism. No less ironically, it will take a huge terrorist atrocity to enable effective counterterrorism.

Addressing Denial

In the meantime, those who wish to strengthen counterterrorism by acknowledging the role of Islam have three tasks.

First, intellectually to prepare themselves and their arguments so when calamity occurs they possess a fully elaborated, careful, and just program that focuses on Muslims without doing injustice to them.

Second, continue to convince those averse to mentioning Islam that discussing it is worth the price; this means addressing their concerns, not bludgeoning them with insults. It means accepting the legitimacy of their hesitance, using sweet reason, and letting the barrage of Islamist attacks have their effect.

Third, prove that talking about Islamism does not lead to perdition by establishing the costs of not naming the enemy and of not identifying Islamism as a factor; noting that Muslim governments, including the Saudi one, acknowledge that Islamism leads to terrorism; stressing that moderate Muslims who oppose Islamism want Islamism openly discussed; addressing the fear that frank talk about Islam alienates Muslims and spurs violence; and demonstrating that profiling can be done in a constitutionally approved way.

In brief, even without an expectation of effecting a change in policy, there is much work to be done.

Contact Borntolose at borntolose3@charter.net


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ANOTHER TACK: OUT OF THE BOX, OBAMA

Posted by Borntolose, March 15, 2013

The article below was written by Sarah Honig who is a veteran columnist and senior editorial writer who joined The Jerusalem Post while still in her teens. She served for many years as The Post's political correspondent (a position she also held on the now-defunct but once-influential Davar), headed the Tel Aviv bureau at the Post and wrote daily analyses of the political scene, along with in-depth features. Honig is a mother, an artist and an avid collector of antique and vintage dolls. View her website at www.sarahhonig.com This article appeared March 14, 2013 in the Jerusalem Post and is archived at
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-Ed-Contributors/Another-Tack-Out-of-the-box-Obama

Before Obama begins coaxing us with honeyed blandishments, he must take a long, hard and unbiased look out of the box.

If our soon-to-arrive visitor, US President Barack Obama, truly fancies himself the harbinger of new tidings to this region — as he has tirelessly promoted himself in the past — then it's high time for him to take the truly bold tack and think out of the box.

Had Obama by happenstance peeked over the edge of the conventional box, he's have recoiled in horror from the two-state sham. He'd have realized that it will unleash all manner of mayhem and misery — as surely as the last vestiges of stability are right now brutally expunged from the Arab realm in the traumatic wake of what's still extolled as the Arab Spring.

But so far Obama never dared venture outside his confining worldview container. His self-acclaimed innovative statesmanship wasn't ever genuinely innovative.

Obama is an unexceptional mantra-chanter, an unimaginative product of his times. He, moreover, takes formulaic trendiness to dangerous extremes. He distorts and aggrandizes out of all proportion hackneyed clichés that fail both the tests of history and of good sense.

What Obama proclaims as nonconformism is in fact the conformity of his mother's beatnik and hippie-generation era and of his own upbringing and formative years. Today's cognition-constricting political correctness is the dogma born in the second half of the twentieth century.

As the proletarian revolution began to slowly but inexorably lose its allure in the free world's intellectual salons and group-think campuses, well-heeled Western radicals discovered the Third World — downtrodden, but, as stylish mythology would have it, spiritually superior.

That was the outlook inculcated into Obama and from which he either couldn't unfetter himself or which he had expediently exploited to further personal vested interests. It impelled him to rush, hot on the heels of his first inauguration in 2009, to address the global Muslim collective from Cairo University's rostrum.

That was just the forerunner of much more in the same vein. Not only was Obama not embarrassed by his fawning performance in Egypt, but he celebrated it as a cultural/diplomatic milestone, a momentous historic event.

And so, on the first anniversary of his sycophantic extravaganza, Obama dispatched his own hand-picked (first African-American) NASA Administrator, Charles Bolden, to tell al-Jazeera that America's president himself demanded outright that henceforth NASA's principal goals be to encourage children to learn math and science, expand international relationships and "foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science... and math and engineering."

For those who forgot, NASA is the acronym for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, formally lumbered with such mundane uninspiring chores as space exploration, scientific discovery and aeronautics research.

Bolden didn't misspeak and his utterance was in no way incidental. He later repeated the message to engineering students in Orlando Florida, stressing that Obama specifically instructed him to "find ways to reach out to dominantly Muslim countries."

The prevailing predisposition is to brush aside assorted Obama administration absurdities as overblown or tendentious reporting. Hence, NASA's outreach to Muslims was readily dismissed as a one-off bit of trivial flattery meant to make nice and sooth the savage by pretending he's really a savant.

Obama's fervent fans are anyhow likely to applaud any of his oddball initiatives as sophisticated pluralism.

This fits in snugly with Obama's moral-relativist mindset that preaches unstinting tolerance toward adversarial viewpoints, that hypes the hypothesis that no cause is unavoidably more just than any other and that promises preference to ostensible third-world underdogs with a peeve.

The Arabs, especially those parading under the Johnny-come-lately Palestinian moniker, quickly hogged center-stage in that lucrative role of endeared third-world underdogs with a peeve. They became the First World's permanent superstars — first under Nasser's banner of pan-Arab nationalism and ultimately under a varied array of warring Islamic fanatics.

But it goes without saying that in all mutations of the love affair with the Middle East's supposedly suffering masses (their mind-blowing oil wealth notwithstanding), the sufferings of the Jewish people never aroused significant sympathy. Far from it. As ever, Jews constitute fashionable foes.

Never to be left behind, Israeli left-wingers eagerly jumped on the opportunity of luxuriating in the ambiance of chic enlightenment. If their own country is denigrated as uncool and oppressive, then local leftists evince no qualms about jeopardizing the self-determination of the ancient Jewish people. At the same time they espouse the ideal of self-determination for Palestinians, whose nationhood is a recent invention cynically calculated to counterbalance renascent Jewish national independence.

Sad as it is to admit, the entire notion of a Palestinian state residing alongside Israel is totally made-in-Israel. It appeared in the early 1970s on far-Left's fringes mainly to exasperate then-Prime Minister Golda Meir, who was by no stretch of the imagination a right-winger.

She correctly and vigorously noted that no Arab Palestinian nation had ever existed in the entire annals of mankind, that Palestine is a Roman name inflicted on this country to humiliate defeated Judea, that it remained alive only in Europe, that it was re-imported here by the British Mandate only after WWI, that the Arabs (who couldn't even pronounce it) rejected the Palestinian designation, which ironically ended up used only to describe this land's Jews in pre-state days.

The two-state solution was the brainchild of Golda's political antagonists, part of their effort to denigrate her as incurably obstinate and wrongheaded. This manipulative ploy morphed into establishment orthodoxy as post-Golda Labor veered leftward and inter alia dragged the entire political spectrum with it.

Successive small, seemingly meaningless semantic concessions were in due course codified as the new-fangled lexicon of Israeli public discourse. The two-state solution became standard vocabulary.

All the while, gloating Arab propagandists zestfully built on the Israeli-laid foundations. To hear them, in 1967 Israel premeditatedly occupied a veteran, flourishing and sovereign Palestinian state.

In actual fact, though, the Arabs refused to consider their own Palestinian state in 1947 under the auspices of the UN Partition Resolution. They likewise didn't seize the opportunity to establish a Palestinian state between 1948 and 1967, when they controlled all the territory they now demand. Nonetheless, their counterfeit historiography has gained widespread respectability throughout the international community.

Then came the Osloite concoction geared to implement the urgent necessity — as the world was bamboozled to believe — of expediting Palestinian statehood. That meant splitting the tiny area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean between Jews and Arabs. To be sure, it's quite impossible to carve it up in a way that wouldn't lead to the certain obliteration of Israel (slated to be compressed back into the 9-mile narrowing that dovish Abba Eban described as "the Auschwitz borders"). But foreigners are either unfamiliar with the topography or don't care.

To add insult to injury, the Osloite blueprint ignored the fact that original Palestine was already callously partitioned in 1922 when the Brits unilaterally ripped away nearly 80% of the total earmarked by the League of Nations as the National Home of the Jewish people. That massive severed chunk of Palestine is today known as Jordan and is strictly Judenrein by law.

Even those who disdain history and who cannot abide mention of the past — most probably because it undermines their bogus case against Israel — shouldn't, however, in full conscience willfully disregard the present. The facts on the ground are indisputable. Two of the three Arab-controlled portions of Palestine — Jordan and the Oslo-wrought Palestinian Authority — are propped up by Israel. Gaza, relinquished by Israel, has become Hamastan.

If Israel retreats and/or is weakened, Jordan and the Ramallah-run latifundia will go the way of Gaza, Syria and Egypt. They will come under the attack or sway of some bellicose Jihadist outfit or another.

That's a peace-killer because no coexistence — especially if merely marginally viable — can survive without a minimally stable Arab regime to buttress it. Without some semblance of stability and effective central rule, any deal would overnight be reduced to the fiasco of Israel's withdrawals from Gaza and South Lebanon. Both were in no time turned into vast arsenals of mass destruction, threatening Israel with a myriad of missiles of different ranges and deadly capacities.

If the Arab Spring should teach Obama anything, it isn't that it brought forth the blossoming of democracy but that it resulted in the anarchic fragmentation of the artificial Arab nation-states which imperialist Britain and France arrogantly stitched together.

The Palestinians and Jordanians don't comprise bona fide ethnicities one iota more than do the Syrians, Lebanese or even the Iraqis, whom America vainly sought to democratize and bind into one national cohesive.

Only much-maligned Israel prevents the chaotic and violent disintegration of the PA and Jordan. Only relentless Israeli counter-terrorism daily thwarts the predations of the disparate forces of jihad, already now poised to take over from Mahmoud Abbas. They will be free to do their worst the second Israel pulls out.

Gaza will be much more than hideously replicated on Israel's long convoluted eastern flank. The density of Israel's directly adjoining ultra-vulnerable population centers would incomparably compound the calamity. The influx into independent Palestine of Palestinians from strife-torn Lebanon and Syria would throw yet more matches into the powder keg. Such "peace" could mark the bitter beginning of Israel's end. No less.

That of course, we presume, isn't what Obama wishes. If anything, he swears that he is our best bud, a bosom ally who knows what's best for us even if we stupidly don't.

That makes it all the more morally imperative that Obama remove his ideological blinders — before he begins coaxing us with honeyed blandishments — and that he take a long, hard and unbiased look out of the box. If he doesn't, then his inability to shake off his affinities, orientations and inclinations should not only perturb Israelis and Jews.

If he claims that his two-state compromise and conciliation agenda can remain realistically relevant in the face of all the frenzied martyr-worshipping Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, Salafist and al-Qaida zealots baying for the blood of Jewish infidels, then contrary to his electioneering rhetoric, Obama is insincere.

Contact Borntolose at borntolose3@charter.net


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HUMAN RIGHTS WEAPON & ISRAEL

Posted by Human Rights Voices, March 15, 2013

Today at the United Nations in New York City, the UN's top women's rights body, the Commission on the Status of Women, will wrap up its annual session by condemning only one state for violating the rights of women anywhere in the world. Not Syria, or China, or Saudi Arabia. But Israel, for violating the rights of Palestinian women.

Next week, the UN's top human rights body, the Human Rights Council, will end its session by adopting six resolutions condemning human rights violations by one state alone. Israel. And one resolution each on human rights violations in seven of the other 192 UN countries combined.

One doesn't need a lawyer or foreign affairs guru to figure it out. This isn't about human rights at all. Twisted beyond recognition, 'human rights' are a weapon in the political arsenal of Israel's enemies.

The strategy is a blow not only to Israel, however, but to the millions and millions of human rights victims left by the wayside in the stampede to denounce and defeat the Jewish state.

In Syria, reports suggest that there are more than 90,000 dead, 2.5 million internally displaced and 750,000 refugees. Syrian refugees have even fled to Israel through the Golan Heights where they have received life-saving medical care.

And yet the Human Rights Council has just circulated a resolution called "Human rights in the occupied Syrian Golan." In it, the Council "calls upon Israel to allow the Syrian population of occupied Syrian Golan to visit their families and relatives in the Syrian motherland." Nobody believes that the residents of the Golan are pining to rush into mother Syria, but the UN human rights body is guaranteed to rubber-stamp the absurd declaration next week.

Iran is one of the most abysmal places on earth when it comes to human rights. Torture is widespread. Religious minorities are viciously persecuted. Homosexuals are hanged and strung up in public. Flogging, amputation, and execution by stoning are all part of the criminal "law" and actually applied. Iranian women do not have equal rights. Nor can they run away, since they cannot get a passport without permission of a husband or male relative.

Nevertheless, Iran is a full voting member of the UN Commission on the Status of Women and the UN Human Rights Council refuses to get tough. Now on the table in Geneva, courtesy of Sweden, is a one-page, three paragraph resolution "calling upon" Iran to do only one thing: permit a human rights investigator "access to visit the country." More reporting. No doing.

When it comes to Israel though, Islamic and Arab states have successfully produced another 22 pages and more than 50 detailed paragraphs of denunciations. Passage at the Council is a done deal.

The carefully orchestrated "human rights" pitch will climax just as President Obama disembarks in Israel next week for the first time. Specifically, the UN-based feeding frenzy will converge on the subject of Israeli settlements. Today's CSW resolution on Israel adds so-called "settler violence" to last year's list of Israeli crimes against Palestinian women and girls, and the Human Rights Council will hold its first three-hour kangaroo court devoted to settlements come Monday.

Having made joining and legitimizing the Human Rights Council one of his signature foreign policy moves, President Obama may be tempted to take its output seriously or to adopt a good cop/bad cop routine with Israel's new government. With approval assured, administration diplomats can vote against the whole host of UN decisions, and then the President can turn around and bear down reluctantly on Jerusalem, for the sake of what he has repeatedly referred to as "Israel's own best interests."

For the sake of the victims of human rights abuse worldwide — as well as in Israel — let's hope he chooses to point the human rights weapon where it belongs.

Anne Bayefsky is editor of EYE on the UN. She is also a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and at Touro College. Contact the organization at info@EYEonthe UN.org This article appeared today in the Weekly Standard. This article appeared March 15, 20113 in Opinion Fox News and is archived at
http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2013/03/15/human-rights-are-weapon-in-political-arsenal-israels-enemies.html


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THE CLOUDY SUNSHINE WEEK

Posted by ACD/EWI, March 15, 2013

The announcement reads:

Announcing "Sunshine Week: In Celebration of Open Government," the administration's effort to highlight progress in improving the administration openness, particularly regading the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).

"In our democracy, FOIA, which encourages accountability through transparency, is the most prominent expression of a profound national commitment to ensuring an open government."

It should be. Yet Americans requesting documents under FOIA are getting less information because of an executive order issued by the president on December 29, 2009. It allows the government to classify certain types of information related to national security after it has been requested. Presumably, since then anything-old or new-the government doesn't want out there can be made non-FOIAble.

It seems that this Sunshine Week was for Chinese, Russian and Iranian hackers to celebrate the open windows to our national secrets.

The General Services Administration (GSA) warned U.S. government vendors earlier today that it has "recently identified a security vulnerability in the System for Award Management (SAM), which is part of the cross-government Integrated Award Environment (IAE) managed by GSA."

SAM registration provides all vendors the ability to view all "identifying information including names, taxpayer identification numbers (TINs), marketing partner information numbers and bank account information," of everybody listed.

The GSA mobile notification advised "Registrants using their social security numbers instead of a TIN for purposes of doing business with the federal government may be at greater risk for potential identity theft."

Today's notice came on the heels of a week full of the administration's statements admonishing China's hacking.

National Security Adviser Tom Donilon, speaking at the Asia Society on March 11 in New York, gave a major speech telling China to stop hacking. He described the problem as 'a key point of concern and discussion' at 'all levels of our governments'. He suggested that 'Beijing should take serious steps to investigate and put a stop to these activities,' and he urged the Chinese to recognize 'the urgency and scope of this problem and the risk it poses — to international trade, to the reputation of Chinese industry and to our overall relations'.

He went on to clarify that the cyber attacks should not be used "to derail President Obama's second-term effort to improve ties" with China.

Over the past few weeks, in addition to denying doing anything wrong, the Chinese have added accusations of U.S. hacking. According to them, two major Chinese military websites, including the Defense Ministry, were subject to more than 140,000 hacking attacks during one month last year, almost two-thirds of them from the United States.

Beijing's response to Donilon on March 12, was an offer to talk about the cyber problem (in a worldwide sense). Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi called cyberspace 'a community of common destiny,' adding: 'What cyberspace needs is not war, but rules and cooperation.'

While Donilon was talking, others focused on the results of the Defense Science Board's (DSB's) 18-month study on U.S. military cybersecurity, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper's Hill testimony on security threats.

The DSB reported on the dismal vulnerability of our military. It called the military a "magnet to US opponents" and, among many other things, noted that during war-game exercises, some "adversaries" were able to hack into U.S. military networks with 'relative ease.' The conclusion is that the cyberthreat to our military has not been met, and it hasn't been challenged by the administration.

Clapper gave the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence aworldwide threat assessment, in which cyber led the list (2-3 pages worth). As with the Obama White House, his emphasis was on threats to U.S. public infrastructure. However, these he judged to be minimal in the next two years, first, because of the sophistication involved and, second, because those with the ability now-Russia and China (he forgot to mention Iran)-"are unlikely to launch such a devastating attack against the United States outside of a military conflict or crisis that they believe threatens their vital interests." Clapper also left the door open for some sort of diplomatic solution to cybersecurity:

"The growing use of cyber capabilities to achieve strategic goals is also outpacing the development of a shared understanding of norms of behavior, increasing the chances for miscalculations and misunderstandings that could lead to unintended escalation."

With this, the administration has given yet another sign that it is not averse to some kind of international Internet control of the sort the Chinese have been advocating—inviting the cat to guard the butter jar.

The picture we draw here is intentional. We believe that the U.S. response to the Chinese cyberthreat-and all cyberthreats to our government and economy-is not what it should be. But the news turns out to be worse than that. We've known about the Chinese threat longer than we're willing to admit, but seem determined to do nothing real about it.

Writing in the Washington Free Beacon, security expert Bill Gertz reports that two years ago President Obama rejected a series of tough actions against China. The options were presented to the president over a three-month period beginning in August 2011. The agent was the White House Interagency Policy Committee, a working group directly supporting the National Security Council. According to Gertz,

"The options that eventually were presented included using bilateral and multilateral diplomacy, conducting covert computer network attack operations, levying economic sanctions, and taking legal action against the Chinese government and military. The officials said the options developed by the committee covered the full spectrum of statecraft, including diplomatic, military, intelligence, and economic measures designed to pressure China into halting the cyber attacks."

In response, the Obama administration, in late 2011, decided against approving a comprehensive strategy regarding Chinese cyberthreats. Officials have told Gertz that the administration prefers to limit its response to diplomacy and law enforcement efforts: "The officials said the strategy deliberately played down China's role in the theft of trade secrets and ducked effective action to avoid upsetting relations with China."

For example, the White House strategy says senior U.S. officials will raise trade-secret theft in meetings with foreign leaders while the State Department will track economic spying and "deliver appropriate messages to their foreign counterparts."

If there is a red line that China may not cross cyber-wise, the U.S. is avoiding telling China what it is. As with terrorism, the U.S. government is treating cyber attacks as mainly a criminal matter best addressed through law enforcement. More serious attacks, it believes, should be dealt with by diplomacy.

Not surprisingly, the administration remained silent on the Mandiant report, and informed sources believe the government has kept secret most of its information on Chinese cyberespionage regarding our private sector, i.e., the stealing manufacturing and trade secrets.

In addition, we found out that the White House is sitting on an Office of Management and the Budget report that was due March 1 on the security of federal government computer networks. Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma told a joint hearing of the homeland security and commerce committees that "There's no reason for (the delay), other than (the report) shows significant criticism of the government's performance in keeping federal computer networks secure."

Meanwhile there are other related developments. The most dramatic was Reuter's notice that the Obama administration is drawing up plans to give all U.S. spy agencies full access to a database that contains financial data on all American citizens and others who bank in the U.S. Never mind that the FBI already has access to this information. It is to be expected that once this becomes more widely known, the general public will protest the government's hacking into U.S citizens' bank accounts.

Secretary Janet Napolitano said last week that since its creation in 2009, her National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center "has responded to nearly half a million incident reports and released more than 26,000 'actionable cybersecurity alerts' to state and local governments and private sector companies." She added that the department had "prevented $10 billion in potential losses through cybercrime investigations and arrested more than 5,000″ suspected cyber criminals.

The numbers are dramatic. Five-thousand legal actions? But why do we doubt such large numbers given the paucity of news about them? Of course, what we don't know are the profiles to those who've been charged. Petty hackers? Crabby members of Anonymous? Major foreign governments? Surely not major foreign governments. James Clapper said they wouldn't dare.

In the meantime, the U.S. cybersecurity picture remains dismal and our response to Chinese hacking all the more so. The Obama administration continues to obscure what it's doing and not doing.

Ken deGraffenreid, former Reagan administration White House intelligence director commented about the long-term strategic challenge of Chinese cyber to the US:

"Unfortunately, historically, the U.S. has found it difficult to respond to long term strategic threats in a consistent way. The strategic policy immaturity and incompetence offered by the Obama administration makes this challenge even more problematic.

"[A serious response to China] would encompass an integrated strategic use of all of the tools of statecraft and begin with an honest, forthright presentation to the American people of the stakes involved in every aspect of our national life. The U.S. cannot prevail in this arena on the cheap; fiscally, intellectually, or politically."

Dr, Rachel Ehrenfeld is the Director of the New York-based American Center for Democracy (ACD) and the Center for the Study of Corruption & the Rule of Law. She is an authority on the shadowy movement of funds through international banking systems and governments to fund terrorism. She is co-host of the American Center for Democracy website. This article was published March 15, 2013 on the American Center for Democracy's website (http://acdemocracy.org/political-islams-disinformation/)


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THE RIGHTEOUS REJECTION BY RABBI BEN ROSENBERG'S OF "INTERFAITH" ANTI-SEMITISM

Posted by Chaimdov, March 16, 2013

The article below was written by Debra Rubin who is an award-winning editor and writer, with expertise in editing, website content, profiles, features, op-eds. She is part of the Bluelight Strategies team and an experienced copy editor for Warren Communication News, Debbie previously was the editor of Washington Jewish Week. In addition to managing the newsroom staff and a cadre of freelancers, she oversaw the "modernization" of the paper for the 21st century, launching its online presence. This article appeared February 8, 2013 in NJJN Bureau Chief/Middlesex.

Two years ago, Rabbi Bernhard Rosenberg of Edison suggested that Israel's national anthem be omitted during the area's interfaith Holocaust commemoration, because, he said, Muslim imams at the event remained seated while it was being sung.

At the time, he told NJJN, he said he was making the suggestion "for the sake of peace."

"I thought, this is a Holocaust event, not a political event, so let's just take it out," Rosenberg, the son of survivors, said. "I've always had friendly relations with the imams."

The singing of "Hatikva" was removed from the program for the last two years.

But in a reversal of his position, Rosenberg is now calling for a boycott of the event he helped found, if the singing of "Hatikva" is not reinstated.

Omitting the anthem would be "giving in to the current atmosphere of anti-Semitism," said Rosenberg, referring to a spate of incidents in Europe and rhetoric against Jews coming out of the Middle East. He said he was particularly motivated by Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi's description of Israelis as "bloodsuckers and war mongers" and Jews as "the descendants of pigs and apes."

In addition, he said, despite the absence of the anthem, no imams attended last year's program.

Rosenberg's reversal and protest — in addition to his own lengthy e-mails on the subject, he has urged survivors and children of survivors to send e-mail messages to organizers — has frustrated organizers of event, which is sponsored by the Metuchen-Edison Area Interfaith Clergy Association. It is scheduled to take place Monday, April 8, at the JCC of Middlesex County in Edison.

Nevertheless, the association's Holocaust committee plans to meet Feb. 13 to discuss and make a decision on the matter, said former committee president the Rev. James Thomas of the First Presbyterian Church of Iselin.

The organizers emphasize that no programming plans have yet been set for the program, and some believe Rosenberg has overreacted to the situation by urging survivors and children of survivors to join his boycott.

"No one ever said it's not going back in," said Jennine Shpigel, the JCC's director of Jewish and family programming. "But it has to go through the proper channels. We didn't take it out [two years ago]; the committee did at the suggestion of Rabbi Rosenberg. I personally wasn't happy about it but that was the decision."

Shpigel, who oversees the planning of the Holocaust commemoration, said preparations are in the early stages, and Rosenberg had not contacted her prior to his announcement of a possible boycott. Concerned survivors and children of survivors have been contacting her, some with incorrect information.

Shpigel said the JCC has no political agenda, but "only good intentions in presenting" the program.

"We strive to educate the entire community, remember the victims, and keep the magnitude of the atrocities that occurred in the minds of our citizens," she said.

Meanwhile, the clergy association is open to the possible reinstatement of "Hatikva."

"I think we might want to revisit this and put 'Hatikva' back in the service," Thomas told NJJN in a phone interview. "It seems to me, and I didn't understand this before, that 'Hatikva' is the symbolic representation of the Jewish state, which was the embodiment of hope for many people in the late '40s and early '50s."

However, he said, the majority of association members were unaware of the "Hatikva" issue and invited Rosenberg to attend the meeting to give input, but, Thomas said, both the rabbi and the imams have recently "been almost invisible."

Thomas said he told Rosenberg "it would have to be a collegial decision...," adding that the rabbi "has a way of getting stuck on these things. I said we won't be threatened or coerced."

However, Rosenberg said he first began speaking about the subject with association members over the summer. He produced e-mails from October and November that he had sent to association president Dr. Annari Griesel and others about concerns he had over the removal of "Hatikva."

"I don't blame anybody, but this could have been taken care of very easily and did not have to become a whole big deal," said Rosenberg. "Me and Jennine were the whole committee last year. Now we have to have a whole committee making the decision. It just got all blown out of proportion."

Rosenberg, religious leader of Congregation Beth-El in Edison, founded the Holocaust program about 15 years ago with the Rev. John Painter, former pastor of Centenary United Methodist Church in Metuchen.

The lyrics of "Hatikva," which means "The Hope," refer to a 2,000-year longing by the "Jewish soul" to return to "Zion." In Israel, some Arab lawmakers and left-wing parties have complained that the anthem excludes Israel's non-Jewish minority.

Imams Raouf Zaman of the Muslim Center of Middlesex County in Piscataway and Moustafa Zayed of the Muslim Center of New Jersey in Parlin attended the commemoration in the past. Zayed told NJJN he would do so again regardless of what is decided about "Hatikva."

"I always try to participate in humane causes," he said. "They have a right to include it, and I would not want to make them uncomfortable by not attending because of it."

However, Zayed said, as in the past, he would not stand if the anthem is played because he considers it to have political implications regarding the Palestinian-Israeli issue.

"I renounce for the 100th time what went on in the Holocaust and can separate it from politics," said Zayed. "I care about people and humanity and our relationship with each other. I know some of my Jewish friends have strong beliefs about the State of Israel, but it has nothing to do with our relationship to each other."

He said it was important to maintain relations as friends and colleagues, adding that "the horror of the Holocaust went way beyond any political differences we may have."

For his part, said Thomas, "I think it's worth putting 'Hatikva' back in"; he said he believes many other association members feel that way.

"The Holocaust was one of defining moments of the 20th century and one of the defining moments in world history," he said. "In both the Christian and Jewish traditions, we are told to love God with all our hearts and to love our neighbors as ourselves.

"I think this is an issue where we need to love our neighbors in a way they want to be loved."

Contact chaimdov at chaim@aol.com


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ISRAEL IS INTERESTED IN PEACE ON HER TERMS

Posted by Ted Belman, March 16, 2013

US official says 'Israel must show Arab public it's serious about peace'

This is a euphemism for must agree to share Jerusalem, to stop building settlements and to accept borders based on '67 lines plus swaps. No thanks.

As long as Israel refrains from doing so, it can fairly be said that Israel is not interested in peace on those terms. But she is interested in peace on her terms namely she gets to keep Jerusalem, the settlements and a military presence in Judea and Samaria inter alia.

Ted Belman is a retired lawyer and the Editor of Israpundit. He made aliya from Canada last year and now lives in Jerusalem, Israel. Contact him at tedbel@rogers.com This article appeared March 15, 2013 in Israpundit and is archived at
http://www.israpundit.com/archives/53510


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CARMEL

Posted by Fred Reifenberg, March 16, 2013

Caption Text

Fred Reifenberg was born in Germany, and grew up during the Hitler period. In 40's he moved to NY. He is veteran of Korean War. He currently lives in Israel. He enjoys harmonizing with nature, and photographing nature in it's many wonderful forms. Also creating a variety of abstracts, combining photography and graphics.


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CZECHOSLOVAKIA 1938, ISRAEL 2013

Posted by Udi Schayat, March 16, 2013

The article below was written by Elyakim Haetzni who is an Israeli lawyer, settlement activist and former politician who served as a member of the Knesset for Tehiya from 1990 until 1992. [The article below is a summary of the original article, translated to English]

"...Czechoslovakia was a rich country, thriving, cultural, with great industry and developed technology... and had a large army. ..- 1.5 million soldiers.

In 1925, Czechoslovakia signed a military alliance with France.. [and defense pact with Soviet Russia].... to help one another if attacked by a third party, and all knew it was Germany. The Czechoslovak army could confront by himself the German Wehrmacht for at least 2 months, enough time to materialize all those treaties....Hitler admit that he wouldn't have succeeded by force to break-in those forts" [in Czechoslovakia]....

....What still caused Czechoslovakia to fall down? Answer: Her "Friends"!

In 1938, ..Hitler brought the turmoil in the Sudetenland to a boiling point -... It wasn't for nothing that the Arab parable says: "hit me and complained, left me and wept" - exactly so the Arabs really do to Israel. And so the Anarchists and the legion of all Human Rights organizations, and with them the Western press including The New York Times, and all Foreign Ministries ...they all are complaining and weeping - along with the Arab terrorists. They turn the victim - Israel - to the aggressor, and the aggressor to the victim: The David to Goliath !!!..

This was exactly the picture in Czechoslovakia, in the eve of the Munich shame....

..while the Nazis performing Intifada in the Sudetenland, the Media in England and France accused... Czechoslovakia on: "abuse of the German minority". And while Hitler threatened with war, Czechoslovakia's Western "Friends" stained her as "stirring-up war" and used the term "obstacle to peace", as we know it so well today.....

Experts, pundits, professors and advisers dripped to the Czechoslovaks' ears that it was worth for them to withdraw from the Sudetenland, because in that way they could get rid of their foreign minority while becoming more homogeneous. And for their safety concerns - in an era of peace obviously there was no need for territories. Furthermore, they also received guarantees + sureties!! Sound familiar ??

British, along with the Germans, began intervening in Czechoslovakia's domestic politics.

"I fully sympathize with the bitter fate of the Sudeten, an oppressed German minority", wrote Lord Ransiman, who was sent by the British to Czechoslovakia as head a committee. In his report the Lord demanded an immediate evacuation of the region and - listen! listen! - Czechoslovakia must commit herself to refrain from attacking Germany!...

England and France requested to welcome Hitler's demands... to withdraw a quarter of her territory.. .

Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister, cabled to President Benes, that if he didn't accept the German diktat, "we'll see that as an aggressive provocation against Germany, hence it will release France and England from the treaties signed for the sovereignty of Czechoslovakia".

The Czechoslovaks realized that they were totally left alone. Benes [President] was a weak man by appeasements actions.... and received a huge international popularity, so much so as our leftists love: Chamberlain thanked Benes on the "heavy sacrifices for the peace" that the latter had made.

President Benes, for his fear of the international pressure, ... "so-to-speak friends", had decided: To surrender!

On September 30, 1938 Hitler called the Munich Conference -.. but the Czechoslovak representatives were not allowed to participate. The western countries decision for Czechoslovakia: Withdrawal from the region, 35,000 kilometers, beginning the next morning of October 1st. Within 7 days, will be completely delivered all the industries, railways, fortifications, military installations. 73% of Czechoslovakia's coal mines, 70% of her iron and steel production, 80% of the textile production, 86% of the chemical industry, 70% of electricity generation. 800,000 Czechs were left behind. Additional areas were torn for the sake of the Hungarians and Poles. Hitler wanted everyone to be partners in crime.

In the West, a wave of sympathy burst towards Czechoslovakia "who rescued the peace". The London "Times" (the "Haaretz" newspaper in those days) praised Chamberlain for bringing "peace in our time": "There has never been such a Prime Minister in England's history...". On Churchill, who denounced the surrender and terrible betrayal, the "Times" wrote: "the warmongers must be prosecuted, shot or hanged".

[My Note: As of today, anyone who disagree with leftist ideology, around the world, is pushed out of their "news report", will be ignored, condemned and punished].

Chamberlain concluded his speech in Parliament: "Now, that the danger of Czechoslovakia as an obstacle to peace has passed, it'll be possible to further advance towards compromise. There's a goodwill and willingness on all sides .. to build a lasting peace in Europe..."

Phrases like "obstacle to peace" and "compromise" are familiar to us from somewhere.

"The Permanent Peace" had lasted in Czechoslovakia for a total of 105 days.

On March 15th 1939 Hitler entered Prague, and ...wrote: "Czechoslovakia ceased to exist".

Before the surrender, at the peak of the crisis.....The German conspirators secretly contacted Chamberlain - through Churchill - and announced that if, via the radio, a serious warning to Hitler by a central figure was sound, then they, the German Generals, would arrest Hitler and eliminate the Nazi regime. But Chamberlain refused, the rest - is history.

Today we know, however, that there was no need whatsoever to surrender to Hitler. On the contrary! Rather "the peace in our time" has cost mankind.... oceans of blood.

How symbolic this is, that of all the European countries, only the Czech representative voted in the UN against the Palestinian State! He knows why. As Israeli foreign minister Lieberman knows why- he delivered to the rest of the

Europeans his little reminder on Czechoslovakia of 1938.: References: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/13/world/middleeast/avigdor-lieberman-of-israel-vents-anger-at-europe.html?_r=0 http://www.jpost.com/DiplomacyAndPolitics/Article.aspx?id=295915

........The comparison to the current European demand: to give sovereignty to the so-called 'Palestinians' at the cost of making Western Israel a Hell - is really obvious.

Contact Udi Schayat at udischayat@yahoo.com


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ANTI-SEMITISM AT THE AMERICAN CONSULATE IN JERUSALEM

Posted by Naomi Ragen, March 16, 2013

"My husband is active duty army (U.S.) and we are stationed in Jerusalem for three years. Eliana was my primary care provider, as there is no military base in Israel we use the Consulate for the health unit, mail, and other minor administrative details. Unknown to most of the Consular employees my father is Jewish, I took advantage of my birth right trip, and attended a Jewish university. My husband and I are practicing Catholics and so things were said in front of me that were blatantly antisemitic. Some things were subtle, others were not. I am very sensitive to such comments regardless of what religion I am practicing and I take them very personally. The attitude of the employees at the Consulate towards the Jewish people is appalling. Many previous posters comment about experiences they had at the old Consulate building in East Jerusalem or the new Consulate building in Arnona where passports and visas are dealt with. The health unit is located at the Consulate building in West Jerusalem on Agron. It is there, where the Consular General himself resides, that I was exposed to such violent anti semitism.

Eliana Aaron is absolutely wonderful. She is incredibly warm and dedicated and went well beyond any expectations anyone could possibly have in terms of care. She was completely professional at all times. From our first arrival we heard comments made against the ladies (Eliana, another nurse, and the secretary) that were anti semitic (all three ladies are what is considered "Modern Orthodox" in the United States. Eliana was treated unfairly and has every right to action against the Consulate.

What many Americans, including myself, do not realize is that the Consulate in Jerusalem operates like an Embassy. It reports directly to Washington. The Embassy in Tel Aviv is completely separate, they do not have a relationship and essentially have completely opposing missions.

There is no reason that support can't be provided for the Arab population without hate against the Jewish."

The American consulate seems to be exclusively aimed at benefiting West Bank and east Jerusalem Palestinians.

Remember that scene in "Not Without My Daughter" when Sally Field sees the American flag waving over the American Embassy in Istanbul as she flees Iran? "We're home baby, we're home," she tells her daughter.

Every American abroad knows that feeling. Unfortunately for us Jewish Americans forced to use the American Consulate in Jerusalem, it hasn't felt like home for some time.

It started during the intifada, when, despite daily terrorist threats in the streets of Jerusalem aimed at Jews, the Consulate forced us to go to east Jerusalem to renew our passports and even to bring our newborns there for birth certificates. It literally felt as if a person was taking her life into her hands. Once there, she took her place outside behind a long line of mostly Arab visa-seekers, increasing her sitting-duck feeling almost to the breaking point.

Thankfully, in 2010 the Consulate moved to its new home in Arnona in the western part of the city. Inside, however, things are pretty much the same. Almost all local employees are Arabic-speaking Palestinians. I never hear a word of Hebrew. This isn't coincidental.

A quick look at the cultural activities on the Consulate's website and its Arabic language Facebook page (the Consulate does not have a Hebrew language Facebook page) shows activities exclusively aimed at benefiting West Bank and east Jerusalem Palestinians, whether the focus is women's rights or small businesses. Even Environment Day had the consul going to Wadi Kelt "to observe local flora and fauna in one of the West Bank's most vibrant natural habitats." As for local hires, almost all job descriptions require Arabic.

After speaking with one of the very few Jewish-American Consulate employees, I now realize why.

Eliana M. Aaron is by all accounts a remarkable woman. The first practicing nurse practitioner in Israel, she holds degrees from Yeshiva University, New York University and Rutgers University and was recently accepted to a select doctoral program in nursing at Yale. The great-niece of the late senator Arlen Spector of Pennsylvania, she made aliya in 2002 with her husband, Avrum, a lawyer, to participate in the Zionist dream. Instead, she has found herself, with tragic irony, the victim of what she describes as an anti-Jewish campaign orchestrated by none other than the American Consulate in Jerusalem set up to serve the interests of Americans living abroad.

It all started in 2004 when she accepted the position of advanced practice nurse and medical officer for the US Consulate General in Jerusalem, founding its health unit and being put in charge of the healthcare of US diplomats and their family members, VIP US government visitors and local staff. Her reputation was such that when US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton visited Israel, Clinton's staff personally requested Aaron as their medical officer. Responsible for only work-related health issues for local staff, she went way beyond, once managing to coordinate between the IDF and the Palestinian Authority to rush a Palestinian staff member's hemorrhaging newborn to an advanced Israeli operating room, saving his life.

Nevertheless, from the beginning, Aaron says she found the working environment at the Consulate overtly hostile toward her as an Orthodox Jew and an Israeli. "In 2004 my supervisor, Sylvia Martinez, told me that others didn't want to work with me because I was Jewish," she says. In 2005, the head of USAID at the Consulate bent her ear describing a movie about suicide bombers and how "she now understood and sympathized with them."

But the real problems started in 2010. "A diplomat who was about to give birth insisted that I make arrangements for her at a hospital in Nazareth. Well, there is no hospital in Nazareth. Next, she insisted on a Palestinian hospital in east Jerusalem. But that hospital didn't have a maternity ward." When Aaron explained this, the woman responded angrily, accusing her of "just saying that because you are Jewish."

From that moment onward, Aaron found herself reprimanded again and again for not providing enough options for Palestinian doctors and hospitals for the Consulate staff. "I was hired because I had connections to the best local medical care. It was my job to find doctors with Western degrees, who spoke English and had an excellent reputation. Now I was being asked to lower my criteria. I was being told to choose by race and religion as a priority instead of quality of care. This was unacceptable to me."

She describes how human resources officer Katherine Bischoff (who would later wear a "Free Palestine" T-shirt to Ben Gurion Airport when she was on leave to the US) pointed an accusing finger at her, saying: "People don't want to wait in waiting rooms full of Orthodox Jews. Find us [i.e., Consulate personnel] Palestinian doctors."

According to Aaron, when she complained to her supervisor about the prejudiced remark, she was simply blown off. Eventually, she selected a Palestinian clinic in east Jerusalem. "But when the head was arrested for affiliation with Hamas, I refused to contact him even though my supervisor and American security officers wanted me to continue."

Realizing her superiors would not help, she filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEO) in 2011. She says she did this not only for herself, but for every Israeli Jew working for the Consulate, most of whom are low-level employees afraid of losing their jobs. "What I suffered was tip of the iceberg to what goes on there," she says. Her work conditions consistently worsened. In a grievance filed against her acting supervisor, Edward "Dwayne" Jefferson, she details how he told her: "When you speak, it's a bitch session." According to Aaron, Jefferson made it clear to her colleagues that he had made firing her a priority.

Despite her pending EEO complaint, she was, in her words, "systematically targeted." They took away her company car, accusing her of "unauthorized use" in the "settlements" after she took it to a car wash in Modi'in: "They took away my flextime, stripped my position description, almost every request was challenged, leave requests denied, my medical confidentiality violated and, worse, I was asked to violate my patients' confidentiality."

Weekly, anonymous callers accused her of taking kickbacks, selling government equipment, tax fraud and, most wounding of all to this caring, meticulous professional, medical misconduct.

According to Aaron, despite every allegation being thoroughly investigated and found baseless, she was nevertheless fired in a well-orchestrated termination that had been planned months in advance. The grounds? "They told me I had "misused a government vehicle" and "stolen" the vaccinations I received after being asked to get them by the Office of Medical Services in the State Department."

Furious and heartbroken over what she considered illegal retaliatory actions for her EEO complaint, Aaron appealed her dismissal to US Consul General Michael Ratney. He refused to reconsider.

In January 2013, she filed a lawsuit against the Consulate in the Jerusalem Labor Court demanding to be reinstated and compensated. Facing mounting legal bills, she says the Consulate delayed paying her termination compensation — which has only just now been paid — and has not returned her medical license or her personal computer files that contain her pay stubs. Instead, Consulate officials have accused her of "stealing consulate property" — i.e., her work laptop, employee ID and mobile phones, all of which she informed them were at her lawyer's office for them to pick up, as she has been barred from entering the Consulate.

Like David facing Goliath, she has no illusions: "I am going up against a big and powerful machine. But I want justice to be done. And if that means fighting, I will fight."

When I asked about Aaron, I received the following response from Leslie Ordeman, the US Consulate press attaché and spokesperson: "We do not provide details on specific administrative actions internal to the mission due to privacy and legal concerns. We can say generally that whenever disciplinary action is taken against a local employee of any of our diplomatic missions overseas we follow all relevant local labor laws and State Department regulations. United States diplomatic missions overseas, to include the Consulate General in Jerusalem, maintain work environments that promote tolerance and reflect the American values we endorse worldwide. We have no tolerance for racial or religious discrimination."

As she waits for the slow wheels of justice to turn and to be fully reinstated in her position in the Consulate, the highly qualified Aaron has received a number of job offers. She is currently a Yale doctoral candidate as well as being involved in two non-profit organizations: the Association of Mid-level Medical Providers in Israel — an advocacy group to advance nursing practice and recognition for foreign-trained nurse practitioners in Israel, of which she is co-founder — and Level Lev, the African Refugee Clinic in Tel Aviv, where she is volunteer director of research.

Naomi Ragen is an American-Israeli Orthodox Jewish author, playwright and women's rights activist. Ragen lives in Jerusalem and writes in English. A recurring theme in her fictional works is injustice against women in the Haredi Jewish community. Contact Naomi Ragen at nragen@netvision.net.il


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THE GRUNIS COURT

Posted by Steven Plaut, March 16, 2013

A few days ago it was the one-year anniversary of the appointment of Asher Grunis as Israel's Chief Justice on its Supreme Court. At the time it was expected that Grunis would reform the Court by distancing it from the many years of dominance by leftist anti-democratic "judicial activists."

The good news is that Grunis has been a far cry better than his two predecessors on the job, Dorit Beinisch and Aharon Barak. The late Robert Bork once described Barak as one of the worst Supreme Court justices in the democratic world.

Grunis is clearly not a leftwing lunatic of the Beinisch-Barak mold. He has also by and large resisted the temptation to try to micro-manage defense and foreign policy in Israel. His two predecessors were of the opinion that the Supreme Court should trump the elected government of the people and dictate the tiniest decisions, even very technical decisions, about how the military should behave. Barak insisted that EVERYTHING in the country was subject to his judicial review and veto.

Those two predecessors were also of the opinion that unelected judges should have the power to overturn decisions taken by the elected representatives of the people in the parliament. Grunis has not behaved as a similar judicial tyrant. Grunis has made a few sensible and wise decisions, like his refusal to pander to the Moonbat Left and the Ivory Cartel, who demanded that Ariel University not be recognized as a bona fide university. One of his BEST rulings was in a recent case in which a nuisance suit had been filed by a radical leftist group, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, which was ordered to pay a 45,000 NIS fine for having submitted the frivolous court petition against a hospital for supposedly "mistreating the poor who live in Ashdod." The fine should have been 450,000 NIS, but, as it was, it was unprecedentedly large and has the Moonbat Left in Israel now soiling itself.

Grunis has, however, been a serious disappointment. In a long series of decisions, he has sided with the Left and imposed its ideology on the country, even when the legal basis for doing so was completely flimsy and dubious.

Perhaps the worst Grunis ruling to date was the decision to allow the terrorist Hanin Zoabi to run for the Knesset even after the Israeli elections commission had banned her from running, even after her arrest for violently assaulting Israeli soldiers on the Gaza Flotilla terrorist ship. Winston Churchill did not allow openly pro-Nazi people to run for the parliament in the middle of World War II, and in fact JAILED them, but Winnie did not have Grunis to deal with. Israel is now the only country on the planet whose Supreme Court insists that terrorists dedicated to the annihilation of the country must be allowed to sit in the parliament of the country they do not recognize.

Grunis has also opposed or overturned a series of attempts by the Zionist majority in Israel to rein in the abuses of the anti-Israel Left, such as demands for transparency in funding of anti-Israel leftist NGOs, or a proposal that would allow victims of leftist initiatives to boycott Israel or Israelis to sue the organizers of those boycotts for damages. He has also opposed various measures requiring gestures of loyalty from Israeli Arabs. He defended the "right" of Zoabi's party to mock the national anthem in the last election while REFUSING to overturn a series of decisions by the election board to censor and ban "objectionable" ads and slogans by Rightwing parties.

In other decisions, Grunis and his Court voted to remove two Jewish settlements, Migran and Ulpana, in the "occupied territories." The same Court has NOT ordered the removal of Palestinians squatting on lands they illegally occupy in the West Bank nor Bedouins illegally squatting on enormous tracts of the Negev.

Last week Grunis ordered the government to justify and rationalize its policy of evicting illegal infiltrators from Eritrea and Sudan. No other court on earth would order any other government on earth to justify enforcement of restrictions on illegal infiltration, well - except maybe judges appointed by Obama. Will the court also demand that the government explain why it is spraying the locusts who infiltrated the border? What about THEIR rights?

I guess the best thing that one can say about the Grunis Court so far is that it could be worse and in fact was far worse under Beinisch and Barak. However, Tzipi Livni is to be the new Minister of Justice in the new Netanyahu government and can be expected to try to smack the Court back to its earlier far-leftist orientation under those two previous Chief "Justices." And Grunis is due to retire in less than two years. He is likely to be replaced by yet another far-leftist judicial activist, another Barak clone or groupie.

Steven Plaut is an American-trained economist, a professor of business administration at Haifa University and author of "The Scout." He frequently comments — both seriously and satirically — on Israeli politics and the left wing academic community. Write him at splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il His website address is http://www.stevenplaut.blogspot.com.


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LIBYAN JIHADIS SHAVE BEARD OF CHRISTIAN PRIEST, ATTACK CHURCH AGAIN

Posted by Raymond Ibrahim, March 16, 2013

More details concerning the recent spate of attacks on Christian Copts in Libya—including two church attacks and the mass arrest and torture of Christians, resulting in the death of one—are emerging. Apparently during the assault on the Coptic church in Benghazi from two weeks ago, the terrorists severely beat and shaved the beard and mustache of Father Paul, the priest of the church, as a sign of humiliation. They also beat the deacon and nine attendees.

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Earlier, their fellow Libyan terrorists shaved all the heads of the approximately 100 Copts arrested for having Christian "paraphernalia," that is, Bible, crosses, and icons. Shaving the hair, especially the beard, of one's opponent, is an ancient custom meant to emasculate one's opponent, or, in these cowardly attacks, one's unarmed victims. A decade ago, one Arab commentator discussing the Iraq war, said, "By shaving his [Saddam's] beard, a symbol of virility in Iraq and in the Arab world, the Americans committed an act that symbolizes humiliation in our region, where getting shaved by one's enemy means robbing him of his will."

So Libya's jihadis, the fellows empowered by President Obama, want to make it a point to rob any Christians who fall in their clutches of their wills.

Meanwhile, because Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood-led government has done little regarding the systematic abuse of Egyptian citizens in Libya—they are, after all, only Christians—including the murder of one under torture, Copts demonstrated in front of the Libyan embassy in Cairo, prompting yet another attack on the Benghazi church, which was set on fire two days ago.

Raymond Ibrahim is a Middle East and Islam specialist and author of Crucified Again: Exposing Islam's New War on Christians (2013) and The Al Qaeda Reader (2007). His writings have appeared in a variety of media, including the Los Angeles Times, Washington Times, Jane's Islamic Affairs Analyst, Middle East Quarterly, World Almanac of Islamism, and Chronicle of Higher Education. He was born and raised in the U.S. by Coptic Egyptian parents born and raised in the Middle East, which has provided him with equal fluency in English and Arabic. His understanding of the two the Western and Middle Eastern mindsets positions him to explain the Middle Eastern culture to the West. This article appeared March 16, 2013 and is archived at
http://www.raymondibrahim.com/from-the-arab-world/libyan-jihadis-shave-beard-of-christian-priest-attack-church-again/


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MUSLIM SUPREMACISM AND MEDIA DISSEMBLING

Posted by Raymond Ibrahim, March 16, 2013

Many are the reasons why Americans — including most Christians — are utterly ignorant of the plight of Christians under Islam. Yet there is no doubt that the media, where we get our information, is the root source of this ignorance. Whether by distorting, engaging in apologetics for Islam, or simply not reporting on the reality on the ground, the mainstream media has seen to it that Muslim persecution of Christians, arguably the greatest human rights abuse of our time, is little known and even less acted upon.

Michael Kravshik offers a good, recent example of how the media, including those most expected to be objective, habitually, perhaps instinctively, distort and thus minimize the situation. Excerpts from his article, which is well worth a full read, follow:

This most recent example comes courtesy of both Foreign Policy Magazine and the Associated Press, two sources that are expected to uphold objective integrity when reporting on straight facts. Foreign Policy Magazine's opinion pieces are exceptions to this rule, but this example comes not from an op-ed, but from its "Morning Brief" which is intended to report on facts, not opinion... [O]n March 1, 2013 I was greeted with the following: "Muslim-Chritian fighting has reportedly broken out in a town in Southern Egypt." [Note: spelling error on the word Christian from original source.]

Following the link to the AP report that this headline was sourced from leads to an article entitled, "Christian-Muslim tension flares in southern Egypt." The actual facts of the situation are presented quite clearly in the first paragraph:

"Dozens of Muslim residents threw firebombs and rocks at police on Friday as they tried to storm a church in southern Egypt in search of a woman suspected of converting to Christianity, security officials said." You can find more specifics in the body of the article.

This most recent example comes courtesy of both Foreign Policy Magazine and the Associated Press, two sources that are expected to uphold objective integrity when reporting on straight facts. Foreign Policy Magazine's opinion pieces are exceptions to this rule, but this example comes not from an op-ed, but from its "Morning Brief" which is intended to report on facts, not opinion... [O]n March 1, 2013 I was greeted with the following: "Muslim-Chritian fighting has reportedly broken out in a town in Southern Egypt." [Note: spelling error on the word Christian from original source.]

Following the link to the AP report that this headline was sourced from leads to an article entitled, "Christian-Muslim tension flares in southern Egypt." The actual facts of the situation are presented quite clearly in the first paragraph:

"Dozens of Muslim residents threw firebombs and rocks at police on Friday as they tried to storm a church in southern Egypt in search of a woman suspected of converting to Christianity, security officials said." You can find more specifics in the body of the article.

The report refers to the event in a number of ways:

1) "Christian-Muslim tension flares..." (in the title)

2) "Clashes between Copts and Muslims..."

3) "Violence between Egypt's Christians and Muslims..."

4) "The fighting..."

Tensions, clashes, violence and fighting. By reading the actual details of the event, it is clear that none of these phrases adequately describe what is quite obviously an assault on a besieged Egyptian minority. All of these phrases—especially clashes, and fighting—including the Foreign Policy headline imply the culpability of both parties, which in this case is far from the truth. Regardless of whether the intention to deceive exists, deception has certainly occurred; especially if a reader decided to take Foreign Policy's brief at its word without looking into the details (something everyone is guilty of from time to time). The phrasing used leaves readers with a thoroughly false perception of the actual events. Whether by intentional deception or just plain old poor reporting, the damage has been done.

Thus the power of subtlety; something not limited to the case of Coptic Christians. Intentional or not in this case, in other cases it certainly has been. Either way, the authors have betrayed the integrity and trust that readers have placed in them. As consumers of information, we must always be cognizant of the power of words like these and the ease with which we can all be fooled by them. We must always do our best to use our common sense, and the sparse details we can get our hands on, to make our own value judgments. Unfortunately, this trend is far too common.

Raymond Ibrahim is a Middle East and Islam specialist and author of Crucified Again: Exposing Islam's New War on Christians (2013) and The Al Qaeda Reader (2007). His writings have appeared in a variety of media, including the Los Angeles Times, Washington Times, Jane's Islamic Affairs Analyst, Middle East Quarterly, World Almanac of Islamism, and Chronicle of Higher Education. He was born and raised in the U.S. by Coptic Egyptian parents born and raised in the Middle East, which has provided him with equal fluency in English and Arabic. His understanding of the two the Western and Middle Eastern mindsets positions him to explain the Middle Eastern culture to the West. This article appeared March 16, 2013 and is archived at
http://www.raymondibrahim.com/islam/muslim-supremacism-and-media-dissembling/


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LET'S MOVE ON!

Posted by Arlene Kushner, March 16, 2013

We have a government. I felt reasonably confident this would be the case by now -- as the deadline for Netanyahu has run out and Obama is coming this week. But it's been an insufferably long and complex road getting to that coalition.

I had actually begun a posting last Thursday, when a coalition seemed to be in place. And then I stopped, because yet another roadblock had appeared.

Now, I am less inclined to cover all the ground I would have covered two days ago. Let me simply make some more general observations.

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No matter how you view this just-completed process of coalition formation, Netanyahu is the loser. He has made a series of regrettable errors, beginning perhaps with the inclusion of Tzipi Livni -- if not before, with his attacks on Habayit Hayehudi. His image as a savvy individual who can turn internal political situations to his liking has been badly tarnished.

Last week, what he did was to demonstrate -- hardly for the first time -- that he caves.

This was with regard to Lapid's demands that Rabbi Shai Piron be Education Minister in place of Gideon Sa'ar. He was publicly adamant: "No no and no! Take it or leave it." Had he said, "Well, I'm not in favor, but I have to consider all ramifications and then we'll see," it would have felt different.

Yes, there was a deal that was offered, to make it more palatable for him to back down (and more on this below). I understand, for example, that Bennett and Lapid agreed to withdraw a demand that Livni's role be reduced. But the overall appearance of backing down was unfortunate.

What we were reminded of, in the course of this dispute, is that if he says, "No, I will not remove Jewish residents of Judea and Samaria from their homes," it is not necessarily something we can count on. And Obama is due in days.

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Then what happened is that Netanyahu had agreed that both Bennett and Lapid would have the (honorary) title of Deputy Prime Minister. But when the papers were offered for signing, it was discovered that this had been excised. "How can I trust you?" Bennett asked, with very good reason, as he declined to sign.

This was, quite simply inexcusable. With only two days to go, it was a pathetic stunt. Perhaps vindictive, because he had been pushed into caving on something he wanted. Perhaps -- as well placed sources in Likud are rumored to have said -- he did this at his wife's bidding. It doesn't matter. The decision was his.

The coalition was finally able to come together because Bennett and Lapid agreed to relinquish their titles. And so, just under the line, Netanyahu was able to report to President Peres that he has a coalition. This happened about an hour ago, as I am now writing. If he looks happy in the picture below, it's simply because he's got himself a government. Pheww! Not that he has the government of his choice.

Caption Text

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If Netanyahu has been a political loser during this process, it is quite obvious that Bennett and Lapid have been the winners. These are two men whose political stars are definitely rising -- which is discomfiting Netanyahu more than just a bit. That fourth term as prime minister, to which he aspires, is looking less and less likely.

Bennett has been hailed as a peace maker -- for it was he, doing shuttle diplomacy, who managed to arrange the deal on the education minister.

What is most remarkable here is that the bond between Bennett and Lapid has not been broken in the course of everything that has gone on -- and in spite of the fact that politically they do not always agree. This is said to be a personal bond formed out of mutual respect and jointly agreed determination to act on principle.

It should only be! And only time will tell. A political alliance built on principle and mutual respect? This would signal an incredible new day in politics, and great things for the nation. But I'm not ready to celebrate yet.

I've already written about, and continue to feel, an unease about Lapid because he is too sure of himself for a political novice, and exhibits more than a bit of arrogance. But quite frankly, in the face of how Netanyahu has behaved of late, the fact that there are new faces, new people with declared principles, seems to me very definitely a positive for our future.

There are serious questions being asked about how long this coalition, with its built in tensions, can last.

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The 33rd government will consist of four factions totaling 68 mandates -- Mofaz, with his Kadima party, was not included.

There are certain agreements that have been reached. The size of the government has been downscaled -- something that was necessary: A technique for handling political assignments for all coalition factions without pain has been to increase the number of ministries. Now there will be roughly 21 ministers plus some deputy ministers. Some responsibilities that would have been assigned ministry positions are being categorized otherwise. There is an agreement that next time there will be only 18 ministers.

A bill will be introduced requiring the electoral threshold to be five mandates.

I will table for now what is being proposed regarding army and national service for haredi yeshiva students -- as this highly contentious issue requires a closer look.

~~~~~~~~~~

According to The Jerusalem Post, there is still some disagreement about party assignments, even though the coalition agreements have been signed. We may not have final assignments in all instances until the swearing-in on Monday.

The new government is certainly not bad in all respects and actually has some quite promising things going for it:

Bennett will be part of the Security Cabinet, which is good, and both Bennett and Lapid will serve in the special committee overseeing the "peace process," along with Netanyahu, Ya'alon (Defense Minister) and Livni, as negotiator.

How Lapid will stand on negotiation-related issues remains to be seen, and is a matter of no small importance. He is, as far as I can determine, somewhere between Livni and Bennett in his position. Livni has already attacked Habayit Hayehudi, which she sees as an obstacle to her desire to achieve an "agreement." She says that she hopes Lapid doesn't move over to where Bennett is.

~~~~~~~~~~

Bennett will head an expanded Religious Affairs portfolio. Some very positive changes may come from this. It is my understanding that his deputy, Rabbi Eli Ben Dahan, will be given free reign in most matters.

Extremely welcome news is the fact that Uri Ariel (Habayit Hayehudi) will be Housing Minister.

It is also welcome news that Moshe Ya'alon (Likud) will be Defense Minister -- especially as rumors had Mofaz in this position. Ya'alon is a solidly good guy, but not primarily an ideologue -- he tempers his positions according to the political situation.

What is disconcerting is that his deputy will be Ofer Shelah (Yesh Atid), a leftist with anti-"settlement" leanings. We'll see in coming days how resolute and strong Ya'alon is. Ya'alon had been Minister of Security Affairs. That ministry has been cut and I would assume security affairs will be subsumed within the Defense Ministry.

Ze'ev Elkin (Likud), one of the good guys, is being replaced as Coalition Head by Yariv Levin, and it is not altogether clear as I write what role Elkin will play. Elkins co-chaired a Knesset Caucus on the Greater Land of Israel, and I'm waiting to see where he goes with that.

Yuval Steinitz (Likud), who was Finance Minister (and a good one), is being replaced by Lapid, and will be Energy and Water Minister.

Gideon Sa'ar (Likud), who is being replaced by Piron as Education Minister, will be Minister of Interior.

Yuli Edelstein (Likud), another of the good guys, is going to be Knesset Speaker, replacing Ruby Rivlin. Edelstein was Minister of Public Diplomacy and Diaspora Affairs. That ministry has been cut, and it is not clear which ministry will pick up this work.

~~~~~~~~~~

You can see a full line-up here, but keep in mind that there may still be some adjustments, and that this was drafted before Bennett and Lapid were told they would not be Deputy Prime Ministers.

http://www.timesofisrael.com/guess-whos-coming-to-the-cabinet-table/

~~~~~~~~~~

It will, undoubtedly, be necessary to return to the political issues.

But our focus now very badly needs to be on the presidential visit and a host of problems of huge proportions that we must contend with.

Whatever my comments about Netanyahu being the loser in an internal political struggle, the fact remains is that he is our prime minister and will be facing down Obama in just days.

In this, I will voice support and prayers for his strength. May he keep his eye on the principles that matter for all of us here in Israel. And may our people come together in order to contend with major problems.

Contact Arlene Kushner at akushner@netvision.net.il And visit her website at www.arlenefromisrael.info


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"SPEAKING WORDS OF WISDOM..."

Posted by Sergio Hadar Tezza, March 16, 2013

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Robert Spencer has written an article, "Why I am not a conservative" after his CPAC mistreatment. I appreciate his feelings, but I think it's a mistake to define conservatism in terms of personalities.

Conservatism cannot be defined by Romney or Norquist, or for that matter by any politician.

Floridians have seen Marco Rubio pivot on immigration and Rick Scott on ObamaCare. The crusading politician of yesterday easily becomes the sellout of tomorrow.

I have been sometimes criticized for "attacking" Republicans who are the saviors of the moment. I don't do that. What I do is hold them to conservative principles, rather than jumping on the momentary bandwagon.

I have written positive things about Chris Christie and negative things about him, long before Republicans had begun bashing him. I have done that for most politicians, because I believe that politicians are politicians. No politician trumps principle. Only people as a group can.

Conservatism isn't the latest dodge of the moment. It's not amnesty, gay marriage, anti-war or any of the other gems that show up on some conservative sites every day. It's not the latest clever plan to win. It's why we should win.

Conservatism is not defined by CPAC. It's defined by you. You either see yourself as a conservative or you don't. And I would encourage Robert Spencer to reject CPAC's pandering to Islamists on conservative terms.

When Progressives and Internationalists hijack what being Conservative means, they are attacking an idea by trying to displace it and replace it with something else. And they cannot be allowed to get away with it.

I support Robert Spencer on a number of grounds, and one of them is that the Internationalists should not be able to hijack Conservatism to promote Islamism.

I think Allen West, whose credentials on Islamism are solid, said it best at CPAC. "There's no shortage of people telling us what Conservatism cannot accomplish. What we can't do, how we cannot connect, how we must change our values to fit the times.

Well Ladies and Gentlemen, I want to tell you that that truly is a bunch of malarkey. Last time I checked a bended knee is not and nor shall it ever be a conservative tradition."

Sergio HadaR Tezza can be reached at Hadar-Israel@verizon.net


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A BRIDGE TOO FAR?

Posted by Victor Sharpe, March 16, 2013

Britain's Prince Charles is currently on an official visit to Jordan, Oman and Qatar. But stepping foot in nearby Israel by any member of the British royal family is officially banned by the British Foreign Office.

Prince Charles' latest trip is one more of the many routine visits by various members of the royal family to the Muslim Arab countries of the Middle East organized for them by the Foreign Office in successive British governments. Yet the same royals are never sent to Israel and one wonders if any of them ever express a desire to visit the Jewish state. If they do, no doubt the Foreign Office slaps them down quickly for fear that such a visit would upset their Arab and Muslim trading partners and endanger Britain's extensive and lucrative bi-lateral economic and business ties in the Muslim Arab world.

There was one exception, however, to any of the royals setting foot in Israel. As Ruth King wrote some years back in her RuthfullyYours blog, "In 1994, Prince Philip and his sister, Princess Sophie, traveled to Jerusalem to receive Yad VaShem's Medal of Honor of Righteous Among the Nations, awarded to their late mother. A tree in memory of Princess Alice has been planted at Yad VaShem. In fact Prince Phillip almost had to sneak into Israel defying a ban by his government on Royal visits to Israel."

It was just over a year ago that the Countess of Wessex, wife to Prince Edward, was embroiled in a scandal after she had accepted a lavish set of gems and a solid silver and pearl cup from the Bharaini royal family during her visit to the Persian Gulf state. Her "duties" included attending an opulent and lavish banquet in the repressive and hardline oil rich nation and hobnobbing with King Hamad al-Khalifa and his prime minister, whose name is almost as long as a sentence — Sheikh Khalifa bin Salman al-Khalifa.

Apart from accepting the gifts — or what some have described as bribes — Bahrain was wracked by demonstrations during the so-called Arab Spring in which fifty people were killed and many more arrested and tortured. Under such circumstances, perhaps the extravagant gifts should be returned by Buckingham Palace. So far they remain the property of what is called the Royal Collection.

The value of the jewels alone could be as high as $3.5 million. Back in 2007, the Duchess of Cornwall was given similar gifts by the Saudi royal family including three separate suites of jewels, also estimated at around $3.5 million.

So for the happy Royals, endlessly jetting off to some of the most despotic and autocratic regimes in the world, it is fair game. Visiting the only true democracy in the Middle East, however, is off limits. And the present visit by Prince Charles to Jordan means that only one of the bridges over the River Jordan separates him from the Jewish state: So near and yet so far.

This British ban on royals visiting Israel is no different than the divestment and boycott campaign against the Jewish state by the pro-Palestinian Israel haters of the BDS movement and by the Left. The lordly mandarins of the Foreign Office, influenced by the corrosive presence of the Arabists amongst them, maintain this outrageous boycott of Israel and have done so for 65 years since the Jewish state's 1948 rebirth as a nation in its ancestral and biblical homeland.

Queen Elizabeth, during her 60 or so years on the throne, has made some 250 overseas visits attending, among others, functions in Sudan, Libya, Qatar, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, Iran, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Jordan, Turkey and Saudi Arabia — including some of the most deplorable human rights abusers on earth. But a state visit to Israel, where she would be showered with immense affection by its people, is tragically out of the question.

So what would happen if, just once, Prince Charles ignored his Foreign Office handlers and made the moral choice to cross that bridge over the River Jordan?

Victor Sharpe is a freelance writer with many published articles and essays in leading national and international conservative websites and magazines. Contact him at janvic42@gmail.com


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A MAJOR SLIP OF TONGUE AT THE WHITE HOUSE ON ISRAEL

Posted by Sergio HaDaR Tezza, March 16, 2013

The article below was written by Eugene Kontorovich who is is a Professor at Northwestern University School of Law. Professor Kontorovich's research spans the fields of constitutional law, international law, and law and economics. He also writes extensively about the legal aspects of the Israeli-Arab conflict. This article appeared March 15, 2013 in the Volokh Conspiracy and is archived at
http://volokh.com/2013/03/15/breaking-obama-white-house-describes-west-bank-as-part-of-israel/?ModPagespeed=noscript

In describing President Obama's itinerary during his trip to Israel and Jordan next week, Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes conceded that the Jewish connection to the West Bank is as strong as it is to Israel, and indeed, spoke of the two interchangeably:

Thursday, the President will begin by going to the Israel Museum. At the Israel Museum, he will view the Dead Sea Scrolls, which are a testament, of course, to the ancient Jewish connection to Israel and, frankly, a marvel that the Israelis have restored within the Israel Museum in a very substantial, impressive way. So the President very much looks forward to the opportunity to see the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The Dead Sea Scrolls were first discovered in the Qumran caves in 1947, when it was part of the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine. Thus the White House seems to recognize that Israel's history and borders are rooted in the Mandate — what happened in the "West Bank" in 1947 is somehow "connected" to Israel.

Moreover, most the the scrolls were recovered in the the 1950s, after this portion of the Mandate was illegally invaded and occupied by the Jordan. To put it simply, the Dead Sea Scrolls are from the West Bank, otherwise known as "Occupied Palestinian Territory." The Dead Sea Scrolls, one might say, are written by settlers.

And if it were not for Israel's victory in 1967, the Dead Sea Scrolls would not be in the Israel Museum.

By describing the Dead Sea Scrolls as evidence of the ancient Jewish connection with "Israel" (and by accepting the validity of their placement in the Israel Museum), the Administration implicitly acknowledges the arbitrariness of distinguishing between Israel's presence at the Dead Sea and in Tel Aviv.

No doubt this was an accidental slip of the tongue. But such slips are inevitable because the artificial division of Mandatory Palestine along the 1949 Armistice Line does not accord with any previous historical, demographic, administrative, or geographic realities.

Sergio HaDaR Tezza can be reached at Hadar-Israel@verizon.net


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CAMPUS BLOOD LIBEL

Posted by Americans for Peace & Tolerance, March 17, 2013

The article below was written by Charles Jacobs who is head of Americans for Peace and Tolerance, which he co-founded in late 2008. Jacobs also co-founded The David Project Center for Jewish Leadership in 2002, which he led until July 2008. This article appeared March 15, 2013 in Frontpage Magazine and is archived at
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2013/charles-jacobs/israeli-apartheid-week-learn-to-crush-it/

Spring's coming. Get ready for Israeli Apartheid Week on campuses across the nation. Here in Boston last week, Harvard got off to an early start: the college's Palestine Solidarity Committee placed mock eviction notices on students' doors, warning students that their rooms were "scheduled for demolition in the next three days." This was then likened to "the unlawful displacement of Palestinians."

That little psychodrama is just the prelim to a full program which will include anti-Israel films, the construction of an "apartheid wall" in the Science Center Plaza, and a talk by Hizbollah supporter, MIT Professor Noam Chomsky — who just may be the American Jew most proud to be ashamed that he's a Jew.

At Northeastern University, where Professors Denis Sullivan and Shahid Alam have proudly been working for decades to foment hatred of Israel (see www.shameonneu.com) the schedule is even more fulsome: From March 11-15, students will be shown two anti-Israel propaganda films, one even narrated by Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple. There will be a mock checkpoint constructed on the Centennial Commons, and all week long there will be a lighted sign flashing: "End Israeli Apartheid."

NEU President Aoun, who has finally come under pressure to do something about his radical, anti-Israel/anti-Semitic professors, might find it useful now to emulate Jason Kenney, the Canadian Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism, who condemned Israeli Apartheid Week as simple anti-Semitism. Aoun, who is Christian Lebanese, surely knows that Middle East Christians are the ones suffering from something pretty close to apartheid — in every one of the lovely Arab-dominated states they nervously inhabit. Condemning the lie about Israel while outing the real oppressors would be a double mitzvah. True, he'd have a tenured tantrum on his hands. Meanwhile, the silence of the Jewish Studies Department there continues to astonish.

At Boston University, there will be a sham conference on "The Right of Return." Several scholars who oppose the idea that Palestinians in vast numbers should be allowed to flood into Israel, thereby extinguishing the Jewish state, have submitted proposals to give papers. As of this writing the "conference" conveners have not responded to any of them, so any pretense that their panel is "academic" is a farce. Just more political theatre.

So what do we do about all this? The ADL has said it is "outraged" by the Harvard eviction notices. Nice, but then what?

I attended a workshop last week at the mammoth, yearly AIPAC Policy Conference which addressed the surge of anti-Israelism on the campuses. The two speakers representing Jewish organizations that work on campuses came to promote what has become the Jewish Establishment's only acceptable strategy; it's called "retail engagement." Responding to anti-Israel activity publicly with counter arguments, they say, has been shown to be ineffective. "Debate," they argued, "has no audience." A better approach is to get to know other students personally, especially student leaders, to build relationships with them, to "make friends, not arguments."

Much of this makes sense. Cold facts and logic don't win over most people. So much of politics is personal. Being popular and playing on emotion is often key. This sort of engagement is clearly necessary — but why would anyone think it's sufficient to win? Isn't the other side much larger? Can't they reach out to more leaders? To be truthful — aren't they often more charming?

And don't they have a big advantage? In our leftist-dominated culture which is obsessed with victimhood, the other side continually offers students what seems the high moral road — a victimhood campaign. In a low-information age, a picture of an Israeli tank next to a Palestinian child is enough to set people's judgment against us, sometimes for good.

Our problem is that they lie. Another reason that "retail engagement" alone won't win is that there is something more emotionally powerful than personal friendships at stake: In our world, people see themselves as good and moral people if they are for the underdog, and against oppression. If pro-Israel students, no matter how engaging, are seen to be supporting a cause that people fear taints them morally, friendship with charming Zionists will not often prevail.

No, friendship is not the magic bullet. To win, Jewish students will have to do harder things: They have to re-capture the emotional argument that counts most: Not that we are individually nice people, but that Israel is a decent nation that is being lied about. Jews are being victimized. That is the central truth of the matter, but exists now as the elephant in the PR room. Winning people to this central truth— that they are lying about us — means that pro-Israel students are going to have to do something the Jewish Establishment tells them not to do: they are going to have to call the campaign of lies what it is. They are going to have to talk to their friends about the people who are doing the defaming. They are going to have to "go negative." What we face is more than a social popularity contest: it's a political/ideological war; surely we know by now that it will take more than being charming if we mean to win.

It is time Jewish students stopped crowing that gays can march in Tel Aviv and started calling the propaganda crusade against us what it is: Bull! Lies! A hoax! The most inconvenient truth for our adversaries is that the horrors the Arab/Islamic world has falsely charged against Israel, are things they have actually done themselves — and are still doing.... While the "human rights" world keeps relatively mum. Land theft? The Arab world started out in Arabia and conquered the rest by jihad. Cruelty? Take a look at how women are treated, at how Sunnis treat Shias and vice versa. Is it now 70 or 80,000 dead in Syria? How many black slaves serve Arab masters across Arab north Africa?

Apartheid? Jewish students should say: "glad you brought that up. Because if you are truly interested in institutionalized subjugation in the Middle East, then talk to Simon Deng, an African who was enslaved by Arabs in Sudan; or to Mohammed Yahya, an African Muslim from Darfur, whose people are being massacred by Arabs for resisting Arabization; or to Caroline Doss, a Christian women from Cairo, whose people shiver to think what may soon happen to them because of the wonderful Arab spring. (They're all available.) Apartheid in the M.E. is not about Israel at all. That's a scam. The real apartheid is in the Arab/Islamic states.

If pro-Israel students can convince their classmates that anti-Israelism is based on lies — inversions, actually — Israel might just win on campus. Sure, it helps if pro-Israel students are likeable but only if they have the courage to state the truth and the wisdom not to listen to their establishment "leaders" might their efforts be decisive.

Contact Americans for Peace & Tolerance at apt@peaceandtolerance


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THE BEDOUIN REBELLION AGAINST ISRAEL

Posted by Ted Belman, March 17, 2013

The article below was written by Eric Burns who is an American author, playwright, media critic, and former broadcast journalist. This article appeared March 16, 2013 in Israpundit and is archived at
http://www.israpundit.com/archives/53527#more-53527

Israel's Bedouins have traditionally lived a semi-nomadic existence, making a bare living as farmers and sheep herders. As of 2004, there were 130,000 Negev Bedouins, and 60,000 in the rest of Israel. Although some have migrated to Israel's cities, at least half still live the way their grandfathers lived, in tin shack and tent encampments, lacking paved roads, indoor plumbing, electricity, and sewers, without paying taxes to Israel. As of 2007, about 70,000 Bedouin lived in unrecognized Negev settlements, without basic services. With a fertility rate of 5.5%, one of the world's highest, Bedouin population is increasing rapidly, with attendant high levels of unemployment, poverty, and crime. While a fair number of Bedouin serve in the IDF, there is mounting concern about their increasing Islamic fanaticism.

In 1986, the government established a Negev directorate, as a central authority over unrecognized Bedouin settlements, and to negotiate on land issues. However, by 2007, Israel's government realized it could no longer ignore burgeoning illegal Bedouin settlement, and asked retired Supreme Court justice Eliezer Goldberg to study the problem, and make recommendations. Ehud Prawer, head of the Prime Minister's planning division, turned Goldberg's ideas into a plan. As implemented, the Prawer Plan calls for a massive initial investment of 1.2 billion NIS(roughly $324,000,000), to legalize most of the illegal Negev settlements. For those 20,000 to 30,000 Bedouin whose settlements couldn't be made legal, the Prawer Plan offers generous gifts of land, up to five dunams(about 1.25 acres) per family. The government then gave Minister at Large Bennie Begin(son of former PM Menachem Begin) the task of converting the Prawer Plan into law.

Begin initiated a review process, which included extensive meetings with the Bedouins, where comments and counter-proposals were welcomed. However, subsequent Bedouin behavior indicated that the review process has been subverted, by leftist NGO's, such as the New Israel Fund(NIF), and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel(ACRI). These organizations have coached Bedouin representatives to reject government offers, to "just say no," as "Israel will always come back with a better offer," resulting in a severe erosion of the Prawer Plan's original recommendations. Begin's most recent offer was 63% of the land the Bedouin have illegally expropriated. This includes land registration under Bedouin clan member names. The Bedouins build 1500 to 2000 illegal structures in the Negev, annually. They now claim an area of greater than 200,000 acres—at least 16 times the size of Tel Aviv. Israel is making a supreme sacrifice to satisfy Bedouin demands.(1)/p>

Equally important, there is little, if any discrimination against the Bedouins (or any Arabs) owning, leasing, or purchasing land, despite leftist claims. 80.4% of Israel's land is government-owned, while 13.1% is owned by the Jewish National Fund(JNF), a private charitable organization. 6.5% is about evenly divided between private Jewish and Arab owners. Thus 93.5% of Israel's land is unavailable for private ownership. In 1960, the Knesset passed a number of land laws by which state-owned and JNF lands were both defined as "Israel lands." These laws reinforced the principle that Israel's lands could only be leased, not sold, and gave oversight of them to a new government agency, the Israel Land Authority.(ILA) Israeli Jews and Arabs enjoy equal access to state-owned land, however, regarding residential land, the ILA many times offers Israel's Arabs better terms than it offers to Jews. A prominent example was Avitan v. Israel Land Administration(HC 528/88), in which the plaintiff(Eliezar Avitan) sued the ILA, because they charged a Bedouin family $150 for a long-term lease on a quarter acre plot in Rahat; while charging Avitan $24,000 for a similar plot nearby. Israel's Supreme Court ruled against Avitan, favoring the ILA's "affirmative action" policy for Bedouins. There are a number of similar examples of ILA favoritism towards the Bedouins.

The purpose of JNF's original 1901 charter, and their 1953 charter, was to purchase land for Jewish settlement. This has occasionally been interpreted to mean that JNF shouldn't make long-term leases to non-Jews. However, in practice, this official restriction isn't recognized, and JNF land is not only leased to Israel's Arabs; they're given long-term residential leases via land swaps, whereby JNF land is traded to the government to lease, while JNF receives other land in return. Nevertheless, there are no restrictions on purchasing Israel's private lands, and the Palestinian Authority has encouraged wealthy Palestinians to buy private land. Various Palestinian real estate magnates have made a number of such purchases. Thus in practice, there aren't any restrictions on Israel's Arabs leasing state-owned land, JNF land, or purchasing private land, and the Bedouins have been treated very well by Israel.(2)

However, the Israeli left wasn't satisfied. In September 2011, Supreme Court President Dorit Beinisch ruled that any area in Judea and Samaria that hasn't been declared state land, isn't unowned land, but is considered private Palestinian Arab land, by default. No proof of Palestinian ownership was(is) necessary. Before Beinisch's ruling, unowned land could be awarded to Jews, or to anyone that worked the land for 10 yearswithout prior proven ownership. Her ruling resulted in the demolishing of Jewish homes in Givat HaYovel, north of Jerusalem; in Haresha, which was targeted by Peace Now, which claimed Haresha's Jewish homes were on land claimed by Palestinian Arabs; and in Migron, where families with young children were evicted in the middle of the night. The home of a fallen IDF soldier in Givat HaYovel, Major Eliraz Peretz, was spared only because Defense Minister Ehud Barak petitioned the Supreme Court on his behalf. Also according to Israeli law, land ownership questions are decided by the civil administration and the state prosecutor's office, not the Supreme Court.

Beinisch's ruling simply accepts at face value unsupported Arab land claims, and ignores illegal expropriation, often practiced by Bedouin tribes. Beinisch also understood that Arab land claims are often poorly supported, with many relying on inaccurate British Mandate era fiscal maps, that in no way provide proof of ownership. As a result, leftist NGO's have many times been forced to withdraw their claims. However, her ruling will likely stand, unless legislation is passed that overrides it.

Which brings readers to the situation at Bir Hadaj, a Negev Bedouin village of 5,000 residents, where Israel has developed state-owned land, pursuant to recognizing Bedouin ownership. Between September and November, 2012, police made several raids on Bir Hadaj. An article inHaaretz, dated 11/16/2012, describes the November 12th raid. The article offers graphic descriptions of how police roughed up some residents, then fired tear gas grenades towards the elementary school, resulting in 29 children being hospitalized, for tear gas inhalation. They were released later that day. However, the article also mentions that the raid was "the second of its kind within a month," and that there were security personnel "disguised as Arabs" in the village. Were the residents of Bir Hadaj innocent victims of Israeli police brutality, as the article portrays?

Not likely. As a result of leftist NGO encouragement to refuse Minister Begin's offers, and undoubtedly influenced by Judge Beinisch's ruling, the Bedouins have illegally squatted on JNF land, outside the developed area of Bir Hadaj. They throw rocks, burn tires, and riot every time police try to enforce the law. Bedouin spokesmen have claimed the unrest is because, "The Housing Ministry unit revoked the master plan, and the Interior Ministry is demolishing houses...to pressure us into accepting new proposals....They do not want to divide the plots as planned, but want us to become a municipal community...."

The Housing Ministry has refuted this claim, "The allegation of decreasing the size of the plots in Bir Hadaj is groundless...." One might reasonably conclude that the Bedouins don't want to pay taxes to Israel, and don't want to recognize the government's authority.(3)

In addition, the article doesn't mention that another raid at Bir Hadaj, in September 2012, was conducted to recover stolen IDF Jeeps, used to smuggle drugs and weapons into Israel, from Egypt. The police uncovered a warren of hidden compounds, containing dozens of stolen vehicles, including Jeeps and water tankers. Dozens of Jeeps have been stolen in the past few years, from the IDF's Ketziot and Tze'elim bases in southern Israel. Several were recovered in this raid.

On January 27, 2013, PM Benjamin Netanyahu's cabinet, by a vote of 16 to 3, with 1 abstention, approved Minister Begin's recommendations on formalizing the status of Negev Bedouin settlements. Will Begin's plan of compensation(to those Bedouins moved off state land) and vast land giveaway work?

The Prime Minister's Office supports the plan. However, the plan was approved hastily, without proper consideration. Ministers first read the plan's recommendations only 2 days before the cabinet vote. The ILA received the recommendations only 2 ½ days before the vote, while neither the Defense Ministry nor the IDF had approved it. Why did the cabinet approve it so quickly? 30% of the land included was quickly withdrawn, because it was unsuitable for residential use and herding; IDF bases, roads, and electric company and water authority structures. Immediately after the cabinet vote, the Negev's Jewish residents complained that the plan rewards years of illegal Bedouin squatting, while the Bedouins objected that thousands will be uprooted from their homes.(4)

Recognition of the Bedouins would help stabilize Israel, one reason it's a desirable goal. However, recognition can't be accomplished without Bedouin cooperation—they must live in designated areas, and the smuggling and theft must stop. This is why Minister Begin's plan is unworkable—the Bedouins aren't given any motivation to cooperate. It's also impractical, and shouldn't be implemented. In February 2012, Dorit Beinisch retired as President of Israel's Supreme Court, and was replaced by Judge Asher D. Grunis, a conservative.

Thus far, Judge Grunis has approved a March 2012 decision that evicted 50 Migron families from their homes. It's therefore unlikely that Grunis would rule to repeal Beinisch's September 2011 ruling, that made non-state West Bank land Palestinian Arab land, by default. Such a repeal, or similar Knesset legislation, would help stop the runaway appeasement of those whose criminal behavior and appetite for Israel's land know no boundaries.

1-"Stop the silent surrender of the Negev," by Ari Briggs, reprinted inIsrapundit, 9/20/2012; report in Israel News 11/08/2012; "Arabs illegally settling the Negev in land grab race," by Atara Beck, reprinted in Israpundit 8/23/2012.

2-"Edward Said's Documented Deceptions," at www.camera.org, 8/20/1996.

3-"For Bedouin father, Israel is his children's No. 1 enemy," by Or Kashti,Haaret, 11/16/2012.

4-"Government Bedouin land plan deemed impossible," by Stuart Winer, Maariv, 02/07/2013.

Contact Ted Belman is a retired lawyer and the Editor of Israpundit. He made aliya from Canada last year and now lives in Jerusalem, Israel. Contact him at tedbel@rogers.com


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PASSOVER GREETINGS

Posted by Fred Moncharsh, March 17, 2013

As we approach the holiday of Passover,I have been pondering why it is, that we are the only people whose connection to God is so strange. After all, no other nation can make the infamous claim that appears below.

To begin with, God connects with our forefathers, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. And of Jacob's 12 sons, only Joseph merits a direct connection with God.

And once Joseph dies, God distances himself from this notable family. It takes another 200 years for God to make contact with the descendents, when he appears to Moses.

Over these 200 years, the family has multiplied astronomically. Estimates put the number at close to 3 million. And not 3 million citizens of Egypt, but now they are 3 million slaves.

God chooses a people who are slaves in order to free them and make them chosen and be a God to them.

Why did we need to be slaves for this to happen?

Could not God have chosen us as a free people? What was so special about being a slave?

This question has been on my mind for the past months and only this morning did I finally come up with an answer that satisfied me. [could be temporary :-)]

It's possible that we needed to be slaves back then in order to remind us that it is our nature as human beings to be slaves, even when we don't feel like slaves. Slaves are dependent on their masters for survival. Their masters can feed them or starve them. Work them or rest them. Kill them or let them live.

Passover comes around once every year to remind us that we were chosen by God to be liberated, free from servitude. And even though we are far from the kind of slaves we were in Egypt, if we look at the details of our lives, how many of us have not chosen to become slaves once again. Even if it is only a slave to a daily or weekly routine.

Recent events have made me only too aware of my choices of being enslaved.

It starts with an uncontrollable urge to check my "inbox" every morning.

My smartphone was recently "reset", only for me to find that half my contacts are not there. Phone numbers for people that I need to reach are no longer there. Private numbers that I cherished are gone. Suddenly I feel lost.

With spring on our doorsteps I find myself a slave to my garden that suddenly needs water, fertilizer and weeding.

Things around the house that were put off, now beckon - paint me! fix me! replace me! Not to speak of our dependency on employment, our obligations as parents, grandparents and students etc.

Is it possible that God, in His infinite wisdom, had to make us slaves first, before He chose to be a God to us, by taking us out of slavery in a way that only God could do? Is it possible we have the holiday of Passover each year to break our patterns of slavery and instead focus on serving Him by going through whatever preparations we make each year as Passover approaches? That all of the commandments around Passover are there simply as God's way to break us from other kinds of slavery?

If so, my wishes for myself and all my family and friends, is to take this yearly opportunity to reflect on our own self-imposed slavery and to try our best to break free of them.

If nothing else, just for the 7 days of the holiday.

And let the phrase in the Torah that is repeated 9 different times, that commands us to eat matzah for all 7 days, be the reminder that a free man can even be a slave to a freshly baked loaf of bread out of the oven.

Have a wonderful Seder night.

Contact Fred Moncharsh at fmoncharsh@gmail.com


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MUST WATCH 109 YR OLD HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR: "LOOK FOR THE BEAUTY IN LIFE", GROWING FORESTS IN ISRAEL'S DESERT! AND MORE

Posted by Chaimdov, March 17, 2013

The article below was written by Dr. Bernhard Rosenberg who is a Jewish scholar and speaker. He is the author of numerous books and was the Holocaust chairman of the New York Board of Rabbis. Rosenberg is the spiritual leader of Congregation Beth-El in Edison, New Jersey, professor of speech, and a Holocaust scholar and public speaker.

I often write about the uniqueness of the Holocaust and state that the Holocaust is completely different from other Genocides. This position is controversial to some people. There are those who believe that the only way to preserve the memory of the Holocaust is by making it a universal lesson regarding the tribulations throughout the world. Whether I am right or wrong, only our children, grandchildren and great grandchildren will know. Seventy five years from when the last of the holocaust survivors are gone I predict that regardless of Yad Vashem, the United States Holocaust Museum, and all the other museums and books, the memory of the Holocaust will not be preserved. It will be regarded as just another Genocide in the history of genocides.

Unless we preserve the memory of the Holocaust and tie it to Jewish observance and ritual by including the Holocaust in prayer service or as I have done, creating a Holocaust Siddur and Haggadah (which is available free on line: holocausthaggadah.com) the Holocaust will become a mere date in history. It has to be tied into a revitalized Judaism to keep it alive.I for one, at this point in my life, no longer stress the pain, suffering and horrors of the Holocaust. Today I speak of the importance of learning about the heroic individuals who survived the Holocaust to make better lives for themselves and their families. Many Holocaust survivors have created synagogues, yeshivot and day schools and still support them financially. We need to learn about those who resisted the Nazis, not only about the crematoriums. The memory of the Holocaust will be kept alive by future generations if we have pride in the accomplishments of the survivors and preserve Judaism.

Contact chaimdov at chaimdov@aol.com


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JERUSALEM ISSUE

Posted by Yorum, March 17, 2013

The article below was written by Yarden Frankl who is the Director of Special Media Projects for HonestReporting. He writes analyses and produces videos on anti-Israel media bias. He also blogs at CrossingtheYarden.com. This article appeared March 17, 2013 in the New York Times.

In a front page story on the eve of President Obama's visit to Israel, NYT Bureau Chief Jodi Rudoren writes that a small number of Jews buying apartments in predominantly Arab Jerusalem neighborhoods is "complicating" the Jerusalem issue.

Rudoren admits that these apartments are privately financed and not part of an Israeli government initiative. So should people really be prohibited from buying apartments based on the sole fact that they are Jewish?

Although she has several references to how the area fell under Israeli control in the 1967 war, she fails to give the historical context to that event. Many neighborhoods in and around Jerusalem's Old City had significant Jewish residents who were killed or expelled from the area in 1948. (As you can see in this HR Video, Jerusalem: The Media Myth of Two Cities .) What the Palestinians call a "conquest" of Jerusalem is looked upon by many Israelis as a "liberation" and "reunification." After all, in its 3,000 year history, the city was only divided for 19 years while under Jordanian control.

Yet Rudoren deliberately leaves out anything that doesn't fit her narrative. Two direct quotations from Palestinian Authority officials tell readers about the "colonization" of the area. She cites unnamed "experts" agreeing that the city must eventually be divided as if this was a consensus opinion. But if anything, there is significant opposition within Israel for dividing Jerusalem, especially where historically Jewish areas are concerned.

At the very end of the article, there is one quotation from a Palestinian that put the whole issue into a different light:

They think that this is their place and this is their land, but this is not the case. We are here and we are staying here, but they won't. There are people here who won't let them.

Palestinian intolerance is what "complicates" the Jerusalem issue, not a few Jewish families buying apartments overlooking the Old City.

Contact Yoram at yoramski3438@aol.com


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WHY ON EARTH IS OBAMA GOING TO ISRAEL?

Posted by Yuval Zaliouk, March 17, 2013

The article below was written by Alex Joffe who is a historian and archaeologist. He is a Shillman-Ginsburg Fellow of the Middle East Forum. This article appeared March 12, 2013 in the Times of Israeland is archived at
http://blogs.timesofisrael.com/why-on-earth-is-obama-going-to-israel/

Why exactly is President Obama going to Israel? A variety of theories have been advanced as to why he is making the trip now and what might be accomplished.

Some have suggested that Obama needs to reassure Israel, to hold their hands and tell them that the US-Israeli relationship is special. This suggests that Obama cares about Israeli feelings, at least in the sense that positive sentiments advance policy goals, and that Israelis might be thus comforted by his presence. But the record of bad relations between Obama and Netanyahu is too long, and the fact that Obama is on record saying that Israelis don't know what is best for them, whereas he does, has mitigated whatever good vibrations he might spread now.

Others have suggested that Obama is going to take advantage of the unique circumstances of weakness in the Arab world in order to force progress in Israeli-Palestinian relations. But the Palestinian Authority is again engaged in fruitless reconciliation talks with Hamas and has accused Israel of sabotaging those talks with back channel contacts with Hamas. It has also orchestrated violent protests against Israel in advance of Obama's trip to create a price tag for its cooperation. The idea that Obama holds a strong hand falls short.

Still others believe the visit is a kind of reset, an opportunity to rebuild relations badly damaged by the misstep of forcing Israel to adopt a construction freeze that was neither asked for nor reciprocated by Palestinians, as a condition for resuming negotiations. Given the appointment of Chuck Hagel to be Secretary of Defense, despite revelations regarding his peculiarly obsessive hostility towards Israel and near indifference towards other issues, this rings particularly hollow.

On the whole, the timing of the visit is so inauspicious as to arouse suspicion that a change of American policy is indeed in the making. Consider the Middle East scene today. The Egyptian military is making veiled threats against the American-supported Muslim Brotherhood Morsi government. The civil war in Syria is spreading into Lebanon. The threat of an Islamist takeover in Jordan has never been greater. And Iran, with the help of North Korea, inches ever closer to a nuclear weapon.

Nothing suggests the administration changing its policies on these realities. The US Government continues to support Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey in supplying the increasingly Islamist dominated rebels in Syria, and now will provide non-lethal aid directly. No meaningful pressure has been exerted on Egypt to change course, to push economic reforms or lessen growing repression against Christians and liberals. Jordan is, as ever, almost completely off the American radar. And while the sanctions policy against Iran has hurt the middle and lower classes, it has only increased the regime's belligerence. The idea that Obama is coming to Israel to inform it of significant policy changes is the most far-fetched interpretation of all.

So why now? The simplest explanation may be the best; that in his second term Obama has less to lose and will at least gain a badly needed American PR boost by finally going, and that, in the absence of overt embarrassments, the trip will be deemed a success.

Based on the administration's habit of doubling down on bad calls, chances are that the news Obama is bringing is a commitment to more of the same. A trip half way around the world for those reasons will undramatic as it is unproductive, and for that reason we should expect the trip to be couched in terms of "unprecedented security cooperation" between Israel and the US, and "being on the same page about Iran." Photo-ops and talking past one another will be the norm. The stage has been set by the announcement that the US will keep funding joint development of anti-missile programs regardless of sequestration budget cutbacks. But the question of what might be accomplished remains.

But at another level the visit is dangerous. For one thing it will inevitably expose just how out of sync the US is with Israel as well as the region. The bad chemistry between Obama and Netanyahu will produce awkward body language when they meet. American spokesmen will visibly dance around unwanted questions regarding Hamas and Hezbollah, or Muslim antisemitism. The famously aggressive Israeli press will analyze Obama's every move and every word, as will the Palestinian press. And despite carefully stage-managed meetings with selected groups, groups of Israelis and Palestinians are likely to loudly protest, causing embarrassment all around.

But the real impact of the Obama visit to Israel will not be in Israel but rather in Arab and Muslim countries. After all, it is in those countries that Obama has arguably (and if popularity polls are to be believed, unsuccessfully) invested the most political capital, and it is there that his trip to Israel will create the most disappointment and resentment. The 'Arab Street' will want to see overt confrontation between Israel and the US and will be disappointed when it doesn't appear. More nuanced observers in those societies will assume other forms of American pressure on Israel, because they desire it, and then will be disappointed when evidence does not quickly appear. And virtually all local observers, especially in government ministries and official media, will obsess over the visit as a welcome respite from the situations in Syria and Egypt. The near tragic element of Obama's visit and its timing then is that it plays directly into the region's traditional use of Israel as a weapon of mass distraction.

Obama's visit, by virtue of being routine and ill-timed has the potential to feed the region's worst instincts. Disappointment with Obama will quickly turn to the default setting of blaming Israel. Is that Obama's true goal, a back handed form of incitement? Probably not. Nothing in the Obama' administration's international dealings suggests this level of sophistication; its manufacture of resentment is generally reserved only for the Republican Party. But that will be one of its effects and it will, in all probability, set back the cause of peace, and that of addressing the region's other issues.

Yuval Zaliouk is an Israeli-American conductor. Born into a musical family, he was educated at the Haifa Academy of Music where he studied piano, trombone and percussion. He subsequently received a law degree from the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. Contact him at ynz@netvision.net.il


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THE PARIS SUBURB OF BEZONS CONFERS HONORARY CITIZENSHIP ON MAJDI AL-RIMAWI

Posted by The Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center, March 17, 2013

1. The local council of Bezons, a suburb located northwest of Paris, recently conferred honorary citizenship on Majdi al-Rimawi, a Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) operative who carried out or participated in a series of terrorist attacks, including the assassination of Tourism Minister Rehavam Ze'evi. Majdi al-Rimawi is currently serving a sentence of life imprisonment plus eighty years in an Israeli jail. He was awarded Bezons citizenship "by unanimous vote"[1] [according to the Bezons' council website] at a meeting of the local council called for that purpose on February 13, 2013, to show solidarity with the Palestinian people (Ma'an News Agency, March 11, 2013). A few days previously the council held a meeting dedicated to "Palestinian political prisoners" serving terms in Israeli jails.

2. The ceremony, held in Bezons, was attended by al-Rimawi's wife, Fathia Barghouti (al-Rimawi), who, until the recent elections, was the mayor of West Bani Zeid, a village north of Ramallah (where al-Rimawi lived until he was jailed). Citizenship was conferred as a result of collaboration between his wife, a member of the Barghouti family, and the head of the local council. Bezons and West Bani Zeid have been twin cities since 2008 (NRG website, March 11, 2013).

3. According to al-Rimawi's wife, "the connection between the city of Bezons and the Municipality of West Bani Zeid began in 2008... The matter of prisoners in our region caught the attention of [our] French brothers, and they decided to honor them by granting honorary citizenship to a prisoner from this area... For us, the family of the prisoner, this award is a great gesture from the French [people] and [shows their] support of the issue of Palestinian prisoners in general, and in particular the issue of prisoners sentenced to long prison terms."[2]

4. Dominique Lesparre, the mayor of the Bezons municipal council, wrote in his blog (and published in the local newsletter) that a so-called "genocide" was being carried out in Palestine (a spurious claim routinely repeated by the people waging the campaign to vilify and delegitimize the State of Israel). Regarding Majdi al-Rimawi he said that he was "a participant in the intifada, the struggle for the right to self-defense and to defend his country against the occupation. For his resistance, he has been in prison since 2002." He said that conferring citizenship on him was a strong political statement and that al-Rimawi took strength from the Palestinian struggle and the demonstrations of solidarity around the globe. He also called him a "direct victim of the occupation," and appealed to the French government to demand that Israel release him.[3] He made no mention whatsoever of the fact that Majdi al-Rimawi was in prison for the premeditated murder and involvement in various other terrorist attacks. In addition, the Bezons newsletter said that he had been in prison for more than a decade for the sole crime of "defending his town and its residents, and demanding that international law recognize the 1967 borders, and for that he had been sentenced to more than 80 years in prison" (Haaretz, March 10, 2013).

5. In our assessment, conferring honorary citizenship on the PFLP's Majdi al-Rimawi was not a chance occurrence. Anti-Israeli organizations in France and Italy maintain ongoing relations with the PFLP, the notorious terrorist organization to which Majdi al-Rimawi belongs. Those relations include the attendance of PFLP activists from Ramallah at meetings in France. In addition, activists of the pro-Palestinian network Freedom Flotilla Italia, met with PFLP activists in the Gaza Strip.[4]

The Bezons Conferral of Honorary Citizenship and Reactions

6. The town of Bezons, a suburb of Paris, is home to 28,000 residents. Since 2008 its mayor has been Dominique Lesparre, a member of the French Communist Party. Under his leadership the township was involved in supporting the Mavi Marmara flotilla to the Gaza Strip, and in 2008 it became a twin town of West Bani Zeid, a village north of Ramallah, where the al-Rimawi family lives (Haaretz, February 10, 2013).

7. Olivier Regis, a Bezons council member representing the Union pour un mouvement populaire (UMP), a right-center party, protested the measure and said that Lesparre had turned the council meeting into a political event (Haaretz, March 10, 2013). The European Jewish Congress (EJC) condemned the event and called on the French authorities to condemn Lesparre as well. EJC President Dr. Moshe Kantor said that it was "inconceivable for an elected official to be so ignorant as to call a cold-blooded murderer a victim." He said, "[T]his is the kind of ignorance which leads to people like Mohammed Merah perpetrating the murder of children because they are Jewish. This type of glorification of murder is sending a very ominous message to the next Merah."[5] He also said that he had hoped that the murder in Toulouse would shock France but unfortunately it hadn't been strong to shock those who attack Jews and other minorities (Jerusalem Post, March 11, 2013).

8. The Representative Council of French Jewish Organizations[6] published an open letter of condemnation of Bezons in its newsletter, March 13, 2013:

Contact Terrorism Information Center at newsleter@terrorism.info.org.il


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HOW MANY MORE JEWS IN ISRAEL HAVE TO BE RAPED, ROBBED, DISEASED, BEATEN...

Posted by K, March 17, 2013

How many more Jewish women have to be raped, how many more Jewish people have to be robbed, how many more Israeli's have to beat up, how many more Israeli's have to come down with an African borne disease. How many years if any, will the government realize that they made a mistake by allowing the African invasion to take place and simmer. How many years will it take ,if any, to end this plague upon the Jewish people of Israel and to once and for all rid the country of these despicable dredges of African society. They must be deported before it becomes a greater... epidemic. Deportation.... would be the 'humane thing to do... for the sake of Jews.

Open letter to the High Court of Justice and A.G Yehuda Weinberg..

How many more Jewish women have to be raped, how many more Jewish people have to be robbed, how many more Israeli's have to beat up, how many more Israeli's have to come down with an African borne disease.

How many years if any, will the government realize that they made a mistake by allowing the African invasion to take place and simmer. How many years will it take ,if any, to end this plague upon the Jewish people of Israel and to once and for all rid the country of these despicable dredges of African society. They must be deported before it becomes a greater... epidemic.

These Africans come from societies where rape, murder, arson, rioting and pillaging are normal features of their culture.

Israel must not be turned into an... Eritrea, Sudan, or Soweto.

Tel Aviv police report 45% increase in the number of criminal cases opened against Sudanese, and Eritreans.

There was a 53.2 percent increase in the number of Sudanese and Eritreans suspected in crimes and a 45% increase in the opening of criminal cases against them in 2012, according to figures presented by the Tel Aviv District Police on Wednesday.

The figures state that there were 1,048 Sudanese and Eritreans named as suspects in crimes in 2012, as opposed to 684 in 2011, and 1,092 criminal cases opened against them in 2012 as opposed to 2011. The report does not include specific categories for other foreigners..

The district, home to the majority of the more than 60,000 African migrants in Israel, released the figures as part of their annual statistical round-up on crime in the district.

The figures on African migrants were the most glaring on the list, which included a 65% rise in the number of arrests of juveniles for robbery, to 170 from 103 in 2011.

The figures showed a total of 76,371 criminal cases opened in 2012,..

The district is responsible not only for the city of Tel Aviv but also for Ramat Gan, Givatayim, Bat Yam, Holon, Bnei Brak, Herzliya and other cities in the Tel Aviv area.

---------------------------------------------------------------

When word of the catastrophe occurring in Israel, and pictures, like the one above reach American Jews contemplating aliyah...they won't come!

Contact K at historywatch@att.net


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OBAMA PLAYS POLITICS IN ISRAEL, TOO. MAYBE HE WILL EVEN WAKE UP JEWISH AMERICANS TO HIS OVERT STRATEGY?

Posted by Israel Commentary, March 17, 2013

President Obama is due to visit Israel on March 20 where, the next day, he is to deliver an address in Jerusalem's Binyanei Ha'uma (International Convention Center) to Israeli university students. According to reports, students from Israeli universities received invitations to hear the president's speech in Jerusalem — with the conspicuous exception of Ariel University. Ariel University was recognized last year as Israel's eighth full-fledged state university. It has a student body of 14,000, is one of the country's most distinguished universities, and its Chairman is former Israeli Defense Minister and Foreign Minister, Moshe Arens. (A genuine Israeli patriot and a great friend of the US)

Israeli MK Yoni Chetboun (Jewish Home party) described the exclusion of the West Bank institution "puzzling" and inconsistent. On the one hand the president announces his intentions are not political, he said, "But in the same breath he makes a political decision, boycotting Ariel University ... if the president invites students of all Israeli universities, he should also invite representatives from Ariel University, which is recognized by the Israeli government as legitimate academic institution." Shai Gill, Chairman of Ariel University's student council said that the students were "shocked by [Obama's] discrimination" and added that this decision has provoked hostility among students and promised their presence in the vicinity of the event ('MK slams Obama for excluding Ariel U. from speech,' Jerusalem Post, March 13, 2013)

The US Embassy in Tel Aviv has now denied a report that Ariel students were being barred but indirectly confirmed that they had not been invited to President Obama's Jerusalem speech when an embassy official stated that only students from academic institutions with partnerships or joint programs with the embassy had been invited ('US embassy denies Obama boycott of Ariel University students,' Jewish Telegraphic Agency, March 14, 2013).

Ariel University is located in Ariel, an Israeli town of 22,000 inhabitants in Samaria, has over 600 Arab students, as well as the largest number of Ethiopian university students in all of Israel. Even when former leftwing Israeli prime ministers Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert, in 2000 and 2008 respectively, offered more than 90% of Judea and Samaria to the Palestinian Authority (PA) as part of a proposed peace settlement, Ariel was part of the territory to be retained by Israel. It is part of a majority consensus in Israel that Ariel will remain part of Israel under any possible future agreement with the Palestinian Arabs.

Additionally, the Israeli Prime Minister's Office and a number of Knesset members passed messages to the White House saying they would much prefer if President Obama's speech took place in the Knesset, but this has been rejected in the White House.

ZOA National President Morton A. Klein said, "We are surprised and disappointed that President Obama declined to address the Knesset. The stated official reason is that President Obama wishes to make a less overtly political speech and to address more directly the Israeli public, especially Israeli youth."

Quite apart from the fact that one of the best ways to address the Israeli public is to deliver a televised speech to its democratically elected representatives in the Knesset, there is something deeply divisive and politicized in President Obama's decision to exclude from his audience Jewish and Arab students from Ariel University.

"The excuse for the non-invitation to Ariel students offered by a US embassy official is obviously lame and nonsensical. Whether or not an Israeli university has a partnership or joint program with the embassy in no way precludes the embassy from inviting Ariel students if it wishes to do so. Now that the matter has been raised publicly, this standing non-invitation is almost certainly deliberate.

"If President Obama states he wants to speak to Israeli university students, that, of course, has to include Ariel University students. It is entirely irrelevant whether Ariel University has any relationship with the embassy. Would President Obama have excluded Hebrew University students or Tel Aviv University students if those universities lacked a relationship with the embassy?"

"One would have thought that a desire to speak directly to the Israeli public would have included an eagerness to speak to all sections of that public, including Israelis who live and study in Ariel."

"If the failure to invite Ariel students is merely an innocent oversight, we urge President Obama to immediately rectify this and to instruct the U.S embassy, which reportedly has been dispatching invitations to the President's forthcoming speech, to invite Ariel students."

II Copy and paste to your search engine for a thrilling Israeli video response to adversity.

VIDEO HERE cbh https://youtube.com/watch?v=RzhQuQGyulA?hd=1

Contact Israel Commentary at israelcommentary@comcast.net


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GETTING BACK TO CORE PRINCIPLES AT CPAC 40 IN HARBOR

Posted by Marion Dreyfus, March 17, 2013

Over three days, Thursday through Saturday evening, March 14 to 16, more than xxx dozen current issues of concern to Conservatives, Libertarians and Republicans were addressed at the 40th CPAC annual get-together. On show were 200 speakers on panels and symposia, 15 full-length films and professional, info-dense documentaries, private VIP luncheons and receptions, dozens of new political and analytical books were talked and hawked, and fast new alliances were forged by people of all demographics from all 50 states.

One surprise was the vibrancy of the crowd. With thousands of college age and recent grads roving from hall to hall, bedecked with stickers and campaign buttons ["Kill the Death Bill" was pretty ubiquitous], wearing caustic-ghastly makeup Kristen Stewart and pal Robert Pattinson would be proud to display for the Zombie March dance Friday night, and queuing up for Dr. Ben Carson's autographs after a folksy but meaty barn-burner Saturday ("Let's just suppose, for a magical moment, I were to be president in 2016," his cheeky hypothetical jape, evoked storms of applause and laughter), although there was a healthy representation of adults at the Conservative Political Action gathering in DC suburb, Prince George's County, this year scarcely a retiree was visible at the surging near-8,000 attendees at the HQ Gaylord Hotel this year.

The conventional wisdom is that such a conclave would be top-heavy with hoary-headed WWII vets. Not so. Some, sure. But most of the assembly were in their robust, orneriest middles or engaging just-woken, full-fervor enthusiasts. One modern note of change: Whereas 20 and 30 years ago, the vast preponderance of attendees were smokers, this year, there were zero smokers catching a drag outside the giant Gaylord entryway. A notable fashion stand-out, or maybe a gathering trend: We spotted so few women and girls wearing pants that we could count them on the fingers of our hands.

The majority of the fashion-forward skimpy-mini crowd wore pretty skirts, knits, designer dresses or smartly tailored suits. Okay, we spotted one pair of jeans, but on just one female. Good-looking women were a commonplace in the wide, crowded corridors. Men were mostly fit, shaven, wholesome, handsome, in suits, good ties and polished shoes. Even the sexy security unit, first dressed in elephant grey, with bullet-proof Kevlars bulking up their chests under immaculate shirts, donned all-black dress uniforms the next day. Best-looking pack of security guys who--given the non-violent and respectful behavior of Republicans, Tea Party Patriot folk, top-school grads, religious and ex-military attendees--had nothing to do we've ever seen. Latter-day Maytag salesmen.

Bonus points: This year there were no scuzzy Occupy anarchists messing up the peripheral shrubbery and parking lot. Maybe all that heavy security detail deferred such hijinks. Side note: There were zero picture windows broken, zero attempted rapes, zero police cars soiled by attendees. Not a soul was arrested, funnily enough.

The excitement and optimism evident in the substantial youth contingent, each paying from $100 to $250 (in addition to hotel and food bills), were mirrored in the vigorous steps and clear voices of the Gen X/Y Girls-demographic. (Not that these tres serieux political mavens watch that barometer of excess, post-adolescent snapshot of anomie, geekiness, deplorable absence of norms and random hookups.)There was even a minor sensation of a few well-spoken high school and even middle-school newbie Conservatives attending as assertive Conservatives, to general acclaim, when their ages became known—starting young, but articulate and refreshingly well informed, it seemed. Our own mildly fetishistic roommate acted the welcome sounding board and pleasant co-enjoyer of events and presentations.

Meet 'n' greets were fun for attentive young and old alike. We attended a privileged, separate from CPAC Shabbaton at a nearby hotel, also in sight of the shimmering harbor a few hundred meters away, the evening moderated by columnist Joel Mowbray, where about 100 diners were surprised by the personable, marvelously erect, personably droll and knowledgeable former Senator Allen West, mid-gefilte fish, mixed salad and cold cuts. West discussed current events on the hill and abroad, particularly as regards unconscionable "gifts" to Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, in terms of a quarter billion dollars to the islamist all-but-dictator and avowed anti-Semite/anti-Zionist, Mohamed Morsi, plus the latest tanks and aircraft. West stayed a good time, considering his busy schedule, book commitments and public speech to the much larger non-Shabbat crowd. We met some fascinating people at this "tisch" of 100 mostly out-of-state CPAC attendees.

Saturday, midday--same harbor-view hotel, different room, smaller crowd--we were treated to a political comic for a fast stand-up set on absurd aspects of the political zeitgeist landscape. We had heard rumors that Ted Cruz would drop in, as Allen West, ACORN-buster James O'Keefe (whom Breitbart had deemed "one of the best journalist-reporters in the country" after he and his pretend-prostitute partner had outed ACORN for the frauds they were), and cartographer Mark Langfan had, the night before.

Attendees hailed from all over the United States, with a few even coming from digs in Europe, Russia, the Far East and South America. Excitement and enthusiasm were evident, whether at the Exhibit Hall down two levels from the exhibition concourse, to the flyering volunteers at every escalator efforting to convince the crowds that Chris Christie is still a hero party fave, still the capacious GOP hope for 2016, and not to sequester him out for his storm Sandy perceived party betrayal and padded shoulder-to-skinny shoulder camaraderie with the current half-and-half top Administration enchilada.

The NRA and Intercollegiate Institute, Citizens United as well as the active Tea Party Patriots were strongly in evidence around the hotel and in booths downstairs. They made T-shirts, mandatory totes, free bottles of water, buttons, bumper stickers, ample cocktail receptions, refreshing chocolate mints, even elegant quilted carrying cases with terrific box lunches available, if you knew where to look. And what session to attend.

Speaking of the White House, not much ozone was expended in presentations, roundtables and panels, as policy issues focused on repair, reclamation, fairer representation of military votes, the Justice Department under siege by a seeming injustice moustache-mind, better media accountability and reporting than is currently the case, the future of the GOP and the Tea Party, how the sometimes- fraudulent electoral system can be ameliorated, and halting the dizzying four-year and counting hemorrhage of 'transparency' and accountability under the flouted Constitution can be stoppered. It was not a 3-day calumny-fest.

While the ills of the body politic were cited in relation to how they can best be framed and repaired, the dear-leader-from-behind name was, in fact, notable for being MIA. That is not to say that the book launches and films did not address the golfer-in-chief. They assuredly did and do.

New media were in evidence, with annual blogging awards on hand, and app-, online-, in-person and computer-driven straw polls. (Surprise, not: Rand Paul was favorited for 2016, just as, for most recent poll years, Ron Paul invariably garnered top straws, pulled by his legion of-- often bussed-in-- supporters.) Rand Paul's edgy and amusement-flecked talk on Thursday maximized his fan base after his stellar performance with an historic 13-hour filibuster against unilateral, unvetted presidential drone-strikes against American citizens on American soil.

As fitting for the speedy electronic age we inhabit, Websites and think tanks, institutes and national student leadership programs were talked up, radio and TV interviews taking place on the floor of the major presentation hall. Cellphones, tablets, droids and iPads vied for space with laptops and the occasional humble notebook. At the media pen, with several hundred reps from national papers, magazines, online, international, national and local newsies, it was actually fun to be speed-writing next to communications peeps who did not snort or coast in sneering condescension, which occurs routinely in events that are salted with the heavily leftist press corps.

One Asian writer moved away to a different spot in the holding pen, but actually came back to apologize for having left his first spot: "I didn't want you to think I moved away from you or anything. There was no outlet for my laptop here." Though he was Japanese, we think, he was what one would call in mamma loshen, Yiddish, a real mensch. We were interviewed, ourselves, by three separate radio interview programs during the three days, a sports-and-rock station, a political talk channel, and a local Tampa satirical program. Many photographs were politely requested. (We are not sure why; probably something to do with our clothing making a statement of sorts.)

During the 3-day event, there were 36 book signings, authors delighted in the venue and occasion, generously sharing their time with purchasers. Titles ranged from Benjamin Shapiro's smart monograph on Bullies: How the Left's Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America (Watch that guy; he was on some panels, he's young enough to pass for an undergrad, and he is smart, sharp, fast...a real comer, our estimation.)

Books promoted at intervals throughout each day, with signings held in the Exhibit Hall down two level; Frank David Marshall (someone's REAL father, author suggests); Benghazi and Fast & Furious cover-ups; transparency concerns; bullying by the left; handling the onerous health imposition of the ACA on our lives, privacy and bankbooks.

And film. For those who like their patriotism in the dark, watching and, possibly, resting from all the ambient turbulence stirred up by the wealth of information imparted by the sessions, there was a pride of films and yet more. Fifteen of them, most, sponsored by Citizens United. Among them were full-on features and docs, going from Phelim McAleer's debunking colossus Fracknation, to Dinesh D'Souza's popular 2016, Mike Huckabee's film, The Gift of Life, The Hope & The Change (40 disappointed Democrats talk about their change of heart, and party) from Stephen Bannon; Newt and Calista Gingrich'es timely documentary, America at Risk: The War with No Name, fanatics following their notion of Koranic dicta, but faced with the targets' (us) impossibility of waging winning war against an enemy the government adamantly refuses to even identify, even works overtime to pretend does not exist; plus their hagiography of Ronald Reagan, Rendezvous with Destiny; to Judicial Watch'es DC premiere, District of Corruption, spotlighting government scandal, secrecy and epic ... corruption. One disappointment: Many of us were waiting impatiently for Hillary, The Movie, billed as "everything you've forgotten and need to know about the would-be presidential candidate," but someone forgot to screen it, and our 'need to know' was mysteriously canceled sans explanation.

Issues presented and discussed included reducing the unprecedented debt burden, absent budgets, protecting the military in the face of unprecedented budget cuts, lopsided healthcare, and reconfiguring the current unwonted and escalating costs of the Affordable Care Act, foreign-aid extravagance (especially to avowed enemy states making no secret of their wish-list to dismantle or destroy this country), energy policies, marriage, pregnancy termination, gender concerns, environment, illegal immigration, gun management concerns, Constitutional issues breached by current House abuses, threats from abroad, connecting to the Tea Party , the Justice system, party growth, "global warming" alarmism, branding and marketing of the party, public safety and education--of the voter as well as of youth. Daily Leadership Institute job workshops and internship fairs attracted a steady stream of career hopefuls; these did not focus solely on college grads, but were thoughtfully geared at employment seekers of all age groups, when 89 million Americans are out of work or earning only part-time income.

A major tranche of CPAC time and sentiment was expended in memorials, films, convention coverage, and a lavish cocktail hour for hundreds, devoted to the inestimable loss of the merry savant and media conscience gadfly, Andrew Breitbart. His contribution to the CPACs of the past few years and recently cannot be overstated. Breitbart died one year ago of a massive heart attack. He was just 43.

For good measure, in terms of starred speeches, several were outstanding and a cause for wildly jubilant applause and cheering. Rising rock stars Marco Rubio and Rand Paul (his posters read: "Stand for Rand") scored high on the Thursday superpopular ratings. Friday, Donald Trump raised a blip or two. But for hot, buttered pop-pop terrific, Wayne LaPierre of the NRA filled the 3,000-seat Potomac ballroom, with his rhythmic, reiterated invocation, "And they think I'm crazy?!"

Bobby Jindal, much more relaxed onstage than his ill-fated appearance 4 years ago as the opposition rejoinder to the State of the Union, opened with a series of comic jibes at Democrat frailties and peccadillos, the president's various handicaps, and acquitted himself well.

But the two sweep-you-off-your-feet speakers were Dr. Ben Carson, who recently put the White house back on its heels at the National Prayer Breakfast—and repeated his first grand slam with his direct, genuinely warm, straightforward talk on the responsibility of the state to its people, its health imperatives and his simple faith in faith and the efficacy of the solid parental structure to produce winning citizens in a competitive world. It was brought home to listeners that he is, one, a supremely talented brain surgeon, a man never born with the silver spoon of the spendthrift-in-chief, and yet far more accomplished than those who were shocked at his effrontery in criticizing the president for mounting debt, and for sabotaging of the national health system by an unwanted grab for one-sixth of the economy—an act stuffed down our unwilling throats and becoming ever more a horrendous mistake and costly liability. And two, he could get away with what he said because he, too, is black; no one can accuse him invidiously of the now-corrupt and vile charge of "racism" visited like holy water on Easter Sunday against those daring to counter the administration on any issue. Pow. Pow.

Wow.

And then there was former Governor Sarah Palin, who came out all pistons blazing, with humor, puckish wit, deft packaging, terrific writing--no Tele-Prompter, y'all--. She chided those who needed chiding. And she topped off her boffo performance with a little gesture that brilliantly reminded the cheering, raucously applauding packed house about two annoying recent disruptions: She reached below her lectern for a long second, and drew out a huge cup imprinted BIG GULP, and sucked on the straw. She mocked those who had pitilessly attacked Marco Rubio some weeks ago for nothing more than reaching for a drink of water on air. While at the same time also giving a saucy in-your-face Oh Yeah? to 'Nanny Mayor' Michael Bloomberg, whose effort to deny New Yorkers the right to buy a plus-size soda, over 16 ounces, was recently trounced in the courts, which stated that he had overreached his authority. It was so audacious a move, yet so simple in conception, that not a few people mourned the loss of the McCain presidency, if only because this kind of gorgeous intelligence was subbed in by the plastic box of hammers called Joe Biden. What would our past four years have been, had this feisty politician been permitted to let 'er rip on all the issues she has a handle on far deeper and more insightful than the wooden wallflower Veep, his legendary malaprops and goofball missteps?

She also talked guns: For Xmas, she said her husband, Todd got a new rifle, and she bought him somewhere to hang it: So has the gun, and I have the rack. (Naughty, hilarious, on point.)

And it didn't even matter that she came onstage and faced hordes of her enthusiasts wearing what looked like fitted black jeans instead of something perhaps a bit more suitable for such a public appearance. We'll forgive her that. And as it turned out, the studly moderator, FNC host Steven Crowder, coming onstage immediately afterwards to intro longtime battler Phyllis Schlafly was nearly unhinged by Palin's killer presentation. "I love my wife, but [Palin] is a smart, effective professional woman who is, umm, sooo FINE!" Crowder gushed [roughly reproduced]. Before he made mock of Joseph Biden's hypocrisy at going to Rome to meet with the new pontiff, Pope Francis, in the face of his, and Nancy Pelosi's, unchurchly positions on abortion: They both say they're Catholics. (Though Pelosi has been denied communion as a ticklish consequence of her ...non-sacramental, uncatholic views.)

But wait. As long as this coverage is (and we know: it's nearly as long as CPAC, itself), politics, in the form of disinviting speakers, managed to in sweep one issue, or series of issues, under the rug.

One panel, held in the hotel on Saturday, treated the urgent topics of Muslim expansionism, jihad and government infiltration and their handmaidens in the form of a nest of nuanced but increasingly hard to ignore threats to the country and its people. This panel, titled "The Uninvited," went athwart the organizers of the conference, since one of the chief legs of CPAC involves Grover Norquist, whose credentials are unimpeachable as a patriot, but whose alignment toward Islamism, terror groups and the like is a hands-off proposition.

A 6-person panel, attracting an SRO crowd, included national experts on sharia, jihad and governmental compromise. Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy, Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller, authors and activists in these arenas, and three other experts, spoke passionately and answered questions from an audience concerned about the country's safety, given the peculiar lassitude of the Administration to terror advocates, financing, even outright attacks. Attendees remarked afterwards that the public needs more information in order to process these concerns; holding a 'banned' roundtable on these issues was a necessary part of the important conference. It is to the speakers' credit that they pursued this meeting, and brought their lifelong study of the dangers presented to the CPAC 3-day fora.

What is the upshot of this inspiring, near-encyclopedic review of the issues facing the GOP and their allies in the near and distant future? Citing Jeb Bush, in an op-ed penned in mid-March for The Wall Street Journal, "The road to Republican revival," the goal is:

"The central mission of conservatives is to reignite social mobility in this country—restoring the right to rise."

Marion Dreyfus is a writer and travelor; she has taught English in China on the university level. She can be contacted at dreyfusmarion@hotmail.com


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APARTHEID PALESTINE

Posted by Human Rights Voices, March 17, 2013

The article below was written by Anne Bayefsky who is editor of EYEontheUN (info@EYEonthe UN.org). She is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and at Touro College. This article appeared March 17, 2013 in the Jerusalem Post and is archived at
http://www.jpost.com/LandedPages/PrintArticle.aspx?id=306681

Caption Text

It is impossible to read this latest UN report, or to listen to its authors and its state sponsors, without knowing that the campaign to rid the world of Israeli settlements is a campaign to rid the world of Israel.

On Monday, March 17 in Geneva, the UN Human Rights Council will hold a first-ever three-hour session devoted to the alleged human rights abomination known as the "Israeli settlement." In the moral wasteland of the United Nations, a Jew living on Arab-claimed land is a violation of Arab human rights.

There were once an estimated 900,000 Jews across the Arab world, but today there are less than a few thousand. They were given a choice: die, convert or flee.

Now the 22nd Judenrein Arab state is in-the-making: Apartheid Palestine.

Meanwhile, 20 percent of Israel's population is Arab, and free Arab citizens sit on the highest courts of the land, represent Israel abroad, and hold political office. An Arab living (and thriving) in the Jewish state is fulfilling a human right.

How does this obvious contradiction make it past the human rights geniuses at the UN?

The answer is almost as old as humankind: intolerance, xenophobia, bigotry and lawyers.

On the table in Geneva will be a report, produced by three lawyers carefully selected by the UN brass.

The first item of business brushed aside by these legal beagles was that the conclusion of their so-called "fact-finding mission" was decided before they ever got started. Their job description, laid out by the Human Rights Council, was "to investigate the implications of the Israeli settlements on the... rights of the Palestinian people." But the same resolution already says: "Affirming that the Israeli settlement activities... constitute very serious violations... of the human rights of the Palestinian people."

Then there was the irrelevant issue of the bias of the fact-finders.

Pakistani "expert" Asma Jahangir has already had numerous UN jobs (as has her sister Hina Jilani, one of four authors of the UN's infamous Goldstone Report). In 2004, as UN Special Rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, Jahangir took the extraordinary step of issuing a special statement exclaiming she was "aghast at the planned and deliberate extrajudicial execution of Hamas spiritual leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin."

When Israel killed Yassin's successor, Abdul Aziz Rantissi — with zero civilian casualties — Jahangir "sent a communication to the Government of Israel" worried that Israeli helicopters had fired "into the civilian car of Dr. Abdul Aziz al-Rantisi, a senior Hamas political leader." No matter that their terrible acts had led US authorities to name both men as "specially designated global terrorists," or that as combatants in a war they were not entitled to judicial process.

French "expert" Christine Chanet is on record as having told a UN treaty body meeting in July 2010 that settlements impose "severe" impediments to Palestinian rights.

Her decisions as a member of the UN Human Rights Committee are also revealing. In 2001 she dissented when the Committee decided that a Jewish citizen of the Czech Republic had been denied equal protection of the law after Czech authorities failed to provide restitution for property plundered by the Nazis. Chanet reasoned that by deciding in favor of the Jewish victim, the Committee was wrongly "involving itself in the assessment of evidence by the domestic courts."

But in 2004, Chanet dissented when the Committee decided not to pursue the complaint of a professor who alleged he was denied an academic promotion because of his perceived anti-Israel and anti-Semitic views. In the case of the alleged anti-Jewish victim, Chanet reasoned in the opposite direction. She said the Committee erred in refusing to reassess the professor's record of performance because the right answer was to "be determined not in the light of the complaint as made before a domestic court."

The third judge, Unity Dow from Botswana, has been on the Executive Committee of the International Commission of Jurists (ICJ) since 2006, and was chairperson of the Executive Committee from June 2011 to June 2012. During that time, the ICJ played a leading role in pressing for and supporting the Goldstone report and its libelous accusation that Israeli defense forces deliberately targeted Palestinian civilians.

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that these legal minds produced a report on settlements that looks like law but smells like rubbish.

The report objects to "Settlement Master Plans." The capitalized terminology is invented by the reports' authors and is an unmistakable allusion to the deportation "masterplan" of Nazi SS chief Heinrich Himmler.

The report has one annex. It begins: "Timeline — Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestine Territory 1948." Not 1967.

The report provides a "list of selected sources" upon which it relied, and links to them are helpfully provided by the UN website. A submission by the International Association of Jewish Lawyers and Jurists was deliberately excluded. Included are sources that claim Israel is deliberately dumping "waste" in the territories to increase cancer and miscarriages among Palestinians, that object to Israel's "Law of Return" — the foundation of Zionism, and that place Israeli "security" in quotation marks on the grounds that the issue deliberately "masks an intent" to impose "a system of domination by one racial group over another."

In short, the UN got exactly what it asked for.

Just as predictable is Monday's so-called "interactive dialogue" between UN states and these "fact-finders." Only last November the General Assembly Hall echoed with the hate speech of 120 members of political blocs like the Non-Aligned Movement and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, as well as individual states.

The word "settler" was always preceded by "extremist" or "racist." And "inhuman" "racist" "cruel" Israel was committing a "crime against humanity," a "genocidal blockade," "a regime of closure without precedent anywhere on earth," and "indiscriminately killing civilians."

It is impossible to read this latest UN report, or to listen to its authors and its state sponsors, without knowing that the campaign to rid the world of Israeli settlements is a campaign to rid the world of Israel.

And yet, at the UN, apartheid Palestine is a human right.

The writer is Director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust, @AnneBayefsky


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THE CYRUS CYLINDER...A TESTIMONY TO WHAT A HUMAN LEADER COULD BE

Posted by Gerald A. Honigman, March 17, 2013

According to whose numbers are used, Iran's non-Persian population makes up between 40-50% of the nation's 80 million people...Azeris, Kurds, Arabs, and other ethnic groups. Recent reports have shown ever-increasing torture and executions of Iranian Arabs, Kurds, and others—including freedom-loving Iranians themselves—by the regime of the mad mullahs.

In light of the current news regarding Iran's subjugation of many if not most of its own people while also enabling and fomenting violence elsewhere (including in both Israel and Syria), I am thrilled to report on an amazing journey which has recently gotten underway...

Before I proceed any further, however, I must thank an amazing young lady, Ms. Velma Ann Ruth, of the Middle East Democracy Federation, for notifying me of this development.

As I have championed the attainment of relative justice for all of the diverse peoples of the region since the '60s, Ms. Ruth is also deeply involved with the cause of those persecuted for desiring their own share of the justice pie—no matter how small that may be.

One of my own intellectual heroes over the decades has been Professor Albert Memmi, author of Jews and Arabs. He is from an ancient Tunisian Jewish family and fought with his pen for North African independence against the French in the 1950s. The beginning of his book tells it all...

To my Jewish brothers

To my Arab brothers

so that we can all

be free men at last...

In this same spirit, please share Ms. Ruth's and my own pleasure in alerting you, dear readers, to the tour now underway in America of a truly marvelous archaeological find, the Cyrus Cylinder, aka, the Kurash Prism. It is on loan from the British Museum and has begun the American leg of its journey at the Sackler Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. (http://www.asia.si.edu/exhibitions/current/cyrus-cylinder.asp). One of its other temporary homes will be the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City from June 20th through August 4th of this year.

Discovered in pieces in the late 19th century in the ruins of Babylon, the Kurash Prism was reassembled and translated by the pioneer British Assyriologist, Theophilus Pinches, and the soldier, diplomat, and "Father of Assyriology," Sir Henry Rawlinson, at the British Museum.

Among other things, this priceless, 9-inch long, clay cylindrical treasure provides, in cuneiform writing, historical corroboration of the account in the Hebrew Bible's Book of Ezra of Cyrus the Great's emancipation of the Jews from Babylonian captivity and his facilitation of their return to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem—the one folks like Ahmadinejad and his Arab buddies claim never existed. Iran's current Twelver Shi'a Muslim rulers and their political frontmen have not only pledged to eradicate Israel in their anticipated nuclear future, but have been actively providing massive quantities of arms, training, and so forth to their assorted surrogates—like Hamas and Hizbullah—for many years now.

Some things, some don't. Thus, long before the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, Persia and Babylonia were fighting over the same real estate in the 6th century B.C.E. when Cyrus (559-530 B.C.E.) conquered Babylon. And while the Jewish holiday of Passover is fast approaching, with Egypt's Pharaoh as the primary villain, another Jewish holiday which occurs earlier in springtime, Purim, recorded in the Book of Esther, deals with yet another leader who had genocidal ideas towards Jews—ancient Persia's Haman.

Unfortunately, Jews have had to deal with many of such Hamans over the course of their long history—including those who now rule the same place where Haman lived.

Unlike the mindset and ruthless machinations of Iran's intolerant leaders today, please check out, in these following excerpts from the Kurash Prism, how a mighty—but humane and benevolent—Persian ruler dealt with the diverse peoples he encountered some twenty-five centuries ago...

I am Kurash, King of the World, Great King,...King of Babilani, King of Kiengir and Akkade, King of the four rims of the earth, Son of Kanbujiya...to the region from as far as Assura and Susa, Akkade, Eshnunna, the towns Zamban, Me-turnu, Der as well as the region of the Gutians, I returned to these sacred cities on the other side of the Tigris the sanctuaries of which have been ruins for a long time, the images which used to live therein and established for them permanent sanctuaries. I also gathered all their former inhabitants and returned them to their habitations. Furthermore, I resettled upon the command of Marduk, the great lord, all the gods of Kiengir and Akkade whom Nabonidus had brought into Babilani to the anger of the lord of the gods, unharmed, in their former temples, the places which make them happy.

Here are these same events in the Jews' own writings in the Hebrew Bible, Ezra 1:1-8 :

In the first year of Cyrus, king of Persia, in order to fulfill the word of the Lord spoken by Jeremiah, the Lord inspired King Cyrus of Persia to issue this proclamation throughout his kingdom..."Thus says Cyrus, king of Persia: 'All the kingdoms of the earth the Lord, the God of heaven, has given to me, and he has also charged me to build him a house in Jerusalem, which is in Judah. Whoever belongs to any part of his people, let him go up, and may his God be with him!' Then the family heads of Judah and Benjamin and the priests and Levites—everyone, that is, whom God had inspired to do so—prepared to go up to build the house of the Lord in Jerusalem. All their neighbors gave them help in every way, with silver, gold, goods, and cattle, and with many precious gifts besides all their free-will offerings. King Cyrus, too, had the utensils of the house of the Lord brought forth which Nebuchadnezzar had taken away from Jerusalem and placed in the house of his god.

Jews were grateful to their powerful Iranian liberators and served in their armies throughout their empire. At the fortress in Elephantine, Egypt, for example ancient documents related to this were discovered, along with a synagogue built there for Jewish soldiers serving under the Iranian ruler.

Centuries later, when Judea fought for its freedom and independence against the Roman Empire in the first and second centuries C.E. (see a Judaea Capta coin issued by Rome here http://q4j-middle-east.com), it was Iran, again, which came to the Jews' aid.

And centuries later still, on the eve of the explosive Arab invasions out of the Arabian Peninsula in the seventh century, which resulted in the conquest and forced Arabization, to one degree or another, of both the land of the Jews and that of the Persians (and many others' as well), ancient, non-Jewish documents recorded an army of tens of thousands of Jews from Galilee and the northern hill country aligning itself with Iran against the hated Byzantines.

So, what happened to get to where we are today—with folks like Ahmadinejad vowing to obliterate the Jewish State—Iran's former vassal, later ally, and the very nation Cyrus returned many of the Jews to?

Well, for starters, there was that not-so-little thing briefly mentioned above— the Arab jihadi conquests.

While the fate of Jews under both Sunni and Shi'a Islam was fragile, to say the least, in some ways it was even worse at the hands of the latter.

Thus, as the centuries progressed in a henceforth Muslim Iran—and a Shia one at that—Jews would soon find themselves in an extremely tenuous position. Their very lives and livelihoods came to depend upon a powerful, more secular political ruler, the Shah (like Cyrus over a thousand years earlier), who could act more on their collective behalf against the powerful force of the hostile religious establishment, the religious ulema and the mullahs.

While there were some pre-Islamic problems, as already noted, the fate of Iranian Jews had far more ups and downs clear up to the present time due to the situation brought on by the Arab Muslim conquest of the land. And since Jews were largely dependent on the political power of the Shahs, if the latter were unjust, then the masses, stirred up by the mullahs, frequently took it out on the Jews.

With the overthrow of Iran's last Shah in 1979, a secular, autocratic, harsh despotism (which still managed to achieve much good for the nation) was replaced by one even worse and far less tolerant led by the Twelver Shi'a religious establishment.

And this is the real reason for folks like Ahmadinejad and the mullahs' professed hatred of the Jews and desire to destroy Israel. Undemocratic, oppressive dictators always make sure that they have at least one great, external bogeyman against whom to channel internal frustration, unrest, and violence.

Iran's duplicitous rulers thus cry about such things as "Palestine" and the Jewish "occupation" of Jerusalem (indeed—Jews have occupied it for over 3,000 years) so no one questions what they do, in just one of many horrendous examples, to their own province of Khuzestan's millions of Ahwazi Arabs. There are so many of the latter that this province has been known as Arabistan for centuries—the main reason why the Arabs' Saddam made a land grab for this oil-rich area some three decades ago.

Who better to deflect Iran's far worse sins than the world's most popular scapegoat and whipping post par excellence— the Jew?

Hopefully, more and more Iranians will start to see through this sad ploy as they reconsider the millennia-old relationship between their own nation and that of the Jews.

Think about what could be given cooperation instead of confrontation between these two ancient peoples—and also opening the door to others in the process?

The Cyrus Cylinder/Kurash Prism, bearing a message from perhaps one of the world's greatest leaders of all time, points the way to a much better future—not only for Jews and Persians, but for all other peoples as well. Freedom, tolerance, acceptance of human differences, and mutual respect are just some aspects of the vision that it offers. With the exception of the much reviled nation of the Jews, when is the last time you heard something like that coming out of almost all other leaders in the Middle East?

If you would like to go to see this testimony to what a truly great human leader could be like, the schedule for its American tour can be found here http://cyruscylinder2013.com/2012/11/cyrus-cylinder-tour-dates-and-venues/.

Gerald A. Honigman, a Florida educator, has created and conducted counter-Arab propaganda programs for college youth, has lectured on numerous campuses and other platforms, and has publicly debated Arab spokesmen. His articles and op-eds have been published in both the print media and on websites. Contact him at honigman6@msn.com or go to his website: http://geraldahonigman.com/blog.php


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IRENA SENDLER

Posted by Fred Reinfenberg, March 17, 2013

Remember this lady? I didn't either. Irena Sendler died May 12, 2008 (aged 98) in Warsaw, Poland. During WWII, Irena got permission to work in the Warsaw ghetto as a Plumbing/Sewer specialist. She had an ulterior motive. Irena smuggled Jewish infants out.

During WWII, Irena, got permission to work in the Warsaw ghetto, as a Plumbing/Sewer specialist. She had an ulterior motive.

Irena smuggled Jewish infants out in the bottom of the tool box she carried. She also carried a burlap sack in the back of her truck, for larger kids.

Irena kept a dog in the back that she trained to bark when the Nazi soldiers let her in and out of the ghetto.

The soldiers, of course, wanted nothing to do with the dog and the barking covered the kids/infants noises.

During her time of doing this, she managed to smuggle out and save 2500 kids/infants.

Ultimately, she was caught, however, and the Nazi's broke both of her legs and arms and beat her severely.

Irena kept a record of the names of all the kids she had smuggled out, In a glass jar that she buried under a tree in her back yard. After the war, she tried to locate any parents that may have survived and tried to reunite the family. Most had been gassed. Those kids she helped got placed into foster family homes or adopted.

In 2007 Irena was up for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Contact Fred Reifenberg by email at freify@netvision.net.il


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U.S. CHALLENGES IN NORTH KOREA

Posted by ACD/EWI, March 18, 2013

Caption Text

As with Iran, talks and lax sanctions regimes have failed to prevent North Korea's nuclear buildup.

Congratulating China's new president Xi Jingping, President Obama called Xi's attention to North Korea's nuclear and missile programs that increasingly threaten the United States and its allies. Obama "stressed the need for close coordination with China to ensure North Korea meets its denuclearization commitments."

The Chinese however, have their own agenda. "Whether China — which holds and manages life-support for Pyongyang with massive food and energy aid in exchange, in part, for metals imports — would or could force Pyongyang to back off is a moot point. There is evidence the new Chinese leadership like its predecessors is conflicted, especially with reported support for Pyongyang in the People's Liberation Army with its growing influence over all Beijing decision-making," observed Sol Sanders.

On March 8, following North Korea's early February nuclear testing, the UN Security Council proposed to levy yet another set sanctions on North Korea.

Chinese deputy UN envoy, Wang Min, argued that the North Korean nuclear test posed no threat to international peace and security and "needed to be addressed through dialogue with the North Korean government." Wang then managed to secure the removal of any reference to UN Chapter Seven in the resolution, ensuring that the new sanctions will not have the force of action that previous UN sanctions regimes have had.

The Chinese are North Korea's largest trading partner. Their increase of investments in the North is notable. Some 100 Chinese firms have invested more than $300 million there, including in foodstuffs, industries, electronic, mining, textiles, chemicals and aquaculture. These investors are, of course, offered tax incentives, preferential loans and land utilization deals. Some $6.5 billion more is in the works as Chinese infrastructure companies plan new ports, highways, and power plants."

The 2009 U.N. sanctions on North Korea have largely failed according to a UN Panel of Experts report in May 2011. The report noted North Korea's ability to evade sanctions had in fact improved.

In addition to China, South Korean, and some 30 European companies have invested in copper and gold mines, in North Korea, a well as factories of all sorts, and even Internet service.

According to Business Week, German owned DHL (DPW), delivers packages, and "German-backed outsourcer Nosotek offers North Korean programming help to Western companies developing cell-phone games. Egypt's Orascom Telecom (OTLD) is building a 3G mobile-phone network. France's Lafarge (LG) owns 30 percent of a cement plant... Two Hong Kong-listed companies operate casinos for tourists (locals aren't allowed in)," and a Swedish group markets North Korean makes Noko Jeans.

Finally, Reza Kahlili, pseudonym for a former CIA operative in Iran's Revolutionary Guards, have shed light on how North Korea's nuclear program is being used by the Chinese to facilitate the Iranian nuclear program. When the Revolutionary Guards failed to make good on Chinese missile technology, China has enlisted the North Koreans to fix the problems: "Ultimately it was agreed that in exchange for $7 billion, hardware, installation and launch of the technology and the necessary training for the project would be handled by the North Koreans, since Pyongyang doesn't recognize the U.N. sanctions."

For now, it seems that China's support of North Korea's and Iran's nuclear ambitions and missile programs, as well as the Chinese military's growing strength and the increase pace and volume of its cyber attacks on the U.S., will continue unabated.

Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld is the Director of the New York-based American Center for Democracy (ACD) and the Economic Warfare Institute (EWI). She has authored hundreds of articles and several books on terrorist financing and political corruption. This article appeared March 18, 2013 on the American Center for Democracy (ACD) website and is archived at
http://acdemocracy.org/u-s-challenges-in-north-korea-exclusive/


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THE BEDOUIN REBELLION AGAINST ISRAEL

Posted by Israel_politics2, March 18, 2013

The article below was written by Eric Burns, an author who has written nine books, two of which won the highest award given by the American Library Association for volumes published by a university press. Named as the "Best of the Best" were The Spirits of America: A Social History of Alcohol, and its companion-piece, The Smoke of the Gods: A Social History of Tobacco. Burns is the only non-academic ever to have won the award twice. This article appeared March 16, 2013 in Israpundit and is archived at
http://www.israpundit.com/archives/53527

Various Bedouin tribes are waging a full-scale rebellion against Israel. Negev Bedouin tribes are refusing to settle in designated areas developed by Israel's government, and stealing Jeeps and other equipment from nearby IDF bases. They use the Jeeps to smuggle drugs and other contraband into Israel, from the Sinai. In central Israel and the Galilee, Bedouin tribes are engaging in agricultural theft, from Moshavs and Kibbutzim, extortion and vandalism against Jewish farmers, and crime sprees in the streets and shopping malls. The Israeli police don't respond to many of these incidents.

The Bedouin rebellion would be unwelcome by itself, however, their refusal to recognize Israeli government authority is part and parcel of a leftist campaign against the right of Jews to lease, own, and work Israel's land; and against the sovereignty of Israel's government. This campaign is conducted by groups such as Peace Now, B'tselem, and Rabbis for Human Rights, and aided and abetted by Israel's Supreme Court, the U.N., and the European Union. Slowly but surely, this campaign is gaining the upper hand.

Israel's Bedouins have traditionally lived a semi-nomadic existence, making a bare living as farmers and sheep herders. As of 2004, there were 130,000 Negev Bedouins, and 60,000 in the rest of Israel. Although some have migrated to Israel's cities, at least half still live the way their grandfathers lived, in tin shack and tent encampments, lacking paved roads, indoor plumbing, electricity, and sewers, without paying taxes to Israel. As of 2007, about 70,000 Bedouin lived in unrecognized Negev settlements, without basic services. With a fertility rate of 5.5%, one of the world's highest, Bedouin population is increasing rapidly, with attendant high levels of unemployment, poverty, and crime. While a fair number of Bedouin serve in the IDF, there is mounting concern about their increasing Islamic fanaticism.

In 1986, the government established a Negev directorate, as a central authority over unrecognized Bedouin settlements, and to negotiate on land issues. However, by 2007, Israel's government realized it could no longer ignore burgeoning illegal Bedouin settlement, and asked retired Supreme Court justice Eliezer Goldberg to study the problem, and make recommendations. Ehud Prawer, head of the Prime Minister's planning division, turned Goldberg's ideas into a plan. As implemented, the Prawer Plan calls for a massive initial investment of 1.2 billion NIS(roughly $324,000,000), to legalize most of the illegal Negev settlements. For those 20,000 to 30,000 Bedouin whose settlements couldn't be made legal, the Prawer Plan offers generous gifts of land, up to five dunams(about 1.25 acres) per family. The government then gave Minister at Large Bennie Begin(son of former PM Menachem Begin) the task of converting the Prawer Plan into law.

Begin initiated a review process, which included extensive meetings with the Bedouins, where comments and counter-proposals were welcomed. However, subsequent Bedouin behavior indicated that the review process has been subverted, by leftist NGO's, such as the New Israel Fund(NIF), and the Association for Civil Rights in Israel(ACRI). These organizations have coached Bedouin representatives to reject government offers, to "just say no," as "Israel will always come back with a better offer," resulting in a severe erosion of the Prawer Plan's original recommendations. Begin's most recent offer was 63% of the land the Bedouin have illegally expropriated. This includes land registration under Bedouin clan member names. The Bedouins build 1500 to 2000 illegal structures in the Negev, annually. They now claim an area of greater than 200,000 acres—at least 16 times the size of Tel Aviv. Israel is making a supreme sacrifice to satisfy Bedouin demands.(1)

Equally important, there is little, if any discrimination against the Bedouins (or any Arabs) owning, leasing, or purchasing land, despite leftist claims. 80.4% of Israel's land is government-owned, while 13.1% is owned by the Jewish National Fund(JNF), a private charitable organization. 6.5% is about evenly divided between private Jewish and Arab owners. Thus 93.5% of Israel's land is unavailable for private ownership. In 1960, the Knesset passed a number of land laws by which state-owned and JNF lands were both defined as "Israel lands." These laws reinforced the principle that Israel's lands could only be leased, not sold, and gave oversight of them to a new government agency, the Israel Land Authority.(ILA) Israeli Jews and Arabs enjoy equal access to state-owned land, however, regarding residential land, the ILA many times offers Israel's Arabs better terms than it offers to Jews. A prominent example was Avitan v. Israel Land Administration(HC 528/88), in which the plaintiff(Eliezar Avitan) sued the ILA, because they charged a Bedouin family $150 for a long-term lease on a quarter acre plot in Rahat; while charging Avitan $24,000 for a similar plot nearby. Israel's Supreme Court ruled against Avitan, favoring the ILA's "affirmative action" policy for Bedouins. There are a number of similar examples of ILA favoritism towards the Bedouins.

The purpose of JNF's original 1901 charter, and their 1953 charter, was to purchase land for Jewish settlement. This has occasionally been interpreted to mean that JNF shouldn't make long-term leases to non-Jews. However, in practice, this official restriction isn't recognized, and JNF land is not only leased to Israel's Arabs; they're given long-term residential leases via land swaps, whereby JNF land is traded to the government to lease, while JNF receives other land in return. Nevertheless, there are no restrictions on purchasing Israel's private lands, and the Palestinian Authority has encouraged wealthy Palestinians to buy private land. Various Palestinian real estate magnates have made a number of such purchases. Thus in practice, there aren't any restrictions on Israel's Arabs leasing state-owned land, JNF land, or purchasing private land, and the Bedouins have been treated very well by Israel.(2)

However, the Israeli left wasn't satisfied. In September 2011, Supreme Court President Dorit Beinisch ruled that any area in Judea and Samaria that hasn't been declared state land, isn't unowned land, but is considered private Palestinian Arab land, by default. No proof of Palestinian ownership was(is) necessary. Before Beinisch's ruling, unowned land could be awarded to Jews, or to anyone that worked the land for 10 yearswithout prior proven ownership. Her ruling resulted in the demolishing of Jewish homes in Givat HaYovel, north of Jerusalem; in Haresha, which was targeted by Peace Now, which claimed Haresha's Jewish homes were on land claimed by Palestinian Arabs; and in Migron, where families with young children were evicted in the middle of the night. The home of a fallen IDF soldier in Givat HaYovel, Major Eliraz Peretz, was spared only because Defense Minister Ehud Barak petitioned the Supreme Court on his behalf. Also according to Israeli law, land ownership questions are decided by the civil administration and the state prosecutor's office, not the Supreme Court.

Beinisch's ruling simply accepts at face value unsupported Arab land claims, and ignores illegal expropriation, often practiced by Bedouin tribes. Beinisch also understood that Arab land claims are often poorly supported, with many relying on inaccurate British Mandate era fiscal maps, that in no way provide proof of ownership. As a result, leftist NGO's have many times been forced to withdraw their claims. However, her ruling will likely stand, unless legislation is passed that overrides it.

Which brings readers to the situation at Bir Hadaj, a Negev Bedouin village of 5,000 residents, where Israel has developed state-owned land, pursuant to recognizing Bedouin ownership. Between September and November, 2012, police made several raids on Bir Hadaj. An article inHaaretz, dated 11/16/2012, describes the November 12th raid. The article offers graphic descriptions of how police roughed up some residents, then fired tear gas grenades towards the elementary school, resulting in 29 children being hospitalized, for tear gas inhalation. They were released later that day. However, the article also mentions that the raid was "the second of its kind within a month," and that there were security personnel "disguised as Arabs" in the village. Were the residents of Bir Hadaj innocent victims of Israeli police brutality, as the article portrays?

Not likely. As a result of leftist NGO encouragement to refuse Minister Begin's offers, and undoubtedly influenced by Judge Beinisch's ruling, the Bedouins have illegally squatted on JNF land, outside the developed area of Bir Hadaj. They throw rocks, burn tires, and riot every time police try to enforce the law. Bedouin spokesmen have claimed the unrest is because, "The Housing Ministry unit revoked the master plan, and the Interior Ministry is demolishing houses...to pressure us into accepting new proposals....They do not want to divide the plots as planned, but want us to become a municipal community...."

The Housing Ministry has refuted this claim, "The allegation of decreasing the size of the plots in Bir Hadaj is groundless...." One might reasonably conclude that the Bedouins don't want to pay taxes to Israel, and don't want to recognize the government's authority.(3)

In addition, the article doesn't mention that another raid at Bir Hadaj, in September 2012, was conducted to recover stolen IDF Jeeps, used to smuggle drugs and weapons into Israel, from Egypt. The police uncovered a warren of hidden compounds, containing dozens of stolen vehicles, including Jeeps and water tankers. Dozens of Jeeps have been stolen in the past few years, from the IDF's Ketziot and Tze'elim bases in southern Israel. Several were recovered in this raid.

On January 27, 2013, PM Benjamin Netanyahu's cabinet, by a vote of 16 to 3, with 1 abstention, approved Minister Begin's recommendations on formalizing the status of Negev Bedouin settlements. Will Begin's plan of compensation(to those Bedouins moved off state land) and vast land giveaway work?

The Prime Minister's Office supports the plan. However, the plan was approved hastily, without proper consideration. Ministers first read the plan's recommendations only 2 days before the cabinet vote. The ILA received the recommendations only 2 ½ days before the vote, while neither the Defense Ministry nor the IDF had approved it. Why did the cabinet approve it so quickly? 30% of the land included was quickly withdrawn, because it was unsuitable for residential use and herding; IDF bases, roads, and electric company and water authority structures. Immediately after the cabinet vote, the Negev's Jewish residents complained that the plan rewards years of illegal Bedouin squatting, while the Bedouins objected that thousands will be uprooted from their homes.(4)

Recognition of the Bedouins would help stabilize Israel, one reason it's a desirable goal. However, recognition can't be accomplished without Bedouin cooperation—they must live in designated areas, and the smuggling and theft must stop. This is why Minister Begin's plan is unworkable—the Bedouins aren't given any motivation to cooperate. It's also impractical, and shouldn't be implemented. In February 2012, Dorit Beinisch retired as President of Israel's Supreme Court, and was replaced by Judge Asher D. Grunis, a conservative.

Thus far, Judge Grunis has approved a March 2012 decision that evicted 50 Migron families from their homes. It's therefore unlikely that Grunis would rule to repeal Beinisch's September 2011 ruling, that made non-state West Bank land Palestinian Arab land, by default. Such a repeal, or similar Knesset legislation, would help stop the runaway appeasement of those whose criminal behavior and appetite for Israel's land know no boundaries.

Footnotes

1-"Stop the silent surrender of the Negev," by Ari Briggs, reprinted inIsrapundit, 9/20/2012; report in Israel News 11/08/2012; "Arabs illegally settling the Negev in land grab race," by Atara Beck, reprinted in Israpundit 8/23/2012.

2-"Edward Said's Documented Deceptions," at www.camera.org, 8/20/1996.

3-"For Bedouin father, Israel is his children's No. 1 enemy," by Or Kashti,Haaret, 11/16/2012.

4-"Government Bedouin land plan deemed impossible," by Stuart Winer,

Maariv, 02/07/2013.

Contact Israel_politics2 at israel-politics2@yahoogroups.com


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WHY PRESIDENT OBAMA'S CONCEPT OF THE MIDDLE EAST WILL FAIL

Posted by Ted Belman, March 18, 2013

The article below was written by Barry Rubin who is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and co-author of "Yasir Arafat: A Political Biography" and "Hating America: A History" (Oxford University Press). His latest book is "The Truth About Syria" (Palgrave-Macmillan). Prof. Rubin's columns can now be read online at http://gloria.idc.ac.il/columns/column.html. Contact him at profbarryrubin@yahoo.com This article is archived at
http://5tjt.com/why-president-obamas-concept-of-the-middle-east-will-fail/

To put it plainly, the press briefing supposed to indicate how President Barack Obama's thinks about Israel on the eve of his trip here, is a combination of fantasy and insult. It is likely that the Obama Administration made such statements for show, to persuade the Arabic-speaking world on the even of Obama's trip that the United States is striving for peace, is not acting like a puppet (or should one say, ally? of Israel) and using its influence to change Israeli policy even as it does nothing of the sort.

As proof that Obama isn't going to do anything, he reportedly told Arab-American leaders before his trip that he wouldn't make some peace initiative because the government in Israel is not ready to make concessions and so there is no point in bringing pressure to bear at this time. I see that as a mixed statement. On one hand, he isn't going to pressure Israel because he knows that to be a waste of time. That's good.

Yet the premises on which this argument—as repeated in the public briefing of the media—is based can also be described as believing that what the Arab public really wants is progress toward peace with Israel and that the United States sees the ball as being in Israel's—not the Arabs—court.

The other premise is a strange hint that Washington has suddenly realized what Israel has understood since the beginning—that the "Arab Spring" isn't going well. Now it feels the need to explain to Israeli leaders what they have long known, and give bad advice on what to do about it.

To show how mainstream Israelis who follow these issues closely see these themes, let's quote how the Ynet reporter who covered the briefing—the respected and nonpartisan Yitzhak Benhorin—summarized what Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes said. Here's his lead:

"U.S. President Barack Obama will not be bringing a peace plan to Israel, but he will try to convince Prime Minister Benjamin and the Israeli public that after the Arab Spring, Israel cannot depend on autocrats holding everything together in the region.."

Here's a president arriving at a moment when Israelis think the region is falling apart, with old autocrats being replaced by new ones and a more hostile environment, and the message is: You shouldn't be complacent that everything is great?

Where does this come from? It is the American conception that the "Arab Spring" is a great thing, that old autocrats are falling and will be replaced by more democratic and moderate regimes. That is American; not Israeli thinking.

If that theme is based on fantasy, the second theme is insulting. Here is the second paragraph of Benhorin's analysis:

"The U.S. believes that Israel must show it is serious about its peace efforts. It must convince the general Arab public, if nothing more than to maintain Israel's peace treaty with Egypt."

These are Benhorin's words, not Rhodes' exact formulations. But I think Benhorin reads the message properly.

Ted Belman is a retired lawyer and the Editor of Israpundit. He made aliya from Canada last year and now lives in Jerusalem, Israel. Contact him at tedbel@rogers.com


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ISLAMIC REGIME TO 'HONOR' MICHELLE OBAMA

Posted by FSM Security Update, March 18, 2013

The article below was written by Reza Kahlili who is a pseudonym for an ex-CIA spy who requires anonymity for safety reasons. He is a senior fellow with EMPact America and the author of A Time to Betray, a book about his double-life as a CIA agent in Iran's Revolutionary Guards, published by Threshold Editions, Simon & Schuster, April 2010. A Time to Betray was the winner of the 2010 National Best Book Award and the 2011 International Best Book Award. This article appeared March 17, 2013 in Family Security Matters and is archived at
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/islamic-regime-to-honor-michelle-obama?f=must_reads

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Iran will give First Lady Michelle Obama a special award for allegedly exposing a direct link between Hollywood and the White House, the commander of Iran's Basij paramilitary forces announced Wednesday.

According to MehrNews, an official media outlet of the Islamic regime, Brig. Gen Mohammad Reza Naghdi cited Michelle Obama's announcement of the "anti-Iran" movie "Argo" Oscar for Best Picture in a live feed from the White House Feb. 24.

The movie chronicles the Iranian takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979 in which six American embassy workers fled to the protection of Canadian embassy staff and their eventual rescue.

"Mrs. Obama's action was awesome," Naghdi said with what what the report described as irony, "and if we had spent billions of dollars, we could not show a link and allegiance between Hollywood and the U.S. government and the White House, especially since they have always denied the allegations."

Regime media, in another attack on Hollywood, blasted away at the book "A Time to Betray" by Reza Kahlili, which will be made into a TV miniseries about Kahlili's spying for the CIA in Iran.

Contact FSM Security Update at info@familisecuritymatters.org


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2 JERUSALEM ARABS CHARGED IN FOILED TERROR PLOT

Posted by Arutz Sheva, March 18, 2013

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Two Jerusalem Arab men were indicted Monday morning on charges of plotting to carry out a terrorist attack on Jews in the holy city.

The suspects, 26-year-old Muhammad Badr and 35-year-old Muhammad Odeh are both residents of the Silwan (Shiloach) neighborhood, nestled in the valley just south of the Old City of Jerusalem.

Both suspects were brought before a judge in the Jerusalem District Court. Badr was charged with conspiracy, arson and aggravated intentional bodily harm, and Odeh was charged with aiding in causing aggravated intentional bodily harm.

In addition, Odeh was also accused of aiding in the manufacture of a weapon, and other charges.

The ancient neighborhood of Shiloach was formerly an Arab enclave after Jews were forced out with the Jordanian occupation following the 1948 War of Independence. However, it has slowly become re-integrated with the return of a Jewish presence following the restoration of the area to the city of Jerusalem during the 1967 Six Day War.

A number of Arabs living in the area deeply resent the return of Jews to the neighborhood. They, and outside leftist supporters, invest great efforts in attempting to intimidate and harass the Jewish families into leaving, but few have.

On January 30, 11 agitators operating in the neighborhood were arrested on suspicion of hurling rocks and bricks at police officers. The arrests came two days after riots that broke out during the demolition of two illegal structures in the neighborhood. One police officer was wounded by the attackers, and five rioters were arrested in connection with the violence during the incident.

Chana Ya'aar is a columnist for Arutz-7 (www.think-israel.org) This article appeared March 18, 2013 in Arutz Sheva and is archived at
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/166332#.VZF_BryVsWM


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PALESTINIANS TO SEEK FULL APPROVAL OF REPORT AGAINST ISRAELI SETTLEMENT IN UNHRC

Posted by Daily Alert, March 18, 2013

The article below was written by Thomas Whittle who is a retired Sergeant Major; he served in the United State Army for 26 years. He served three tours in the Republic of Vietnam where he earned a Silver Star for heroism, two Purple Hearts for wounds received in combat action, four Bronze Stars for meritorious service and the Combat Infantryman's Badge. He served 16 years in the Federal Republic of Germany as a first sergeant and the master gunner for all of the armed forces in Europe. This article appeared March 17, 2013 in NZweek and is archived at
http://www.nzweek.com/world/palestinians-to-seek-full-approval-of-report-against-israeli-settlement-in-unhrc-54724/

The Palestinians will seek a unanimous endorsement of the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) for a report of a fact-finding mission that condemns Israeli settlements in the West Bank, a Palestinian official said Saturday.

A Palestinian-Arab draft resolution, which called on the international community to condemn Jewish settlement in the Palestinian territories, has been distributed to the 47 state members of the Geneva-based UN rights body, in preparation for voting at a council meeting on Monday, said Ibrahim Khraishe, the Palestinian representative to the UN in Geneva.

The council will listen to the details of the report of the UN Fact Finding Mission on the Israeli Settlement in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, which was formed last March.

In the report which was revealed in January, the mission called on Israel to stop settlement building in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, which the Palestinians seek as the capital of a future state.

The report also urged Israel to evacuate all the settlements that were built after Israel had occupied the West Bank in 1967 and to move the settlers out gradually.

Israel has boycotted the UNHRC since its decision to form the fact-finding mission, and has refused to cooperate with the investigators.

The Israeli-Palestinian peace talks stopped in 2010 over a dispute on the settlement activities.

Contact Daily Alert at dailyalert@list-dailyalert.org


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ANTI-SEMITIC HAGGADAH AVAILABLE NOW

Posted by Steven Plaut, March 18, 2013

Well, if you were looking for an alternative way to "celebrate" Passover this you, I suppose one of your options would be to use the new pro-terror anti-Semitic jihadist Passover Haggadah prepared by the anti-Israel "Jewish Voices for Peace" cult. You can see the "Haggadah" in full here:

http://he.scribd.com/doc/87713706/Hagadah-JVP-Final-2012 . The "Haggadah" is the project of the JVP pseudo-rabbi, one Brant Rosen. (He runs an anti-Israel blog here:
http://rabbibrant.com/category/jewish-voice-for-peace/, which links to some of the most anti-Semitic web sites on the planet). Brant has a Reconstructionist "ordination" - I think he got it from Rolling Stone Magazine - and heads some sort of Recon-Deconstructionist ashram in Evanston, Illinois. Brant is basically a Mikey Lerner on steroids. I am pretty sure a Hamas flag flies over his "shul."

To give you a sampling from his "Haggadah," the "Ten Plagues" there all refer to supposed mistreatment of the Palestinians by Israel (things like "profiteering" - whatever that is, political prisoners and settlements). The Seder plate includes an Orange — "Symbolizing building Jewish community where women, queer, and transgender people are welcomed and recognized as full valued participants." You know, a fruit that can be squeezed? The text is peppered with citations from Moslem terrorists and from the Koran. There is at least one open call for Islamic terrorism, a "poem" entitled "Revenge." The entire Dayenu, renamed the Nakba Dayenu, is about supposed acts of evil done by Israel against poor innocent Arabs. There are endorsements for boycotts and divestments against Israel in the text, and the entire third cup of wine is a salute to the BDS aggression against Israel. There is a special section on "pinkwashing," the nonsense term used by the Fascist Left to refer to people praising Israel for the tolerance there towards homosexuals. The "Next Year in Jerusalem" theme of course is an endorsement for the "Palestinian Right of Return." And of course the real message of Passover is that no one should dream of attacking Iran or disrupting its plans to nuke the Jews..

If you would like to sit on your digital camera and then send Brant a cyber-moon, his email address is rabbi@jrc-evanston.org.

The Tikkun crowd is only slightly less wacky than the Evanston Reconstructionist pagans. Here is a reprint of what sort of Passover Seder you should be running according to Rabbi Cheech and Rabbi Chong (Lerner and Waskow), the ADMOR-im of this important school of theology:

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Blogs/Message.aspx/2733

This Year Make Your Passover Seder a Multi-Galactic One

Important Passover Message from Mikey Lerner and the Entire Staff of Tikkun Magazine, the Jewish New Age pro-LSD Magazine:

A few years back, Tikkun's Rabbi Arthur Woodstock issued a call to make it a multicultural Passover Seder that year: in other words, a mix of Judaism and PC paganism.

Rabbi Woodstock, above

Well, this year Tikkun magazine has issued a new call for all Jews:

You all should make yours a Multi-Galactic Seder!!!!

Yes, this is the year to invite assorted beings from other planets to your spacey politically-correct Seder, to prove your devotion to multi-galactic understanding and stamping out speciesism along with SUVs. The guests will join in and participate in the many traditional Tikkunesque Passover traditions.

First, the Seder begins with the washing of the hands, or, in the case of visitors from Vulcan, the tentacles. Then the guests dine on lamb's legs made from vegan tofu. The Seder ends with the munching of traditional holiday Tikkun macaroons, made out of matzos flour and hashish. Served on recyclable dinner bowls.

Now to help make your Tikkun Passover multi-galactic Seder complete, "Rabbis" Arthur Woodstock and Michael of Meaning have rewritten the Passover song "Who knows One?"

Here is how the new version will go:

Who knows One? I know One!
One is the greatest rabbi of all time, the Rebbe Jerry Garcia, Shlita.
Who knows Two? I know Two!
Two is Rabbi Cheech and Rabbi Chong, who seem to write most of the articles for Tikkun magazine. (Alternative version - Two is Two States for Two Peoples: the Jordanian "people" and the Palestinian "people.")
Who knows Three? I know Three!
Three is the number of square meters Israel should be left with after adopting policies advocated by Tikkun.
Who knows Four? I know Four!
Four is the greatest sages of Torah learning of all time, according to Tikkun: Rabbis John, Paul, George and Ringo.
Who knows Five? I know Five!
Five is the five genders officially proclaimed by Hillary (back when
Lerner was her temporary guru of Meaning) at the International
Wymmyn's Conference in Beijing, fully endorsed by Tikkun.
Who knows Six? I know Six!
Six is the SIX-TIES, my Heavy Tikkun Dude!
Who knows Seven? I know Seven!
Seven is the seven basic nutritional groups required to make you a happy and healthy progressive, namely: cannabis, marijuana, hashish, pot, weed, grass, and dope.
Who knows Eight? I know Eight!
Eight is the number of people who really read Tikkun magazine.
Who knows nine? I know nine!
Nine is the number of people on earth who actually regard Mikey Lerner as a rabbi.
Who knows ten? I know ten!
Ten is the median IQ score for Tikkun readers.
Who knows eleven? I know eleven!
Eleven is the number of the Eleventh Commandment: "Thou Shalt Be Trendy!"
Who knows twelve? I know twelve!
Twelve is the number of times Michael Lerner can say "loving and caring" in one minute (the fewest number of times, that is).
Who knows thirteen? I know thirteen!
Thirteen is the number of sentences from the entire Bible that Tikkun editors have actually read.

Steven Plaut is an American-trained economist, a professor of business administration at Haifa University and author of "The Scout." He frequently comments — both seriously and satirically — on Israeli politics and the left wing academic community. Write him at splaut@gmail.com His website address is http://www.stevenplaut.blogspot.com.


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PALESTINIANS UNENTHUSIASTIC ABOUT OBAMA VISIT

Posted by GWY123, March 18, 2013

The article below was written by Mohammed Daraghmeh who is author and novelist, who was shortlisted fro a prestigious Arabic literature prize. Contact him at http://www.dailystar.com.lb/Mohammed-Daraghmeh. This article appeared March 17, 2013 in the News.Yahoo.com and is archived at
http://news.yahoo.com/palestinians-unenthusiastic-obama-visit-185949028.html

westbank
(AP Photo/Majdi Mohammed, File)

RAMALLAH, West Bank (AP) — President Barack Obama will find a disillusioned Palestinian public, skeptical about his commitment to promoting Mideast peace, when he visits the region.

Obama's trip, beginning Wednesday, appears aimed primarily at resetting the sometimes troubled relationship with Israel. But winning the trust of the Palestinians, who accuse him of unfairly favoring Israel, could be a far more difficult task.

After suffering disappointments during the first Obama administration, Palestinians see little reason for optimism in his new term. The White House announcement that Obama will not present any new peace initiatives strengthened their conviction that the U.S. leader isn't prepared to put the pressure on Israel that they think is necessary to end four years of deadlock in negotiations.

"Obama is coming for Israel, not for us," said Mohammed Albouz, a 55-year-old Palestinian farmer. "Obama will come and go as his predecessors did, without doing anything."

While Israel is preparing to give Obama the red-carpet treatment, there are few signs of excitement in the West Bank. Large posters of Obama hung in Ramallah last week were quickly defaced, and a small group of activists called "The Campaign for Dignity" plans on releasing black balloons into the air in a sign of mourning when Obama arrives.

Obama himself played a role in reaching the current deadlock, which stems in large part from disagreements over Israeli settlement construction in the West Bank and east Jerusalem. The Palestinians claim both areas, captured by Israel in the 1967 Mideast war, as parts of a future state, a position that is widely backed internationally.

When Obama first took office, he strongly and publicly criticized the Israeli settlements, saying the construction undermines hopes for peace. "It is time for these settlements to stop," Obama said in a high-profile address to the Muslim world delivered in Cairo just months after taking office.

When Benjamin Netanyahu was elected Israeli prime minister in early 2009, the Palestinians said they would not negotiate unless settlement construction was frozen. They were further emboldened by Obama's tough stance.

Obama persuaded Netanyahu to impose a 10-month slowdown, but Palestinians did not agree to restart talks until the period was nearly over. When the Israeli moratorium expired several weeks later, Netanyahu rejected American appeals to extend the slowdown, and the negotiations collapsed.

Obama stopped pushing the matter, and talks have never resumed, and the Palestinians, viewing Obama as afraid to take on Israel's allies in Washington, have few expectations now.

"What we are going to tell him behind closed doors is what we are saying in public. There is no secret that a successful peace process needs a complete settlement freeze," said Nabil Shaath, a top adviser to President Mahmoud Abbas. "The Israelis are building on our land and claiming they want to negotiate with us about this land."

More than 500,000 Israelis now live in settlements in the West Bank and east Jerusalem. The Palestinians say the ever-growing settlements are a sign of bad faith and make it increasingly difficult to partition the land between two peoples.

Netanyahu maintains that negotiations must resume without preconditions, and the fate of the settlements should be one of the issues on the table. He notes that previous rounds of negotiations have gone forward without a construction freeze.

Obama will get a firsthand glimpse of settlements when he heads to the Palestinian city of Ramallah on Thursday. The 20-minute drive from Jerusalem passes by sprawling settlements that are home to tens of thousands of Israelis.

Obama is scheduled to meet with Palestinian leaders and visit a youth center. He plans to head to the West Bank town of Bethlehem the next day to see the Church of the Nativity, built on the site where Christian tradition says Jesus was born.

Netanyahu, who was re-elected in January, has said he will make a renewed push for peace in his new term. His new government, which takes office this week, is sending mixed signals.

On one hand, he has named former Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, a political centrist who has good working relations with the Palestinians, as his chief negotiator. The biggest partner in his coalition, the centrist Yesh Atid Party, has demanded the new government make a serious attempt to restart talks.

At the same time, Netanyahu's own Likud-Yisrael Beitenu bloc is dominated by hard-liners who oppose major concessions to the Palestinians. Another partner, the Jewish Home Party, is linked to the settler movement and would reject any attempts to freeze construction, much less hand over West Bank territory to the Palestinians.

Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, said getting talks back on track will require a deeper and long-standing effort by the president and his new secretary of state, John Kerry, who is expected back in the region in April.

"We really hope that President Obama and Secretary Kerry can succeed in reviving a meaningful peace process, succeed in having Netanyahu saying the sentence that he accepts the two states in the 1967 borders," Erekat said. "We don't need new plans. We need commitment."

The gaps between Israel and the Palestinians are just one of many obstacles. The Palestinians are also deeply divided between Abbas' government in the West Bank, which favors a negotiated agreement with Israel, and the rival Hamas government in the Gaza Strip, which rejects peace with Israel. Hamas has controlled Gaza since expelling Abbas' forces in 2007.

Yehia Moussa, a senior Hamas official in Gaza, told the pro-Hamas "Felesteen" newspaper the Obama visit was meant to "cool down" the Palestinians "by giving empty promises that will assist with continuing the (Israeli) occupation."

Hani Masri, a prominent Palestinian commentator in the West Bank, said the visit might lead to some movement.

"Most likely we are going to see some life in the negotiations," perhaps a limited settlement freeze that forces Abbas to resume talks. "But such a process won't lead to a peaceful settlement."

Contact GWY at gwy123@aol.com


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OBAMA MUST HOLD FAST TO MORAL COMPASS ON TRIP TO ISRAEL

Posted by Human Rights Voices, March 18, 2013

This article was written by Anne Bayefsky and it originally appeared March 18, 2013 in Fox News. Anne Bayefsky is editor of EYE on the UN. (Contact the organization at info@EYEonthe UN.org.) She is also a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and at Touro College.

As President Obama touches down in Israel on Wednesday, he will not be stumbling into a morally neutral landscape somewhere between the Hatfields and the McCoys. Instead, the ticket to wading successfully into the Arab-Israeli conflict is to hold fast to a moral compass of inalienable rights, starting with equality, and freedom from racial and religious intolerance.

The appeals that the president can expect to hear from Palestinian quarters will be deliberately couched in the emotive language of discrimination — Jewish settlements on Arab land and "apartheid walls" surrounding them.

Settlements are widely perceived to be the key wedge issue between the United States and Israel.

After all, early in his tenure, Obama became the first U.S. president to tell Israelis that a total settlement freeze was a condition "for us to move forward." The date was May 18, 2009 and he was standing beside Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu at a press briefing.

Israel responded with a unilateral moratorium on new settlement construction, but it expired in September 2010 after the good faith gesture went unanswered. Subsequently, the Palestinian Authority took its cue from the president's words and has refused to resume negotiations ever since.

Fast forward. The Palestinian political machine has commandeered every international forum at its disposal to make settlements the central sticking point. The most recent example is a new UN report from a "fact-finding mission" that was commissioned by the UN Human Rights Council on the rights violations said to result from Israeli settlements.

But here's the rub. At the heart of the furious opposition to settlements, is the endorsement of one more Arab country without Jews. The creation of what is best described as 'apartheid Palestine' is the real end game.

The Middle East Road Map, endorsed by the Security Council in 2003, labeled settlements a "final status" issue to be "negotiated between the parties" because ownership of the land and the longevity of settlements had not, and has not, been determined. If negotiators decide that a particular territory will become part of a future Palestinian state, why should an exodus of current Jewish inhabitants be automatic?

One-and-a-half million Arab men and women — twenty per cent of the population — are free citizens of democratic Israel. They have the right to vote, to stand for election, to sit on an independent Supreme Court and to represent their country abroad, freedoms that are non-existent for their brothers and sisters in Arab countries.

And yet eliminating the presence of Jews now residing in what is claimed to be "Palestine" is the gold standard for building an Arab state.

Moreover, Jewish settlements have been uprooted by Israeli governments in the past under very difficult circumstances. Israeli governments have put the issue of settlements on the negotiating table and stand ready to negotiate immediately, without preconditions. So the irrational refrain that settlements are an obstacle to peace resonates for the wrong reasons, as the UN so ably demonstrates: anti-semitism and the objection to any Jewish state are at the root of it all.

The Human Rights Council's settlement report, currently being applauded in Geneva, has one annex. It begins: "Timeline — Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestine Territory 1948." Not 1967. The report's pseudo-legal analysis objects to "Settlement Master Plans." The lingo — invented by the reports' authors — is an unmistakable allusion to the deportation "master plan" of Nazi SS chief Heinrich Himmler.

The "selected sources" upon which the UN "fact-finders" relied (and which are posted on the UN's website), include tales that Israel is deliberately dumping "waste" in the territories to increase cancer and miscarriages among Palestinians and declarations that Israelis harbor "racist beliefs of Jewish supremacy."

The link between the anti-settlement battle cry and the racist challenge to the Jewish state's legitimacy is also apparent from the General Assembly's most recent fall session.

Last November, 120 countries represented by the Arab League, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, and the Non-Aligned Movement and its spokesperson Iran, hollered about: "the racism of Israel and its settlers;" "Israel's racist, inhumane policies...feverish settler campaigns and systemic killing of civilians;" "the terror, violence and provocations by extremist Israeli settlers;" "The era of Zionism is over."

In short, the demonization and delegitimization of settlements is inextricably connected to the demonization and delegitimization of Israel itself.

Big words, but not abstract.

On March 11, 2011, Palestinian terrorists decapitated 3 month old "extremist settler" Hadas Fogel, and butchered her "settler" brothers Yoav, 11, Elad 4, and her "settler" parents Ehud and Ruth.

In January 2012, Palestinian Authority official television broadcast and re-broadcast a program in which family members of the by-then convicted murderers — egged on by the PA TV host —praised the "operation."

Facilitating the creation of apartheid Palestine is not a confidence-building measure. It will not produce a peace partner or spawn a law-abiding future neighbor. Enabling apartheid Palestine should be an anathema to every post-segregationist fiber in the American body politic, starting with President Obama.


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A MESSAGE TO OBAMA BEFORE HIS UPCOMING VISIT TO ISRAEL...

Posted by Nurit Greenger, March 18, 2013

We have heard that while in Israel this week Obama has invited to meet with a delegation from every university in the country but have excluded and disinvited Ariel university from attending the meeting.

We have also heard that Obama will try pressuring Israel to continue holding off on dealing, seriously, with Iran's nukes...until it is too late and then, in all likelihood, he will blame everyone but himself that Iran has gone nuclear.

Under these circumstances, if I was Benjamin Netanyahu, the newly reelected Prime Minister of Israel, I would tell the visiting United States president the following:

"Mr. President, with all due respect, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the President of the Islamic Republic of Iran is flipping you off! North Korea is threatening you with a nuclear attack and China is warning you that if you strengthen your defense capabilities against a North Korean attack on USA soil, the Chinese will consider this move a provocation.

Under these circumstances, Mr. President, when no one else in the world is taking you seriously, why, in this hour of extreme peril for my country, I should put my people at risk and listen to you and back off from Iran, consider making and concessions to our enemies and agree to you excluding Ariel university students, their campus is and will always be part of the state of Israel, from attending your speech?

Instead, I would suggest, Mr. President, that you help me, or at least not be an obstacle to me taking defensive measures for my people, on all issues, and thus you continue being in my good graces, considering that when all hells break loose, you may soon have to come to me for assistance!

After all, Mr. President, your policies have isolated your country together with our country in this world, while the Iranians, the North Koreans and the Chinese have expanded their influence even into your sphere throughout Latin America.

If, at the end, you desert us, you will be really alone - and so will we! But, with one major difference: you have somehow managed to go up against, even G-d, while we still have God on our side!

Now, Mr. President, if you will excuse me, my wife, Sara'le is waiting for me for dinner! I look forward to your response to my overture when I return."

Contact Nurit Greenger by email at 4nuritg@ca.rr.com. Visit her blog: http://ngthinker.typepad.com


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OBAMA'S AMERICA & THE GENOCIDE OF CHRISTIANS

Posted by Michael Travis, March 18, 2013

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Arabs in Bethlehem had a "warm welcome" for American officials who on Monday came to prepare for President Barack H. Obama's visit to the city Friday, by throwing shoes and garbage at the vehicles in an entourage from the U.S. Consulate

Here are a few photos of the Syrian Christians that the United States of Obama has paid millions of U.S. Dollars to murder.... in their Muslim Brotherhood-Al Qaeda programme of ethnic cleansing and genocide of all Non-Moslims in the Middle-East and Africa.

Syrian Christians Fleeing as Islamists Take Over

Islamic rebels have been taking over Christian villages in Syria and that leaves the Christians facing some tough choices.

Recently a Muslim group captured the Christian village of Yacoubiyeh.

Many residents fled, leaving behind empty homes, damaged churches and relics of their faith.

Some say they won't return until they see how the Muslim rebel commander treats minorities.

The commander says he will treat everyone fairly, but like many rebel leaders he makes his decisions according to harsh Islamic law.

There are reports of Muslim rebels murdering Christians and kidnapping others for ransom.

Christians make up about 10 percent of Syria's 23 million people.

Syria: Muslim Militia Forces Christian Exodus

Syria's 2,000-year-old Christian community is being devastated by the country's civil war.

A Swedish journalist interviewed more than 100 Syrian Christian refugees in Turkey and Lebanon. They say Muslim rebel militia are driving them out because of their faith.

One woman said her husband and son were shot in the head just because they were Christians.

Syria's population of 2 million Christians is the second largest in the Middle East after Egypt, and now whole villages are disappearing when Islamist rebels arrive.

Every week, hundreds of Syrian Christians arrive in Lebanon. A Lebanese patriarch said it is a ''great exodus taking place in silence."

CBN Middle East Bureau Chief Chris Mitchell spoke with Lela Gilbert, co-author of Persecuted: The Global Assault on Christians, about the persecution of Christians in Syria and the Middle East. Click play to watch.

Watch more of Mitchell's interview with Gilbert, here.

Meanwhile, Secretary of State John Kerry said the Obama administration will give the Syrian opposition an additional $60 million in aid.

Kerry said the United States will also for the first time provide food and medical supplies to the rebels fighting to remove President Bashar Assad.

He announced the new support and change in policy in Rome Thursday, where an international conference on Syria is being held. European nations are expected to follow Kerry's example.

Kerry said the goal of the aid is to put more pressure on Assad to step down and to make way for a democratic transition.

Contact Michael Travis at michaelmgr1@gmail.com


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SET IN PLACE AND HOPEFUL

Posted by Arlene Kushner, March 18, 2013

"Set in Place and Hopeful"

The 33rd government has been announced by Prime Minister Netanyahu in its final permutation. The list of ministers (22 in number) and deputies is provided at the end of this posting. You may want to save it.

After the balagan of establishing the coalition, with all of its extraordinary tensions and game-playing, I am finding that there truly are enough good people in the government so that there is some reason to be hopeful.

A handful of changes from the prior list I had shared, which was still tentative, are worthy of note here:

Yuval Steinitz (Likud), former Finance Minister, will be holding the position of Minister for International, Intelligence and Strategic Affairs -- an important position that includes handling strategic dialogue with the United States. < /p>

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I had assumed -- incorrectly -- that the responsibilities of the Ministry of Strategic Affairs, which had been headed by Moshe Ya'alon, would be subsumed under his new Defense Ministry position. As it turns out, it has been decided that strategic affairs, along with intelligence, will fall within Steinitz's new bailiwick. This new ministry was actually created for him.

Steinitz, who previously served as a chair of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee, will also sit on the committee overseeing negotiations, such as they may be, with the Palestinian Arabs.

~~~~~~~~~~

The left-wing Ofer Shelah (Yesh Atid) will not be Deputy Defense Minister under Ya'alon after all. Instead that position will be filled by the nationalist Danny Danon (Likud).

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Ze'ev Elkin (Likud), former coalition head, now has a new position as Deputy Foreign Minister.

Caption Text

There is question as to how much power Elkin will have in the current absence of foreign minister designate Avigdor Lieberman: will he be temporary de facto minister, or was his a political appointment? The question is all the more intriguing because Elkin, who is a nationalist, has not exactly seen eye-to-eye with Netanyahu over a period of time.

According to Israel Hayom, professionals at the Foreign Ministry, unhappy about the lack of clear definition about Elkin's role, are also smarting because they have not been assigned a place in strategic negotiations with the US or in negotiations with the PA.

What I begin to wonder is how much ministry there will be left to head, should Lieberman return to his prior post.

~~~~~~~~~~

Perhaps most surprising is that fact that Moshe Feiglin (Likud) -- who has been a persistent challenge to Netanyahu, and someone the prime minister, until now, has tried his best to sideline -- has been given a position as Deputy Speaker of the Knesset. Not the most powerful of positions -- he will on occasion run Knesset sessions when the Speaker Yuli Edelstein is unavailable -- it still marks the first time that Netanyahu has accorded Feiglin, a staunch nationalist ideologue, any recognition.

This is just one of the appointments that makes me wonder, all over again, exactly who Binyamin Netanyahu is. He is not consistent in the message he gives. (Please, do not write to share your theory about the prime minister.)

~~~~~~~~~~

The new ministers have been sworn in, and the prime minister held his first Cabinet meeting shortly thereafter. He told those gathered:

"There are excellent people here, fit people, experienced people. The only way to be successful will be to work together, which I'm sure we will do. The citizens of Israel are expecting us to work together..."

Faction heads within the coalition are making the appropriately conciliatory noises: Everyone is talking about standing behind Netanyahu and being of assistance for the sake of the nation. They should only take a hard look now at what's coming down the road and mean what they say!

~~~~~~~~~~

Tzipi Livni made her little speech about how she'll work diligently to advance "peace talks."

But Yisrael Beitenu Chair (and Foreign Minister designate) MK Avigdor Lieberman called a press conference to mark the beginning of the new government, at which he said that there would be no more progress in peace negotiations in the next four years than there has been in the past four.

He further said that Israel would "emphatically oppose any attempt to reimpose a [building] freeze."

~~~~~~~~~~~

We have been confronting increased Palestinian Arab violence of one sort and another in Judea and Samaria of late. A Shin Bet report indicates that there were a total of 139 attacks, including firebombings and the use of improvised explosives, in February, compared to 83 in January.

Of the many incidents that might be mentioned, I want to call attention to two specific ones here:

Just today, a 70 year old man was shot in the legs on a road outside Kedumim in Samaria. According to an Israel National News report, the assailant, in a car, had stopped to ask directions, and then shot him.

While last Thursday night, on a road outside of Ariel, also in Samaria, Arabs threw rocks that hit a truck, causing it to veer off course and collide with a car. The woman driving the car and her three young daughters were all injured, but it was the youngest, Adelle Biton, age two, who was hurt critically. She is still fighting for her life.

~~~~~~~~~~

It is, first of all, important that incidents such as this be widely publicized. But beyond this, there is the need to respond more forcefully to this low-grade terrorism. And it is here that I have hope.

Shortly after Adelle Biton was so seriously injured, Naftali Bennett made a statement:

"Some people take rock throwing lightly, and prevent action against them. Rock throwers are trying to murder and they need to be treated accordingly.

"Let us pray for the life of the baby girl."

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/166240

How correct he is, and how refreshing to hear someone call it as it is, advocating a new and necessarily tough stance. Many is the time I've heard rock throwing minimized -- "just kids throwing stones." Look again.

~~~~~~~~~~

Then today, after the man was shot in the legs, MK Moti Yogev, a colonel in the reserves and former commander of an elite infantry unit, called for changing the rules of engagement with terrorists:

"The event in Samaria is, in effect, a development from events where rules of engagement were changed. If we are willing to [tolerate] rock attacks, then the fire bombs follow. If we are lax on fire bombs, then we experience the gunfire. This is how it was in the past, and this is apparently what is happening now.

"...I hope that the IDF, under the new incoming defense minister...Minister Moshe Yaalon, together with the new deputy defense minister, Danny Danon, will set a policy that will make clear, first, that the Land of Israel belongs to the nation of Israel, and this policy is also what gives us quiet from terror attacks, and that he will set a clear policy regarding rules of engagement, and the all-out war against the terrorists."

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/166333

More welcome words, which must be followed by appropriate action. An all-out war against the terrorists, indeed, without fear of how it would be spun in the international press, or what other nations expect from us.

~~~~~~~~~~

MK Avigdor Lieberman expressed a very similar sentiment when he called upon Defense Minister Ya'alon to instruct soldiers to open fire at "rock-throwing terrorists....

"Rock-throwing [should] be treated like shooting using firearms, only this kind of change will stop civilians and soldiers from being targeted by Arab rioters and prevent disasters."

~~~~~~~~~~

Well, I was on King David Street today, site of the King David Hotel, where President Obama will be staying, and saw some of the security preparations being set up. For local residents, the president's visit means an inability to move about the city.

All in all, there's no way to avoid the fact that he's coming. So stay tuned...

Talk continues unabated with regard to the fact that the US Embassy, on behalf of the president, invited Israeli university students to hear his speech at the International Convention Center in Jerusalem (Binyanei Ha'uma) on Thursday, but excluded those of Ariel University in Samaria for what seem to be political reasons. Obama is trying to reach out to young people, but has set a negative tone before the event has even taken place.

Uri Reshtik, Israel Student Union Chair, has sent a letter to the Embassy in which he refers to the exclusionary invitation as "discrimination based on ulterior motives. Such discrimination is not respectable and not acceptable."

MK Nachman Shai (Labor) has gone further, calling on student's to boycott Obama's main speaking event:

"It is shocking to think that you can disqualify students just because they learn in the West Bank. I do not understand how President Obama wants to conduct a dialogue with the Israeli public when he is consciously excluding part of it."

http://www.timesofisrael.com/labor-mk-calls-on-students-to-boycott-obama-speech/

How lovely it would be if students in large numbers heeded the call of this left-wing MK.

~~~~~~~~~~

Binyamin Netanyahu (Likud) -- Prime Minister

Moshe (Bogie) Ya'alon (Likud) -- Defense Minister

Yair Lapid (Yesh Atid) -- Finance Minister

Gideon Sa'ar (Likud) -- Interior Minister

Shai Piron (Yesh Atid) —- Education Minister

Naftali Bennett (Habayit Hayehudi) —- Economy and Trade Minister

Tzipi Livni (Hatnua) -- Justice Minister

Yael German -— Health Minister

Yisrael Katz (Yisrael Beitenu) -— Transportation Minister

Gild Erdan (Likud) —- Communications and Home Front Defense Minister

Silvan Shalom (Likud) —- Regional Development, Water and Energy Resources Minister

Uri Ariel (Habayit Hayehudi) —- Housing Minister

Steinitz (Likud) —- Minister for International, Intelligence and Strategic Affairs

Uri Orbach (Habayit Hayehudi) —- Minister for Pensioners Affairs

Meir Cohen (Yesh Atid) -- Welfare Minister

Ya'akov Peri (Yesh Atid) —- Science Minister

Amir Peretz (Hatnua) —- Environmental Protection Minister

Sofa Landver (Yisrael Beiteinu) —- Immigrant Absorption Minister

Uzi Landau (Yisrael Beiteinu) -— Tourism Minister

Yair Shamir (Yisrael Beiteinu) —- Agriculture Minister

Yitzhak Aharonovitch (Yisrael Beiteinu) —- Internal Security Minister

Limor Livnat (Likud) —- Culture and Sports Minister

Eli Ben-Dahan (Habayit Hayehudi) -— Deputy Minister for Religious Affairs

Mickey Levy (Yesh Atid) —- Deputy Welfare Minister

Danny Danon (Likud) —- Deputy Defense Minister

Ze'ev Elkin (Likud) —- Deputy Foreign Minister

Avigdor Lieberman (Yisrael Beiteinu) —- Foreign Minister-designate

Contact Arlene Kushner at akushner@netvision.net.il and visit her website: www.ArlenefromIsrael.info


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THE SECRET DOCUMENT THAT SET OBAMA'S MIDDLE EAST POLICY

Posted by Gloria Center, March 18, 2013

Caption Text

"We have to confront is violent extremism in all of its forms.... America is not — and never will be — at war with Islam. We will, however, relentlessly confront violent extremists who pose a grave threat to our security — because we reject the same thing that people of all faiths reject: the killing of innocent men, women, and children. And it is my first duty as president to protect the American people." —President Barack Obama, Cairo, June 2009.

"The United States is now experiencing the beginning of its end, and is heading towards its demise....Resistance is the only solution. [Today the United States] is withdrawing from Iraq, defeated and wounded, and it is also on the verge of withdrawing from Afghanistan. [All] its warplanes, missiles and modern military technology were defeated by the will of the peoples, as long as [these peoples] insisted on resistance." —Muslim Brotherhood leader Muhammad al-Badri, Cairo, September 2010.

What did the president know and when did he know it? That's a question made classical by the Watergate scandal. Now it is possible to trace precisely what Obama knew and when he knew it. And it proves that the installment of power of the Muslim Brotherhood was a conscious and deliberate strategy of the Obama Administration developed before the "Arab Spring" began.

In February 2011 the New York Times ran an extremely complementary article on President Obama by Mark Landler, who some observers say is the biggest apologist for Obama on the newspaper. That's quite an achievement. Landler praised Obama for having tremendous foresight, in effect, predicting the "Arab Spring." According to Landler,

"President Obama ordered his advisers last August [2010] to produce a secret report on unrest in the Arab world, which concluded that without sweeping political changes, countries from Bahrain to Yemen were ripe for popular revolt, administration officials said Wednesday."

Which advisors? The then counter-terrorism advisor and now designated CIA chief, John Brennan? National Security Council senior staffer Samantha Power? If it was done by Obama's own staff, rather than State and Defense, it's likely that these people or at least one of them was the key author.

So should U.S. policy help allies avoid such sweeping change by standing firm or by helping them make adjustments? No, explained the report, it should get on the side of history and wield a broom to do the sweeping. The article continued:

"Mr. Obama's order, known as a Presidential Study Directive, identified likely flashpoints, most notably Egypt, and solicited proposals for how the administration could push for political change in countries with autocratic rulers who are also valuable allies of the United States, these officials said.

"The 18-page classified report, they said, grapples with a problem that has bedeviled the White House's approach toward Egypt and other countries in recent days: how to balance American strategic interests and the desire to avert broader instability against the democratic demands of the protesters."

As I noted, the article was quite explicitly complementary (and that's an understatement) about how Obama knew what was likely to happen and was well prepared for it.

But that's precisely the problem. It wasn't trying to deal with change but was pushing for it; it wasn't asserting U.S. interests but balancing them off against other factors. In the process, U.S. interests were forgotten.

If Landler was right then Obama did have a sense of what was going to happen and prepared. It cannot be said that he was caught unawares. This view would suggest, then, that he thought American strategic interests could be protected and broader instability avoided by overthrowing U.S. allies as fast as possible and by showing the oppositions that he was on their side. Presumably the paper pointed out the strength of Islamist forces and the Muslim Brotherhood factor and then discounted any dangers from this quarter. One could have imagined how other U.S. governments would have dealt with this situation. Here is my imagined passage from a high-level government document:

In light of the likelihood of sweeping political changes, with countries from Bahrain to Yemen were ripe for popular revolt, U.S. policy should either help friendly governments retain control or encourage them to make reforms that would increase the scope of freedom in a way that would satisfy popular desires without endangering U.S. interests and long-term stability. In the event that the fall of any given regime seemed likely, U.S. policy should work both publicly and behind the scenes to try to ensure the triumph of moderate, pro-democratic forces that would be able to prevent the formation of radical Islamist dictatorships inimical to U.S. interests, regional peace, and the well-being of the local population. [Note: that is my reconstruction and NOT a quote from the document]

Such an approach would have been easy and in line with historic U.S. policy. We have every reason to believe that the State Department and the Defense Department favored such an approach.

But let's look at precisely how the White House described the U.S. policy it wanted:

"...how the administration could push for political change in countries with autocratic rulers who are also valuable allies of the United States,"

In other words, a popular revolt was going to happen (I've seen the cables from the U.S. embassy in Tunisia that accurately predicted an upheaval) but would it succeed or fail? The Obama Administration concluded that the revolt should succeed and set out to help make sure that it did so. As for who won, it favored not just moderate Islamic forces—which hardly existed as such—but moderate Islamist forces, which didn't exist at all.

Anyone who says that the United States did not have a lot of influence in these crises doesn't know what they are talking about. Of course, the U.S. government didn't control the outcome, its leverage was limited. But there's a big difference between telling the Egyptian army to stay in control, dump Mubarak, and make a mild transition—and we, the United States, will back you—or telling them that Washington wanted the generals to stand aside, let Mubarak be overthrown, and have a thoroughgoing regime change, a fundamental transformation, to coin a phrase.

So the Obama Administration did not stand beside friendly regimes or help to manage a limited transition with more democracy and reforms. No, it actively pushed to bring down at least four governments—Bahrain, Egypt, Tunisia, and Yemen.

It did not push for the overthrow of two anti-American regimes—Iran and Syria—but on the contrary was still striving for good relations with those two dictatorships. Equally, it did not push for the fall of radical anti-American governments in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip. No, it only pushed for the fall of "valuable allies." There was no increase in support for dissidents in Iran despite, as we will see in a moment, internal administration predictions of unrest there, too. As for Syria, strong administration support for the dictatorship there continued for months until it was clear that the regime was in serious trouble. It seems reasonable to say that the paper did not predict the Syrian civil war.

Want more evidence about the internal administration document? Here's another article from the time which explains:

"The White House had been debating the likelihood of a domino effect since youth-driven revolts had toppled President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia, even though the American intelligence community and Israel's intelligence services had estimated that the risk to President Mubarak was low — less than 20 percent, some officials said.

"According to senior officials who participated in Mr. Obama's policy debates, the president took a different view. He made the point early on, a senior official said, that 'this was a trend' that could spread to other authoritarian governments in the region, including in Iran. By the end of the 18-day uprising, by a White House count, there were 38 meetings with the president about Egypt. Mr. Obama said that this was a chance to create an alternative to "the Al Qaeda narrative" of Western interference."

Notice that while this suggests the debate began after the unrest started, full credit is given to Obama personally, not to U.S. intelligence agencies, for grasping the truth. This is like the appropriation by the White House of all the credit for getting Usama bin Ladin, sort of a cult of personality thing. We know for a fact that the State Department predicted significant problems arising in Tunisia (from the Wikileaks documents) and perhaps that is true for other countries as well. But if Obama wants to take personal credit for the new U.S. policy that means he also has to take personal blame for the damage it does.

Now I assume what I'm about to say isn't going to be too popular but I'll also bet that history will prove it correct: The revolution in Egypt was not inevitable and Obama's position was a self-fulfilling prophecy. And judging from what happened at the time, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton agrees with me. The idea of an "alternative to 'the al-Qaida narrative"'of Western interference is straight Brennan. What Obama was really saying was: Ha! So al-Qaida claims we interfere to put reactionary pro-Western dictators in power just because they're siding with us? We'll show them that we can put popular Islamist dictators in power even though they are against us!

If I'm writing this somewhat facetiously I mean it very seriously.

And here's more proof from the Washington Post in March 2011 which seems to report on the implementation of the White House paper's recommendations:

"The administration is already taking steps to distinguish between various movements in the region that promote Islamic law in government. An internal assessment, ordered by the White House last month, identified large ideological differences between such movements as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and al-Qaeda that will guide the U.S. approach to the region." That says it all, doesn't it? The implication is that the U.S. government knew that the Brotherhood would take power and thought this was a good thing.

It continued:

"'If our policy can't distinguish between al-Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood, we won't be able to adapt to this change,'" the senior administration official said. "'We're also not going to allow ourselves to be driven by fear."'

Might that be then counterterrorism advisor and now CIA director John Brennan? I'd bet on it.

What did Obama and his advisors think would happen? Why that out of gratitude for America stopping its (alleged) bullying and imperialistic ways and getting on the (alleged) side of history the new regimes would be friendly. The Muslim Brotherhood in particular would conclude that America was not its enemy. You know, one Brotherhood leader would supposedly say to another, all of these years we thought the United States was against us but now we see that they are really our friends. Remember Obama's Cairo speech? He really gets us!

More likely he'd be saying: We don't understand precisely what the Americans are up to but they are obviously weak, cowardly, and in decline! In fact, that's what they did say. Remember that President Jimmy Carter's attempts to make friends with the new Islamist regime in Iran in 1979 fed a combination of Iranian suspicion and arrogance which led to the hostage crisis and Tehran daring to take on the United States single-handed. America, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini at the time, can't do a damned thing against us.

Incidentally, everyone except the American public—which means people in the Middle East—knows that Obama cut the funding for real democratic groups. His Cairo speech was important not for the points so often discussed (Israel, for example) but because it heralded the age of political Islamism being dominant in the region. Indeed, Obama practically told those people that they should identify not as Arabs but as Muslims.

In broader terms, what does Obama's behavior remind me of? President Jimmy Carter pushing Iran's shah for human rights and other reforms in 1977 and then standing aloof as the revolution unrolled—and went increasingly in the direction of radical Islamists—in 1978.

As noted above, that didn't work out too well.

Incidentally, the State Department quite visibly did not support Obama's policy in 2011. It wanted to stand with its traditional clients in the threatened Arab governments, just as presumably there were many in the Defense Department who wanted to help the imperiled militaries with whom they had cooperated for years. And that, by the way, includes the Turkish army which was being visibly dismantled by the Islamist regime in Ankara.

While the State Department backed down on Egypt it drew the line on Bahrain. Yes, there is a very unfair system there in which a small Sunni minority dominates a large Shia majority and yes, too, some of the Shia opposition is moderate but the assessment was that a revolution would probably bring to power an Iranian satellite government.

But the idea that they're going to be overthrown any way so let's give them a push did not apply to Iran or Syria or Hamas-government Gaza or Hizballah-governed Lebanon and not at all to Islamist-governed Turkey.

It makes sense that this basic thinking also applied to Libya, where dictator Muammar al-Qadhafi was hardly a friend of the United States but had been on better behavior lately. As for Syria, the U.S. government indifference to who actually wins leadership of the new regime seems to carry over from the earlier crises.

Credit should be given to the U.S. government in two specific cases. Once the decision to overthrow Qadhafi was made, the result was a relatively favorable regime in Libya. That was a gain. The problem is that this same philosophy and the fragility of the regime helped produce the Benghazi incident. The other relatively positive situation was Iraq's post-Saddam government, to which most of the credit goes to Obama's predecessor but some to his administration. Still, Iraq seems to be sliding—in terms of its regional strategic stance, not domestically—closer toward Iran.

At any rate, the evidence both public and behind the scenes seems to indicate that the Obama Administration decided on two principles in early 2011.

First, let's help overthrow our friends before someone else does so and somehow we will benefit from being on the right side.

Second, it doesn't really matter too much who takes power because somehow they will be better than their predecessors, somehow we will be more popular with them, and somehow U.S. interests will be preserved.

Landler definitely thought he was making Obama look good. Instead, I think, he was really showing us that the bad thinking and disastrous policy was planned and purposeful.

Prof. Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center, editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal, and a featured columnist for PajamasMedia at http://pajamasmedia.com/barryrubin/. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan) This article appeared March 14, 2013 on the Rubin Center Research in International Affairs webbsite and is archived at
http://www.rubincenter.org/2013/03/the-secret-document-that-set-obamas-middle-east-policy/


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MIXED MARRIAGE

Posted by Ted Roberts, March 18, 2013

Every time there's a mixed marriage within our Jewish community we mourn a little. So common these days. Some optimists even say, no problem. They'll have four kids, raise them all as Jews, and instead of 10 million Jews in the world, there'll be 10 million and 4. I guess that's one way o f looking at it. It used to be shocking. But today it has almost fallen in the acceptable range. Acceptable is the wrong word. It's more like your abstemious wife drinking three Mai Tais and dancing on the table. Surprising, but forgotten in a month. Nobody declares the death of Judaism. Maybe we lost a battle, but we're still winning the war — still alive and kicking. And besides, says some cheerful observer, maybe Jim will convert so there are ten million and FIVE Jews.

It would be suicidely politically incorrect to speak against any kind of mixed union. Our society worships the great god, Diversity. Reactions vary — yes, mildly negative. But now that society, at least in the USA, welcomes us with open arms we understand the lure of integration. (But so did the Jews of pre war Germany. A completely awkward analogy, but mildly relevant.)

Funny, upon hearing the news that Rebeccah has married an upright, hymn-singing Presbyterian, my mind flashes back 3300 years to a big, fat book with small print invariably found in hotel rooms. We call it the Chumash — "they" call it the Old Testament. It loudly bans marriage with the natives of the land of milk and honey. A major theme in all that small print is one of voluntary segregation and I suspect that the same separation is one of several concepts that drives Halacha. Don't even mix the wool and linen on your shirt and don't even think about plowing your field with an ox and a donkey. And men shouldn't dress like women, nor vice versa. Why? "Separation" say many of our sages.

Don't forget who you are. You're a chosen people. But of course there's a problem here. Overdo or use the wrong words and you sound a lot like Hitler. It's a fine line between his definition of Aryan and our definition of chosen. Both imply superiority even though our goal is goodness and theirs was murderous.

But oddly enough the Book is full of our heroes who didn't harken to this golden rule especially when it comes to the core of the matter — intermarriage.

But back to intermarriage. Generally considered abhorrent, but possibly beneficent by presenting the cultural banquet table of Judaism to hungry non-Jews. "I said possible." At a very low key, the 2000 year old competition between Judaism and Christianity continues. Who's to say the tide may not change?

The figures are familiar to all. About 50% of Jews choose non-Jewish mates. And this figure has grown, steadily rising since the 70's. Not encouraging. And worse, only 33% of their offspring are raised Jewish. But that, too may change if we intensify our outreach efforts. And don't cry yet. Sometimes for encouragement I go to the Tanach, our bible. Lo and behold, we've lost the contest for over three millennia and we're still here.

Consider Moses. Our No. 1 candidate for sainthood married a Cushite or a Midianite depending on which passage you read. Moses! He did not marry a Jew! Were there no Jewish maidens in the hordes of Egyptian maidens that attracted his marital attention? An incredible fact of Jewish history. What a catch he would have been. Can you see her proud mother sitting around with her friends? "Oh, yes, my lovely daughter, Zippora, is dating Moses, you know." In fact, later in a bizarre biblical episode she saves his life.

Then there's David. I don't have to retell you the story of him and that married Hittite lady. And you think Solomon stayed with the fold? Oh, I skipped Judah, for whom we're named. Judah, fourth son of Jacob, our patriarch. He also has a preference for Canaanites. The bible tells us so. And finally amongst the notable mixed marriages is Boaz, grandfather of David, and Ruth the Moabite — directly in the genealogical line of the Mosiach, we're told. Moses, Judah, David, Solomon, and Boaz (and even Abraham marries Hagar, an Egyptian) behave imperfectly in direct violation of the biblical ban. A regular United Nation of wives, yet we survive. Maybe there's a method to this madness.

The notable Ephraim Buchwald says we prayed for a melting pot — what we got instead was a meltdown.

Contact Ted Roberts at te11d@hiwaay.net


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ORIANA FALLACI ASKS: IS MUSLIM IMMIGRATION TO EUROPE A CONSPIRACY?

Posted by Borntolose3, March 18, 2013

The article below was written by Brendan Bernhard who is a contributing editor to the New York Sun, where he was the television critic from 2006-08, and a former staff writer at LA Weekly. He writes about culture, politics, and sports, and is the author of White Muslim (Melville House), a study of converts to Islam in the West. This article appeared March 15, 2006 in the LA Weekly and is archived at
http://www.fisheaters.com/forums/index.php?topic=989596.0

In The Force of Reason, the controversial Italian journalist and novelist Oriana Fallaci illuminates one of the central enigmas of our time. How did Europe become home to an estimated 20 million Muslims in a mere three decades?

How did Islam go from being a virtual non-factor to a religion that threatens the preeminence of Christianity on the Continent? How could the most popular name for a baby boy in Brussels possibly be Mohammed? Can it really be true that Muslims plan to build a mosque in London that will hold 40,000 people? That Dutch cities like Amsterdam and Rotterdam are close to having Muslim majorities? How was Europe, which was saved by the U.S. in world wars I and II, and whose Muslim Bosnians were rescued by the U.S. as recently as 1999, transformed into a place in which, as Fallaci puts it, "if I hate Americans I go to Heaven and if I hate Muslims I go to Hell?"

In attempting to answer these questions, the author, who is stricken with cancer and has been hounded by death threats and charges of "Islamophobia" (she is due to go on trial in France this June), has combined history with snatches of riveting firsthand reportage into a form that reads like a real-life conspiracy thriller.

If The Force of Reason sells a lot of copies, which it almost certainly will (800,000 were sold in Italy alone, and the book is in the top 100 on Amazon), it will be not only because of the heat generated by her topic, but also because Fallaci speaks for the ordinary reader. There is no one she despises more than the intellectual "cicadas," as she calls them — "You see them every day on television; you read them every day in the newspapers" — who deny they are in the midst of a cultural, political and existential war with Islam, of which terrorism is the flashiest, but ultimately least important component. Nonetheless, to give the reader a taste of what Muslim conquest can be like, in her first chapter, Fallaci provides a brief tour of the religion's bloodiest imperial episodes and later does an amusing job of debunking some of its more exaggerated claims to cultural and scientific greatness.

The book is also animated by a world-class journalist's dismay that she could have missed the story of her lifetime for as long as she did. In the 1960s and '70s, when she was a Vietnam War correspondent and a legendarily ferocious interviewer — going mano a mano with the likes of Henry Kissinger and Yasser Arafat, Fallaci was simply too preoccupied with the events of the moment to notice that an entirely different narrative was rapidly taking shape — namely, the transformation of the West. There were clues, certainly. As when, in 1972, she interviewed the Palestinian terrorist George Habash, who told her (while a bodyguard aimed a submachine gun at her head) that the Palestinian problem was about far more than Israel. The Arab goal, Habash declared, was to wage war "against Europe and America" and to ensure that henceforth "there would be no peace for the West." The Arabs, he informed her, would "advance step by step. Millimeter by millimeter. Year after year. Decade after decade. Determined, stubborn, patient. This is our strategy. A strategy that we shall expand throughout the whole planet."

Fallaci thought he was referring simply to terrorism. Only later did she realize that he "also meant the cultural war, the demographic war, the religious war waged by stealing a country from its citizens ... In short, the war waged through immigration, fertility, presumed pluriculturalism." It is a low-level but deadly war that extends across the planet, as any newspaper reader can see.

Fallaci is not the first person to ponder the rapidity of the ongoing Muslim transformation of Europe. As the English travel writer Jonathan Raban wrote in Arabia: A Journey Through the Labyrinth (1979), in the mid-1970s Arabs seemed to arrive in London almost overnight. "One day Arabs were a remote people ... camping out in tents with camels ... the next, they were neighbors." On the streets of West London appeared black-clad women adorned with beaked masks that made them look "like hooded falcons." Dressed for the desert (and walking precisely four steps ahead of the women), Arab men bestrode the sidewalks "like a crew of escaped film extras, their headdresses aswirl on the wind of exhaust fumes."

Writers far better acquainted with the Muslim world than Raban have been equally perplexed. In 1995, the late American novelist Paul Bowles, a longtime resident of Tangier, told me that he could not understand why the French had allowed millions of North African Muslims into their country. Bowles had chosen to live among Muslims for most of his life, yet he obviously considered it highly unlikely that so many of them could be successfully integrated into a modern, secular European state.

Perhaps Bowles would have been interested in this passage from Fallaci's book: "In 1974 [Algerian President] Boumedienne, the man who ousted Ben Bella three years after Algerian independence, spoke before the General Assembly of the United Nations. And without circumlocutions he said: 'One day millions of men will leave the southern hemisphere of this planet to burst into the northern one. But not as friends. Because they will burst in to conquer, and they will conquer by populating it with their children. Victory will come to us from the wombs of our women.' "

Such a bald statement of purpose by a nation's president before an international forum seems incredible. Yet even in British journalist Adam LeBor's A Heart Turned East (1997), a work of profound, almost supine sympathy for the plight of Muslim immigrants in the West, a London-based mullah is quoted as saying, "We cannot conquer these people with tanks and troops, so we have got to overcome them by force of numbers." In fact, such remarks are commonplace. Just this week, Mullah Krekar, a Muslim supremacist living in Oslo, informed the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten that Muslims would change Norway, not the other way around. "Just look at the development within Europe, where the number of Muslims is expanding like mosquitoes," he said. "By 2050, 30 percent of the population in Europe will be Muslim."

In other words, Europe will be conquered by being turned into "Eurabia," which is what Fallaci believes it is well on the way to becoming. Leaning heavily on the researches of Bat Ye'or, author of Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, Fallaci recounts in fascinating detail the actual origin of the word "Eurabia," which has now entered the popular lexicon. Its first known use, it turns out, was in the mid-1970s, when a journal of that name was printed in Paris (naturally), written in French (naturally), and edited by one Lucien Bitterlin, then president of the Association of Franco-Arab Solidarity and currently the Chairman of the French-Syrian Friendship Association. Eurabia (price, five francs) was jointly published by Middle East International (London), France-Pays Arabes (Paris), the Groupe d'Etudes sur le Moyen-Orient (Geneva) and the European Coordinating Committee of the Associations for Friendship with the Arab World, which Fallaci describes as an arm of what was then the European Economic Community, now the European Union. These entities, Fallaci says, not mincing her words, were the official perpetrators "of the biggest conspiracy that modern history has created," and Eurabia was their house organ.

Briefly put, the alleged plot was an arrangement between European and Arab governments according to which the Europeans, still reeling from the first acts of PLO terrorism and eager for precious Arabian oil made significantly more precious by the 1973 OPEC crisis, agreed to accept Arab "manpower" (i.e., immigrants) along with the oil. They also agreed to disseminate propaganda about the glories of Islamic civilization, provide Arab states with weaponry, side with them against Israel and generally tow the Arab line on all matters political and cultural. Hundreds of meetings and seminars were held as part of the "Euro-Arab Dialogue," and all, according to the author, were marked by European acquiescence to Arab requests. Fallaci recounts a 1977 seminar in Venice, attended by delegates from 10 Arab nations and eight European ones, concluding with a unanimous resolution calling for "the diffusion of the Arabic language" and affirming "the superiority of Arab culture."

While the Arabs demanded that Europeans respect the religious, political and human rights of Arabs in the West, not a peep came from the Europeans about the absence of freedom in the Arab world, not to mention the abhorrent treatment of women and other minorities in countries like Saudi Arabia. No demand was made that Muslims should learn about the glories of western civilization as Europeans were and are expected to learn about the greatness of Islamic civilization. In other words, according to Fallaci, a substantial portion of Europe's cultural and political independence was sold off by a coalition of ex-communists and socialist politicians. Are we surprised? Fallaci isn't. In 1979, she notes, "the Italian or rather European Left had fallen in love with Khomeini just as now it has fallen in love with Bin Laden and Saddam Hussein and Arafat."

Considerably less intemperate than her last book on the topic of radical Islam, the volcanically angry The Rage and the Pride, The Force of Reason is despairing, but often surprisingly funny. ("The rage and the pride have married and produced a sturdy son: the disdain," she writes with characteristic wit.) And, Fallaci being Fallaci, it is occasionally over the top and will no doubt be deeply offensive to many, particularly when, in a postscript the book might have been better off without, she claims that there is no such thing as moderate Islam. Nonetheless, the voice and warmth and humor of the author light up its pages, particularly when she takes a leaf out of Saul Bellow's Herzog by firing off impassioned letters to the famous both living and dead. She is savage about the Left, the "Peace" movement (war is a fundamental, if regrettable, condition of life, she states), the Catholic Church, the media and, of course, Islam itself, which she considers theological totalitarianism and a deadly threat to the world. She is much more optimistic about America than Europe, citing the bravery of New Yorkers who celebrated New Year's Eve in Times Square despite widely publicized terrorism threats, but here one feels that she is clutching at straws. Though Fallaci now lives in New York, little amity has been extended to her by her peers since the post-9/11 publication of The Rage and the Pride, and she remains almost as much of a media pariah here as she does in Europe. The major difference is that we're not putting her on trial.

As that Norwegian Mullah told Aftenposten, "Our way of thinking ... will prove more powerful than yours." One hopes he's wrong, but if he is, it will be ordinary Americans and Europeans, including courageous Arab-Americans like L.A. resident Wafa Sultan and the Somali-born Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali (two women openly challenging Islamist supremacism), who prove him so, and not our intellectual classes (artists, pundits, filmmakers, actors, writers ...). Many of the latter, consumed by Bush-hatred and cultural self-loathing, are perilously close to becoming today's equivalent of the great Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun, who so hated the British Empire that he sided with the Nazis in World War II, to his everlasting shame. The Force of Reason, at the very least, is a welcome and necessary antidote to the prevailing intellectual atmosphere.

Contact Borntolose3 at borntolose3@charter.net


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HOW IRAN CAN BEAT ISRAEL

Posted by Paul Rotenberg, March 18, 2013

The article below was written by Paul Bracken who is a professor of political science and business at Yale University. Professor Bracken grew up in Philadelphia. He received his Bachelor of Science (Engineering) degree from Columbia University in 1971 and his PhD in Operations Research in 1982 from Yale University. This article appeared March 18, 2013 in the National Post and is archived at
http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/paul-bracken-how-iran-can-beat-israel

Caption Text

The Lionel Gelber Prize is a literary award for the world's best non-fiction book in English on foreign affairs. It was founded in 1989 in the memory of Canadian diplomat Lionel Gelber. A prize of $15,000 is presented annually by The Lionel Gelber Foundation, in partnership with Foreign Policy magazine and the Munk School of Global Affairs. This year's winner will be announced on March 25th and give a free public lecture at the Vivian and David Campbell Conference Facility at the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto, on April 15th. In a week-long series, the National Post showcases the finalists.

War games have been used for a long time to discover and test strategies. During the Cold War, analysts at the Rand Corporation used games to explore the strange new world of nuclear strategy. Such games need a scenario: hypothetical plot outlines of plausible future developments. As nuclear weapons have spread in recent years, basic questions needed to be asked about the difference a nuclear context makes. To discover these questions as they apply to the Middle East, games have been played in the United States and Israel. I have been involved in some of these exercises and find them insightful — and troubling.

In free-form games, teams are set up for the principal actors — the United States, Israel, Iran, Egypt, Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas. The members of each team are told to roleplay what they believe their countries or groups would do. The participants are diplomats, retired officials and military officers. Games bring different agencies together in a protected and confidential setting. Often these agencies have never talked to one another before, except through official bureaucratic channels. Games force senior officials to pay attention to problems that many of them would rather not think about.

Let's consider a game of a nuclear Middle East, where Iran has built the bomb (the scenario I describe here is actually a synthesis of several similar games). The game starts with an incident: Hezbollah kidnaps Israeli soldiers, or there is a big terrorist strike inside Israel. Israel hits back with air strikes on villages believed to be Hezbollah ammunition dumps. Next, the West Bank and Gaza flare up.

After the Israeli air strikes on Lebanon, Hezbollah fires Scuds with cluster bomb warheads into Haifa and Tel Aviv. This is new. These weapons came from Iran. There even are Iranian "advisers" with them. Hezbollah also has new, advanced anti-ship missiles. No Israeli warship can defend against them.

The expectation of most players was that the deadlier conventional weapons would accelerate Israeli attacks. But they did the opposite: Israel slowed down.

In the Gaza war of 2009 and the Lebanon war of 2006, Israel quickly upped the ante. The other side might get in the first punch, but Israel was going to immediately answer with quite a wallop. But not here. I noticed that players, on whatever team, were perking up, curious about how Israel was going to handle this. There was a lot more Israeli caution here. Hesitation even. And everyone saw it.

And that was the heart of the matter, something I don't think anyone really appreciated beforehand. Israel knew how to escalate in a conventional war or against an intifada or an insurgency. But a nuclear context was different.

And Israel wasn't at all confident in this game. What would Iran do? That's what the Israel team needed to know. The Mossad couldn't say. They debated but couldn't agree on what the red lines were. Maybe at the higher levels of escalation there weren't any recognized limits.

Now the tempo increased. Iran, Syria, Hamas and Hezbollah pressed harder. Israeli civilian casualties climbed from the cluster-loaded Scuds. The Israel team debated a big escalation to shock Iran. It was tricky, though, because the biggest unknown was the results of escalation itself. Some on the Israeli team argued that perhaps they should de-escalate: Put out peace feelers, work the back channels and ask the United States to demand an immediate cease-fire.

But how to de-escalate when Iran was emboldened? The conventional rockets kept coming in from southern Lebanon. So the Israel team considered the unthinkable: explode a nuclear warhead 100,000 ft over Tehran. Israeli plans since the 1970s had called for doing this as a last-ditch alternative to firing all-out atomic attacks. It would shatter windows throughout the city, but wouldn't kill anyone, or hardly anyone. Surely it would shock Iran into a cease-fire. Iran would pressure Hezbollah to stand down and fold its cards. That was the hope of the Israel team, anyway.

But what about the United States? Should Israel just do it, or discuss it with Washington first? The Israel team couldn't agree one way or the other.

Events overtook debate, as they so often do. Iran upped the ante by declaring a full nuclear alert. Iran's tactics were fascinating. Tehran barely had a nuclear force. But a great deal of thought had been devoted to it. Atomic rockets on truck launchers were flushed from their peacetime storage bases, along with hundreds of conventionally armed rockets and shorter-range missiles that could hit U.S. bases throughout the Middle East. The Iranian government placed some mobile missiles in city parks in Tehran, Esfahan and Mashhad. Some were concealed, but others were right in the open for every U.S. and Israeli satellite to see. Other nuclear rockets were mixed in with hundreds of conventionally armed missiles.

U.S. and Israeli intelligence couldn't tell a conventional missile from a nuclear one. Given time, CIA experts might be able to distinguish them. But the mobile missiles — nuclear, conventional, and the dummies — kept scrambling about to new locations. This process was faster than the intelligence cycle times needed to make accurate estimates.

Putting missiles in cities meant that tens of thousands of innocent people would be killed if Israel or the United States attacked them with conventional arms. Iran then might hit back at Israel with atomic weapons. As for an Israeli nuclear attack, that would drive casualties into the millions because it meant firing bombs directly into Iran's cities. No one thought Iran would hold back after that.

Iran also kept a few nuclear missiles in hardened, underground silos. It looked as if these were for quick-reaction firing, ready to launch on short notice. Mobile missiles could take hours to move and set up. Someone in Iran had thought through the various possible scenarios to understand that Iran needed a prompt firing deterrent.

Iran's nuclear alert did something else. It stretched Israel's relations with the United States to the breaking point. The U.S. team wanted to act as if nuclear war was completely unthinkable. They didn't want to go there, even hypothetically.

But the Iran team didn't see things this way. Not at all. Iran had a small, crude nuclear force, true, but its political strategy for using that force was complex — shrewd, even. This came as a surprise to the United States team. They had come into the game convinced that the two nuclear deterrents, of Israel and Iran, would produce a mutual standoff. But this wasn't happening. The dynamics were taking an ominous new turn, and it didn't look good.

The Israelis knew how to deal with an intifada or rocket attacks. But this was new. Desperate, they considered the unthinkable: Detonating a nuclear 'warning shot' above Tehran

Another surprise to the U.S. and Israel teams arose from the communications they had with each other. Certain delicate matters that should have been discussed in peacetime were ignored because it would have meant actually discussing how nuclear weapons might be used. But now, in the time-compressed, stressed fever of a crisis, it was impossible to analyze all these issues adequately.

So the two teams spoke past each other. Israel wanted to know concretely what the United States would do to stop Iran. The United States had said that Iran wouldn't be allowed to go nuclear. Now Tehran had done so. Moreover, Iran was threatening Israel with nuclear weapons. The U.S. team responded to the Israeli question with a message that Washington "would take all measures necessary." But the Israel team wanted to know exactly what that meant. Would the United States join in a pre-emptive strike on Iran?

The U.S. team was worried that the crisis would accelerate the bomb's spread. But the Israelis weren't in any mood to receive a U.S. lecture on the dangers of nuclear proliferation. Their survival was at stake. So they ordered two Jericho missiles alerted under a special plan

certain to be photographed by American satellites. It was a plan that had been worked out years ago to "introduce" nuclear weapons into the Middle East. The intent of this esoteric communication from Tel Aviv to Washington, obviously, was to shock the White House. "We hope it leaks to the media, too; maybe we should make sure it does," one Israel team member said.

Israel's move forced a U.S. decision. Washington wanted to restrain Israel, defend Israel and scare the living daylights out of Iran. So the United States publicly gave Israel a nuclear guarantee. Making it public was an escalation, because it put the American reputation on the line. If one atomic missile hit Israel, the United States solemnly announced, well, that would be it for Iran. But the guarantee didn't specify which weapons America would use. The term nuclear made reference only to Iran's attack on Israel.

There was more going on than in the game play itself. At the sidebar coffee breaks, several U.S. team participants expressed genuine frustration with the designers for putting them in this terrible position. There was also anger at the Israel team and, actually, with Israel for having nuclear weapons at all.

The U.S. team wanted to end the crisis. But here they were getting pulled more deeply into it. What if payment on the U.S. guarantee was demanded? So many issues hadn't been thought through. The Joint Chiefs were screaming for guidance. What if the United States actually had to launch against Iran? What, exactly, would they fire at, and with what weapons? The chiefs needed to know in order to make plans and get airplanes and ships in position. You can't just pick up the phone and order someone to do something that hasn't been considered for decades.

The chiefs pointed out some unsettling facts. Iran's atomic missiles, presumably the legitimate targets, couldn't be located. Perhaps Iran's cities should be hit? The individual playing the president said that he didn't want to go down in history as the first leader to kill five million people in an afternoon.

Some on the U.S. team called instead for a massive conventional strike. They added that if Iran's leaders ordered nuclear retaliation they would be put on trial for war crimes in The Hague, and hanged. That sounded great, but the president asked if Iran would simply kick back and watch an attack unwind over 10 weeks' time, withholding an atomic strike on Israel (and others) as it rolled in. The president was very angry. He asked why better options and intelligence hadn't been developed over the years as the world watched Iran go nuclear. Everybody talked about deterrence. But now Iran had an offensive deterrent. Why hadn't anybody seen this coming?

Attention shifted back to Israel. The Israelis didn't like the U.S. nuclear guarantee one bit. It gave Iran and Hezbollah a green light to throw more conventional missiles at Israel. Tension, fear and stress increased. This wasn't faked, at least in my view. People were getting angry outside of the game. But at whom? That, they weren't sure about.

Distrust infected the Israel team. Maybe it was paranoia. Was America selling Israel out with cheap talk about stopping the spread of the bomb? Maybe it was like 1975, they said, when the United States watched South Vietnam go down while debating lofty issues of presidential power and purpose. Given Jewish history, who could blame them for thinking like this?

The crisis was spinning out of control.

Iran's next move jacked the tensions to a fever pitch. It was an inspired move, actually. Without saying anything, Iran evacuated its big cities. The population rode out to the distant suburbs and beyond. The United States watched this fantastic exodus over satellites. Soon, CNN put videos taken on the ground on the Web. Iran was now poised for nuclear attack. Its population would survive an Israeli counterstrike.

Israel, by contrast, was in chaos. There was nowhere for the Israelis to go. Ben Gurion Airport near Tel Aviv was closed by the rockets bombing it. Hundreds of thousands of Jews were mobbing the coastal marinas, desperately trying to escape to Cyprus in small boats. TV showed the panic. Deterrence, and the myth of Israeli invincibility, the bedrock of Israeli security, were disappearing.

But suddenly Iran declared that in the interest of world peace it would step back from the brink, having exposed the true nature of "the Zionist nuclear entity." This came as a welcome relief, especially to the U.S. team. They wanted out.

So the game ended. I believe this abrupt termination was artificial, but it was no accident. I've played in games that just got too intense. The design team had to break it off to prevent the animosity from getting out of hand.

Lessons were drawn, as they always are after a game. The United States needed better intelligence. Cruise missiles are a problem. The list went on with the usual items.

But there was an overarching lesson. Iran had thrown Israel into pandemonium without firing a shot. The population was terrified. The economy was in ruins. Israel's reputation as the Prussia of the Middle East was smashed. Yes, nuclear war had been avoided. Deterrence worked. But who in Israel, the United States, or, for that matter, Iran would claim this was the real lesson? Iran had used a small nuclear force to overturn Israeli deterrence and rupture the Middle East order. Tehran was now empowered with a tremendous psychological victory. Iran had stood up to the Israelis and the Americans and had gotten away with it.

What fascinated me almost as much as the lessons of the game was the mood. Games have moods, just as dramas do, which after all is what these exercises really are. Fear is the overriding mood I've seen in nuclear crisis games. In each instance, whether in Pentagon simulations or in actual crises, it's this fear more than anything else that stands out. It's a very different type of fear than the fear of being in combat. Participants have to make life-or-death decisions for millions of people. The stress is over making a wrong choice — and losing cities.

The players in this game were too young to have known this type of fear. I don't think any of the game participants believed such monumental life-and-death choices could actually exist. Yet they surely did exist for leaders in the first nuclear age. Now, as we enter the second nuclear age, they are back.

Contact Paul Rotenberg at pdr@rogers.com


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MUSLIM CLERIC CALLS U.S. AID TO EGYPT 'JIZYA'

Posted by Raymond Ibrahim, March 18, 2013

As earlier suggested, the wonderful thing about Salafis—those extra "radical" Muslims who seek to emulate as literally as possible prophet Muhammad's teachings and habits—is that they are so unabashed and frank about what they believe. Such is the degree of brainwashing that they have undergone. Unlike the Muslim Brotherhood, which was founded much earlier, doublespeak is not second nature to the Salafis.

Caption Text

The most recent example comes from Al Hafiz TV, an Egyptian Islamic station. During a roundtable discussion on the U.S. and foreign aid to Egypt, an Islamic cleric, clearly of the Salafi bent—he had their trademark mustache-less-beard—insisted that the U.S. must be treated contemptuously, like a downtrodden dhimmi, or conquered infidel; that Egypt must make the U.S. conform to its own demands; and that, then, all the money the U.S. offers to Egypt in foreign aid can be taken as rightfully earned jizya.

Historically, the jizya was money, or tribute, that conquered non-Muslims had to pay to their Muslim overlords to safeguard their existence, as indicated in Koran 9:29. As the spirit of Islam continues making a comeback, Muslims around the world continue calling for non-Muslims, especially Christian minorities under Islam, to resume paying the jizya, which was abolished in the 19th century thanks to European intervention.

According to the sheikh, Egypt must be less cooperative with the U.S. and at the same time insist for more monetary aid. If so, the sheikh believes that "America will accept; it will kiss our hands; and it will also increase its aid. And we will consider its aid as jizya, not as aid. But first we must make impositions on it."

When the host asked the sheikh "Do the Americans owe us jizya?" he responded, "Yes," adding that it is the price Americans have to pay "so we can leave them alone!" When the host asked the sheikh if he was proclaiming a fatwa, the latter exclaimed, "By Allah of course!" The sheikh added that, to become a truly Islamic state, Egypt must "impose on America to pay aid as jizya, before we allow it to realize its own interests, the ones which we agree to."

While the Egyptian cleric was focused on "international jizya"—that is, money paid by one non-Muslim nation to a Muslim nation, U.S money to Egypt—other Muslims have been receiving and enjoying individual "jizya" from Western, infidel governments, in the form of welfare aid.

Just last February, for example, Anjem Choudary, an Islamic cleric and popular preacher in the United Kingdom, was secretly taped telling a Muslim audience to follow his example and get "Jihad Seeker's Allowance" from the government—a pun on "Job Seeker's Allowance." The father of four, who receives more than 25,000 pounds annually in welfare benefits, referred to British taxpayers as "slaves," adding, "We take the jizya, which is our haq [Arabic for "right"], anyway. The normal situation by the way is to take money from the kafir [infidel], isn't it? So this is the normal situation. They give us the money—you work, give us the money, Allahu Akhbar ["Allah is Great"]. We take the money. Hopefully there's no one from the DSS [Department of Social Security] listening to this."

Thus, the non-Muslim world should be grateful to the Salafis for always and ever exposing Islam's teachings and beliefs. Immensely proud of and indoctrinated in their Islamic heritage, and like the earliest Muslim conquerors drunk with power and pride, convinced that Allah is on their side and they can do no wrong, today's Salafis are unabashed when it comes to the things of Islam, from evoking them to upholding them.

But of course, all this honesty is for naught for those many in the West who, having eyes and ears, do not see or hear reality.

Raymond Ibrahim is a Middle East and Islam specialist and author of Crucified Again: Exposing Islam's New War on Christians (2013) and The Al Qaeda Reader (2007). His writings have appeared in a variety of media, including the Los Angeles Times, Washington Times, Jane's Islamic Affairs Analyst, Middle East Quarterly, World Almanac of Islamism, and Chronicle of Higher Education. He was born and raised in the U.S. by Coptic Egyptian parents born and raised in the Middle East, which has provided him with equal fluency in English and Arabic. His understanding of the two the Western and Middle Eastern mindsets positions him to explain the Middle Eastern culture to the West. This article appeared March 18, 2013 and is archived at http://www.raymondibrahim.com/from-the-arab-world/muslim-cleric-calls-u-s-aid-to-egypt-jizya/


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NEW GOVERNMENT * KARZAI SPITS AT THE US * UN OBSERVERS RUN TO SAFETY OF ISRAEL * OBAMA COMING TO STOP ATTACK ON IRAN!

Posted by Steven Shamrak, March 18, 2013

New Government - 4 Parties, 68 Members by Isi Leibler

http://wordfromjerusalem.com/mulling-over-our-new-government/

After six tortuous weeks of horse trading, spins and hypocrisy, Israel has its 33rd government. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with Lapid, Jewish Home leader Naftali Bennett and former foreign minister Avigdor Liberman to confirm the terms of new government.

The principal beneficiaries were Yesh Atid and Bayit Yehudi who set aside their major political differences and made a pact to negotiate jointly towards the formation of the government. They succeeded and thus foiled Binyamin Netanyahu's efforts to play them against each other, ultimately obliging him to concede to their core demands.

The necessary legal documents were to be drawn up and signed on Thursday, leaving Netanyahu free to formally inform President Shimon Peres on Saturday night - the final day of the six weeks allocated to him - that he has mustered a Knesset majority. The coalition will comprise four parties: Likud-Beytenu (31 seats), Yesh Atid (19), Jewish Home (12) and Hatnua (6), for a total of 68 members in the 120-seat Knesset. Netanyahu's Likud Beitenu holds seven portfolios including Defense which former chief of staff Moshe Yaalon takes over from Ehud Barak.

Netanyahu has four critical years in which basic decisions affecting the future of Israel may well be determined. If he convinces his coalition partners to set aside the past and cooperate to devise long term strategies, both in terms of the peace process as well as implementing the long overdue domestic social, economic and electoral reforms, he will establish a legacy that could enable him to be regarded as one of the greatest leaders of the nation. But to achieve this he must resolve to set aside the sleazy political infighting and concentrate exclusively on serving the national interest. If he fails to do so, the government's life span will be extremely limited.

Food for Thought by Steven Shamrak

The most alarming predictions about Barack Hussein Obama's presidency have been realised. He was and is still weak in bring to a halt North Korean nuclear program; he created instability in the Middle East by allowing the Islamist's 'Spring' to flourish. Now he is letting Iran and its nuclear weapons program off the hook by applying political pressure on Israel. With a friend like this, who systematically holds Israel's hands during the fight with mortal foes, who needs enemies!

Karzai Spits at the US

Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel was greeted on his first visit to Afghanistan since taking office by suicide bombs, threats and Afghan President Hamid Karzais accusation that the US is colluding with the Taliban. Karzai said that those attacks, which together killed 19 people, aided US goals and accused US of holding peace talks with the radical Islamists and the bombs were in the "service of America." (Hundreds of billions of US tax-dollars are wasted on building democracy in Afghanistan and forging a fake alliance. Just imagine the White House 'outrage' if Israeli Prime Minister would publicly announce that the US aiding and abetting, which is actually the truth, the enemies of Israel - the best ally the US ever had!)

'Ugly Nothing' did not Condemn Syrian Rebels!

The abduction of 21 Philippine members of the United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF), which has monitored a ceasefire zone between Syria and Israel since 1974, has heightened security fears. Canada , Japan and Croatia have withdrawn their forces in recent months leaving only the Philippines, Austria and India in UNDOF. The UN has halted peacekeeping patrols in the Golan Heights amid fears of kidnapping and that fallout from the Syrian war could cause more countries to withdraw from its force. (There is no the UN Security Council resolution of condemnation, no protests of 'peace-loving' idiots!)

End of Another Temporary Party of Traitors

Barak announced his retirement from politics before the last election, and the members of his Atzmaut (Independence) party, which he formed when he split from the Labor party, decided they will not be running either. (Good Riddance! Barak's story is a clear example of the problems the political system of Israel has. When self-centered and psychological damaged people, who have no national pride or sense of national integrity, take over the country has only one way to go - into abyss!)

Additional $250 Million Given to Muslim Brotherhood

http://freedomoutpost.com/2013/03/kerry-praises-egypts-democracy-as-obama-slips-muslim-brotherhood-another-250-million/#ixzz2MiU0Un45

Secretary of State John "Swiftboat" Kerry gave praise to Muslim Brotherhood led Egypt for "their version of democracy" and released $250 million of American tax payer money into the Islamic regime's hands. Giving aid to Egypt and Israel is making tensions grow stronger, fueling an arms race that could end in bloodshed. We're aiding the future enemy.

Israel Cleared but Hamas is not Blamed for Death of a Baby

independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/un-clears-israel-and-says-errant-hamas-rocket-probably-killed-baby-in-gaza-8531161.html

An errant Hamas rocket probably killed the baby son of a BBC journalist in Gaza during the brief war between Hamas and Israel last November, according to a UN report into the incident. (There are no condemnations of Hamas from the 'righteous' anti-Semitic press and so-called human right organizations, but the usual silence!)

Outposts Dismantled 'in Honor' of Obama

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/166199#.VZK0DbyVsWM

1. The IDF has received orders to dismantle the new communities of Ramat Migron and Oz Tzion by the beginning of next week - in preparation for the visit of US President Barack H. Obama. The communities are in the area of Ramallah, which Obama will be visiting on his visit to Israel. 2. Barack Obama invites Miss Israel Yityish Aynaw to official state dinner. (Obama's visit is nothing but a photo opts and attempt to discourage Israel from destroying the Iranian nuclear program! And, he has no intention to free Pollard.)

French Anti-Semites Honours Israeli Minister Killer

The Paris suburb of Bezons honoured Majdi al-Rimawi, who was sentenced to life in prison in Israel for his role in the 2001 murder of tourism minister Rehavam Zeevi, last month. It was a unanimous decision taken by the Bezons local council to honour Rimawi. Al-Rimawi and three other Palestinians were convicted of Zeevi's assassination. The four are members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

PA to Obama: Stay off Temple Mount!

The Palestinian Authority has advised the White House in Washington to call off President Barack Obama's tour of the Western Wall and al Aqsa mosque on Temple Mount during his visit. His visits to those shrines, said the PA, would be an affirmation of Israeli sovereignty. The Palestinian Islamic Jihad called on its supporters to prevent the US president setting foot on Temple Mount with a hail of rocks and eggs. (Israel must advise Obama not to visit Ramallah as it would be affirmation of occupation of Jewish land by Arabs!)

Important Collaboration

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/166087#.VZK1nryVsWM

Israeli and American scientists at Ben Gurion University and the University of Michigan are collaborating on research to develop renewable energy technology. Each university has pledged half a million dollars to jumpstart the three-year program that is aimed at solving major challenges in the realm of advanced vehicle fuels, solar energy and thermoelectric materials, which convert heat to electricity.

UN observers Run to Safety of Israel

The flight of hundreds of UN Disengagement and Observers Force (UNDOF) soldiers - Indian, Austrian and Filipino - in trucks and APCs from the Syrian side of Golan into Israel was in full swing early Monday, March 11. Many more UN troops are expected to make their way during the day to refuge in IDF camps across the border.

Quote(s) of the Week:

"Without Israel, Cyprus and Saudi Arabia are toast, and they know it. Without Israel, oil would be $1,000 a barrel. Without Israel, the US would have to fund an extra $200 billion yearly defence budget to defend southern NATO countries from a Muslim caliphate's northward tsunami." - Mark Langfan, a New York based strategy expert - The US is not doing Israel any favours by granting it special status as a strategic ally! It is a self-serving US strategy, which prevents Israel from achieving its own national goals.

Obama Coming to Stop Attack on Iran!

http://www.debka.com/article/22813/Obama%19s-Israel-visit-is-on---to-sweeten-pill-of-nuclear-Iran

President Barack Obama will visit Israel later this month, the 20th, even if Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu fails to put together a governing coalition beforehand. "We're going," White House spokesman Josh Earnest said at a briefing for reporters - Secretary of state John Kerry thought otherwise when he skipped a visit to Israel as not worthwhile until a government is in place.

President Obama's calculations for making the trip are a lot more complicated than Kerry's - none of them are good news for Israel!

Obama arrives less than a month after the last Six-Power (US, Russia , UK, France, China and Germany) nuclear discussions with Iran ended in Kazakhstan . After those talks, US and Western media trumpeted "an unusual sense of optimism"... follow-up to Kazakhstan in April, shortly after Obama's talks in Jerusalem, would be devoted to "cementing that progress," which translated into rewarding putative nuclear concessions by Iran with the easing of economic sanctions.

There is serious disenchantment in Jerusalem about dangerous concessions made to Iran:

1. President Obama has given in to the Fordo uranium enrichment plant continuing to operate instead of shutting down, as demanded by Israel - even though its function is to turn out 20 percent pure (near-weapons grade) uranium;

2. He has even consented to the Iranians continuing to manufacture uranium to that level;

3. Washington has dropped its insistence on Iran sending out of the country its stocks of 3.5-5 percent enriched uranium. With these gains, the Iranian negotiators must have been laughing all the way home from their talks with the six big powers on 26-27 of February and crowing over what one Israeli official called " Tehran's huge success and Israel 's total defeat."

Conscious of how these concessions to the Islamic Republic are received in Jerusalem , it is no wonder that President Obama brushed off the invitation to address the Israeli Knesset, where lawmakers would likely put him on the spot. He has chosen instead to deliver a speech at Jerusalem 's Convention Center, so as to deliver his message straight to the Israeli public.

By going over the heads of Israel' s government and parliament to face a less informed audience, he believes he can get away with sweet-talking his surrender to a nuclear Iran .

When Air Force One lands in Israel March 20 and Israeli dignitaries push forward to greet the US president, a small group of anonymous Air Force pilots will be watching from a distance, waiting for the order to fly out and carry out their mission in a single night. (Obama and other international bigots have sold out Israel to Iran , and he is attempting to brain-wash Israelis to accept defeat and ignore the threat of nuclear armed Iran!)

Steven Shamrak was born in the former Soviet Union (USSR) and participated in the Moscow Zionist "refusenik" movement and currently lives in Melbourne, Australia. He publishes internet editorial letters on the Arab-Israeli conflict. He can be reached by email at StevenShamrak.e@gmail.com


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THE TEMPLE MOUNT - A JEWISH REALITY

Posted by Soulreflections, March 19, 2013

March 10 2013 , the International Web Cast of the 4th "Temple Mount Awareness Day" --- Did you watch? Did you listen? Did you hear? Do you care? Do you even know what is really going on here?

I was fortunate to be a guest on this years presentation and to my great chagrin, I have to say, that I have never been on the Temple Mount. Why? Well, I heard that there is always some kind of trouble there and for all my Zionist fire and for all my love for Israel and for all I have personally gone through in my life to finally get here, I really just avoided 'trouble". Much like most everyone.

Then came the Broadcast and things changed.

I met Rabbi Richman, the director of the "Temple Institute" in our pre-interview conversation and was immediately thrust into understanding what in reality we are talking about. I met a man of deep conviction, a man who literally puts his life on the line to fight for ME, MY Rights as a Jew and my heritage and legacy. Day and night, at any hour he is available and ready to take on 'the forces" which prevent Jews from praying on the Temple Mount. Let is us be very clear: the forces are Muslim but they are also a government, namely that of the State of Israel, who permit and have themselves allowed for this situation to exist in the first place.

Do you understand what that means? A Jew is not allowed to pray on the Mount, lest he be arrested. A Jew is not allowed to be seen moving his lips without taking an enormous chance of winding up in the hands of the watchful Arab Police force---DO YOU UNDERSTAND THAT A JEW IS LITERALLY AFRAID FOR HIS SAFETY ON G-D'S OWN HOLY GROUND WHERE WE HAVE WORSHIPPED FOR THOUSANDS OF YEARS? TODAY, IN MY COUNTRY, ON MY LAND, ON THE HOLIEST GROUND IN THE WORLD, I, A JEWESS HAVE TO FEAR FOR MY LIFE? dO YOU KNOW THAT TRUCKLOADS OF TEMPLE MOUNT 'SO CALLED DEBRIS" ARE DUMPED EVERY DAY --precious history destroyed---Did you know that????

Something is definitely wrong with this picture and something must be done.

"Temple Mount Awareness Day" was watched by Thousands, but must be see by millions. I venture to say, that 'the world' has no clue. I am not talking about the politicians, but people like you and me, people who vote, people who care about others, Noahide Law observers, Righteous Christians who value and follow their own religion etc. In simple terms, Humanity as a whole, which has been shown by thousands of years of world history, that the Temple was and will always be the seat of G-D ALMIGHTY - that the Temple is and was and will always be in the place where the Jewish People can and must come to pray. I will go further to say that the Temple belongs to the world, to every single person who Believes. We, the Jews, have always shared our blessings, we have always been seen as the lamplighters of the morality of the world, we invite you to join our fight to take back our/your POWER.

Where in the world is there another place, a holy place, where ANY HUMAN BEING is 'forbidden' to pray. Do you have any idea what this means??? Forbidden and arrested if he does and happens to be a Jew. It is ludicrous to think about this in a free society - On my land, in my home, I have to be afraid to move my lips???? and why???

Because, since the founding of the State of Israel, we, the Jews, after holocausts, inquisitions, murder and genocide, we keep trying to SHOW the world how 'fair' and giving and caring we are even about our sworn enemies. Foe the sake of 'peace' we give up territories, grounds, prisoners and OUR TEMPLE MOUNT.

Moshe Faiglin, the newly elected Parliament member of the Knesset was the honored guest at the 4th "Temple Mount Awareness" event. Besides being a very intelligent and competent politician, he is one of the only Knesset members who wholeheartedly speaks out for the right of the Jew to his Temple Mount and his Temple. He visits there and he PRAYS there. The point which brought things back into my reality was the fact that he said: "Bring your family and friends, bring your Rabbis...YOU GO!!!

Of course - if I go, my family and friends go. If the JEWISH PEOPLE THEMSELVES GO to express their need to be there and instead of fear to pray,

real awareness will be made PUBLIC - Not with the intent to cause a riot or an incident - but to exercise their G-d given right as Jews on OUR HOME GROUND.

That has to be our reality! We are not a people who stand in fear, we have always fought for our right To Be, we have always fought for our G-d and for our holy land---WE MUST AND CANNOT SHIRK OUR RESPONSIBILITY TO HIM, WHO GAVE IT TO US IN THE FIRST PLACE AND TO HIS "HOME" ON EARTH!!!

Stand up, go to the Mount, feel your holiness and whom YOU represent - connect with your ancestors, your sages, your heritage, your legacy, your people, the THRUTH.

"Silence is a Sin" said the Lubavitcher Rebbe - Don't be silent - don't forget who you are, what you are and before whom you will come to be judged.

Take your family, take your children, TEACH THEM to stand tall and be FREE! - Be a Jew and support this Cause. Jews of the world,

Human beings, Rally to the Mount - G-D is waiting for YOU!

Contact Soulreflections9 at Soulreflections9@aol.com


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CYPRUS, TERRORISM & DRUGS

Posted by ACD/EWI, March 19, 2013

For the first time during the Euro crisis, depositors will contribute to the cost of recapitalizing banks. But Cyprus's bailout precedent may end up affecting bank depositors elsewhere in Europe and even in the U.S.

This bailout scheme was initiated by Germany, and agreed upon by the Cypriot government, the International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank and the European Union. Here's how it works: Nicosia will find 5.8 billion euro from a 9.9 percent "stability levy" on deposits larger than 100,000 euro and a 6.75 percent levy on smaller deposits. The IMF will throw in a billion euro and the rest will come from the European Stability Mechanism. While the benefit would be limited the potential risks of destabilizing the whole banking system of Southern European eurozone countries, and beyond, are high.

Cyprus has become a major money-laundering destination for Russians even before the fall of the Soviet Union. They were joined oligarchs who found safe haven in the Cypriot banks. Not surprisingly, the Cypriot government doesn't wish to push them away. Instead, it works to minimize the burdens on the large depositors (Russians) so as not to "derail progress on renegotiating a 2.5 billion euro loan from Moscow."

Nobody is happy about this: not even Russia is pleased. But that's understandable as it's in Putin's interest to protect the billions of dollars of Russian deposits, laundered or not, and the depositors from paying out up to 2 billion euro:

"While assessing the proposed additional levy on bank accounts in Cyprus, Mr Putin said that such a decision, should it be made, would be unfair, unprofessional and dangerous," the president's spokesman said following the meeting. Anton Siluanov, Russia's finance minister, also criticized the move, stressing the EU's failure to discuss the proposal with Russia in advance. "The decision on the tax on deposits, in our opinion, is not fair because the problems of the banking supervision and regulation are passed on to investors," he told journalists after the meeting, adding: "I pity our businessmen."

All of this is truly wonderful. Cyprus wants to maintain its ability to attract offshore money, Russia wants to continue to have a place to do its dirty laundry, and the EU wants to bail out Cyprus by accommodating both. The small depositor who will pay for this is not happy, but he has little to say about it. Besides, he can't move his money: banks on Cyprus are closed for the time being. And one day, nit in the distant future we may end up facing the same 'bailout" solution for our banks.

Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld is the Director of the New York-based American Center for Democracy (ACD) and the Economic Warfare Institute (EWI). She has authored hundreds of articles and several books on terrorist financing and political corruption. This article appeared March 20, 2013 on the American Center for Democracy (ACD) website and is archived at
http//www:acdemocracy.org/cyprus-terrorism-drugs/


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NEW GOVERNMENT TO PROMOTE JEWISH NATION BILL

Posted by Ted Belman, March 19, 2013

"The law changes the balance between Israel's "democratic" and "Jewish" nature, and makes it clear that of the two principles, the definition of the state's Jewish nature is the more important one. This is very important. Now');">Now when the SC of Israel has to decide on an issue it stresses equality in its decision. Thus the Israel Land Authority cannot favour Jewish buyers even though the money which bought the land in the first place intended the purchase as being for Jews alone. The new law, should it pass gives priority to promoting Jewish rights at the expense of equality rights. I am all for it. Israel was created for Jews not for anybody who happens to live there.

The Likud and Habayit Hayehudi parties agreed in their coalition agreement to advance a controversial Basic Law subverting Israel's democratic identity to its identity as the state of the Jewish people.

Former MK Avi Dichter, then a member of Kadima, submitted two versions of the bill during the previous Knesset's term. The first would have removed the Arabic language as an official language in Israel, granting it instead a "special status." The second softened this clause.

According to the text of the first bill, the state would invest resources in promoting Jewish settlement but would not commit itself to building for other national groups.

The first version of the bill also included a clause stating that Jewish law would serve as a source of inspiration for Knesset legislation. While that formulation was dropped in the second version, the new bill stated that in cases where existing laws did not provide an adequate answer to a legal question, the courts should make their rulings "in light of the principles of justice, integrity and peace of Israel's heritage."

Senior members of Habayit Hayehudi could not say which of the formulations would be presented to the new Knesset, but they said they did not expect that the clause regarding the Arabic language would be part of the new version.

Dichter's version of the bill was based on a draft put together by the Institute for Zionist Stategies. Then-Kadima chair Tzipi Livni stepped in at the time to block the bill, following widespread public criticism.

Livni, now head of Hatnuah, is slated to become justice minister in the new government, as well as the head of the Ministerial Committee for Legislation, which decides which bills will receive the government's support. As such, she will have the power to either advance or block such a bill.

Comment by Ted Belman

This article says "As such, she will have the power to either advance or block such a bill." That's not true. The committee votes on whether to have Knesset vote on bill. The article linked to in this paragraph says:

to a large extent the fate of Knesset bills is actually determined by the 17 ministers who belong to the committee — and sometimes just by the handful who show up that day. In at least one vote, just one member — Justice Minister Yaakov Neeman, who heads the committee — was recorded as being present.

Livni said:

"that as the Chair of the Ministerial Committee on Legislation, she would block the Jewish Nation Law, which is a part of Likud's agreement with Bayit Yehudi.

"The law changes the balance between Israel's "democratic" and "Jewish" nature, and makes it clear that of the two principles, the definition of the state's Jewish nature is the more important one."

'The law would downgrade the status of the Arabic language as an official language and would promote construction policies that favor Jews."

Ted Belman is a retired lawyer and the Editor of Israpundit. He made aliya from Canada last year and now lives in Jerusalem, Israel. Contact him at tedbel@rogers.com This article was published March 18, 2013 in Israpundit and is archived at
http://www.israpundit.com/archives/39146


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PALESTINIANS VANDALIZE BILLBOARD OF OBAMA IN BETHLEHEM

Posted by Daily Alert, March 19, 2013

The article below was written by Elior Levy.

Dozens of Bethlehem residents vandalize large billboard bearing image of US president, stress that Obama would not receive warm welcome during Friday visitSW

The Palestinian protest against the upcoming visit of US President Barack Obama in Israel and the Palestinian Authority is gaining momentum: On Monday dozens of Bethlehem residents vandalized a large billboard bearing the image of the US president.

The young Palestinians were protesting over what they see as America's pro-Israel policy — they stressed that the president would not receive a warm welcome in Bethlehem.

The protestors some of whom belong to organized Palestinian movements while others are relatives of Palestinians imprisoned in Israel, convened just dozens of meters away from the Church of the Nativity, removed the billboard and then proceeded to drive away with the billboard.

They then spray painted the billboard with swastikas and a large — "X" over Obama's face. Incidentally, at the same time a convoy of American cars passed by. One of the protestors threw a shoe at the convoy and fled.

Last week Ramallah's main streets became filled with posters calling on Obama to leave his smartphone at home when visiting Ramallah seeing as Israel prevents the PA from utilizing the third-generation (3-G) cellular technology. Then unknown vandals marked an "X" over Obama's posters.

There has been a major Palestinian outcry against the proposed visit since the US president announced his intentions of including Ramallah and Bethlehem in his trip.

Contact Daily Alert at dailyalert@list-dailyalert.org


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AT ANY PRICE

Posted by Hebron, March 19, 2013

Over the past few days I've seen numerous articles, effectively open letters to Obama, suggesting courses of action while here in Israel. I believe it much more important, not to advise the President, rather to speak to Israeli leaders, those now holding the reins of power in our country.

Most groups that I guide here in Hebron visit, among other places, the museum in Beit Hadassah. This site allows people to receive, over a few minutes, a comprehensive education about the history of Jewish Hebron, over hundreds of years.

One of the most emotional places in the museum is the memorial room, dedicated to the memory of 67 Jews slaughtered in Hebron during the riots in August, 1929. In words and photos, people can understand, in a relatively short period of time, the background to the atrocities committed by their next door neighbors, and the subsequent consequences.

A day prior to the beginning of the massacre, Thursday, August 22, a group of Jews belonging to the Hagana, the Jewish defense organization, visited Hebron and met with the Jewish community leaders. They offered them weapons, saying that Mufti Haj Amin El Husseini was inciting and trouble was about to erupt. Hebron's Jews refused to take the weapons, explaining that they would only act as a provocation, that they'd already met with the city's Arab leadership, who promised to protect them. As a result, when, the next day, the rioting commenced, they had no means of protection. The results are history.

Upon conclusion of this explanation, I express two thoughts to my audience: First, in 1967, during the Six Day War, Israel did not conquer and occupy a foreign city when arriving in Hebron. Rather, they had come home. And second: We must be able to protect ourselves. Not only on an individual basis; rather on a national level. When Israel puts its security in the hands of others, the only thing we receive in return are dead Jews. Oslo left Israeli security with Arafat. The result: some 2,000 people killed by Arab terror. Israel abandoned Gaza to the Arabs and have paid a price of some 13,000 rockets and missiles shot into Israel from the land we gave them.

These are the same two thoughts which Israeli leaders must recite to themselves, as well as to their guests, in the coming days. Israel is our homeland. Hebron is the heart of Israel. Beit El is the path via which the Patriarch Abraham toured our land, and was literally a stairway to Heaven. Shilo was home to our most sacred sanctuary for hundreds of years. And of course, Jerusalem is our eternal capital.

Israel is facing a seemingly lethal threat from Iran. Syrian weapons of mass destruction may fall into the hands of Hizballah and Hamas. We cannot and must not allow responsibility for our security to be in the hands of anyone else but ourselves. Not at any time. But certainly not when the man who is President of the United States' middle name is Hussein.

While speaking of 'settlements' in Judea and Samaria, while discussing Jerusalem and the other holy cities in our Land, our leaders can pose simple questions to Obama and Kerry: 'Would you, in return for a peace accord with Al-Qaeda, give them Boston or Philadelphia?" "Would you grant them total autonomy or sovereignty in a section of Washington D.C.?"

And while discussing Syria's chemical weapons, and Iran's nuclear weapons program, "would you allow Canada to decide if and when the United States should attack and destroy North Korea's nuclear weapons' facilities?

Rafael Medoff, in an op-ed piece titled, Obama, FDR and Zionism in today's Jerusalem Post, basically expresses the bottom line: "By 1942, FDR was so averse to being seen as pro- Zionist that he rejected even a request to permit the Palestine (Jewish) Symphony Orchestra to name one of its theaters the "Roosevelt Amphitheatre... [We] asked the President about refugees, the White Paper, etc. What he proposed to do about these things. [We] made a number of suggestions to him as to what [we] thought he ought to do and the answer to all of these suggestions was 'No'... David Niles, a close adviser to FDR, once remarked that if Roosevelt had lived (and thus Harry Truman remained vice president), he probably would not have supported the creation of Israel, and as a result the Jewish state might never have been established."

This was the 'almighty FDR,' who, in 1933 said, 'The German authorities are treating the Jews shamefully and the Jews in this country are greatly excited. But this is also not a governmental affair. We can do nothing except for American citizens who happen to be made victims."

And what about the 'almighty BHO'. How will he be quoted fifty or sixty years from now?

'I really was very sorry, but there wasn't anything we could do, it was too late...'

The answer, clearly, is to make sure he understands, in no uncertain terms, Israel is our country, our land. It's not for sale, none of it, at any price. And we will make sure it stays that way, that it stays safe, at any price. Period.

David Wilder is spokesman of The Jewish Community of Hebron. You can contribute directly in Israel to The Jewish Community of Hebron, POB105, Kiryat Arba-Hebron 90100, email: hebron@hebron.org.il or phone: 972-52-431-7055. In USA, write to The Hebron Fund, 1760 Ocean Ave., Brooklyn, NY 11230, email: hebronfund@aol.com or phone: 718 677 6886.


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OBAMA'S WHITE HOUSE STAFF - JUST A SAMPLING

Posted by Roberta Dzubow, March 19, 2013

Caption Text

Arif Alikhan - Assistant Secretary for Policy Development for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security

Mohammed Elibiary - Homeland Security Adviser

Rashad Hussain - Special Envoy to the (OIC) Organization of the Islamic Conference

Salam al-Marayati - Obama Adviser - founder Muslim Public Affairs Council and its current Executive Director

Imam Mohamed Magid - Obama's Sharia Czar - Islamic Society of North America

Eboo Patel - Advisory Council on Faith-Based Neighborhood Partnerships

Contact Roberta Dzubow by email at Roberta@adgforum.com


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DEAR FAMILY, FRIENDS, AND COLLEAGUES: HAPPY PESACH 2013

Posted by Nurit Greenger, March 19, 2013

Caption Text

Dear Family, Friends, and Colleagues,

Since Moses parted the sea and took the Children of Israel out of bondage, around 1440 BCE, Jews have had many other forced exodus:

From Israel to Babylon by the Babylonians in 586 BCE; in 70AD, when the Romans destroyed the Temple and exiled the Jews to the four corners of the world; then came exodus from one European country to another for decades as the one from England; and then from Spain / the Spanish Inquisition in 1492, the Russian Pogroms in the 19th century, and the Holocaust which was the "Exodus" of 6Million Jews to Heaven. Then, as World War II ended, the remainder of European Jews' Exodus to Palestine and then the Exodus of 900,000 Jews who fled the Arab world and found rescue in the nascent nation state of the Jewish people, Israel. And the last, the Exodus of 1Million Russians Jews who immigrated to Israel during and after the Fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990s.

So Jews, we have made the rounds, by choice and by force, and we have returned home, to Jerusalem, to NEVER LEAVE AGAIN.

Happy Pesach to every Jew, to the one who already lives in Israel and the one who will live there, as God gathers us, for eternity, in the land He granted and promised to us.

Happy Pesach

Contact Nurit Greenger by email at nurit.nuritg@gmail.com. Visit her blog: http://ngthinker.typepad.com


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POW

Posted by Midenise, March 19, 2013

The article below was written by Dr. Hal Kushner who was born in 1941 in Honolulu, Hawaii. He graduated from the University of North Carolina with a BA degree in Chemistry in 1961, and he received his M.D. from the Medical College of Virginia in 1966. Dr. Kushner entered the Army while a medical student on May 12, 1965. He served his internship at Tripler Army Medical Center in Honolulu, the same hospital where he was born. He next received aviation medical training at Fort Rucker, Alabama, and Pensacola, Florida, before deploying to Vietnam as a Flight Surgeon in August 1967 with the 1st Squadron, 9th US Cavalry, 1st Air Cavalry Division. Kushner was captured by the Viet Cong west of Tam Ky, South Vietnam, on December 2, 1967. He spent the next 1,933 days in captivity in various prison camps, first in South Vietnam, and then toward the end of the war, in North Vietnam. He was released during Operation Homcoming on March 16, 1973. Col Kushner was inducted into the Army Aviation Hall of Fame in April 2001. This article is archived at
http://www.war-stories.com/pow-kushner-personal-story-1967.htm

At the 1st Cav reunion DR Hal Kushner, who serve with 1/9 Cav, 1 Cav Div, in Vietnam, told the story of his service in Vietnam and his horrible ordeals, extreme pain and suffering and unflinching loyalty and honor to the United States Army and our country.

The words of Dr. Hal Kushner:

I want you to know that I don't do this often. I was captured 2 Dec.1967, and returned to American control on 16 Mar.1973. For those of you good at arithmetic - 1931 days. Thus it has been 32 years since capture and 26 years since my return. I have given a lot of talks, about medicine, about ophthalmology, even about the D-Day Invasion as I was privileged to go to Normandy and witness the 50th anniversary of the invasion in Jun.1944.

But not about my captivity. I don't ride in parades; I don't open shopping centers; I don't give interviews and talks about it. I have tried very hard NOT to be a professional PW. My philosophy has always been to look forward, not backward, to consider the future rather than the past. That's a hell'uva thing to say at a reunion, I guess. In 26 years, I've given only two interviews and two talks. One to my hometown newspaper, one to the Washington Post in 1973, and a talk at Ft. Benning in 1991 and to the Military Flight Surgeons in 1993. I've refused 1,000 invitations to speak about my experiences. But you don't say no to the 1-9th, and you don't say no to your commander. COL Bob Nevins and COL Pete Booth asked me to do this and so I said yes sir and prepared the talk. It will probably be my last one.

I was a 26-year-old young doctor, just finished 9 years of education, college at the University of North Carolina, med school at Medical College of VA, a young wife and 3 year old daughter. I interned at the hospital in which I was born, Tripler Army Med Center in Honolulu, HI. While there, I was removed from my internship and spent most of my time doing orthopedic operations on wounded soldiers and Marines. We were getting hundreds of wounded GIs there, and filled the hospital. After the hospital was filled, we created tents on the grounds and continued receiving air evac patients. So I knew what was happening in Vietnam. I decided that I wanted to be a flight surgeon. I had a private pilot's license and was interested in aviation. So after my internship at Tripler, I went to Ft. Rucker and to Pensacola and through the Army and Navy's aviation medicine program and then deployed to Vietnam. While in basic training and my E&E course, they told us that as Doctors, we didn't have to worry about being captured. Doctors and nurses they said were not PWs, they were detained under the Geneva Convention. If they treated us as PWs, we should show our Geneva Convention cards and leave. It was supposed to be a joke and it was pretty funny at the time.

I arrived in Vietnam in Aug.1967 and went to An Khe. I was told that the Div. needed two flight surgeons; one to be the div. flight surgeon at An Khe in the rear and the other to be surgeon for the 1-9th, a unit actively involved with the enemy. I volunteered for the 1-9th. The man before me, CPT Claire Shenep had been killed and the dispensary was named the Claire Shenep Memorial Dispensary. Like many flight surgeons, I flew on combat missions in helicopters, enough to have earned three air medals and one of my medics, SSG Jim Zeiler used to warn me: "Doc, you better be careful. We'll be renaming that dispensary, the K&S Memorial Dispensary."

I was captured on 2 Dec 67 and held for five and a half years until 16 Mar 73. I have never regretted the decision that I made that Aug to be the 1-9th flight surgeon. Such is the honor and esteem that I hold the squadron. I am proud of the time I was the squadron's flight surgeon.

On 30 Nov.1967, I went to Chu Lai with MAJ Steve Porcella, WO-1 Giff Bedworth and SGT McKeckney, the crew chief of our UH-1H. I gave a talk to a troop at Chu Lai on the dangers of night flying. The weather was horrible, rainy and windy, and I asked MAJ Porcella, the A/C commander, if we could spend the night and wait out the weather.

He said, "Our mission is not so important but we have to get the A/C back." I'll never forget the devotion to duty of this young officer; it cost him his life.

While flying from Chu Lai to LZ Two Bits, I thought we had flown west of Hwy. 1, which would be off course. I asked Steve if we had drifted west. He called the ATC at Duc Pho and asked them to find him. The operator at Duc Pho said that he had turned on his radar off at 2100. He said, "Do you want me to turn it on and find you?" MAJ Porcella replied "Roj" and that was the last thing he ever said. The next thing I knew I was recovering from unconsciousness in a burning helicopter which seemed to be upside down. I tried to unbuckle my seat belt and couldn't use my left arm. I finally managed to get unbuckled and immediately dropped and almost broke my neck. My helmet was plugged into commo and the wire held me as I dropped out of the seat which was inverted. The helicopter was burning. Poor MAJ Porcella was crushed against the instrument panel and either unconscious or dead. Bedworth was thrown, still strapped in his seat, out of the chopper. His right anklebones were fractured and sticking through the nylon of his boot. SGT Mac was unhurt but thrown clear and unconscious. I tried to free Porcella by cutting his seatbelt and moving his. However, I was unable to. The chopper burned up and I suffered burns on my hands and buttocks and had my pants burned off. While trying to free Porcella, some of the M-60 rounds cooked off and I took a round through the left shoulder and neck. My left wrist and left collarbone were broken in the crash, and I lost or broke 7 upper teeth.

Well, after we assessed the situation - we had no food or water, no flares, no first aid kit or survival gear. We had two 38 pistols and 12 rounds, one seriously wounded WO co-pilot, a moderately wounded doctor, and an unhurt crew chief. We thought we were close to Duc Pho and Hwy 1 and close to friendlies. Bedworth and I decided to send Mac for help at first light.

We never saw him again. Later, 6 years later, COL Nevins told me that SGT Mac had been found about 10 miles from the crash site, shot and submerged in a rice paddy.

So on that night of 30 Nov.1967 I splinted Bedworth's leg, with tree branches, made a lean-to from the door of the chopper, and we sat in the rain for three days and nights. We just sat there. We drank rainwater. On the third morning, he died. We could hear choppers hovering over our crash site and I fired most of the rounds from our 38's trying to signal them, but cloud cover was so heavy and the weather so bad, they never found us. I took the compass from the burned out helicopter and tried to go down the mountain towards the east and, I believed, friendlies. My glasses were broken or lost in the crash and I couldn't see well: the trail was slippery and I fell on rocks in a creek bed and cracked a couple of ribs. I had my left arm splinted to my body with my army belt. My pants were in tatters and burned. I had broken teeth and a wound in my shoulder. I hadn't eaten or drunk anything but rainwater for three days. I looked and felt like hell. One of the cruel ironies of my life, you know how we all play the what if games, what if I hadn't done this or that, well, when I finally reached the bottom of the mountain, I estimated 4 hours after first light, the weather cleared and I saw choppers hovering over the top. I knew I couldn't make it up the mountain, and had to take my chances. But if I had only waited another 4 hours

I started walking up the trail and saw a man working in a rice paddy. He came over and said Dai-wi, Bac-si- CPT Doctor. He took me to a little hootch, sat me down and gave me a can of sweetened condensed milk and a C-ration can, can opener and spoon. This stuff was like pudding and it billowed out of the can and was the best tasting stuff I ever had. I felt very safe at that point. One minute later, my host led a squad of 14 VC with two women and 12 rifles came upon me. The squad leader said, "Surrenda no kill." He put his hands in the air and I couldn't because my left arm was tied to my body. He shot me with an M2 carbine and wounded me again in the neck. After I was apprehended, I showed my captors my Geneva Convention card, white with a red cross. He tore it up. He took my dogtags and medallion which had a St. Christopher's (medal) on one side and a Star of David on the other, which my dad had given me before leaving. They tied me with commo wire in a duck wing position, took my boots and marched me mostly at night for about 30 days. The first day they took me to a cave, stripped my fatigue jacket off my back, tied me to a door and a teenage boy beat me with a bamboo rod. I was told his parents were killed by American bombs. We rested by day, and marched by night. I walked on rice paddy dikes, and couldn't see a thing. They would strike these little homemade lighters and by the sparks they made, see four or five steps. I was always falling off the dikes into the rice paddy water and had to be pulled back up. It was rough. On the way, I saw men, women and kids in tiger cages, and bamboo jails. I was taken to a camp, which must have been a medical facility as my wound was festering and full of maggots and I was sick. A woman heated up a rifle-cleaning rod and gave me a bamboo stick to bite on. She cauterized my through and through wound with the cleaning rod and I almost passed out with pain. She then dressed the wound with mercurochrome and gave me two aspirin. I thought, what else can they do to me. I was to find out.

After walking for about a month through plains, then jungles and mountains, always west, they took me to a camp. I had been expecting a PW camp like a stalag with Hogan's Heroes; barbed wire, search lights, nice guards and red cross packages - and a hospital where I could work as a doctor. They took me to a darkened hut with an oriental prisoner who was not American. I didn't know whether he was Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotian or Chinese. He spoke no English and was dying of TB. He was emaciated, weak, sick and coughed all day and night. I spent two days there and an English-speaking Vietnamese officer came with a portable tape recorder and asked me to make a statement against the war. I told him that I would rather die than speak against my country. His words which were unforgettable and if I ever write a book, will be the title. He said, "You will find that dying is very easy; living, living is the difficult thing."

A few days later, in a driving rain, we started the final trek to camp. I was tied again, without boots, and we ascended higher and higher in the mountains. I was weak and asked to stop often and rest. We ate a little rice which the guards cooked. We actually needed ropes to traverse some of the steep rocks. Finally, we got to PW camp one. There were four American servicemen there, two from the US and two from Puerto Rico. Three were Marines and one in the Army. These guys looked horrible. They wore black PJs, were scrawny with bad skin and teeth and beards and matted hair. The camp also had about 15 ARVNs who were held separately, across a bamboo fence. The camp was just a row of hootches made of bamboo with elephant grass roofs around a creek, with a hole in the ground for a latrine. This was the first of five camps we lived in the South-all depressingly similar, although sometimes we had a separate building for a kitchen and sometimes we were able to pipe in water thru bamboo pipes from a nearby stream.

I asked one of the Marines, the man captured longest and the leader, if escape was possible. He told me that he and a special forces CPT had tried to escape the year before and the CPT had been beaten to death, while he had been put in stocks for 90 days, having to defecate in his hands and throw it away from him or lie in it. The next day I was called before the camp commander and chastised and yelled at for suggesting escape. My fellow PW then told me never to say anything to him that I didn't want revealed, because the Vietnamese controlled his mind. I threatened to kill him for informing on me. He just smiled and said I would learn. Our captors promised us that if we made progress and understood the evils of the war they would release us. And the next day, they released the two Puerto Ricans and 14 ARVNs PWs. The people released wore red sashes andgave anti-war speeches. Just before the release, they brought in another 7 American PWs from the 196th Light Bde who were captured in the TET offensive of 1968. I managed to write our names, ranks and serial numbers on a piece of paper and slip it to one of the PRs who was released. They transported the information home and in Mar 68 and our families learned we had been captured alive.

We were held in a series of jungle camps from Jan. 68 to Feb 71. At this time, conditions were so bad and we were doing so poorly, that they decided to move us to North Vietnam. They moved 12 of us. In all, 27 Americans had come through the camp. Five had been released and ten had died.

They died of their wounds, disease, malnutrition and starvation. One was shot while trying to escape. All but one died in my arms after a lingering, terrible illness. Five West German nurses in a neutral nursing organization, called the Knights of Malta, similar to our own Red Cross, had been picked up (I always thought by mistake) by the VC in the spring of 69. Three of them died and the other two were taken to North Vietnam in 1969 and held until the end of the war.

The twelve who made it were moved to North Vietnam on foot. The fastest group, of which I was one, made it in 57 days. The slowest group took about 180 days. It was about 900km. We walked thru Laos and Cambodia to the Ho Chi Minh trail and then up the trail across the DMZ until Vinh. At Vinh, we took a train 180 miles to Hanoi in about 18 hours. We traveled with thousands of ARVN PWs who had been captured in Lam Song 719, an ARVN incursion into Laos in 1971.

Once in Hanoi, we stayed in an old French prison called The Citadel or as we said, The Plantation until Christmas 72 when the X-mas bombing destroyed Hanoi. Then we were moved to the Hoa Lo or Hanoi Hilton for about three months. The peace was signed in Jan 73 and I came home on Mar 16 with the fourth group. In the North we were in a rough jail. There was bucket in the windowless, cement room used as a latrine. An electric bulb was on 24 hours. We got a piece of bread and a cup of pumpkin soup each day and three cups of hot water. We slept on pallets of wood and wore PJs and sandals and got three tailor made cigarettes per day. We dry shaved and bathed with a bucket from a well twice per week, got out of the cell to carry our latrine bucket daily.

Towards the end, they let us exercise. There were no letters or packages for us from the south, but I understood some of the pilots who had been there awhile got some things. In the summer, it was 120 in the cell and they gave us little bamboo fans. But there were officers and a rank structure and commo done through a tap code on the walls. No one died. It was hard duty, but not the grim struggle for survival which characterized daily life in the camps in the south. In the north, I knew I would survive. In the south, we often wanted to die. I knew that when they ordered us north, I would make it. In the south, each day was a struggle for survival. There were between three and twenty-four PWs at all times. We ate three coffee cups of rice per day. In the rainy season, the ration was cut to two cups. I'm not talking about nice white rice, Uncle Ben's. I'm talking about rice that was red, rotten, and eaten out by bugs and rats, cached for years, shot through with rat feces and weevils. We arose at 4, cooked rice on wood ovens made of mud. We couldn't burn a fire in the daytime or at night unless the flames and smoke were hidden, so we had these ovens constructed of mud which covered the fire and tunnels which carried the smoke away. We did slave labor during the day, gathering wood, carrying rice, building hootches, or going for manioc, a starchy tuberous plant like a potato. The Vietnamese had chickens and canned food. We never got supplements unless we were close to dying then maybe some canned sardines or milk. We died from lack of protein and calories. We swelled up with what is called hungry edema and beriberi. We had terrible skin disease, dysentery, and malaria. Our compound was littered with piles of human excrement because people were just too sick or weak to make it to the latrine.

We slept on one large pallet of bamboo. So the sick vomited and defecated and urinated on the bed and his neighbor. For the first two years, we had no shoes, clothes, mosquito nets or blankets. Later, in late 69, we got sandals, rice sacks for blankets, and a set of clothes. We nursed each other and helped each other, but we also fought and bickered. In a PW situation the best and the worst come out. Any little flaw transforms itself into a glaring lack. The strong can rule the weak. There is no law and no threat of retribution. I can report to you that the majority of the time, the Americans stuck together, helped each other and the strong helped the weak. But there were exceptions and sometimes the stronger took advantage of the weaker ones. There was no organization, no rank structure. The VC forbid the men from calling me Doc, and made me the latrine orderly to break down rank structure. I was officially forbidden from practicing medicine. But I hoarded medicine, had the men fake malaria attacks and dysentery so we could acquire medicine and keep it until we needed it. Otherwise, it might not come. I tried to advise the men about sanitary conditions, about nutrition and to keep clean, active and eat everything we could; rats, bugs, leaves, etc. We had some old rusty razor blades, and I did minor surgery, lancing boils, removing foreign bodies, etc. with them, but nothing major.

At one time, in the summer of 68, I was offered the chance to work in a VC hospital and receive a higher ration. The NVA Political officer, who made the offer and was there to indoctrinate us, said it had been done in WW II. I didn't believe him and didn't want to do it anyway, so I refused and took my chances. Later, upon return, I learned that American Army doctors in Europe in WW II, had indeed worked in hospitals treating German soldiers. But I'm glad now I did what I did. We had a 1st Sergeant who had been in Korea and in WW II. He died in the fall of 68 and we were forbidden from calling him "Top". The VC broke him fast. I was not allowed to practice medicine unless a man was 30 minutes away from dying, then they came down with their little bottles of medicine and said "Cure him!" At one point we were all dying of dysentery and I agreed to sign a propaganda statement in return for chloromycetin, a strong antibiotic, to treat our sick. Most of us were seriously ill, although a few never got sick, maintained their health and their weight. I never figured it out.

When a man died, we buried him in a bamboo coffin and said some words over his grave and marked it with a pile of rocks. I was forced to sign a death certificate in Vietnamese. I did this 13 times. The worst period was the fall of 68. We lost five men between Sept and Christmas. Shortly before the end of Nov., I thought I was going to lose my mind. All of these fine young strong men were dying. It would have been so easy to live, just nutrition, fluids, and antibiotics. I knew what to do, but had no means to help them. I was depressed and didn't care whether I lived or died myself. At this time, we were simply starving to death. As an example of how crazy we were, we decided to kill the camp commander's cat. Several of us killed it, and skinned it. We cut off its head and paws and it dressed out to about three pounds. We were preparing to boil it when one of the guards came down and asked us what was going on. We told him we had killed a weasel by throwing a rock. The guards raised chickens and the chickens were always being attacked by weasels. Well, the guard, who was a Montagnard, an aborigine, found the feet, and knew it was the cat. The situation became very serious. The guards and cadre were mustered..it was about 3 am. The prisoners were lined up and a Marine and I were singled out to be beaten. He was almost beaten to death. I was beaten badly, tied up with commo wire very tightly (I thought my hands would fall off and knew I would never do surgery again) for over a day. I had to bury the cat. And I was disappointed I didn't get to eat it. That's how crazy I was.

Shortly thereafter, the Marine who had been beaten so badly died. He didn't have to. He simply gave up, like so many. Marty Seligman, a professor of ology at University of Pennsylvania has written a book about these feelings called Learned Helplessness and Death. The Marine simply lay on his bamboo bed, refused to eat, wash or get up and died. So many did this. We tried to force them to eat, and to be active, but nothing worked. It was just too hard. This Marine wavered in and out of coma for about two weeks. It was around Thanksgiving, the end of November. The rains had been monstrous and our compound was a muddy morass littered with piles of feces. David Harker of Lynchburg, VA and I sat up with him all night. He hadn't spoken coherently for over a week. Suddenly, he opened his eyes and looked right at me. He said, "Mom, dad...I love you very much. Box 10, Dubberly, Louisiana." That was Nov 68.

We all escaped the camp in the south. Five were released as propaganda gestures. Ten Americans and three Germans died and twelve Americans and two Germans made it back. I am the only PW who was captured before the end of 67 to survive that camp. I came back Mar 16, 1973 and stayed in the hospital in Valley Forge, PA for a month getting fixed up with several operations and then went on convalescent leave. The first thing I did was go to Dubberly, LA and see the Marine's father. His parents had divorced while he was captured. I went to see five of the families of those that died and called the others on the phone.

It was a terrible experience, but there is some good to come from it. I learned a lot. I learned about the human spirit. I learned about confidence in yourself. I learned about loyalty to your country and its ideals and to your friends and comrades. No task would ever be too hard again. I had renewed respect for what we have and swore to learn my country's history in depth (I have done it) and to try to contribute to my community and set an example for my children and employees. I stayed on active duty until 77 when I was honorably discharged and entered the reserve from which I retired an as O-6 in 86. I have a busy medical practice down in Florida and been remarkably successful. I am active in my community in a number of ways and despite being drenched with Agent Orange a number of times and having some organs removed, have enjoyed great health. Except for some arthritis and prostate trouble, I'm doing great. So I was lucky...very lucky and I'm so thankful for that. I'm thankful for my life and I have no bitterness. I feel so fortunate to have survived and flourished when so many braver, stronger and better trained men did not.

Contact Milton Franks-Lhermann at midenise@zahav.net.il


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SPAIN TO PROSECUTE IMRAN FIRASAT FOR 'CRIME' OF CRITICIZING ISLAM

Posted by Stand Up America, March 19, 2013

This week, Spain has formally accused Imran Firasat of inciting or provoking hatred and violence according to Article 510 of Spanish Penal Code, and have decided to prosecute him for the 'crime' of criticizing Islam and hurting the feelings of Muslims living in Spain.

Last year, with the collaboration of Dr Terry Jones and Stand Up America Now, Imran produced a movie, "The Innocent Prophet", on the Prophet Muhammad's life. The film, released on December 15th, has received over 65,000 views on our youtube channel, StandUpAmericaNow.

Because of the movie, both Imran and Dr Jones were deemed a 'threat to the national security of Spain.' Dr Jones was banned from Spain and placed on the Schengen List, effectively banning him from all of Europe.

The Spanish government revoked Imran's refugee status, granted to him originally because he was imprisoned and tortured in Pakistan for leaving Islam. He is at risk of being deported to an Islamic country, where he will definitely be killed for 'blaspheming' Islam and the Prophet Muhammad. That revokation decision is in the process of being appealed with the help of the Legal Project, Middle East Forum, and Discourse Institute UK. But now Spain is looking for a way to imprison him through this latest prosecution.

Imran has discovered that a Muslim named Helal Jamal Abboshi Khaledi, who is the General Secretary of "Union de Comunidades Islamicas en España" (Union of Islamic Communities in Spain), lodged complaints against his website, his movie and his activities concerning Islam. In his complaints, Mr. Khaledi threatened the Spanish authorities with upcoming violence by Muslims.

Imran writes, "It may be pointed out that for past 8 years, I have given more than a hundred interviews in the Spanish media, criticizing Islam because of its violent ideology and discriminatory social system, I have written a biography on Prophet Muhammad's life in Spanish, I have made several cartoons of Muhammad, I have formally petitioned the Spanish government for banning the Quran, which the Spanish parliament even admitted for consideration. And despite of all these, I was never prosecuted nor asked to stop doing the same. Even if it is about the movie "The Innocent Prophet", I formally informed all important institutions of the government about my plan prior to its production. And I never received a response to my letters, presumably because they had not found anything in the project that would violate the law. They were fully aware that what I was doing was within my right to freedom of expression."

"But after this Islamic organization complained about my opinions on Islam, the entire government jumped on its feet. This shows how powerful or menacing Muslims have become in Spain and in the wider western world. Just a complaint from them against someone seems to spur major government departments of western countries into action. Those ministers, who were previously busy with their fiestas and never cared about my movie or opinions on Islam, suddenly jumped into action for prosecuting me, despite the fact that I have done everything within my right to freedom of expression without breaking any Spanish law. They are ready to abuse their power to influence the judicial system against me just to make Muslims happy."

IMRAN'S LETTER FROM SPAIN IN FULL

Spain's willingness to violate its own laws is an indirect result of the weakness of the United States government and the Obama administration's continuing to appease Islam and to threaten anyone who speaks out against Islam. President Obama himself has said, "The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam." The words "MUST NOT", alone are a type of threat, "MUST NOT belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam." Those words are directly from our President, a protector of radical Islam, a protector of violence and anti-constitutional actions.

Obama's blatant destructive actions against the U.S. Constitution leads other nations to ignore their own constitutions, which victimizes their own law-abiding citizens.

Thank you,

Dr Terry Jones

Contact Stand Up America at info@standupamericanow.org


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NOBEL LAUREATE TELLS UN COUNCIL: 'STOP UNDERMINING PEACE'

Posted by AFSI, March 19, 2013

As President Obama prepares for his trip to Israel, Ramallah, and Jordan, we see that he has already made decisions based on the prevailing lies, myths, deceptions, and fantasies that are supported by the enemies of Israel - especially the UN. Ambassador Alan Baker, part of the Levy report Committee that found Israel blameless in terms of the evils of which it is accused, writes below a most erudite and convincing article regarding Israel's legality. Nobel Peace Laureate David Trimble goes after the UN Human Rights Commission in its failure to address true human rights violations. See below for these critically important reports. Would that the Obama team would read and learn and act accordingly.

GENEVA, March 18, 2013 - Nobel Peace Laureate David Trimble, member of the British House of Lords, took the floor this morning at the UN Human Rights Council-in a debate with its commission of inquiry into Israeli settlements-to deliver the following statement on behalf of the Geneva human rights group UN Watch, which also organized a UN press conference where Lord Trimble addressed the international media. The video will follow in our next update.

Nobel Peace Laureate Tells U.N. Council: 'Your inquiry is wrong, your report undermines peace, stop the selectivity against Israel'

Caption Text

UN Watch statement delivered by The Right Honourable Lord David Trimble, in the UN Human Rights Council debate on Israeli Settlements, 18 March 2013

On receiving the Nobel Peace Prize 15 years ago, I cited Edmund Burke. My experience in Northern Ireland underlines his insistence that every idea or proposal derives its merit from circumstance, which carries more weight than abstraction and ideology.

I am a firm believer in a two-state solution, which will require difficult compromises.

This report, however, does not help. By urging the removal of all settlers living beyond the green line, the report is inconsistent with Security Council Resolution 242, endorsed by the Council decision establishing this commission.

It could lead to the utterly grotesque consequence that the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem should be returned to the desolate condition that existed between 1948 and 1967.

The Report's conclusions address one of the issues in a high handed and one-sided manner. It is not the necessary comprehensive agreement; nor is it part of one. It amounts to a unilateral measure of the sort opposed by the international community.

I have to say that the very idea of this inquiry is wrong. Negotiations can only be by the Israelis and the Palestinians. Others at best can play a helpful role. But outside bodies purporting to make authoritative pronouncements on major issues over the heads of the parties can only undermine and subvert the peace process.

This report abandons principles established in the Clinton Camp David talks, and applied in the Road Map and the Olmert-Abbas talks.

The United Nations and its human rights bodies should all be working with others to advance the cause of peace, not to hinder it.

I regret to say that the Council displays the same selectivity that led to the abolition of the earlier Commission. I urge you to heed the criticism by successive UN secretary-generals of this Council's habit of singling out only one specific country, to the exclusion of virtually everything else.

Thank you, Mr. President.

Helen Freedman is executive director of Americans For a Safe Israel/AFSI. She can be contacted at afsi@rcn.com.


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WHEN ASSIMILATIONIST LIBERAL JEWS QUOTE SCRIPTURE

Posted by Steven Plaut, March 19, 2013

When I was a lad, we used to suffer from the frequent visits of missionaries who often canvassed our neighborhood, presumably because of the large number of Jewish families whose souls could be saved there.

Occasionally, I would chat up these people, and at one point, I asked about the training and preparation they undergo before taking to the streets to save our doomed souls. The missionary confided to me that she had learned 15 or 20 selected Biblical quotations in a special seminar - including many especially chosen because the quotes were thought to hold persuasive power for Jewish listeners - and she simply pulled these out during missionary visits.

Possibly some of the missionaries knew their Bible backward and forward, but the ones with whom I came into contact were apparently all one-day-crash-course Bible thumpers. (I learned that all I needed to do to drive these neighborhood missionaries into a state of confused silence was to produce an alternative Biblical quote not on their list of 15 or 20, or show them how their quotes of choice had been wrenched out of their overall context.)

This comes to mind because it is strongly reminiscent of a fad quite common these days among Jewish assimilated liberals and leftists in the United States. These people constitute the School of Jewish Politically-Correct Bible Thumpers. They advocate the PC fads and programs of the American Left, while coating them with a thin veneer of supposedly Biblical ethics.

Like the missionaries of my youth, they learn a dozen or so select Biblical phrases, taken out of context, and argue that the Bible and traditional Judaism unambiguously require that one accept and support a left-wing political agenda. I assume that most readers are familiar with these folks.

Examples of Jewish politically-correct Bible thumping abound. The most outrageous, of course, are the Cheech-and-Chong ethics and the political platform of the editors of Tikkun magazine, featuring the Politics of Meaning psychobabble promoted by "Rabbi" Michael Lerner.

But many mainstream liberal leaders of the Jewish community also engage in Biblical posturing in order to conscript scripture for support of liberal fads. Generally, such Bible-based PC preaching operates through conjuring up the ethics of the Prophets as scriptural underpinning for the Left's political agenda.

The term "Prophetic Ethics" is used to justify support for everything from affirmative action to abortion on demand, animal rights to homosexual marriage, ecological activism to various and sundry redistributionist social programs.

The Oslo peace accord, it should go without saying, was accorded a particularly hallowed place in the doxology of the Jewish politically-correct Bible thumpers.

What is one to make of all this? Let us begin by noting that the attempt by Jewish leftists to conjure up scriptural support for their political agenda might be somewhat more persuasive if these same people were practitioners of traditional Judaism. Orthodox politically-correct Bible thumping is extremely rare, albeit not completely non-existent.

In most cases, politically-correct Bible thumpers are scripturally motivated only under circumstances that they find convenient, and with respect to those political causes they happen to find appealing. Otherwise, they simply ignore everything else in scripture and halacha (Jewish Law) that does not fit their political agenda.

These folks are generally not Jews whose lifestyles are determined by Biblical rules regarding, say, diet, Sabbath, sexual relations, etc. Indeed, when Scripture clearly favors a moral or political position that is not fashionable, these same PC Bible thumpers suddenly decline to adapt themselves to Biblical ethics.

At times, they will go through contortions to force their supposed understanding of these ethics into a PC mold. For example, there is probably nothing as clear-cut as the Biblical prohibition against homosexuality, yet the Thumpers insist that gay "marriage" is the ultimate manifestation of Biblical values. The very notion of gay rights is completely antithetical to Biblical morality; the Bible, in fact, explicitly labels sodomy an abomination and makes it a capital offense. You can agree or disagree with that opinion, but there is no room for any doubt as to what the Bible's position is.

But that did not stop the PC branch of the Reform and Conservative movements from deciding that Reform rabbis can ordain gay marriages. I doubt Reconstructionist "rabbis" would have any problem performing a marriage between a man and his goat.

Similarly, while the Jewish religious position on abortion is not identical with the one espoused by the Roman Catholic Church and other Christian denominations, abortion on demand when a mother's life is not in danger is hardly a position held by traditional Judaism.

One can accept or reject the scriptural view of homosexuality or abortion - it's a free country. But if one is representing one's political agenda as being Biblically-based, why the arbitrarily selective distortion?

The biggest problem with PC appeals to Prophetic Ethics and Jewish compassion is that there is absolutely no support in Jewish tradition for feel-good advocacy programs that actually exacerbate real-world problems. In other words, one cannot conscript Biblical ethics and morality on behalf of a political cause - even if doing so makes one feel righteous and moral - until one can at least show credibly that the cause would indeed resolve or alleviate real-world problems.

The PC Biblical Ethics-poseurs are too lazy to go out and actually acquire the analytic tools needed for assessing policy proposals. Learning economics, statistics, cost/benefits accounting, etc., requires effort and investment. The PC postureurs prefer to practice effortless recreational compassion and armchair peacemaking.

Besides, the very first thing one learns in social science and in policy analysis is that all things have tradeoffs. That is the one truth with which leftist Biblical Ethics-poseurs and other PC preachers simply cannot cope. If a policy proposal has both costs and benefits (and which does not?), there is no way that selective scriptural quotation and appeals to Prophetic Ethics can resolve the dilemma.

If a proposal to improve the quality of the environment also produces higher food prices or higher energy or transportation prices and so impacts living standards (especially for the poor), what is one to do? Should the proposal be adopted or rejected in the name of justice and ethics? Social science has a tool for answering such dilemmas (namely, cost/benefits evaluation). Those who issue vague and highly generalized appeals to Biblical ethics do not. They simply want to make themselves feel righteous without having to exert any real effort.

Similarly, one cannot rationalize any policy in the name of the Prophetic love of peace unless it can first be shown to produce peace. The Oslo peace formula cannot be rationalized by an appeal to the Biblical yearning for peace unless it can be shown analytically to lead truly to peace. Those who think the Oslo process does not lead to peace are not only justified - they are obligated - to oppose it, precisely because of their yearning for peace and their ethical concerns. Opponents of the Oslo process are no less fond of peace than its politically correct supporters, just more skeptical or analytically dissident. (For the sake of argument, I am intentionally ignoring those sections of scripture that rule out territorial compromise in the Land of Israel altogether, EVEN for peace.)

In some cases, the PC Bible thumpers take positions in such clear contradiction to the scriptural ethics they claim to uphold that one does not know whether to laugh or cry. You would never know from the "social action" agitprop of the Reform and the Conservatives against the death penalty that Judaism is unambiguously in FAVOR of it! Not only is there no Biblical case for animal rights (although the humane treatment of animals is indeed mandated when they are not being eaten or turned into shoes), but one of the most clear-cut messages of the Bible is that human interests always take priority over those of animals. It's true that the Bible does not explicitly prohibit vegetarianism, except on Passover, but there is absolutely nothing therein that mandates it, and much rabbinic commentary is concerned with the rules of kosher slaughter and diet.

Another example: While there is a clear Biblical basis for charity, it is equally clear that the emphasis is on individual charitable acts over which the giver exercises control, choice and personal responsibility. There is nothing that can be interpreted as mandating a massive welfare state that deprives individuals of control over their property; indeed, a good deal of Biblical and rabbinic law concerns the protection and preservation of private property rights. The main forms of Biblical mandatory income-redistribution regard funding Levites and priests.

Finally, it should be abundantly clear to anyone reading the Bible, even superficially, that Prophetic Ethics are premised upon and augment - and in many cases are thought to be a means for achieving, protecting and developing - Jewish national existence and national self-interest. (Contrast this with the recent fatwa by Tikkun's Moonbeam Lerner - that the Jubilee laws mean Israel has to give back its lands to the "Palestinians.") The very same Jewish politically correct Bible thumpers who argue that Prophetic Ethics mandate the Left's political agenda are generally the first to distance themselves from (if not outright denounce) all acts and ideas designed to promote and protect Jewish national existence and national interests. The hypocritical pretend-enthusiasm for Prophetic Ethics on the part of the PC Bible Thumpers is best understood as part of the overall trend of Jewish assimilation in North America. Liberalism has been the main avenue of assimilation for North American Jews. In effect, assimilationist Jews long ago substituted the liberal/Left political agenda for Judaism as their religion. They are as zealously attached to this pseudo-religion as most Jews in the past were to authentic Judaism.

Like all religious beliefs, this devotion to liberalism is by definition non-rational. Assimilated Jews adhere to this religion of liberalism even when it is clearly harmful to their own self- interests, as in the case of the apartheid racial preference policy euphemistically known as "affirmative action". And the astronomical intermarriage rates of American non-Orthodox Jews reflect the fact that, once liberalism has replaced Judaism as the religion of the Jews, marrying a non-Jewish liberal is simply not looked upon as marrying outside the faith. Jewish and gentile liberals observe the same "religion".

Shakespeare's Hamlet is a play about a royal family of Danes. It uses Danish images and symbols and takes place, as it were, inside a Danish castle. But it would be absurd to represent Hamlet as a Danish play. It is an Elizabethan English play. In the same way, the Jewish Politically Correct Bible Thumpers use Jewish imagery and symbols in order to market the political agenda of the Left. But it is absurd to represent their position as one motivated by and expressing Jewish traditional ethics and Biblical morality. Theirs is a leftist ideology, and not, by any stretch of the imagination, a Jewish one.

Steven Plaut is an American-trained economist, a professor of business administration at Haifa University and author of "The Scout." He frequently comments — both seriously and satirically — on Israeli politics and the left wing academic community. Write him at splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il His website address is http://www.stevenplaut.blogspot.com.


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THE CHRISTIAN LEFT'S PECULIAR HATRED OF ISRAEL

Posted by Dr History, March 19, 2013

The article below was written by Joseph Puder who is a freelance journalist and the founder and executive director of the Interfaith Taskforce for America and Israel (ITAI). This article appeared March 18, 2013 in Frontpage Magazine and is archived at
http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/181709/christian-lefts-peculiar-hatred-israel-joseph-puder? utm_source=FrontPage+Magazine&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=da7776a6ef-Mailchimp_FrontPageMag

boycott2

Last week Jerusalem witnessed the convergence of 80 Christian leaders from 20 countries and five continents. They came to Israel to express their solidarity with the Jewish state and its Jewish people. The occasion was the fourth bi-annual leadership forum of Christians for Israel; a non-denominational Christian organization that was established in the Netherlands in the 1970s and has grown in numbers to the hundreds of thousands. Issuing "A call to repentance, a word of hope," their statement declared that God has not terminated his everlasting covenant with Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and their descendants, and that the Church has definitely not replaced Israel as God's covenant people. "The return of the Jewish people to the land is a wonderful sign of hope — it proves that God is faithful to His word, and that He is preparing all things for the coming of the Messiah and the establishment of God's kingdom on earth."

By way of contrast, "progressive" Christians influenced by "Liberation Theology" and tainted by a Marxist worldview have mobilized on behalf of the Palestinians (not Syrian Muslim children being murdered by Muslims or Coptic Christians being persecuted in Egypt) and against "Zionist" Israel, a code-word for Jews.

If one wishes to understand "progressive" Christianity's vile anti-Semitism, consider this; of all the evil in the world including the ongoing human butchery of civilians in Syria, the persecution of Christians in Egypt, Iraq, Iran, Turkey and the Palestinian territories, slavery in Arab Muslim Sudan and Saudi Arabia, religious intolerance in Pakistan, and gross human rights violations in China, Russia, Africa, Asia, and Latin America, what do the Quakers, the Church of England Christian Aid, the Church of Scotland-Methodist Church, and an assortment of mainline Protestant churches chose to boycott? Products produced in the Jewish "settlements" of Judea and Samaria.

To add insult to injury, mainline Protestant church leaders and theologians released a statement last June titled "A Call to Action: A U.S. Response to Kairos Palestine." This biased, one-sided document stated:

We begin with a confession of sin to Palestinians in the State of Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, the diaspora and in refugee camps in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria. As U.S. Christians, we bear responsibility for failing to say "Enough!" when our nation's ally, the State of Israel, violates international law. Our government has financed Israel's unjust policies and has shielded its government from criticism by the international community. At the outset of the current U.S. administration, our government led Palestinians to believe that, at last we would pursue a political solution based on justice. But the "peace process" has continued to be no more than a means for the ongoing colonization of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, the imprisonment of Gaza and the continuation of the structures of oppression.

For starters, one should question what international law Israel has violated with regards to the Palestinians. UNSC Resolution 242 of 1967 calls for peace in exchange for territories (albeit not all territories captured by Israel in 1967. Gush Etzion was Jewish territory conquered by Jordan in the 1948 War of Independence as was the Old City of Jerusalem's Jewish Quarter). Lord Caradon, Britain's Ambassador to the UN and a key drafter of Resolution 242 said, "It would have been wrong to demand that Israel return to its positions of June 4, 1967. That is why we [the members of the UNSC] didn't demand that the Israelis return to them and I think we were right not to."

Israel's Ambassador to the UN (1978-1984) and International law professor, Yehuda Blum, asserted in a June 11, 1979 speech in Washington, D.C.:

A corollary of the inalienable right of the Jewish people to its Land is the right to live in any part of Eretz Yisrael, including Judea and Samaria which are an integral part of Eretz Yisrael. Jews are not foreigners anywhere in the Land of Israel. Anyone who asserts that it is illegal for a Jew to live in Judea and Samaria just because he is a Jew is in fact advocating a concept that is disturbingly reminiscent of the "Judenrein" policies of Nazi Germany banning Jews from certain spheres of life for no other reason than that they were Jews. The Jewish villages in Judea, Samaria and the Gaza district are there as of right and are there to stay.

Blum observed that

The right of Jews to settle in the Land of Israel was also recognized in the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, which stressed the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and... the grounds for reconstituting - I repeat - reconstituting "their national home in that country." The Mandatory Power was also entrusted with the duty to encourage close settlement by Jews on the land, including state lands and waste lands not required for public purposes.

The Call to Action by the mainline Protestant churches does not mention Israel's complete withdrawal from Gaza or the Hamas terror campaign against Israel, nor Hamas's Islamic intolerance and its rejection of peace with Israel or recognition of its right to exist as a Jewish State.

Adam Gregerman, writing for Religious Dispatches, pointed out:

In their advocacy for the Palestinian cause, however, the Kairos USA authors have rolled back the clock. In its critique of Israeli policies, the statement troublingly undermines these positive Christian views and takes a zero-sum attitude toward the conflict. Out of a desire to support the Palestinians, they jeopardize these remarkable interreligious gains by issuing one-sided indictments and by failing to honor Jewish religious and historical perspectives.

The authors of Kairos USA dismiss G-d's covenant with the Jewish people and His promise of the land to the Jews, saying that there is no "theology of entitlement" for what they consider modern Israel. Yet, they evaluate the State of Israel and its policies according to religious criteria.

The Kairos USA authors maintain that the situation in Israel and Palestine "is not a struggle among religions." They must not have read the Hamas Charter or the Palestinian Covenant because both consider the State of Israel "Islamic Wakf" or Islamic endowment land, where only Muslims can reign.

The willful failure of progressive Christians to see the Muslim world and the Palestinian leadership as motivated by a triumphalist Islamic ethos, which is intolerant towards the religious and political rights of Christians and Jews (dhimmis, or subjected people as seen by conquering Islam), and parenthetically ignores Palestinian terrorism and unwillingness to recognize or make peace with the Jewish State, reveals their deep seated prejudice, if not their latent anti-Semitism.

The Christians for Israel message of love and their biblical quest for peace in Jerusalem are uplifting. It constitutes an antithesis to the hostility displayed by the so-called progressive Christians and authors of the Kairos USA towards the Jewish state. This enmity is not accidental. Rather, it is borne out of the progressive Christians' contempt for Jewish particularism, which is manifested in the State of Israel.

Contact Dr History at drhistory@cox.net


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THE MODERN BLOOD LIBEL

Posted by Barbara Sommer, March 19, 2013

The article below was written by Jerrold L. Sobel who is a retired History teacher from New York, living in Naples Florida for the past 12 years. He has a BA in 20th Century European History and an MA in International Relations. For over 40 years Sobel has been writing essays and Op-Eds on these topics and has been published in cyber and hard copy media in the United States, Canada, England and Israel. His main interest is the Middle East conflict. This article appeared March 23, 2013 in the American Thinker and is archived at
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2013/03/apartheid_week_the_modern_blood_libel.html

For centuries throughout their glorious but tormented history, long before the re-establishment of the state of Israel, Jewish people have been victims of the blood libel. Through an annual rite known as Apartheid Week, this execrable phenomenon has once again reared its ugly head, this time gaining respectability in the halls of academia and on college campuses throughout the United States and Canada. Harvard is a prime example.

In an effort to publicize their vilification of Israel during libelous Apartheid Week, a vehemently anti-Israeli organization within Harvard known as the Palestine Security Committee employed a tactic becoming all too common throughout the U.S.: they posted mock eviction notices on the doors of students claiming their dorms would soon be demolished.

Some inevitably will argue this is just an expression of their First Amendment rights. In reality, it's nothing of the sort. As stated by Robert Trestan, Anti-Defamation League (ADL) Acting New England Regional Director: "This tactic is designed to silence and intimidate pro-Israel advocates at Harvard and campuses around the country," He continues: "Free expression has a place on campus; however targeting the dorms of Harvard students lends itself to creating tension, isolating students and fomenting hostility."

Intimidating pro-Israel advocates on campuses around the country is indeed the operative phrase here. Far from a sophomoric stunt, this is part of a nationwide movement on campus which seeks to denigrate Israel while stifling academic discourse. From Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, Brooklyn College, Northeastern University and far too many other universities throughout the United States, hatred of Israel and Jews in general is being spewed. Most disturbing, on many campuses this calumny is more than tacitly supported by the administration, most egregiously in Boca Raton Florida at Florida Atlantic University (FAU).

Dead babies, apartheid walls, and once again, mock eviction notices placed on student dorms and calls for Israel's destruction; all part of a troubling pattern of extreme activism perpetuated by the aforementioned anti-Semitic nationwide organization Palestine Security Committee, also known as Student Justice For Palestine (SJP).

FAU is a university with an anti-Semitism problem and an irresponsible administration helping to make things worse. In January 2011 FAU's SJP, along with other chapters from universities around the state participated in an organizing conference sponsored by the American Muslims for Palestine organization (AMP). The objective of the meeting was to have SJP become more effective in its efforts by having experienced anti-Israel activists provide training, and to help regional chapters coordinate with each other and share their resources. AMP is a well-funded, professional organization with ties to Islamic radicals and supporters of terrorism against Israel. It specializes in targeting vital parts of the educational system, primarily libraries, high schools, university curricula, and student organizations. Flown in to lead the conference was one of the leaders of the now infamous Irvine 11, who were convicted of systematically harassing Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren to the point that he was unable to deliver a lecture at the University of California. So much for the free interchange of ideas.

Rather than heed the warnings and evidence it received, Florida Atlantic University's administration applied no scrutiny to SJP as it increased its radical activities on campus. A steady stream of anti-Semites and anti-Israel firebrands have been reaching into campus with the goal of radicalizing the students. As a result, the activities and messaging of SJP have steadily become more aggressive. FAU's indifference to anti-Semitism appears directly attributable to Dr. Charles Brown, the University's Senior Vice President for Student Affairs. Prior to his joining FAU in 2006, Dr. Brown served in similar positions at Wayne State University in Detroit and the University of South Florida in Tampa, two of the most notoriously venomous anti-Israel universities in the country. His time at USF immediately followed the indictment of Professor Sami Al-Arian, who later plead guilty to serving as the American head of the Islamic Jihad Terror organization. Al-Arian and his cronies at USF, including his research associate and now current FAU professor Bassem Al-Halabi, cultivated a culture of anti-Semitic student radicalism that continued to be tolerated throughout Brown's tenure there.

By the spring of 2012 FAU's SJP chapter was fully out of control. Mock eviction notices were posted on the door of hundreds of on-campus residences. SJP brazenly misappropriated the seal of Palm Beach County, which was a violation of law. The Palm Beach County attorney's office immediately sent a cease and desist order. The fake eviction notice also included a seal and authorization stamp from FAU's student housing authority, which were in fact issued by the university. In response to this, Dr. Charles Brown, the school's senior vice president for student affairs, initially misled reporters by claiming that the university had not authorized the fliers. This statement was later retracted when SJP revealed that not only had it been approved, but an FAU employee actually escorted hundreds of notices on dorm rooms and elevators. If this doesn't cross the line of academic freedom into the realm of administrative complicity, what does?

To answer my own question: on Feb. 6, the Tom Trento TV/radio crew attempted to sit in on a public meeting at FAU, where Greta Berlin, a noted Jew/Israeli hater, was to speak. The crew was denied entry into this advertised, public, taxpayer-supported event and threatened with arrest by a Boca Raton police officer, who claimed he was taking his orders from "the building manager." Enough said about constitutional rights when up against a complicit school administration and ignorant civil service employees.

To push back against the administration's anti-Israel/anti-Semitic bent and the actions they are culpable for, a writing campaign of protest has begun to FAU's President MJ Saunders: president@fau.edu. Protests and letters may not stop this egregious behavior at FAU but withholding charitable donations may raise some eyebrows at the school.

Contact Barbara Sommer at lsommer_1_98@yahoo.com


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RELEASED FEMALE ARAB PRISONERS

Posted by Richard Shulman, March 19, 2013

IMRA of 3/19/13 reports what happens to Arab female prisoners released by Israel after serving a prison sentence for having committed terrorist acts. The women are ostracized, even divorced and called names. They are assumed to have been raped.

What does that indicate about P.A. society, if not also the broader Muslim or at least Arab society? I think it reflects the Muslim Arab position on human sexuality. They think that unless women are escorted by relatives, they will be raped. Judging by what Muslim Arab men do to unescorted women in the P.A. and in Egypt, that fear is soundly based. But that fear reflects a vicious society.

It also reflects a fundamentally unjust society. Arab men rape women when opportune, and Arab society blames the victims, that being two injustices. Arab men assume that Arab women want sex with any man, even if it means being raped. Ironically, the operation that Arab society (and some others) subjects girls to may destroy much of the pleasure that sex could bring).

Further irony -- Arab women who do what they are told is patriotic, though they may have other motives, including doing it so as to overcome accusations of -- now hold your breath -- holding hands with another unmarried person, are if captured and imprisoned then called whores by their own families.

Further injustice -- assuming that Israeli prison guards have the same vicious, criminal,and uncontrollable lust as Muslim Arab men. Sometimes Palestinian Arabs admit that Israel is more decent in certain ways than are their own rulers. In this subject, we see another way in which the Arabs should emulate Israelis. (I admit that Western societies have become too licentious.)

As for Western feminist organizations, like Western homosexual organizations, they favor the Arabs, who abuse their gender, over the Israelis, who do not. Shame on the feminist and gay organizations for betraying their mission in favor of their radical ideology! They should be taking up the causes of abused Arab women and gays, not ignoring those causes because of Western radical anti-semitism.

Richard Shulman is a veteran defender of Israel on several web-based forums. His comments and analyses are a regular feature on Think-Israel. He provides cool information and right-on-target overviews. He distributes his essays by email. To subscribe, write him at ricshulman@aol.com.


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OBAMA'S LINE IN TEL AVIV SANDS

Posted by ACD/EWI, March 20, 2013

Days before his visit to Israel, on March 14th in a direct address to the Israeli public, President Obama stated for the first time that Iran has "over a year or so" to develop a nuclear weapon.

Interviewed by Israel's channel 2 TV, six days before he was to begin his much hyped visit to Israel, Obama declared: "Our goal is that Iran does not possess a nuclear weapon that could threaten Israel or trigger an arms race in the region that would be extremely dangerous." He then offered yet another of his empty threats: "If not I continue to keep all options on the table."

Obama's declared "goal" could have been considered more genuine had his words been backed up with action. Moreover, in his message to the Iranian people, in a video released on the Iranian-Persian New Year (Nowruz) on Monday, Obama offered the Mullahs "a new relationship," if only Tehran fully discloses details about its nuclear program. He has delivered a similar message each year since he arrived in the White House.

Iran's consistent response has been that its her "sovereign right to enrich uranium for peaceful purposes." Moreover, Iran claims that the enriched uranium will be used for new nuclear power plants "so it can export more oil."

A day earlier, on March 13, the U.S. announced the exemptionof 11 countries — all closely allied with the U.S. — from Iran's oil sanction program not because the have stopped buying Iranian crude, but because they have reduced their oil imports from Iran.

Earlier this month, Pakistan, another U.S "ally," has been threatened for beginning the construction of a $7.5-billion-U.S.-dollar gas pipeline from Iran, which has been announced in early February.

Only now the State Department reacted: "If this project actually goes forward, we have serious concerns that sanctions will be triggered," announced State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland.

Threats aside, Pakistan serves as the main U.S. route to withdraw its and NATO forces from Afghanistan and will do nothing to jeopardize it. Islamabad, of course, takes every advantage of the situation.

All the while, the U.S. government has been buying Iranian oil for Afghanistan's security forces as detailed by Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction.

Titled, "Afghan National Security: Limited Visibility Over Fuel Imports Increase the Risk that U.S. Funded Fuel Purchases Could Violate U.S. Economic Sanctions Against Iran," was released in January 2013. Turns out that between 2007-2012,vendors were not required "to provide information on the sources of fuel or certify that their fuel purchases complied with U.S. sanctions prohibiting transactions with Iran."

However, neither Kabul nor Tehran made secret the December 2011 agreement in which Afghanistan agreed to buy "one million tons per year of gasoil, gasoline and jet fuel" from Iran. And in early February, Afghanistan declared that despite American pressure it would continue to purchase Iranian oil.

It seems that with Obama, U.S. bark has lost the fear it used to generate because it's clear that Obama's "open options" vis-a-vis Iran are not just another line in the sand, but an offer to accommodate Tehran's nuclear ambitions.

Strengthening this impression is the statement issued inBrussels today detailing the easing of the sanctions on Iran by the six powers. This softening comes on top of already watered-down demands on Iran, which were made Kazakhstan last month.

Now, the six powers, including the U.S., offer to ease "a ban on trade in gold and other precious metals, and a relaxation of an import embargo on Iranian petrochemical products."

In exchange, a senior U.S. official said, Iran would among other things have to suspend uranium enrichment to a fissile concentration of 20 percent at its Fordow underground facility and "constrain the ability to quickly resume operations there."

The Mullah's must be pleased with this latest development. Israel less so.

Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld is the Director of the New York-based American Center for Democracy (ACD) and the Economic Warfare Institute (EWI). She has authored hundreds of articles and several books on terrorist financing and political corruption. This article appeared March 20, 2013 on the American Center for Democracy (ACD) website and is archived at
http://acdemocracy.org/obamas-line-in-tel-aviv-sands/


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GERALD M. STEINBERG: NETANYAHU IS FROM MARS, OBAMA IS FROM VENUS

Posted by Gerald Steinberg, March 20, 2013

Caption Text

Benjamin Netanyahu and Barack Obama have spent four years bickering, instead of co-operating on policies that will best serve Israeli and American interests. As they begin Act Two — with both leaders having won fresh mandates from their respective voters — will they learn to get along?

When they meet this week, the Israeli Prime Minister and the American President will need to find a middle ground between their very different perceptions of international politics. The Israeli leader is a hard-core realist (or pessimist, if you prefer), who sees the dangers of what Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) described as the "war of all against all" in the anarchy of international politics. Israel stands out as a solitary and vulnerable Jewish state in a hostile and dangerous Middle Eastern environment, whereby survival depends on a powerful military able to defeat all threats.

Obama, on other hand, is a liberal democrat who takes an idealist (or optimistic) approach. Like Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), he believes that disputes generally can be overcome through dialogue and compromise. For Obama, the use of military force is an undesirable last resort, reserved for a few sociopaths such as bin Laden, Gaddafi and the leaders of the Taliban. He has given priority to ending America's military role in Iraq and Afghanistan, and renewed U.S. participation in the UN Human Rights Council, citing its lofty principles, rather than the unpleasant reality.

Gerald Steinberg teaches international diplomacy at Bar Ilan University, Israel and is the founder and president of the NGO Monitor, an institute whose stated aim is "to generate and distribute critical analysis and reports on the output of the international NGO community" and "to publicize distortions of human rights issues in the Arab-Israeli conflict and provide information and context for the benefit of NGOs working in the Middle East." Steinberg has been a longtime critic of Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, Christian Aid, Oxfam and other organizations that have "contributed to the hatred, rather than supporting peace". Writing in a 2004 Jerusalem Post article he said, "HRW's press statement exposes it as a biased political organization hiding behind the rhetoric of human rights." Later he accused HRW of "exploiting the rhetoric of human rights to delegitimize Israel". Human Rights Watch accused Steinberg of "sleight of hand" in his reporting of its activities, and of conveniently ignoring its condemnations of Palestinian militant actions and of not mentioning inconvenient facts. Contact him at gerald.steinberg@BIU.AC.IL. The article above is appeared March 20, 2013 in the National Post and is archived at
http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/gerald-m-steinberg-netanyahu-is-from-mars-obama-is-from-venus


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OBAMA'S MIDDLE EAST MAP ERASES ISRAELI TERRITORY

Posted by Robert Spencer, March 20, 2013

This article was written by the Washington Free Beacon Staff and is installed at
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2013/03/obamas-middle-east-map-erases-israeli-territory

Caption Text

One thing you have to give to Obama: he's consistent. And so are the many who refuse to see this consistency, or where it is tending. "Obama's Middle East Map Erases Israeli Territory," from the Washington Free Beacon, March 18 (thanks to Pamela Geller):

The map of the Middle East displayed in an Obama administration video released days before President Barack Obama's visit to Israel shows the Jewish state dispossessed of substantial parts of its current territory, including its capital.

The map of Israel, displayed repeatedly during the video, shows the Golan Heights, Jerusalem, northern Israel, and areas surrounding what is currently the West Bank as non-Israeli territory. The Golan Heights is shown as part of Syria; Jerusalem is shown as part of the West Bank; and northern Israel is shown as part of Lebanon.

The itinerary on the White House website also implies that Jerusalem is neither Israel's capital nor even part of Israel.

The president's schedule lists two stops in "Tel Aviv, Israel" and one in "Amman, Jordan" but his activities in Israel's capital city are identified as taking place only in "Jerusalem" "" with no country name attached. This keeps with a reluctantly-acknowledged administration policy of denying that Jerusalem is Israel's capital or even a part of Israel.

Robert Bruce Spencer is an American author and blogger best known for his criticism of Islam and jihad. As of 2014, he has published twelve books, including two New York Times best-selling books.


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ISRAEL APARTHEID WEEK - CAMPUS BLOOD LIBEL

Posted by FSM Security Update, March 20, 2013

The article below was written by Charles Jacobs who is a political activist and co-founder of the American Anti-Slavery Group and also the David Project, and the organization Americans for Peace and Tolerance. This article appeared March 20, 2013 in Family Security Matters and is archived at
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/israel-apartheid-week-campus-blood-libel?f=must_reads

Caption Text

Spring's coming. Get ready for Israeli Apartheid Week on campuses across the nation.

Locally last week, Harvard University got off to an early start: the college's Palestine Solidarity Committee placed mock eviction notices on students' doors, warning students that their rooms were "scheduled for demolition in the next three days." This was then likened to "the unlawful displacement of Palestinians."

That little psychodrama is just the preliminary to a full program that will include anti-Israel films, the construction of an "apartheid wall" in the Science Center Plaza, and a talk by MIT Professor Noam Chomsky, a Hezbollah supporter who just may be the American Jew most proud to be ashamed that he's a Jew.

At Northeastern University, where Professors Denis Sullivan and Shahid Alam have proudly been working for decades to foment hatred of Israel (see www.shameonneu.com), the schedule is even more fulsome: From March 11 through March 15, students will be shown two anti-Israel propaganda films, one even narrated by Alice Walker, author of "The Color Purple." There will be a mock checkpoint constructed on the Centennial Commons, and all week long there will be a lighted sign flashing: "End Israeli Apartheid."

Northeastern President Joseph Aoun, who has finally come under pressure to do something about his radical, anti-Israel/ anti-Semitic Professors, might find it useful now to emulate Jason Kenney, the Canadian Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism, who condemned Israeli Apartheid Week as simple anti-Semitism. Aoun, who is Christian Lebanese, surely knows that Middle East Christians are the ones suffering from something pretty close to apartheid - in every one of the lovely Arab-dominated states they nervously inhabit. Condemning the lie about Israel, while outing the real oppressors would be a double mitzvah. True, he'd have a tenured tantrum on his hands. Meanwhile, the silence of those involved with the Jewish Studies Program there continues to astonish.

At Boston University, there will be a sham conference on "The Right of Return." Several scholars who oppose the idea that Palestinians in vast numbers should be allowed to flood into Israel, thereby extinguishing the Jewish State, have submitted proposals to give papers. As of this writing, the "conference" conveners have not responded to any of them, so any pretense that their panel is "academic" is a farce. It's just more political theater.

So, what do we do about all this? The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has said it is "outraged" by the Harvard eviction notices. Nice, but then what?

I attended a workshop last week at the mammoth, yearly American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) Policy Conference which addressed the surge of anti- Israelism on the campuses. The two speakers representing Jewish organizations that work on campuses came to promote what has become the Jewish Establishment's only acceptable strategy: It's called "retail engagement." Responding to anti-Israel activity publicly with counterarguments, they say, has been shown to be ineffective. "Debate," they argue, "has no audience." A better approach is to get to know other students personally, especially student leaders, to build relationships with them, to "make friends, not arguments."

Much of this makes sense. Cold facts and logic don't win over most people. So much of politics is personal. Being popular and playing on emotion is often key. This sort of engagement is clearly necessary - but why would anyone think it's sufficient to win? Isn't the other side much larger? Can't they reach out to more leaders? To be truthful - aren't they often more charming?

And don't they have a big advantage? In our leftist-dominated culture, which is obsessed with victimhood, the other side continually offers students what seems the high moral road: a victimhood campaign. In a low-information age, a picture of an Israeli tank next to a Palestinian child is enough to set people's judgment against us, sometimes for good.

Our problem is that they lie. Another reason that "retail engagement" alone won't win is that there is something more emotionally powerful than personal friendships at stake: In our world, people see themselves as good and moral people if they are for the underdog and against oppression. If pro-Israel students, no matter how engaging, are seen to be supporting a cause that people fear taints them morally, friendship with charming Zionists will not often prevail.

No, friendship is not the magic bullet. To win, Jewish students will have to do harder things: They have to recapture the emotional argument that counts most: Not that we are individually nice people, but that Israel is a decent nation that is being lied about. Jews are being victimized. That is the central truth of the matter but it exists now as the elephant in the PR room.

Winning people to this central truth - that they are lying about us - means that pro-Israel students are going to have to do something the Jewish Establishment tells them not to do: They are going to have to call the campaign of lies what it is. They are going to have to talk to their friends about the people who are doing the defaming. They are going to have to "go negative." What we face is more than a social popularity contest - it's a political/ ideological war. Surely we know by now that it will take more than being charming if we mean to win.

It is time Jewish students stopped crowing that gays can march in Tel Aviv and started calling the propaganda crusade against us what it is: Bull! Lies! A hoax! The most inconvenient truth for our adversaries is that the horrors the Arab/Islamic world has falsely charged against Israel are things they have actually done themselves - and are still doing - while the "human rights" world keeps relatively mum.

Land theft? The Arab world started out in Arabia and conquered the rest by jihad. Cruelty? Take a look at how women are treated, at how Sunnis treat Shias and vice versa. Is it now 70,000 or 80,000 dead in Syria? How many black slaves serve Arab masters across Arab North Africa?

Apartheid? Jewish students should say: "Glad you brought that up. Because if you are truly interested in institutionalized subjugation in the Middle East, then talk to Simon Deng, an African who was enslaved by Arabs in Sudan; or to Mohammed Yahya, an African Muslim from Darfur, whose people are being massacred by Arabs for resisting Arabization; or to Caroline Doss, a Christian women from Cairo, whose people shiver to think what may soon happen to them because of the wonderful Arab Spring. (They're all available.) Apartheid in the Middle East is not about Israel at all. That's a scam. The real apartheid is in the Arab/Islamic states.

If pro-Israel students can convince their classmates that anti-Israelism is based on lies (inversions, actually), Israel might just win on campus. Sure, it helps if pro- Israel students are likable, but only if they have the courage to state the truth - and the wisdom not to listen to their establishment "leaders" - might their efforts be decisive.

Contact FSM Security Update at info@familysecuritymatters.org


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THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD'S CONTEMPT FOR WOMEN ...

Posted by GWY123, March 20, 2013

The article below was written by Amira Nowaira who is an Egyptian academic, translator, columnist and author. She gained her doctorate in English literature from Birmingham University. The article appeared March 18, 2013 in the Guardian and is archived at
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/mar/18/muslim-brotherhood-rejects-egyptian-womens-rights

Caption Text

Last week, Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood issued a strongly-worded statement unabashedly rejecting the draft UN declaration calling for an end to all forms of violence against women. It claims that the declaration contravenes Egypt's "cultural specificity" and would lead to "the complete disintegration of society" if ratified. Needless to say, the statement has fuelled the anger of Egyptians, especially women.

But why has the Brotherhood decided to embark on this confrontational course through the release of such a belligerent statement at such a critical moment? The president, Mohamed Morsi, is facing huge opposition at home and mounting criticism internationally. In speaking openly, almost defiantly, about the potentially explosive issue of women, the Brotherhood is risking further anger at home and alienating the international powers that have been supporting them.

The Brotherhood probably felt impelled to send a not-so-covert threat to Egyptian women. Throughout the past seven months, Egypt's rulers have done their utmost to take women out of the political equation, as their active participation in protests has become a real headache for the Morsi regime. The statement seems to have been conceived in response to their mounting pressure and the vocal opposition, and intended to reassert the dominance and power of the Brotherhood. The subtext of the statement is that the new regime has no intention of respecting the rights of women enshrined in the international agreements to which Egypt is a signatory.

Before his election, Morsi had tried to promote his image as a democratic and progressive leader who respected women's rights. He even pledged to appoint a woman as one of his deputies. It was a pledge, like several others, that he never honoured. Instead, women have been witnessing shocking acts of violence against them as the state has looked on, pretending to see nothing. The systematic sexual harassment of female protesters and the violence experienced not only by women demonstrators but also by ordinary women going about their business on the streets have become a daily occurrence. In the face of growing violence, however, women have remained adamant and defiant.

The Brotherhood and its offspring, the presidency, never considered violence against women to be an important issue, even when they said otherwise. Their support of female genital mutilation (FGM) is just one example. Attempts were made in the short-lived Islamist-dominated parliament to decriminalise it and if it hadn't been for the vocal opposition of women, the legislation might have passed. When Morsi was once asked about his views on the subject, instead of clearly and unambiguously condemning the practice, he said that it was a decision that should be left to the family concerned. Thus the brutal cutting up of a piece of a girl's flesh was treated by him with the same kind of callous indifference as the decision to go for a family picnic.

In reading the Brotherhood's statement bashing the attempt to stop violence against women, one might think that the writers have suddenly woken from their slumber and have crashed headlong into the 21st century. How else can we understand their horror at the idea that marriage should be based on partnership and not guardianship? Or their utter dismay at the suggestion that a woman should not obtain her husband's consent before she can travel, work or take contraceptives? Or their shock at the simple insinuation that husbands should not have a free hand to beat up or rape their wives?

To the Brotherhood, I offer this following simple logical argument: abusing human beings is wrong. Women are human beings. Therefore abusing women is wrong. Too much to ask for? Or too hard to understand?

Of course, the argument can only be valid if we all agree with the basic premise that women are human — for it is possible that the Brotherhood would contest this fact. As is clear in Brotherhood literature and discourse, women are often figuratively referred to in demeaning terms. How often have women been described as precious stones that are so valuable that they need to kept under lock and key and protected against theft? Or as candy bars that have to be wrapped up in order to keep away the flies? Or as lower-class citizens who should be restrained and protected against their own immoral and destructive instincts?

As modern history is not the Brotherhood's strongest suit, I can only tell them that for more than 100 years, Egyptian women have fought tooth and nail for the right to be regarded as human beings and to be treated with the dignity and respect they deserve. Dignity and respect, my dear Brothers, are not culture-specific, and neither is violence, which cannot be condoned under any pretext, be it religious, cultural or social. The Brotherhood's statement has exposed it for what it really is: a misogynistic, power-hungry and hopelessly anachronistic organisation.

Contact GWY123 at GWY123@aol.com


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FIVE MEDIA SPINS TO WATCH FOR DURING OBAMA VISIT

Posted by Honest Reporting, March 20, 2013

The article below was written by Alex Margolin who is a writer based in Jerusalem. He is currently a staff member at HonestReporting, which is committed to defending Israel against media bias. He was born in the Soviet Union and grew up in America before making Aliyah to Israel, He has a deep interest in the history of the Soviet Jewry movement.

With President Barack Obama touching down in Jerusalem for his first official visit to Israel, the Middle East is once again the top story in the international press.

While most media reports ahead of the visit noted the Obama administration's desire to "reboot" relations between the US and Israel, there are a number of issues that often come up whenever some of media report on Israel in the diplomatic arena.

The following are five of the main media spins to watch for in coverage of the Obama visit.

1. Settlements are the biggest obstacle to peace.

One of the most persistent media themes since the early days of the Obama administration is that the peace process has stalled because Israel refuses to stop building in Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

The idea gained steam in Obama's first year as president and the media has maintained the narrative ever since. Often ignored is the fact that Israel implemented a 10-month freeze of settlement activity — and the fact that it failed to make any impact on peace talks. The AP got the facts straight, however, noting that the Palestinians did not take advantage of the freeze.

The claim that Israel is responsible for the impasse, however, is likely to show up in coverage of Obama's visit. Reviews of Israeli-US relations during the Obama years are likely to discuss settlements as a cause of friction between the allies, strongly implying that peace talks have been on hold because of Israel's refusal to implement a freeze.

But as Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal aptly put it, the issue is largely beside the point.

I'd like to hear the president tell Palestinians during his visit to Bethlehem that what really stands between them and a state isn't Israel or its settlements. Israel dismantled its settlements in Sinai for the sake of peace with Egypt, and dismantled them again in Gaza in the interests of disengaging from the restive coastal strip. Most Israelis would gladly do so again for the sake of a real peace with the Palestinians.

2. Israel isn't interested in peace.

Another theme that has appeared repeatedly in the news for the past few years is the claim that Israelis no longer care about peace with the Palestinians, either because life in Israel is just fine without it or because Israel is simply not prepared to make the sacrifices that would be required.

The issue was most prominently expressed in Time magazine in 2010 and has appeared, in various forms and with some regularity, ever since.

What tends to be missing in media accounts of Israeli attitudes towards peace is the status of the peace partner. Israeli opinion polls consistently show that Israelis support efforts to reach a genuine and stable peace, but don't believe that there are prospects for an enduring peace with the Palestinians on the horizon.

As Bret Stephens stated in the op-ed quoted above, there is good reason for the Israeli skepticism:

Israelis can have no confidence in such a peace so long as Palestinians elect Hamas to power, cheer the rocketing of Israeli cities, insist on a "right of return" to Tel Aviv and Haifa, play charades at the U.N., refuse to negotiate directly with Israel, and raise their children on a diet of anti-Semitic slurs. In his 2009 speech in Cairo, Mr. Obama spoke the truth about the Arab world's Holocaust denial. He shouldn't deprive his Palestinian audience of a similar dose of truth-telling, least of all in Bethlehem.

Watch for news reports that place the full responsibility for the stalled peace process on Israel. If the media fail to take into account the lack of effort on the other side, they are perpetuating a distorted picture of the region.

3. The new Israeli government isn't a peace partner.

Although the new Israeli government has been in power for only one day before Obama's visit and contains more moderates than the government it replaces, media reports are likely to focus on the policies of its most hawkish members — and to suggest that it's not a government suited to peace with the Palestinians.

Indeed, it is a government that was elected for a decidedly domestic agenda, not for diplomacy.

And the government is still headed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has repeatedly been maligned as being uninterested in peace despite numerous statements to the contrary.

The Washington Post offers a subtle illustration.

After quoting Netanyahu's conciliatory statements to the Palestinians during the swearing in ceremony for his new government, the paper immediately casts doubt on prospects for peace.

"With a Palestinian partner that is ready to conduct negotiations in good faith, Israel will be ready for a historic compromise that will end the conflict with the Palestinians once and for all," Netanyahu [said].

Still, key positions in his new government are held by strong backers of Israeli settlement in the West Bank, an issue that has stymied efforts to restart peace negotiations.

The paper follows with a list of past statements from members of the government in support of settlements.

Too often, the media gives the impression that Netanyahu's peace statements are not genuine. The same level of critique, however, is never applied to his Palestinian counter-parts.

4. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the Mideast's core problem.

The events of the Arab Spring in a place like Egypt, or the Arab Winter in areas such as Syria and Libya, should have closed the book on the argument that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the key to all Middle East affairs.

As one Arab state after another saw its citizens rise up against their oppressive leaders, the real problems at the heart of the Arab world were revealed, and they had nothing to do with Israel.

Some media outlets, however, refuse to give up on the long-held belief that solving the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians will have a ripple effect on the rest of the region. Haaretz put its own twist on the issue, opining that with the instability in Syria and beyond, the long held view that the Israeli-Palestinian track can become an instrument for calming the area, soothing antagonism towards the U.S and even assisting in the formation of a U.S.-led anti-Iranian coalition, is bound to become doubly attractive.

World leaders, including Jordan's King Abdullah, are also reluctant to give up on the idea.

It wouldn't be surprising if some media attempt to link Obama's visit with the view that reviving the peace process has global implications. It will be harder for them to prove, however, how peace between Israel and the Palestinians will calm the civil war in Syria.

5. Over-hyping tensions between Obama and Netanyahu.

It's no secret that relations between Obama and Netanyahu have been cool at best, and even somewhat hostile at times.

But despite the obvious tensions between the two in the past, it's still possible for the media to overplay the issue. Allies have disagreements over policy,but it's not for the media to sensationalize the issue for the sake of higher newspaper sales.

The Obama administration has been careful to avoid pressuring Netanyahu publicly on peace or Iran, at least during the run-up to the visit. To focus on past relations between the two leaders as one of the main story lines of the visit would be lazy journalism.

Don't let the press distort the meeting between Netanyahu and Obama so that it fits one of the pre-packaged narratives peddled by the media. And if you see any of the above news spins, be sure to lodge your complaint with the news outlet.

Israeli leaders greet President Obama4. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the Mideast's core problem.

The events of the Arab Spring in a place like Egypt, or the Arab Winter in areas such as Syria and Libya, should have closed the book on the argument that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the key to all Middle East affairs.

As one Arab state after another saw its citizens rise up against their oppressive leaders, the real problems at the heart of the Arab world were revealed, and they had nothing to do with Israel.

Some media outlets, however, refuse to give up on the long-held belief that solving the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians will have a ripple effect on the rest of the region. Haaretz put its own twist on the issue, opining that with the instability in Syria and beyond,

the long held view that the Israeli-Palestinian track can become an instrument for calming the area, soothing antagonism towards the U.S and even assisting in the formation of a U.S.-led anti-Iranian coalition, is bound to become doubly attractive.

World leaders, including Jordan's King Abdullah, are also reluctant to give up on the idea.

It wouldn't be surprising if some media attempt to link Obama's visit with the view that reviving the peace process has global implications. It will be harder for them to prove, however, how peace between Israel and the Palestinians will calm the civil war in Syria.

5. Over-hyping tensions between Obama and Netanyahu.

It's no secret that relations between Obama and Netanyahu have been cool at best, and even somewhat hostile at times.

But despite the obvious tensions between the two in the past, it's still possible for the media to overplay the issue. Allies have disagreements over policy,but it's not for the media to sensationalize the issue for the sake of higher newspaper sales.

The Obama administration has been careful to avoid pressuring Netanyahu publicly on peace or Iran, at least during the run-up to the visit. To focus on past relations between the two leaders as one of the main story lines of the visit would be lazy journalism.

Don't let the press distort the meeting between Netanyahu and Obama so that it fits one of the pre-packaged narratives peddled by the media. And if you see any of the above news spins, be sure to lodge your complaint with the news outlet.

Contact Honest Reporting at action@honestreporting.com


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FUN AND GAMES WITH ISSA AMRU IN HEBRON

Posted by Hebron, March 20, 2013

The article below was written by David Wilder who is spokesman of The Jewish Community of Hebron. You can contribute directly to The Jewish Community of Hebron, POB10, Kiryat Arba-Hebron 90100, hebron@hebron.org.il, 972-2-9965333 or write to The Hebron Fund, 1760 Ocean Ave., Brooklyn, NY 11230, hebronfund@aol.com. This article appeared March 20, 2013 in the Jerusalem Postand is archived at
http://www.jpost.com/Blogs/The-Wilder-Way/Fun-and-Games-with-Issa-Amru-in-Hebron-364781

Late this morning I made my way from our offices in the Avraham Avinu neighborhood to Beit Hadassah, a few minutes away, to speak with a group there. Being a few minutes early, I first went upstairs to my home. Coming downstairs, ten minutes later, a friend asked if I was going to film the 'balagan' outside in the street. What balagan (disturbances) I asked. "A march, with Arabs and palestinian flags, right here on the street."

I ran up to the street, grabbed my camera from the car, and saw, a few meters in front of me, a group of Arabs, foreign anarchists and Israelis, as well as a large group of journalists, mostly Arab photographers, and a few soldiers and Hebron residents. Some of the people were wearing masks with pictures of Obama on them. Most of the pushing and shoving, centered around a banner sign they were carrying.

As I started filming, I quickly saw a true Hebron nemesis, also with a camera. Issa Amru can be described as something of a terrorist trouble-maker, a master provocateur .

Who is this guy?

The following is a letter sent today to senior IDF and police officers:

To:

General Nitzan Alon

Commander, Central Command

Col. Avi Bluth

Hebron Brigade Commander,

Commander Itzik Rachamim

Hebron Police Commander

Re: Issa Amro

This person is the center of anarchist-terrorist activity in Hebron. Activity is not confined to incitement and organizing illegal demonstrations and violence, but also includes actual military operations, including Molotov cocktails and more.

For example, a video circulated on the ambush and use of firebombs against IDF soldiers. The tape was written in Arabic "by Youth against the settlements," an organization of Issa Amro and his partner Jonathan Pollack.

Contact Hebron at hebron@hebron.com


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POLITICIANS RAISE POLLARD WITH US PRESIDENT

Posted by Barbara Summer, March 20, 2013

The article below was written by Gil Hoffman who is the chief political correspondent and analyst for The Jerusalem Post. He has interviewed every major figure across the Israeli political spectrum, has been interviewed by top media on six continents and is a regular analyst on CNN, Al-Jazeera and other news outlets. This article appeared March 20, 2013 in the Jerusalem Postand is archived at
http://www.jpost.com/Diplomacy-and-Politics/Politicians-raise-Pollard-with-US-president-307156

Imprisoned Israeli agent's wife asks students not to heckle Obama; at least two ministers mentioned Pollard to US president.

Caption Text

US President Barack Obama received repeated reminders about imprisoned Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard during his visit to Israel Wednesday.

Obama might have hoped to avoid the issue by empathizing with the Israeli public on the issue in an interview with Channel 2 last week. He said in the interview that he did not intend to release Pollard immediately and that the Israeli agent would have to go through normal legal processes.

But at least two ministers mentioned Pollard to Obama when they greeted him at Ben-Gurion Airport: Constuction and Housing Minister Uri Ariel and Culture and Sport Minister Limor Livnat.

"Please free Pollard," Ariel managed to say.

"Please don't forget our brother Jonathan Pollard," Livnat told Obama.

There were signs saying "Yes you can free Pollard" on the way from Obama's hotel to his meetings with President Shimon Peres and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.

Pollard's wife, Esther Pollard, asked students who will attend Obama's speech to the Israeli people on Thursday to treat him respectfully and not heckle him or organize a walk-out from the talk. She said however that if they get a chance to speak to Obama personally, they can use that opportunity to urge him to free her husband.

At least three people Obama will meet with over the rest of his visit intend to raise Pollard's fate: Labor leader Shelly Yacimovich, Miss Israel Yityish Aynaw, and bereaved IDF mother Miriam Peretz.

"I will do everything possible to bring about Pollard's release," Yacimovich said.

"This is a humanitarian gesture of the first degree. Israel must do everything it can to bring about his freedom and I will do the best I can."

Yacimovich will meet Obama Thursday, even though she is not yet opposition leader. Kadima leader Shaul Mofaz, who formally holds the title, said he would not stand in Yacimovich's way.

Netanyahu invited Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon, International Relations Minister Yuval Steinitz and Justice Minister Tzipi Livni to attend the dinner with Obama Wednesday night at the Prime Minister's Residence, but he did not invite Finance Minister Yair Lapid or Economics and Trade Minister Naftali Bennett because they deal with internal issues.

Obama told Lapid and Livni that he was looking forward to working with them.

He also gave Lapid advice that he received from his wife, Michelle Obama, about his career choice.

"Be careful what you wish for, [because] you might get it," he said.

Contact Barbara Sommer by email at sommer_1_98@worldnet.at.net


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"UNDERWHELMED"

Posted by Arlene Kushner, March 20, 2013

That's me.

The helicopters have been whirring overhead here in Jerusalem today, reminding me that President Obama is in town. I'm too much of a cynic -- or a realist -- to be excited about this.

Caption Text

It was all sweetness and light as the president stepped from his plane. "It's good to be in Israel again," he declared (in Hebrew). My mental response was: "So what kept you from visiting during the four years of your first term?"

If you wish, you can see the first moments of the president's arrival here:

http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid1852112022001?bckey=AQ~~,AAABk9JMLWE~,0pl3uFLFPXsNLzaJagAtptvvs-PtgYlp&bclid=0&bctid=2238975510001

~~~~~~~~~~

I was going to say that nothing comes cheaper than words. Often that is true, and he certainly has been well-prepped by Jewish advisors on what to say. But sometimes there is import to words even when spoken by politicians. During his initial talk at the airport, he said:

"...I know that in stepping foot on this land, I walk with you on the historic homeland of the Jewish people.

"More than 3,000 years ago, the Jewish people lived here, tended the land here, prayed to God here. And after centuries of exile and persecution, unparalleled in the history of man, the founding of the Jewish State of Israel was a rebirth, a redemption unlike any in history.

Today, the sons of Abraham and the daughters of Sarah are fulfilling the dream of the ages — to be 'masters of their own fate' in 'their own sovereign state.'"

http://www.timesofisrael.com/full-text-of-obamas-speech-on-arrival-in-israel/

~~~~~~~~~~

Well! That is a change. When he was in Cairo for his major talk four years ago, he linked the formation of Israel to the Holocaust, raising considerable Jewish ire that he neglected our millennia-long connection to the land. And now he has corrected this: He is acknowledging this land as Jewish.

~~~~~~~~~~

This is not likely to go down well with the Palestinian Arabs, to whom he has been playing for so long, and who claim this land as their own. Could it be that he is weary of them (see more on this below)?

Don't know yet. But my gut sense is that he is not, not at bottom.

~~~~~~~~~~

Perhaps rather than saying I'm underwhelmed, I should say that I'm dubious. I do not, for a moment, believe that the president of the US has become our best friend overnight. The question, rather, is why the considerable change of tone -- which undoubtedly reflects a change in tactics -- and precisely what is it that he wants from us.

Remember that an enormous number of pleas were made -- including by prominent Americans -- for him to pardon Pollard, and perhaps bring him along on this trip. What a act that would have been, from someone who's big on "good will gestures." A gesture that would have gone well beyond words.

But no, this man, who would not even let Pollard attend his own father's funeral, either is simply without compassion or without a sense of justice in this situation. Or he's holding Pollard as a bargaining chip, in return from something he wants from us.

~~~~~~~~~~

And then there are his plans for his major talk here, tomorrow. It should have been delivered at the Knesset and his decision not to do so represents a snub to the elected members of the Knesset, who are accustomed to being addressed by visiting heads of state.

What Obama is trying to do is appeal to the Israel people directly, circumventing their elected representatives. And he's attempting this via an address to university students, yet. I've already written about the exclusion of the students of Ariel University, and so this entire gambit seems to be in poor taste.

I suspect it speaks to his lack of faith in his ability to relate positively to our elected officials. Or maybe he simply imagines he can sway the opinions of young people more readily.

~~~~~~~~~~

President Obama meet first with President Peres this afternoon, amidst a good deal of hoopla -- children singing and waving flags and such. Peres told him, "We trust you on Iran."

And then my internal question was "We do?" What does trusting him mean? That he'll act militarily before it's too late? That he'll back us if we decide we cannot wait longer? Yes, talk like this -- Heaven help us -- is cheap.

~~~~~~~~~~

Whatever substance is taking place during this "feel good" visit, of course, is occurring during Obama's talks with Netanyahu, at his residence. The first part of those talks ended just a while ago, as I write, although I understand they returned for more talk after the press conference, now completed.

The Obama statements about "enduring commitments" to our security and a friendship that is "eternal" are all very nice, as far as they take us. But the substance of those talks may yet hit us in the face. The press conference hardly reflects all of that substance. Press conferences such as these never do.

~~~~~~~~~~

I will say, however, that the press conference indicates that interaction is more positive between the two leaders this time than at any time in the past. There was a warmth in the words, more positive body language and even humor.

You can see a video of the entire press conference here (scroll down about one-fourth of the page). Stay with it through the reporters' questions, which are the most informative part:

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/166433

~~~~~~~~~~

As to Iran, it sounds as if the two have agreed to continue to disagree. Netanyahu acknowledges that Obama wants to prevent Iran from going nuclear, and Obama says he does not embrace a policy of containment but hopes that diplomacy will still work.

Netanyahu, towards the end of questioning, also acknowledges the different perceptions as to timing.

What is most important here, I think is that Netanyahu said that Israel retains the right of self defense and that Obama recognizes this. Obama has not convinced Netanyahu to simply let him handle matters. The prime minister said:

"Today we have both the right and the capability to defend ourselves, as you said. Today the essence of the state of Israel is the fulfillment of the age old dream of the Jewish people to be masters of our fate. This is the essence of the state, this is how I know that you appreciate we can not cede our right to defend ourselves even though you are our greatest friend and Israel has no greater friend than the US."

~~~~~~~~~~

As to Syria, there is great concern mutually, for things are deteriorating rapidly there (I've said this before -- but the deterioration continues). Now there is some evidence that Assad used chemical weapons against his own people yesterday -- but American officials are still not confirming this (or are in denial because of what it would mean). I sensed a bit of a hedge on this from Obama. And there was enormous defensiveness regarding a journalist's question as to why the US hasn't acted in Syria to stop the carnage until now.

~~~~~~~~~~

And then there are the Palestinian Arabs and the question of "peace negotiations."

Netanyahu has come forth once again -- sigh -- with his standard line about being committed to two states for two peoples, and sitting down at the table without pre-conditions. If he holds to his insistence that there be no pre-conditions, we'll be OK, because the Palestinian Arabs are demanding several concessions upfront -- a building freeze, release of all prisoners, etc.

~~~~~~~~~~

Obama said things that are simply erroneous, however, and which I cannot let pass. He spoke of a year of quiet, with no deaths to Israelis from terrorist attacks coming from Judea and Samaria. He suggested that this was because of a strong PA, cooperating with the international community. What he was referring to were the PA security forces, for which the US has spent a fortune.

The bottom line here is that those security forces have never been effective, and have been deteriorating in the last year. The PA forces have never been eager to take on terrorists, from Hamas or other groups (including those affiliated with Fatah). There are instances now of PA security officers providing information to Hamas. It is the diligence of the IDF that has kept terrorists from acting. If the IDF has to pull back, we're in trouble.

It is absolutely true that the US supports Israel's security in a host of ways, such as with funding for Iron Dome. But what Obama sees as being in Israel's best security interest, is not necessarily what IS in our best interest.

~~~~~~~~~~

It has been suggested that a chastened Obama now recognizes that no agreement between Israel and the PA is possible. Thus, goes the thinking in some quarters, he will treat it as a diplomatic victory if he simply gets the two sides to sit down together.

This, quite obviously, would mean considerable Israeli concessions. And that may be what all of this feel-good talk is about: to soften us up for the demands from Obama yet to come.

But...there are also those who see what Obama is now doing as the first part of a good cop-bad cop routine. After he's done making us feel good, he will send Secretary of State John Kerry in for the kill. This is not an implausible scenario:

Kerry is here now, actually flew in yesterday -- and will remain for the duration of Obama's visit. On Friday, when Obama leaves, he will as well -- going for meetings in Jordan. But then Saturday night he will return here to meet with Netanyahu again. That meeting will be all business -- without the fanfare, the children singing, the flags waving and all the rest.

~~~~~~~~~~

Obama goes to Ramallah tomorrow morning for talks with PA President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad. Will he assure them not to worry because he'll get us to make significant concessions?

What I noticed during the press conference is that he offered praise of the PA for "cooperating with the international community."

~~~~~~~~~~

There have been Palestinian Arab groups in Ramallah and Bethlehem expressing hostility to Obama, saying he's a friend to the Zionists, etc. There have been shouts from crowds about his not being welcome. Shoes have been thrown at his picture on billboards and on one occasion in Bethlehem, his picture was burned.

And now comes the worst because of association directly with the PA:

"Just before U.S. President Barack Obama arrives to visit Israel and the Palestinian Authority, the PA-run newspaper Al-Hayat Al-Jadida chose to print anti-American and pro-Hitler comments in an opinion piece.

"'Our history is replete with lies ... [including] the lie about al-Qaida and the September 11 [2001] events, which asserted that Muslim terrorists committed it, and that it was not an internal American action by the Freemasons,' opinion writer Hassan Ouda Abu Zaher wrote in an op-ed published Monday.

"The op-ed, which was translated by Palestinian Media Watch, also suggests that Hitler was greater than both Churchill and Roosevelt."

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_article.php?id=8109

This is what he's headed to, and, you can rest assured, a great number of demands by Abbas regarding what must be done for the PA. How I would love to be a fly on the wall for the Obama-Abbas talks.

~~~~~~~~~~

Obama then returns for his talk to our university students. We'll know more about where he stands tomorrow, after the press conference I assume he'll have in Ramallah, and then the talk in Jerusalem.

Contact Arlene Kushner at akushner18@gmail.com and visit her website: www.ArlenefromIsrael.info


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GRASPING AT STRAWS OVER IRAN POLICY

Posted by Richard H. Shulman, March 20, 2013

No matter how duplicitous and increasingly dangerous a dictatorship is Iran, The New York Times sets no deadlines and no red lines. It always anticipates a peace deal. It does not examine the enemy's culture of diplomacy by deceit and of war. Instead, it bases policy on enemy P.R.. It believes hints rather than practice. Hope eternal, solution rare.

This approach is Vali Nasr's in the New York Times of 3/18/13: "Why Iran May Be Ready to Deal."

"Economic sanctions are biting hard," Mr. Nasr claims. What that means is not explained. Another hard blow, we are told, is that Iran may be losing its strategic alliance with Syria. How hard? Iran is installing more centrifuges and hardening its nuclear sites. One could just as easily surmise that Iran is getting desperate to complete its nuclear program, to regain its stature. Mr. Nasr believes the opposite, that pressure on Iran gives it an incentive to produce nuclear weapons. But Iran had that incentive years before sanctions hurt its economy.

The answer for Mr. Nasr is not to tighten sanctions but to experiment with removing sanctions piecemeal in return for Iranian agreements. Mr. Nasr might review Iran's practice of violating agreements, before he advocates more agreements. Like most people, he fails to ask why Iran needs to negotiate anything, if sanctions have finally cornered it, all it need do is comply with UN resolutions. Also like most people, he fails to ask, if sanctions can bring Iran into compliance, and since our Presidents did not want to raid Iran militarily, why weren't all the sanctions imposed from the outset, instead of letting Iran go so far over so many years. My conclusion is that Pres. Obama is as insincere about sanctions as he is about keeping military options on the table.

Here come the hints on which Mr. Nasr bets our lives. "Hints of progress were seen at the round of talks in Kazakhstan last month. The U.S. proposed an easing of sanctions in return for Iran surrendering ability to highly enrich uranium." This time Iran said it would reply in a few weeks, instead of rejecting the proposal out of hand, as it usually has done. Mr. Nasr takes that softer language as a hint that Iran is ready for a deal. I take it as another delay that gives the centrifuges more time to work. N. Korea negotiates the same way.

Iran's leaders suspect that the U.S. wants to overthrow its regime, writes Mr. Nasr. Evidence for that? None stated. Evidence against? None stated, but remember Pres. Obama cold-shouldering the huge demonstrations against the regime? Remember the U.S. ignoring the Iran-Hezbollah killing of U.S. troops? Remember Obama sabotaging sanctions?

What do Iranians think of sanctions? Mr. Nasr thinks they oppose them. He does not explain how he arrived at that conclusion.

Since Iran does not submit to UN inspections, who knows what nuclear progress Iran is making in secret facilities below facilities already known! Now that Iran has been allowed to be at the threshold of making bombs, and now that it is further working with N. Korea, we no longer can take chances with sanctions and diplomacy.

Richard Shulman is a veteran defender of Israel on several web-based forums. His comments and analyses are a regular feature on Think-Israel. He provides cool information and right-on-target overviews. He distributes his essays by email. To subscribe, write him at ricshulman@aol.com.


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AND WHY NOT THE HOLLYWOOD CANTOR?

Posted by Nurit Greenger, March 20, 2013

In my previous article 'Three Jewish Tenors -Three Jewish Tenors Make Ancient Jewish Music Come to Life',
http://newsblaze.com/story/20121023081338nurg.nb/topstory.html, I wrote, the Jewish nation has its own Three Tenors.

Cantor Samuel Cohen moved to Los Angeles seven years ago. Shortly after his arrival he met and befriended Cantor Marcus Feldman. About two years later, Cantor Natenel Baram moved to Los Angeles and Cantor Cohen invited him to perform in a concert together with Cantor Feldman and that is when their musical friendship began. Shortly after this concert Cantor Friedmann joined and become the final link in the Hollywood Cantors' group.

Cantor Cohen began to mull that if there is the Three Tenors, Plácido Domingo, José Carreras, and, now the late, Italian singer Luciano Pavarott, the IL VOLO, the Italian trio operatic pop teenage singers, The Texas Tenors (http://www.thetexastenors.com/), and Il Divo, the English multinational operatic pop vocal crossover group, (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9bOUK0u3Ug), then why not have four young cantors do the same?

The idea of four young cantors — three tenors and one base/baritone — singing, now known as The Hollywood Cantors, became reality three years ago when they began giving concerts.

The Four

Cantor Samuel "Sam" Cohen of Congregation Kehillat Ma'arav - the only Conservative congregation in Santa Monica, California, serving the Westside and beyond (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtDThKOHWkA) (Cantor Sam Cohen sings Zocreinu Lchayim - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtDThKOHWkA)

Cantor Jonathan Friedmann of Bet Knesset Ba'midbar, a reform congregation in Las Vegas, Nevada, (http://ajrca.org/faculty/cantor-jonathan-friedmann-phd-10/)

Cantor Marcus Feldman of Sinai Temple, Los Angeles, California (http://ajrca.org/alumni/cantor-marcus-feldman/)

Cantor Netanel "Nati" Baram of Young Israel of North Beverly Hills, California (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9OiURICmRE - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmjxxc7feSo)

From L-Cantor Jonathan Feldman, Cantor Samuel Cohen, Cantor Marcus Feldman and Cantor Netanel "Nati" Baram; Center Dianna Volman-photo by Orly Halevy

The fact is that there is no other tenor trio, or quartet, like The Hollywood Cantors in the world. The four young, gifted, talented men sing an array of Chazaunt and cantorial songs in English and Hebrew, as well as songs in Yiddish, Italian, Russian and Spanish and I am sure their repertoire will diversify further and expand.

Last weekend I attended The Hollywood Cantors pre-Passover concert at the Plummer Park Fiesta Hall, in West Hollywood. The crowd, mostly Russian-Jewish immigrants, filled the hall and heard a superb vocal performance. The purpose of the concert was to get into the mood of the Seder's chanting.

The four were accompanied by Dianna Volman, piano, Susan Greenberg, flute, Jonathan Rubin, violin and Carmit Baran, bassoon. Violinist Angela Bae, age 14, a winner of the Spotlight Award, played Nugin for violin.

From L-Dianna Volman, Angela Bae, Cantor Samuel Cohen, Cantor Jonathan Feldman, Cantor Marcus Feldman, Cantor Netanel Baram, Carmit Baran, Susan Greenberg, Jonathan Rubin- photo by Orly Halevy

Cantor Cohen emceed part of the programs with a great sense of humor. Later on he told me that to be able to create a repertoire that speaks to everyone, they take into consideration the audience in front of whom they will be performing.

For centuries Jews have contributed to a variety of music, much is internationally know and even acclaimed.

Cantors have not moved out of Hollywood yet, where they are well known and often perform. Now we need to move them beyond the borders of Hollywood to become an international musical treasure.

AMAZING HOLLYWOOD CANTORS - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFWaFHkSwuc&feature=em-share_video_in_list_user&list=UUmuO1ezE1Wp2wHDkhIjms7A

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Contact Nurit Greenger by email at nurit.nuritg@gmail.com. Visit her blog: http://ngthinker.typepad.com


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REVIEW OF JEWS AND BOOZE

Posted by George Jochnowitz, March 21, 2013

Henry Ford held Jews responsible for alcoholism in the United States. "There is not a dialogue on the stage today that does not drip with whiskey," he wrote. "The idea of drink will be maintained by means of the Jewish stage, Jewish jazz and the Jewish comics until somebody comes down hard upon it as being incentive of treason to the Constitution." (1) Ford, who was both an anti-Semite and a prohibitionist, believed that Jews were very powerful, controlled the media, and opposed prohibition so that they could make money from their distilleries and saloons.

There were indeed Jews who owned businesses connected with alcohol, and that probably was a factor in the general opposition of the Jewish community to prohibition. Other factors may have been even more important. Jews, by and large, don't feel threatened by alcoholism within their own communities. Alcoholism happens to others. There is even a folk song including the words "Oy oy oy, shikker is a goy, shikker iz er, trinken miz er, vayl er iz a goy."(2) (A drunkard is a gentile. Drunkard is he; drink must he; for he is a gentile). The word for "must" is miz, to rhyme with iz, as it does in Polish and Ukrainian Yiddish but not in Lithuanian and Standard Yiddish, where it is muz.

When the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) was formed in 1874, ther was some discussion about the use of the word "Christian" in the name of the organization since it might "shut out the Jews." The name was chosen anyway, since the members felt there was no creed test." (3) However, in 1895, the editor of the periodical The American Jewess, Rosa Sonnenschein, wrote that "the name Christian indicates too narrow a sphere." But that was not her main objection to the movement. Rather, she felt that drunkenness among Jews was "only encountered in a few isolated cases." (4) Sonnenschein might never have heard of the popular song Shikker iz a goy, but she was expressing a similar view, although much more politely.

There is apparently a genetic component in the relatively low rates of alcoholism among Jews. There is a gene called ADH2*2 that prevents whose with the gene from enjoying drunkenness. "Recently, reports have shown a relatively high prevalence [approximately 20 percent] of ADH2*2 in Jewish samples ... suggesting that ADH2*2 is one of the factors explaining the low rates of alcoholism in this group," Earlier research has shown that differences in religious practice and level of religiosity cannot account for these low rates. (5) People are genetically different from each other. These differences may include the way we experience the world. Some people are color blind; most are not. Some people have absolute pitch; most do not. Some people are super tasters; most are not. If we perceive the world differently, in is natural that we react differently.

20 percent with ADH2*2 means that four-fifths of Jews do not have a gene that makes them dislike being drunk. It may well be, however, that having a fifth of the population with a genetic aversion to getting drunk can slow down the rates of alcoholism among the remaining majority. It is also quite likely that religious customs involving drinking wine at family gatherings has a sobering effect on the role of alcohol in community life.

I had never been aware of any alcoholics until I was about 7 or 8 years old. Then I met Mr. Shikker (not his real name, of course, although he was a gentile). His wife and their six children worked on our farm near Goshen, New York, and on other farms in the area. When they got paid, Mr. Shikker took all their money and went to a bar to get drunk. He then got into a fight, injured somebody, and was sentenced to jail. While he was in jail, his wife and children could keep the money they earned. When he got out of jail, the situation repeated itself. When I was 8, my parents stopped farming, and we never saw the Shikker family again. A few years later, we were told that they had been in an auto accident. Mrs. Shikker was driving, and Mr. Shikker was killed. The rest of the family survived with only minor injuries. In the days before seat belts were used in cars, it was not unusual for the person sitting in the right front seat to suffer the most serious—and perhaps fatal—injuries in an auto accident.

I became a supporter of prohibiting alcoholic beverages at that time, although it was not an issue, since the 21st Amendment had been ratified in 1933, before I was born. I have since modified my views.

However, I understand why prohibition had been a major political issue. There must have been many people who had met and perhaps even been abused by alcoholics like Mr. Shikker. And that's not all. Alcohol is bad for one's health. "According to Robert Brewer, the alcohol program leader at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, heavy drinking is the third leading preventable cause of death in this country, after smoking and a combination of bad diet and inactivity." (6)

Jews were not the only community in which drinking alcoholic beverages was a social and family practice. German Americans were another such group. "They sensed nativism in the [prohibitionist] movement's occasional screeds against immigrants, and feared that the anti-alcohol initiative was, at its core, an attack on German culture and German American communities." (7) Then the United States entered World War I. "The nation was wracked by a nativist spasm that inspired the banning of the German language in Iowa and music composed by Germans in Boston, and led to the lynching of a German immigrant in Missouri." (8) I had never before heard of the lynching of a German in the United States. This is one of many facts I learned from this very informative and readable book.

Another attack against immigrants was voiced by Bishop James Cannon, Jr., a spokesman for the Anti-Saloon League. Speaking against presidential candidate Governor Al Smith and in support of Herbert Hoover, Cannon said that Smith wanted Italians, Sicilians, Poles and Russian Jews to continue to immigrate. Cannon said that Smith "wants the kind of dirty people you find on the sidewalks of New York . . . . That kind has given us a stomach ache. We have been unable to assimilate such people into our national life." (9)

During the years of Prohibition, Jews were allowed to use wine for religious celebrations and Catholics were allowed to have wine at Mass. To a certain extent, the ability to obtain alcoholic beverages legally helped bootleggers. However, Jews and Catholics were certainly not the only people engaged in these illegal practices. "Bootlegging provided a vital source of income for Americans of every stripe, in every region, in big cities, small towns, and rural areas. Instead of reducing illegal activities, as proponents had predicted, Prohibition inspired a crime wave so substantial that it overwhelmed both the courts and prisons." (10) Jewish organizations naturally opposed any attempts at bootlegging, arguing that the law of the land is the law (dina d'malchutah dina). (11)

The spread of crime was one of the factors that made Prohibition increasingly unpopular. Congress voted to repeal the 18th Amendment in 1933. "Thirty-seven states held popular elections to determine their position, and of the twenty-one million Americans who voted on the matter, nearly 73 percent favored the repeal of the law."(12) The 21st Amendment was passed the same year.

In the 19th century, there were Jews who owned bars. "An 1890 study of the occupants of Lower East Side Jews found 248 saloon keepers among them." (13) After the end of Prohibition, and in particular, after the end of World War II, "Jewish occupational trends gravitated toward white-collar occupations such as medicine, law, and education." (14) The connection between Jews and the manufacture and sale of booze had ended.

George Jochnowitz was born in New York City, in 1937. He became aware of different regional pronunciations when he was six, and he could consciously switch accents as a child. He got his Ph.D. in linguistics from Columbia University and taught linguistics at the College of Staten Island, CUNY. His area of specialization was Jewish languages, in particular, Judeo-Italian dialects. As part of a faculty-exchange agreement with Hebei University in Baoding, China, he was in China during the Tiananmen Massacre. He can be reached at george@jochnowitz.net.


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THE OBAMA HAS LANDED; THE TUCHAS-KISSING HAS BEGUN

Posted by Ya'aqov Ben-Yehudah, March 21, 2013

At Ben-Gurion International Airport, where U. S. President Barack Obama landed, his journey of surreal lies began. Let's take a peak...

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First, Obama uttered some token words of Hebrew for the sake of "moderate" Israelis. His ultra-leftist colleagues in crime don't need him to speak Hebrew. They would rather speak English, like any good Westerner would speak. "Tov lehiot shoov ba'aretz (Hebrew: It's good to be again in Israel)," he said... "We stand together because peace must come to the Holy Land." Spell-check doesn't catch homonyms. Obama obviously meant "piece," not "peace."

Obama said that the US has an unwavering commitment to Israel's security, and added: "I am confident in declaring that our alliance is eternal." Unwavering commitment to Israel's security? Security in its eventual death? (I't s God's.) Alliance toward what goals? Throwing Jews out of their homes, giving land away to those who want to annihilate us, even though it's not ours OR YOURS to give away? (I't s God's.)

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Greeting the President at the airport was recently re-elected, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who said, "Thank you for standing by Israel at this time of historic change." Standing by Israel??!! You mean standing by Israel, while we throw Jews out of their homes, give land away to those who want to annihilate us, even though it's not Netanyahu's OR YOURS to give away? (I't s God's.) I believe that Netanyahu also may have thanked Obama for the various opportunities he has provided for him to jump at each and every one of Obama's whims, and to grovel at his every command, and to kiss his טוכאס tuchas (Yiddish: rear end, backside, buttocks, colloq.: "ass").


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Israeli President Shimon Peres then greeted Obama: "Your visit here is a crown demonstration of the profound relationship between our two nations.

"From the depths of our hearts, toda raba. Thank you Mr. President, thank you for what you do." Peres ended his speech by saying: "Welcome home, Mr. President."

Peres also said that "America and Israel share a destiny," and then, "Your vision reflects the future as it should be." These statements of our illustrious President begs several questions:

1. What "profound relationship" between our two nations? That Prez Peres, who is SUPPOSED to be holding a purely symbolic position, can more easily fool us all by when Obama pushed Netanyahu around to further the goal to break apart Israel? It is still not clear to me if Peres is calling the shots, or if he and Obama receive their orders from the same source.

2. "...Thank you for what you do." What DOES he do? Make it easier for the Erev Rav-controlled, Israeli government to further it's aims to de-Jewify and to de-Judify the Land of Israel? (God forbid!)

3. "Shared destiny" What shared destiny? Is that horrid joke about Israel being the 51st state about to come true? Or is this just code for the finalization of the American imperialist takeover of Israel, already in progress?

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And, now we hear of recently sworn in U. S. Secretary of State John Kerry's "surprise visit." It seems that he's here to make us an offer we can't refuse.

My friend Tomer Devorah sums it all up, by connecting the dots...

No doubt the media will project a false image of this visit as one entirely welcomed by Israelis. They're good at that. But we've been around a lot longer than the 65 years of the modern state's history and we haven't survived as a people this long without learning a thing or two about what really lies behind the false faces of people like Obama.


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I am glad how she phrased that, "people like Obama." There are so many cooks here, spoiling the broth, and all of them fit this description.

She also brought our attention to the fact that one of those players is former Meretz-Yachad Party Chair Yossi Beilin. I should have suspected that he sneaking around in the background making deals, like the illegal (but no one seems to care) Oslo and Geneva Accords. Even the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin dubbed Yossi Beilin "Shimon Peres's Poodle."

Obama's journey of lies brings him in contact with various liars, yet all of these liars have one thing in common. They all kissing up to whoever is in power, whoever can give them more power, whoever can maintain their power. And today, that seems to be U. S. President Barack Obama.

Contact Ya'aqov Ben-Yehudah at yaaqov.ben.yehudah@gmail.com


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STONE THROWING IS ALSO TERROR

Posted by Michael Freund, March 21, 2013

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As I write these words, a Jewish toddler injured in a Palestinian terror attack is lying in a hospital bed struggling for her life.

Shortly after 6 p.m. on March 14, Adwa Biton and her three young daughters were driving along Route 5 near Ariel in Samaria. They were on their way home after the girls had paid a visit to their grandmother when a group of Palestinians along the side of the road began hurling stones at Israeli vehicles.

Our ostensible peace partners scored a direct hit when one of their projectiles struck a truck, which swerved off course and collided with Biton's vehicle. The car was crushed under the weight of the truck, and it took rescue workers nearly half an hour to extricate the family.

When they did, they discovered that two-year-old Adelle Biton was not breathing and required mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Somehow, they managed to revive her, though she was in critical condition. Her two sisters, six-year-old Naama and four-year-old Avigail, as well as her mother, were all moderately injured.

This horrific incident, which left an innocent child on the brink of death, was nothing less than an act of terror. No bullets were involved nor were any bombs detonated, but that does not in any way make it less cruel or heartless.

After all, when a Palestinian picks up a stone and throws it at an Israeli vehicle, he is not expressing outrage or protesting against some perceived wrongdoing. He is making a conscious decision to grab hold of a potentially deadly object and send it hurtling through the air in order to cause bodily harm.

This is not about a group of kids tossing pebbles on the water at the beach. It is a group of thugs trying to terrorize people and intimidate them from making safe use of the roads. And it must be stopped.

Indeed, in recent weeks there has been a sharp upswing in the number of Palestinian rock-throwing attacks against Israelis, though you would never know it from reading the mainstream press, much of which has spoken vaguely of "growing tension" in the region without bothering to mention the attacks.

At around the same time as the attack on the Biton family, Palestinians near the Jewish community of Eli in Samaria stoned an Israeli vehicle and injured a one-year-old baby boy, causing him light injuries from which he is expected to recover.

And in a third rock attack that same evening, Palestinians stoned an Israeli bus heading to Tel Aviv. When the windows smashed, glass went flying through the air, wounding Aviva Hazan, the wife of a former Likud Knesset Member, in the eye.

This situation is simply intolerable and cannot be allowed to continue. Stone throwing may be low-tech terrorism, but terrorism it most assuredly is. And it is time for the Israeli government and army to treat it as such.

To begin with, Israel should impose harsher sentences on Palestinian stone-throwers and classify their actions not as "disturbing public order" but as "terror." Likewise, the rules of engagement need to be revised in order to give Israeli troops greater freedom to use force against Palestinians hurling rocks.

And video cameras should be installed along key routes throughout Judea and Samaria in order to make it easier to identify the perpetrators and bring them to justice swiftly.

Such measures will deter Palestinians from taking to the roadside, amassing an armory of rocks, and targeting innocent Israelis. If they know their actions will be taken seriously and punished acutely, they will think twice before engaging in such brazen acts.

Israel must take steps to ensure that those who raise a hand against Israelis, whether holding a rifle or a rock, will be dealt with accordingly.

Michael Freund is the Founder and Chairman of Shavei Israel. He writes a syndicated column and feature stories for The Jerusalem Post, Israel's leading English-language daily, and he previously served as Deputy Director of Communications & Policy Planning in the Prime Minister's Office under Benjamin Netanyahu. A native of New York, he holds an MBA in Finance from Columbia University and a BA from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. Email Michael at msfreund@earthlink.net View Michael's website at www.shavei.org. This article appeared March 22, 2013 in the Jewish Press and is archived at
http://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/columns/fundamentally-freund/stone-throwing-is-also-terror/2013/03/22/


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OBAMA, IRAN AND PEACE

Posted by Jewish Covenant Alliance, March 21, 2013

First, address the Iran question

Tom Friedman is at it again ("Mr. Obama goes to Israel", March 14th) -- seeking to have America try to save Israel from itself. With great craft, he explains why "America's need to forge an Israeli-Palestinian peace has never been lower and the obstacles to it never higher". He, nonetheless, goes on to propose some tough questions for President Obama to ask the Israelis on this very subject for their own good.

In all his otherwise perceptive analysis, however, one word is missing, "Iran". He thus conveniently writes not a word about the one tough question that the new government of Israel is sure to ask Obama: "Mister President. Are you really serious about stopping the evil ayatollah regime in Iran, if sanctions are not enough to thwart its drive for nuclear weapons capability ?" Once the red line of capability has been crossed, an actual weapon can follow more quickly than it can be stopped. The world will likely then have "deterrence by default", with Tehran deterring Washington, more than vice versa.

In the end, Middle East Arab leaders increasingly fear Iran as much if not more than they fear each other. This is true also of the Palestinian leadership vis-a-vis the Tehran-sponsored Hamas. Therefore, no Israeli-Palestinian peace is likely until this Arab fear is neutralized. Both President Obama and Mr. Friedman would be doubly wise to devote their energies to this question first ... in the interest of peace.

Sincerely,

Aaron Braunstein

Jerusalem

Israel

The writer is JCA's founding president and a retired U.S. Foreign Service Officer who served seven years in Egypt (1990-95) and Tunisia (1970-71).


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JEWISH PROPERTY RECLAIMED IN HOLON! ANOTHER SUCCESS FOR THE ISRAEL LAND FUND

Posted by Israel Land Fund, March 21, 2013

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Another property has been returned to its rightful owners, thanks to Arieh King and his team at the ILF. This time, the property wasn't in the usual areas of Jerusalem or Judea and Samaria, but in Holon, a city next to Tel Aviv.

Since the '50s, an apartment has been owned by a Jewish family. A few years ago, the owner of the property passed away. Recently the inheritor tried to reclaim his empty apartment from Arab squatters and was violently attacked, leaving him hospitalized. After several unsuccessful attempts, the police finally informed the owner that he needed legal documents to be issued through the courts.

At this point the inheritor called the ILF. Under Israeli law, it is permissible within 30 days of a squatter entering your property to use force to gain entry, which is exactly what the ILF team recently did.

At the moment, a small team of ILF activists are living in the apartment just in order to maintain a physical presence there.

Contact Israel Land Fund at office@israellandfund.com


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ROCKET VICTIM: WE'RE 'VICTIMS OF OBAMA,' AND NOBODY CARES

Posted by Arutz Sheva, March 21, 2013

The article below was written by David Lev who produced documentaries and television commercials before making Aliyah in 1999. He then organized Diplomatic Supplements for the Jerusalem Post. Later he led a PR mission to the British Government, aimed at increasing awareness of Israel's terrorist problems. Lev decided upon more practical measures by serving with a volunteer unit tasked with preventing such attacks. He has won a leading writing award for a competition hosted by A7. David is founder & editor of Aliyah Magazine, dedicated to attracting Jews to live in Israel. This article appeared March 21, 2013 in Arutz Sheva and is archived at
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/166448#.VZbsd7yVsWM david@aliyahmagazine.com and http://www.aliyahmagazine.com

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Hamas on Thursday denied that it or any other Gaza terror group had fired rockets at Israeli targets in the midst of U.S. President Barack H. Obama's visit to Israel. "Israel has fabricated these reports in order to mar the reputation of the resistance forces," a spokesperson for Hamas said.

A rocket fired at Israel from Gaza caused heavy damage to a house in Sderot Thursday morning. A second rocket hit an open area near the Gaza border, and two other rockets aimed at Israel fell on the Gaza side of the border fence. There were no injuries, but two residents of the house were treated for shock.

Israel, for its part, said that the attack would not go unanswered, and that Israel would "choose the time and place for its response." Israeli officials said that it was possible that Hamas was trying to elicit an Israeli response to the attack while Obama was in the region, creating a diplomatic crisis when the President visits Palestinian Authority-controlled areas Thursday and Friday. If that is indeed their intent, the officials said, then Israel could expect more rocket attacks during Obama's visit.

Israeli officials added that they were interested in seeing if PA chief Mahmoud Abbas condemned the attacks when he spoke with Obama Thursday afternoon, something he had not done at all during the period leading up to Operation Pillar of Defense, when Hamas and other Gaza terror groups fired thousands of rockets at Israel.

In an interview on Israel Radio, Yossi Haziza, whose house was damaged in Thursday's attack, said that while physical damage — to houses and people — could be repaired, the real damage by attacks like these was to the psyche of the victims. Haziza's wife and child were sleeping at the time of the attack, and the shock of the attack caused them a great deal of fear that he was unsure they would ever be able to ovecome.

"I don't know how we are going to deal with this," he said. "The terrorists fire whenever they want and however they want and we seem unable to stop them. Apparently we did not do a proper job in stopping them in Operation Pillar of Defense.

"It could be that Hamas is doing this in 'honor' of Obama, sending him a message before he goes to Ramallah that he had better not forget about them," Haziza continued. "But so what? Because they want to send a message to the president we have to suffer? Are our children supposed to be sitting ducks for diplomatic reasons? Now they have to grow up with these negative experiences. Who knows what the damage will be later on? We need to be properly defended, regardless of diplomatic issues."

Contact Arutz Sheva at news@israelnationalnews.com


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FIRST DAY OF VISIT: OBAMA TEASES BIBI OVER RED LINES

Posted by Arutz Sheva, March 21, 2013

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The banter between Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and President Barack Obama, after Obama stepped off of Air Force One Wednesday, was about red lines. Specifically, when Obama was unsure of where to walk, Netanyahu told him to follow the red lines that were painted on the tarmac

In an off-the-cuff response, Obama joked about Netanyahu's tendency to paint red lines — a reference to his famous U.N. speech about the Iranian bomb — and Netanyahu also answered jokingly that the red lines on the tarmac were in fact part of an Israeli plot that was meticulously planned in advance.

Reporters noted that when Obama took off his jacket to walk down the tarmac in his shirtsleeves, Netanyahu quickly took of his jacket as well. Obama traded some banter with the new Treasury Minister, Yair Lapid, and needled him about having left a much better job as television anchorman for the challenge of being in charge of the economy.

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Arutz Sheva staff contributed this article and it is archived at
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/166432#.VZbvP7yVsWN. Contact Arutz Sheva at news@israelnationalnews.com


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OBAMA AND NETANYAHU SHOW UNUSUAL SOLIDARITY

Posted by Daily Alert, March 21, 2013

The article below was written by Scott Wilson who is an American film and television actor. Wilson has more than fifty film credits since the 1960s, including In the Heat of the Night, In Cold Blood, The Great Gatsby, Dead Man Walking, Pearl Harbor, and Junebug. This article appeared March 20, 2013 in the Washington Post and is archived at
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/obama-arrives-in-israel-for-three-day-visit/ 2013/03/20/a01774aa-914f-11e2-9abd-e4c5c9dc5e90_story.html

JERUSALEM — President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu expressed an unusual degree of solidarity Wednesday on a set of shared national security concerns that have divided them in the past, signaling either a turn in their vital, if volatile, relationship or a cool tactical display of diplomatic theater.

The leaders' joint appearance concluded a tone-setting first day of Obama's first presidential trip to Israel, a visit celebrated with military ceremony, children's serenades and a rare personal chemistry with a hard-line Israeli leader with whom Obama has often bickered publicly.

In particular, Obama and Netanyahu, appearing at an evening news conference, reached what seemed to be a consensus regarding Iran's uranium-enrichment program.

Iran denies that the program is designed to develop a nuclear weapon, despite mounting evidence to the contrary. Netanyahu and Obama, who advocates a diplomatic solution to the matter, have disagreed over how much time remains before a military strike against Iran is necessary to slow down the program.

Obama said recently that he thinks Iran is a year from achieving a nuclear-weapons capability, a timeline that has differed from Israeli assessments. On Wednesday, Netanyahu moved closer to Obama's timeline — and even softened his certainty about Iran's intent — to allow more space for diplomacy.

"I think that there's a misunderstanding about time," Netanyahu said. "If Iran decides to go for a nuclear weapon — that is, to actually manufacture the weapon — then it will take them about a year."

Obama, in turn, reiterated his support for Israel's right to self-defense. He pledged to seek additional funding for the Iron Dome system, which he saw when he swung by an anti-missile battery after his arrival at Ben Gurion International Airport.

The system, which shot down hundreds of Gaza-fired rockets in November, will receive $200 million in U.S. funding this fiscal year. Obama said he and Netanyahu will begin talks to extend the U.S.-Israeli military aid agreement beyond its current 2017 expiration.

"Israel's security needs are truly unique, as I've seen myself," Obama said. "And flying in today, I saw again how Israel's security can be measured in mere miles and minutes."

The warm display by Obama and Netanyahu comes against the backdrop of a rapidly changing Middle East, shifting politically and culturally through war, protest and elections.

It is too soon to tell whether the two leaders have overcome past differences, which have played out in venues as public as the Oval Office. But the signs of a stronger U.S.-Israel relationship may put new pressure on Iran's leaders, who Obama said Wednesday must be convinced that it is not in their interest to pursue a nuclear weapon.

Obama's visit to the prime minister's official residence featured a surprising levity between two men whose public posture together has more often than not been dour, angry and hectoring.

Upon arrival at Netanyahu's residence, Obama invited the prime minister's wife, Sara Netanyahu, to stand between the two for a photo. "A rose between the thorns," Obama joked.

He and Netanyahu, appearing relaxed and jovial, chatted while Obama signed a guest book. The prime minister complained about how hard it was to form a government in Israel's multi-party system, telling Obama, "You have only one party" to compete with.

"The grass is always greener, my friend," the president replied.

When Obama later teased Netanyahu during the news conference that his "handsome sons" got their looks from their mother, a grinning Netanyahu responded, "I could say the same thing about your daughters."

And as Israeli television captured the president's arrival live, a shot of Obama removing his suit jacket to stroll along the tarmac captured Netanyahu doing the same moments later, a strutting camaraderie not seen previously from the two leaders.

Obama is packing a lot into his three-day trip to Israel and the occupied West Bank, where he is scheduled to meet Thursday morning with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Prime Minister Salam Fayyad.

The trip, on which he is accompanied by his new secretary of state, John F. Kerry, is a mission of remedial diplomacy after a difficult first term with the United States' closest Middle Eastern ally and a deeply disillusioned set of Palestinian leaders.

Obama's early demand that Netanyahu cease settlement construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem — areas, along with Gaza, that Palestinians consider part of their future state — created a rift that became a bitter campaign issue in last year's U.S. election.

In his 2009 address to the Islamic world in Cairo, Obama said he would not accept the "legitimacy" of continued Israeli settlement construction in the occupied territories, activity that many legal experts say violates international law.

His decision not to stop in Israel after that speech — he instead visited the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany to highlight Jewish suffering during the Holocaust — raised concern among many Israelis that Obama did not understand their nation's biblical roots.

Immediately on arrival Wednesday, Obama began to address those lingering concerns, which stirred resentment even among the slice of the Israeli electorate that supports the creation of a Palestinian state.

As he spoke from the airport tarmac, Obama began with a simple "Shalom," the common Hebrew salutation, which, literally translated, means "peace." He then set out to repair the impression he made during his first term.

"More than 3,000 years ago, the Jewish people prayed here, tended the land here, prayed to God here," Obama said at the welcome ceremony. "And after centuries of exile and persecution, unparalleled in the history of man, the founding of the Jewish state of Israel was a rebirth, a redemption unlike any in history."

In addition to the Iranian nuclear program, Obama and Netanyahu said they agree on the dangers posed by the widening civil war in Syria.

Obama defended his policy toward Syria — where an estimated 70,000 people have been killed — citing the international sanctions he has helped organize against President Bashar al-Assad's government.

But he also said that the use of chemical weapons by Syria's government, which Syrian rebels alleged occurred on Tuesday, would be a "game-changer" prompting a more direct, if unspecified, U.S. response.

Netanyahu's hard-line Likud party lost seats in the January elections, and he now heads a governing coalition more moderate and secular than his last.

Whether that will translate into a new peace process is unclear, as Israelis focus on the domestic issues around which much of the election was fought.

Obama said he will speak Thursday about how to revive direct Israeli-Palestinian negotiations with Abbas — and, later that evening, to young Israelis in a speech at the Jerusalem International Convention Center.

Direct talks between the two parties have been dormant, except for a brief period in the fall of 2010, for more than four years.

But Obama received a boost Wednesday from Netanyahu, who in the past has endorsed the creation of a Palestinian state with so many caveats that Palestinian leaders have dismissed the notion as a ploy.

In his opening statement, Netanyahu said, "Israel remains fully committed to peace and to the solution of two states for two peoples." It was one of his strongest public comments in favor of a Palestinian state.

Obama acknowledged that he is not bringing new ideas for how to begin those talks, saying that he "purposely did not come here with some big announcement that did not necessarily meet the realities on the ground."

"I'm absolutely sure that there are a host of things that I could have done that would have been more deft and would have created better optics," Obama said of his first-term efforts. "But ultimately, this is a really hard problem."

Contact Daily Alert at dailyalert@list-dailyalert.org


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PRESSURING THE PA

Posted by Daily Alert, March 21, 2013

The article below was written by Dan Diker who is a former secretary general of the World Jewish Congress, an umbrella group representing Jewish communities and organizations in nearly 100 countries around the world. This article appeared March 20, 2013 in the Jerusalem Post and is archived at
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Op-Ed-Contributors/Pressuring-the-PA-307105

Despite their internal challenges, Obama can still prevail upon the Palestinians to stop the vicious incitement against Israel, stop refusing to negotiate peace with Israel, hold free and fair elections and stop threatening the US administration when it offers to help Palestinians achieve stable political independence.

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The state visit of US President Barack Obama to Israel comes at an important moment.

The United States and Israel share vital interests in a turbulent Middle East; stopping the Iranian regime's sprint for nuclear weapons and terrordriven regional supremacy, managing Syria's spiraling instability while tracking its movable stores of chemical weapons, and keeping radical Islam in check are a few front-burner issues.

The two democratic nations also share an interest in a peaceful, resilient resolution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. All factions in the incoming Israeli government have made clear that they are committed to a diplomatic process with the Palestinian Authority.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's commitment to a durable peace seems clear.

He has already tapped his first coalition partner, incoming Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, to head peace talks with Palestinian negotiators along the lines of Netanyahu's 2009 Bar-Ilan speech, in which he committed to a viable, non-militarized Palestinian state while reaffirming Israel's vital security needs and national interests such as defensible borders and a united Jerusalem.

In contrast, Obama's planned visit to Ramallah comes at a far more defiant moment for the Palestinian Authority and its leadership.

They will need to be pressured by Obama to jumpstart any meaningful peace negotiations with Israel.

The PA's unilaterally engineered upgrade to non-member observer state status at the UN General Assembly last year uprooted the cardinal principle underlying peace talks with Israel since 1993 and defied US calls to return to the table without preconditions.

The Palestinians continue to refuse. For their part, they say that they are lukewarm at best over Obama's upcoming Ramallah visit. Both Fatah and Hamas officials have issued threats of violence during the president's visit. They say they are weighing a third intifada. Nasser Lacham, the editor-in-chief of the Palestinian Ma'an News Agency, told Israel Army radio on March 12 that the Palestinian public no longer trusts Obama and worries that a US-led peace process will result in the PA descending into chaos and going the way of Egypt, Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Palestinian reality is not far from that assessment. The Fatah-Hamas split is as sharp as ever. Public protests against the PA over the past year reflect broad frustration over price hikes, unemployment, corruption and perceived regime weakness that nourish Hamas's popularity. Abbas remains the unelected leader of the PA by fiat since his four-year term ended in 2010.

The public has long branded him "the mayor of Ramallah" for his limited authority and credibility.

Appointed PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad has no Palestinian constituency and is a target of both Fatah and Hamas activists. Incitement against Israel's existence continues unabated. Palestinian Media Watch recently reported on a children's program on PA TV channel The Best Home that taught that Israel's land belongs to the Palestinians and was "occupied" in 1948.

Palestinian behavior seems unconducive to taking part in an effective peace process, which is difficult even when both sides exhibit good will.

Despite their internal challenges, Obama can still prevail upon the Palestinians to stop the vicious incitement against Israel, stop refusing to negotiate peace with Israel, hold free and fair elections and stop threatening the US administration when it offers to help Palestinians achieve stable political independence.

Contact Daily Alert at dailyalert@list-dailylert.org


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THE ISRAEL TEST AND THE AMERICA TEST

Posted by Jewish Policy Center, March 21, 2013

The article below was written by Shoshana Bryen who has more than 30 years of experience as an analyst of U.S. defense policy and Middle East affairs and has run programs and conferences with American military personnel in various countries. The former Senior Director for Security Policy at JINSA, Mrs. Bryen was for 17 years author of the widely read and republished JINSA Reports. After serving as JINSA's Executive Director during the 1980s, she focused on planning and running national security related programs and conferences in the U.S., Israel, Jordan, Taiwan and elsewhere. She has worked with the Strategic Studies Institute of the U.S. Army War College and the Institute for National Security Studies in Tel Aviv, and lectured at the National Defense University in Washington. This article appeared March 21, 2013 on the Jewish Policy Center website and is archived at
http://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/4052/the-israel-test-and-the-america-test

President Obama has had an opportunity during his visit to see some of Israel's pioneering technology. The list (with thanks to Tom Gross) includes energy alternatives; search and rescue technology; a bionic exoskeleton that allows paraplegics to walk; and a "third eye" camera that helps prevent automobile collisions.

If he stayed longer, he could see how Israel has become the world's top water recycler, how Israeli agricultural technology has revolutionized desert agriculture, and how three Israeli universities made the top 100 of the Shanghai Ranking, the worlds most authoritative university ranking system. He could eat the food, dance in the nightclubs, or as he said, put on a "disguise, wear a fake moustache and wander through Tel Aviv and go to a bar..."

The question is not what he will see, but how the president will understand Israel's technological revolution, its culture, and its people. How he will respond to what George Gilder called "The Israel Test."

Gilder posited that one's attitude toward Israel -- positive or negative -- is, in fact, a test of and a reflection of one's self. There are those who see the miracle that is Israel, the accomplishments it has, and the democratic principles it treasures in a region largely devoid of those principles and accomplishments, and say, "Yes, those are great. I want to be associated with people who do those things, I want to learn from them, I want to share with them and have them share with me." There are others who see the same things and say, "Yes, but they stole the land, they raped the people. They didn't build this. Their successes would have been Palestinian successes if Israel hadn't stolen them, they don't deserve what they have and I want to punish them for what they have done."

Admiration on the one side, jealousy and vengefulness on the other.You can pretty much sort the world into "these" and "those."You can also apply the same test elsewhere; for example, to the United States.

Israelis greeted the president with skepticism, but with respect for the country he leads and for the long, close and fruitful relations between Israelis and Americans at many levels.

The Palestinians do not have the same relationship with the United States and its people, and have been broadly clear about their displeasure with the president. On the West Bank, Palestinians have been painting swastikas on billboards with the president's face and promising demonstrations and flag burnings, which the PA announced it would not prevent. On the contrary, the PA Ministry of Detainees and Ex-Detainees (yes, really) provided placards for the protesters. PA leader Mahmoud Abbas announced last week that Hamas is not a terrorist organization, despite the U.S. listing of it as such following the deaths of American citizens at Hamas's hands. Abbas also declared one of his top goals to be the release of 1,000 prisoners in Israeli jails (something probably better negotiated with Israel than the Americans) and a renewed "settlement freeze" (something he wasted when the president last produced one).

Palestinians interviewed before the visit were blunt. Some believe that U.S. support for the Palestinians is tainted and constrained by support for Israel. "I know America is the leading country for freedom and human rights, and I respect Obama because he is a good man," said one woman, "but between America and Israel there is a very strong relationship."

Others were less kind. "We will receive (Obama) with shoes. We want to tell America that we hate you and you have no place here. We don't want to see Obama in Palestine... He does not have anything to offer our people," said one. Another was opposed to the president's visit to Bethlehem, "especially since he has made it clear that he is coming as a pilgrim." One of the protest organizers said the Mr. Obama's objective was to support Israel. "Obama is not welcome in Palestine. He has done nothing for the Palestinians."

That would come as news to Americans, including President Obama.

Despite American reservations about aspects of Palestinian behavior, the U.S. has been committed to an independent Palestinian State since the Oslo Accords. It provides hundreds of millions in aid to the PA and hundreds of millions more to UNRWA for the provision of social services to Palestinians. Despite sequestration and the fact that Abbas disregarded the president's strong request that he not seek "country status" at the UN last November, Secretary of State John Kerry is working assiduously to release nearly $500 million in U.S. aid and generate more from the EU. The U.S. has also trained a Palestinian security force that is the nucleus of a future Palestinian Army. The president engineered a 10-month "settlement freeze," distanced the U.S. government from the Israeli prime minister, declined to speak in the seat of the Israeli Government, and posited the 1967 lines as a future border.

An objective fear of losing the benefits many Palestinians don't seem to recognize as benefits may why Abbas banned reporting from the President's trip to Hebron -- lest Palestinian anti-Americanism be widely viewed in the United States, further reducing already limited American patience.

If Gilder's test tells more about the taker than about Israel, Americans largely pass "the Israel test." Israelis generally return the favor despite occasional political tensions. Palestinian attitudes toward Israel, not surprisingly, fall into Gilder's second group -- those who believe that Israel's objective accomplishments are based on illegitimate foundations. If Palestinian attitudes toward American support say more about them than about the United States, one or the other should consider a policy adjustment.

The only one left to take the test is President Obama.

Contact Jewish Policy Center at list@jewishpolicycenter.org


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TURKISH HYPOCRISY ON ISRAEL

Posted by Steven Simpson, March 21, 2013

The article below was written by Steven Simpson who has a B.A. in political science with an emphasis on Middle Eastern studies, as well as a Master's Degree in library science. Aside from contributing to the American Thinker, he has contributed in the past to such publications as the Canada Free Press, P.J. Media, Front Page Magazine, and the Gatestone Institute. He can be reached at ssimusa@hotmail.com. This article appeared March 21, 2013 in the American Thinker and is archived at
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2013/03/turkeys_erdogan_ and_the_zenith_of_hypocrisy.html

Turkey's Islamist prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, is once again engaging in his favorite political pastime - Israel-bashing.

Late last month at a U.N. convention held ironically to promote religious tolerance, Erdoğan lambasted Israel by calling Zionism "a crime against humanity." Indeed, Erdoğan even outdid the biggest anti-Israel institution in the world - the United Nations - which in 1975 passed its infamous "Zionism is Racism" resolution.

But Erdoğan's continuous contempt for Israel shows the arrogance and hypocrisy of Turkey. For if there has ever been a country in the Middle East guilty of committing crimes against humanity, it is Turkey. Indeed, next to Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, 20th-century Turkey ranks right up there when it comes to massacres, rapes, expulsions, and rapine perpetrated against ethnic and religious minorities - namely Armenians, Greeks, and Kurds.

Before documenting Turkey's crimes against other people, it should first be noted that today's Turkey has for all intents and purposes become an Islamic republic in everything but name only. The so-called "Turkish-Israeli" alliance has been in tatters since Erdoğan came to power in 2003. Aside from veering Turkey on an Islamist course - and cause - the Turks (even with Obama's "apology tour" that began in Turkey back in 2009) remain extremely anti-American. This writer back in 2010 documented Erdoğan's democratic ascent to power, his ideology and goals, and what an Islamist Turkey means to America, Israel, and the West in general.

Regrettably, Israel allowed herself to once again be verbally slapped down by the vitriolic and sanctimonious Erdoğan. With Erdoğan's latest diatribe, all Israel could weakly say was "that it was a sinister and mendacious comment." America, fearful of losing its only Muslim NATO "ally," also was quite quiet when it came to Erdoğan's latest bombastic tirade.

Ironically, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry was on his way to Turkey to meet with officials when Erdoğan had his latest verbal apoplectic attack against Israel. Though the mainstream media made it out that the U.S. was furious with Erdoğan, Kerry simply called the comments "objectionable." Indeed, Erdoğan upbraided Kerry when Kerry had apologized for being late to a dinner with the Turkish prime minister after holding talks with Turkey's foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu. Mr. Kerry had commented to the prime minister that he had held lengthy discussions with Mr. Davutoglu. An irritated Erdoğan then acerbically stated to Kerry that they "must have spoken about everything so there is nothing left for us to talk about." Kerry meekly responded "that there's a lot to talk about." However, it remains unknown what the two actually discussed, and if Kerry raised any objections to Erdoğan's statements on Israel, no one has yet reported on the event.

This now leaves us with Erdoğan's hypocrisy in lecturing Israel about supposed "war crimes" and leads us to actual war crimes perpetrated by Turkey during the 20th century - crimes that still go on today against the Kurds. It is a record that not only has caused oceans of blood to be spilled, but still has repercussions felt to this day.

Probably the most well-known war crime that Turkey engaged in was the slaughter - if not genocide - perpetrated against the Armenians in the first two decades of the 20th century. In fact, the Turks were already slaughtering Armenians in the late 19th century in what has come to be known as "the Hamidian massacres." Estimates of the slaughter range from hundreds of thousands to millions. In any event, Turkey has consistently and constantly denied that such crimes against the Armenians took place. Turkey is so sensitive to the charge of genocide that when the U.S. Congress in 2010 finally passed a resolution condemning this crime, Turkey threatened "serious consequences" to the "partnership" between America and Turkey. Ironically, Barack Obama, who had the audacity to say back in 2007 that "nobody is suffering more than the Palestinian people," sought to stop the congressional resolution on the Armenian genocide.

Continuing with Turkish war crimes, and the hypocrisy of the neo-Ottoman crypto-Sultan Erdoğan, there were the massacres and expulsions of the Greeks from their ancestral homelands. This is another Turkish crime against humanity that is little-known, and even less spoken or written about. "The Pontian Genocide" took place between the years of 1916 and 1922. Again, estimates vary in the casualty rate, but the slaughter could have been as close to 1,000,000 Greeks killed. This doesn't even take into account the surviving 1.5 million Greeks who lived in Asia Minor (Anatolia) for millennia before being expelled by the Turks to European Greece during this era.

Finally, there are the Kurds. If there was ever an authentic Middle Eastern minority of Muslims that deserves a nation-state, it is the Kurds. While Islamist governments in Iran and Turkey (as well as the Arab world) talk about "Islamic solidarity" when it comes to the so-called "Palestinians," there is not even a syllable of talk regarding the plight of the Kurds. The Kurds have been killed and suppressed by Arab, Persian, and Turk for centuries, all of whom see the legitimate aim of the Kurds to establish their own state as a threat to the status quo of continuous Arab, Persian, and Turkish imperialism.

While the Kurds are spread out over Syria, Iraq, Iran, and Turkey, it has been in the last country that the Kurds have basically been written out of history by the Turks. The Turkish quest to deny any semblance of a Kurdish existence has been so bizarre that Turkey even banned the Kurdish language during the years 1983-1999 and routinely referred to them as "mountain Turks." To this day, Turkey routinely crosses the Syrian and Iraqi borders to fight against "Kurdish terrorists."

This background on Turkish war crimes is just a brief sketch of the brutal actions that Turkey has committed over the decades (if not centuries). The next time the arrogant, bellicose, and venomous Erdoğan along with his fellow Islamists lectures Israel about "crimes against humanity," they should look in the mirror and admit to true war crimes.

Indeed, Israel - and America, for that matter - would do history a great justice if they reminded Turkey in the strongest language possible, of the Turks' bloody crimes against their own minorities, instead of sitting back and allowing Turkey to pontificate about Israel's nonexistent "crimes against humanity." Continued silence will only strengthen bullies and thugs like Erdoğan, lend credence to his outlandish slander, and allow Turkey to continue to rewrite history in its own image.

Contact Steven Simpson at ssimusa@hotmail.com


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MOTI, TOW HIM

Posted by Steven Plaut, March 21, 2013

Well, as you know, Obama and his entourage are in town. The local media are besides themselves in ecstasy, as are the local leftists. It is strange seeing so many Israelis getting so excited by the visit of some Kenyan.

In any case, Obama used the opportunity to urge Israelis to seek peace by appeasing the Islamofascist terrorists. No surprise there. Obama tried to "speak over the heads" of the Israeli elected officials by urging a large assembly of Israeli students to demand that Israeli leaders "take risks" for "peace." We know what he meant by that. The assembly by the way was CLOSED to students from Ariel University, which Obama - following the Israeli tenured Left - evidently is boycotting because it is on the correct side of the 1967 Green Line.

Now the funniest part of the visit so far was that the yanks flew in a bunch of armored Caddies to carry the entourage from the airport to Jerusalem and PLO-occupied Ramallah. But one of the cars broke down along the way (Obama was not in it). Someone called in a local Israeli towing service. So the press all day has been featuring photos of Moti's Towing Service and its prime tow truck lifting and dragging away the stricken welfare Cadillac. See this: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/barackobama/9943357/Barack-Obama-in-Israel-the-Beast-limo-breaks-down.html.

The truck had a large banner painted on its side that reads Moti Is Towing You.

Well, I would like to take this opportunity to issue my own special personal appeal to Moti the tow truck guy: Moti, if any other Obama cars breaks down, especially the one in which Obama is riding, then please tow the car right away at my expense directly to Ariel University!

Steven Plaut is an American-trained economist, a professor of business administration at Haifa University and author of "The Scout." He frequently comments — both seriously and satirically — on Israeli politics and the left wing academic community. Write him at splaut@gmail.com His website address is http://www.stevenplaut.blogspot.com. This article appeared March 21, 2013 in the Zionist Conspiracy and is archived at
http://zioncon.blogspot.com/2013/03/tow-him-moti.html


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SALAFIS REVEAL ISLAMIST ATTITUDE & METHODS

Posted by Richard H. Shulman, March 21, 2013

Most Islamists and their supporters practice the Islamic principle of deceiving non-believers in behalf of jihad. Not the Salafis. Salafis are so sure of divine favor, they don't feel as much need to dissemble. They can be remarkable frank.

A Salafist leader in Egypt advocates that his government cooperate less with the U.S., make more policy demands upon the U.S., and consider U.S. aid as payment of the non-believer tax. That would make Egypt truly an Islamic state, he said on Egyptian TV. If Egypt treats the U.S. contemptuously, as if conquered by Islam, foreign aid can be treated as religious tribute, he added.

During the current revival of militant Islam, calls are increasing for imposing the religious tax on non-Muslims. The calls are loud in Egypt, where Christians are numerous. Not much has been heard much about that tax since the 18th century, when Europe made the Muslims stop imposing it.

A Salafist leader in Britain, Anjem Choudary, urged Muslims there to let non-Muslims do the work and pay Muslims unemployment insurance as if a non-believer tax. He, at least, hoped that the socialist welfare department not hear of his exploitation of its system. He called the non-Muslims "slaves." No need for him to worry, however, Westerners remain deaf and blind to Muslim cheating and attempts to take over (Raymond Ibrahim, FrontPageMagazine.com, 3/19/13 http://www.meforum.org/3468/us-aid-egypt-jizya).

Interesting that some of the Islamists who want to impose Islamic rule on us already consider us their slaves, subject to their embezzlement.

Islamists practice deception. They consider the U.S. inferior because of religious differences. Radical Muslims want to take our money and then our freedom. Why don't the major Western media inform audiences of this, instead of letting our government borrow billions of dollars to donate them to Radical Muslim regimes such as in Egypt and the P.A.? Every nuance of Islamist speech is scrutinized for changes in tone or for promises. The promises are believed. Softer tones are touted as "new hope for peace."

Muslims make suckers of our media, and our media makes suckers of our people.

How can we defend ourselves from this clash of religions, when most of us don't know about it?

Richard Shulman is a veteran defender of Israel on several web-based forums. His comments and analyses appear often on Think-Israel. He provides cool information and right-on-target overviews. He distributes his essays by email. To subscribe, write him at richardshulman5@aol.com.


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TOURING ISRAEL'S NORTH

Posted by MS Kramer, March 21, 2013

In Part 1, our AACI tour group visited the En Afek Nature Reserve, located in a marshy area surrounded by metropolitan Haifa, and toured the fabulous Citadel conservation project of ancient Acre, a UNESCO World Heritage site, before arriving at our destination for the weekend, the Ruth Rimonim Hotel in Safed (Tsfat), famous for Kabbalah, ancient synagogues, and its Artists Colony.

On Friday morning, we visited the Hameiri Cheese Dairy, located in a large home that has been passed on through six generations of the Meiri family, who came to Safed from Persia. Yaniv, the family member who currently manages the dairy, told us that it was the first cheese factory in Israel. Yaniv is the brother of Shlomi and son of Meir. Those two names denote the oldest son in alternate generations of the Meiri family, in which the oldest son typically inherits the family home (but cannot rent it to someone else or sell it). The current Meir's oldest son was born with disabilities and, until recently, the family believed that the dairy would close when Meir III retired. However, several years ago Meir's second son, Yaniv, moved back to Safed from Tel Aviv to take over the management of the dairy.

In many old Safed homes additional rooms have been unearthed by each new generation, such as the basement where the Hameiri dairy is located. Salted cheeses are family's specialty: tsvati and grinza cheeses, which are available only at the dairy and at selected fine restaurants and shops. Water for the dairy is provided by a spring running below the property, which Yaniv said may lead to the famous Ari Mikveh (the Ari is the 16th century Kabbalist, Rabbi Issac Luria - the Lion) further down the hill.

Yaniv's father Meir, who has a theatrical bent, regaled us with stories of the special qualities of Safed and its history, especially during the 1948 War of Independence. He explained that Safed's 1,000 Jews (outnumbered 30:1!) refused to take the advice of the British to be evacuated on the eve of the British relinquishment of the Palestine Mandate. The Jews stood fast, reinforced by only 35 Palmach (Striking Force) soldiers. With God's help and the fearsome Davidka (see below), the Arabs fled the city and the Jews retained Safed. Meir finished by assuring us that his son will continue the family tradition of making Israel's finest cheeses.

We then visited a traditional tallit (prayer shawl) weaving studio at the Canaan Gallery, where these and other items are woven using the same techniques which Jews brought to Safed in the 16th and 17th centuries We were fascinated by the workings of the weaving machine, operated, of course, only by foot and hand power. (www.canaan-gallery.com)

That evening, many of us attended Shabbat services. Some chose one of the ancient Safed synagogues and others one of the newer synagogues.. My wife Michal and I went to the "Carlebach Synagogue." We arrived early to get (separate) seats in the small hall. Before the service began, the room filled up to capacity with haredim (ultra-Orthodox) of all sorts, mostly wearing the style of clothing of their particular sect. Unlike a traditional service, the hall was soon rocking from the dancing of the men to the melodies made famous by the charismatic "Singing Rabbi," Reb Shlomo Carlebach (1925-1994).

On Shabbat, we skipped the usual synagogue tour, which we had done before, to walk with friends around the town. The day was perfect, and we soon arrived at the Saraya, a 300-years-old, white stone building in a commanding position on a hilltop. Constructed by D'har El Omar, a powerful Bedouin sheikh who ruled over the Galilee at the start of the 18th century, the building was later taken over by the Ottoman Turks and then by the British during Mandate times. During the War of Independence, Lehi (Underground) fighters blew up the building, which had become the Arab headquarters. After the war, the Saraya was rebuilt and served many purposes. In 1975, the Saraya was reconstructed and today is known as "The Isaac and Edith Wolfson Community Center."

We next walked higher, to the lovely Mezuda Park and Crusader fort. We enjoyed the spectacular 360-degree views from there before walking back towards the hotel. We stopped at the Davidka monument, where we learned how the fearsomely loud mortar played a major role in motivating the Arabs to flee the city. The mortar, whose "bark" was much worse than its "bite," was moved from location to location to give the impression that there were many mortars, not just one. The monument is located across the street from the bullet-scarred police station, which was on the dividing line between the Jewish and Arab sectors.

That evening we went to one of the many Artist Colony studio/galleries. This one was David Friedman's Kosmic Kabbalah Art Gallery. David, originally from Denver, came as a child with his family as immigrants to Israel. That attempt was unsuccessful, but eventually all the family members successfully made aliyah.

David was greatly influenced in the 1970s by psychedelic art, including rock album covers, and Buddhist mandalas. He became ultra-Orthodox, but later, while suffering a severe illness, he became less doctrinaire in his religious practice. David's paintings are fascinating, exhibiting his belief that colors, shapes, and numbers - all important aspects of Kabbalah - are a universal language that speaks to all people. (www.kosmic-kabbalah.com)

The next morning we left Safed and drove the short distance to Rosh Pina (Cornerstone), the first new Jewish settlement in Palestine. Adi Zarchi, our guide, explained that in 1877, seventeen Yeshiva students left Safed to start Rosh Pina, located next to an Arab village. Unfortunately, the pioneers didn't know anything about agriculture and and soon suffered from lack of food. People in Safed told them to pray for charity, as they had done in Safed. Eventually, only two families stayed.

In 1880, David Shuv arrived from Romania to purchase land. His landsmen arrived in 1882 and renamed the village, Rosh Pina. They soon discovered how harsh conditions were, but they persevered despite more warnings from the people of Safed. By 1884, with only thirteen families remaining, Baron Rothschild stepped in to help develop the community, building the first synagogue and workers' housing. Rabbi Joseph Freidman, a Palestine-born Jew known by the Arabs as Effendi Yusef, came to Rosh Pina to promote its agricultural efforts, resulting in crops of clementines (the smallest of the mandarin oranges) by the end of the 19th century.

The Baron's managers, unbeknownst to him, made it very difficult for newcomers. The managers lived in large homes and enjoyed expansive private gardens, while the workers lived far less comfortably. The system was changed in 1900 with very constructive results. Although a silk industry dependent on mulberry trees failed, newcomers continued to arrive. In 1917, the town suffered due to the privations of WWI. In 1929, shomerim (Jewish guards) organized themselves to defend the settlers from Arab assaults. Soon after that, Jewish defenders trained by Zev Jabotinsky's Revisionist party came to the area to train and protect the villagers. During the War of Independence, the Arabs in the nearby village abandoned their homes, after the Syrians encouraged them to leave. They were told to return three days later and occupy Rosh Pina, once the Jews had been slaughtered.

Rosh Pina is a now small, picturesque community, known mostly for B&Bs and artisans. We visited the workshop of Peter Issakovich, Windsong, the harp center of the Galilee. We saw many Celtic harps, door harps, musical tables, wooden xylophones and didgeridoos, all handcrafted by Peter, originally from South Africa. My favorite was the deep, sonorous didge (didgeridoo) which produces amazing, meditative tones. (www.woodsong.co.il)

Before leaving Rosh Pina, we stopped at the Jerusalem Bells shop owned by the artist Ofer Rubin, who makes wind chimes in various colors, materials and sizes, with sounds to match. The gallery, in his beautiful old stone house, also features stained glass, wooden weather vanes and more,. Rubin is considered to be one of Israel's experts in the field. (www.israeltraveler.org)

On the way home, we stopped for a fabulous meal at the large home of a Druse IDF veteran, Ibrahim Riad, whose family has been serving kosher ethnic lunches to groups for years, in their village of Sejur. Riad's wife cooks everything including bulgul (broken wheat) and wedding rice with broken pasta, which Riad said gives strength to the husband on his wedding night. We walked off part of our repast at the Farod Stream reserve, before the bus continued south to drop us off at various locations in central Israel. Kudos to AACI for a wonderful weekend, with an excellent itinerary and an outstanding group.

Learn all abut AACI, the Association for Americans and Canadians in Israel at www.aaci.org.il.

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Contact MS Kramer at mskramer@jhu.edu


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"THE PARTY'S OVER"

Posted By Arlene Kushner, March 21, 2013

If indeed there ever was a party, except in people's imaginations.

I must confess something here. I understand better today how Obama got re-elected. I'm seeing his charm up close and when he turns it on, it's considerable. Then it becomes a question of what to accept as real....

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I want to start with the last event of Obama's day here, because it irks me so greatly. I am referring to his talk to 600 university students at Binyanei Ha'uma -- the Jerusalem Convention Center.

Let me quote what Ruby Rivlin, former speaker of the Knesset, said about the president's decision -- which he called "worrying" -- to speak at the Convention Center rather than the Knesset:

"Three American presidents [Carter, Clinton and Bush] have spoken on the Knesset stage, as well [Egyptian President Anwar] Sadat and leaders from Europe. President Obama should speak to the people of Israel through its elected representatives."

Because of apparent concern on the part of Obama that members of the Knesset might interrupt him if he spoke in the Knesset or demonstrate on behalf of Pollard, Rivlin, at the request of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and National Security head Ya'akov Amidror reached an agreement with MKs that there would be no disruptions. And these agreements were reported to the Americans.

Said Rivlin, "Unfortunately, despite these agreements...President Obama decided not to visit the Knesset, a decision which is in bad taste....The Knesset is a symbol of Israeli sovereignty, and with all due respect to the president, it cannot be ignored."

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Myself, I think the concerns about being interrupted were an excuse, and nothing more, for what Obama did. Young people are more impressionable, less critical. He wanted to set a tone, deliver a message. And I consider what he did to be manipulative.

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So what did he say to the young people?

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There was the requisite amount of feel-good stuff -- more than requisite for my taste. Actually, over the top with repeated Hebrew phrases thrown in and gushing about how he really always had a good relationship with Prime Minster Netanyahu (yea, right).

And then, then he pushed his positions, and they've made me angry. No, very angry.

When he addressed the issue of Iran, he said:

"All of us have an interest in resolving this issue peacefully. Strong and principled diplomacy is the best way to ensure that the Iranian government forsakes nuclear weapons. Moreover, peace is far more preferable to war (sic), and the inevitable costs — and unintended consequences — that would come with it. Because of the cooperation between our governments, we know that there remains time to pursue a diplomatic resolution. That is what America will do — with clear eyes — working with a world that is united, and with the sense of urgency that is required."

Excuse me! These young people are Israeli citizens, and their prime minister has said, unequivocally, that he does not believe diplomacy will work unless there's a credible military option -- and one that would be exercised if necessary. How does Obama, a guest in our country, totally discount this and say that diplomacy is the best way. Not, "it is my opinion that..." or "I hold on to the hope that..." But an unequivocal statement of his own that contradicts and doesn't even give a nod to what Netanyahu thinks.

And then he speaks about what is possible with regard to timing "because of the cooperation between our governments." Dirty pool. He and Netanyahu do NOT agree on the timing, and yet he gives the impression that this agreement exists.

The "cooperation" has to do with intelligence that is shared, not with the conclusions drawn from the intelligence. It is important that this distinction be clear.

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On the subject of Iran, allow me to move back to what was said at the press conference yesterday. It was a positive thing, that Netanyahu made it clear that we are responsible for our own security and will cede this to no one -- and that he said Obama acknowledges this as our right.

However, there's a "but..." here. Because we don't know what was said behind closed doors, we don't know if Obama convinced Netanyahu to wait longer than he would prefer to wait before acting. My inner (intuitive) sense is that he may have. And we don't know if Obama has agreed to back us or provide logistical assistance if we move militarily. There's a great deal we don't know.

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And then Obama made his pitch for the "peace process."

Here he did some qualifying of the "you may not agree with me, but..." sort. But then proceeded to make a case for a "two state solution" that is unbalanced. And pie in the sky. And deceptive.

"...So I believe that the Israeli people do want peace, and you have every right to be skeptical that it can be achieved.

"But today, Israel is at a crossroads. It can be tempting to put aside the frustrations and sacrifices that come with the pursuit of peace...

"I want you to know that I speak to you as a friend who is deeply concerned and committed to your future, and I ask you to consider three points.

"First, peace is necessary. Indeed, it is the only path to true security..."

Let's stop right here for a moment. Necessary? It would be nice, if it were possible. But it's not. "The only path to true security"? Sure, if it were true peace. But what Obama envisions -- a "peace agreement" -- simply puts us at risk.

And what a crock, that he is concerned for our future. He's concerned for his political success and a host of other things.

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"Second, peace is just."

What glib nonsense this is -- designed to appeal to the sense of justice of an idealistic student population. The real issue is one of whether the peace agreement would be "just" in its particulars. For many of us, justice means Jews keeping the land that has been ours going back 3,000 years, and which international law ceded to us early in the 20th century -- in recognition of that ancient bond with our homeland.

For Obama it's something else entirely:

"...the Palestinian people's right to self-determination and justice must also be recognized. Put yourself in their shoes — look at the world through their eyes. It is not fair that a Palestinian child cannot grow up in a state of her own, and lives with the presence of a foreign army that controls the movements of her parents every single day. It is not just when settler violence against Palestinians goes unpunished. It is not right to prevent Palestinians from farming their lands; to restrict a student's ability to move around the West Bank; or to displace Palestinian families from their home."

This paragraph is so distorted in its representation of the reality that it is sickening. Every child has a right to "her own state"? What about a Kurdish child, for example? And it is not true that the Palestinian child's parents are controlled in their movements every single day -- not if they live in a PA city and go about their business peacefully.

And settler violence unpunished? I'd need him to clarify this, which he states as fact. What about the horrendously increased level of Palestinian violence, which he mentions not at all. And on and on...

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"...while I know you have had differences with the Palestinian Authority, I believe that you do have a true partner in President Abbas and Prime Minister Fayyad. Over the last few years, they have built institutions and maintained security on the West Bank in ways that few would have imagined a decade ago. So many Palestinians — including young people — have rejected violence as a means of achieving their aspirations."

Sigh... a true partner in President Abbas... Uh huh. As to maintaining security, I alluded to this myth yesterday. The IDF is maintaining security. If there are two states -- Heaven forbid -- the terrorists will flock in droves to the new Palestinian Arab state.

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"Which leads to my third point: peace is possible. I know it doesn't seem that way. There will always be a reason to avoid risk, and there's a cost for failure. There will always be extremists who provide an excuse to not act."

True peace with the Palestinian Arabs is NOT possible. But he would have it that anyone who recognizes this is an "extremist."

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"...There will be many voices that say this change is not possible. But remember this: Israel is the most powerful country in this region. Israel has the unshakeable support of the most powerful country in the world. Israel has the wisdom to see the world as it is, but also the courage to see the world as it should be."

Go for it, he's telling the young students. Don't listen to the "extremists" and those who say it isn't possible. Here I am, the president of the United States, speaking directly to you and saying it is possible:

"Today, as we face the twilight of Israel's founding generation, you — the young people of Israel — must now claim the future. It falls to you to write the next chapter in the story of this great nation."

http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2013/03/21/text-of-obamas-speech-in-israel/

Manipulative is not even a strong enough word for how Obama conducted himself here. Take a lesson. Under no circumstances is this a man to be trusted.

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Now let's back up just briefly, to the visit Obama made to Ramallah this morning.

According to multiple reports, the tone was decidedly different from what it had been in Israel. No joyous flag waving. There was a large demonstration of hundreds just a short distance from the Muqata (PA headquarters in Ramallah) that could be heard when Obama arrived. The crowd -- organized by an Islamist group called Hizb ut Tahrir -- called for him to leave.

Yesterday, Khaled Abu Toameh, writing in the JPost, reports, a group of Palestinian lawyers filed a request with the PA prosecutor-general that Obama be arrested. That this was about US Army involvement in the death of a Palestinian journalist ten years ago (when Obama wasn't even on the scene) indicates a good measure of hostility to the US in segments of Palestinian Arab society.

Obama and putative PA president, Mahmoud Abbas, met for 90 minutes and then held a press conference. Both parties were largely unsmiling, although Israel National News reports Obama was noticeably warmer to PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad (long a favorite of the West).

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What is clear is that during the press conference, Obama was attempting to play down the issue of "settlements," which, ironically, is the one he himself had advanced as a precondition to negotiations early in his first term. Apparently he has learned at least this from his mistakes -- for he fomented a hardening of Abbas' position.

He had told Netanyahu that "settlement" expansion was not "constructive" or "appropriate." Now at the press conference he suggested that focus in negotiations should be on "core issues": establishment of a Palestinian state and guarantees of Israeli security.

"That's not to say settlements aren't important. That's to say if we solve those two problems, the settlement issue will be resolved," he said. "If the expectation is that we can only have direct negotiations when everything is settled ahead of time, then there's no point in negotiations. It's essential to work through this process even if we have concerns on both sides. We can push through these things, not use them as excuses not to do anything.

"..."Israelis must recognize that continued settlement activity is counterproductive to the cause of peace, and that an independent Palestine must be viable, that real borders will have to be drawn.

[While] "Palestinians must recognize that Israel will be a Jewish state, and that Israelis have the right to insist upon their security."

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But Obama couldn't close the Pandora's box he had opened last year.

Responded Abbas:

Everybody considers settlements more than a hurdle toward a two-state solution. The [United Nations] security council issued more than 13 resolutions, not only condemning settlements but demanding ending and removing them because they're illegal. We're demanding nothing other than the implementation of international law. The issue of settlements in clear."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/barackobama/9946213/Flustered-Barack-Obama-on-the-back-foot-over-Israeli-settlements.html

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Well, for the record, it's not "clear" at all. The Levy Report, which examined a host of legal and historical parameters, determined that the "settlements" are not illegal.

Also for the record: Before Obama raised the "settlement" issue, a great deal of negotiating took place while building was going on. Nothing in the Oslo Accords prohibits settlements.

But if Obama wants to push "peace" forward -- which means bringing Abbas to the table -- where will he go from here? According to PressTV, Abbas political advisor Nimr Hammad quoted Abbas as having told Obama during their meeting:

"A resumption of negotiations is not possible without an Israeli settlement freeze in the West Bank and east al-Quds [Jerusalem],"

http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2013/03/21/294682/no-peace-talks-without-settlement-freeze/

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Has Obama already made a demand of Netanyahu that in the interests of "peace" he freeze building past the Green Line? Will Kerry be expected to deliver that message next week?

What we will need to watch for is a de facto building slowdown that is not officially announced.

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Obama spoke at the press conference today about "real borders" having to be drawn. This addresses another hot button issue about which little is being said publicly: Abbas demands Israel's pullback to the '67 line, and Obama has gone along with this. What was discussed between Obama and Netanyahu on this issue?

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Yesterday, a group of Palestinian Arabs set up a protest camp at E1, the area that runs between Ma'aleh Adumim and Jerusalem, and upon which we are supposed to build (if approval ever comes through in the face of international protests). Some 200 Arabs erected 15 tents as a message to Obama that he was favoring Israel. Last night the IDF handed out eviction notices. But you can count on it -- they will not be evicted until Obama has gone home. While there should be no delay, let's hope there's speedy action thereafter.

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This morning, four rockets were aimed at Israel from Gaza. One hit a home in Sderot, damaging it considerably and traumatizing the family. Another hit an open area near the Gaza border, and two others landed inside of Gaza. Hamas denied that anyone inside Gaza had shot rockets.

Israeli officials said there would be a response "at the time and place" of their choosing. It is obvious that this will not happen until Obama is gone. Somehow, regrettably, a response is considered to have the potential to create a "diplomatic incident." While it rather seems to me that a friend, visiting, and disturbed by the violence imposed on innocent Israelis, would quite understand a response. Obama did say he was our best friend, didn't he? And he did condemn the attack.

I suspect this may also be delayed until after Kerry's second visit.

Contact Arlene Kushner at akushner18@gmail.com and visit her website: www.ArlenefromIsrael.info


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JEWISH ANTI-SEMITES FINALLY COME OUT OF THE CLOSET

Posted by Sergio Hadar Tezza, March 22, 2013

The article below was written by Moshe Averick who received his ordination as an orthodox Rabbi in 1980. He has taught theology and spirituality for nearly 30 years to Jews of all ages, ranging from high school to adult education. Many of his students have gone on to become educators and rabbinic leaders in North America, England, and Israel. He is known for his singular ability to explain complex topics in clear, understandable language and - to borrow the description of one University of Chicago-trained philosopher of science - his "wicked" sense of humor. He supervised educational programs at UCLA and Northridge University on behalf of Yeshiva University of Los Angeles under the auspices of the Simon Wiesenthal Center and in Toronto, Ontario, was among the founding faculty members of what is now one of North America's largest Jewish adult education centers, Aish Hatorah of Toronto. His lectures in Jewish Thought at the Shalavim Rabbinical Seminary in Israel were enthusiastically received for 12 years before he moved back to Chicago in 2007. He has lectured on the subject of atheism and belief in God at universities and colleges for both secular and religious student organizations. This article appeared March 21, 2013 in the Algemeiner and is archived at
http://www.algemeiner.com/2013/03/21/jewish-anti-semites- finally-come-out-of-the-closet/#

Ben Ehrenreich, a freelance journalist and novelist — in a LA Times op-ed piece entitled "Zionism is the Problem has put all his cards on the table, has decided to let the chips fall where they may, and has crossed the proverbial Rubicon. Finally, once and for all, we can understand the true problem in the middle-east: the very existence of the State of Israel:

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"The problem is fundamental: Founding a modern state on a single ethnic or religious identity in a territory that is ethnically and religiously diverse leads inexorably either to politics of exclusion or to wholesale ethnic cleansing. Put simply, the problem is Zionism...establishing a secular, pluralistic, democratic government in Israel and Palestine would mean...the only salvation for the Jewish ideals of justice that date back to Jeremiah.

No kids, the problem is not Saudi Arabia, where practicing any religion other than Islam is punishable by death; the problem is not the murderous and tyrannical regime in Syria that has murdered tens of thousands of its own citizens (imagine what they would do to Jews!); the problem is not Jordan, where selling land to Jews is a capital crime; the problem is not Iran whose leader has vowed to inflict a nuclear Holocaust on the world; the problem is not Egypt whose fanatical Moslems assassinated the first Arab leader to make peace with Israel and is now ruled by a Moslem Brotherhood whose mantra is Jihad! Jihad! Jihad!, and the problem is certainly not the Palestinian Arabs whose only innovative contributions to mankind have been plane hijackings, murder of Olympic athletes, suicide bombers, and whose greatest hero — Yasser Arafat — is the godfather of all radical Islamic terrorism in the world. In other words, the Arabs/Palestinians/Moslems are not expected to live up to any of the ideals of justice and morality expressed in exhortations of the prophet Jeremiah. They are permitted to routinely engage in "politics of exclusion" (try wearing a cross or Star of David necklace in Saudi Arabia) and "ethnic cleansing" (any Christians left in Bethlehem these days?).

No, the problem is Israel; the only pluralistic, democracy in the middle-east, the country whose Arab population has a higher life-expectancy and per-capita income than any of the surrounding Arab states, where hospitals treat all of its citizens, be they Jew, Arab, Christian, or other; the only country in the middle-east with a truly free press and where freedom of religion and expression is guarded, where an Arab judge sits on the Israeli Supreme Court, where an Arab judge can preside over the trial of, and sentence, a former (Jewish) President of the State of Israel to a prison term for rape, and where Arabs vote and can (and do) elect Arab representatives to the Knesset who rail against the very state that confers upon them the right to be elected.

>"Israeli policies have rendered the once apparently inevitable two-state solution less and less feasible."

Only someone who is completely ignorant of the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict or a liar (or both) could possibly write such nonsense. The two state solution was already agreed upon by Israel and failed because of the Jew-hatred and bloodthirsty designs of the surrounding Arabs.

In 1947 the United Nations voted into existence two new countries and welcomed them to join the family of the nations of the world. One was a Jewish Palestinian state called Israel. The other was an Arab Palestinian state whose official name we will never know for reasons which will soon become clear. The Arab Palestinian state included every square inch of the territories known as the West Bank and Gaza and also much of what is now northern Israel. Although Jerusalem was to be an international city, it certainly would have de-facto come under Arab control. Of the seven countries in the region — Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel and the Arab Palestinian state — only one officially recognized the existence of the Arab Palestinian state: Israel.

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Why don't we know the official name of the Arab Palestinian state? Because instead of bothering to form a government and taking care of all those other picky details needed to establish a functioning country, they joined together with their Arab brothers from the surrounding countries and launched a war to destroy the State of Israel. The Arab Palestinian state never even recognized itself! For the next 20 years every square inch of Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, were under Arab control until, in 1967, they launched another war to destroy the State of Israel. Why didn't they use these 20 years to build a state? The answer, of course, is simple. They never were interested in a state of their own, they were interested in the destruction of the Jewish State.

Ehrenreich, of course, would never write an article calling for the disbandment of the Jewish state without the obligatory comparison to South Africa:

"If two decades ago comparisons to the South African apartheid system felt like hyperbole, they now feel charitable. The white South African regime, for all its crimes, never attacked the Bantustans with anything like the destructive power Israel visited on Gaza in December and January, when nearly 1,300 Palestinians were killed."

There you have it, Israel is more evil than the former white South African regime. Is it possible that Israel's attacks on Gaza had something to do with the fact that Hamas, the ruling party in Gaza, has in its official charter an exhortation to kill Jews and destroy the State of Israel? Did it have anything to do with the fact that Palestinians fired more than 2000 rockets from Gaza into Israel in 2012? When asked about the rocket attacks, Ehrenreich replied: "Rockets? What rockets? I don't see any rockets. Do you see any rockets?"

Logic, facts, and history are wasted on Jewish Jew-Haters like Ehrenreich. He is the classical Hellenized Jew who joins with anti-Jewish gentiles against his own people. He is not the first and he will not be the last. The sages of the Talmud composed a special prayer for traitors like him: "For the slanderers let there be no hope and let wickedness perish in an instant....."

Sergio Tezza can be reached at Hadar-Israel@verizon.net


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A SALUTE TO DENMARK

Posted by Fred Reifenberg, March 22, 2013

SALUTE to Denmark .. This could very well happen here on our Continent....

The article below was written by Susan MacAllen. It appeared March 09, 2008 in Snopes.com and is archived at
http://message.snopes.com/showthread.php?t=26990

In 1978-79 I was living and studying in Denmark. But in 1978 - even in Copenhagen, one didn't see Muslim immigrants.

The Danish population embraced visitors, celebrated the exotic, went out of its way to protect each of its citizens. It was proud of its new brand of socialist liberalism one in development since the conservatives had lost power in 1929 - a system where no worker had to struggle to survive, where one ultimately could count upon the state as in, perhaps, no other western nation at the time.

The rest of Europe saw the Scandinavians as free-thinking, progressive and infinitely generous in their welfare policies. Denmark boasted low crime rates, devotion to the environment, a superior educational system and a history of humanitarianism.

Denmark was also most generous in its immigration policies - it offered the best welcome in Europe to the new immigrant: generous welfare payments from first arrival plus additional perks in transportation, housing and education. It was determined to set a world example for inclusiveness and multiculturalism.

How could it have predicted that one day in 2005 a series of political cartoons in a newspaper would spark violence that would leave dozens dead in the streets -all because its commitment to multiculturalism would come back to bite?

By the 1990's the growing urban Muslim population was obvious - and its unwillingness to integrate into Danish society was obvious.

Years of immigrants had settled into Muslim-exclusive enclaves. As the Muslim leadership became more vocal about what they considered the decadence of Denmark's liberal way of life, the Danes - once so welcoming - began to feel slighted. Many Danes had begun to see Islam as incompatible with their long-standing values: belief in personal liberty and free speech, in equality for women, in tolerance for other ethnic groups, and a deep pride in Danish heritage and history.

The New York Post in 2002 ran an article by Daniel Pipes and Lars Hedegaard, in which they forecasted accurately that the growing immigrant problem in Denmark would explode. In the article they reported: "Muslim immigrants constitute 5 percent of the population but consume upwards of 40 percent of the welfare spending. Muslims are only 4 percent of Denmark's 5.4 mill ion people but make up a majority of the country's convicted rapists, an especially combustible issue given that practically all the female victims are non-Muslim. Similar, if lesser, disproportions are found in other crimes. Over time, as Muslim immigrants increase in numbers, they wish less to mix with the indigenous population. A recent survey finds that only 5 percent of young Muslim immigrants would readily marry a Dane. Forced marriages - promising a newborn daughter in Denmark to a male cousin in the home country, then compelling her to marry him, sometimes on pain of death - are one problem".

"Muslim leaders openly declare their goal of introducing Islamic law once Denmark's Muslim population grows large enough - a not-that-remote prospect. If present trends persist, one sociologist estimates, every third inhabitant of Denmark in 40 years will be Muslim".

It is easy to understand why a growing number of Danes would feel that Muslim immigrants show little respect for Danish values and laws.

An example is the phenomenon common to other European countries and the U.S : some Muslims in Denmark who opted to leave the Muslim faith have been murdered in the name of Islam, while others hide in fear for their lives. Jews are also threatened and harassed openly by Muslim leaders in Denmark, a country where once Christian citizens worked to smuggle out nearly all of their 7,000 Jews by night to Sweden - before the Nazis could invade. I think of my Danish friend El sa - who as a teenager had dreaded crossing the street to the bakery every morning under the eyes of occupying Nazi soldiers - and I wonder what she would say today.

In 2001, Denmark elected the most conservative government in some 70 years - one that had some decidedly non-generous ideas about liberal unfettered immigration. Today Denmark has the strictest immigration policies in Europe. (Its effort to protect itself has been met with accusations of 'racism' by liberal media across Europe - even as other governments struggle to right the social problems wrought by years of too-lax immigration.)

If you wish to become Danish, you must attend three years of language classes. You must pass a test on Denmark's history, culture, and a Danish language test.

You must live in Denmark for 7 years before applying for citizenship. You must demonstrate an intent to work, and have a job waiting. If you wish to bring a spouse into Denmark, you must both be over 24 years of age, and you won't find it so easy anymore to move your friends and family to Denmark with you.

You will not be allowed to build a mosque in Copenhagen. Although your children have a choice of some 30 Arabic culture and language schools in Denmark, they will be strongly encouraged to assimilate to Danish society in ways that past immigrants weren't.

In 2006, the Danish minister for employment, Claus Hjort Frederiksen, spoke publicly of the burden of Muslim immigrants on the Danish welfare system, and it was horrifying: the government's welfare committee had calculated that if immigration from Third World countries were blocked, 75 percent of the cuts needed to sustain the huge welfare sy stem in coming decades would be unnecessary. In other words, the welfare system as it existed was being exploited by immigrants to the point of eventually bankrupting the government. 'We are simply forced to adopt a new policy on immigration.

The calculations of the welfare committee are terrifying and show how unsuccessful the integration of immigrants has been up to now,' he said.

A large thorn in the side of Denmark's imams is the Minister of Immigration and Integration, Rikke Hvilshøøj. She makes no bones about the new policy toward immigration, 'The number of foreigners coming to the country makes a difference,' says, 'There is an inverse correlation between how many come here and how well we can receive the foreigners that come.' And on Muslim immigrants needing to demonstrate a willingness to blend in, 'In my view, Denmark should be a country with room for different cultures and religions. Some values, however, are more important than others. We refuse to question democracy, equal rights, and freedom of speech.'

Hvilshøøj has paid a price for her show of backbone. Perhaps to test her resolve, the leading radical imam in Denmark, Ahmed Abdel Rahman Abu Laban, demanded that the government pay blood money to the family of a Muslim who was murdered in a suburb of Copenhagen, stating that the family's thirst for revenge could be thwarted for money. When Hvilshøøj dismissed his demand, he argued that in Muslim culture the payment of retribution money was common, to which Hvilshøøj replied that what is done in a Muslim country is not necessarily what is done in Denmark. The Muslim reply came soon after: her house was torched while she, her husband and children slept. All managed to escape unharmed, but she and her family were moved to a secret location and she and other ministers were assigned bodyguards for the first time - in a country where such murderous violence was once so scarce.

Her government has slid to the right, and her borders have tightened. Many believe that what happens in the next decade will determine whether Denmark survives as a bastion of good living, humane thinking and social responsibility, or whether it becomes a nation at civil war with supporters of Sharia law.

And meanwhile, Americans clamor for stricter immigration policies, and demand an end to state welfare programs that allow many immigrants to live on the public dole. As we in America look at the enclaves of Muslims amongst us, and see those who enter our shores too easily, dare live on our taxes, yet refuse to embrace our culture, respect our traditions, participate in our legal system, obey our laws, speak our language, appreciate our history . . we would do well to look to Denmark, and say a prayer for her future and for our own.

Contact Fred Reifenberg by email at freify@netvision.net.il


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CONTENTIONS OBAMA'S MIX OF REALITY AND FANTASY

Posted by We Are For Israel, March 22, 2013

The article below was written by Jonathan S. Tobin who is Senior Online Editor of Commentary magazine with responsibility for managing the editorial content of the website as well as serving as chief politics blogger. From January 2009 to April 2011, he was executive editor of the magazine. Prior to coming to Commentary, Tobin was editor in chief of the Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia and the Connecticut Jewish Ledger. His writing has appeared in the New York Post, The Jerusalem Post, The American Spectator, the Weekly Standard, the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, USA Today and many other publications. Over the course of his career, he has won more than 50 journalism awards for commentary, editorial writing, and arts criticism. He has been named the top columnist and editorial writer for Jewish newspapers in North America several times, as well as the top weekly columnist and editorial writer in Pennsylvania and Connecticut. In 2006, he received the unique distinction of being named both the best editorial columnist and the best arts critic in Philadelphia by the Society of Professional Journalists. This article appeared March 21, 2013 in Commentary and is archived at
https://www.commentarymagazine.com/2013/03/21/obamas-mix-of-reality-and-fantasy/

President Obama continued his charm offensive with the people of Israel with his speech to an audience of students in Jerusalem that reaffirmed his support for Zionism and Israel's "unbreakable" alliance with the United States. But however far he may have gone toward reassuring Israelis of his concern for their security during this trip, many of the headlines today will be devoted to the part of his address that attempted to prod the Jewish state to recommit to the peace process.

The speech demonstrated that, despite the new warmth between Obama and Prime Minister Netanyahu, there is still considerable distance between their positions. But even the section devoted to advocacy for a renewed peace process showed that there is even greater distance between the United States and the Palestinians.

In a transparent effort to go over the heads of Israel's government by appealing to the public, the president made the argument that peace and the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside Israel were both just and necessary to secure the country's future. He urged the hand picked left-leaning audience of students to pressure their leaders to pursue peace. He spent the first half of his speech extolling the legitimacy of Zionism as well as highlighting the threats to its existence from terror groups and hostile neighbors as well as Iran. But his clear purpose was to establish his bona fides as a friend of the Jewish state primarily in order to give him the standing to advocate for a reinvigorated peace process in which the country would once again take "risks for peace." This was both clever and effective and there's no doubt that, as many pundits seemed to say in its aftermath, is was a better exposition of the liberal Zionist position on the peace process that had been given in the country in many years.

But however much this may have encouraged Israel's moribund political left, the president's warning that "neither occupation nor expulsion is the answer" to the question of how Israel was to navigate the future ran aground on his assurance that the goals of the Arabs who attended his 2009 Cairo speech were similar to those of the Israelis who heard him today in Jerusalem. Obama's high-flown rhetoric about the virtues of coexistence and the need to establish two states for two peoples was widely applauded by the Israelis. But he is tragically mistaken if he really thinks the Muslim Brotherhood supporters who heard him in Cairo or most Palestinians have assimilated this ethos of live and let live.

The president may well be right that the ideal solution to the conflict is one in which the Palestinians have a state alongside Israel that will give them a focus for their national identity without threatening their Jewish neighbors. Were that a possibility, he would be correct in assuming that the vast majority of Israelis would embrace such an option even if, as was the case with the three offers past Israeli leaders made to the Palestinians, it involved far-reaching and possibly dangerous concessions. But his assumption that the Palestinian Authority—which rejected those three offers—let alone the Hamas rulers of Gaza or the Palestinian population for whose support both compete share this desire for two states is unfounded.

The president eloquently and rightly made clear that the United States would never abandon the Jewish state or allow its enemies to prevail:

So that is what I think about when Israel is faced with these challenges — that sense of an Israel that is surrounded by many in this region who reject it, and many in the world who refuse to accept it. That is why the security of the Jewish people in Israel is so important — because it can never be taken for granted. But make no mistake: those who adhere to the ideology of rejecting Israel's right to exist might as well reject the earth beneath them and the sky above, because Israel is not going anywhere. Today, I want to tell you — particularly the young people — that so long as there is a United States of America, Ah-tem lo lah-vahd [You are not alone].

This was comforting rhetoric to Israelis and their friends. But the problem facing those who want to solve the conflict is not whether the United States can reassure Israelis that they have nothing to fear but whether it can persuade the Palestinians to redefine their national identity in such a way as to be able to accept a solution to the conflict that does not involve Israel's disappearance.

In telling Israelis that they were now the most powerful country in the region, he seemed to be saying they should stop thinking of themselves as victims and embrace a future in which their economic prowess can enrich the region. But by speaking of a future in which Israel could be "the hub for a thriving regional trade," it sounded as if the president was channeling Israeli President Shimon Peres's fantasy of a "New Middle East" that fueled the post-Oslo euphoria of the 1990s that was debunked by the reality of the Yasir Arafat-ruled terror state the peace accords established.

Unlike in many of his previous comments about the conflict, the president acknowledged that Israel had already taken risks for peace and had been answered with anti-Semitism, terrorism and war. If, as he also noted, Israelis have grown skeptical about the prospects for peace, it is not because they lack the will for it or the idealism to which his remarks appealed, but because they know their foes have not given up their goal of Israel's destruction.

In Jerusalem, Obama was preaching to the choir about peace. But if he thinks Israelis will rise up and force the Netanyahu government —which was chosen in an election in which the vast majority of the electorate prioritized domestic issues over the futile quest for a solution to the conflict—he's dreaming. The Muslim Brotherhood sympathizers that heard Obama in 2009 at a stronghold of anti-Semitism and rejection of Zionism may all want a good future for their families just like the Israelis. But they want the future to be one in which there is no Jewish state. The same is true of Hamas and, despite the statements in English to the Western press by PA leader Mahmoud Abbas, it is true of Fatah and its sympathizers as well.

Though this speech will, to some extent, satisfy those who continue to long for the American president to "save Israel from itself," it's not likely it will have much of an impact on the Palestinians or Muslims and Arabs who agree that Israel and the United States are united by common values and despise both for that very reason.

We can all hope that, as the president said, peace will begin "in the hearts of the people." But if that was his goal, he had the wrong audience. What Palestinians heard was not so much his advocacy for their rights and statehood as the president's affirmation of America's commitment to Israel's future as a Jewish state whose security will not be undermined. If that will cause some of them to give up their quest for its destruction, that is all to the good. But as much as this speech demonstrated that there are still plenty of differences between the positions of Obama and Netanyahu, it also made clear that there is even more distance between those of the president and a Palestinian public that has yet to accept Israel's legitimacy.

Contact We Are For Israel at weareforisrael@gmail.com


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FATAH PRAISES UM NIDAL, MOTHER OF TERRORIST "MARTYRS"

Posted by PMW Bulletin, March 22, 2013

Abbas Zaki, Member of Fatah Central Committee, recently spoke about the death of Hamas MP Um Nidal (Mariam Farahat), referring to her "journey of giving, overflowing with struggle and sacrifice." PA MP Mustafa Al-Barghouti expressed similar awe for Um Nidal "giving her three heroic sons... for Palestine and for the freedom of the Palestinian people."

Palestinian Media Watch documented that Um Nidal joined her terrorist son Muhammad in 2002, in his farewell video sending him off on his terror attack, saying this "is the best day of my life." She added that she wished to "sacrifice more [sons] for Allah's forgiveness, and for the flag [of Islam]."

Following that attack, in which Muhammad killed 5 Israeli students, Um Nidal said: "I gave my son to Jihad for Allah. It's our religious obligation... As much as my living children honor me, it will not be like the honor the Martyr showed me... The greatest honor [my son] showed me was his Martyrdom."

Um Nidal was the mother of two other "Martyrs," as well, all members of Hamas' military wing, the Al-Qassam Brigades. One of the sons, Nidal, invented the Qassam rocket and was killed when explosives he was preparing detonated. The third son, Rawwad, was killed together with three other Hamas terrorists by Israel.

Abbas Zaki in his statement stressed that Um Nidal "sacrificed her three heroic sons Nidal, Muhammad and Rawwad, on the altar of freedom for Palestine"

The following is the transcript of Um Nidal's statement before and after her son's attack in 2002:

Um Nidal with her son, Muhammad, who is armed and ready to carry out a terror attack: "By Allah, today is the best day of my life. I feel that our Lord is pleased with me, because I am offering something [my son] for Him. I wish to sacrifice more [sons] for Allah's forgiveness, and for the flag [of Islam], 'There is no god but Allah,' to fly over Palestine.... It's true that there's nothing more precious than children, but for the sake of Allah — what is precious becomes cheap."

Um Nidal after her son's death: "I gave my son to Jihad for Allah. It's our religious obligation. If I wanted to have compassion for him, or to make him change his mind, it would be wrong, a mistake. I don't want to be guided by my feelings, a mother's feelings. I put them aside for a while for something greater, although a mother's feelings are involved. Why? Because I love my son, and I wanted to choose the best for him, and the best is not life in this world. For us there is an Afterlife, the eternal bliss. So if I love my son, I'll choose eternal bliss for him. As much as my living children honor me, it will not be like the honor the Martyr showed me. He will be the intercessor on the Day of Resurrection. What more can I ask for? Allah willing, the Lord will promise us Paradise, that's the best I can hope for. The greatest honor [my son] showed me was his Martyrdom."

Um Nidal has also expressed how she viewed the kidnapping of Israeli soldiers as "the only solution":

"Disregarding the fact that I'm a member of Parliament as a Palestinian citizen, by Allah, I don't believe in any solution other than one: kidnapping Zionist soldiers."

PMW documents that the PA promotes Martyrdom death for Allah as an ideal and how parents express joy over their children's death as Martyrs.

Itamar Marcus, Director of Palestinian Media Watch (http://www.pmw.org.il), was Israeli representative to the Tri- Lateral Anti Incitement Committee established under the Wye accords, and has written reports on Palestinian Authority, Syrian and Jordanian schoolbooks.


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AMERICA'S DEPENDENCE ON ISRAEL

Posted by Yaacov Levi, March 22, 2013

Prof. Paul Eidelberg

Whenever high officials of the United States visit Israel, much is made of American military aid to the Jewish state. This writer has yet to hear of any reciprocity on the part of high officials of Israel. Jews are thus made to appear as beggars receiving handouts like Americans on the dole.

Consider the condescension of Present Barak Obama, who repeatedly acknowledges Israel's right to defend itself—as if Israel's right of self-defense depends on the good will of the United States! This is another way of informing (or misinforming) people that Israel is a beggar nation whose existence depends not on the courage and resources of her own people—let alone on God—but on the benevolence of Uncle Sam.

Can anyone imagine an Israeli Prime Minister suggest that America has a right to defend itself?

Can anyone imagine an Israeli statesman suggest that the survival of the United States depends very much on the military/cum economic assistance Israel has provided her American ally?

Can anyone imagine that Israel's dependence on the United States is to no small extent the result of U.S.-support of Israel's enemy—the PLO-Palestinian Authority?

On the other hand, are Americans aware of what Israel has sacrificed in blood and treasure as a result of her government's yielding to the Oslo covenant of death signed on the White House lawn to the applause of benighted former Presidents of the United States?

If anyone is interested in these questions, consult the attached file, which may also be found in the Internet, in a paper published by Ariel Center for Policy Research.

Contact Yaacov Levi at jlevi_us@yahoo.com


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OBAMA: ISRAEL MEANS NO NEW HOLOCAUST

Posted by Arutz Sheva, March 22, 2013

United States President Barack Obama visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem on Friday morning.

"Here on your ancient land, let it be said: The state of Israel doesn't exist because of the Holocaust, but due to the state of Israel, the Holocaust will never happen again," Obama declared.

The victims of the Holocaust will never be forgotten, said Obama. He noted that he has visited Yad Vashem before, but said that it would remain heart-breaking even after 1,000 visits.

"We see how evil can, for a moment in time, triumph," he said. "We see the barbarism that enfolds when we begin to see other human beings as less than us."

There is no place for racism or anti-Semitism, he declared.

Obama had previously caused upset by stating that the state of Israel was reestablished because of the Holocaust.

Obama also visited the tombs of Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin and of Theodore Herzl. He placed stones on each grave, in line with Jewish tradition, and spoke with Rabin's children and grandchildren.

Contact Arutz Sheva at news@israelnationalnews.com This article appeared March 22, 2013 in Arutz Sheva and is archived at
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/166481#.VaVLILyVsWM


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PRESIDENT OBAMA'S SPEECHES IN ISRAEL

Posted by Sanford Aranoff, March 22, 2013

There were several extremely important developments that happened during President Obama's recent trip. These developments, while of major importance to Americans, were only briefly mentioned. Obama spoke to Israeli college students eloquently and enthusiastically about the real possibility of peace with the Arabs on the basis of two states for two people. He encouraged the young students to act towards this goal, and to work to overcome the inertial of the leaders. The important and dangerous fact is that this speech was ahistorical. No reference was made to history. If the President assumed that the students, being young, were unaware of history he is mistaken, for Israelis are very aware of history. What Obama did was to select some aspects of history and to use them to praise Israel, while totally forgetting to mention major critical historical events. Not only did Obama forget these critical historical events, but also Israeli and American history professors along with major news networks.

While Obama was in Israel, bad guys in Gaza fired rockets into Israel causing property damage but fortunately no one was hurt. Obama did not even see fit to comment on this serious attack. This is because he is living outside of history. He sees his goals for the future while blissfully being aware of the past.

Allow me to refresh your memories about the history of Gaza. In 1967 Egypt attacked Israel in an act of unprovoked aggression. Israel defeated this evil aggressor. Throughout history, when a nation is attacked and defends itself, it then keeps the territory it acquired. The world pressured Israel to give back land it acquired in this war; however, it kept Gaza and did not give it back. Jews moved into this beautiful place. People started building a time-share complex, something that would have brought in much needed income. The Jews build hothouses, and made the economy viable. The Arabs in Gaza kept trying to kill Jews. Some Israelis said that maybe Israel should give Gaza to Egypt to free Israel from the attacks; however, most Israelis objected.

Europeans pressured Israel to withdraw from Gaza. Prime Minister A. Sharon objected, saying that this is simple appeasement very similar to British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's decision to give part of Czechoslovakia to Nazi Germany. The European nations strongly condemned Sharon, saying there is no comparison. Eventually Sharon yielded, and ordered the Army to evacuate all the Jews from Gaza, and then withdrew the occupying force.

The Arabs of Gaza reminded President Obama when he was in Israel about Israel's foolish withdrawal. Israel's goal in withdrawing from Gaza was to bring peace. The reality is that it brought rockets, danger, and possibly war. This is a clear lesson that once Israel is victorious against Arabs who are trying to kill Jews, and then Israel acquires land; Israel must never return this land to the Arabs if Israel wants peace.

The other lesson is that although Israel knew that withdrawing from Gaza would be as bad as Chamberlain's giving Czechoslovakia to the Nazis, Israel yielded to foreign pressure and acted in a foolish and dangerous way.

The fact that Obama made no reference to Israel's withdrawal from Gaza shows that Obama and Americans in general are living in a dream world with no connection with real historical events.

The fact that no Israeli leader criticized Obama for ignoring the lessons from Gaza shows that Jews have not learned the lessons from the past. In the 1930's, when Germany passed the Nuremburg laws, Jews did not protest. Jews did not want to rock the boat. This was a fatal mistake. Jews should have violently protested these evil laws, including using weapons to fight these laws. Jews say they learned lessons, when they say "Never again!" However, Jews did not learn the important lessons, and did not fight people who demanded withdrawal from Gaza. Israel does not fight people who demand withdrawal from the "West Bank" and not to build "settlements".

Obama's dreaming, living in an alternative reality, shows itself about the events of 1947. The UN partitioned Palestine into two areas, two states for two peoples. This is what Obama wants to do now. The Arabs objected, and fought a terrible bloody war, resulting in proportionally large numbers of Jews dying.

The false concept of two states for two peoples did not work in 1947 nor did it work with Sharon's withdrawal from Gaza in 2006. Anyone who suggests that today Israel can give up land for peace is a person who denies reality, and so is irrational.

How can we deal with such irrational people? We may take inspiration from the Biblical Prophets, who tried to uproot idolatry, which is very irrational. We need words, threats, and actions. We must fight with everything we can. We can expect they will resort to dirty propaganda, full of false statements and emotions. We must remain steadfast as the Biblical Prophets were, knowing that we stand for truth.

The lesson Americans must learn from this is that if the President can say things that are contradicted by history, things that are clearly wrong, we can be certain this is what he will say about all his policies. Everything he says is ahistorical. For example, he created a government health plan, ignoring the historical reality that this never worked. With people like this, we do not discuss things, except to act to oppose his agendas.

There is only one solution. Israel must occupy all the land in the original Mandate, and apply Israeli law. Arabs will have the right to vote if they affirm allegiance to Israel. This is the only rational solution. Americans need to be very wary of Obama the dreamer, and try to vote out of office all those who support this person.

Contact Sanford at aranoff@analysis-knowlege.com


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FROM CAIRO 2009 TO JERUSALEM 2013

Posted by Barbara Sommer, March 22, 2013

The article below was written by Yoram Ettinger who is an insider on US-Israel relations, Mideast politics and overseas investments in Israel's high tech. He is a member of the American-Israel Demographic Research Group (AIDRG), which has documented dramatic flaws behind demographic fatalism on one hand and a Jewish demographic momentum on the other hand. Ettinger is a consultant to members of Israel's Cabinet and Knesset, and regularly briefs U.S. legislators and their staff on Israel's contribution to vital U.S. interests, on the root causes of international terrorism and other issues of bilateral concern. His Op Eds have been published in Israel and in the U.S., and he has been interviewed on Israel's and U.S.' TV and radio. He was also a speaker at an AIPAC Annual Conference. Ettinger did his graduate studies at UCLA and undergraduate at UTEP and served as Minister for Congressional Affairs at Israel's Embassy in Washington (with a rank of an ambassador), Israel's Consul General in Houston and Director of Israel's Government Press Office. He is the editor of Straight from the Jerusalem Cloakroom and Boardroom newsletters on issues of national security and overseas investments in Israel's high-tech.

Is President Obama learning from history by avoiding — or repeating - the crucial errors of his 2009 visit to the Middle East?

In 2009, Obama anticipated engagement, rather than confrontation, with Iran, which threatens the survival of pro-US Arab regimes in the Persian Gulf and beyond. Obama expected an Arab Spring and a march of pro-US democracy on the Arab Street, rather than the stormy, tectonic anti-US Arab Winter. Just like President Carter's reckless abandonment of the Shah and his courting of Khomeini, President Obama turned his back on America's ally, Mubarak, while extending his hand to America's inherent enemy, the trans-national, subversive Muslim Brotherhood. The desertion of Mubarak undermined US reliability in the eyes of pro-US Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the Gulf States. Furthermore, the newly-elected President promoted the UN as the quarterback of international relations and the US as a multilateral arbitrator/mediator, rather than a unilateral, determined military superpower. Such a policy has eroded America's posture of deterrence, which is the backbone of the dwindling club of pro-US Arab regimes.

In 2013, President Obama is increasingly aware that a nuclear Iran would primarily target vital US economic, national and homeland security interests. He is better acquainted with the threat of the Arab Winter, the potential disintegration of a few Arab countries and the intensification of Islamic terrorism. The 2013 visit aims to reassure pro-US Arab regimes, who dread a nuclear Iran and are disillusioned with the US focus on diplomacy and economic sanctions. They doubt Washington's intent to employ the only effective option against Iran: a surgical, disproportional military preemption with no boots on the ground. President Obama aspires to secure the remaining pro-US Arab regimes in the face of the conventional and chemical lava erupting on the Syrian Street, which could sweep through Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and other Arab countries.

In 2009, the US President considered the Palestinian issue the epicenter of Middle East turbulence and anti-US Islamic terrorism, a facilitator of anti-Iran Arab coalition and the crown-jewel of Arab policy-making.

In 2013, the seismic Arab Street, from northwest Africa to the Persian Gulf, has exposed the marginal role played by the Palestinian issue in shaping Arab priorities and Middle East developments. Irrespective of Palestinian-oriented rhetoric, President Obama's visit is driven by Iran's nuclearization, the exploding Arab Street and the outcry by America's Arab allies, not by the Arab-Israeli conflict or the Palestinian issue. Neither the Middle East, nor US-Israel relations, evolves around the Palestinian issue.

In 2009, the US President assumed that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is over the size — not the existence - of Israel, hence the formula of land-for-peace. Therefore, he insisted that painful Israeli concessions would pacify the Palestinians, rather than whet their appetite and radicalize their policy. He believed that his goodwill and charismatic communications skills would achieve an Israel-Palestinian agreement, which eluded his White House predecessors. He was certain that his conviction could produce a peace accord in a region that has never experienced intra-Arab peaceful coexistence, intra-Arab tolerance, intra-Arab compliance with agreements and not one Arab democracy in the last 1,400 years. He promoted "Give peace a chance" in a region, where too many sanctify martyrdom (suicide bombing) rather than life.

In 2013, Obama harbors much of his 2009 approach towards the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, while recognizing that pressuring Israel radicalizes the Palestinians. He ignores the centrality of Islam, which prohibits "infidel" sovereignty in the abode of Islam. Moreover, notwithstanding the US financial and diplomatic embrace of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas and Salaam Fayyad have moved closer to Hamas, Russia, China, North Korea and Iran, fueling anti-US, anti-Israel and anti-Jewish sentiments via incitement and hate-education in Palestinian schools, mosques and media. Is Obama aware that the application of moral equivalence to Israel (the role model of counter-terrorism and unconditional alliance with the USA) and to the Palestinians (the role model of international terrorism and allies of the Nazis, Communist Bloc, Saddam Hussein, Khomeini and Bin Laden) has been morally-wrong and strategically-flawed? Is he aware that unprecedented Israeli gestures (e.g., 1993 Oslo Accord, 2005 uprooting Jewish settlements) were interpreted as weakness, propelling unprecedented hate-education, terrorism and non-compliance?

In 2009, the US President approached Israel as a minor strategic ally, possibly a burden, obstructing US ties with Muslims.

In 2013, Israel is highlighted as the only stable, reliable, predictable, capable, democratic and unconditional ally of the US, in contrast with the increasingly violent, intolerant, unpredictable, unstable, unreliable and anti-US Arab Street. US-Israel strategic cooperation has been considerably upgraded, independent of US-Israel disagreements over the Palestinian issue, and as a result of regional and global developments which are much more significant than the Palestinian issue. Shared values, mutual threats, joint interests and Israel's cutting edge defense and commercial technologies and battle tactics have underscored the mutually-beneficial, two-way-street, win-win ties between the US and Israel.

In order to avoid the errors of the 2009 visit, and attain the key goals of the 2013 visit - the bolstering of the US posture of deterrence and power projection in the face of Iran and the boiling lava on the Arab Street, regardless of the Palestinian issue — President Obama may have to walk the (military) walk, not just talk the (diplomatic and economic) talk.

Contact Barbara Sommer at lsommer_1_98@yahoo.com


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THE OBAMACARE 'STING'

Posted by Frank Salvato, March 22, 2013

In the Academy Award winning movie "The Sting," the characters played by Paul Newman and Robert Redford set-up a fake betting parlor and racetrack broadcast to "reel in the whale." The "sting," or the con game, was set-up from the very start to play out exactly as planned; the winner was predetermined: the con men. Obamacare — or the Affordable Care Act, laughable as that law's title may be — is not unlike "The Sting," in that the outcome emanating from the passage of this law was predetermined, but it may not be what you think.

Most people who understand Obamacare to be an affront to the Constitution (this, of course, would not include US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts) and a gear stopper, economically, hold the position that the real catalyst behind this horrible piece of legislation was the creation of a single-payer healthcare system. To avoid this the popular hypothesis held that those opposed to the outrageous provisions set forth in the Affordable Care Act would either: a) win the General Election in a landslide and repeal the whole of the law or, b) in the aftermath of a lame electoral attempt, dismantle the law piece-by-piece in an effort to defund and render impotent the law piecemeal. As it stands, courtesy of the establishment Republican Party, we have opted for "B."

"When the young people in this country find out that they are going to be the generation of debtors and there's no way they're ever going to get out from underneath this kind of stuff — I've got to tell you, people don't even realize how crushing it's going to be after the 1st of this next year," Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) said.

"And I'll predict that within that year — now I may be wrong on this — but within the immediate future the Democrats are going to throw their hands in the air and say, 'It's not working. It's unaffordable. And we have to go to a single-payer system,' Hatch said, adding, "...where the government controls everybody's lives...That's what's behind all of this. And they know it's going to fail. It's already failing, and it hasn't even triggered yet, the big expenses."

But I believe this notion to be too simplistic; too shortsighted. It doesn't take into account that in addition to a Progressive ideologue who believes government is the answer to all of the social maladies facing our populace, Mr. Obama is a Chicago politician. And anyone who understands Chicago politics knows that job-one for the successful machine politician is to position oneself to win the next election. To that end, Mr. Obama has his sights set on two goals at this moment in time: to take back the US House of Representatives in 2014, and to render the opposition party — or in this case the opposition parties in both the GOP and the Libertarian Party — ineffective against the Progressive/Democrat Movement.

In Obamacare, Mr. Obama has a vehicle that can do both, especially if the Republicans and Libertarians continue to fail in mastering the art of political messaging (and believe me, Mr. Priebus' GOP reform manifesto is not the blueprint to success unless the messaging issue is resolved first).

Let's set aside, for the moment, that the Affordable Care Act came complete with a boatload of non-related tax increases, something that Liberal Democrats and Progressives giggle about to this day for the citizenry's failure to realize. Incidentally, with the tax increases hidden in Obamacare, the sun-setting of the Bush Tax Cuts, and the tax increases on the producers through the "Fiscal Cliff" surrender of the GOP, any so-called "balanced approach" tax increase to dealing with the debt and deficit would amount to the fourth major tax increase imposed on the American people. "Ahem," Mr. Boehner and Mr. Cantor.

The one thing that Sen. Hatch is absolutely correct about is that the Affordable Care Act was designed to fail. But it is at this point that those Conservatives elected to federal government miss some very important aspects to "the sting."

First, by imposing a plan designed to fail, Mr. Obama and his Progressive comrades will have forced the rest of the ruling class to "fix" the health insurance system. Of course, they hope that it will culminate in a single-payer nationalized healthcare system, but understand that in reality it is a long shot (like the number 13 horse). It is more likely that many of the reforms floated before Obamacare's passage — being able to purchase insurance across State lines (portability), tort reform, provisions for pre-existing conditions, etc. — will be enacted into law individually. Nevertheless, by forcing the opposition parties to fix an admittedly broken system, Mr. Obama can take ownership of the fact that "his" actions — even through the failed Affordable Care Act, and even though the labor unions and special interest groups actually crafted the behemoth legislation — resulted in a "better system for all"; a victory for the "spirit of the intent" of the Progressive Movement, as he will, no doubt, claim, if, in fact, there is a positive outcome.

Second, the aforementioned taxes will continue to exist, as repealing taxes is anathema in Washington, DC.

But third, and this is where "the sting" could go either way, if Republicans and Libertarians fail at providing a potent, truly affordable and superior fix for Obamacare; if they fail on any aspect of the almost unattainable promises made to the public by Mr. Obama and the "you have to pass the bill to find out what's in the bill" Progressives, Democrats will destroy the Conservative brand by declaring Republicans and Libertarians "denied" the American people "affordable healthcare" in dismantling the Affordable Care Act. Democrats and Progressives will paint the Republicans — whose brand is badly tarnished by gross mismanagement at the federal level already — as toadies of the wealthy who would just assume urinate on the poor as look at them, and they will point to the "cruelty" of the Republican-led deconstruction of the "benevolence" of Obamacare.

In attaining all three of these political goals — the forcing of action by Republicans and Libertarians, the imposition of taxes (pain) on the American people, and successfully executing "the sting" of forcing Republicans and Libertarians to succeed in a super-human political endeavor that Progressives themselves could not achieve — not only will Mr. Obama be able to brag about neutering the opposition parties for decades to come, but he will have cemented his legacy as a "benevolent" president, even if it is an illusion, and even if, in reality, he has done more to hurt the United States economically (the deficit and debt) and globally (allowing the rise of radical Islam) than any president in American history — including Jimmy Carter.

This leaves Republicans and Libertarians — who simply must join forces now that Democrats and Progressives have sold their souls to bond into one — with a very hard choice. They can either let Obamacare play out to collapse of its own accord and hope that they have the intelligence to work together, devoid of political ego, to pick-up the pieces to the benefit of the nation, or they can try to repeal and defund the Affordable Care Act piecemeal. There are dangers to both actions.

Given the track record of establishment, inside-the-beltway politics, hoping that the federally elected can cooperate — devoid of ego — in the best interest of the American people is a dark horse longshot. I am not saying that it can't be done. I am simply stating the obvious: that it isn't the standard operating procedure in Washington, DC. That said, with people like Rand Paul, Mike Lee, Ted Cruz, and Marco Rubio in the Senate, and Michelle Bachmann, Paul Ryan, Louie Gohmert, Steve King and Joe Wilson in the House — and this is by no means a complete list, there is hope.

But if Republicans and Libertarians attempt to defund and render impotent the Affordable Care Act, they had better heed this warning: They had better execute a messaging campaign that is overwhelmingly successful and it has to be a well-coordinated, cohesive, simply-stated, all-hands-on-deck, 24/7/365 effort that doesn't allow the Madison Avenue marketing whores of the Progressive Movement a breath by which to advance a false narrative. Republicans and Libertarians must expose "the sting," place the blame squarely and ruthlessly where it belongs and never — ever — let up on the pressure. Succinctly, Republicans and Libertarians must own the message. If they do not; if they fail in the least bit, they will, as Ronald Reagan so eloquently stated before he took up residence in the White House, "sentence the American people to a thousand years of darkness."

If Republicans and Libertarians can succeed in this, they will have enlightened themselves to the key to winning elections for decades to come: messaging. If they fail...well, Scott Joplin doesn't have a song for that.

Frank Salvato is the Executive Director for BasicsProject.org a non-partisan, 501(c)(3) research and education initiative focusing on Constitutional Literacy and the threats of Islamic jihadism and Progressive neo-Marxism. His writing has been recognized by the US House International Relations Committee and the Japan Center for Conflict Prevention. His organization, BasicsProject.org, partnered in producing the original national symposium series addressing the root causes of radical Islamist terrorism. He is a member of the International Analyst Network and has been a featured guest on al Jazeera's Listening Post, Radio Belgrade One, ITN Production's Truthloader Program in the UK and on Russia Today. He also serves as the managing editor for The New Media Journal. Mr. Salvato has appeared on The O'Reilly Factor on FOX News Channel, and was featured in the documentary, "Ezekiel and the MidEast 'Piece' Process: Israel's Neighbor States." He is the author of the series Understanding the Threat of Radical Islam, an educational pamphlet series. Mr. Salvato's opinion and analysis have been published by The American Enterprise Institute, The Washington Times, Accuracy in Media, Human Events, and are syndicated nationally. He is a featured political writer for EducationNews.org, BigGovernment.com and Examiner.com and is occasionally quoted in The Federalist. Mr. Salvato is available for public speaking engagements. He can be contacted at contact@newmediajournal.us.


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MY RAGE

Posted by Nurit Greenger, March 22, 2013

There has been a dramatic shift in relations between Israel and Turkey... Netanyahu and his Turkish counterpart Erdogan spoke and agreed that both countries ambassadors returned to their post, the legal case on the Marmara Flotilla is dropped and the countries re-establish/resume relations. Netanyahu expressed regret and offered an elusive apology over the consequences of the Marmara flotilla and accepted to complete the compensation, Turkey will cancel the legal proceedings it began, see below.

I do not see eye to eye with Netanyahu in the matter and I side with Avigdor Lieberman .

I therefore am using my freedom of Speech Obama so freely used while in Israel and contained while speaking to the Arabs and tell the nation of Israel as follows:

This is Islam Taqiyya in action...

But that is not the issue of rotten politics, it is a matter of respect and dignity that appears Jews simply lack. More so, Barack Hussein Obama, a manipulator bar none, has, once again, brought the Prime Minister of Israel to his knees holing him under his thumb.

Will the terrorist on the Mavi Marmara, pay compensations to the IDF soldiers they attacked and injured? I do not think so.

What kind of a country do we, Jews, have that cannot hold to its own dignity?

We, Jews, have been marginalized, disrespected, persecuted and killed for millennium and now, when we have sovereignty we have no idea what to do with it and how to apply it.

If the leader of Israel behaves so amoral, no wonder the world disrespects Israel, treats her under totally separate hostile standards, interferes in her affairs, internal and international, and manipulates her. And Israel's enemy laughs at her.

Don't Israel appears to be a fool? I think so.

The world is not to blame. Israel has bought it all upon itself. When, in 1967, she was victorious and returned lost land into her hands, Israelis simply could not bathe in their victory and hold to it. So what they have done? They decided to punish themselves. They brought the world terrorist savage Arafat into their land, along with his 100,000 troops and family members, and the result was tens of hundreds Israelis dead. Then they went further with their self inflicting punishment and signed an agreement with the savage Arafat who never stuck to one clause of the agreement while the Israelis, sticking to a delusional agreement , suffered an untold victimization, murder and mayhem. But if that was not enough, Israelis expelled and keep on expelling Jews from their homes, built in the land of Israel, to look good to the world who sits and watches, with satisfaction, her own inflicted sorrow. Jews simply cannot see themselves superior, victorious and in control of their own fate. They need outsiders to navigate them, to tell them no matter what.

If we look at the world, no other nation behaves as Israel does; stubborn, recalcitrant and myopic. Other nations do what is right for them, Israel is doing what is right for all other nations but herself. Until the knife is at her throat and then she reacts but never goes all the way to end the threats, the suffering, the disrespect, and the interference in her sovereignty, so the cycle goes on, as it has been for the past 65 years and will continue so. And this is a war of attrition of the world on Israel and it is very tiring and it wears one out.

So let us think for a moment, what good Israel's behave has brought her? What do we have today? Israel is surrounded by thousands of rockets ready to destroy her in a short while. The world is acting obnoxiously against her and anti-Semitism is on the rise, as bad as in 1938. That is a direct result of weakness, and schizophrenically ambiguous policy lacking public diplomacy.

I said and say again, Benjamin Netanyahu is a good orator, just like Obama; he is a bad executer. Netanyahu weakness was revealed when he gave Hebron away to Israel worst nemesis, the Moslems. Netanyahu is a weak leader, an opportunist. The worst, Netanyahu is not the kind of a leader Israel can afford under present reality; rather, he is probably dangerous to Israel's existence.

We, Jews, get what we deserve, because we do not really know who we are and what we stand for.

My blood is boiling and I hope yours too. I do not apologize to Turkey for the Mavi Marmara tragic incident. I apologize to the IDF Commando brave soldiers who landed into the terrorists' den and had nothing to defend themselves but of paint-gun.

The Nation of Israel along paint-gun's diplomacy, means the state of Israel is doomed.

Dramatic shift in relations: Netanyahu Erdogan spoke and agreed: the ambassadors returned, Legal case on Marmara canceled

Dramatic thaw in relations: Prime Minister Turkish counterpart talked first time since 2009, and decided to re-establish the relationship between the two countries. Netanyahu expressed sorrow over the consequences of the flotilla and accepted to complete the compensation, Turkey will cancel the legal proceedings

The first results of Obama's visit: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan spoke today and Netanyahu apologized for the killing of Turkish civilians during the takeover of the ship Mavi Marmara, which led the Turkish flotilla to Gaza in May 2010.

The move, supported by Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon and military, probably MOT due to American pressure, rather the escalating of the civil war in Syria, which raises a need for a strong ally in the region.

The apology led to a conclusion on Saturday of normalization between the two countries, including the return of diplomatic representation level and sending ambassadors back to Tel Aviv and Ankara. Erdogan, who took back some of the things he said against Zionism, agreed to cancel the existing legal proceedings against IDF soldiers, including any proceedings to be opened in the future.

Turkish Prime Minister took back the unequivocal demand to remove the blockade on Gaza. During the conversation Netanyahu also went over the steps Israel has taken already to ease the blockade. The two leaders agreed to continue working together to improve the humanitarian situation in Gaza.

Elusive apology

The wording of the apology is elusive and differs from the original Turkish demand for an apology for the killing of its citizens. The text agreed upon includes "an apology to the Turkish people for the mistake could lead to loss of human life." This following an Israeli investigation of the incident, indicating of number of operational errors during the takeover of the Mavi Marmara.

During the conversation, Netanyahu clarified that the tragic consequences of the flotilla was not intentional. He expressed regret for on behalf of the State of Israel on the damage and loss of human life. It also agreed that Israel will pay compensation into a humanitarian fund to be established specifically for the families of the victims, not direct compensation to the families as the Turks demanded.

The dramatic move is the result of a long meeting held today between Netanyahu and Obama. The White House is working for a long time for the return to normal relations between the countries, but so far these efforts did not bear fruit. Turkey insisted on three conditions: an apology for the killing of its citizens, direct compensation to the families and the closure of the Gaza Strip.

Israel has held several meetings with Turkish representatives, the last took place a few weeks ago in Rome, between the head of the National Security Council, Yaakov Amidror, and deputy Turkish Foreign Minister Faridoon Sinirlolo. The negotiations were to mature several times, but according to an Israeli source the Turks refused to give up their demand for lifting the blockade on Gaza...

Tailwind against Iran?

During his visit to Israel this week Obama pressured Netanyahu to end the affair with Erdogan, in view of the deteriorating situation in Syria. Between the two countries they arrived at an understanding that cooperation in the political, military and intelligence, which was discontinued due to the flotilla, may bear fruit in the entire region and for the United States. Israel believe that this will also help on the Iranian issue.

Netanyahu eventually settled to the satisfaction of Obama, this after once before he took his agreement back in the wake of pressure from the then Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman.

In Israel they hope that that the new agreement will moderate the public statements of Turkish officials and also the opening to a different relations Even if the parties will not renew the close relationship that existed between the two countries in the past years, there is hope that reconciliation will enable better results in both strategic and practical level.

The conversation took place in the afternoon at the airport, in front of Obama, just minutes before takeoff Jordan. Dramatic reconciliation announcement came at the same time in Turkey, Israel and the United States.

"The United States deeply appreciates our close partnerships with Turkey and Israel, and we attach great importance to the rehabilitation of the positive relationship between them in order to promote peace and security in the region," the statement issued by the White House.

"I hope the day exchanges between the leaders will have more extensive cooperation, which will include many challenges and many opportunities," added Obama. The conversation took place in the afternoon at the airport, in front of Obama, just minutes before takeoff to Jordan. The dramatic reconciliation announcement went out at the same time in Turkey, Israel and the United States.

"The United States deeply appreciates our close partnerships with Turkey and Israel, and we attach great importance to the rehabilitation of the positive relationship between them in order to promote peace and security in the region," the statement issued by the White House.

"I hope the exchanges between the leaders today will allow for more extensive cooperation, which will include many challenges and many opportunities," added Obama.

On Friday, Chairman of the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee and the number 2 in the list of Likud-our home, MK Avigdor Lieberman, attacked, strongly, the apology of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to his counterpart Turkish Recep Erdogan, for the Narmara Flotilla events in 2010. "The apology of the State of Israel for the activities of IDF soldiers against terrorist organization is a serious error," said Lieberman.

Contact Nurit Greenger by email at 4nuritg@ca.rr.com. Visit her blog: http://ngthinker.typepad.com


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THE NEW YORK TIMES VS. THE JEWS

Posted by Martin Sherman, March 22 , 2013

Over the last fortnight, the so-called "paper of record" has ratcheted up its bias and bile a notch or two.

Caption Text

There is an unavoidable conflict between being a Jewish state and a democratic state. — Joseph Levine, "On Questioning the Jewish State," The New York Times, March 9

There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.

George Orwell

Last week I cautioned that a crucial intellectual battle has been launched to strip the Jews of their political independence and national sovereignty. As promised, in this week's column I will elaborate on the inanity and iniquity of this Judeophobic initiative.

Pernicious, perverse, paradoxical

The Time — together with several other major mainstream media entities — has chosen to throw its weight decisively behind this patently pernicious, perverse and paradoxical endeavor.

But over the last fortnight, the so-called "paper of record" has ratcheted up its bias and bile a notch or two. This prompted the following comment from Commentary's Seth Mandel in his "A New Low for the Times" (March 18): "The bias against Israel in the press, and especially theNew York Times, has become so steady and predictable that it can be difficult to muster outrage.

Since the paper flaunts, rather than attempts to disguise, its hostility to Israel, it can be easy to miss when the Times crosses yet another line. And the paper and its editors have done so again this weekend."

I have not designated this drive to denigrate, delegitimize and demonize the conduct of the Jewish state — and of late, the very idea of a Jewish state — "pernicious," "perverse" and "paradoxical" without reason.

Should this unholy crusade achieve its declared objectives, it will precipitate a reality that reflects a total negation of the very values invoked for its promotion, and the antithesis of those allegedly cherished by its propagators.

Escalating enmity

Until relatively recently, the bulk of the Times's censure of Israel's actions focused on its policy regarding the status of the territories beyond the pre-1967 Green Line, and the fate of the Palestinian Arabs resident there.

But with the emerging realization — indeed, perhaps resignation — that the previously preferred outcome of establishing a Palestinian state in these territories, is becoming increasingly unworkable, emphasis has shifted and enmity escalated. It now seems that the paper has begun to channel condemnation less against what the Jewish state does, and more against what it is — i.e. Jewish.

This is a line that it is apparently pursuing with increasing virulence, frequency and prominence on its pages, last week touting it on both the front page of its Sunday edition and the cover of its weekly magazine.

Barely a week previously, a lengthy opinion piece by University of Massachusetts professor of philosophy Joseph Levine appeared, advancing contrived and contorted claims disputing the conceptual validity of the Jewish people's right to national self-determination and political sovereignty, now even within the Green Line.

To recap

Readers will recall that in my column last week, I pointed out the conceptual fallacies and faults in Levine's approach to statehood, which seems to postulate that no state can be considered "democratic" if the conduct of its public life reflects the sociocultural dominance of the major ethnic group — even if it comprises a "vast majority."

Accordingly, we are asked to believe that majority rule is an intolerable moral anathema for democratic governance. Indeed, unless the majority surrenders — or, at least, substantially dilutes — the expression of its identity, while the minority is allowed full expression of its identity — no matter how incompatible or adversarial it might be with that of the majority — the resulting sociopolitical reality is allegedly so disastrously impaired that its continued existence cannot be countenanced.

Thus, in Levine's eyes, a "people" only merit the right to self-determination if they comprise a segment of humanity whose members are bound together by nothing more substantive than their equality before the law of the land and the accident of their physical location within the borders of that land. This is, as I showed, a position severely at odds with those of leading philosophers of liberal political theory over the past two centuries. It is one which fails to capture the most elemental essence that drives aspirations for national self-determination and that comprises the primal conditions for stable democratic governance: A sentiment of political allegiance born of a spiritual compatibility — which may arise because of ethnic homogeneity, or despite ethnic heterogeneity.

Silly or sinister?

In the absence of such communal cohesiveness, as John Stuart Mill tells us, "Free institutions are next to impossible." Indeed, "in a country made up of a people without fellow-feeling the united public opinion, necessary to the working of representative government, cannot exist."

Recent history bears eloquent, if tragic, testimony to the enduring validity of this perceptive insight. Wherever attempts have been made to weld inimical ethnicities together in a single political entity, if it is not bound by the iron grip of tyranny, the results have almost invariably been reminiscent of a Hobbesian nightmare of anarchy, chaos and bloodshed — as the examples of Lebanon and the Balkans starkly underscore.

Clearly, then, proposing policy prescriptions that not only disregard, but directly contravene, both the theoretical rationale and the empirical evidence regarding the attainment of the purported goal of sustainable democracy is either silly or sinister.

But whether dumb or deceptive, it is an approach that harbors huge hazards for Jews and Arabs — and for the hopes of liberal democracy — in the Holy Land.

"Israel was a mistake"

Yet despite its clearly calamitous consequences, it appears that this is the approach theTimes has opted to adopt and advance both by publications of explicit endorsement (such as Levine's opinion piece) and by implicit insinuations (such as last week's 8,000-word magazine cover story by one Ben Ehrenreich, warmly embracing the Palestinian "resistance").

Thus for example, flying in the face of facts, the latter misinforms Times readers by implying that the recent Operation Pillar of Defense was an unprovoked Israeli initiative that began when "in mid-November, Israeli rockets began falling on Gaza," conspicuously omitting any mention of the fact that it was hundreds of Palestinian rockets falling on Israel that precipitated the fighting.

But, perhaps more significant — and revealing — than the blatantly biased and manifestly misleading content of the Times cover story, was the choice of its author. For as veteran pundit Jonathan Tobin tersely remarks: "Ehrenreich's bias is so deeply embedded in the piece that it is pointless to criticize anything but the decision to employ him to write it."

And that is precisely the point. For it is more than implausible to assume the Times was unaware of Ehrenreich's strong anti- Zionist predilections. Indeed, these were unambiguously laid out in a Los Angeles Times op-ed titled, "Zionism is the problem" (March 15, 2009). In it Ehrenreich unfavorably compares the Jewish state to apartheid South Africa, stating: "If two decades ago comparisons to the South African apartheid system felt like hyperbole, they now feel charitable."

He goes on to advocate what in effect is the abolition of the nation-state of the Jews, pontificating: "The Zionist ideal of a Jewish state is keeping Israelis and Palestinians from living in peace. Establishing a secular, pluralist, democratic government in Israel and Palestine would of course mean the abandonment of the Zionist dream. It might also mean the only salvation for the Jewish ideals of justice."

This appears then to be the kind of journalist/ journalism that the New York Times is promoting.

As to the public sentiment it is liable to arouse, this might be gauged by the tenor of one of the talkbacks to Ehrenreich's cover story — rerun in abbreviated form as an interview with him posted on the New York Times site today (March 21) — from Molly in Costa Rica: "Israel was a mistake, and they must leave.

Israel is a transplanted organ that the Middle East is rejecting. It will never fly."

Perilous, preposterous prescription

The New York Times-propagated prescription, that in effect promotes the dismantling of the Jewish nation-state and replacing it with an un-Jewish secular state-of-all-its- citizens, is preposterous and perilous — in both principle and practice. Supporting it puts you firmly on the wrong side of history — and for self-respecting New York Times readers, what could be worse? For the concept of "multiculturalism," once so fashionable, that underpins the rationale of the state-of-all-its-citizens idea, is rapidly being discredited. It has been tried — and has failed.

As I pointed out in an earlier column, "Nakba nonsense," May 17, 2012, harsh and explicit declarations have come from the leaders of nearly all major European countries — including France, UK and Germany — acknowledging its disappointing failure. For example, Angela Merkel lamented: "The tendency had been to say, 'Let's adopt the multicultural concept and live happily side by side.' But this concept has failed, and failed utterly." Moreover in democracies as far-flung as Australia and Canada, the media have begun to publish expressions of exasperation and frustration at the deleterious effects of trying to absorb cultures incompatible with the host culture.

Even against a far less adversarial national- political background, incompatible social-cultural and religious disparities are causing increasingly unacceptable societal consequences for the host societies.

It is thus entirely unclear why anyone — unless motivated by malice — could possibly propose the application of such a failed formula in the far more daunting circumstances prevailing in Israel.

Anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism

Despite the protestations of anti-Zionists, such as Levine and Ehrenreich, that opposing Zionism "does not manifest anti-Semitism," it does.

No amount of academic acrobatics or intellectual sophistry can blur the truth in the words, widely attributed to Martin Luther King Jr.: "When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews, you are talking anti-Semitism. And what is anti-Zionist? It is the denial to the Jewish people of a fundamental right that we justly and freely accord all other nations of the globe. It is discrimination against Jews because they are Jews. In short, it is anti-Semitism."

It is anti-Semitic (i.e. Judeophobic) to denigrate every coercive action undertaken by Israel — whether military or administrative, proactive or reactive, preemptive or punitive — intended to protect Jews from attacks merely because they are Jewish, as racially motivated, disproportionate crimes against humanity.

It is anti-Semitic to peddle dangerous delusions, designed to deprive the Jews of their national independence and political sovereignty, and the purveyors of such poisonous merchandise must be forced to bear the burden of shame that plying their ignominious trade so richly deserves.

Fatal flaw in post-Zionist logic

I realize I have not fulfilled all my promises made last week, and several issues I undertook to deal with have been left unaddressed, particularly the significance for the non-Jewish minorities living in a Zionist Jewish nation-state. Regrettably, I have let my indignation at the New York Times distract me and that — together with new editorial constraints — preclude further discussion.

However, as my credibility is everything, I P-R-O-M-I-S-E to take up these topics soon in a forthcoming article — which I can already inform you will be titled, "The fatal flaw in post-Zionist logic".

Dr. Martin Sherman is in the Department of Political Science at Tel Aviv University. He has written extensively on water, including "The Politics of Water in the Middle East," London: Macmillan, 1999. He was a senior research fellow at the Interdisciplinary Institute in Herzliya and Academic Coordinator of the Herzliya Conference in 2001 and 2002. He is currently Academic Director of the Jerusalem Summit.


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SOLDIER'S WARNING: OBAMA URGING MODERN-DAY 'MUNICH 1938'

Posted by Ted Belman, March 22, 2013

The article below was written by Gil Ronen, wa riter for Arutz Sheva. This article appeared March 20, 2013 in Arutz Sheva and is archived at
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/166431#.VaaUFryVsWM

Short documentary released this week warns Obama is selling out Israel by pressure to retreat.

Caption Text

In a short documentary released this week, William "Bill" Langfan, a World War II veteran and witness to the Nazi death camps, warns that U.S. President Barack Obama's pressuring Israel to retreat to 1948 Armistice lines is another version of the 1938 Munich appeasement of Adolf Hitler.

In the 15-minute-long film, Langfan, who participated in the 1944 Normandy landings and the Battle of the Bulge, remembers reading about the shameful sellout of Czechoslovakia by Britain's Neville Chamberlain as a 16-year-old growing up in New York.

VIDEO HERE: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/166431#.VaaXVLyVsWN

By making it impossible for Czechoslovakia to defend itself and forcing it to relinquish the Sudetenland to Hitler, the West sealed Czechoslovakia's fate: The Nazis conquered the country the following spring.

Langfan, who has spent decades studying Israel's security situation, warns that Obama, aided by England France and the European Union, is pressuring Israel to weaken itself by ceding territory to a terrorist Palestinian Authority that remains virulently anti-Semitic and depicts Israelis in terms reminiscent of Nazi propagandist Josef Goebbels.

Ted Belman is a retired lawyer and the Editor of Israpundit. He made aliya from Canada last year and now lives in Jerusalem, Israel. Contact him at tedbel@rogers.com


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ANOTHER TACK: BAD JEWS = GOOD STORY

Posted by Robert Hand, March 22, 2013

The article below was written by Sarah Honig who is a veteran columnist and senior editorial writer who joined The Jerusalem Post while still in her teens. She served for many years as The Post's political correspondent (a position she also held on the now-defunct but once-influential Davar), headed the Tel Aviv bureau at the Post and wrote daily analyses of the political scene, along with in-depth features. Honig is a mother, an artist and an avid collector of antique and vintage dolls. View Sarah's website at www.sarahhonig.com. This article appeared March 21, 2013 in the Jerusalem Postand is archived at
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Another-Tack-Bad-Jews-Good-story-307352

Israel is presumed guilty even when proven innocent- even when exculpated by an ultra-hostile body like UNHRC.

Caption Text

It was a PR windfall for Hamas when 11-months-old-Omar Misharawi was killed by a rocket that hit his family's home on November 14, 2012 — at the very outset of Operation Pillar of Defense.

During that confrontation, thousands of Hamas missiles and mortars rained on Israel. The long-range ones reached all the way to Tel Aviv but were still depicted in news reports abroad as crude homemade projectiles with minimal damage potential.

Omar's misfortune dealt Israel's image a particularly nasty blow — probably the worst since the bogus Muhammad al-Dura episode. Newspapers the world over featured what became an iconic AP photo of Omar's weeping father, Jihad, cradling the little corpse, his agonized face turned skywards as he plaintively exclaimed: ""We're only civilians. So why did Israel do this?"

It was a damning question resonated unquestioningly around the globe.

Further fanning the anti-Israel flames was the fact that Misharawi was a video editor employed by the BBC Arabic service in Gaza. This served both to amplify the story and to claim for the father the role of a nonviolent observer, the last person who deserved Israeli punishment.

This powerfully underscored the vileness of Israel's ostensible latest crime.

Then, months later, UN investigations unexpectedly determined that Omar was "killed by what appeared to be a Palestinian rocket that fell short of Israel." This is the wording of a report on operation Pillar of Defense commissioned by non-other than notorious Israel-basher Navi Pillay, the UN High Commissioner of Human Rights. She's the one who had initiated the Goldstone Report on Operation Cast Lead. Goldstone had since backtracked from the wholesale denunciation of Israel for alleged intentional targeting of Gazan civilians. Pillay hasn't.

Her animus toward Israel is so doctrinaire and so all-consuming that either obfuscation down the line of the UN's own investigators' findings or some revision must not be ruled out. Moreover, this report's designated recipient is non-other than that disreputable repository of antagonism to Israel, UN Human Rights Council, which routinely singles Israel out as its constant and compulsory scapegoat.

It's not that this latest report is on the whole kinder on Israel than any previous texts inspired by Pillay and addressed to the UNHRC, but by some inexplicable fluke this one's language appears a tad less hectoring (comparatively speaking). It also doesn't entirely ignore aggression from Gaza that "continuously violated international humanitarian law by launching indiscriminate attacks on Israel and by attacking civilians." Additionally, Gazans are faulted for "launching rockets from populated areas, which put the population at grave risk."

Yet no matter how Pillay and the UNHRC wrestle with their predicament, they cannot deny that their own investigation ruled that a rocket which Gazans fired with premeditated aim at Israeli homes (where, surprise of surprises, babies like Omar also reside) struck the Misharawi home, killing Omar as well as his aunt and uncle.

In other words, Omar was Hamas's own collateral damage, a casualty of Gazan bloodlust. While not specifically an intended victim, he was nevertheless a very useful victim who was instantly pronounced a shahid (a martyr in the holy war). In no time Omar's pictures starred on placards of anti-Israel protestors in European streets and on American campuses.

One would therefore assume that when an outfit as noxiously anti-Israel as UNHRC uncharacteristically exonerates Israel, this should command special attention and not be pooh-poohed — certainly not by those who avidly hang onto the UNHRC's every slander.

But did the tardy retraction of the smear receive anything like the play accorded the initial defamation? Heck no! Not even close. Not even an infinitesimal fraction of the emotional manipulation of last November. The truth merited no notice. Guiltless Jews make no story. Bad Jews make a good story.

BBC Gaza correspondent Jon Donnison showed just how good in the November 24, 2012 BBC broadcast of "From Our Own Correspondent." Two days later his story also debuted in the BBC News website magazine, under the headline "Gaza baby only knew how to smile."

"Standing in what is left of his burnt-out home this week, Jihad showed me a photo on his mobile phone," Donnison recounted. "It was of a cheeky, chunky, round-faced little boy in denim dungarees, chuckling in a pushchair, dark-eyed with a fringe of fine brown hair pushed across his brow." But, Donnison added without a hint of British understatement, "Also on Jihad's phone is another photo. A hideous tiny corpse. Omar's smiling face virtually burnt off, that fine hair appearing to be melted onto his scalp. Jihad's sister-in-law Heba was also killed. 'We still haven't found her head,' Jihad said. His brother, Ahmad, suffered massive burns and died of his injuries in hospital several days later."

Donnison didn't merely commiserate with a workplace colleague. He also went to unmistakable lengths to demolish educated assessments, voiced soon after the incident, that this carnage was Hamas's handiwork.

Donnison's unsubstantiated premise was that Hamas mostly fired mortars early on in the fighting. "Mortar fire," he then conjectured matter-of-factly, "would not cause the fireball that appears to have engulfed Jihad's house." How could the uninitiated abroad challenge the seeming expert's verdict?

With equal assurance he also rejected the notion that "the damage to Jihad's home was not consistent with powerful Israeli attacks... The BBC visited other bombsites this week with very similar fire damage, where Israel acknowledged carrying out what it called 'surgical strikes.'" Again, if the reporter on the scene says so, why would news-consumers doubt him?

There was no doubt whose narrative Donnison was pushing: "Most likely is that Omar died in the one of the more than 20 bombings across Gaza that the Israeli military says made up its initial wave of attacks." Donnison needed no investigation and no proficiency in rocket trajectories or warheads. He just knew whom to blame.

But while Gaza-resident foreign correspondents may prove tendentious, owing in part to fear of their highly illiberal hosts, this decidedly is no excuse half-a-world away in America.

Patrick Pexton, until this month The Washington Post's ombudsman, took the trouble on November 23, 2012 to respond in an op-ed to readers who complained that running Jihad's photo on page-one was biased because nothing of the sort is ever featured when Israeli civilians are killed.

Pexton resorted to the devil's arithmetic — there just aren't enough current Israeli casualties.

He might have heaped praises on Israel for looking after its civilians. He might have noted approvingly that, unlike its enemies, Israel doesn't position rocket launching pads in residential quarters. He might have mentioned that Hamas fired Fajr 5 missiles from the Misharawis' Zeitoun neighborhood in Gaza.

Instead, however, Pexton imparted the impression that that the Palestinians, as per the popularized myth, are proverbial Davids struggling against an ogre Israeli Goliath.

He described Gazan rocketing of Israeli towns and villages as "disruptive and traumatic. But let's be clear: The overwhelming majority of rockets fired from Gaza are like bee stings on the Israeli bear's behind. These rockets are unguided and erratic, and they carry very small explosive payloads; they generally fall in open areas, causing little damage and fewer injuries." Boiled down, Pexton's argument is that Israel deserves less empathy because more Israelis aren't killed.

Most members of the media overseas willingly subscribe to the theory that a fundamental asymmetry exists in Israel's favor. This supposed asymmetry is used to downplay the immense firepower directed deliberately against Israeli civilians. At the same time, Israeli guilt for whatever befalls Gazans is presented as self-evident.

It's never emphasized that the inadvertent injury of civilians — inevitable in combat — is considered disastrous in Israeli eyes. Conversely, when Israeli civilians are murdered by callous design, Gaza celebrates gleefully.

Therein lies all the difference. But who cares? Undeniable alacrity exists to ascribe culpability to Israel. Thus Pexton wrote "That the man [Jihad Misharawi] is Palestinian — not a terrorist but a journalist — and that the bomb was dropped by Israelis, to my mind, is almost beside the point." Israeli wrongdoing is a given.

This automatic assumption that Israel is blameworthy must more than all else worry us. Against this background, there's no chance that we could conceivably win the battle for hearts and minds overseas. These hearts and minds had been a priori predisposed against us — be it subtly or blatantly.

There's an alarming eagerness to find fault with the Jewish state, eagerness that is simply without match in other contexts. In no other conflict — including in conflicts which claim incomparably more innocent lives — is there such a self-righteous, almost ecstatic rush to judgment.

The upshot is that Israel is presumed guilty even when proven innocent — even when exculpated by an ultra-hostile body like UNHRC.

Were the world's opinion-molders genuine truth-seekers, they'd readily concede that murdering Israeli children is a deliberate Arab goal. They'd also readily concede that the Arab side harbors no misgivings about cynically putting Palestinian children in harm's way. Gaza's human shields are valuable when their presence deflects counter-strikes but also if these shields are accidentally hit. It's a win-win gambit.

Hypercritical news-purveyors need to own up that their heartstrings are never tugged by the indisputably intentional murders of Israeli babies like ten-months-old Shalhevet Pass or three-months-old Hadas Fogel (and way too many others).

Israeli babies whose lives were cut short by Arab rockets, by suicide bombers, by fire-bombers, by rock hurlers, by snipers who coolly pulled the trigger or — close-up and gruesomely personal — by knife-wielding butchers, didn't inspire tearjerker coverage about their lost smiles or their family's grief. Their images never dominated the front pages. At most they were described as generic "Israelis" or "settlers" but never as sympathy-stimulating real individuals, with specific ages, names and faces.

If there's asymmetry in this saga, it's foremost in the dehumanization of Israeli casualties, even of juvenile ones.

There can be no fair reporting until the media everywhere concedes that displaying bloodied corpses (be they real or fake), especially of tots, constitutes an indispensable tactic in the Arabs' psychological blitz against Israel.

Reporters and commentators who dismiss the Israeli case out of hand and betray their responsibility to check the facts, all but sign on as active soldiers in the Arab propaganda war — even when they purport to don the mask of solemn neutrality.

Contact Robert Hand at borntolose3@att.net


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APPEASEMENT DOESN'T BRING PEACE

Posted by Udi Schayat, March 23, 2013

This was written by Gil Ronen, writer for Arutz Sheva, and it was published today in Arutz-Sheva (www.Israel National News.com).

Caption Text

Chamberlain, at left. German Federal Archive

In a short documentary released this week, William "Bill" Langfan, a World War II veteran and witness to the Nazi death camps, warns that U.S. President Barack Obama's pressuring Israel to retreat to 1948 Armistice lines is another version of the 1938 Munich appeasement of Adolf Hitler.

In the 15-minute-long film, Langfan, who participated in the 1944 Normandy landings and the Battle of the Bulge, remembers reading about the shameful sellout of Czechoslovakia by Britain's Neville Chamberlain as a 16-year-old growing up in New York.

By making it impossible for Czechoslovakia to defend itself and forcing it to relinquish the Sudetenland to Hitler, the West sealed Czechoslovakia's fate: The Nazis conquered the country the following spring.

Langfan, who has spent decades studying Israel's security situation, warns that Obama, aided by England France and the European Union, is pressuring Israel to weaken itself by ceding territory to a terrorist Palestinian Authority that remains virulently anti-Semitic and depicts Israelis in terms reminiscent of Nazi propagandist Josef Goebbels.

Contact Udi Schyat at udischayat@yahoo.com


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DID OBAMA END TURKEY-ISRAEL DISPUTE?

Posted by Richard H. Shulman, March 23, 2013

"With Obama as Broker, Israelis and Turkey End Dispute Over Ship Raid" "U.S. Allies Reconcile After an Apology". So spins theNew York Times.

In reporting on the Mideast, that newspaper and the people it interviews use value-laden terms that express misconceptions or slant. Years of such usage amount to indoctrination. Most people are unaware of acquiring this bias. Such terms, tossed around casually, are "allies," Israel's best Muslim friend," "democratic Turkey, the notion of Obama as a reconciler and a constructive force," and "end dispute."

Obama has helped destabilize the Mideast, as in Egypt and Libya. Turkey also destabilizes the region, with its threats of war against Greece, Cyprus, and Israel, so it really is not an ally of the U.S.. Turkey gradually is crushing democratic institutions. Israel has no Muslim countries as friends.

Nor is the Times realistic in supposing that a Turkey-Israel détente will help the region deal properly with Syria. Both sides in Syria {considering that Islamists dominate the rebel side) are evil. Best let them exhaust each other, for if either side wins, Radical Islam wins! Efforts by American opinion-makers to get the U.S. to help the rebels reflect uninformed, idealism. That's how the U.S. gets into conflicts of no use to U.S. security, wasting our resources. And so, after the U.S. finishes, there gets to be ethnic and political cleansing as in Indochina, Serbia, Egypt, Libya, and eventually in other places.

The report mentions hopes to keep the Syrian war from expanding. What do the reporters think that Islamists want to do, when their goal is to impose their regimen on the whole region and then the world? Pres. Obama, who was raised a Muslim and learned Arabic and Islam's religious goals, fails to acknowledge this. How do his supporters account for him? They don't. They aren't aware of what really is going on and who is what. They see everything from a Western viewpoint, thereby getting manipulated by regional interests.

Nor did the Turkey-Israel dispute end. Many agreements, especially with Islamists, do not end disputes. They are general statements that require detailed implementation in good faith and need a means of conflict resolution. Israel has made agreements that leave appeals and decisions in foreign, usually antithetical hands. The Arabs have violated their agreements with Israel. What is the point of them?

Besides, Muslims can't end a conflict that really is religious and when their religious goal is to destroy non-Muslim sovereignty. Israel's neighbors do not act in good faith. A political agreement cannot end Islamic hatred of rival religions. Turkey is jettisoning its secular outlook and restoring its religious and imperial one. If it pulls back on this particular issue, do not be deceived, it is just expedient for now. Do not assume that Turkey still is civilized.

The new agreement was open-ended. Turkey's response is to see what Israel will do specifically. This opens the door to new disagreements. Turkish PM Erdogan may well take another hostile posture when the details are proposed. In this he would be like Abbas and Arafat, using one set of Israeli concessions to demand more and to humiliate the non-Islamic side.

Actually, Pres. Obama did not claim to have ended the dispute. He called the agreement "a work in progress." He admitted that Turkey and Israel would have disagreements. Therefore, the headline was false. Misleading headlines are a serious fault of tendentious journalism, because many people don't read past the headlines.

Remember, this is not a just solution. This agreement brought: (1) An Israeli apology; (2) An Israeli offer to open Gaza to more outside shipments; (2) An Israeli promise to compensate Turkish families of people who illegally breached a legal blockade, attacked Israeli troops, and were beating, shooting, and stabbing them. The agreement did not terminate Turkey's criminal charges against Israeli military officials, leveled despite even the UN finding that Israel acted within its rights.

A fair agreement would have brought from Turkey: (1) Apology for encouraging terrorists to run the blockade; (2) Promise to repress terrorism; (3) Compensation for the wounded Israelis; (4) Acknowledgment that the blockade was run in the hope of further shipments being allowed to bring heavy weapons to the terrorist army in Gaza; and (5) Dropping criminal charges against Israelis. The best to have hoped for would be that Turkey would let the dispute fade away. Perhaps Erdogan might find that his demagoguery no longer is popular.

The New York Times misrepresents the flotilla as seeking to "deliver supplies" and to let more in. The flotilla was commanded by a terrorist gang trained in shipboard combat and eager to be martyred. They hoped to provoke, attack, and embarrass Israel sufficiently so that Israel lets heavy arms into Gaza, which then would be turned on Israel. That various leftists also were aboard reflects naivete and gave some cover to the Islamists.

Israeli officials now say they would let more goods into Gaza (though most already are allowed in, so what's the problem?), so long as more rockets were not fired into Israel. This may reflect Israel's greatest strategic blunder, a policy of letting terrorists build armies along the Israeli border and perfecting and accumulating rockets, so long as they don't fire the rockets. Then the terrorisets fire some, partly to test Israeli resolve and partly to test Israeli defenses and Muslim advances in rocket engineering. Well, Israel figures, only a few rockets were fired. Therefore, Hamas feels emboldened to let fly more. Eventually they fire too many for Israeli politicians to let its people sustain the damage. So Israel retaliates semi-hard. Then the UN springs into action. It condemns both sides or just Israel for escalation. But one day the Muslim side may unleash a broadside that overwhelms Israeli defenses.

The only negative note in the report was from Israel's former Foreign Min. Lieberman. He called the agreement a "grave mistake" that would undermine the IDF. That is a serious statement that the reporters left hanging. Why did they leave it hanging? I find that theTimes screens out a great deal of news and explanation that would tarnish the gloss its paints on Obama's reputation.

Perhaps Mr. Lieberman meant that Israel might resume weapons delivery to Turkey. Such weapons could be turned on Israel. Turkey also might learn Israeli military technology, to place at the service of Radical Islam (Jodi Rudoren & Mark Landler, NY Times, 3/23, A1).

Richard Shulman is a veteran defender of Israel on several web-based forums. His comments and analyses are a regular feature on Think-Israel. He provides cool information and right-on-target overviews. He distributes his essays by email. To subscribe, write him at ricshulman@aol.com.


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PESACH

Posted by Arlene Kushner, March 23, 2013

Pesach begins with seder on Monday night and preparations for the holiday are in high gear. I am mindful -- and right now it's hard work to stay mindful -- of what comes first.

And so, I want to wish my readers a joyous and meaningful Pesach.

May the holiday uplift us and inspire us. And may the Almighty be with us now as he was then.

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I do not know if I will post again before the holiday begins, or during the week of the holiday. I ask, please, that you hold off on communication to me for the duration.

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Were that I had good and uplifting things to report before the holiday begins! But I have to take it as it is.

As time elapses, what Obama did with his "talk" to university students at Binyanei Ha'uma rankles me ever more. I called it beyond manipulative. Let me here add "despicable."

But I wanted to explain, for those who asked me about this, that there was really nothing we could have done to stop it without causing a major incident. The US Embassy, on behalf of the president, arranged the parameters of the talk. We may hate it, we may find it vile. But they were permitted to hold it where they chose and to invite whomever they chose.

And, I will note here, the choices of whom to include were carefully calculated: The U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv invited college students from around the country to submit essays on why they should be invited. Students were selected based on these essays. You can imagine whose essays were selected.

From Ruthie Blum cited here: http://www.jewishpress.com/blogs/shiloh-musings/obama-visit-strangles-israel/2013/03/20/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=obama-visit-strangles-israel

This provides a picture of how well orchestrated the whole Obama spectacle was.

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But I move on from this bad news to worse. Obama is gone, he went to Jordan yesterday. But not before he had pushed Netanyahu to place a call to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, apologizing for the Mavi Marmara flotilla incident. Apologizing. After three years of properly refusing to do so. We had offered regrets, but not an apology, which implies fault.

The Mavi Marmara -- which came out of Turkey and had Turkish citizens aboard associated with a terrorist organization, the radical Islamist IHH -- was attempting to break the legal blockade of Gaza maintained by Israel to prevent armaments from being brought in by sea. When the captain refused to turn around, Israeli Navy commandos -- expecting very little protester resistance and intending to go to the bridge to get the captain to stop -- boarded the ship by helicopter and found themselves viciously attacked by those in wait for them. In the battle that ensued, Turkish citizens died. See more here: http://www.therightscoop.com/at-least-ten-die-as-israel-navy-intercepts-gaza-flotilla/

Obviously they had spoken about it earlier during Obama's visit (or shall I say, Obama did his arm-twisting earlier), but in a very bizarre scenario, the call Netanyahu actually made to Erdogan was from a trailer set up on the tarmac at the airport, very shortly before the president was due to fly out. Erdogan asked to speak to Obama first, and then he spoke with Netanyahu.

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An official statement from Netanyahu's office shortly thereafter said:

"In light of Israel's investigation into the incident which pointed to a number of operational mistakes, the prime minister expressed Israel's apology to the Turkish people for any mistakes that might have led to the loss of life or injury."

Mistakes??? What about the behavior of the Turks, which were clearly not mistakes? I think this shameful. Please see these two pictures. The first of someone on the Mavi Marmara swinging an iron bar at an unarmed Israeli Navy commando, and the second of an injured IDF soldier on board

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Netanyahu further said there would be Israeli compensation for lives lost, via a fund to be determined.

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What makes this doubly hard to swallow is that just a month ago, Erdogan had referred to Zionism as a "crime against humanity" at an Alliance of Civilizations Forum in Vienna.

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4350791,00.html

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After the phone call, Erdogan and Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu pronounced themselves satisfied with Netanyahu's apology, which met all their demands. They said they would proceed with normalizing relations with Israel. And they would stop legal proceedings against Israeli military leaders they held responsible for the Mavi Marmara deaths.

Obama, of course, went off as the victor who cemented this diplomatic "achievement":

"The United States deeply values our close partnerships with both Turkey and Israel, and we attach great importance to the restoration of positive relations between them in order to advance regional peace and security."

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Today Netanyahu, writing on his Facebook page, provided the "reason" why he did what he did:

"Syria is crumbling, and its massive stockpiles of advanced weapons are starting to fall into the hands of various elements. What we fear most is that terrorist groups will get their hands on chemical weapons."

"Before the Sabbath, I spoke to the Turkish premier. Three years after Israel-Turkey ties had been cut off I decided it was time to restore them. The changing reality around us requires that we constantly reexamine our relations with countries in the region.

"In the past three years the State of Israel has initiated several attempts to resolve the crisis with Turkey.

"It's important that Turkey and Israel, which both share a border with Syria, are able to communicate with each other and this is also relevant to other regional challenges. In addition, the visit of US President Barack Obama and Secretary of State Kerry created an opportunity to end the crisis.

"That is why towards the end of the US president's visit I decided to call the Turkish prime minister on order to solve the crisis and mend the relations between our two nations."

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You like the way he says, the Obama visit "created an opportunity"? And then, that he "decided" to call the Turkish premier to end the crisis. All on his own, he decided.

I'm not buying it. If it's important for the two countries to be able to communicate each other over Syria, Turkey -- which is indeed worried about Syria -- should be willing to do so for its own sake, not because of an apology.

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I confess disappointment that our new Secretary of Defense, Moshe Ya'alon supported his prime minister and said he did the right thing. Was it naive of me to expect Ya'alon, so soon after appointment, to cross his boss?

Former foreign minister (and foreign minister designate) MK Avigdor Lieberman, at least, got it right, as he often does:

He called Netanyahu's apology a "serious mistake."

"Anyone who has seen the pictures from the Marmara understands - without a shadow of a doubt - that the actions of the IDF soldiers were in self-defense."

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MK Yoni Chetboun of Habayit Hayehudi also severely criticized Netanyahu's apology:

"...Turkey is one of the more moderate countries in the Muslim world and it is proper that we have diplomatic relations with it.

"...And yet, Israel does not have the privilege to apologize for its soldiers actions, when they acted in accordance with the principles of the IDF's ethical code and its definition of 'the purity of arms.' The apology amounts to a knife-stab in the back of the IDF's combat soldiers and commanders. It sends a grave message to our soldiers, 'we don't have your backs.' As a soldier and commander in all sectors of warfare I can testify that government backing is critical for the soldier at the front.

"What is more, it constitutes a dangerous precedent that will encourage anti-Zionist organizations to continue [operating] the mechanism of delegitimizing Israel in general and the IDF in particular."

Chetboun, who was an officer in the Golani Brigade's elite Egoz reconnaissance unit and still serves in the reserves, said the apology to Turkey will cause more damage than good.

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/166501

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Chetboun has spoken out before and I have good hopes for him, and for his party. I'm waiting to see if Bennett also comments.

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In the end, the enthusiasm of Obama for this "achievement" may be short-lived. Already today according to Turkey's Hurriyet daily, cited by Times of Israel, Erdogan is saying:

"We will see what will be put into practice during the process. If [the Israelis] move forward in a promising way, we will make our contribution. Then, there would be an exchange of ambassadors." He also indicated it wasn't time yet to drop the charges against IDF military leaders. What was satisfactory one day ago, and met all demands, is no longer so.

http://www.timesofisrael.com/erdogan-too-early-to-cancel-legal-steps-against-soldiers/

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As I see it, Erdogan reasons that he can get even more from a weak Netanyahu, who was so obviously pressured by Obama into that apology. What more, I cannot say. But this is a dangerous situation.

In dealing with people such as Erdogan, strength is essential. What might be perceived as conciliation and reaching out is seen by the Muslims as weakness. Failure to comprehend this is a major fault of Obama's. I thought Netanyahu knew better, and perhaps at heart he does.

People on the left don't usually get this. Shelly Yachimovich, head of Labor, praised Netanyahu's apology, saying that it's best to "swallow one's pride." And I thought when she said it what a serious misperception of the situation that statement represented. The dignity of our nation is not a small matter.

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There are many rumors floating regarding other concessions that Obama extracted from Netanyahu. Undoubtedly there were such concessions, but their nature is not yet clear. It's being said, for example, that Netanyahu agreed to let the US know in advance if we move to attack Iran. It will take a while until we have documentation on some of these rumors. (Note: Debka is not documentation.)

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But one thing that's coming at us is clear. The bad cop is in town. Remember my reference to the good cop-bad cop routine. Obama did his thing marvelously well -- full of charm and good humor. Now comes Secretary of State John Kerry, who went to Jordan with Obama and has now returned here.

In Amman, Kerry met with the PA's Abbas. Now Kerry may have come with a plan -- we were told Obama would bring no peace plan but they said nothing about Kerry. This is not a plan for final peace. It's a plan to get Abbas to the table.

King Abdullah of Jordan said he would be pleased to host a meeting between the parties, and what Kerry might be promoting is a "peace summit" in Amman to be attended by officials of Israel, the PA, the US and Jordan.

Really, really bad news if true.

At this point it's rumor, with conflicting information coming through. This may be a fiction of Palestinian Arab imagination, as they see Kerry as someone more sympathetic to them. The Palestinian Arab "ambassador to Jordan" is speaking of a "US pledge to prepare a study and measures to revive a new political process between [Palestinians] and Israelis."

While "A top Jordanian official said that during his meeting with Kerry, he did not 'sense anything new in the US position towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

"'Kerry did not promise anything, and did not commit to anything at all, and did not mention any expected Palestinian-Israeli talks.'"

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4360262,00.html

From other sources I've been reading about suggestions Kerry has for concessions we should make to bring Abbas to the table. This was expected. One of the reported concessions is release of prisoners, something Abbas speaks about all of the time.

But there's yet more (which I hesitate to mention yet) that requires confirmation.

All of this to be watched very closely. I would feel more confident if our prime minister were currently demonstrating spine.

And may the Almighty be with us now as he was then.

Contact Arlene Kushner at akushner18@gmail.com and visit her website: www.ArlenefromIsrael.info


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HISTORICAL REVISIONISM CLARIFIED BY FORMER ISRAELI AMBASSADOR ALAN BAKER

Posted by Jerome S., March 23, 2013

The article below was written by Sara Lehmann who is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn, was formerly an editor at a major New York publishing house. This article appeared March 13, 2013 in the Jewish Press and is archived at
http://israel-commentary.org/?p=6203

Alan Baker as a former Israeli ambassador to Canada and an expert in international law, has been involved in the negotiation and drafting of agreements and peace treaties with Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and the Palestinians.

Last year Baker was thrust into the spotlight when he was appointed by Prime Minister Netanyahu to the three-member committee chaired by former justice Edmund Levy to examine the legal aspects of land ownership in the West Bank. That produced the highly publicized Levy Report.

The Jewish Press: Your history is an interesting blend of diaspora and Israeli influences. How has that contributed to your political outlook?

Baker: I'm from a traditional Jewish family in England. As a student I was very much involved in Jewish student organizations and was elected chairman of the Organization of Jewish Students of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. That was the time that the New Left came up, during the Six-Day War. There were huge battles on campuses then, and I found myself taking part in debates on Israel's right to exist, its right to defend itself, and the right of the Jewish community to shechitah, many of the issues that are still around.

You've had ample opportunity to observe the evolution of world opinion toward Israel and the Jewish community at large. Why has it changed over the years?

What has happened over the years is that the Arabs have enhanced their influence in the UN and their capability of neutralizing it, much more so now than twenty years ago. I certainly feel the difference. When you walk along the corridors of the UN and your best friends walk past you and don't look at you because they're afraid the Arabs might see them talking to you, it's not a pleasant feeling. I think it's clear that there is an element of anti-Semitism and resentment in the international community to the achievements of Israel, to the fact that we are a superpower in the field of high technology.

As one of three appointees to the Levy Committee, you concluded in the Levy Report that Israel's presence in the West Bank is not occupation and that the Israeli settlements are legal under international law. Can you explain how you arrived at that conclusion?

This was nothing new. This has always been Israel's position, from the day after the entry into the West Bank. Meir Shamgar, who became chief justice and then military advocate general, wrote in 1967-68 that this cannot be considered occupation because we haven't occupied it from a sovereign country. Jordan was there illegally.

The question was how to fix the issues of Israel's settlements regarding building and ownership. Over the years the government halted settlement activity and froze the activity of the planning and zoning committees and the statutory laws dealing with giving permits for purchasing and settling. Many people had paid money and started building and found themselves in the middle without approval. So they continued to build and hence their buildings were declared illegal outposts. The illegality wasn't because they stole land from anybody but because they simply weren't able to complete the statutory requirements.

The Levy Committee examined the rights that Jews have in the territories and came to the conclusion that we have well-based legal and historical rights, stemming from the Balfour Declaration, the British Mandate and the UN Charter.

We recommended setting up a special court to deal with competing land claims because in many cases an Arab would sell land to Jews and after the Jews would build a settlement, some other Arab would come along and say this is my land. In most cases the Israeli military government or civil administration would accept the Arab's claims without really questioning them, like in Ulpana and Migron.

(The Israeli Supreme Court has been a pathological obstacle. Instead of taking an objective view of the facts involved, over the years the Court has adopted a totally left wing ideology divorced from the basic history of its own country. jsk)There are judgments by Israel's Supreme Court, by Aharon Barak and others, which said they'd treat the territories as if they were "occupied territories" — a basic lie to begin with. In order to avoid this, we recommended setting up a special court to deal with land issues and freeing up the planning and zoning committees so that they can consider whether a building is in accordance with the law.

Do you feel the report was widely accepted?

No. To a large extent it was hidden because we got into the election process and regrettably Netanyahu was afraid to push it. When we first gave it to him he was overjoyed. He said, "Where have you been? This is the answer." But somebody must have put pressure on him. What was publicized was the initial determination that the territories aren't occupied. Hillary Clinton directly opposed it and recommended to Bibi that it should be rejected, without even knowing what was written there.

The UN Human Rights Council recently declared that Israel must immediately withdraw all of its citizens from the "occupied Palestinian territories." With this rhetoric representative of much of world opinion, can Israel afford to just ignore it?

Of course not. However, such rhetoric is bordering on anti-Semitism, because they're coming out with expressions like "settlement master plan," hinting at Nazi terminology, and "OPT — Occupied Palestinian Territories" and "settler violence," as if settler violence is a different and worse type of violence from others. They've decided that the territories are Palestinian, in violation of the Geneva Convention and against the UN's own determinations that negotiations need to take place.

I think the Israeli government is hoping that the Human Rights Council is so discredited as an anti-Israel, anti-Semitic organization that nobody will take its resolutions very seriously. The question is whether we should relate to it in a serious manner because by doing so we might be giving it credibility it doesn't have, which was my reservation regarding the Goldstone Commission. But our economy is based on involvement in the world economy and we can't ignore that. In addition, Jewish organizations that go to Geneva have approached me for help.

To that end, you are currently in New York to launch an initiative at the UN, begun by MK Nissim Ze'ev and his assistant Shoshana Beckerman, on the rights of Jews as indigenous people to the Land of Israel. Can you explain this initiative and what you hope to achieve by it?

The UN has recently recognized the rights of indigenous people, who are thereby entitled to enjoy the rights and privileges of such people in their land. This is a very serious claim as to our rights to the territories, because even before the Balfour Declaration the Jewish people can truly claim we were the indigenous people. Jews have lived constantly in the area and we've suffered from exiles. No one can deny this. If anyone doubts it, the one question to ask is, "Do you believe in Jesus? Was Jesus a Jew?" Here's your answer. And so we are preparing a series of documents clarifying our history.

Beyond semantics, what kind of practical implications can arise from this and what hopes are there that the UN will accept such a recommendation?

In a way it's semantics, but, it's more principle. It's acknowledgement that the land and territorial rights of Jews have existed from time immemorial and have some protection. So when the UN comes along and adopts resolutions calling upon Israel to leave the territories, we can say no, your resolution is in violation of the UN's own declaration protecting the rights of indigenous people. This would be the ultimate aim. And we have indications that it will be very difficult for them not to accept it because nobody can claim that we are not an indigenous people.

As a veteran diplomat, what advice can you offer those who try to defend Israel against its detractors?

Go on the attack. Stress our rights. It's called rights-based diplomacy. Look how the Arabs have succeeded. I take off my hat to them. They've succeeded in taking over the UN, in taking the issue of settlements off the negotiating table and pressing it in front of Obama as a precondition. We've got to fight it. That's why I'm against hasbara, which has become a catchword for apology. We should not apologize. We should push our rights; explain that Israel is an economic, high-tech giant. We've got so many positive things we're doing.

Contact Jerome S. Kaufman at jkaufman253469@comcast.net


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NEW POPE WANTS DIALOGUE WITH ISLAM

Posted by Donald Hank, March 24, 2013

Quote:

"... it is important to intensify dialogue among the various religions, and I am thinking particularly of dialogue with Islam."

Jesus did not dialogue with the religious tyrants of his day. He in fact did the exact opposite, directly clashing with them. For example, he called the religious leaders of his day white washed sepulcres (meaning clean looking on the outside, rotten on the inside) and hypocrites.

And he said 'I am the way, the truth and the life. No man cometh unto the Father but through me.' How could any dialogue with another religion be possible under these rigorous terms? A dialogue implies common ground and give and take: I will accept some of your teachings if you accept some of mine.

The main and insurmountable obstacle to 'dialogue' with Islam is that Muslims believe (and Mohammed taught) that, while the Judeo-Christian scriptures were correct, some wicked scribes seriously distorted them to mislead people and in their present form, the scriptures no longer represent what was originally written.

There are several problems with this assertion, including , but not limited to, the following:

1--The scriptures would have had to be seriously distorted on more than one occasion because both the OT and the NT were allegedly distorted.

2--The Hebrew scribes were in fact so fastidious and meticulous in their copying of the ancient texts that little change is noted between the OT (Tanakh) as handed down to us from the Masoretes as early as the 7th century (say, the King James version, which is a translation of the Masoretic OT) and the versions found in the Dead Sea scrolls, which predate the time of Christ.

Nor are there major discrepancies between the different translations (not counting radical modern 'translations' deliberately distorted to accommodate certain interest groups). The Hebrews started a trend to use Greek in their scriptures before the time of Christ. The Greek versions that have been handed down do not differ significantly from the Hebrew, which can be roughly said to reflect the original, and also Hebrew-to-Aramaic versions, all of which match incredibly well with each other. So Mohammed was accusing a class of people--scribes--well known for their diligence and meticulousness, of a fault they were never known to have, namely, inaccuracy.

3--Both the OT and the NT are so internally consistent that the alleged "wicked scribes" would have had to make absolutely certain that they had carefully changed all the interrelated parts in such a way that their distortions matched. A daunting task. Further, Christ quoted OT scriptures on different occasions to support his teachings. His quotes match the original, or what is accepted as the original by both Jews and Christians.

4--I have debated with Muslims on line (and will probably continue to do so) and none of them is able to answer a simple question, namely, at what period in history was the OT distorted and at what period in history was the NT distorted?

5--If there were distortions, why doesn't Mohammed tell us the correct versions of the distorted passages? We know that Mohammed was illiterate, and Muslims admit this. But if he had supernatural ability to know that scripture was distorted, then he should also have had the ability to rectify the parts that were incorrectly copied or deliberately distorted. He made no attempt to do this, and his writings (as dictated to another person) bear little resemblance to the OT and NT. Most of what he says that contradicts the OT and NT sounds more like a rebuttal than a rewrite of the scriptures. But since he admits that the original scriptures were important, why is it that he made no attempt to rectify or edit the texts to their original form, instead of just presenting a rebuttal (for example, stating that God cannot have a son)?

6--The oral tradition among the Hebrews was very strong. If someone had actually tried to distort the scriptures at any time during Hebrew history, enough scholars would have noticed to challenge these distortions. The wayward scribes would have probably been stoned to death. It is inconceivably that scribes could have gotten away with this wholesale distortion that Mohammed speaks of. The same holds true for the NT.

It is hard to imagine how any Christian could dialogue with people who have been taught not only a different set of scriptures but have in fact been told specifically to reject Judeo-Christianity and to treat Jews and Christians as inferiors or worse, as blasphemers and heretics.

It is quite possible that, in such a dialogue process, Muslims may try to convert Christians, but it is hard to imagine them acquiescing to non-Muslim teachings.

The only route open to Christians is apologetics, which does not admit of a dialogue but rather encourages proof of the scriptures and the superiority of the Christian faith and culture.

This was the route embarked upon by St. Thomas of Aquinus and St. Augustine. How odd that the highest ranking man in the Roman Catholic hierarchy would depart so radically from a route that was so successful that it acculturated an entire continent and then crossed the Atlantic and forged the New World's culture and others, creating the most powerful and dynamic cultures and economies the world had ever known.

Contact Donald Hank at zoilandon@msn.com


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RELEASE TERRORISTS AND THEY'LL RENEW TALKS

Posted by Yoram Fisher, March 24, 2013

Kerry plans to offer an outline for Israeli-PA peace talks and will ask Israel to release terrorists as part of it.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry held talks with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on Saturday evening, after earlier discussing ways to push a new peace plan with Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, U.S. and Israeli sources said.

A radio report said Netanyahu and Kerry had a first round of private talks and were then joined by Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, Netanyahu's personal envoy Yitzhak Molcho and his national security adviser Yaakov Amidror.

Channel 10 News reported that Kerry is planning on offering Israel and the PA an outline which would see Israel releasing terrorists from its prisons and transferring areas from Area B, which is under joint PA-Israeli control under the Oslo Accords, to Area A which is under full PA control.

Kerry's outline would have the PA undertaking a return to the negotiating table and promising not to file lawsuits against Israel with the International Criminal Court.

Earlier on Saturday, Kerry met Abbas in the Jordanian capital, reported AFP.

"Kerry and Abbas discussed possible steps to revive a new political process for peace," the PA's ambassador in Amman Attallah Kheiry told AFP.

"Abbas stressed that Israeli settlements endanger the peace process and that Israel should free Palestinian prisoners."

Kerry accompanied President Barack Obama on a four-day visit to the region, during which the two met top Israeli and PA leaders in Jerusalem and Ramallah.

During his visit Obama did not bring to a visible breakthrough in the impasse in the peace talks.

Kerry will be Obama's new pointman on the Middle East, as part of the renewed U.S. efforts to push the sides back to negotiations.

Abbas has continuously imposed preconditions on peace talks and has demanded that Israel freeze Jewish construction in Judea, Samaria, and eastern Jerusalem. When Israel froze construction for a ten-month period in 2010, however, he refused to come to the table.

One unverified report in Israel on Saturday claimed that Obama and Netanyahu had reached an agreement on a "silent construction freeze," in which Israel would not promote any new construction plans but would not officially announce that there is a freeze.

Contact Yoram Fisher at yoramski@yahoo.com


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APOLOGY TO THE TURKISH PRIME MINISTER

Posted by Steven Plaut, March 24, 2013

An open letter to Recep Tayyip ErdoÄŸan Prime Minister of Turkey

Dear Mister Prime Minister:

On behalf of all of the people of Israel, I would like to apologize to you for the cowardice and fathomless idiocy of the Prime Minister of Israel. As you know, this weekend Benjamin Netanyahu sent you an "apology" for Israel having defended itself against the genocidal terrorists who attacked Israeli soldiers armed only with paintguns when they boarded the terrorist "flotilla" ship that you sent out to challenge Israel's naval blockade of the Hamas enclave in Gaza. Netanyahu spoke only for himself when he apologized to you for Israel's defending itself and its people, this two generations after the Holocaust. He does not represent anyone at all in the country when it comes to this "apology." No one else in the country, except for some anti-Israel radical leftists with tenure at the universities, agrees that Israel owes you an apology for defending its people.

Actually, on behalf of all REAL Israelis, I would like to apologize to you for the fact that ONLY nine terrorists were killed by Israeli troops on the flotilla ship when Israeli soldiers were savagely attacked by Turkish and other terrorists. I would like to apologize for the fact that Israeli did NOT torpedo and sink the terrorist ships trying to break the blockade and bring in aid to the Hamas Nazis. I would like to apologize for the fact that Israel has a Prime Minister who is so clueless, insensitive, and divorced from Jewish history that he would consider buying a few moments of diplomat calm with a Moslem aggressor by shaming his entire country with an "apology" to Turkey, exhibiting one of the most disgraceful acts by a Jew in all of history, and all this just hours before the Jewish holiday of national liberation, Passover.

Beyond that, I really do think that Israel owes an apology for NOT having done much more to draw the world's attention to the illegal occupation and destruction by Turkey of the jewel of Cyprus, the city of Famagusta. Israel sat by while Turkey conquered 40% of Cyprus and transferred tens of thousands of its own people as illegal settlers to the island. And for that I apologize. And since you have spent so much time in recent years denouncing Israel as an occupier, I think Israel owes an apology to the world for not helping to end the illegal Turkish occupation of the great ancient Greek capital of Constantinople, now under an illegal Saracen occupation that has continued for far too long. It is high time that Constantinople be returned to its true heritage and its legal owners, the Greek people. It is less than a hundred years since the city, along with Smyrna and other Greek homelands, was almost liberated by the Greeks, who were only to be blocked by the Turkish military aggressors, the mass murderers of the Armenians.

So Mister Prime Minister, as you see, I am afraid that Israelis DO owe the world quite a few apologies.

On behalf of the non-pusillanimous citizens of Israel, I remain

Contact Steven Plaut at no_reply@yahoogroups.com


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HOW MANY HIZBOLLAH TERRORISTS MADE IT TO L.A., N.Y., DENVER, BALTIMORE, CHICAGO, DETROIT, WEST PALM BEACH, ETC?

Posted by Sergio Hadar Tezza, March 24, 2013

Hezbullah partners with Mexican drug kingpin, Iran launders money through Venezuela, State Department buries head in sand

Caption Text

In April, it will be seven years since I first warned about Hezbullah activities in Mexico. Now, with the State Department still ostrich-like burying its head in the sand, the chickens are coming home to roost. Adam Kredo reports on Hezbullah's partnership with a Mexican drug kingpin and Iran laundering billions of dollars through Venezuela (Sanctions? What sanctions?), while the State Department continues to pretend not to see anything (Hat Tip: Sunlight).

Iran's foothold in the country is expected to grow exponentially under the rule of Chavez's likely successor, Vice President Nicolas Maduro.

[Roger] Noriega and other experts warned House lawmakers at a Foreign Affairs Committee hearing on Wednesday that Iran's terrorist proxy Hezbollah is gaining power in Venezuela.

Hezbollah, which carries out terrorist attacks on Iran's behalf, has helped Tehran access Venezuela's sophisticated financial sector, experts said.

"It's easy to say billions have been laundered through various Iranian enterprises and institutions through the Venezuelan economy," Noriega told the Free Beacon in an interview Thursday. "The Iranians have seized on this as a way to evade sanctions."

Hezbollah has not only infiltrated Venezuela's governmental bodies. The organization has also established terrorist training facilities on the country's Margarita Island, according to Noriega.

Hezbollah has been able to form from this Caribbean haven "a marriage of convenience" with various narcotics traffickers and drug gangs that bring the terrorist "threat to our doorstep," Noriega told lawmakers Wednesday.

The Mexican drug lord Joaquin Guzman, ringleader of the deadly Sinaloa Cartel, is known to have spent time on Margarita Island where he likely established ties with Hezbollah, according to Noriega.

"Our [belief] is that the brokered a relationship, a collaboration between Hezbollah and that narco group," said Noriega, who also served as the U.S. ambassador to the Organization of American states from 2001 to 2003.

Read the whole thing. If you're an Israeli, it's obvious to you why this is so bad, but if you're an American, think about this: There have been hundreds of thousands of converts to Islam in Mexico over the last few years. What if some of those Mexicans stealing across the border into the United States are adherents of 'radical Islam' who are forming Hezbullah cells in the United States? What if? You can bet that it's happening. And now, President Obama is granting them amnesty so that they can stay in the US.

What could go wrong?

Contact Sergio Hadar Tezza at nutella59@UCLA.edu

This article appeared March 24, 2013 in the Israel Matzav and is archived at
http://israelmatzav.blogspot.se/2013/03/hezbullah-partners-with-mexican-drug.html
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NOA SHAINDLINGER CELEBRATE THE HELICOPTER CRASH THAT KILLED TWO ISRAELI PILOTS

Posted by Udi Schayat, March 24, 2013

This is Noa Shaindlinger, an extreme-left Israeli anarchist and a self proclaimed "peace activist" who took to Facebook to celebrate as news of the incident surfaced. "We may have some good news later this morning", referring to Tuesday's helicopter crash that killed two Israeli reserve pilots. Shaindlinger later deleted the post from her page, but kept on spewing hatred and claiming these two pilots were probably up to no good by the mere fact that they were

Israeli air-force pilots.

Please take a good look at the face of this hate-monger beast of a person, who saw in this sad accident an opportunity out lashed at everybody including her own parents and spared nobody, not even the grieving families of the fallen pilots. Even if there is no law forbidding her from exercising the right to free speech - She should be condemned by all, by her peers, acquaintance, University alumni, and by anybody that has a son / father / boyfriend / girlfriend in the armed forces of any free and democratic countries in the world !

Shaindlinger no doubt would have appreciated the tweet sent out by Hamas's military wing: "Allah sent them to hellfire, God willing".

Noa Shaindlinger is/was also a PhD student at the University of Toronto

Contact Udi Schayat by email at udischayat@yahoo.com


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JUST ADDED ONE.....

Posted by Fred Reifenberg, March 24, 2013

Caption Text

Fred was born in Germany, and grew up during the Hitler period. In 40's he moved to NY. He is veteran of Korean War. Currently lives in Israel. He enjoys harmonizing with nature, and photographing nature in it's many wonderful forms. Also creating a variety of abstracts, combining photography and graphics.Contact him at fred3432gmail.com


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TURKEY BADLY NEEDED TO END ROW WITH ISRAEL.

Posted by Ted Belman, March 24, 2013

Netanyahu's apology gave Obama a diplomatic breakthrough

Erdogan desperately needed this raprochement. So did Obama. So why did Netanyahu have to eat crow. Erdogan should have been forced by necessity to eat crow to teach him a lesson. Bibi didn't just pick up the phone at the last minute. Rest assured this apology was scripted and agreed upon before Obama arrived in Israel.

If that wasn't bad enough, Netanyahu is making concessions to get the Palestinians to start negotiations. TOI writes:

The focus: New ideas for enabling a resumption of direct negotiations. Netanyahu has reportedly been considering a package of goodwill gestures — including approval of building requests, and a release of prisoners — designed to encourage Abbas to come back to the peace table.

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu granted the Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan a face-saver for ending their three-year rift out of willingness to crown US President Barack Obama's three-day visit with an impressive diplomatic breakthrough. He swallowed Israel and its army's pride and, at the airport, with Obama looking on, picked up the phone to Erdogan and apologized for the killing by Israeli soldiers of nine Turkish pro-Palestinian activists in 2010 aboard the Mavi Marmara, which was leading a flotilla bound on busting the Israeli blockade of the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip.

The crowing comment by Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu — "Turkey's basic demands have been met; we got what we wanted" — was out of place, spiteful and ill-mannered.

He knows perfectly well that for the past year, amid a constant stream of ranting abuse from Ankara, Israel has been quietly responding to Turkey's desperate need for cooperation in four essential fields, which are disclosed here by DEBKAfile:

1. The Turkish armed forces are heavily dependent on Israeli military technologies from the long years of the close alliance between the two countries, which Ankara cut short. This dependence applies most particularly to its drones, the backbone of today's modern armies. It is also holding up the huge transaction for the sale of American Boeing Awacs electronic warning airplanes to Turkey.

Boeing was unable to deliver the aircraft without Jerusalem's consent, because a key component, the early warning systems, is designed in Israel. This consent has been withheld in the face of Turkey's urgent need and the US aviation firm's impatience to consummate the deal.

Turkey is in need of those planes — not just to monitor events in neighboring wartorn Syria, but to complete its air defense lineup against Iranian ballistic missiles. Without the AWACs, the advanced FBX-radar system the US has stationed at the Turkish Kurecik air base is only partly operational. The Kurecik battery is linked to its equivalent at a US base in the Israeli Negev, a fact which Ankara chooses to conceal.

2. In view of the turmoil in Syria, the bulk of Turkey's exports destined for the Persian Gulf and points farther east have been diverted to the Israeli ports of Haifa and Ashdod, whereas just a year ago, they went through Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia.

Since no end is seen to the Syrian conflict and the closure of the Turkish-Syrian border, more and more export traffic from Turkey is making its way through Haifa port and thence by rail across Israel to Jordan. Turkish goods bound for destinations in Europe and the US are diverted to Israeli ports too as Egyptian ports are made increasingly dysfunctional by that country's economic crisis..

3. In the first year of the Syrian uprising, when Davutoglu was still a frequent traveler to Damascus for talks with Bashar Assad, Ankara entertained high hopes of becoming a major player for resolving the Syrian debacle. But he also sought to strike a deal with the Lebanese Hizballah, Assad's ally, for obstructing Israeli gas and oil exploration in the eastern Mediterranean

Three years on, Turkish leaders have woken up to the realization that they had better hurry up and jump aboard the US-backed Israeli energy bandwagon or else they will miss out on an outstanding and lucrative economic development, namely, the forthcoming opening up of a Mediterranean gas exporting route to Europe.

4. Turkey, Israel and Jordan are all in the same boat as targets for the approaching large-scale use of Syria's chemical and biological weapons.

This topic was high on the agenda of President Obama's talks with Jordan's King Hussein Friday, March 21, in Amman, after he had explored the subject with Israel's prime minister in Jerusalem.

Obama presented them with his plan to consolidate into a single US-led Turkish-Israeli-Jordan HQ the separate commands established six months ago in each of those countries to combat the use of unconventional weapons.

This unified command would stand ready to launch units of the four armies into coordinated land and air action inside Syria upon a signal from Washington.

The US president used his visits to Jerusalem and Amman to tie up the ends of this contingency plan with Netanyahu and Abdullah, while Secretary of State John Kerry got together with Erdogan in Ankara.

However, this four-way military effort to combat the Syrian chemical threat could not have taken off with Ankara and Jerusalem not on speaking terms.

This had been going on for three years, ever since Erdogan suspended military ties with Israel and downgraded diplomatic relations pending an Israeli apology for the Marmara incident, compensation for the victims and the lifting of its naval blockade on Gaza.

The Turkish prime minister insisted on the Israeli prime minister paying obeisance to Turkish national honor. And finally Netanyahu relented. But Israel stood its ground on the last condition; a UN probe had pronounced the Israeli blockade legal and legitimate although its raid on the Turkish ship was deemed "excessive." So the blockade remains in place and, indeed, Friday, March 23, Israel's new defense minister, Moshe Yaalon, tightened it by restricting the Gaza offshore areas open to Palestinian Mediterranean fishermen.

This was punishment for the four-rocket attack staged from Gaza on the Israeli town of Sderot Thursday, the second day of President Obama's visit to Israel.

DEBKAfile's military sources comment that the new defense minister may have also been directing a reproach at the prime minister for apologizing to Turkey and admitting to "operational errors," thereby casting aspersions on the professionalism of the Israel Navy's Shayetet 13 commando unit and its legitimate action in defense of Israel's legal Gaza blockade.

Ted Belman is a retired lawyer and the Editor of Israpundit. He made aliya from Canada last year and now lives in Jerusalem, Israel. Contact him at tedbel@rogers.com. This article appeared March 23, 2013 in Israpundit Digest and is archived at
http://www.israpundit.com/archives/53681#more-53681

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WRITE MIISTER LAPID TO DEMAND THAT NO FUNDS BE PAID TURKEY IN REPARATIONS

Posted by Steven Plaut, March 24, 2013

Just a fast afterword and followup to the previous item about Netanyahu's cowardly "apology" to Turkey.

Not only did Bibi "apologize" for Israel using force against the genocidal Islamofascist terrorists who attacked Israeli troops, not only did he apologize for using armed force to protect the people of Israel, Netanyahu ALSO agreed to pay reparations to the Turkish families of terrorists killed in the ship deck fighting when the flotilla ship was boarded. The terrorists there attacked the IDF troops who boarded the ship. The Turkish terrorists were killed while attempting to murder Israeli soldiers. That is the basis for Netanyahu offering to pay reparations. Maybe Bibi will next offer to pay the Palestinians compensation for the damages to their Qassam rockets that they shoot into Israel when these are shot down by Israel's iron dome anti-missile system?

Bibi's problem is that he needs the Minister of Finance to sign any checks for any reparations payments to the Turkish families of the dead terrorists.

So I wanted to suggest that you drop a line to Yair Lapid, the still untested new Minister of Finance but an Israeli claiming to be a proud ZIonist with a sense of Jewish self-respect. Urge him top REFUSE to make any reparations payments to the families of the terrorists. While you are at it, suggest he deduct the amount Netanyahu offered to pay Turkey in reparations from Netanyahu's own salary checks.

Contact Steven Plaut at stevenplaut@gmail.com


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THE FOX AND THE RAVEN - THOUGHTS ON A VISIT

Posted by Yuval Zaliouk, March 24, 2013

The raven seized a piece of cheese and carried his spoils up to his perch high in a tree. A fox came up and walked in circles around the raven, planning a trick. 'What is this?' cried the fox. 'O raven, the elegant proportions of your body are remarkable, and you have a complexion that is worthy of the king of the birds! If only you had a voice to match, then you would be first among the fowl!' The fox said these things to trick the raven and the raven fell for it: he let out a great squawk and dropped his cheese.

Now it is up to PM Netanyahu to prove he can squawk but keep the cheese...

Dear friends,

To begin with, ask yourself the question: Which of the two do you prefer, the Obama of the first term or the Obama of the (so far) second?

One thing is clear at the very outset: During Obama's first term he chose to court the Arabs and the Islamic world. He believed that by doing so, he could force Israel to make concessions and the "Palestinians" would reciprocate by making peace. This would bring glory upon him and crown him the greatest peace maker of all times (and would even justify the Nobel Peace Prize he received so prematurely).

Alas, he made one grave mistake. It was the Arab world he was dealing with...

By his appeasing policies toward those who revere nothing but strength, his policy achieved the opposite; peace was getting increasingly more distant (Does this remind you of history not so long ago?).

Obama is a stubborn man. It is not easy for him to change his mind or his policies. But, Obama, like the fox in the fable, is also smart. He could see what his adversarial policies "achieved." Turmoil in Egypt, Libya, Syria, Saudi, Lebanon, the "Palestinians," Jordan, the Maghreb, Iraq, Pakistan and Afghanistan resulted directly from his mistaken policies and to top it all, the Muslim Brotherhood and Iran have been walking into all the vacuums his policies left behind.

A rude awakening was the Arab/Islamic world's refusal to behave in accordance with Western rules, sensibilities and culture.

Another unwelcome blow for Obama was the reelection of PM Netanyahu and the very favorable pro-Netanyahu polls during the Israeli election campaign.

In this context, the idea of the visit was born. Instrumental in organizing it was the US ambassador to Israel Dan Shapiro who correctly read the political map and advised the Obama administration on how to bring about a change of heart among Israelis. Until the visit, some 80% of Israelis perceived Obama as pro-Palestinian and hostile to Israel.

Whether Obama had a genuine change of heart or was forced to have it by circumstances, one thing is abundantly clear: During his visit his attitude, actions and statements were diametrically opposed to those of his first term. One might say that short of mainly two big mistakes (see below), Obama's visit to Israel was picture perfect.

Here, from an Israeli point of view, are positive aspects pointing to a possible Obama change of heart:

"Palestinians" must recognize Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people.

Israel was not founded as result of the Holocaust. Israel has been the Jewish homeland for 3000 years.

No mention of return to the 1948 armistice lines.

"Palestinians" must come to the negotiation table without pre-conditions (as insisted persistently by Netanyahu).

Resolution of the conflict can be achieved only by direct negotiations. Peace cannot be imposed.

No public mention of "settlement" freeze (insisted as pre-condition by Abu Mazen).

No more mention of "illegal" settlements (obstacle to peace, yes, illegal no).

No mention of East Jerusalem as the "Palestinian" capital.

No mention of "right of return" for "Palestinian refugees."

Obama refused to lay a wreath at Arafat's grave, yet laid a wreath at Herzl's grave, the founder of the Zionist movement.

Obama called upon the Europeans to list Hezballah as a terrorist organization.

Obama, during the press conference with Abu Mazen, repeatedly condemned the rockets from Gaza fired that morning, while Abu Mazen remained silent in front of the entire world press.

Not new, but much more emphasized, repeated promises for US defense and military cooperation and support for Israel.

All the above Obama will find very difficult to walk away from, therefore I believe one can assume that he did indeed have a change of heart.

And yet, in his major speech in front of thousand students as carefully picked from the left as possible, Obama faltered in a major way, enough to negate the good impressions he was trying to make. Thus he lost many Israelis who were willing to give his promises a chance.

1) His mention of the word "occupation" (one cannot occupy what's yours) and his description of the hardships Palestinians suffer under "occupation." Somebody forgot to brief the President that 90% of Judea & Samaria's Arabs live under their own rule and autonomy, including their own government, parliament, police and security forces. They go to work uninterrupted and enjoy normal life under immensely better conditions than any Arab in the entire Middle East.

(2) He told his student audience to push their Israeli leaders to make peace. Israeli leaders have been pushing for peace for decades. They offered the "Palestinians" enormous concessions. They even abandoned territories such as Gaza. For peace they handed the entire oil and gas rich Sinai over to the Egyptians. It has been the "Palestinians" who have refuses to make peace, not the Israeli leaders.

But back to the positive: Consider one very important aspect of this entire visit. The bitter pill the new Obama approach must now be swallowed by all those who got used to his hostility to Israel and for whom Obama served as champion. All Obama's far left-liberal supporters, the media, academia, the left-wing of the Democratic Party, J-Street, will have to adjust and re tune their attitudes to Israel. Suddenly, this sour to Israel President is expressing admiration, is hugging and kissing, is demonstrating unlimited friendship, is most comfortable among Israelis, and is emotional and amiable even towards the Netanyahus. Symbolically at least, this change cannot be ignored.

At the same time, Obama snubbed Abu Mazen. During his first term, Obama forced Israel to a settlement freeze. He called upon Israel to return to the 1948 armistice lines. Thus, he pushed Abu Mazen up a very tall tree from which, justifiably, he refused to climb down. Now enters a new Obama who tells Abu Mazen to climb down without pre-conditions. This, in my opinion, is not something Abu Mazen will agree to do, because at the bottom of the tree, lurks Hamas eager to declare him a traitor and even take his life.

Bluntly put, Obama abandoned the bleeding Abu Mazen in the battlefield. He also made it much more difficult for John Kerry to succeed in his mission to bring the parties closer.

Why did Obama do that? One theory I propose is that Obama realized Abu Mazen's weakness. The PA Chairman no longer enjoys the support of his people. In Judea & Samaria you can now find a Hamasnic, maybe even an Al Qaeda snake, hiding under every rock (there are many rocks in Judea & Samaria). Obama may also have realized that the "peace" process leading to Two States Solutions has been dying for a long time and received its final kiss of death during his first term and thus can no longer be resuscitated. His mentioning of the TSS during his visit may prove nothing but a nostalgic lip service.

Major territorial concessions from Israel cannot be achieved either. Imagine if Syria could dip her toes in the water of Lake Galilee....

Obama had another chance to scrutinize Israel's minute size. His helicopter ride from Ben Gurion airport near Tel Aviv to Jerusalem lasted less than 20 minutes. His Air Force One ride to Amman, Jordan over Judea & Samaria lasted 35 minutes of which only 30 miles where over the territories.

The likelihood of Obama getting drowned in the shifting sands of the Middle East, like all the US Presidents before him, must be a daunting possibility for him. He already demonstrated his reluctance to intervene in Syria, and do not forget, he let the Europeans do the dirty job of bringing down Kaddafi. Obama is escaping from involvement (Iraq, Afghanistan), not increasing it.

So what's left for Obama to do? How can he restore America's diminishing deterrence to which he contributed so much in his first term? How can he restore his faltering reputation in the international arena? How can he atone for the incredible mess his policies created in the Middle East? How can he repent for dropping America's best allies like Mubarak?

The answer and only choice left is Israel, and the biggest elephant of all — IRAN.

Here, like the Europeans in Libya, it is Israel that can pull the chestnuts out for him and America and produce for him a sure victory. This is the nature of his declaration that every country has the right to self-defense.

Indeed, the "Palestinians" are angry, kicking and screaming, but they are (always have been) a very small piece in a huge puzzle. Likewise, the importance of the Arab world is diminishing as the US is growing more independent of Arab oil. Recent discoveries of huge deposits of gas and oil in Israel increase her stature and importance vis-à-vis the Europeans.

President Obama may have finally realized that Israel is America's best most reliable ally. Let us hope, not only for Israel's sake, but for America too.

And as far as PM Netanyahu is concerned, If Obama was bluffing, yet again, let us hope and pray that Netanyahu is smart enough to not let go of the cheese in his beak.

Contact Yuval Zaliouk at ynz@netvision.net.il


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PASSOVER'S GIFT: THE PROMISED AND UNDIVIDED LAND

Posted by Victor Sharpe, March 24, 2013

Billions, of the world's people do not know the meaning of the towering festival of freedom and liberty known as Passover; a festival of spring, recognizing an event that has blessed the world for over 3,300 years.

The festival begins on March 25th of this year and falls always on the 15th day of the Jewish month of Nissan. Jews and Christians know the Biblical story of the Exodus and of the salvation of the Jewish people from centuries of slavery under the Egyptian pharaohs and the subsequent creation and deliverance of an entire nation.

Such a seminal event in humanity's history became the foundation for freedom and liberty- created many centuries before democracy was first enunciated by Greek philosophers who nevertheless lived within a polytheistic society.

Many people know in varying degrees the Passover story and the birth of the Jewish people and of their undying faith in the One and Only God; invisible and indivisible. Judaism has given the world monotheism in its purest and most undiluted nature. The Unity of God is what Jews have defended against all who attempted to suggest a plurality: even to enduring martyrdom as they uttered with their dying breath the towering prayer, the Shema, which is the central place in Jewish religious thought: "Hear, oh Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One."

And other words from Deuteronomy:

"The Lord, He is God, in heaven above and upon the earth beneath; there is none else."

Or from Isaiah: "Besides Me, there is no God. Turn to me and you are saved in all ends of the earth! For I am God, and there is none else."

The long suffering Jews under Egyptian bondage were led to freedom by the Jewish prophet, Moses, who brought them to their own very special and promised land: The Land of Israel.

Moses spoke with God in Sinai and brought a wondrous divine gift to the Jewish people and through them to all humanity -- the Decalogue; the Ten Commandments, and the basis of today's laws of Judeo-Christian civilization and jurisprudence. These ten brief commandments -- a mere 120 Hebrew words -- are written on the walls of synagogues and in many churches as well as in secular sites. Many of the latter are often the subject of attack by the ACLU and atheist organizations.

As in all Jewish practice, Moses was never deified. He was shown in the Torah, the first five books of the Bible, as a man; nothing else. Indeed in order not to deify him or exalt him over others he is shown in the Holy Bible with human failings and his burial place remains unknown. He sought the mountain top and beheld the Promised Land of Israel, yet was never to enter.

Unlike in so many other nations, Moses' sons and descendants did not set up a dynasty, and in fact are not mentioned in Scripture after his death (except for a possible coded reference to a grandson in Judges 18:30). In fact, in the Torah (the first five books of the Bible) Moses is described merely as "the humblest and meekest of all human beings." For in Judaism, only God is divine and besides Him there are none other.

Passover (Pesach in Hebrew) is the first of the Jewish holidays and festivals, coinciding with the coming of the spring in the Jewish people's ancestral, biblical and native land: the land given by God in an everlasting Covenant to the Jewish people. It is the land extending from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea -- a mere 40 miles in width known for millennia by its biblical names of Judea and Samaria.

Sadly, a mostly hostile world prefers to deny its biblical and Jewish patrimony by renaming it the West Bank, the name given to it by the Jordanian Arab invaders who drove out its Jewish inhabitants and illegally occupied the territory for a mere 19 years from 1948 until it was liberated by Israel during its defensive June 1967 Six Day War. Indeed, part of the Covenanted land also includes Gilead (the biblical and ancestral possession of the tribes of Manasseh, Gad and Reuben) which is east of the river Jordan in the present day Arab state of Jordan.

But in the heart of the land stretching from the river to the sea, an Arab people who call themselves Palestinians would carve out a terror state with the sole intention of coming against the Jewish homeland and destroying it. In doing so they challenge the very promises of God in Scripture; (God to Abraham):

"Unto thy seed have I given this land...I will give to thee and to thy seed after thee all the land of Canaan for an everlasting possession"; (God to Isaac):

"Unto thee and unto thy seed will I give all these lands... "; (God to Jacob):

"The land which I gave unto Abraham and Isaac, to thee I will give it, and to thy seed after thee..."; (God to Moses):

"I am come down to deliver them out of the hand of the Egyptians, and to bring them...unto a good land and large, a land flowing with milk and honey..."; (God to Joshua):

"Be strong and courageous, for it is you who will cause this people to inherit the land that I have sworn to their fathers to give them."

The Passover festival precedes two other harvest festivals based upon the agricultural cycles of ancient and modern Israel. Next comes Shavuot, Pentecost, which records and commemorates the giving to Moses the Ten Commandments followed by Succot, which is known as Tabernacles. Mankind was, and is, blessed through the Passover for it is a veritable gift to those who accept its divine message and perform the ritual meal, the Seder, recording the Exodus story.

But there is an evil in men's hearts, and it is a profound evil, for those who hate and envy this Jewish gift to humanity and its message of freedom, liberty and foundational democracy. They have chosen since time immemorial to rise up to destroy all that it stands for and persecute those -- the Jews -- who received it from God and who have shared it with all humanity.

Let me recount what Mary Antin wrote in 1911 about the horrors inflicted upon the Jews in Russia as they celebrated the festival of liberty in the Exodus story during the festive Seder meal. Ms. Antin wrote of what routinely took place at Passover -- often coinciding with Easter -- and of how Russian neighbors reminded the Jews that for them it was another Egypt:

"... in Russian cities and even more in country districts, where Jewish families lived scattered, the stupid peasants would hear lies about the Jews, fill themselves with vodka, and set out to kill their Jewish neighbors.

"They attacked them with knives and clubs and scythes and axes, killed them or tortured them and burned their houses. This was called a pogrom.

"Jews who escaped the pogroms came with wounds on them and horrible, horrible, stories of little babies torn limb from limb before their mother's eyes. Only to hear these things made one sob and sob and choke with pain.

"People who saw such things never smiled any more, no matter how long they lived and sometimes their hair turned white in a day and others went insane."

In the Passover story, which is enshrined in the Haggadah, the book retelling the events of the Exodus and of the order of the Seder meal, there is a profound and millennial old passage: "Not one man alone has risen up against us to destroy us, but in every generation there have risen up against us those who sought to destroy us; but the Holy One, blessed be He, delivers us from their hands." And so it was and still is.

As if to remind us of the generational evil that is perpetrated against Jewish men, women and children, some two years ago, a family in the Jewish Israeli village of Itamar, in biblical and ancestral Samaria, was slaughtered by Arab Muslims whose tracks led back to a nearby Palestinian settlement. The members of the Fogel family were sleeping in their tiny home on the Sabbath when two Palestinian murderers entered and knifed to death the father, mother, and three children, including a little baby girl only three months old.

This is only one recent example in a long and dismal string of savage atrocities perpetrated by local Arabs, those who today call themselves Palestinians, against Jews as the latter sought to live peaceful lives and redeem the land. And by the way, there has never in all of recorded history ever existed a sovereign, independent Arab state called Palestine.

Mary Antin spoke about unspeakable horrors inflicted on Jewish families in Russia; atrocities which had been repeated time after time throughout Europe and the Islamic world for millennia. Those relentless persecutions, pogroms and the shattering genocide perpetrated against the Jews in the Holocaust by Nazi Germany, in which a third of the world's Jewish population was exterminated, were done when the Jews were still living in the long night of statelessness after Rome had destroyed Jewish Judea in 135 AD.

Yet today, since the modern miracle in 1948 of Israel's rebirth and reconstitution as a sovereign, independent nation, restored again to its native, ancestral and biblical homeland, successive Israeli governments since that of Yitzhak Rabin -- despite all the overwhelming and empirical evidence of implacable Arab and Muslim refusal to ever accept it as a Jewish state -- plead for peace. It is offered again and again to the Arabs, those who call themselves Palestinians, and again and again rejected by them. Yet still Israeli leaders make unheard of and suicidal offers of "land for peace."

And still the world urges Israel to make yet more concessions to these Palestinian Arabs who never, ever make any concessions to the Jewish state in return. Instead, in their state run media they indoctrinate their children from pre-school age with relentless and utterly evil hate towards Israel and the Jewish people so that yet another generation of Arabs grow up with genocide towards the Jewish state in their hearts. As the Jewish prophet said: "Peace, peace but there is no peace."

So Israel's repeated attempts to seek peace may seem to many observers as an aberration, an illogical and deeply naïve act in the face of so much evidence of antipathy and hatred exhibited towards the Jewish state by the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians.

After all, what nation would accept such Arab and Muslim barbarity and withstand so many Palestinian crimes against its civilian Jewish population -- and still hope for peace? What nation would continue, despite the rain of thousands of missiles launched from Hamas occupied Gaza upon Israeli women and children, to hold out the hand of peace to a people who display such cruelty and crimes against humanity? What nation, after seeing the horror in the Fogel home, would still harbor hopes of a peaceful Palestinian state living side by side with Israel? What people would still entertain the insanity of dividing up the tiny land under the fatal rubric of a "two-state-solution?"

Well, only a state whose people embraced the Passover message for millennia and the biblical passage in Leviticus19;18, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself," would remain convinced of the benefits to all, even to an Arab people who have poisoned and morally crippled themselves for over 60 years with the most abhorrent and loathsome anti-Jewish hatred. But, nevertheless, to give away one inch of the land is a profound rejection of the Covenant made between His people and Almighty God. It is also a strategy of national suicide.

As Passover approaches, there are insistent reports that the Islamists fighting to overthrow Syria's Bashar Assad are poised to launch a war against Israel on the Golan Heights, which Israel liberated in the 1967 Six Day War and which has a rich Jewish history dating back to Biblical times. Remember the words: In every generation.

So we approach the Passover festival, which brings light and blessings to all humanity but which also brings the maniacal threats of genocide against the Jewish people by those who would unleash unutterable terror and who, like the evil president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, spew hideous ravings and shameless libels against the ever suffering Jews.

As Caroline Glick of The Jerusalem Post reminded Leah Zinder, Israeli broadcaster and journalist, in a recent IBA broadcast, Israel is not alone. There are millions of Americans -- the vast majority -- who support Israel and want to fight for her in the media and in the political realm against grievous pressure from the Obama Administration but are waiting for Israel to give them the reason to do so. Christian Zionists display immense and heartfelt love for the restored Jewish state and are a beacon of spiritual sanity in a world gone mad.

So these timely thoughts and questions must be urgently considered before, during and after the time of Passover for it surely is humanity's moral barometer.

As the great Rabbi J.H. Hertz wrote in 1935:

"Though man cannot always even half control his destiny, God has given him the reins of his conduct altogether into his hands."

And it would not go amiss to remind the increasingly Godless European Union of Passover's gift to the Jewish people: The promised and undivided land.

Oh, and by the way, for centuries Jews have uttered a prayer at the conclusion of the Passover meal. In Hebrew it is L'Shanah HaBa'ah B'Yerushalayim. In English it means, "Next year may we be in Jerusalem," the 3,000 year old eternal capital of the Jewish people.

But in the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century the world, through the hateful two-state-solution, is forcing Jerusalem to again be divided by a wall of concrete and Arab hate. Those who call themselves Palestinians demand the eastern half of the city and the ancient Jewish prayer at Passover may yet become a bitter and tragic joke.

Worshipers will be forced into saying,

"Next year in West Jerusalem."

Victor Sharpe is a freelance writer and author of the trilogy, Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish state. Contact Victor Sharpe at janvic42@gmail.com


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TWO DIFFERENT VIEWS ON NETANYAHU'S APOLOGY TO TURKEY'S ERDOGAN

Posted by Israel Commentary, March 25, 2013

Prime Minister of Turkey

Dear Mister Prime Minister:

On behalf of all of the people of Israel, I would like to apologize to you for the cowardice and fathomless idiocy of the Prime

Minister of Israel. As you know, this weekend Benjamin Netanyahu sent you an "apology" for Israel having defended itself against the genocidal terrorists who attacked Israeli soldiers armed only with paint guns when they boarded the terrorist "flotilla" ship that you sent out to challenge Israel's naval blockade of the Hamas enclave in Gaza.

Netanyahu spoke only for himself when he apologized to you for Israel's defending itself and its people, this two generations after the Holocaust. He does not represent anyone at all in the country when it comes to this "apology." No one else in the country, except for some anti-Israel radical leftists with tenure at the universities, agrees that Israel owes you an apology for defending its people.

Actually, on behalf of all REAL Israelis, I would like to apologize to you for the fact that ONLY nine terrorists were killed by

Israeli troops on the flotilla ship when Israeli soldiers were savagely attacked by Turkish and other terrorists. I would like to apologize for the fact that Israeli did NOT torpedo and sink the terrorist ships trying to break the blockade and bring in aid to the Hamas Nazis. I would like to apologize for the fact that Israel has a Prime Minister who is so clueless, insensitive, and divorced from Jewish history that he would consider buying a few moments of diplomat calm with a Moslem aggressor by shaming his entire country with an "apology" to Turkey, exhibiting one of the most disgraceful acts by a Jew in all of history, and all this just hours before the Jewish holiday of national liberation, Passover.

Beyond that, I really do think that Israel owes an apology for NOT having done much more to draw the world's attention to the illegal occupation and destruction by Turkey of the jewel of Cyprus, the city of Famagusta. Israel sat by while Turkey conquered 40% of Cyprus and transferred tens of thousands of its own people as illegal settlers to the island. And for that I apologize.

And since you have spent so much time in recent years denouncing Israel as an occupier, I think Israel owes an apology to the world for not helping to end the illegal Turkish occupation of the great ancient Greek capital of Constantinople, now under an illegal Saracen occupation that has continued for far too long. It is high time that Constantinople be returned to its true heritage and its legal owners, the Greek people.

It is less than a hundred years since the city, along with Smyrna and other Greek homelands, was almost liberated by the Greeks, who were only to be blocked by the Turkish military aggressors, the mass murderers of the Armenians.

So Mister Prime Minister, as you see, I am afraid that Israelis DO owe the world quite a few apologies. On behalf of the non-pusillanimous citizens of Israel, I remain

The article below was written by Steven Plaut who is an American-trained economist, a professor of business administration at Haifa University and author of "The Scout." He frequently comments — both seriously and satirically — on Israeli politics and the left wing academic community. Write him at splaut@gmail.com His website address is
http://www.stevenplaut.blogspot.com


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PASSOVER GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED 2013

Posted by Yoram Ettinger, March 25, 2013

1. A central Passover lesson: Liberty entails responsibility, communal-awareness, blood, sweat and tears; not complacency, wishful-thinking or egotism. Sustaining liberty obligates free people to assume the cost, risks and sacrifice of self-reliance, including forty years in the desert and the defiance of great powers, lest they forfeit liberty and risk oblivion. The Hebrew word for "responsibility" — אחריות — consists of the word "liberty" — חירות — reinforced by the first Hebrew letter — א — which is the first letter of the Hebrew words for God, faith, Adam, human-being, father, mother, light, soil, land, love, tree, covenant, soil, credibility, awesome, power, courage, spring, unity, horizon, etc.

2. The Passover-US-Israel connection: Moses, the US Founding Fathers and Israel's Founding Father, Ben Gurion, were challenged by the "loyalists," who were intimidated by the cost of liberty, preferring subjugation to Egypt, the British King and the British Mandate.

3. Passover (פסח) highlights the fact that the Jewish People were passed-over (פסח) by history's angel of death, in defiance of conventional wisdom. Non-normative disasters have characterized Jewish history ever since slavery in Egypt and the Exodus: the destruction of the two Temples, exiles, pogroms, expulsions, the Holocaust, anti-Semitism, daily Arab/Muslim terrorism and wars, etc. The 1948 re-establishment of Jewish sovereignty — against global, regional, economic and military odds - constituted a modern day Exodus and Parting of the Sea. Principle-driven tenacious defiance-of-the odds constitutes a prerequisite to Jewish deliverance in 2013, as it was during The Exodus some 3,450 years ago.

4. Passover's centrality in Judaism is highlighted by the first, of the Ten, Commandments: "I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery." The Passover ethos is included in daily Jewish prayers, Sabbath and holiday prayers, the blessing over the wine, the blessing upon circumcision, the prayer fixed in the Mezuzah (doorpost) and in the annual family retelling of the Exodus on the eve of Passover. Passover symbolizes the unity, interdependence and straight line/direction between the People of Israel, the Torah of Israel and the Land of Israel. In Hebrew, Israel (ישראל) means "straight," "overcoming" and the acronym of the names of the Jewish Patriarchs (אברהם, יצחק, יעקב) and Matriarchs (שרה, רבקה, רחל, לאה).

5. David Ben Gurion, the Founding Father of the Jewish State, Passover and the reaffirmation of Jewish deed over the Land of Israel: "More than 300 years ago, a ship by the name of the Mayflower left Plymouth for the New World. It was a great event in American and English history. I wonder how many Englishmen or how many Americans know exactly the date when that ship left Plymouth, how many people were on the ship, and what was the kind of bread the people ate when they left Plymouth.

"Well, more than 3,300 years ago, the Jews left Egypt...and every Jew in the world knows exactly the date we left. It was on the 15th of [the month of] Nisan. The bread they ate was Matzah. Up to date all the Jews throughout the world on the 15th of Nisan eat the same Matzah, in America, in Russia. [They] tell the story of the exile from Egypt, all the sufferings that happened to the Jews since they went into exile. They finish by these two sentences: 'This year we are slaves; next year we will be free. This year we are here; next year we will be in Zion, the land of Israel.' Jews are like that (The Anglo-American Committee, March 11, 1946, http://bit.ly/evSqbP)."

Rabbi Gamliel, Head of the Sanhedrin, mid-first century: "In each generation, every individual must consider himself as if he/she personally participated in the Exodus from Egypt."

6. President Ezer Weizman, Passover and the avowal of Jewish roots in the Land of Israel, Jewish unity and collective-responsibility: "Only 150 generations passed from the Pillar of Fire of the Exodus from Egypt to the pillars of smoke from the Holocaust. And I, a descendant of Abraham, born in Abraham's country, have witnessed them all. I was a slave in Egypt. I received the Torah at Mount Sinai. Together with Joshua and Elijah, I crossed the Jordan River. I entered Jerusalem with David, was exiled from it with Zedekiah, and did not forget it by the rivers of Babylon. When the Lord returned the captives of Zion, I dreamed among the builders of its ramparts. I fought the Romans and was banished from Spain. I was bound to the stake in Mainz. I studied Torah in Yemen and lost my family in Kishinev. I was incinerated in Treblinka, rebelled in Warsaw and migrated to the Land of Israel, the country whence I had been exiled and where I had been born, from which I come and to which I return.... And, like our forefather King David who purchased the Temple Mount, and our patriarch Abraham who bought the [Hebron] Cave of Machpelah, we bought land, we sowed fields, we planted vineyards, we built houses, and even before we achieved statehood, we were already bearing weapons to protect our lives...(German Bundestag, January 16, 1996, http://bit.ly/10aOcJr)."

7. "Next Year in the rebuilt Jerusalem" concludes the annual reciting of the Haggadah, the Passover saga. It reaffirms the ancient Jewish commitment to build homes all over Jerusalem, the 3,300 year old indivisible capital of the Jewish people.

8. Passover's centrality in the American ethos inspired the Puritans, the Pilgrims, the Founding Fathers and contemporary American morality and state of mind.

The Pilgrims — beginning with William Bradford's "Mayflower" and John Winthrop's "Arabella" - considered Britain "modern day Egypt," the British king was "the modern day Pharaoh," the sail through the Atlantic Ocean was "the modern day parting of the sea" and America was "the modern day Promised Land."

The Founding Fathers were significantly inspired by Moses and the Exodus. In 1775, the president of Harvard University, Samuel Langdon, said that "the Jewish government [that God handed down to Moses] was a perfect republic." Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" (the cement of the 1776 Revolution) referred to King George as "the hardened, sullen tempered Pharaoh of England." The term Federalism is based on "Foedus," the Latin word for "The Covenant." The Founding Fathers studied the political structure of the semi-independent 12 Tribes (colonies), which were governed by tribal presidents (governors) and by Moses (the Executive), Aaron (the Judicial) and the 70 Elders (Legislature). John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin proposed the "Parting of the Sea" as the official US seal. George Washington and John Adams, the first and second presidents, were compared to Moses and Joshua. Washington was eulogized as Moses and Virginia was compared to Goshen.

Yale University President, Ezra Stiles stated (May 8, 1783): "Moses, the man of God, assembled three million people — the number of people in America in 1776."

"Let my people go" and "Go down Moses" became the pillar of fire for the Abolitionists. "Proclaim liberty throughout all the Land unto all the Inhabitants thereof" (Leviticus 25:10) is inscribed on the Liberty Bell. The Statue of Liberty highlights a Moses-like tablet. The biography of Harriet Tubman, who dedicated her life to freeing other slaves, is called The Moses of Her People. Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, was motivated by the laws of Moses, which condemn slavery. Martin Luther King was considered the Moses of his age.

Daniel Boone was referred to as "The Moses of the West."

A statue of Moses stares at the Speaker of the House of Representatives, is featured (along with Maimonides) in the US House of Representatives Rayburn Building subway station, towers above the Supreme Court Justices (in addition to seven additional Moses statues in the Supreme Court Building) and is found in the Main Reading Room of the Library of Congress. A Ten Commandments monument sits on the grounds of the Texas and the Oklahoma State Capitols. Cecile DeMille's hit movie, The Ten Commandments, promoted US liberty, morality and freedom of religion and expression, in contrast to Soviet oppression.

Theodore White wrote in The Making of the President: "It is as if Kennedy, a younger Moses, had led an elderly Joshua [LBJ] to the height of Mount Nebo...and there shown him the Promised Land which he himself would never enter, but which Joshua would make his own."

9. Moses, the hero of Passover, has been a role model of effective leadership, highlighting humility, faith, principle and endurance-driven leadership, along with human fallibility. Moses' name is mentioned only once in the Passover Haggadah, as a servant of God, a testimony to Moses' humility. The only compliment showered upon Moses, by the Torah, is "The humblest of all human beings."

10. The Exodus is mentioned 50 times in the Torah, equal to the 50 years of the Jubilee, a pivot of liberty. 50 days following the Exodus, Moses received the Torah (Pentecost Holiday), which includes — according to Jewish tradition — 50 gates of Wisdom. Where does that leave the 50 States?!

11. Passover highlights the centrality of spiritual, social and national Liberty. The difference between the spelling of Ge'oolah ("deliverance" in Hebrew - גאולה) and Golah (Diaspora in Hebrew - גולה) is the first Hebrew letter, Alef - א. (Please see #1 above).

12. Passover — the role model of liberty — interacts with Shavou'ot/Pentecost - the role model of morality. Liberty and morality are mutually-inclusive. The liberty/morality interdependence distinguishes Western democracies from rogue regimes.

13. The Exodus took place around 1,400 BC, establishing the Jewish People in the forefront in the Clash of Civilizations between democracies and rogue regimes. Passover is celebrated on the 15th day of the Jewish month of Nissan ניסן — the first month of the Biblical Jewish year and the introduction of natural and national spring (Nitzan is the Babylonian word for spring and the Hebrew word for bud). Nissan (Ness - נס is miracle in Hebrew) is the month of miracles, such as the Exodus, the Parting of the Sea, Jacob wrestling the Angel, Deborah's victory over Sisera, Daniel in the Lion's Den, etc.

14. The 15th day of any Jewish month features a full moon, which stands for optimism — the secret Jewish weapon - in defiance of darkness. It is consistent with the 15 parts of the Hagaddah (the Passover saga); the 15 generations between Abraham's message of monotheism and Solomon's construction of the first Temple; the 15 words of the ancient blessing by the Priests and the 15th day of the Jewish month of Shvat, Arbor Day — the "Exodus" of vegetation. The Hebrew value of 15 corresponds to two Hebrew letters which are the acronym of God — י and ה.

15. Passover has four names: The holiday of Pesach ("Passed-over" and "sacrifice" in Hebrew), the holiday of liberty, the holiday of Matzah and the holiday of spring. The number 4 features in the Passover Saga, representing the four women who shaped the life of Moses (Batyah — Pharaoh's daughter, his savior, Yocheved - his mother, Miriam - his sister and Ziporah — Jethro's daughter, his wife); Joseph's four enslavements- twice to the Midianties, once to the Ishmaelites and once in Egypt; the 4 times that the word "cup" was mentioned by Pharaoh's jailed wine-butler when recounting his dream to Joseph; the 4 Sons (human characters) of the Haggadah; the 4 glasses of wine drunk on the eve of Passover; the 4 Questions asked on the eve of Passover and the 4 stages of the divine deliverance from Egyptian bondage. The 4th Hebrew letter (ד) is an acronym of God.

16. Passover is celebrated in the spring, the bud of nature. Spring, Aviv in Hebrew (אביב) consists of two Hebrew words: Father — אב - of 12 — יב — months/tribes. The word spring is mentioned 3 times in the Torah, all in reference to the Exodus. Passover — which commemorates the creation of the Jewish nation — lasts for 7 days, just like the creation of the universe. Passover is the first of three Jewish pilgrimages, succeeded by Shavou'ot/Pentecost, which commemorates the receipt of the Ten Commandments, and Sukkot/Tabernacles, named after Sukkota - the first stop in the Exodus.

"Next Year in the rebuilt Jerusalem"

Ambassador Yoram Ettinger is an editor and consultant who lives in Jerusalem. Contact him at Yoram Ettinger at yoramtex@netvision.net.il


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WHY IS THE IQ OF ASHKENAZI JEWS SO HIGH?

Posted by Yoram Fisher, March 25, 2013

The article below was written by Hank Pellissier who serves as IEET Interim Managing Director and Fundraiser. He was IEET's Managing Director on January-October in 2012, and is an IEET Affiliate Scholar. He's the author of several books including Invent Utopia Now, former editor at Transhumanity.net, and founder of BrighterBrains.org A journalist, Hank was the "Local Intelligence" columnist for the New York Times (San Francisco edition) and he's a frequent contributor to GreatSchools.org. Past work includes a daily column for Salon.com ("Naked World"), two columns for SfGate.com ("Urban Animal" and "Odd Barkings"), and dozens of futurist articles for the IEET, H+ Magazine, World Future Society, and Acceler8or, occasionally under his nom de plume, "Hank Hyena."Hank has raised charity funds via GoFundMe.com and Indiegogo for "TransHumanitarian" projects in The Philippines and Africa that have dewormed 1,100 children and provided food, clothing, shoes, socks, tools, and educational supplies. In western Uganda he's launched eight health clinics (one is "H+ Clinic"), one science centre, and he co-founded BiZoHa - the world's first atheist orphanage. This article appeared July 19, 2011 in the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies and is archived at
http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/pellissier20110719.

Ashkenazi Jews are smart. Shockingly brilliant, in general. Impressively greater in brain power than the bulk of the human population. How did they get that way? Ashkenazi Jews, aka Ashkenazim, are the descendants of Jews originally from medieval Germany, and later, from throughout Eastern Europe. Approximately 80% of the Jews in the world today are Ashkenazim; the remainder are primarily Sephardic.

Researchers who study the Ashkenazim agree that the children of Abraham are on top of the IQ chart. Steven Pinker — who lectured on "Jews, Genes, and Intelligence" in 2007 - says "their average IQ has been measured at 108-115." Richard Lynn, author of "The Intelligence of American Jews" in 2004, says it is "only" a half-standard higher: 107.5. Henry Harpending, Jason Hardy, and Gregory Cochran, University of Utah authors of the 2005 research report, "Natural History of Ashkenazi Intelligence," state that their subjects, "score .75 to 1.0 standard deviations above the general European average, corresponding to an IQ of 112-115." Charles Murray, in his 2007 essay "Jewish Genius," says "their mean is somewhere in the range of 107-115, with 110 being a plausible compromise."

A Jewish average IQ of 115 is 8 points higher than the generally accepted IQ of their closest rivals—Northeast Asians—and approximately 40% higher than the global average IQ of 79.1 calculated by Richard Lynn and Tatu Vanhanen in IQ and Global Inequity.

Plus, contemplate this astounding tidbit: Ashkenazi "visual-spatial" IQ scores are only mediocre; in one study their median in this category was a below-average 98. They surmount this liability by logging astronomic figures in "verbal IQ", which includes verbal reasoning, comprehension, working memory and mathematical skill; a 1958 survey of yeshiva students discovered a median verbal IQ of 125.6.

I'm not asserting Ashkenazi cognitive specialness because I'm philo-semitic, or a Zionist, or pro-Israeli. I'm pointing it out because it is irrefutably true. People who can't comprehend the easily understood data verifying high Ashkenazi IQ may not simply be anti-semitic; they must also be crippled in the math/logic zone of their inferior parietal cortex, with subsequent IQ in the ~85 range.

In the 19th century, Mark Twain noted that:

[The Jews] are peculiarly and conspicuously the world's intellectual aristocracy... [Jewish] contributions to the world's list of great names in literature, science, art, music, finance, medicine, and abstruse learning are.. way out of proportion to the weakness of his numbers. He has made a marvelous fight in this world... and has done it with his hands tied behind him.

Twain's observation is not dated. Ashkenazi Jews have continued to mentally out-compete other demographics since his statement, often suffering horrendous consequences for their toil. Here is a brief list of Ashkenazi accomplishments in the last 90 years.

Nobel Prizes: Since 1950, 29% of the awards have gone to Ashkenazim, even though they represent only 0.25% of humanity. Ashkenazi achievement in this arena is 117 times greater than their population.

Hungary in the 1930s: Ashkenazim were 6% of the population, but they comprised 55.7% of physicians, 49.2% of attorneys, 30.4% of engineers, and 59.4% of bank officers; plus, they owned 49.4% of the metallurgy industry, 41.6% of machine manufacturing, 72.8% of clothing manufacturing, and, as housing owners, they received 45.1% of Budapest rental income. Jews were similarly successful in nearby nations, like Poland and Germany.

USA (today): Ashkenazi Jews comprise 2.2% of the USA population, but they represent 30% of faculty at elite colleges, 21% of Ivy League students, 25% of the Turing Award winners, 23% of the wealthiest Americans, and 38% of the Oscar-winning film directors.

Israel: In 1922, this swamp and desert land was inhabited by a impoverished population of 752,000. Today there are 7,746,000 residents, with an Ashkenazi majority that have elevated it into a high-tech entrepreneurial nation with the highest per capita income in the region.

Personally, I find the Nobel Prize statistic the most amazing. Consider this: if everybody on the planet was an Ashkenazi Jew, would the result be 117 times more Nobel Prize-winning caliber individuals, with 117 times as many spectacular achievements, per annum? INSTANT SINGULARITY! Without any help from AI...

Let's proceed. With the facts I've laid out, only the most obtuse reader can resist the pronouncement that Ashkenazi Jews are, on average, exceptionally intelligent. I emphasize the word exceptional because I am frequently chided as an "exceptionalist" and I want to make it clear that, yes, I do, in fact, believe specific cultures have evidenced greater ability to produce exceptional individuals and exceptional societies.

That said, the important question is... Why is the IQ of Ashkenazi Jews so high? Is the reason genetic, environmental, cultural, educational? A unique combination of several?

Here are eight theories:

Squeezed Into Brilliance: Jews in Europe were officially excluded from "common" occupations such as agriculture from 800-1700 A.D. This restriction forced the Ashkenazim for 900 years into intellectually more demanding vocations, such as trade and finance. Ashkenazim who weren't mathematically and verbally adept enough to succeed in these jobs drifted away from Judaism—low IQs were pushed out. Conversely, the most successful merchants and number-crunchers raised larger families, passing on an increasing percentage of algebraic brains.

Escape Plan: The most intelligent and/or wealthy Ashkenazim were better equipped to escape, alive, the Inquisitions, pogroms, persecutions, holocausts, and other genocidal threats because they: 1) could afford to emigrate; 2) could predict the need to do so; and 3) had social and economic opportunities in the nations they fled to. Poorer, less connected, and less astute Ashkenazi ranks thus were inexorably depleted.

Sick Genius: Ashkenazim are prey to a host of debilitating diseases that might, counter-intuitively, enhance their collective intelligence. Tay-Sachs, Gaucher's disease, Niemann-Pick disease, and Mucolipidosis type IV are all sphingolipid disorders that kill or severely weaken those who have two copies, but if you inherit just one, you get neuron growth promotion and accelerated interconnection of brain cells. A second cluster of Ashkenazi lipid storage disorders might stimulate neuron proliferation in the DNA repair genes.

People of the Book: In 64 A.D., the high priest Joshua ben Gamla insisted that Jewish fathers educate their sons in the Torah. This demanding edict reduced the Jewish population from 4.5 to 1.2 million, by pushing out the lower IQs. The remaining Jews became the first male literate ethnicity in history, with subsequent ability to move into highly-skilled professions. Judaic culture prized scholarship, abstract thought, and analytic argument, with the best Torah students marrying into the wealthiest families and having larger numbers of children.

Trading Tongues: Ashkenazi merchants plied their wares globally, from rubber in Brazil to silk in China. To prosper in the exchange, they memorized multiple languages. The stateless tribe needed diverse fluency anyway, to communicate with neighbors in their adopted lands. A "fusion" tongue was also created: Yiddish (German, Hebrew, Aramaic, plus other Slavics and a touch of Romance). Neurologists today recognize that language learning enhances memory, mental flexibility, problem solving, abstract thinking, and creative hypothesis formulation.

Check Mate: Chess historically has been a highly-favored activity among Ashkenazim; a 1905 magazine described it as the "Jewish National Game." Almost 50% of Grandmasters have been Ashkenazi. The visual, organizational, and strategic skills required for chess build up the precuneus in the superior parietal lobe, and the caudate nucleus, a part of the basal ganglia in the subcortical region.

Melodic Minds: Music has been revered in Jewish religious traditions for 3,000 years. Klezmer "reached a very high level of sophistication and ornamentation," according to the Jewish Music Institute, and Ashkenazi composers and instrumentalists contribute hugely to Western classical music (one history site declares, "The Jews 'Own' the Violin"). Have centuries of practice paid off? Researchers today believe music training optimizes neuron development and improves brain function in math, analysis, memory, creativity, stress management, concentration, motivation, and science.

Great Expectations: Success breeds success, on the neurological level. Victory provides a rush of dopamine, a neurotransmitter that activates motivation for further accomplishments. Ashkenazi children understand they are capable of high achievement, and they're obliged to develop their skills for contribution to humanity. Is stern discipline necessary to produce these results? Ashkenazim have long discouraged spanking of their children; strong familial ties, incessant encouragement, and hard focused work at excellent institutions, seems to be sufficient.

That's the range of explanations. My opinion is they're all possibly correct, but what most intrigues me are the "environmental" factors—factors that are accessible to all humanity.

I wonder, if the rest of the world really wants Ashkenazi-level achievement, why don't we play chess with our children at night, instead of tossing them a violent video game? Why can't we listen to their classical compositions on the weekend, instead of urging them to get concussions on the football field? Why can't we provide them with excellent schools, entice them to learn oodles of foreign grammar, and convince them to believe in and expand their abilities, instead of forcing them to endure years of educational mediocrity and expecting nothing back but the same?

If all humanity adopted the best available characteristics of Ashkenazi culture, would we, as a whole, immensely benefit? Would we learn more quickly, more deeply, and produce greater wonders? Would we become over- instead of under-achievers?

If we promoted high IQ behavior to humans everywhere, globally, would we all become... enhanced? Better humans?

Contact Yoram Fisher at yoramski@yahoo.com


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THE ILLEGAL OCCUPATION THAT MUST END!

Posted by Steven Plaut, March 25, 2013

Famagusta, Cyprus: The ghost town lies near the very center of the city, just outside the Venetian walls. It is home only to snakes, scorpions, and rats of a hundred varieties. Signs on the fences around the ghost town show armed Turkish soldiers threatening those taking photographs with arrest or worse. The crumbling buildings inside the perimeter are frozen in time in 1974, as if in an episode of "The Twilight Zone."

Nothing has changed since central Famagusta was converted into a ghost town - called Varosha - by the invaders. It is said that the car distributorships in the ghost town even today are stocked with vintage 1974 models. For years after the rape of Famagusta, people told of seeing light bulbs still burning in the windows of the abandoned buildings. Hollywood studios could clothe whole movie sets with the 1974 fashions still in the closets of the homes.

Three years after the invasion, the scene was described by Swedish journalist Jan-Olof Bengtsson: "The asphalt on the roads has cracked in the warm sun and along the sidewalks bushes are growing. Today - September 1977 - the breakfast tables are still set, the laundry still hanging and the lamps still burning. Varosha is a ghost town."

The Turks currently at the forefront of the assault against Israel for its "illegal occupation" of its own Jewish homeland, and for supposedly mistreating Palestinians, are the very same people who continue the massive crime against humanity in the form of the Famagusta ghost town. Born in ethnic cleansing, it is the enduring testimony to the illegal land grab on Cyprus by Turkey, the mass expulsion of the ethnic Greek Cypriots from the northern 40 percent of the island, the theft of their property, and an unknown number of murders of Greek Cypriots by Turkey.

The illegal "Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus" is recognized by not a single country besides Turkey itself. Since its brutal invasion, Turkey has moved countless thousands of its citizens/troops onto northern Cyprus. This is the same Turkey that venomously denounces Israel when it builds "settlements" in the suburbs of Jerusalem for Jewish civilians on lands they have purchased legally.

Famagusta was first erected in the 13th century BCE. Phoenicians came and went, as did the Assyrians and Persians. Greek settlers came to dominate its population. Some Jews migrated in from their homeland, producing the wine used in the Jerusalem Temple described in the Talmud, and later learning to manufacture silk.

The Venetians gave the center of Famagusta its defining character, with its massive defensive bulwarks, gates and towers. Shakespeare's mythical Othello served as ruler of Famagusta, and the largest Venetian fortress in the wall is obligingly called Othello's Tower even today.

In 1571 the Ottoman Turks took control, relinquishing control to Great Britain in 1878. After an armed campaign by Cypriots, the Brits left in 1958 and Cyprus became a republic. Things were not well, however, in the inter-communal relations between Cypriot Greeks and Cypriot Turks. Atrocities were committed by both sides. After a particularly horrific set of attacks, and partly in response to attempts by some radical Greek nationalists on the island to seek amalgamation with Greece, the Turks invaded the island in the summer of 1974.

Within two days they had taken Famagusta. The Turkish air force bombed the helpless town. The entire Greek population, fearing massacres at the hands of the invaders, fled south. Meanwhile, Turkish tanks rolled onward until Turkey had conquered half the Cyprus capital of Nicosia. There it erected a wall running through the center of the city.

The apartheid wall of occupation does not attract "solidarity" protesters or leftist professors from the West. They are too busy denouncing and attacking Israel for building a security fence around Jerusalem, a fence to keep the Palestinian suicide bombers from murdering Jewish children. No Rachel Corries go to Nicosia to defy the Turkish occupation army. They know they would instantly be jailed in a typically barbaric Turkish prison.

Countless UN resolutions since 1974 have demanded that Turkey leave the island and restore stolen property to Greek Cypriots. The same Turkish government that regularly denounces Israel for daring to defend its civilians from Arab terrorists and for otherwise disregarding anti-Israel world opinion has never paid those UN resolutions any mind.

Turkey insists that Palestinians be granted statehood and "self-determination" while refusing to allow Turkish Kurds, Armenians, Assyrians, Greeks, Bulgarians, Azeris and others to exercise any of it, even in the form of limited language autonomy. While Arabs living in Israel enjoy levels of freedom a hundred times better than do Turks living in Turkey, the Turkish government continues to denounce Israel for its alleged suppression of Arab "human rights." On the very day that Turkey recently murdered 120 Kurds, it denounced Israel for committing "war crimes."

Respect for human rights in Turkey is notably absent. The Turkish military police routinely kill civilians. Journalists have been assassinated. Islamofascism is growing stronger and local Islamic fundamentalist terrorists filled the Gaza "peace flotilla" sponsored by Turkey. Those are the terrorists whose suppression by Israel has now become the focus of Turkey's demand for an Israeli apology.

When Israel invaded Gaza to put a stop to massive rocket attacks against its civilians by Hamas terrorists, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan denounced Israel for "massacring innocent women and children." He accused Israel of "mass murder" in Gaza, ranting at length about how Israel had turned the Gaza Strip into an "open-air prison."

But, in fact, the largest ongoing "open air" human-rights violation and crime against humanity is on display for all to see behind the barbed wire and fences of the ghost town of Famagusta.

Steven Plaut is an American-trained economist, a professor of business administration at Haifa University and author of "The Scout." He frequently comments — both seriously and satirically — on Israeli politics and the left wing academic community. Write him at splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il His website address is http://www.stevenplaut.blogspot.com.


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BIBI'S APOLOGY TO ERDOGAN: BACK-STABBING BY BIBI & OBAMA

Posted by AFSI, March 25, 2013

Cited as a great diplomatic victory for President Obama, as he returns from his trip to Israel, Ramallah and Jordan, is the apology that PM Netanyahu proffered to PM Erdogan of Turkey for the May 31, 2010 killing of nine Turkish terrorists on the Mavi Marmara. The ship was part of a Gaza-bound flotilla attempting to break the naval blockade on Gaza. Linked to the apology is an agreement to compensate the families of those who were killed, and to cancel the legal proceedings against IDF officials who were deemed culpable in the situation. Immediately after the apology, Erdogan announced his intentions to visit Hamas's PM in Gaza, Ismail Haniyeh and Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal. How Israel can have diplomatic relations with Turkey, while Erdogan is courting recognized terrorists, is hard to understand.

Perhaps the greatest tragedy coming out of this apology to Turkey was expressed by MK Yoni Chetboun of the Balyit Yehudi party. While recognizing the importance of Turkey in the region, MK Chetboun, a Major in the reserves, who served as an officer in the Golani Brigade's elite Egoz reconnaissance unit, was clear in his recognition that the apology was a "knife in soldiers' backs."Chetboun said, "Israel does not have the privilege to apologize for its soldiers actions, when they acted in accordance with the principles of the IDF's ethical code and its definition of "the purity of arms.' The apology amounts to a knife-stab in the back of the IDF's combat soldiers and commanders. it sends a grave message to our soldiers, ' we don't have your backs.' As a soldier and commander in all sectors of warfare I can testify that the government backing is critical for the soldier at the front." MK Chetboun continued, "It constitutes a dangerous precedent that will encourage anti-Zionist organizations to continue operating the mechanism of delegitimizing Israel in general and the IDF in particular."

Proof that this dhimmi posture of Israel's will only lead to more demands of humiliation and degradation is the latest reports regarding new U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry's vision of breaking the impasse between the PA and Israel. It would involve Israel releasing terrorists and transferring land in Area B, under joint Israeli/PA control, to Area A, which is totally Arab controlled. In addition, Obama and Netanyahu might have agreed on a "silent construction freeze," one that is unannounced but is the reality.

AFSI joins Prof. Steve Plaut in his denunciation of the Netanyahu APOLOGY. Read this and weep:

An open letter to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan Prime Minister of Turkey

Dear Mister Prime Minister:

On behalf of all of the people of Israel, I would like to apologize to you for the cowardice and fathomless idiocy of the Prime Minister of Israel. As you know, this weekend Benjamin Netanyahu sent you an "apology" for Israel having defended itself against the genocidal terrorists who attacked Israeli soldiers armed only with paintguns when they boarded the terrorist "flotilla" ship that you sent out to challenge Israel's naval blockade of the Hamas enclave in Gaza. Netanyahu spoke only for himself when he apologized to you for Israel's defending itself and its people, this two generations after the Holocaust. He does not represent anyone at all in the country when it comes to this "apology." No one else in the country, except for some anti-Israel radical leftists with tenure at the universities, agrees that Israel owes you an apology for defending its people.

Actually, on behalf of all REAL Israelis, I would like to apologize to you for the fact that ONLY nine terrorists were killed by Israeli troops on the flotilla ship when Israeli soldiers were savagely attacked by Turkish and other terrorists. I would like to apologize for the fact that Israeli did NOT torpedo and sink the terrorist ships trying to break the blockade and bring in aid to the Hamas Nazis. I would like to apologize for the fact that Israel has a Prime Minister who is so clueless, insensitive, and divorced from Jewish history that he would consider buying a few moments of diplomat calm with a Moslem aggressor by shaming his entire country with an "apology" to Turkey, exhibiting one of the most disgraceful acts by a Jew in all of history, and all this just hours before the Jewish holiday of national liberation, Passover.

Beyond that, I really do think that Israel owes an apology for NOT having done much more to draw the world's attention to the illegal occupation and destruction by Turkey of the jewel of Cyprus, the city of Famagusta. Israel sat by while Turkey conquered 40% of Cyprus and transferred tens of thousands of its own people as illegal settlers to the island. And for that I apologize. And since you have spent so much time in recent years denouncing Israel as an occupier, I think Israel owes an apology to the world for not helping to end the illegal Turkish occupation of the great ancient Greek capital of Constantinople, now under an illegal Saracen occupation that has continued for far too long. It is high time that Constantinople be returned to its true heritage and its legal owners, the Greek people. It is less than a hundred years since the city, along with Smyrna and other Greek homelands, was almost liberated by the Greeks, who were only to be blocked by the Turkish military aggressors, the mass murderers of the Armenians.

So Mister Prime Minister, as you see, I am afraid that Israelis DO owe the world quite a few apologies.

On behalf of the non-pusillanimous citizens of Israel, I remain

Most sincerely yours,

Prof. Steven Plaut

Americans For a Safe Israel/AFSI is a pro-active pro-Israel advocacy group. AFSI may be contacted by mail at 1623 Third Ave., Suite 205, New York, N.Y. 10128 (Tel: 212-828-2424; Fax: 212-828-1717); by email at afsi@rcn.com; or by accessing its website: www.afsi.org. Helen Freedman is Executive Director. She writes, "The best way to send a message to the detractors of Israel in the media, the Administration, and the public is by joining AFSI and becoming active with AFSI's work. As a member, you will receive all our email alerts as well as email copies of our renowned monthly publication, The Outpost. See past editions."


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AL QAEDA BRIGADE CAPTURES SYRIAN-ISRAELI-JORDANIAN BORDER JUNCTION

Posted by Udi Schayat, March 25, 2013

Caption Text
Al Qaeda-affiliated Nusra fighters on Golan

The highly strategic intersection of the Syrian, Israeli and Jordan borders, just east of the Golan, was captured by the Al Musanna Brigade of al Qaeda's Syrian arm, Jabhat al-Nusra on Passover Eve, Monday, March 25, debkafile's exclusive sources report.

This put the jihadists directly opposite 14 Israeli southern Golan villages and at a distance of 5-6 kilometers from one of Israel's earliest kibbutzim, Ein Gev, on the shores of the Sea of Galilee.

debkafile's military sources report that this sensitive area fell to al Qaeda in a fierce battle waged with the Syrian army's 5th Division in the village of Sham Al-Jawla. Control of this village has opened the way for the jihadists to reach the Syrian Golan sector from the south and for direct access to the Syrian-Israeli-Jordanian borders.

On a second front, al Qaeda fighters have seized control of Wadi ar-Ruqqad, a 70-kilometer long waterway which forms the Golan's eastern boundary.

This wadi rises at a point north of Quneitra on the Syrian side of the Golan, flows south through a shallow gulch to become a waterfall which drops south west into a 20-kilometer basalt tunnel of which 6 kilometers run through Israeli territory. Ar Ruqqad waters then flow into the Yarmuk River up to the point where the Syrian, Israeli and Jordanian borders connect.

It is not the first time that the jihadists fighting with Syrian rebels have occupied positions abutting on Israeli soil, but this time they have gained control of one of its precious sources of water.

Israel and Jordan share out the Yarmouk waters under a pact they concluded which also covers the ar-Ruqqad tributary.

While most media attention in the West and Israel has been drawn to the threat posed by Syria's chemical arsenal, al Qaeda's descent on new, highly strategic ground affecting three nations has been ignored.

US President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry discussed at length in their talks in Jerusalem, Amman and Ankara the danger of chemical weapons falling into Islamist terrorist hands fighting with the rebels in Syria. Until a few hours ago, the two American visitors, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and King Abdullah were not fully apprised of al the Jabhat al Nusra's rapid advance.

Before he left Amman for home Saturday, Obama received information that the Iraqi Al Qaeda front had begun preparing Chlorine gas-CI trucks ready to push across the border into Syria for the use of its Jabhat al Nusra partners.

This poisonous gas was used more than once for jihadist terrorist attacks inside Iraq. And this peril brought John Kerry hurrying over to Baghdad Sunday, March 24. He was not able to persuade Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki to discontinue the Iranian airlift of weapons and troops to Assad through Iraqi skies, but he left al-Malilki with a grave warning that Washington would hold Baghdad responsible if any of the chorine gas trucks reached Syria.

Contact Udi Schayat by email at udischayat@yahoo.com


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LETTER TO AARP

Posted by Midenise, March 25, 2013

Aarp did not pay one frigging penny sent when my 2nd husband was losing battle to cancer and he payed in for over 5 yrs.....'''when Jbr was ready to sign up I told him over my dead body.....that was the end of aarp issue and went with same cost at state farm that payed on the minute practically (Anonymous)

SHRINKING AARP IS LOSING PLENTY OF SENIORS...AARP'S FALL FROM GRACE.

THE LADY THAT WROTE THIS LETTER, NOT ONLY HAS A GRASP OF 'THE SITUATION' BUT AN INCREDIBLE COMMAND OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE!

Her letter was sent to Mr. Rand who is the Executive Director of AARP.It only takes a few days on the Internet and this will have reached 75% of the public in the USA ..

Dear Mr. Rand,

Recently you sent us a letter encouraging us to renew our lapsed membership in AARP by the requested date. This isn't what you were looking for, but it's is the most honest response I can give you. Our coverage gap is a microscopic symptom of the real problem, a deepening lack of faith. While we have proudly maintained our membership for years and long admired the AARP goals and principles, regrettably, we can no longer endorse its abdication of our values. Your letter stated that we can count on AARP to speak up for our rights, yet the voice we hear is not ours.

Your offer of being kept up to date on important issues through DIVIDED WE FAIL presents neither an impartial view nor the one we have come to embrace. We do believe that when two parties agree all the time on everything presented to them, one is probably not necessary. But, when the opinions and long term goals are diametrically opposed, the divorce is imminent. This is the philosophy which spawned our 200 years of government.

Once upon a time, we looked forward to being part of the senior demographic. We also looked to AARP to provide certain benefits and give our voice a power we could not possibly hope to achieve on our own. AARP once gave us a sense of belonging which we no longer enjoy. The Socialist politics practiced by the Obama Regime and empowered by AARP serves only to raise the blood pressure my medical insurance strives to contain. Clearly a conflict of interest there! We do not understand the AARP posture, feel greatly betrayed by the guiding forces that we expected to map out our senior years and leave your ranks with a great sense of regret. We mitigate that disappointment with the relief of knowing that we are not contributing to the problem anymore by renewing our membership. There are numerous other organizations which offer discounts without threatening our way of life or offending our sensibilities and values.

This Obama Regime scares the living daylights out of us. Not just for ourselves, but for our proud and bloodstained heritage. But more importantly for our children and grandchildren. Washington has rendered Soylent Green a prophetic cautionary tale rather than a nonfiction scare tactic. I have never endorsed any militant or radical groups, yet now I find myself listening to them. I don't have to agree with them to appreciate the fear which birthed their existence. Their borderline insanity presents little more than a balance to the voice of the Socialist Mindset in power. Perhaps I became American by a great stroke of luck in some cosmic uterine lottery, but in my adulthood I CHOOSE to embrace it and nurture the freedoms it represents as well as the responsibilities.

Your web site generously offers us the opportunity to receive all communication in Spanish. ARE YOU KIDDING??? The illegal perpetrators have broken into our 'house', invaded our home without invitation or consent. The President insists we keep these illegal perpetrators in comfort and learn the perpetrator's language so we can communicate our reluctant welcome to them. I DON'T choose to welcome them, to support them, to educate them, to medicate them, or to pay for their food or clothing. American home invaders get arrested. Please explain to me why foreign lawbreakers can enjoy privileges on American soil that Americans do not get? Why do some immigrants have to play the game to be welcomed and others only have to break and enter to be welcomed?

We travel for a living. Walt hauls horses all over this great country, averaging over 10,000 miles a month when he is out there. He meets more people than a politician on caffeine overdose. Of all the many good folks he enjoyed on this last 10,000 miles, this trip yielded only ONE supporter of the current Regime. One of us is out of touch with mainstream America . Since our poll is conducted without funding, I have more faith in it than ones that are driven by a need to yield AMNESTY (aka-make voters out of the foreign lawbreakers so they can vote to continue the governments free handouts). This addition of 10 to 20 million voters who then will vote to continue Socialism will OVERWHELM our votes to control the government's free handouts. It is a "slippery slope" we must not embark on!

As Margaret Thatcher (former Prime Minister of Great Britain) once said "Socialism is GREAT - UNTIL you run out of other people's money".

We have decided to forward this to everyone on our mailing list, and will encourage them to do the same. With several hundred in my address book, I have every faith that the eventual exponential factor will make a credible statement to you. I am disappointed as all get out! I am more scared than I have ever been in my entire life! I am ANGRY! I am MAD as heck, and I'm NOT gonna take it anymore!

Walt & Cyndy Miller,

Miller Farms Equine Transport

Contact Midenise at midenise@zahav.net.il


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70 YEARS LATER, RECALLING THE FIRST BATTLE AGAINST THE NAZIS IN THE WARSAW GHETTO

Posted by Sergio Hadar Tezza, March 25, 2013

Tonight, at the Seder, let's remember the 70 years since the insurrection of the Warsaw Ghetto, where some proud Jews reacted to the attack of the nazi elite troops who came to liquidate the ghetto on 'Erev Pesach, they resisted for a very long time, and caused panic, consternation and heavy losses among the son'e' Israel.

Seventy years ago this month, the Nazis began their second deportation of the Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto. In response, on Jan. 18, 1943, the first organized and armed Jewish/Zionist resistance action in the Ghetto was launched.

The fighters of the ZZW and ZOB drove the Nazis from the Ghetto. Months later, on April 19, 1943, on the eve of Passover, the Nazi SS and police units entered the Ghetto and were attacked by organized Jewish partisans yet again.

There were two separate armed resistance organizations in the ghetto—the ZZW and ZOB. The most famous Jewish leader of armed resistance is Mordechai Anielewicz, commander of the ZOB (Jewish Fighting Organization) during the uprising. The ZOB was an alliance of several Zionist and non-Zionist youth groups. Anielewicz received paramilitary training in Betar as a young teenager and left Betar before the war. The ZOB had a socialist orientation, and Betar as an organization did not participate in it, in part because of politics.

ZZW, the Jewish Military Organization, was commanded and manned by Betar members and their allies. Betar's fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising have been largely written out of history. Moshe Arens, Israel's former defense minister and a Betar alum, recently wrote a yet-to-be published book on Betar's heroic battle against the S.S. in the ghetto. Flags Over the Warsaw Ghetto was released by Gefen Publishing in November 2011. That book and articles by Arens about the ZZW that were published in Yad Vashem Studies, Haaretz and The Jerusalem Post have helped to create a far more accurate account of the ZZW's participation in the uprising, and did much to recall the heroism of Pawel Frenkel, ZZW's commander.

The ZZW is now thought by historians to have been the better-equipped force in the Ghetto, and had procured machine guns. The ZOB, however, had more fighters.

The groups finally decided to coordinate their efforts in the last moments before the April 19 battle began. For 28 days, Jewish warriors fought the enemy and showed bravery not seen since the days of Bar Kochba's uprising against Rome.

In the Vilna Ghetto, Betar leader Joseph Glazman was deputy commander of the United Partisan Organization, the only armed Jewish resistance group in that ghetto.

Betar was founded in 1923 by Ze'ev Jabotinsky (1880-1940), a figure who is too often forgotten today. Professor Daniel J. Elazar (1934-1999), a scholar of the Jewish political tradition, in the May 15, 1981 edition of the journal Sh'ma Elazar remarked about Jabotinsky's legacy:

"Would there be serious public commemoration of the 100th birthday of Zev Jabotinsky had it not been for the fact that the Likud won the election in Israel in 1977? Not likely. For thirty years and more, Jabotinsky was one of those non-persons in Israel and the Jewish world... The ruling Labour Party made him a non-person for the same reasons that it portrayed Menachem Begin and his supporters as uncivilized fascists—it is easier to beat the opposition by painting it as irrelevant, intolerable and non-existent, until it is too strong to be dismissed."

This year's 70th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising offers an opportunity to remind today's Jews about Jabotinsky's vital contributions. His words and ideas animated a generation of young Jews to resist the Nazis and fight for the freedom of Israel as soldiers in the Irgun and Stern Group/LEHI. The fact that the Islamofascists and the Iranians are so focused today on destroying Israel and the Jewish People in a future Holocaust, and at the same time denying the original Holocaust, demands a new look at Jabotinsky and his ideas.

Moshe Phillips is the president of the Philadelphia Chapter of Americans For a Safe Israel/AFSI. The chapter's blog can be found athttp://phillyafsi.blogtownhall.com and Moshe tweets at http://twitter.com/MoshePhillips. This article appeared in jns.org and is archived at
http://www.jns.org/latest-articles/2013/1/12/70-years-later-recalling-the-first-battle-against-the-nazis.html#.Va7B8LyVsWM


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A LAND THE ROMANS NAMED PALESTINE...

Posted by YogiRUs, March 25, 2013

An ongoing sinister effort to de-legitimize the Jewish peoples right to their inherent homeland - Palestine is being perpetrated by so-called West Bank Arab historians and some senior PLO officials. One such "historian" in an interview on Al-Filistiniya (Fatah) television denied that the Jewish nation has any historical connection to the Land of Israel, at first denying thousands of years of documented Jewish history in Israel, and then replacing it with 4,000 to 5,000 of fictitious Arab Palestinian history.

Arab involvement in ancient Palestine were mainly in the form of incursions. From time to time, Nabatean Arabs from tip of Arabian Peninsula would invade the lands to the north, terrorizing and plundering.

On one such occasion, it was an Idumean living in Jerusalem, named Antipater, (the father of the future Roman installed King, Herod) who bribed the Nabatean

Arabs to attack Judea in an effort to wrest the throne from its Hasmonian ruler Aristobulus .

This came about at a time Rome's eastern legions, under Pompey were in a process of territorial expansion in the Near East.

Rome, before its conquest of Judea had stated several times that it was a friend of the Jews. When a mini civil war was about to take place in Judea between two opposing brothers, Hycran and Aristobulus, both sides agreed to turn to a powerful Roman (Pompey) to arbitrate...big mistake.

Then, upon hearing that Nabatean Arabs had laid siege to Jerusalem, Pompey promptlysent his lieutenant Scaurus to scare the Nabateans off. The Arabs fled.

A short thereafter, Pompey's Roman legions invaded Judea, sacked the Holy Temple and slaughtered thousands.

Before the 1880's there were few Jews in Palestine and not many Arabs. The Jews were known as Palestinians and the Arabs- as Arabs.Most of the Arabs were roving Bedouin tribes, mainly from the surrounding Arab countries.

They roamed from the Negev to Galilee, and across present-day Jordan. Some settled in Haifa Jerusalem, Acre and Hebron.

In 1921 the British foreign office tore away two-thirds of mandated Palestine and awarded it to the great grandfather of Jordan's present King Abdullah, Emir Abdullah, the youngest son of Hussein ibn Ali the former King of the Hijaz (present day Saudi Arabia).

His Hashemite tribes settled into eastern Palestine among a few nomadic Bedouin tribes.

On May 25.1946 Trans-Jordan became a Kingdom.Three years later it was renamed The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, and then renamed once again, present day Jordan. Not only are the Arabs who call themselves 'Palestinians' not indigenous to Palestine, neither are the Jordanians.

With the arrival of more Jews and the British capture of Palestine in 1918, many more Arabs from the surrounding countries entered the area: hoping for jobs, a higher standard of living, and better medical care, all of which was being created by the influx of more Jews and the British mandated government.

In 1934 thirty thousand Syrian Arabs moved across the northern frontier from Hauran in Syria.

Between the years of 1887 and 1914 the Jewish population of Palestine increased from about 50,000 to 90,000 with many more coming after the end of World War I.

This was not the first great wave of returnees.

In 1492 a large number of Jews, having been expelled from Spain came to Palestine, many of whom settled in Jerusalem. From the period of 1920 to the 1930's during what was called the second aliyah many more thousands arrived.

After the re-establishment of the Jewish State, calling itself Israel, the Arabs decided to call themselves Palestinians, hoping to gain legitimacy as the aboriginal inhabitants of the land. The fallacy of Arab claims that most Arabs living in Palestine are indigenous to that area and not newcomers is simply not true. Until 1967 most Arabs considered themselves part of the 'Great Arab Nation' - Southern Syrians.

The claim by Arabs that they are an ancient and indigenous people of Palestine fails to stand up to historic scrutiny.

Historical footnote: many centuries before the present era there were two separate kingdoms in the area that later became known as Palestine. Israel was the northern kingdom and Judea was the southern kingdom (southerners calling themselves Judeans). The word "Jew" is a modification of the word Judean.

Since the time of King David, and many centuries before his reign, there have always been an unbroken Jewish presence in the Holy Land.

historywatch

'Facts...Not Fiction'

Contact YogiRUs at YogiRUs@aol.com


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"JORDAN'S KING FINDS FAULT WITH EVERYONE CONCERNED"

Posted by YogiRUs, March 25, 2013

The article below was written by David Kirkpatrick who is a technology journalist, author, and organizer of technology-oriented conferences. He is the author of The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company that is Connecting the World. Published in 2010, Kirkpatrick's book chronicles the history of the company since its inception in 2004 and documents Facebook's global impact.[3] Formerly Senior Editor of Internet and Technology at Fortune magazine, Kirkpatrick is the founder and CEO of Techonomy Media Inc., a tech-focused conference company.

King Abdullah's perspective provides a golden opportunity for the U.S. to secure vital U.S. interests in the Middle East and broker a resolution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, if our own State Department were not dominated by the Arabist "dinosaurs" he so candidly disparages.

Clearly his regime is faced with major challenges to its continued existence, and from his statements it is also clear that he feels it necessary to preempt an "Arab Spring" within his borders by being the agent of political liberalization, including greater representation of his "Palestinian" subjects who constitute well over 50% of the population (more like over 70%, actually). As soon as that objective is realized, you have, in effect, a Palestinian state situated in the largest portion (3/4) of pre-White Paper Mandatory Palestine.

What is more, the U.S. is soon going to face the question of what it is going to do in the wake of a diminished or eliminated presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, especially in the face of growing Iranian strength and belligerancy. Taken together, the "Arab Spring" turned "Winter", the draw- down of American forces in high-risk theatres of operation, the growing Iranian threat and the apparent forward-looking disposition of the Hashemite monarch, suggest a daring proposition: an American-Jordanian defense pact premised on the commitment of the Jordanian Monarch to get fully behind a resolution of the Palestinian problem under Hashemite auspices.

This would include the establishment of major U.S. bases in the sparsely populated and relatively secure regions of eastern Jordan; a U.S. commitment to sustain the viability of a Hashemite constitutional monarchy on the British model; and a declaration by the King respecting the special historical relationship that has always existed between his oligarchy and his ethnic Palestinian subjects and his resolve to put an end to the festering wound of Palestinian statelessness within the boundaries of eastern Palestine. An appropriate name-change relecting this relationship would also be desirable: The Hashemite Kingdom of Palestine, or Hashemite Kingdom of Jordanian Palestine would do nicely.

Such an arrangement would secure stability in Jordan/Palestine, provide the U.S. with a major military presence in easy striking distance of potential adversaries at little immediate risk, defuse the Arab-Israeli conflict, and provide a great economic boon and stability to the region as a whole.

Whatever remaining problems would exist regarding the disposition of Arab populations west of the Jordan River could then be worked out amicably through symetric state to state negotiations between Israel and a fully-fledged Palestinian state, rather than an embryonic Palestinian "Authority".

This should be the focus and objective of energetic American diplomacy in the region. This is a solution to a seemingly intractable problem that will bring real "change", and be a winning proposition for all the parties concerned. And the success of such a program would promise the Hashemite regime continued viability and progress well into the future, while securing for King Abdullah the status of a preeminently great Arab leader.

(And if that were not enough, it could position his house for even greater glory through a return to its former rule of the Hejaz in a post-Saudi, Arabia, replacing that debased regime with an enlightened, modern, pro-Western leader - a larger and more difficult project which should also be on the American drawing-boards. But more of that anon).

The question is, can our own diplomatic "dinosaurs" be replaced by a more intelligent and viable life-form? And how might the arrival of the requisite meteor-shower be arranged?!!

Contact YogiRUs at YogiRUs@aol.com


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: FROM THE LID: SEQUESTER BE DAMNED - $500 MIL FOR PALESTINIANS

Posted by Barbara Sommer, March 25, 2013

The article below was written by Jeff Dunetz who is editor and publisher of the The Lid, and a weekly political columnist for the Jewish Star and TruthRevolt. He has also contributed to Breitbart.com, HotAir, and PJ Media's Tattler. This article appeared March 24, 2013 in The LID and is archived at
http://yidwithlid.blogspot.com/2013/03/sequester-be-dammed-us-unblocks-500m.html?utm_source= The+Lid+List&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=bf6b6ba579-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN

White House tours have been cancelled, Airport towers have been closed, criminal illegal immigrants have been released ---all because President Obama is making sure that America suffers from the "sequester" that 2% cut in federal spending which began to take place the first of March.

That doesn't mean Obama hasn't added any more non essential spending, on Friday the United States has quietly unblocked almost $500 million in aid to the Palestinian Authority which had been frozen by Congress for months.

"To date, we have moved $295.7 million in fiscal year 2012 money... and $200 million in fiscal year 2013 assistance," State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told reporters.

The Obama administration also notified Congress in late February that it was seeking a further $200 million to fund US Agency for International Development (USAID) programs for the Palestinians, she said.

The first sum comprises some $195.7 million, allocated under the 2012 fiscal year budget for USAID economic, development and humanitarian assistance, as well as a further $100 million earmarked specifically for narcotics control.

The second sum of $200 million unblocked and available to the Palestinian Authority will come under the 2013 budget and be spent for direct budget support.

The Palestinian Authority is facing its worst economic crisis in years, in part because of a failure by donors to deliver pledged funds. But its finances were plunged further into chaos after president Mahmud Abbas won upgraded UN observer status at the UN General Assembly in late November.

Anybody notice all the protests in the Palestinian controlled territories when Obama visited? What about their continued refusal to negotiate? Heck this supposed moderate government continues to recognize Israel's right to exist.

But in this time sequester, President Obama can find a way to give an organization with no interest in peace a half of a billion dollars at the same time he works to "punish" the American people.

Contact Barbara Sommer by email at sommer_1_98@worldnet.at.net


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THE GOOD NEWS FROM OBAMA: ISRAELI PUBLIC HAS A SAY

Posted by Barbara Sommer, March 25, 2013

As we approach the Passover seder I am not going to write about the chutzpah of President Obama to lecture us about dignity, justice, etc. as he continues to refuse to sign the piece of paper that would set Jonathan Pollard free. Nor am I going to detail his troubling double standard - with an automatic pass for Mahmoud Abbas and not a word about the profoundly disturbing Palestinian demand that literally every terrorist be released regardless of either the crime or the timing (if a terrorist were to slaughter the mothers in a maternity ward with their babies this afternoon and they were captured alive, their release would be included in the blanket demand). Nor am I going to relate how frustrating it is that we are not given credit for the tremendous risks we have been willing to take in easing various restrictions to improve the daily lives of the Palestinians. And of course, I am not going to write now about the painfully naïve assertion that a sovereign Palestinian state would actually be a good thing for the neighborhood.

Instead I want to focus on a very encouraging element of President Obama's 21 March address to the pro-retreat crowd of Israelis vetted by the American Embassy for a photo op.

Here is the encouraging line: " I can promise you this, political leaders will never take risks if the people do not push them to take some risks. You must create the change that you want to see. Ordinary people can accomplish extraordinary things."

National Security Adviser Yaakov Amidror has been advocating a building freeze and other measures out of fear of the risk of losing American support.

In the coming days, weeks and months Prime Minister Netanyahu will face tremendous pressure to give in to American demands out of this fear of the risk of losing American support.

I agree with President Obama. "Political leaders will never take risks if the people do not push them to take some risks."

It will not be an easy task. But it is a task that can be achieved.

The Israeli "street", along with the MK's from the national camp who are willing to take a stand, can most certainly convince Prime Minister Netanyahu to take the risk of standing firm and not folding to American demands.

And the beauty of it is that even President Obama himself recognizes that Prime Minister Netanyahu can only go so far in bucking Israeli public opinion.

Contact Barbara Sommer by email at sommer_1_98@worldnet.at.net


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GAZA FLOTILLA APOLOGY MAY HAVE RAMIFICATIONS BEYOND ISRAEL-TURKEY RELATIONS

Posted by Algemeiner, March 25, 2013

The article below was written by Alex Traiman who is a writer and director from Beit El, a Jewish settlement in the West Bank comprised predominantly of far-right and religious Israelis. Traiman has emerged within Israel and the United States as a vocal proponent of Israel's controversial settlement policy and an advocate of military action against Iran's alleged nuclear weapons program. Traiman is also the Jerusalem bureau chief for the Jewish News Service (JNS), a news outlet that Mondoweiss claims "peddles neocon propaganda as news." JNS is run by Joshua Katzen, a supporter of Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories who serves on the boards of the neoconservative Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) and the Daniel Pipes led-Middle East Forum.[1] - See more at: http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/traiman_alex#sthash.f1UClDVf.dpuf. This article appeared March 25, 2013 in the Algemeiner and is archived at
http://www.algemeiner.com/2013/03/25/gaza-flotilla-apology-may-have-ramifications-beyond-israel-turkey-relations/

Caption Text

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reversed Israeli policy last Friday, offering an apology to the Turkish people for the deaths of nine Turkish citizens aboard the armed Mavi Marmara flotilla headed toward Gaza in 2010. But that apology may have had less to do with Turkey itself than with guarantees relating to Iran or Syria. "Apologizing to Turkey may clear the deck on one issue to get free reign on other issues." Dr. Harold Rhode—who worked for 28 years in the Pentagon, including from 1989-90 as the head of the Turkish Desk at the U.S. Department of Defense—toldJNS.org. "In almost every case there is more to such diplomatic announcements than meets the eye."

The apology took place during a phone call between Netanyahu and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan that was brokered by U.S. President Barack Obama during the final hours of his visit to Israel.

Reports have stated that in return for Israel's apology, along with compensation to the families of the victims and an easing of the blockade on Gaza, Turkey would restore diplomatic relations with Israel, including the formal exchange of ambassadors.

While the apology may have indeed given Obama a diplomatic victory that provides benefits both to Israel and Turkey, there may be additional factors to consider, according to Rhode, who retired from the Pentagon in 2010—just a few months before the Mavi Marmara incident.

"There might be more to this agreement than what is currently being reported," Rhode said.

During his time at the Pentagon, Rhode specialized in looking at the wider context and cultural cues of any given situation in the Middle East.

"While much of the attention in the region has focused on Syria, Egypt, Iraq and Israel, the situation in Turkey is actually quite fragile," Rhode said.

"Turkey has enormous internal problems," he said. "And many people there believe that Erdogan is ruining the future their country."

Erdogan is seeking to move up to become Turkey's president, but wants to expand the powers of the presidency, making it almost into a monarchy and sultanate. His party doesn't have the votes to change the constitution, so Erdogan decided to make concessions to the Kurdish party in Parliament, offering them more cultural rights within Turkey, in exchange for their votes to change the constitution.

Turkey has the largest Kurdish population of any country in the world. As in northern Iraq and Syria, Turkey's Kurdish population seeks to control its own destiny. On many levels, the Kurdish push for control of its destiny may be among "the most important developments taking hold in the Middle East," Rhode said.

According to Rhode, Erdogan doesn't want an independent Kurdistan; he instead wants a Sunni-Muslim state or commonwealth, in which Sunni Turks, Kurds, and Arabs rule.

"Erdogan considers himself a Muslim before a Turk," Rhode said. "What he wants is to become somewhat like a King, Sultan, or Supreme Ruler of Turkey, and not merely a Prime Minister. And his vision is to unite all of the country's Muslims behind his rule—in essence to reestablish his own version of the Ottoman Empire."

In Rhode's view, uniting Turkey's diverse ethnic factions, in some form of alliance with the Sunnis in Syria and Iraqi Kurdistan will ultimately prove too difficult.

"Erdogan is juggling a lot right now, and needs to demonstrate that he is powerful," said Rhode. "He needs ammunition to prove how strong he is. This apology from Israel helps him to do that."

"Israel essentially obliged Erdogan by appearing to be bending at the knees," he said. "But we do not know what Israel got in return."

Rhode explained that Turks "generally do not like or respect supplicants."

"The apology will be taken by the Turks as well as the Iranians and other regional players as a sign of weakness," he said. "And in the Middle East, whenever somebody sees weakness, they pounce. They punch."

According to Rhode, it is extremely important that Israel now take efforts to appear strong in the wake of the apology.

"It is essential that Israel will remind its enemies who's boss," said Rhode. Newly appointed Israeli Defense Minster Moshe Ya'alon "has been doing just that in both Syria and Gaza," he said.

"It is very important for Israel to look very strong here," Rhode said.

Ya'alon has already reduced the Mediterranean fishing boundaries of the Gaza Strip from six miles to three in the wake of rocket fire on the Israeli town of Sderot. He similarly ordered a crushing retaliatory strike on a Syrian missile-launching site that fired into Israel.

Ya'alon said that he supports Israel's apology to Turkey.

"Netanyahu made a responsible decision," he said.

"The deal reached with Turkey does not conflict with Israel's position on the matter over the past three years," Ya'alon said. "The recent regional developments and the American involvement facilitated a resolution to this crisis. This is in the best interest of both Israel and Turkey."

America considers both Israel and Turkey to be among its closest allies in the Middle East. Obama is reported to have an especially close relationship with Erdogan, while having an often-tense relationship with Netanyahu.

"Unfortunately, President Obama's friendship with Erdogan is consistent with a pattern of cozying up to anti-Western dictators, as we have seen him trying to do in the early months of his Administration. He tried to appease Venezuela's with Hugo Chavez (who died recently), and later with Egypt's Mohammed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood," Rhode told JNS.org.

"Erdogan is clearly aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood. "Together with the Saudis and Qataris, Erdogan has been supporting Sunni fundamentalists in the region, particularly in Syria," said Rhode. (But even here, the Saudis, Qataris and Erdogan disagree about which Sunni fundamentalist factions within the Syrian opposition they support.)

"All three are supplying and arming the fundamentalists that hate America and hate Israel," Rhode said.

While Erdogan is reported to have accepted Israel's apology on behalf of Turkey's citizens, he may already be backtracking in an attempt to further solidify his position in the Muslim world. Less than 48 hours after the apology, Erdogan stated that a return to normalized diplomatic relations is contingent upon Israel fulfilling its commitments in the deal.

One of the major questions, according to Rhode, is "whether both sides consider this apology to be real, or whether this is merely window dressing."

"Given Erdogan's reaction today, this may be window-dressing, but that remains to be seen," Rhode said.

Contact Algemeiner at editor@algemeiner.com


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ARE WE ALL METAPHORICALLY JEWISH?

Posted by Dr. Richard Swier, March 25, 2013

The article below was written by Alan Caruba who is the founder of The National Anxiety Center, a clearinghouse for information about media-driven campaigns designed to influence public opinion and policy. A veteran public relations counselor and professional writer, Caruba has emerged as a conservative voice through his weekly column, "Warning Signs", posted on the Center's Internet site and widely excerpted on leading sites. A member of the Society of Professional Journalists, the American Society of Journalists and Authors, and a charter member of the National Book Critics Circle. This article appeared March 25, 2013 in WATCHDOGWIRE and is archived at
http://watchdogwire.com/florida/2013/03/25/are-we-all-metaphorically-jewish/

Caption Text
CAPTION

America is rightly called a Christian nation. The new Pope Francis represents 1.2 billion Catholics worldwide. There are 1.5 billion Muslims. There are more than 959 million Hindus and more than 467.5 million Buddhists. The world's Jews, however, are a scant 14 million or so. The two main locales of their population are Israel and the United States with about six million each.

So why does it feel like I live in a society and a world where the imprint of Judaism is so large?

One obvious reason is that Israel looms large in coverage by the U.S. news media for a multitude of reasons that include the large evangelical Christian support for Israel, the presumed attachment American Jews have for it (some do, some do not), and because it is regularly threatened by its neighbors in the region. While President Obama was there, the Iranian Supreme Leader was threatening to destroy Haifa and Tel Aviv. There were rockets from Gaza.

On Monday evening Jews around the world will begin the celebration of "pasach" which is also known as Passover. The Jewish lunar calendar dates this year as 5,773. In general terms, Judaism is about 3,800 years old, dating back to Abraham. Rabbinic Judaism which arose after the destruction of the temples in Jerusalem and subsequent exiles is about 2,000 years old. The influence of Judaism, however, began when Moses went up Mount Sinai and came back with the Ten Commandments. For Western civilization, they have been enduring moral guidelines ever since.

I doubt that most Americans and others are aware of the enormous imprint on civilization, religion, science, physics, medicine, technology, the arts, and virtually all other aspects of our lives that has been made by Jews. Christianity, of course, has its roots in Judaism and even Islam borrowed some of its precepts from it.

In the West we live in a metaphorical Jewish world.

Passover is a good time to contemplate such things. We know, for example, that Albert Einstein developed the Theory of Relativity, an enormous contribution to physics and our understanding of the universe. Or that Jonas Salk developed the first polio vaccine for polio and that Albert Sabin developed the oral vaccine for polio. Two generations ago it was a dreaded disease. Selman Waksman discovered Streptomycin and every time you say "antibiotic", you are using a word he coined. I won't list all the names of Jews who advanced medicine because it is long. The same holds true for various Nobel Prize categories.

Do you like those sexy or just plain denim jeans you wear? Levi Strauss, a Jew. They were sewed on a machine invented by Isaac Singer, a Jew.

For Americans, the impact, influence and participation in our popular culture is so hugely Jewish that whole books could be written about it. George Gershwin composed the Rhapsody in Blue, starting it with a clarinet solo that is straight out of the Klezmer tradition of Yiddish music.

The American theatre has been peopled with Jews from playwright Arthur Miller to the team of Rogers and Hammerstein that created iconic musicals. Movies were transformed by Jewish directors such as Cecil B. DeMille, Billy Wyler, and Woody Allen. It's a long list.

As for actors and actresses, it's also a very long list. Born in the 1920s, there's Mel Brooks and Lauren Bacall, Jerry Lewis and Carl Reiner. Move ahead to the 1930s and we have Dustin Hoffman, Alan Arkin, and, for Star Trek fans, there's William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy. The decade of the 1950s gave us comedien Jerry Seinfeld, actor Richard Dreyfuss, singer Bette Midler and music legend, Bob Dylan, born Robert Allen Zimmerman. From the 70s generation, younger fans will recognize Sarah Michelle Geller of "Buffy" fame, Gwyneth Paltrow, Joaquin Phoenix, and Maya Rudolph from Saturday Night Live. Born in the 80s, there's Natalie Portman, Scarlett Johansson, and a bevy of talent on the big and small screens.

In my lifetime, six million Jews from throughout Europe were murdered during the Holocaust and one must wonder at the loss of physicists, physicians, chemists, artists and others who might have contributed to our lives. The Iranian threat of a nuclear weapon to be used against Israel is described as" existential", but it is so real that it must never be allowed to occur. No nation or group of nations can "contain" a nation determined to kill millions and dominate, not just the Middle East and Africa, but the entire world.

A recent Wall Street Journal commentary, "Israel's High-Tech Pipeline to the U.S." by Michael Eisenstadt and David Pollack examined the extraordinary role in high tech played by Israel where its computer and communications geniuses have already developed much of the technology we take for granted; "applications such as instant messaging, Internet telephony, and data-mining." The authors note that Israelis "have helped the U.S. preserve its military edge." Microsoft's Bill Gates says "innovation going on in Israel is critical to the future of the technology business."

And now you understand better, after enduring four years of Arab intransigence, turmoil, and the threat of jihad—holy war—why President Obama began his second term with a visit to Israel. It was a global platform to warn Iran against going ahead with its nuclear ambitions and threats. No nation in the Middle East wants that to happen, but especially Israel.

On Passover 2013, Jews as they have for centuries will gather at the Seder table and repeat the story of having once been slaves in Egypt and of how, with the help of God, they escaped to the promised land. "They tried to kill us, they failed, let's eat" is the joke they tell, but the story of the Jews over the centuries is perhaps better reflected by what a founder and Israel's first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, once said, "To be a realist in Israel, you have to believe in miracles."

Consider the empires that tried to destroy the Jewish people—ancient Egypt, Philistines, the Assyrian Empire, Babylonian Empire, Persian Empire, Greek Empire, Roman Empire, Byzantine Empire, Crusaders, Spanish Empire, Nazi Germany, and the Soviet Union. None of them exists today.

On Passover, you too might want to bow your head and say a prayer for Christians throughout the Middle East and parts of Africa who are being killed or driven from their homes, just as Jews have experienced from the days of ancient Egypt.

Contact Dr. Richard Swier at drswier@gmail.com


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MY INTERVIEW WITH TIFFANY

Posted by Ashraf Ramelah, March 25, 2013

The article below was written by Tiffany Gabbay who serves as an independent consultant with Quidlibet Research Inc., assisting for-profit and not-for-profit organizations in areas related to development, communications, public relations, writing, public speaking and strategic management. Tiffany's consulting has lent valuable strategic support to organizations like Ventures for Veterans, The David Horowitz Freedom Center, and the Center for Security Policy, a national security-driven think tank based in Washington, D.C. Tiffany has played a vital role shaping the organization's outreach efforts and managing its communications and public relations initiatives. She formerly served as Assistant Editor and Foreign Affairs Editor for Glenn Beck's, TheBlaze, and also as a contributor to FrontPage Magazine, The Jewish Voice and soon, the Jerusalem Post. She has appeared frequently as a guest on various radio and televised news programs for TheBlaze TV and SUN News Canada, and is also on public speaking circuit, appearing on panels and symposia focused on the Middle East and Israel. This article appeared March 25, 2013 in the BLAZE and is archived at
http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/03/25/prominent-arab-convert-to-christianity-leaves-catholic-church-over-its-weakness-on-islam/

In a shocking display that does not bode well for the Catholic Church and its stance on defending the multitudes of Christians currently being persecuted in Islamic countries, Magdi Christiano Allam, a prominent covert from Islam to Christianity, has left the Catholicism. He reasoned that he could not abide the church's "weakness" and policy of appeasement towards Islam.

The Egyptian-born Allam, who publicly converted in St. Peter's Basilica on Easter 2008 with the oversight of Pope Benedict XVI himself, renounced his Catholicism because, in his view, the church legitimizes a religion that is "inherently violent" to people of all walks, including fellow Muslims.

Ever-outspoken, Allam assures that he will remain a Christian, but roundly criticized the Catholic Church for also fostering an environment in which the Islamization of Europe will, in his mind, most assuredly take place.

Translated from the Italian news outlet, Corriere, Allam clarified that his mind had been made up before the new pope was chosen and that the driving factor to leave the church is its of Islam's place among the monotheistic religions.

"I am convinced," Allam stated, "that Islam is an ideology inherently violent as it has been historically conflictual inside and warlike outside."

"I am even more convinced that Europe will eventually be submitted to Islam, as has already happened since the seventh century."

Allam also criticized the church for not having "the vision and the courage to denounce the incompatibility of Islam with our civilization and fundamental rights of the person."

"I will continue to believe in Jesus," he continued. "I have always loved and proudly identify with Christianity as the civilization that more than others brings man closer to God who chose to become man.:

Allam had been vocal in his views on Islam while praising the former pope's moral courage, but this new turn of events is bound to cause waves in Vatican, which has come under fire before for turning a blind eye to the plight of Christians in Muslim countries.

Ashraf Ramelah, director of the Christian human rights group, Voice of the Copts, told TheBlaze that he agrees with Magdi's decision and assessment of the church's take on Islam "100 percent."

"Islamization is causing a part of the problem," Ramelah said. "I believe the church thinks that if they are nice, they might be able to convert them [Islamists] to Christianity. But history has shown this not to be the case."

Ramelah said he has no problem with Pope Francis' desire to open a dialogue with Islam, but cautioned that such sentiments have a way of being twisted in the Islamic world to mean that Christians are "submitting to them."

"Why must we always submit to them," asked Ramelah. "This is the question that has to be asked. If I want to have a relationship with someone, both parties have to have an interest. So, from our side, we start [the dialogue], but then Muslims laugh in our face. I don't have problem with dialogue, but they take it to mean submission."

In full support of his friend Allam, Ramelah said that the church needs to be "a little more mature in how it manifests its ideology" and said that he believes in democracy only "with people who respect democracy. "

Contact Ashraf Ramelah founder and president of Voice of the Copts, has recently given testimony to the Canadian Parliament on the revolution taking place in Egypt. Please visit www.voiceofthecopts.org


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THE MEANING AND CONSEQUENCES OF ISRAEL'S APOLOGY TO TURKEY

Posted by Yuval Zaliouk, March 25, 2013

The article below was written by Caroline Glick who is a US-born Israeli journalist, newspaper editor, and writer. She writes for Makor Rishon and is the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post.This article appeared March 24, 2013 in FRONTPAGE Magazine and is archived at
http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/182975/meaning-and-consequences-israels-apology-turkey-caroline-glick

Caption Text

US President Barack Obama was on the line when Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to apologize for the deaths of nine Turkish protesters aboard the Turkish ship Mavi Marmara on May 31, 2010.

For those who don't remember, the Mavi Marmara was a Turkish ship that set sail in a bid to break Israel's lawful maritime blockade of Hamas-controlled Gaza's coastline. When Israeli naval commandos boarded the ship to interdict it, passengers on deck attacked them — in breach of international maritime law. Soldiers were stabbed, bludgeoned and thrown overboard. In a misguided attempt to show the good faith of Israeli actions, the naval commandos were sent aboard the ship armed with paintball guns. As a consequence, the soldiers were hard-pressed to defend themselves. In the hand-to-hand combat that ensued, nine of the Turkish attackers were killed.

The Mavi Marmara was an eminently predictable fight. The Turkish group that hired the boat was an al-Qaeda-affiliated Turkish NGO named IHH. In 1999, the Turkish government was so wary of IHH that it barred the group from participating in relief efforts following a devastating earthquake.

IHH's fortunes shifted with the rise of its fellow Islamists in the AKP Justice and Development Party led by Recep Tayip Erdogan. The AKP won the 2002 elections and has since been reelected twice.

By 2010, Prime Minster Erdogan had a long track record of anti-Israel actions. Indeed, by 2010, Erdogan had effectively destroyed the strategic alliance Israel had developed with Turkey since 1949. In 2006, Erdogan was the first major international leader and NATO member to host Hamas terror chief Ismail Haniyeh. The same year he allowed Iran to use Turkish territory to transfer weaponry to Hezbollah during the Second Lebanon War.

In 2008, Erdogan openly sided with Hamas against Israel in Operation Cast Lead. In 2009, he called President Shimon Peres a murderer to his face.

By the time the flotilla to Gaza was organized, Erdogan had used Turkey's position as a NATO member to effectively end the US-led alliance's cooperative relationship with Israel, by refusing to participate in military exercises with Israel.

Following the incident, rather than apologize for his allied NGO's gross violation of international maritime law and acts of wanton aggression against Israeli forces, Erdogan doubled down. He removed Turkey's ambassador from Israel. He demanded an apology as a condition for the restoration of relations. He had his court system open show trials against IDF soldiers and commanders. He stepped up his exploitation of Turkey's NATO membership to block substantive military cooperation between Israel and NATO. And he cultivated close economic and political ties with Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood.

At the same time, Erdogan has cultivated close ties with President Barack Obama and his administration, and has spent millions of dollars on lobbying efforts on Capitol Hill to neutralize congressional opposition to his hostile behavior towards Israel and the US.

For three years Israel refused to apologize to Turkey. And then Obama came to Israel for a visit, and before he left the country, he had Netanyahu on the phone with Erdogan, apologizing for the loss of life of the Turkish protesters who stabbed and bludgeoned Israeli soldiers. Netanyahu also offered restitution to their families.

Israeli President Shimon Peres sought to silence the public outcry in Israel against Netanyahu's action by soothingly saying that it was done to bury the past and move on to a better day in relations with Turkey. IDF Chief of General Staff Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz publicly backed Netanyahu's actions, saying it was necessary to cultivate Turkish cooperation for dealing with the situation in Syria, which is rapidly spiraling out of control. Israeli and international concerns that all or parts of Syria's massive arsenal of chemical and biological weapons, as well as its ballistic missiles, will fall into the hands of jihadist forces have risen as jihadists, allied with al-Qaeda, have come to dominate the opposition to the Syrian regime.

Israel's own concerns regarding the civil war in Syria have also escalated as rebel forces — affiliated with al-Qaeda -- have taken over sections of the border region. UN observer forces deployed along Israel's border with Syria since 1974 have been fleeing in droves, for Israel and Jordan. Earlier in the month, rebel forces took dozens of observer forces from the Philippines hostage for several days.

Given the situation, the main questions that arise from Israel's apology to Turkey are as follows: Is it truly a declaration with little intrinsic meaning, as Peres intimated? Should it simply be viewed as a means of overcoming a technical block to renewing Israel's strategic alliance with Turkey? In other words, will the apology facilitate Turkish cooperation in stemming the rise of jihadist forces in Syria, and blocking the transfer of chemical and biological weapons and ballistic missiles to such actors? Finally, what does Obama's central role in producing Israel's apology say about his relationship with the Jewish state and the consequences of his visit on Israel's alliance with the US and its position in the region? And finally, what steps should Israel consider in light of these consequences?

On Saturday, the Arab League convened in Doha, Qatar and discussed Israel's apology to Turkey and its ramifications for pan-Arab policy. The Arab League member states considered the prospect of demanding similar apologies for its military operations in Lebanon, Judea, Samaria and Gaza.

The Arab League's discussions point to the true ramifications of the apology for Israel. By apologizing for responding lawfully to unlawful aggression against the State of Israel and its armed forces, Israel did two things. First, Israel humiliated itself and its soldiers, and so projected an image of profound weakness. Due to this projected image, Israel has opened itself up to further demands for it to apologize for its other responses to acts of unlawful war and aggression against the state, its territory and its citizens from other aggressors. The Arab League like most of its member nations is in an official state of war with Israel. The Arabs wish to see Israel destroyed. Kicking a nation when it is down is a perfectly rational way for states that wish other states ill to behave. And so the Arab League's action was eminently predictable.

As for the future of Israel-Turkish cooperation on Syria, two things must be borne in mind. First, on Saturday Erdogan claimed that Netanyahu's apology was insufficient to restore Turkish-Israel relations. He claimed that before he could take any concrete actions to restore relations, Israel would first have to compensate the families of the passengers from the Mavi Marmara killed while assaulting IDF soldiers with deadly force.

Beyond that, it is far from clear that Turkey shares Israel's interests in preventing the rise of a jihadist regime in Syria allied with al-Qaeda. More than any other actor, Erdogan has played a central role in enabling the early jihadist penetration and domination of the ranks of the US-supported Syrian opposition forces. It is far from clear that the man who enabled these jihadists to rise to power shares Israel's interest in preventing them from seizing Syria's weapons of mass destruction. Moreover, if Turkey does share Israel's interest in preventing the Syrian opposition from taking control over the said arsenals, it would cooperate with Israel in accomplishing this goal with or without an Israeli apology for its takeover of the Mavi Marmara.

So if interests, rather than sentiments dictate Turkey's actions on Syria, as they dictate the interests of the Arab League in kicking Israel when it is perceived as being down, what does Obama's central role in compelling Israel to apologize to Turkey tell us about his attitude towards Israel and how his attitude towards Israel is perceived by Israel's neighbors, including Iran?

By forcing Israel to apologize to Turkey, Obama effectively forced Israel to acknowledge that it is in the wrong for lawful actions by its military taken in defense of international law and of Israel's national security. That is, Obama sided with the aggressor — Turkey — over the victim — Israel. And in so doing, he signaled, deliberately or inadvertently, to the rest of Israel's neighbors that the US is no longer siding with Israel in regional disputes. As a consequence, they now feel that it is reasonable for them to press their advantage and demand further Israeli apologies for daring to defend itself from their aggression.

Whether or not Obama meant to send this message, this is a direct consequence of his visit. Now Israel needs to consider its options for moving forward. For Israel's allies in Congress, it is important to take a strong position on the issue. Members of Congress and Senate would do well to pass resolutions stating their conviction that Israel, while within its own rights to apologize, operated with reasonable force and wholly in accordance with international law in its interdiction of the Mavi Marmara, which was on an illegal voyage to provide aid and comfort for an internationally recognized terrorist organization in contravention of binding UN Security Council resolution 1379 from September 2001, which prohibits the proffering of such aid. Congress should enjoin the administration to issue a declaration noting US support for Israel in its actions to defend itself from aggression in all forms, including from Hamas-controlled Gaza.

Second, Israel should scale back the level of military assistance it receives from the US. While Obama was in Israel, he pledged to expand US military assistance to Israel in the coming years. By unilaterally scaling back US assistance and developing its domestic military industries, Israel would send a strong signal to its neighbors that it is not completely dependent on the US and as a consequence, the level of US support for Israel does not determine Israel's capacity to continue to defend itself.

On a wider level, it is important for Israel to develop the means to end its dependency on the US. Under Obama, despite the support of the great majority of the public, the US has become an undependable ally to Israel, and indeed to the rest of the US's allies as well. The more quickly Israel can minimize its dependence, the better it will be for Israel, for the US and for the stability of the region. The apology to Turkey was a strategic error. To minimize its consequences, Israel must boldly assert its interests in Syria, Iran, and throughout the region.

Contact Yuval Zalioul at ynz@netvision.net.il


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THE ESCALATING COST OF LEADING FROM BEHIND

Posted by ACD/EWI, March 26, 2013

Leading from behind in Libya cost the lives of four Americans. That U.S. policy may end up costing many more than the reported 80,000-130,000 lives that have already been lost in Syria.

A basic misconception of the Arab/ Islamic world has for decades been ruling U.S. policy regarding the Middle East.

Perhaps the most dangerous error in judgment has been the U.S. tacit acceptance of the Assad regimes' decades-long growing WMD arsenal.

The salafist terror group, Jabhat al-Nusra, an extension of al Qaeda in Iraq, joined the Syrian Sunni jihadist groups in January 2012. However, it took the State Department almost a year to designate the group as terrorist. Perhaps Obama's repeated assertions that al Qaeda has been decimated as a result of killing bin Laden, slowed the designation.

In the meantime, al-Nusra has been attracting Sunni jihadists from all over the world, not only from Iraq. The sophistication and experience of these al-Qaeda terrorists has led to the dramatic escalation in the fighting in Syria and to mortars exploding in the heart of Damascus.

As feared, fighting between Sunni jihadis and Alwaites has erupted again in Tripoli, Lebanon's second-largest city, and in Beirut: the Hezbollah-appointed, Sunni prime minister Najib Mikati has resigned, further destabilizing the country.

In the meantime, Syrian government forces continued to fire on Hezbollah bases in the Bekaa Valley, and Israeli forces that have been fired on in the Golan, fired in return into Syria. Today, Jordan closed its border with Syria following reports that al Nusra forces had taken over an important junction near the border. Realizing the Assad ship is sinking, the UN decided "temporarily" to abandon Syria.

News on CIA involvement in the war has become more detailed, and it's clear that the Agency is helping to airlift in to the Syrian rebels loads of arms from Turkey, Arab countries and from the Balkans.

The Arms Pipeline to the Syrian Rebels.

Caption Text

p>"More than 160 military cargo flights for Syria's rebels, mostly from Qatar and Saudi Arabia, have landed in Turkey and Jordan since January 2012 ."

In addition, Syrian rebels have been receiving training from the CIA, British, French and Jordanian intelligence services in weapons and counterintelligence tactics to prevent pro-Assad infiltration. And the Pentagon is helping to train Jordanian forces to counter Syria's chemical weapons threat.

However, the al Nusra Front, already controls broad areas of northern Syria:

"U.S. counterterrorism officials said they have seen a growth in communications among operatives from al Nusra Front, al Qaeda in Iraq and al Qaeda's central leadership in Pakistan. Officials also report growing numbers of al Qaeda fighters traveling from Pakistan to Syria to join the fight with al Nusra. The ties to al Qaeda's central operations have become so significant that U.S. counterterrorism officials are debating whether al Nusra should now be considered its own al Qaeda affiliate instead of an offshoot of al Qaeda in Iraq, as it has generally been viewed within the U.S. government, according to a person familiar with the debate."

Clearly, rumors of al Qaeda's decline have been greatly exaggerated. Even under heavy fire from Assad, it has grown in strength to become the leading rebel force in Syria. The al Nusra Front is now more of a threat to the U.S. and the West than al Qaeda in the Maghreb and Sahel. The latter has been "fueled" by the disbursement of Qaddafi's Libyan arsenal.

Al Nusra may soon by "fueled" by Assad's chemical weapons.

Were chemical weapons on the loose and/or in use in Syria? Immediately after last Tuesday's incident near Aleppo, the Obama administration would neither confirm nor deny this, After all, Obama drew a red line around Syrian chemical weapons, calling their movement or use a "game-changer" for him back in August 2012. A "game-changer" may necessitate a U.S. armed intervention in Syria, which, so far, Obama has been trying to avoid.

Reports from apparently informed sources claimed that last December the White House reached out to Assad and allegedly preventing him from launching a chemical weapons attack: "Even as the administration has repeatedly said that Assad has lost 'legitimacy,' because it has expressed its fears of chemical weapons so publicly, it has effectively legitimized him as an interlocutor simply because he has taken his country hostage."

The best explanation for Obama's point of view on Syria, apart from his general wish to withdraw the U.S. from the rest of the world in all meaningful ways, is that he doesn't want to anger Iran out of the belief that the U.S. can still reach a diplomatic deal on its nuclear program.

"If the Obama White House is capable of sympathizing with Iranian interests, it has failed to take into consideration our own interests in Syria," says Lee Smith. The conflict is spreading and afflicting American allies bordering on Syria-Israel, Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon.... If the administration fears angering the Iranians by backing Assad's enemies, then shouldn't we be angry with Iran for backing Assad to the hilt?"

Apparently not. The Obama administration is readying itself and its allies for the next round of "negotiations" with Iran, on April 5-6, in Almaty, Kazakhstan.

By then, however, al Nusra and Hezbollah fighters stand a good chance of taking over Assad's chemical weapons, perhaps use them, but surely transport them for use elsewhere.

Dr, Rachel Ehrenfeld is the Director of the New York-based American Center for Democracy (ACD) and the Center for the Study of Corruption & the Rule of Law. She is an authority on the shadowy movement of funds through international banking systems and governments to fund terrorism. She is co-host of the American Center for Democracy website. Ken Jensen is an Associate Director of the Economic Warfare Institute and co-host of the American Center for Democracy website. This article was published March 26, 2013 on the American Center for Democracy's website http://acdemocracy.org/the-escalating-cost-of-leading-from-behind/


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AN OPEN LETTER TO HAARETZ re CONTRACEPTION AND ETHIOPIAN WOMEN

Posted by Maurice Ostroff, March 26, 2013

Dear Mr. Ehud Ein-Gil,

I thank you for your email of January 3 and I apologize for the delay in replying.

However, with respect sir, I disagree with your statement that Haaretz duly acted according to the Israel journalistic ethical code, clause 5 of which which requires that *A. Prior to the publication of any item, the newspaper and the journalist shall check the accuracy thereof with the most reliable source and with appropriate caution in the circumstances of the case. **B. An examination of the accuracy of an item aforesaid shall not be waived because of the urgency of the publication. **C. The fact that an item has been published in the past shall not discharge the person seeking to rely on it in a publication from checking the reliability of the item.* My reasons are as follows.

1. *The sterilization allegation*. Your sub-headline alleging that Israel forcibly sterilizes women has caused and continues to cause such serious damage that it deserves more than a mere inconspicuous notice at the end of the article claiming that it was merely "changed due to an editing error" without explaining what was changed. The correction does not inform readers of the original text that the information was incorrect.

The Haaretz article was rapidly followed by screaming headlines around the world, quoting Haaretz in repeating the lie that Israel forcibly injects Ethiopian women with the Depo Provera contraceptive and even forcibly sterilizes them. A Google search for Israel and Depo Provera yields more than 200,000 results and this egregious lie continues to be displayed on the Internet poisoning the minds of millions of people about Israel as in the following example that appeared in Investment Watch

[image: Inline image 1]

KultureKritic,

a leading website for socio-political commentary continues to report that according to Haartez, by sterilizing Ethiopian women, Israel is making certain that some immigrants won't be able to have children.

And also quoting from Haaretz, Disclose TV carries the headline *"Nazi Israel is sterilizing Ethiopian women by force"

*

As there can be no doubt that this type of sensational report in Haaretz is always eagerly reproduced internationally, allowing the allegation about sterilization to be published shows a grossly negligent disregard of the duty to use reasonable care in preventing publication of a falsehood that inevitably would cause and has caused grave harm.

In the circumstances the inconspicuous notice at the end of the article that reads " *The sub-headline of this article was changed due to an editing error*" is woefully inadequate. First of all it should appear at the top of the article not at the end but more importantly it should be available to people who have read the original misinformation including those who reproduced it. The minimum rectification required is that Haaretz should not only publish a prominent article setting out the error and the correct facts, it should also attempt to mitigate the damage by notifying organizations that have reproduced the erroneous information about the error.

*

2. The Isha L'Isha report

*The "Isha L'Isha" publication by Hedva Eyal, to which you refer, does not support the article to which I objected. It contradicts it.

For example it reproduces a chart purporting to disprove a statement by the Health Minister that using Depo Provera is very popular among women in Ethiopia. According to information received from Ms. Hedva Eyal the chart was reproduced from a WHO report about research carried out in 1997. Contrary to Ms. Eyal's conclusions however, while this WHO report shows a relatively low usage of injectables at that time, it points positively to their increased usage in the future. I quote from this report. ".. the assessment concluded that of the methods currently available through the public sector, several appear to have *the potential for increased utilization: injectables,* condoms, surgical sterilization and, possibly, Norplant and the IUD" More significantly the 1997 statistics quoted are out of date. A 2004 report by the WHO states unambiguously ".. the most popular family planning method in sub-Saharan Africa: injectable progestin-only contraceptives such as depot medroxyprogesterone acetate (DMPA, Depo Provera). Though practically unknown on the continent before the 1990s, injectable contraceptives *have rapidly become the region's method of choice*. This WHO document concludes "This practice should be scaled up in Africa and elsewhere. .". Obviously Sir, your article to which I objected is seriously misleading in completely suppressing readily available contradictory information such as the above quoted examples and because of the widespread implications of that article, I insist on the right of reply in an oped that I am prepared to submit to Haaretz setting the record straight with factual verifiable information.

Sincerely

Maurice Ostroff/p>

Dear Mr. Maurice Ostroff,

Thank you for your letter, dated 31 Dec. 2012, which was forwarded to me.

The use of the work "sterilization" in the sub headline was a result of misunderstanding by the English editor - this claim does not appear at all in the original Hebrew article, and in fact is not mentioned in the text of the English translation. The subhead was therefore corrected, and the change was noted at the bottom of the article (See http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/an-inconveivable-crime.premium-1.484110).

The TV documentary was not the article's only source. The author, Ms. Efrat Yardai, has been following the case of the use of Depo-Provera by women of Ethiopian origin since 2008. Before her article was published, she sent us the text of a serious and professional piece of research undertaken by a team from a feminist organization in 2008/2009 (see http://www.isha.org.il/upload/file/Depo_Provera%2520ENGLISH.pdf).

Ms. Yardai, who was then the spokeswoman of the Israel Association for Ethiopian Jews, has been following closely the research of the TV team, and was acquainted with the research findings - including material that was not used in the TV program.

Therefore, I find that we have duly acted according to the journalistic ethical code.

Sincerely,

Ehud Ein-Gil

Senior editor

Haaretz

Contact Maurice Ostroff at maurice@trendline.co.il


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NEW NUCLEAR SITE IN IRAN, AND JOHN KERRY'S IRANIAN SON-IN-LAW

Posted by Kenneth Timmerman, March 26, 2013

In a greeting to the Iranian people on the occasion of the traditional New Year (Nowruz) holiday last week, Secretary of State John Kerry exposed a secret that journalists and academics have been agonizing over for the past six weeks: the fact that his daughter has married an Iranian-American who has extensive family ties to Iran.

"I am proud of the Iranian-Americans in my own family, and grateful for how they have enriched my life," Kerry said in the official statement. Kerry also said he was "strongly committed to resolving" the differences between the United States and the Islamic Republic of Iran, "to the mutual benefit of both of our people."

Politicians like to keep their families off-limits to the press, a decorum enforced vigorously when it comes to politicians who are in favor with the national media but ruthlessly discarded for others. But in Kerry's case, there could be larger ramifications.

Since its inception, the FBI has vetted U.S. government officials involved in national security issues, and it generally won't grant clearances to individuals who are married to nationals of an enemy nation or have family members living in that country, for fear of divided loyalties or, more simply, blackmail.

Behrouz (Brian) Nahed and Vanessa Kerry Nahed are both resident physicians at Mass General in Boston. An Iranian government website first published pictures of the married couple in February, just as Kerry was up for confirmation hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Dr. Nahed's parents live in Los Angeles, but he has relatives still in Iran. The Iranian website reported that shortly after their marriage, the young couple visited those relatives in Iran.

Was the Iranian publication itself a subtle form of blackmail, aimed at letting Kerry know that the regime is fully aware of his son-in-law's extended family in Iran? The Islamic Republic systematically puts pressure on family members of prominent Iranian-Americans (for example, individuals who work at the Persian service of Voice of America), to make sure that they do not engage in hostile statements or activities against the Tehran regime.

Certainly, Secretary Kerry has long favored a U.S. rapprochement with the Islamic Republic. He has repeatedly appeared with groups such as the American Iranian Council (AIC), and has taken money from Iranian-Americans for his political campaigns, including at least one illegal donation from an Iranian woman who did not have a green card. So he didn't need to have an Iranian-American family member to believe that the United States should forge direct relations with the Islamic Republic or ease U.S. pressure on the regime.

Kerry may have figured that by revealing the family tie himself he could diffuse the situation, and make it more difficult for the regime to put pressure on his son-in-law's family. Of course, that's assuming Kerry in fact plans to do anything that angers the regime.

Kenneth R. Timmerman is a political writer and conservative activist who was the 2012 Republican nominee for U.S. Representative for the newly redrawn Maryland's 8th congressional district, facing the incumbent Chris Van Hollen, a Democrat. Timmerman lost to Van Hollen in a landslide, 33% to 63%. In 2000, Timmerman was a candidate for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senator from Maryland. Timmerman is executive director of the Foundation for Democracy in Iran, an organization that works to support democratic movements in Iran. He authored Shakedown: Exposing the Real Jesse Jackson. Timmerman has also written on the spread of weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East. He is currently an Expert at Wikistrat. He ran for Lieutenant Governor of Maryland on a ticket with businessman Charles Lollar in the 2014 Maryland gubernatorial election. This article appeared March 25, 2013 in the Daily Caller and is archived at
http://dailycaller.com/2013/03/25/kerry-exposes-iranian-family-tie-and-subjects-family-to-blackmail/


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IS IT THE BEGINNING OF A NEW ERA * HAPPY PESACH * WELCOMING FIREWORKS FOR OBAMA * JEWS MUST BE THE CHOSEN PEOPLE

Posted by Steven Shamrak, March 26, 2013

Let's Hope it is the Beginning of a New Era

http://www.kingscalendar.com/cgi-bin/index.cgi?action=printtopic&id=1475&curcatname=Report%20and%20Periodicals&img=In%20the%20News

The Likud and Habayit Hayehudi parties agreed in their coalition agreement to advance a controversial Basic Law subverting Israel's democratic identity to its identity as the state of the Jewish people.

The coalition agreements signed with both parties make almost no mention of the peace process... Habayit Hayehudi added a clause to the agreement requiring the government to pass a law within 90 days mandating a referendum over any agreement that includes handing over territory.

The actual Coalition Guidelines first paragraph reads:

To the Jewish people the inalienable right for a state in the Land of Israel, its historical national homeland of the Jews.

And the second reads:

Israel will strive for a peace agreement with the Palestinians in order to arrive at a diplomatic arrangement with them that will end the conflict with them. If such an agreement is achieved, it will be brought to the Government and Knesset for approval and if required by law, for a plebiscite.

One negative element is the use of "Palestinians".

A positive element, is that a "two-state solution" and the Bar-Ilan speech are not mentioned. (One can only hope that the newly emerged political leadership, Lapid and Naftali Bennett, will keep their promises and implement their Jewish national and social reforms agenda. They have a difficult task ahead, fighting Labor infested judicial system and Netanyahu's chameleon behavior!)

Inaction - More Islamic Threat for the US

http://www.wnd.com/2013/02/u-s-warned-al-qaida-hit-squads-coming/?cat_orig=world

The Islamic regime ruling Iran is in preparation for a major cyber attack very soon on major US facilities - to send a warning to the US that the regime is capable of harming America's infrastructure. It would be intended as a message to the Barack Obama administration that Iran's nuclear rights must be accepted and sanctions relieved.

A senior Iranian Revolutionary Guard commander has warned America and Europe that al-Qaida operatives will soon attack them.

The potential targets in the US include high-voltage towers to create blackouts, cell towers, water supplies, public transportation and various buildings belonging to the Defense Department and military.

Six US politicians who have promoted tougher measures against the regime are on the hit list, along with such targets as the Washington National Cathedral and Lincoln Memorial in DC and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

PA's Welcoming Fireworks for Obama

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2013/03/201332154848685422.html

Two of the four rockets fired from Gaza early Thursday landed in the town of Sderot as US President Barack Obama was making his first official visit to Israel in four years. The attack was launched from the Hamas-ruled enclave the day of visiting US President Barack Obama's side-trip to Ramallah. As a presidential candidate Obama visited in 2008 Sderot, which is frequently targeted by rocket attacks from the Gaza Strip. It was the second such rocket attack since the end of the eight-day confrontation between Israel and Hamas in November, when 933 rockets hit Israel, while another 421 were intercepted in mid-air by the US-funded Iron Dome air anti-missile system.

Food for Thought

Both countries, France and the United Kingdom , were main instigators and enforcers of the international arms blockade during the Israel 's War of Independence, hoping that advancing seven fully armed Muslim armies would finish what the Nazis started - Holocaust - genocide of Jews! But now they are threatening unilaterally break an international arm embargo and supply weapons to Islamists in Syria ! Isn't it another example of blunt international anti-Semitic hypocrisy?

Obama's Visit was not Welcomed in Ramallah

http://www.jpost.com/International/Hundreds-in-Ramallah-protest-Obamas-planned-visit-307134

Palestinian police scuffled on Tuesday with scores of demonstrators protesting against the visit of US President Barack Obama to the PA controlled Judea and Samaria. Dozens of officers and plainclothes policemen prevented the crowd from reaching the main offices of Mahmoud Abbas in Ramallah.

Fatwa Against Muslim Travel to Aksa Mosque

http://www.jpost.com/Middle-East/Fatwa-issued-against-Muslim-travel-to-Aksa-Mosque

The PA Scholars Association, a radical Islamic issued a fatwa banning foreign Muslims from visiting the Temple Mount as long as Jerusalem is under Israeli control. The fatwa came in response to reports that pilgrims from some Islamic countries have recently been visiting the Temple Mount as part of tourist trips. (It does prove again that the al-Aksa Mosque is not a Muslim holy site. Israel must issue its own 'fatwa', which would ban Muslims from entering the Temple Mount. Non-Muslims are not allowed to visit Mecca, why should Muslims be allowed visit the Holiest Jewish place?)

Americans' Sympathy for Israel is at a 22-year High

http://www.timesofisrael.com/americans-sympathy-for-israel-at-22-year-high/

Ahead of Obamas visit, a poll finds 64% relate more with the Jewish state, just 12% with Palestinians. The figures mark a 22-year high in sympathy for Israel . The last Gallup poll that showed 64% sympathy came in 1991, at the height of the First Gulf War and in the midst of the first intifada. (Israel does not need anyone's sympathy! The United States must stop sabotaging Israel 's efforts - decisively defeat enemies and reunite all Jewish ancestral land, Eretz-Israel, as it was defined even by the League of Nations in 1922!)

Egypt Worries about Its National Security

http://www.jpost.com/Defense/Report-Egypt-intensifies-Gaza-tunnels-destruction

The Egyptian army continued destroying tunnels from Gaza. There are indeed large-scale ongoing military operations underway on the Egypt-Gaza border. The Egyptian army is using modern technologies, surveillance cameras and dogs. Egyptian security interests are leading Egypt to crackdown on the tunnel smuggling. Last August, jihadists in the Sinai killed 18 Egyptian soldiers. Closing of the tunnels has led Hamas to turn to the border crossing with Israel for trade and makes Hamas more dependent on Israel. (The international press is silent about this Egyptian initiative, but anti-Israel bigots were extremely 'passionate' about every Hamas tunnel destroyed by Israel.)

Contradiction of Principle and Imposed Reality

On Day One of his visit to Israel, President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu put to rest their long dispute over an Israeli strike on Iran. In principle, Israel had the right to independently defend itself, they acknowledged, but in practice would not exercise this principle without first consulting with Washington.

Torture of Christians in Libya is not Headline Material

http://www.timesofisrael.com/christians-claim-they-were-tortured-in-libya/

Dozens of Coptic Christians were tortured inside a detention center run by a powerful militia in eastern Libya . An estimated 50 Egyptian Christians have been detained in Libya on suspicion of proselytizing. During four days of detention they were flogged, forced to take off their clothes in cold weather and stand at 3am outdoors on a floor covered with stones. (International bigots have been facilitating replacement of Arab dictators with Jihadist anarchy!)

PA's 'Monumental' Political Game

http://www.jpost.com/Middle-East/Bethlehem-municipality-removes-anti-Israel-monument-306

The Bethlehem Municipality has removed a stone monument, which ignores the existence of Israel, out of concern that US President Barack Obama would see it during his visit to the city. But rather than wait for the end of Obama visit, Arab activists together with some municipal council members, put the monument back in place. The monument depicts a map of historic Palestine without Israel!

US-backed Terrorists Behind Attacks on Israel

http://www.veteranstoday.com/2015/05/23/us-backed-terror-group-planning-nuke-attack-on-us

It was the Syrian opposition and not the Syrian government behind the firing Sunday and yesterday at the Israeli border. The Syrian official accused the jihadist opposition of attempting to draw Israel into the conflict to aid the rebels by targeting the regime of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Israeli forces shot two Tamuz rockets at the Syrian position in Tel Fares, in the southern Golan, after establishing the source of the gunfire which damaged Israeli military patrol vehicles

Quote(s) of the Week:

"All the current troubles in the world are all because of that shitty little country Israel . Why should the world be in danger of World War III because of those people?" - Daniel Bernard, French Ambassador to England, December 2001 - Anti-Semitic bigots do not care about diplomatic protocol or niceness, where Israel is concerned.

Jews Must be the Chosen People

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4098351,00.html

Studies show descendants of Jews from Medieval Germany, throughout Europe have IQ 20% higher than global average. That's 10 points higher than the "accepted" IQ of their biggest competition, Northeast Asia.

According to the Institute for Ethics & Emerging Technologies, "Since 1950, 29% of the Oslo awards have gone to Ashkenazim, even though they represent only 0.25% of humanity. Ashkenazi achievement in this arena is 117 times greater than their population." (If Jews are descendants of Kazars, as many Arabs and traditional anti-Semites claim, why is such difference of IQ from neighbouring Russian and European population?)

Steven Shamrak was born in the former Soviet Union (USSR) and participated in the Moscow Zionist "refusenik" movement and currently lives in Melbourne, Australia. He publishes internet editorial letters on the Arab-Israeli conflict. He can be reached by email at StevenShamrak.e@gmail.com


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RUTH KING'S REVIEW OF MY BOOK

Posted by David Hornik, March 27, 2013

The article below was written by Ruth King who is an editorial board member of Family Security Foundation, Inc. and a freelance writer. She has written a book and articles on gardening, and also writes a monthly column in OUTPOST, the publication of Americans for a Safe Israel. This article appeared March 26, 2013 in Ruthfully Yours and is archived at
www.ruthfullyyours.com/2013/03/26/53825/

David Hornik moved to Israel in 1984. In the preface to Choosing Life In Israel he states: "This book is both about my own choice to live in Israel and Israel's choice to live and thrive in the face of challenges."

Hornik's book is a compendium of personal and political essays he has written since he became one of Israel's most incisive journalists. Arranged in chronological order, they revisit in eloquent prose a besieged nation's triumphs and tragedies, its ancient stones and its modern cities, its beauty, its warts, the incalculable harm of mindless appeasement, and its holiness.

Hornik's heart is in Israel's history and the vision of Zionists restored to an ancient land, but his mind is also focused on politics and the hypocrisy of those whose aim is to tarnish and delegitimize the Jewish state.

In the internet age many excellent columns rapidly fade from memory, so this print anthology is a welcome reminder of events that shaped Israel's destiny and the contemporaneous reaction of a clear eyed observer.

The euphoria that accompanied President Obama's visit to Israel is reminiscent of the great optimism engendered by the Oslo Accords.

In "Intifada" written in 2003 and again in "Washington-Bibi is In. Peace is Dead" written in 2009, Hornik speaks sarcastically of the extent to which commentators and journalists disregarded the spree of terrorism that followed Oslo: "Many Israelis —if their charred bodies weren't long ago interred—have such pleasant memories of those years (following the infamous handshake between Rabin and Arafat) in which 200 Israelis died in terror attacks, a total far beyond any previous comparable period in Israeli history." He chides those architects and point men of Oslo who ignored the butchery and "...never stood up and said that perhaps this process should be stopped and the Israeli army should retake the areas from which Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Arafat's PLO terrorists were now staging repeat attacks."

In 2005 in "The Wages of Appeasement" Hornik wrote: "...treating the likes of Hitler or Arafat or Stalin or Kim Il Sung, as benign, rational individuals....who just want to improve situations, is a very basic lapse of adult functioning." And, he presciently noted, well before Israelis focused on the threat of radical Islam: "The test is whether today's democracies can stand up to the jihadist assault with its unprecedented dangers."

In "The West's Denial of Evil" (2006) He reminds us that the West continues to fail the test: "Almost five years after 9/11, after Madrid, London, the terror war against Israel, and so on, the cowardice—the lunging to pin blame on one's own side, the eager abandonment of logic and fairness while rushing to embrace moral inversion and idiocy—all this is so strong as to suggest that the West's survival is anything but certain."

I recently asked one of Israel's top journalists, an American who, like Hornik, moved there many years ago, why the foreign press, including Jews, echo the complaints and outright libels of Arabs in writing of Israel. The answer: "All the foreign journalists — and diplomats, for that matter, whose sport is bashing Israel — love being stationed here even while they are trashing us in their columns. They stay in nice places in trendy neighborhoods because they get a lot of bang for their buck. They have fun, because there's always lots to cover and lots to do in their free time. There are great bars and restaurants and lots of beautiful women and men who fawn all over them. Israelis speak English, which makes it easy for foreign correspondents to talk to them. The Government Press Office which spoon feeds them translations and arranges trips and interviews, unlike the Arab countries they cover, does not penalize or threaten or ban them for any harsh criticism of Israel. "

Here is how Hornik, in a 2011 column, describes one of those leading "calumnists" of Israel. "Tom Friedman, of course does not live in a country surrounded by neighbors where journalists are beaten and sexually abused by a mob of 'democracy supporters,' where a terror potentate threatens invasion and conquest, or where much of the population is enamored of a mass child murderer. How much easier to visit the Middle East for a jaunt, hobnobbing with the Facebook and Twitter savvy youth in Tahrir Square, and direct one's bile at Israel."

But Hornik's book is not just an indictment of Israel's foes: it is also a paean to Israel and depicts the night life, the beaches, the cafes and the intensity and joy of life in Israel. In the "Epilogue-Some Things I Love About Living in Israel", he writes of the Land of Israel: "It's a varied, beautiful, and sacred land....it exudes sacredness." Of Jerusalem, he writes: " Whenever I think of its name, there's a heart fluttering sensation. It becomes the center of one's dreams and sentiments. Perhaps it can be that, too, outside of Israel, but it's different when one has known its stones and cypresses for years. To me it exudes holiness with the same undeniable, indeed sensuous immediacy that its stones exude soft light."

I asked him why he had originally decided to move to Israel, a land he describes as "living on a roller coaster ride with deep lows and dizzying highs." This is his reply:

"I grew up in what could be called a pro-Israel home, but not a Zionist home. Moving to Israel wasn't something that was encouraged or on the agenda. I was very attracted to the idea of Israel—a distant place where Jews spoke a different language, ran things by themselves, and where the Jewish holidays—which made me feel very foreign in the part of upstate New York where we were living—were the national holidays. I also loved the Israeli songs I heard and the images of agricultural work. But all this was, at most, a latent passion, something in the background.

"In my twenties I became strongly interested in politics, with Israel's affairs as my most intense focus. My admiration grew as I came to understand better what the Jewish state was up against, how tough it had to be to survive. At the same time, I found myself amazed at how cynically—especially so soon after the Holocaust—the world's organizations, its democracies, and even U.S. administrations treated this struggling little state. These passions grew and grew until I felt my loyalty to Israel become my primary loyalty, meaning there was nothing to do but go and live there. It has been a productive and successful decision for me in every way, the best thing I've done."

Publishing this fine book is the second best thing he's done and a gift to his American readers. Buy it, read it, and give it to your friends and libraries. (it is available on Amazon in paperback and Kindle editions.)

Contact David Hornik at hornikd@actcom.co.il


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NICE SPEECH, FLAWED ANALOGY, WRONG AUDIENCE...

Posted by Gerald A. Honigman, March 17, 2013

The headline in my Daytona Beach, Florida newspaper on March 22nd read, "Obama Urges Israelis To Compromise..."

Returning to Israel after meeting with Mahmoud Abbas's latter day Arafatians (the so-called "moderates"), on Thursday, March 21st, in a speech at the Jerusalem Convention Center, President Obama urged Israelis to empathize with Arabs and recognize their "right to self-determination, their right to justice...two states for two peoples."

Continuing his plea on behalf of the "Palestinians," he often drew applause--like when he offered, "I honestly believe that if any Israeli parent sat down with these kids, they'd say, 'I want these kids to succeed, I want them to prosper, I want them to have opportunities just like my kids do'...The Palestinian people's right to self-determination and their justice must also be recognized."

Much of what the President said sounded reasonable. But his words were delivered to the wrong audience, and his analogy was seriously flawed.

For starters, any objective study of the past century would show--despite all the real and alleged sins that Israel has been accused of--that Jews bent over backwards, sideways, and forwards to arrive at an honest compromise with Arabs in their struggle over the land.

The problem has not been an unwillingness--as Obama suggests--of Jews to grant Arabs "justice." It has been--without doubt--just the opposite.

Indeed any justice granted to others, besides Arabs, in the region is perceived by Arabs as being an injustice to themselves. They call the potential birth of Kurdistan, for example, "another Israel." Keep in mind that Kurds predate Arabs in both allegedly "Arab" Syria and Iraq by millennia.

Why is the creation of a 22nd state for Arabs sacred (their second, not first, in the original April 25,1920 Mandate of Palestine), yet Obama never speaks in such terms regarding the plight of scores of millions of truly stateless peoples in the region--folks like Kurds and Imazighen/"Berbers," whose own hopes in the post-Ottoman era after World War I were squashed largely by Arab nationalism in its various stripes. Unlike Arabs, these folks still don't have one state yet let alone almost two dozen others. Has the American president ever lectured an Arab audience about this travesty of justice? Has he ever told Arabs, unabashedly to their faces as he freely does with Jews, that if they expect to have a 22nd state of their own officially recognized that they would have to grant other peoples that same recognition?

When the Ottoman Empire fell apart after World War I, many different peoples ruled by the Turks for centuries saw a chance, in the new age of nationalism, to rule themselves. A popular saying in diplomatic circles at the time went something like ..."Arabia for the Arabians, Judea for the Jews, Armenia for the Armenians, and Kurdistan for the Kurds."

Unfortunately, Arabs didn't quite see things this way.

Since their own much earler imperial, Caliphal conquests had them replacing the Byzantine and Persian empires and ruling the whole region for a time, they saw themselves as the only legitimate rulers of what they call "purely Arab patrimony."

So, forget about Obama's "justice" for Kurds, Imazighen ("Berbers"), black Africans in the Sudan and elsewhere, Copts, Assyrians, native "kilab yahud" (Jew dogs), and so forth. Frequenty, those folks' languages and cultures have been simply outlawed in the forced Arabization process--still going on to this very day.

Contrary to Obama's assertions, the truth is that it has been the Arabs themselves who have repeatedly insisted that they would settle for nothing less than 100% of the territorial pie when it came to a discussion of what to do with that portion of the former Ottoman territory which became the original Mandate of Palestine.

It has been Arabs--not Jews--who have repeatedly refused to compromise...yet check out the title of that newspaper headline again at the beginning of this analysis. Also bear in mind that the Minutes of the Permanent Mandates Commission and other solid documentation show that many, if not most, Arabs were newcomers themselves into the Mandate--so much so that the very definition of the word "refugee" had to be revised by UNRWA to accomodate them after their invasion of a reborn Israel backfired in 1948.

To deal with the competition between nationalisms in the Mandate, the Brits began by chopping off almost 80% of the total area and handing it over to Arab nationalism in 1922, giving birth to what would later be renamed Jordan. So, right from the get-go, Jews' were restricted to some 20% of the original area that they had earlier been promised access to.

In 1947, another partition was proposed which would have divided the 20% of the land left as of 1922 into a second Arab state, and a tiny one for the Jews. Despite potentially winding up with close to 90% of Palestine, Arabs rejected the offer because, once again, in their eyes, Jews (or Imazighen, Kurds, Copts, Assyrians, etc.) were entitled to absolutely nothing. Keep in mind that over one half of Israel's Jews are from refugee families who fled the so-called "Arab" world.

Despite some nice words, Obama delivered them to the wrong people. He needed to offer his advice to an Arab audience--not to applauding Jews, especially starry-eyed, naive college students. Jews have worked towards achieving a just solution which took into account the cause of their enemies long before the President was born. Had the Arabs done likewise, this conflict would have been resolved decades ago.

But now, however, let's turn to perhaps the worse offense of all--whether done deliberately or in ignorant innocence.

In discussing an alleged "two state solution," Obama and others play right into the hands of the Arabs' deliberate deception.

You see, there are two legitimate parties to this conflict--Arabs and Jews.

Yet, even the most "moderate" of Arabs insist on getting not one share of the "Palestine" pie, but two. Palestine, by the way, is the name the Roman Emperor Hadrian bestowed on the land of Judaea after the Jews' second costly revolt. It was named for the Jews' historic enemies, the non-Semitic Philistines from the islands near Crete. Open http://q4j-middle-east.com to see a Judea Capta coin and what ancient Rome called the land prior to the Bar Kochba Revolt.

Even in the most "moderate" Arabs' count, they demand one portion for "Arabs" and another for "Palestinians"--or, as I described this earlier, have demanded that in this geographical addition problem, 1 + 1 = 3...not 2 (see http://www.virtualjerusalem.com/blogs.php?Itemid=4925).

Think about this a minute...If Jews played this same renaming game, they could call themselves something different and then demand dozens of states too...http://www.newmediajournal.us/staff/honigman/2008/11192008.htm. As could Kurds and others as well. "Hey, we're not really Kurds--we're Irbilians, Mosulians, Kirkukians, Sulimanyians, Mahabadians, Qamishlians, Diyarbakirians, and so forth."

Get the picture?

No, formerly,truly stateless Jews and currently stateless peoples like Kurds and Imazighen are not the same as renamed, allegedly stateless "Palestinians." The latter are part of the greater Arab family which has nearly two dozen states to call its own. Furthermore, the latter have largely been carved out of mostly non-Arab peoples' lands--lands in which other native peoples' very languages and cultures have often been outlawed in the forced Arabization process.

Now, are there different Arab groups within the greater Arab family?

Sure...just like there are many different sub-groups within the Jewish or Kurdish or Amazigh families of nations.

But the possession of multiple sub-groups does not give Arabs the right to deny all other peoples their own share of justice in the region. Yet, that has always been the Arab game plan--and what the American President promotes in such speeches as the one he recently gave in Jerusalem.

1 + 1 = 2...not 3.

Arabs are entitled to one share of the Palestine pie--not two. They must decide among themselves how they want to share rule over their one part of "Palestine.

Whether this translates into a merger of parts of Judea and Samaria--"West Bank"--with Jordan (the most sensible yet unlikely solution), or whether a tiny, second Arab state is created in Gaza, Judea, and Samaria after Israel gets the absolutely essential compromise in the territories promised by the final draft of UNSC Resolution 242, the choice must not leave the sole state of the Jews as vulnerable as in the days prior to the 1967 war when Israel was a mere 9-15-mile wide rump state of a nation.

I hope that the leaders of Israel made this very clear before Mr. Obama returned to Washington.

Chag sameach and Happy Easter to my Jewish and Christian friends.

Contact Gerald A. Honigman at honigman6@msm.com or http://www.geraldahonigman.com


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THE THREAT OF ISLAMIC BETRAYAL

Posted by Raymond Ibrahim, March 27, 2013

A recent assassination attempt in Turkey offers valuable lessons for the West concerning Islamist hate—and the amount of deceit and betrayal that hate engenders towards non-Muslim "infidels."

Caption Text

Last January, an assassination plot against a Christian pastor in Turkey was thwarted. Police arrested 14 suspects. Two of them had been part of the pastor's congregation for more than a year, feigning interest in Christianity. One went so far as to participate in a baptism. Three of the suspects were women. "These people had infiltrated our church and collected information about me, my family and the church and were preparing an attack against us," said the pastor in question, Emre Karaali, a native Turk: "Two of them attended our church for over a year and they were like family."

And their subversive tactics worked: "The 14 [suspects] had collected personal information, copies of personal documents, created maps of the church and the pastor's home, and had photos of those who had come to Izmit [church] to preach."

Consider the great lengths these Islamic supremacists went to in order to murder this Christian pastor: wholesale deception, attending non-Islamic places of worship and rites to the point that "they were like family" to the Christian they sought to betray and kill. While some may think such acts are indicative of un-Islamic behavior, they are, in fact, doctrinally permissible and historically demonstrative.

Islamic teaching permits deceits, ruses, and dispensations. For an in depth examination, read about the doctrines of taqiyya, tawriya, and taysir. Then there is Islam's overarching idea of niyya (or "intention"), best captured by the famous Muslim axiom, "necessity makes permissible the prohibited." According to this teaching, the intentions behind Muslim actions determine whether said actions are permissible or not.

From here one may understand the many incongruities of Islam: lying is forbidden—unless the intention is to empower Islam; killing women and children is forbidden—but permissible during the jihad; suicide is forbidden—unless the intention is to kill infidels, in which case it becomes a "martyrdom operation."

Thus, feigning interest in Christianity, attending church for over a year, participating in Christian baptisms, and becoming "like family" to an infidel—all things forbidden according to Islamic Sharia—become permissible in the service of the jihad on Christianity.

History offers several examples of Muslims feigning friendship and loyalty to non-Muslims only to break faith at the opportune moment, beginning with Islam's founder. When a non-Muslim poet, Ka'b ibn Ashraf, offended Muhammad, the prophet exclaimed: "Who will kill this man who has hurt Allah and his prophet?" A young Muslim named Ibn Maslama volunteered on condition that, to get close enough to Ka'b to assassinate him, he be allowed to deceive the poet. The prophet agreed. Ibn Maslama went to Ka'b feigning friendship; the poet trusted his sincerity and took him into his confidence. Soon thereafter, the Muslim youth returned with a friend and, while the trusting poet's guard was down, they slaughtered him.

Likewise, Muhammad commanded a convert from an adversarial tribe to conceal his new Muslim identity and go back to his tribe—which he cajoled with a perfidious "You are my stock and my family, the dearest of men to me"—only to betray them to Islam.

Such are the lengths some Muslims—past and present—go to in order to win the trust of those infidels they mean to betray. For example, in October 2012 in Somalia, a nation that has nothing in common with Turkey, neither race, language, nor culture—only Islam—this same story of betrayal recently took place. When a Muslim sheikh became suspicions that a woman in his village had converted to Christianity, he sent his wife to the apostate, instructing her to pretend to be interested in learning about Christianity. The trusting Christian woman was only too happy to share the Gospel with the feigning Muslim woman. After it was verified that the woman was Christian, the sheikh and other Muslims went to her house and shot her dead.

Such betrayals can only be understood in the context of the growing hate felt for infidels, Christians at the top of the list. In Turkey alone—a relatively "moderate" nation in comparison to other Muslim nations like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt—recent anecdotes of hate include the slaying of an 85-year-old Christian Armenian woman, who was repeatedly stabbed to death in her apartment. A crucifix was carved onto her naked corpse. This is the fifth attack in the past two months against elderly Christian women (one lost an eye), even though Christians make less than 1% of Turkey's population.

The Turkish pastor targeted for assassination also explained the great enmity felt for Christians: "There is hate and this hate feeling continues from people here." Muslim children often curse and throw rocks at his church and its congregation—which consists of only 20 members.

Then of course there was the Malatya massacre. In April 2007, several terrorists attacked a publishing house in Malatya, Turkey, for distributing Bibles. They bound, tortured, and stabbed for several hours three of its Christian employees before slitting their throats. Evidence also later emerged that the massacre was part of a much larger operation, including involvement of elements in Turkey's military. One unidentified suspect later said: "We didn't do this for ourselves, but for our religion [Islam].... Let this be a lesson to enemies of our religion."

Indeed, the true "lesson" is best captured by the following question: If some Muslims, including women, are willing to go to such lengths to eliminate the already ostracized and downtrodden non-Muslim minorities in their midst—attending churches and becoming like "family members" to those infidels they intend to kill—how much deceit and betrayal must some of the smiling Muslim activists of America, especially those in positions of power and influence, be engaging in to subvert and eliminate the most dangerous of all infidels, the original Great Satan?

And yet, according to the Obama administration, the only Islamic-related threat Americans need to worry about is al-Qaeda—open, bearded terrorists screaming "death to America" while toting their Kalashnikovs—not, of course, that the administration allows that al-Qaeda has anything to do with "radical extremist Islamism," let alone Islam proper.

Raymond Ibrahim is a Middle East and Islam specialist and author of Crucified Again: Exposing Islam's New War on Christians (2013) and The Al Qaeda Reader (2007). His writings have appeared in a variety of media, including the Los Angeles Times, Washington Times, Jane's Islamic Affairs Analyst, Middle East Quarterly, World Almanac of Islamism, and Chronicle of Higher Education. He was born and raised in the U.S. by Coptic Egyptian parents born and raised in the Middle East, which has provided him with equal fluency in English and Arabic. His understanding of the two the Western and Middle Eastern mindsets positions him to explain the Middle Eastern culture to the West. This article appeared March 27, 2013 and is archived at
http://www.raymondibrahim.com/islam/the-threat-of-islamic-betrayal/


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APOLOGY TO TURKISH PRIME MINISTER

Posted by Dave Alpern, March 27, 2013

We would all do well to remember that only about a week before Netanyahu's "apology," the same Erdoğan denounced Zionism as a "crime against humanity." At the very least, Bibi should have forcefully demanded a full apology for this as a precondition for this miserable and craven "apology" to such a breathtakingly two-faced and hypocritical Jew-hater. But alas, we Jews just can't stand up for ourselves properly and have yet again shamed and humiliated ourselves in another PR screw-up. :-((

An open letter to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan - Prime Minister of Turkey

Dear Mister Prime Minister:

On behalf of all of the people of Israel, I would like to apologize to you for the cowardice and fathomless idiocy of the Prime Minister of Israel. As you know, this weekend Benjamin Netanyahu sent you an "apology" for Israel having defended itself against the genocidal terrorists who attacked Israeli soldiers armed only with paintguns when they boarded the terrorist "flotilla" ship that you sent out to challenge Israel's naval blockade of the Hamas enclave in Gaza. Netanyahu spoke only for himself when he apologized to you for Israel's defending itself and its people, this two generations after the Holocaust. He does not represent anyone at all in the country when it comes to this "apology." No one else in the country, except for some anti-Israel radical leftists with tenure at the universities, agrees that Israel owes you an apology for defending its people.

Actually, on behalf of all REAL Israelis, I would like to apologize to you for the fact that ONLY nine terrorists were killed by Israeli troops on the flotilla ship when Israeli soldiers were savagely attacked by Turkish and other terrorists. I would like to apologize for the fact that Israeli did NOT torpedo and sink the terrorist ships trying to break the blockade and bring in aid to the Hamas Nazis. I would like to apologize for the fact that Israel has a Prime Minister who is so clueless, insensitive and divorced from Jewish history that he would consider buying a few moments of diplomatic calm with a Moslem aggressor by shaming his entire country with an "apology" to Turkey, exhibiting one of the most disgraceful acts by a Jew in all of history, and all this just hours before the Jewish holiday of national liberation, Passover.

Beyond that, I really do think that Israel owes an apology for NOT having done much more to draw the world's attention to the illegal occupation and destruction by Turkey of the jewel of Cyprus, the city of Famagusta. Israel sat by while Turkey conquered 40% of Cyprus and transferred tens of thousands of its own people as illegal settlers to the island. And for that I apologize. And since you have spent so much time in recent years denouncing Israel as an occupier, I think Israel owes an apology to the world for not helping to end the illegal Turkish occupation of the great ancient Greek capital of Constantinople, now under an illegal Saracen occupation that has continued for far too long. It is high time that Constantinople be returned to its true heritage and its legal owners, the Greek people. It is less than a hundred years since the city, along with Smyrna and other Greek homelands, was almost liberated by the Greeks, who were only to be blocked by the Turkish military aggressors, the mass murderers of the Armenians.

So Mister Prime Minister, as you see, I am afraid that Israelis DO owe the world quite a few apologies.

On behalf of the non-pusillanimous citizens of Israel, I remain

Most sincerely yours,

Prof. Steven Plaut

Contact Dave Alpern at daveyboy@bezeqint.net


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STRUK:YOU CAN HELP SAMARIA, BY VISITING

Posted by Arutz Sheva, March 27, 2013

The article below was written by Maayana Miskin who has lived in Israel since 2003 and is a student of political science. She lives in Haifa with her family. This article appeared March 27, 2013 in Arutz Sheva and is archived at
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/166597#.VbagwLyVsWM

MK Struk says that visits to Judea and Samaria provide a real boost to Israelis in the region.

Caption Text

MK Orit Struk (Bayit Yehudi) called Wednesday for Israelis to visit Samaria (Shomron) during the intermediate days of Passover.

"Take advantage of the fact that these sites are open to visitors to come to Sebastia, with its ancient ruins from the days of King Ahab and Herod," she urged.

The more people visit Judea and Samaria, the more likely it is that popular sites will be open to Israelis on a more permanent basis, she noted.

Visits also "strengthen the ties between the People of Israel and the Land of Israel," she said.

An event is being held Wednesday in Samaria in the ruins of Homesh, one of four communities that was destroyed in the 2005 Disengagement.

Many of those present will sign the Homesh Pact, a document calling on the government to "right the wrong" of the Disengagement from northern Samaria by allowing the community of Homesh to be rebuilt.

Contact Arutz Sheva at news@israelnationalnews.com


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THE GOLAN HEIGHTS' BIBLICAL AND POST-BIBLICAL HISTORY

Posted by Victor Sharpe, March 27, 2013

Caption Text

Even as modern day Syria is convulsed in a murderous and bloody civil war with over 70,000 dead and thousands more maimed; even as its tyrant, Bashir al-Assad, fights for his political and physical life; even with all this, he nevertheless spews forth his hatred of Israel and his call to take away the Golan Heights from the Jewish state. But so do those "rebels" who are fighting him and thus remind us of the famous aphorism: "better the devil you know."

Indeed, enormous numbers of jihadis and Islamists are pouring into the vacuums left by retreating Syrian forces. Al Qaida, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, ad nauseum, are already occupying sensitive areas next to the Jordanian and Israel borders. In particular, these jihadis have fired at Israeli jeeps and soldiers on the Golan and Israel has been forced to respond to the Muslim aggression.

Those of us who have stood on the Golan's 1,700 foot steep escarpment, are struck by its immense strategic value overlooking Israel's fertile Hula Valley and the beautiful harp shaped lake below, called by its Hebrew name, Kinneret (the Sea of Galilee).

But during Syria's occupation of the territory, no agriculture of any significance took place and no restoration of its terrain was ever undertaken. Instead, the Golan was a Syrian army artillery encampment whose sole purpose was to deliberately rain an endless barrage of deadly shells down upon Israeli farmers, fishermen and villagers below.

So what is the history of the Golan Heights and what is its overwhelming biblical significance to the reconstituted Jewish state? Perhaps we should return primarily to the biblical books of Joshua and Numbers.

Before the Tribes of Israel would cross the River Jordan and enter the Promised Land, the first among them had already taken possession of territory east of the River Jordan. These were the half tribes of Manasseh, Gad and Reuben who liberated the Bashan and Gilead from the Amorites. This territory largely exists today in the Arab state of Jordan.

But Biblical Bashan also incorporates today's Golan Heights. Gilead is the fertile land, which lies in what is the north eastern area of today's Kingdom of Jordan:

" ... a little balm, and a little honey, spices and myrrh, nuts and almonds" (Gen 43:11.)

It was Canaan, west of the Jordan, (including today's so-called West Bank) which would pose the formidable challenge to Joshua bin Nun, the general leading the Israelite tribes. So it was that Moses, the Lawgiver, spoke to the children of Gad and Reuben thus:

"Shall your brethren go to war, and shall you sit here?" (Numbers 32:6) The leaders of the two tribes replied that they would indeed send their warriors west into Canaan and fight alongside their brethren while their families would remain behind.

"We will build sheepfolds here for our cattle and cities for our little ones. But we ourselves will go ready armed before the children of Israel until we have brought them unto their place: and our little ones shall dwell in fenced cities because of the inhabitants of the land. We will not return unto our houses until the children of Israel have inherited every man his inheritance." (Numbers 32: 16-18)

The story of reconstituted Israel and its people is mirrored in the biblical story of those ancient ancestors. The young men and women of modern Israel have gone again and again from their homes; be they villages, towns or cities, to the borders and established communities there in times of danger and peril, just like those young men did from the biblical tribes of Gad and Reuben.

Victor Sharpe is a freelance writer and author of several books including The Blue Hour, a collection of short stories, and Volumes One and Two and Three of Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish state. This article appeared March 27, 2013 in Family Security Matters and is archived at
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/the-golan-heights-biblical-and-post-biblical-history?f=must_reads#ixzz2OkG6YN42


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NO NEED FOR APOLOGIZED BY TURKEY (IN TURKISH TOO)

Posted by Udi Schayat, March 27, 2013

My friend reminded me of a shameful episode that the Turks are responsible for it, which took place during World War II. So shameful, so not to forget it and have to upload it. No Turks, only, should be ashamed. The whole world needs!

On December 16, 1941, came from Romanian Black Sea steamboats called'' stroma'' headed to Israel, through the Straits of the Dardanelles. On board were 103 children, 272 women and 393 men (total of 768 Jewish people), who escaped the horrors of the fascist regime of Antonescu in Romania.

Near the coast of Turkey, the engine stopped and the ship tossed by the waves. Turkish authorities towed the ship to a nearby port, however, the immigrants left quarantine and offered them refuge.

Istanbul Jewish immigrants provided food for two months, but the food ran out. Jews around the world sought to find a solution to the immigrants, with no results. Then, the Turkish government ordered the crew shaky, leaving the Turkish port.

Got none done, the Turks pull the small ship with all people on board with a tug boat out of the Turkish port, outside the territorial waters of Turkey in the Black Sea, a distance of 8 km from the beach''. The ship left without food and water, hundreds of people crowded on board.

Unsuccessful attempt was made to correct the ship's engines and it rattled the rough sea, helpless.

The next morning there was a tremendous explosion. Perhaps the ship hit a mine, or any other options are there (?)

The explosion caused enormous damage. The ship immediately went into a tailspin and from 768 people who were on board, survived two only : immigrant named David Stolyar and one of the officers of the ship. The two managed to climb on a wooden beam.

Bitterly cold water, in the morning, David realized that the officer did not survive and died. David found and picked up by a fishing boat and he was the only survivor left to tell the world about the shameful behavior of the Turks.

It was the worst disaster in the history of illegal immigration. The huge peninsula Turks called Asia Minor, a continent right, not a temporary shelter to refugees from fascism. Turks expelled the immigrants to their deaths.

We do not need an apology from the Turks! We will not forget nor forgive!

If anyone of my readers know Turkish - please send this message to any Turks he know and to Erdogan, to shame him too.

Lawyer Gideon Rosenblum

Contact Udi Schayat at udischayat@yahoo.com


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MUSLIM LEADER: 'WE ARE ABOVE THE LAW'

Posted by Act for America, March 27, 2013

The article below was written by John Griffing who is a frequent contributor to American Thinker and is published across an array of conservative media, both in the realm of commentary and research. Read more at http://www.wnd.com/author/jgriffing/#euOd7z6wilAmtQwk.99. This article appeared March 03, 2013 in WND and is archived at
http://www.wnd.com/2013/03/we-are-above-the-law-of-the-land/#7QLzhvWduD4lHW6I.99

Muslims living in America should not be bound by U.S. law, according to a leader of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, who delivered the controversial message to a crowd at a Muslim rally in Austin, Texas.

"If we are practicing Muslims, we are above the law of the land," said Mustafa Carroll, executive director of the Dallas-Fort Worth CAIR branch.

The rally in Austin was part of a nationwide effort to hold "Muslim Capitol Day" events.

According to the event website, Muslims from around Texas went to the capitol to "promote civic and political activism throughout the wider Muslim community."

The organizers said one major issue discussed "was the recent House and Senate bill proposals involving the implementation of 'anti-Shariah' legislation, where the First Amendment rights and freedoms of Muslims would ultimately be hindered."

Critics argue Shariah prohibits other faiths from free exercise of religion when enforced, giving freedom only to Muslims.

Carroll's statement was similar to a statement allegedly made by CAIR co-founder and former chairman Omar M. Ahmad. He was paraphrased by a reporter saying, "Islam isn't in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant" and the Quran "should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth."

Carroll began joking about the widespread concern about Shariah, the religious code that governs Muslim civil and political life.

"We tried to downplay Shariah, because we didn't want to give the other side any excitement for being here," he said.

He dismissed critics who express concern about Shariah, calling them "anti-foreign."

"When you even say the word Shariah, people get nervous. We are not advocating for Shariah. We are not trying to make Shariah the law of the land," he said.

Carroll claimed Muslims only want the "right to practice our faith."

But he also said, "If you understand Shariah, the foundation of our faith ... how we treat our neighbor, how we treat our parents ... how we participate in society, all of that is part of Shariah."

Carroll is on record defending Hamas, classified by the U.S. as a terrorist group.

"I think you can only blame Hamas for so long. It takes two to tango. And I think, you know, that what we've heard for a number of years is this terrorist, terrorist, terrorist, terrorist, Hamas, Hamas, Hamas, was not just Hamas," he's said.

At CAIR's Dallas banquet in 2007, Carroll denied the Quran is the source of terrorism.

"Look at the true cause of the terrorism. It's not somebody is reading a book, reading a Quran, and then go out and say, 'Well, the Quran told me to blow this up. I'm gonna blow it up.' The cause, the root cause of terrorism is oppression. The root cause of terrorism is oppression."

Rev. Ronnie C. Lister, a social justice activist from the Houston area, spoke at Muslim Capitol Day.

"This country belongs to you. This state house is your state house. The police department is your police department," he told the crowd. "This land is your land. ... God is on your side ... this is your house. [It] does not belong to the Republicans. It does not belong to the Democrats. It does not belong to just Americans. It belongs to all of us!

"We are looking for the day when a Muslim will become president of the United States; you heard it from me," Lister said.

Islamic expert Frank Gaffney, founder of the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C., told WND that Carroll's declaration of Islamic supremacy was consistent with Muslim teaching.

"When you hear one of their speakers say, we are above the law of the land — take it to the bank. That is what they really believe," he said. "That is what all Muslims believe. That is what Shariah teaches. To the extent that Muslims adhere to Shariah, they are obliged to try and impose it on the rest of us."

"The organized spread of Shariah is what Gaffney calls "civilization jihad."

Gaffney, assistant secretary of defense for international security policy in the Reagan administration, noted CAIR was founded in 1993 to s

Contact Act for America at actforamerica@donationnet.net


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NO MONEY FOR TRAFFIC CONTROL TOWERS, W.H. TOURS, SOLDIERS' PAY, EEC. BUT $700 MIL AVAILABLE FOR PALESTINIAN TERRORISTS AND MILLIONS FOR THE OBAMA'S CONSTANT VACATIONING.

Posted by Sergio Hadar Tezza, March 27, 2013

The article below was written by Daniel Greenfield who is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, and a New York writer focusing on radical Islam. This article appeared March 24, 2013 in Frontpage Magazine and is archived at
http://www.frontpagemag.com/point/182871/no-money-traffic-control-towers-700-mil-available-daniel-greenfield

Caption Text

Budgets are all about priorities. Some things don't matter, like 20,000 United States Marines, White House tours, the space program and air traffic control towers.

But some things do matter... like aiding terrorists.

The United States has quietly unblocked almost $500 million in aid to the Palestinian Authority which had been frozen by Congress for months, a top US official said Friday.

"To date, we have moved $295.7 million in fiscal year 2012 money... and $200 million in fiscal year 2013 assistance," State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland told reporters.

The Obama administration also notified Congress in late February that it was seeking a further $200 million to fund US Agency for International Development (USAID) programs for the Palestinians, she said.

And that brings us up to the $700 million that Kerry was discussing last month.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry is fighting to send the Palestinian Authority nearly $700 million in aid, despite major budget cuts and a fierce debate over where existing money should go.

"The Secretary feels extremely strongly that it is time now to get this support to the Palestinian Authority," said State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland.

Kerry is working with lawmakers to "get appropriated money released for the Palestinian Authority because we think it's very, very important that they remain effective in supporting the needs of the Palestinian people," Nuland said.

The question is should the needs of the American people come before those of the Palestinian people... or should the needs of the terrorists come before those of Americans?

Kerry and the rest of Obama Inc. clearly believe that Palestinians should come before Americans.

Contact Sergio Hadar Tezza at nutella59@ucla.edu


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APPEASING TERROR FLOTILLAS?

Posted by UCI, March 27, 2013

The article below was written by Globes/Lilach Weissman and JPost.com staff. It appeared March 27, 2013 in the Jerusalem Post and is archived at
http://www.jpost.com/Diplomacy-and-Politics/Turkey-demands-1m-for-each-flotilla-fatality-307840

Ankara, J'lem at odds on compensation, as Israel is only willing to pay $100,000 for each Turk killed in 'Mavi Marmara' raid; Turkish PM says Turkey will become more involved in Israeli-Palestinian peace talks.

Caption Text

There are huge gaps between Israel and Turkey over the level of compensation to be paid to the families of the nine Turks that were killed in the Mavi Marmara IDF raid. While Turkey is demanding $1 million for each person killed, Israel is prepared to pay $100,000.

The nine Turkish activists died when IDF commandos boarded the Mavi Marmara, which was part of a flotilla attempting to break the Gaza blockade in May 2010.

On Friday, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu spoke with his Turkish counterpart Tayyip Erdogan, voicing regret for the loss of life in the Mavi Marmara incident, and apologizing for any mistakes that led to the death of nine Turkish activists. Breaking a three-year deadlock, the two agreed to normalize relations.

Turkey conditioned the normalizing of relations with an official apology, compensation for the bereaved families of the nine Turkish activists, and the removal of the Israeli Gaza blockade.

Minister of Justice Tzipi Livni is mediating the compensation talks between Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu and Israel. She has spoken to Davutoglu over the past few days and the two countries have agreed to set up a joint committee to discuss the amount of compensation to be paid.

Technical teams that will discuss this issue — the Israeli team led by Joseph Ciechanover and the Turkish one by Foreign Ministry Undersecretary Feridun Sinirlioglu, a former ambassador to Israel — are expected to begin meetings this week. In past negotiations between the two countries over the compensation issue, the idea was for Israel to pay directly into a Turkish fund set up for the families, and not to the families individually.

On Tuesday, Erdogan told the Turkish parliament that now that relations with Israel were on the mend, Ankara is going to become more involved in "solving the Palestinian question and thus bringing about a new equation."

He also added that the wording of Netanyahu's apology was done under US President Barack Obama's supervision, and that the phone conversation was recorded and written statements were issued by all three parties, according to Turkish daily Hurriyet.

Contact UCI at voices@unitycoalitionforisrael.org


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NOW OBAMA NEEDS TO PRESSURE TURKEY

Posted by Jonathan Schanzer, March 27, 2013

In a surprise development on Friday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu issued an apology to Turkish Prime Minister Yayyip Erdoğan over the ill-fated May 2010 flotilla conflict on the high seas between Israeli commandos and Turkish-backed activists seeking to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza.

The clashes left nine Turks dead. Erdoğan has been demanding an apology ever since, while ramping up his anti-Israel rhetoric — most recently, comparing Zionism with fascism. With relations at their nadir, the Israelis had nothing to lose by issuing this apology — Netanyahu's apology was clearly a concession to U.S. President Barack Obama, who just garnered a great deal of goodwill during his much-heralded trip to Israel.

But if Obama plays his cards right, he should make demands of Erdoğan, too. The relationship between the two men is already warm. According to the Los Angeles Times, "Obama has logged more phone calls to Erdogan than to any world leader except British Prime Minister David Cameron." But the president has ignored the fact that Turkey has also become one of the more troubling epicenters of illicit financial activity.

After delivering the Israeli apology to Turkey, Obama has an opportunity to demand that Erdoğan cease this activity.

For one, Turkey is believed to have emerged in recent years as one of the primary patrons of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas. In December 2011, Erdoğan reportedly "instructed the Ministry of Finance to allocate $300 million to be sent to Hamas' government in Gaza." Since then, Turkey has reportedly provided Hamas with funds for hospitals, mosques, and schools in the Gaza Strip, with other resources to help rebuild the territory, particularly after the Hamas war with Israel in November 2012.

Turkey is not Hamas' only sponsor, of course. There is Qatar, which has been on a regional spending spree. And there is also Iran, which has had a difficult time meeting its sponsorship obligations, thanks to Western sanctions designed to derail its nuclear program.

Sanctions won't work, however, if Turkey has its way.

Iran has apparently been benefiting handsomely from Turkey's Halkbank. According to Turkey's Deputy Prime Minister Ali Babacan, "In essence, gold exports [to Iran] end up like payments for our natural gas purchases." In August 2012, according to Reuters, "nearly $2 billion worth of gold was sent to Dubai on behalf of Iranian buyers." Halkbank acknowledged that it was responsible for processing the payments. Despite increased scrutiny, the Turkish newspaper Zaman noted in January that the Iranian "gas-for-gold" was still going.

Halkbank, meanwhile, has reportedly helped Iran on other scores. In February 2012, the Wall Street Journal reported that Halkbank was processing "payments from third parties for Iranian goods." This included "payments for Indian refiners unable to pay Tehran for imported oil through their own banking system for fear of retribution from Washington."

In November 2012, a Turkish banking watchdog announced Halkbank had curbed its illicit dealings. But the bank's website clearly boasts of a representative office in Tehran.

To be fair, Halkbank is almost certainly not the only Turkish institution to have dabbled in sanctions busting schemes. In November 2012, the Turkish newspaper Zaman noted that there are currently over 2,000 Iranian companies registered in Turkey. How many of these companies have ties to the Iranian government? How many of them throw off cash to the regime? More importantly, how many of them help Tehran procure dual-use materials that brings the Iranian nuclear bomb one step closer to reality?

As it turns out, at least one does. German police recently exposed a network that supplied Iran with nuclear industry components through Turkey. But the announcement came only after hundreds of components for Iran's Arak heavy water nuclear reactor made their way to Iran undetected.

Turkey can, in this case, claim that it had no knowledge of this network. But that won't fly when it comes to the Turkish branches of Bank Mellat, an Iranian bank sanctioned by the U.S. and the EU. Turkey continues to allow the bank to operate on its soil because the United Nations has yet to designate it. According to Zaman, as recently as April 2012, other Iranian banks have also applied to operate in Turkey's financial market.

Part of the problem is Turkey's legal regime. For more than five years, the Financial Action Task Force (the U.N. of terrorism finance) warned that Ankara had neither adequately criminalized terrorism finance nor established sufficient infrastructure to identify and freeze terrorist assets. FATF first flagged the problem, via a mutual evaluation, in 2007. Ankara did nothing for five years, until FATF threatened to add Turkey to the black list, which currently only includes Iran and North Korea. Erdogan and the Turkish parliament eeked out legislation and averted the blacklisting just shy of the February 22 deadline.

The result of this five year blackout and cavalier attitude to sanctioned Iranian financial institutions: Turkey was not bound to any laws, despite international pressure to fight terrorism or illicit nuclear proliferation. With over 2,000 Iranian companies involved in anything from energy to commodities, real estate to finance to the automotive sector, the potential for mischief is enormous. Had Turkey put its house in order, it might have been able to prevent significant embarrassment.

Turkey watchers quietly concede that more embarrassment is likely on the horizon. From Hezbollah assets to money-changers and gold dealers who do Iran's bidding to government backing of jihadists in Syria, Turkey will remain an illicit finance problem for the foreseeable future.

Thanks to his ability to deliver Israel's apology, Obama has increased leverage to reverse this trend.

The article above was written by Jonathan Schanzer and Emanuele Ottolenghi. Jonathan Schanzer, a former terrorism finance analyst at the U.S Department of the Treasury, is vice president for research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, where Emanuele Ottolenghi, author of 'The Pasdaran: Inside Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps,' is a senior fellow. Contact Jonathan Schanzer at list@pundicity.com. This article appeared March 27, 2013 in Pundicity Informed Opinion Review and is archived at


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JIHAD IN SYRIA, PART II

Posted by Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi, March 27, 2013

In my previous article I examined the question of how jihadists in Syria conceive of their jihad against the Assad regime. But how does the regime portray jihad?

Earlier this month, many observers were surprised by a statement issued by the Supreme Iftaa Council, whose leader is Mufti Ahmad Hassoun, the most senior Sunni cleric in Syria as Grand Mufti, with strong ties to the regime. The council's fatwa was a call for jihad to defend Assad's government.

I provide my translation of the statement below, as quoted by the Syrian Arab News Agency and reproduced on a pro-regime site called Zanobia (named after the empress of the Palmyrene Empire that had seceded from Rome in the Crisis of the Third Century: an apt symbol for the regime's professed stance of 'resistance' to supposed Western imperialism). I highlight parts in bold for my own emphasis:

"God Almighty has said: Those who have obeyed God and the messenger after injury has struck them. To those among them [i.e. the believers] who have done good and feared God is a great reward. Those to whom the people have said, 'The people had indeed gathered against you [i.e. the believers].' But it increased them in faith and they said, 'Our reliance is God and He is the best dispenser' [Qur'an 3:172-3].

And the Almighty has said: Permission [to fight] has been given to those who are being fought because they have been wronged, and verily is God able to grant them victory [Qur'an 22:39].

And the Messenger of God (peace be upon him) has said: Whosoever fights so that the word of God may be- as it is- supreme, he is fighting in the cause of God [Sahih Bukhari 4:52:65].

And he said: There are two sorts of eyes, which Hellfire does not impair. One eye has overflown [i.e. cried] with fear of God, the other has spent the night guarding in the path of God [i.e. jihad to protect the Ummah: Sunan at-Tirmidhi].

And he said: Whosoever is killed protecting his wealth is a martyr; whosoever is killed protecting his blood is a martyr; whosoever is killed protecting his life is a martyr; whosoever is killed protecting his family is a martyr [Sunan at-Tirmidhi, Number 1421, Sahih].

Sons of Syria the fatherland, sons of our Arab and Islamic nation, in the darkness of the conditions, which the Syrian Arab Republic is witnessing on account of the war that has attacked the nation- the work of a number of states that wish for the fragmentation of the Arab and Islamic nation, through the targeting of Syria's stances and support for freedom, national self-determination, human dignity and resistance.

The country that has remained lofty through the ages of time in the face of Zionist aggression and its policies of expansionism. Verily there is the targeting of our Syrian people and the brave army; that is, the targeting of steadfastness, resistance, and today our people who bring forth the best of their sons to defend Syria against arrogance, humiliation, subordination and partition for the area; for they wish to break up Syria just as they did to a number of other states.

So verily does the Supreme Iftaa Council in the Syrian Arab Republic call on our Syrian Arab people to the undertaking of the obligation according to the Shari'a. First, that the defense of united Syria and the Syrian people is a duty of all the sons of our people just as it is a duty of all the Arab and Islamic states.

And we implore our people in Syria to stand shoulder to shoulder with our Syrian Arab army and our armed forces and we call on our sons to fulfill the religious duty of joining the Syrian Arab army for the defense of our homeland which the heavens have blessed and which the Imam of the prophets [i.e. Mohammed] called to him.

And we warn about standing in the face of our Syrian Arab army and our armed forces since that constitutes betrayal and contributing to the weakening of its strength that has been made ready and continues to be so for decisive battle against the Zionists and whoever stands behind them that contributes to the achievement of the goals of the enemy.

Second, appeals of affection to our sons in the Syrian Arab army as you boldly embark on battles in defense of our people and our nation by the watch of God Almighty in your Jihad and your defense of Syria, raising high the word of God and righteousness in our precious homeland.

The protection of the land, the homeland, dignity, honor, and wealth, for the art of warfare is a duty of faith and patriotism, in which they have thus protected the blood of the innocents, the sanctity of the land, and dignity.

May your stand be with our Syrian people as a stance of protection and custody for our human, economic, cultural and historical wealth. God aid you in His victory and your stand since in Him are the best of the land, the unity of our land, and the security of our people.

The Almighty has said: Don't be weak and do not grieve, for you will have the advantage if you are believers [Qur'an 3:139]. Oh God, protect the land of Syria, its people, and its army by your guardianship; and aid us, oh God, in victory and assist us."

Notable is the opening invocation of a number of Qur'anic verses and hadith traditions. The implication of all of these quotations is the idea of defensive jihad for Syria against the rebellion. I highlighted Qur'an 22:39 in bold because jihadist groups who conceive of their fight against the Assad regime as defensive in nature also invoke this verse.

Before proceeding further, one should dispense of Ammar Abdulhamid's misleading term "Alawite Jihadism." While Abdulhamid does explain that "Alawite Jihadism" did not develop as a "strictly religious phenomenon," it implies that there is some kind of specific religious struggle behind the efforts of Alawites fighting for the Assad regime.

On the contrary, to the extent that pro-Assad Alawite fighters express any sentiment about religion, it is normally in the form of a non-religious bloodline identity, which often includes opposition to Islam, and not merely the Sunni form of it as Abdulhamid implies, though the anti-Sunni rhetoric is undeniable

In the most extreme manifestation, this can give rise to statements like 'F— you and your prophet [Mohammed].' A more subtle variation on the anti-Islamic hostility is to ask rhetorically, 'Who is your God? Isn't Bashar your God?' The latter, as I have argued before, does not so much reflect actual worship of Assad (as Abdulhamid seems to think) as simple mockery of the fact that the deity the detainees worship is not saving them from torture and death.

In any event, even if one were to suppose that the Syrian Alawite community at large is still attached to the traditional faith and its practices that remain very much alive in southern Turkey, the fact is that traditional Alawism does not teach jihad as a form of armed struggle.

Rather, as Yaron Friedman noted, jihad takes the form of taqiyya (i.e. not disclosing aspects of the faith to outsiders for fear of persecution) and mystical initiation, while the notion of 'martyrdom' (being a shaheed) takes on a metaphorical meaning.

If there were some kind of specific religious zealotry behind the support for Assad with calls for jihad, then it would have been apparent among at least some of Turkey's Alawites. Instead, what we find is that support for Assad among this community is rooted in perceptions that Turkey is backing extremist armed groups targeting Alawites- with feared potential of leading to spillover into Turkey with sectarian bloodletting.

Coming back to the fatwa for jihad, it actually fits in perfectly well with the Assad dynasty's approach of 'Sunnification': a policy that contributed much to the divorcing of the Alawite community in general from a real religious identity. For the Alawites, as Joshua Landis has noted previously, 'Sunnification' meant declaring Alawites to be orthodox Twelver Shi'a, while encouraging apparent religious practices along the lines of orthodox Sunni Islam.

Continuing his father's own example of public piety, Bashar has the state media make a big deal of his attendance of mosques for special Islamic occasions. Even the manner of prayer captured in photographs is shown to be in conformity with Sunni Islam, contrasting completely with the organization and practice of prayer among Alawites in Turkey (for more on the latter see this book).

While 'Sunnification' might seem like a very cynical ploy to disguise a minority-dominated despotism, it is a policy in keeping with Ba'athist ideology, which, as envisioned by Ba'ath party-founder Michel Aflaq (a Greek Orthodox Christian), equated Islam with Arabist identity. This equation is most clearly seen in his lecture "In Memory of the Arab Prophet," which argued:

"We [i.e. Arab nationalists] shall always bear witness to Arabism as the body that hosts the spirit of Islam...The relationship of Islam to Arabism is not like any other relationship between nationalisms and religions. The Arab Christians will be aware of this when their nationalism reaches its complete awakening and they regain their true essence. Islam is their national culture and they need to saturate themselves with it, so they can understand it and love it, so that they protect Islam as they would protect the most valuable of the components of their Arab identity."

One should compare Aflaq's remarks with Arab nationalist thinker George Habash's claim that "Islam...is one of the basic components of Arab nationalism. Similarly, one can say that the culture of a Christian Arab is Islam."

The ideal Ba'athist regime, just as it should defend Arab identity, should thus uphold the 'essence' of Islam, and try as far as possible to bring minorities- Muslim or non-Muslim- within that fold. This is exactly what the Assad dynasty has been upholding, and the question of jihad is no less relevant.

Among the regime-aligned clergy, consider the case of the recently assassinated Sheikh Muhammad Said Ramadan al-Buti. Buti was one of those behind the above fatwa. One thing to notice immediately is that the fatwa does not accept any identity for Syria beyond the Arab one, despite the fact that Buti was Kurdish by heritage: a perfect example of the fulfillment of Aflaq's Arabist ideology for a state. In his writings, Buti touched on the subject of jihad on more than one occasion.

In a work he wrote back in the 1990s, entitled 'Jihad in Islam: How to Understand and Practise It,' Buti tried to characterize jihad as something defensive in nature (for the relevant excerpts if buying the book is inconvenient, google for a free PDF copy of this book, which, whatever you think of its author and conclusions, nonetheless presents al-Buti's arguments fairly). Several years later, however, Buti wrote the following in commenting on Qur'an 9:5:

"The verse (9:5) does not leave any room in the mind to conjecture about what is called defensive war. This verse asserts that holy war, which is demanded in Islamic law, is not a defensive war because it could legitimately be an offensive war. That is the apex and most honorable of all holy wars. Its goal is the exaltation of the word of God, the construction of Islamic society, and the establishment of God's kingdom on earth regardless of the means. It is legal to carry on an offensive holy war."

For the Assad regime, which in keeping with Ba'athist ideology claims to protect 'true' Islam, this kind of discourse posed no problem. Jihad as warfare- offensive or defensive- is not only acceptable but also desirable so long as it is directed at the right targets.

Thus there was no real ideological contradiction in sending jihadists into Iraq while playing a part as a torture destination for international terrorist suspects in the CIA's rendition program: it is just that the latter jihadists were regarded as practicing an illegitimate form of jihad in a posing a perceived threat to Syria itself.

And so it is with the present Syrian civil war: attacking the Assad regime- so the reasoning goes- is not really jihad at all. One should observe that in criticizing the rebels, Syrian state media never attack the concept of jihad per se; instead the jihadist rebels- seen as al-Qa'ida-aligned and working for foreign powers- are denounced as 'terrorists,' 'takfiris,' 'Wahhabis' or agents of 'Zionism' (on the last, cf. the fatwa itself).

Instead, those who wage true jihad fight for the regime. Those who wage true jihad will defend the unity of the Syrian Arab nation and thus also the Arab and Islamic nation from the sinister forces that seek to tear both apart.

Now one can understand how a band of Assad loyalists in Raqqah- where the regime as in the Aleppo area forged significant Sunni Arab loyalist ties- vowed to fight 'true jihad against the Free Army and Jabhat al-Nusra' in a video that emerged this month during the fall of that city to rebel forces (hat-tip: @Syrian_Scenes).

In conclusion, the Assad regime, like the jihadists, portrays jihad in the current civil war as a defensive enterprise. The fatwa for jihad issued by regime-aligned Sunni clerics may of course be used to play on any potential Sunni Arab disillusionment with treatment at the hands of rebel factions whose behavior may be deemed religiously extreme.

Yet it should not be thought that the fatwa is somehow out of keeping with the regime's ideology: rather, the very nature of that ideology makes a pretense to the guardianship of what constitutes 'true' Islam and therefore legitimate forms of jihad.

The appeal to jihad in keeping with said ideology in turn demonstrates that the regime still thinks it can fight for control over all of Syria and believes it has substantial support spanning all the country's ethnic and religious groups- including Sunni Arabs, and not merely a tight loyalist Alawite circle.

Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi is a student at Brasenose College, Oxford University, and an intern at Daniel Pipes' Philadelphia-based think-tank, the Middle East Forum. Contact Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi at list@pundicity.com. This article appeared March 25, 2013 in Pundicity Informed Opinion and Review is archived at
http://www.aymennjawad.org/13111/jihad-in-syria-part-ii


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PRESIDENT MORSI SMUGGLING AL-QAEDA LEADER ZAWAHIRI TO EGYPT?

Posted by Raymond Ibrahim, March 27, 2013

According to a new report from the Arabic-language website Misr al-Gidida (New Egypt), during Egyptian president Muhammad Morsi's recent visit to Islamabad, Pakistan, he secretly met with Ayman Zawahiri, the leader of the terrorist organization al-Qaeda, and promised to smuggle the Egyptian-born jihadi back home. The Arabic report cites a Pakistani source saying that the meeting was clandestinely arranged, away from the delegation accompanying Morsi, and "facilitated by elements of Pakistani intelligence [ISI] and influential members of the international organization, the Muslim brotherhood" [all quotes translated from Arabic by author].

Morsi himself is a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood; Zawahiri is a former member who grew impatient with the Brotherhood's tactics of non-violent patience and perseverance, eventually quitting the organization and joining the jihad, becoming its current leader. (See "Ayman Zawahiri and Egypt: A Trip through Time" for an expose on Zawahiri and his decades-long connections to Egypt, the Salafis, and the Muslim Brotherhood.)

Caption Text

The Pakistani source adds that "the meeting lasted 45 minutes, during which Egyptian president Muhammad Morsi promised to make preparations for Ayman Zawahiri to return soon to Egypt, indicating that some Muslim Brotherhood members would handle the operation, by first smuggling the al-Qaeda leader to a Gulf nation, likely Qatar, and then easily transferring him to Egypt—on condition that Zawahiri disappear lest he embarrass Egypt's ruling Muslim Brotherhood with its American ally, whose security and intelligence agencies consider Zawahiri most wanted."

Although this report cannot be independently verified, any number of indicators support its veracity. Among other things, the ever-vocal Salafi faction of Egypt, which all but venerates al-Qaeda, have been incessantly calling for Egypt's native son Zawahiri—the "hero" who gave America a bloody nose via the strikes of 9/11—to return. Aboud al-Zomor, for instance, the Egyptian jihadi who was implicated for the assassination of Sadat but released after the ousting of Hosni Mubarak and who is now a leading member of the new Egyptian parliament—has called for the return of Zawahiri to Egypt, "with his head held high and in safety."

Muslim Brotherhood leader President Morsi himself—who was also imprisoned and released during the "Arab Spring"—has already released any number of other jihadis, including some who were on death row in Egypt for the deaths and terrorism they committed. He is also trying to release the "Blind Sheikh"—an early mentor turned competitor of Zawahiri—from the U.S where he is currently serving a life sentence for his connection to the 1993 World Trade Center bombings.

The report further suggests that Zawahiri will likely disappear in the increasingly lawless Sinai, where al-Qaeda is already active under the leadership of Zawahiri's brother, Muhammad Zawahiri—another jihadi who was imprisoned under Mubarak only to be released under Morsi. Interestingly, when asked in a recent interview with CNN if he is in touch with his al-Qaeda leader brother, Muhammad only smiled and responded, "of course not." In retrospect, it appears the smile was based on the sheer naivety of the question.

Raymond Ibrahim is a Middle East and Islam specialist and author of Crucified Again: Exposing Islam's New War on Christians (2013) and The Al Qaeda Reader (2007). His writings have appeared in a variety of media, including the Los Angeles Times, Washington Times, Jane's Islamic Affairs Analyst, Middle East Quarterly, World Almanac of Islamism, and Chronicle of Higher Education. He was born and raised in the U.S. by Coptic Egyptian parents born and raised in the Middle East, which has provided him with equal fluency in English and Arabic. His understanding of the two the Western and Middle Eastern mindsets positions him to explain the Middle Eastern culture to the West. This article appeared March 27, 2013 and is archived at
http://www.raymondibrahim.com/from-the-arab-world/president-morsi-smuggling-al-qaeda-leader-zawahiri-to-egypt/


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JEWISH SOLDIERS IN THE CIVIL WAR AND THEIR PESACH SERVICE

Posted by Israel Commentary, March 27, 2013

The article below was written by Michael Freund who served as Deputy Communications Director in the Israeli Prime Minister's Office under Binyamin Netanyahu. He is the founder and chairman of Shavei Israel/Israel Returns -- www.shavei.org and www.IsraelReturns.org -- a Jerusalem-based organization that searches for and assists the Lost Tribes of Israel and other "hidden Jews" seeking to return to Zion. In addition, Freund is a correspondent and syndicated columnist for The Jerusalem Post. A native New Yorker, he is a graduate of Princeton University and holds an MBA in Finance from Columbia University. He has lived in Israel for the past 16 years and remains an avid New York Mets fan. Email him at msfreund@earthlink.net. This article appeared March 24, 2013 in Israel Commentary and is archived at
http://israel-commentary.org/?p=6235

It was April 24, 1864, at the height of the American Civil War, and in between his duties as an infantryman, young Isaac J. Levy sat down in camp on one of the intermediate days of Passover to write a short letter to his sister back home.

Levy, who served in the 46th Virginia infantry unit, was a soldier in the Confederate army which was battling on behalf of the southern states that sought to secede from the United States.

The war had just entered its fourth year, and it would prove to be the bloodiest conflict in American history. New research published last year in the journal Civil War History by demographic historian J. David Hacker of Binghamton University revealed the death toll may have been as high as 750,000 people.

Levy and his regiment, which included his brother Ezekiel, who served as a captain, were posted at Adams Run, South Carolina, and the fog of war had cast a shadow over his observance of the holiday.

"No doubt you were much surprised on receiving a letter from me addressed to our dear parents dated on the 21st which was the first day of Pesach," he wrote to his sister Leonora, with the word "Pesach" carefully printed in Hebrew letters. "We were all under the impression in camp that the first day of the festival was the 22nd," and he had therefore unwittingly failed to observe the holiday's start on the appropriate day.

But Levy went on to assure her that his brother had purchased matza "sufficient to last us for the week" in the city of Charleston at the cost of two dollars per pound, and that they were "observing the festival in a truly Orthodox style." Sadly, just four months later, Isaac Levy was killed in the trenches during the Siege of Petersburg on August 21, 1864. He was 21 years old.

On the eve of the Civil War, which began in April 1861, American Jewry numbered an estimated 150,000 people, out of a total population of some 31 million. The overwhelming majority of American Jews at the time were recent arrivals: just a decade earlier, there had been 50,000 Jews living in the United States.

Most of the immigrants were German Jews looking for greater opportunity and freedom.

Like their fellow Americans, the Jews of the United States quickly found themselves caught up in the war between the North and the South, and it had a profound influence on them.

As historian Eli N. Evans has written, "For Jews in America, the Civil War was a watershed that involved Jewish soldiers from all over the nation."

"Serving their countries under fire and fighting side by side with their gentile comrades in arms," Evans argued, "accelerated the process of acculturation, not only through their self-perceptions, but also because of the actions of the community around them."

Indeed, an estimated 10,000 Jews — 3,000 southern Confederates and 7,000 Northerners — fought in the war, with nine Jews reaching the rank of general and 21 attaining that of colonel.

One of the most famous American Jews in the military was Commodore Uriah P. Levy. A veteran of the War of 1812 against Great Britain, Levy had endured frequent anti-Semitism throughout his naval career. He briefly served in the Union Navy at the start of the Civil War but retired shortly thereafter.

Another Jew — Judah P. Benjamin — served as secretary of state and secretary of war for the Confederacy, overseeing the administration of the conflict for the South.

A number of Jewish soldiers distinguished themselves in the Civil War and were granted the Medal of Honor, the US military's highest award, for exceptional bravery on the battlefield.

One such soldier, Sgt.-Maj. and Adjutant Abraham Cohn of the New Hampshire Infantry, was singled out by the assistant adjutant general of the United States for "conspicuous gallantry displayed in the Battle of the Wilderness [of May 1864], in rallying and forming disorganized troops under heavy fire; also for bravery and coolness in carrying orders to the advance lines under murderous fire in the Battle of the Mine, July 30, 1864."

Jews also played a key part in helping to finance both sides in the conflict. German-born Jewish banker Joseph Seligman used his connections in the German and Dutch financial markets to help the North dispose of $200 million in bonds, thereby providing the federal government with a financial lifeline that enabled it to prosecute the war.

Despite the loyalty and courage they demonstrated, Jewish soldiers often encountered anti-Semitism, and Jews nationwide were subjected to accusations of being "war profiteers" and even aiding the enemy.

In fact, it was at the height of the Civil War that the most infamous act of anti-Semitism in American history took place, when Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant issued General Order No. 11 on December 17, 1862, expelling Jews "as a class" from the Tennessee military district. When Abraham Lincoln learned of the order, he rescinded it.

To what extent Jewish soldiers during the Civil War were allowed to observe their faith is not entirely clear, though we can gain an insight from the experience of 19-year-old Private Joseph Joel of the 23rd Ohio Volunteer Infantry, an account of which he published after the war in the March 3, 1866 issue of the Jewish Messenger.

Joel had the good fortune of serving together with 20 other Jews, and as Passover approached in 1862, they found themselves encamped in Fayette, West Virginia.

Together, they "united in a request to our commanding officer for relief from duty in order that we might keep the holydays." Their commander, Rutherford B. Hayes, who would later go on to become the 19th president of the United States, "readily acceded."

Having been granted the hoped-for permission, Joel and his comrades went about making the necessary preparations for the holiday.

"Our next business," he wrote, "was to find some suitable person to proceed to Cincinnati, Ohio, to buy us Matzos."

Fortunately, they found a Jewish merchant who sold supplies to the army and was heading home to Cincinnati, and he agreed to help, sending them "seven barrels of Matzos" along with "two Hagodahs and prayer-books."

Armed with some of the basics, Joel turned his attention to obtaining "the other requisites for that occasion." A number of the Jewish soldiers were dispatched to the countryside to find various food items for the festive Seder meal while others stayed behind "to build a log hut for the service," a possible reference to a temporary synagogue.

Given the difficulties of war, Joel and his fellow Jewish servicemen had to improvise as best they could. He recalled that "Horseradish or parsley we could not obtain, but in lieu we found a weed, whose bitterness, I apprehend, exceeded anything our forefathers 'enjoyed.'" Similarly, Joel was unable to obtain the necessary ingredients to make haroset, the dish intended to remind participants at the Seder of the mortar used by the Israelites to make bricks in ancient Egypt.

So he and the other soldiers did the next best thing: They "got a brick which, rather hard to digest, reminded us, by looking at it, for what purpose it was intended."

That evening, Joel and the 20 other Jewish soldiers sat down and conducted the Seder, one that he later said he would remember for the rest of his life.

"There, in the wild woods of West Virginia, away from home and friends, we consecrated and offered up to the ever-loving God of Israel our prayers and sacrifice," he wrote.

"I doubt whether the spirits of our forefathers, had they been looking down on us, standing there with our arms by our side ready for an attack, faithful to our God and our cause, would have imagined themselves amongst mortals, enacting this commemoration of the scene that transpired in Egypt," Joel related.

While a number of the participants in that memorable Passover commemoration later died in battle, Joel survived a number of wounds and after the war he moved to Staten Island with his wife.

With the deliverance of the Jewish people from slavery serving as one of Passover's central themes, it is difficult not to wonder whether the Jewish soldiers of the North and South viewed the titanic struggle between the states through the prism of the festival, particularly since the issue of slavery lay at the heart of the conflict.

Did southern Jewish combatants see the irony when they recited the section in the Haggada which declares, "We were slaves unto Pharaoh in Egypt," even as they fought to preserve the enslavement of blacks? Did Jewish Union soldiers imagine themselves as deliverers of another people from servitude? We may never know.

Nonetheless, despite the carnage of the fratricidal conflict and the ideological divide between the two sides, the onset of Passover occasionally still had a unifying effect.

In his 1961 classic, American Jewry and the Civil War, the late Bertram W. Korn relates a story signifying how the fraternal bond among Jews could overcome political differences.

"One day during a Passover," Korn wrote, "Union soldier Myer Levy of Philadelphia was walking through a captured Virginia town, when he saw a boy sitting on the steps of his house and eating matza. When Levy asked for some, the boy leaped up and ran into the house shouting, 'Mother, there's a damn-Yankee Jew outside!' The boy's mother came out and invited Levy to return that evening for a Passover meal."

The name of that gracious woman has been lost to history, but the power of her kindness, and the lesson it teaches, has not. Through her action, she paid homage to the words of the Haggada, which states: "Whoever is hungry let him come and eat, whoever is in need let him come and celebrate Passover."

When we gaze back at the American Civil War, and the Jews who struggled to preserve their traditions even amid the gunpowder and cannon-fire, it is an example well worth remembering.

Contact Israel Commentary at israelcommentary@comcast.net


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LIB COLUMNIST CALLS FOR ENDING MILITARY FUNERAL HONORS FOR VETS

Posted by FSM Security Update, March 28, 2013

The article below was written by Bill McClellan who is a columnist for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Contact Bill McClellan at bmcclellan@post-dispatch.com. This article appeared March 28, 2013 in Family Security Matters and is archived at
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/lib-columnist-calls-for-ending-military-funeral- honors-for-vets-most-veterans-did-nothing-heroic?f=must_reads

Marc Garcia is a trumpet player who moonlights as a bugler at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery. He plays taps at the end of graveside services. If you have ever been to such a service, you know that the haunting notes of the melody provide an emotional end to the event. Garcia contacted me recently to say that he and his fellow buglers have been replaced by a battery-operated bugle.

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He wrote in an email: "When I sound live taps, I put all my spirit and soul into all 24 notes that I play, and that's the same spirit and soul that our veterans gave to this country while serving. And now they are going to get a fake bugle? A live bugler adds that very important touch for the military service. To me, our veterans deserve the real thing and it's a disgrace to present them with anything else!"

Buglers make $24.50 per service. That's not excessive. They have to be at the grave site early, and sometimes the preachers carry on a while. Also, there is an honorary three-volley rifle salute, and the folding and presentation of the flag.

The rifle salute is done by a four-man team - three riflemen and a fourth man who gives the orders. (The fourth man now operates the battery-run bugle.) Generally, these teams come from veterans service organizations - VFWs or American Legion Posts. Garcia said the teams get $100 per service.

The flag teams are made up of two men. The family of the veteran can request either uniformed service members or members of veterans service organizations for this duty. Garcia said he does not know how much the flag team receives.

The Missouri Military Funeral Honors Program in Jefferson City declined to provide information to me.

Who is eligible for military honors at a funeral? According to the program's website, virtually all veterans who have received an honorable discharge are eligible. A veteran does not have to be buried at a national cemetery to receive military honors. The honors teams travel to private cemeteries.

Since the program began in Missouri in 1999, more than 114,000 veterans have received these honors. The program has been averaging 729 funerals a month.

According to the program's website, it is funded by the federal government and the Missouri National Guard Trust Fund.

Contact FSM Security Update at info@familysecuritymatters.org


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EREKAT: ARAB DELEGATION WILL PRESENT PEACE PLAN IN WASHINGTON

Posted by Paul Rotenberg, March 28, 2013

When Obama turns to Israel and says "the whole world says you should do this and it will bring peace to the world" Israel is going to be in big trouble. They can demand a withdrawal to anywhere, they can demand all of Jerusalem, do you think Netanyahu will say no? They can demand anything at all without as much as a reason, but when the whole Islamist world says that this is our demand, Obama and the EU and most of the rest of the world will fall in line. What will the Israeli government say, after the minister of justice immediately offers to accept, when the presidents of major Jewish organizations say, accept it? This is major trouble brewing.

DOHA, Qatar (Ma'an) -- A delegation of Arab ministers will head to Washington to discuss the Arab Peace Initiative with US President Barack Obama's new administration, Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat said Wednesday.

The delegation "aims to declare a joint stand towards the peace process so America realizes this is not only a Palestinian issue but an Arabic and Islamic one as well," Erekat said.

The group will include the foreign ministers of Palestine, Qatar, Jordan, Egypt. Ministers from Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Morocco and Iraq may also attend, Erekat said.

Contact Rotenberg at pdr@rogers.com


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POLITICIANS MUST EXPERIENCE THE U.S. BORDER TO UNDERSTAND IT

Posted by Daily Events, March 28, 2013

The article below was written by John Hayward, who began his blogging career as a guest writer at Hot Air under the pen name "Doctor Zero," producing a collection of essays entitled Doctor Zero: Year One. He is a great admirer of free-market thinkers such as Arthur Laffer, Milton Friedman, and Thomas Sowell. He writes both political and cultural commentary, including book and movie reviews. An avid fan of horror and fantasy fiction, he has produced an e-book collection of short horror stories entitled Persistent Dread. John is a former staff writer for Human Events. He is a regular guest on the Rusty Humphries radio show, and has appeared on numerous other local and national radio programs, including G. Gordon Liddy, BattleLine, and Dennis Miller.

Several members of the bipartisan "Gang of Eight" immigration reform group in the Senate, including John McCain (R-AZ) and Chuck Schumer (D-NY), were taking a tour of the border on Wednesday when they actually watched a woman climb over the 18-foot border fence, swiftly ending up in Border Patrol custody. This surreal incident led Senator Schumer to declare, "You can read and you can study and you can talk but until you see things it doesn't become reality I'll be able to explain this to my colleagues."

That's a neat summary of the border security crisis. For decades, Washington politicians have pretended the border is an exotic mystery and insoluble problem, when it's really quite straightforward. A physically challenging problem to be sure - given the size of the border, rough terrain, and number of violators - but simple enough, and not intractable.

Schumer said his visit to the border taught him "we have adequate manpower, but not adequate technology." He's got it exactly backwards. We've never had enough boots on the border, we just lost 4000 agents due to sequestration, and even as powerful new drone surveillance technology is brought to bear, we can see that centuries-old fence technology works quite well. The trick is making sure the fence is big enough, and either well-patrolled or too formidable to climb over.

For years, the political class has pretended the border is just like "The Matrix" from the popular film series: no one can be told about it, they must experience it to understand. That's silly, especially given how many other things Congress is happy to legislate without understanding or experiencing.

Contact Daily Events at HumanEventsDaily@email.humanevents.com


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FOOD FOR THOUGHT

Posted by YORAM, March 28, 2013

If you can get arrested for hunting or fishing without a license, but not for being in the country illegally . ..you might live in a country founded by geniuses but run by idiots.

If you have to get your parents' permission to go on a field trip or take an aspirin in school, but not to get an abortion .. . you might live in a country founded by geniuses but run by idiots.

If the only school curriculum allowed to explain how we got here is evolution, but the government stops a $15 million construction project to keep a rare spider from evolving to extinction .. . you might live in a country founded by geniuses but run by idiots.

If you have to show identification to board an airplane, cash a check, buy liquor or check out a library book, but not to vote who runs the government .. you might live in a country founded by geniuses but run by idiots.

If the government wants to ban stable, law-abiding citizens from owning gun magazines with more than ten rounds, but gives 20 F-16 fighter jets to the crazy new leaders in Egypt ..

. you might live in a country founded by geniuses but run by idiots. If, in the largest city, you can buy two 16-ounce sodas, but not a 24-ounce soda because 24-ounces of a sugary drink might make you fat ... you might live in a country founded by geniuses but run by idiots.

If an 80-year-old woman can be stripped searched by the TSA but a woman in a hijab is only subject to having her neck and head searched ... you might live in a country founded by geniuses but run by idiots.

If your government believes that the best way to eradicate trillions of dollars of debt is to spend trillions more ... you might live in a country founded by geniuses but run by idiots.

If a seven year old boy can be thrown out of school for saying his teacher's "cute," but hosting a sexual exploration or diversity class in grade school is perfectly acceptable ... you might live in a country founded by geniuses but run by idiots.

If children are forcibly removed from parents who discipline them with spankings while children of addicts are left in filth and drug infested "homes". .. you might live in a country founded by geniuses but run by idiots.

If hard work and success are met with higher taxes and more government intrusion, while not working is rewarded with EBT cards, WIC checks, Medicaid, subsidized housing and free cell phones ... you might live in a country founded by geniuses but run by idiots.

If the government's plan for getting people back to work is to incentivize NOT working with 99 weeks of unemployment checks and no requirement to prove they applied but can't find work ... you might live in a country founded by geniuses but run by idiots.

If being stripped of the ability to defend yourself makes you "safer" according to the government . .. you might live in a country founded by geniuses but run by idiots.

Contact YORAM at yoramski3438@aol.com


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ISLAM'S OUTRAGEOUS OBSCENITIES

Posted by Raymond Ibrahim, March 28, 2013

Islamic TV personality, Abu Islam—the man who made international headlines when he insulted Christianity and tore a Bible on camera to screams of "Allahu Akbar!" and later incited Muslims to rape female protesters—unwittingly insulted Islam's prophet Muhammad in a way that would have caused much of the Islamic world to riot and call for his death (if he was a non-Muslim).

This occurred during one of Abu Islam's recent TV shows, which revolved around attacking Egyptian commentator and comedian Bassem Youssef, whose popular jabs frequently target Islamists, including President Morsi. In retaliation, Abu Islam spent a large segment of his show insulting Youssef. Yet, unlike the latter's well-received jokes which are primarily based on wit and innuendo, the cleric relied on hurling ugly obscenities. Among other things, Abu Islam swore to Allah that according to Sharia law, because Youssef is a "pretty boy," he is required to wear a niqab, or face veil, to cover himself up like a woman.

Abu Islam hurled even worse insults on the comedian, which he tried to justify by referring to the teachings of Islam. He told Muslim viewers who would condemn his use of vile language, "Shame on you Muslims; learn your religion well. The Koran itself curses them, curses the likes of Bassem Youssef, those before him and after him."

He went on to give examples, quoting Koran verses that refer to infidels as "dogs," "donkeys," and "cattle." "Are these curses or not?" asked the cleric. "Well, it's your lord who curses, who insults.... Cursing and insulting is from Allah almighty, praise and glory to him."

Next Abu Islam moved to the Sunna—along with the Koran, the second pillar of Sunni Islam, the words, deeds, and recommendations of Islam's prophet, Muhammad, and his companions as documented in the hadith literature. Said Abu Islam:

Now hear the words that the prophet counsels me to use against people like you [Bassem Youssef]. He tells me to tell you "Bite your father's penis, and do not whitewash." In other words, I'm supposed to tell you to go bite your father's male member, but I'm supposed to use the real word ["penis"] without whitewashing. The prophet orders me to mention your father's male member, but without whitewashing [instead of saying "male member" he should say "penis"]. You see how well-mannered I am—I cannot even bring myself to use the words the prophet commanded me to use on you. I just can't do it!

As for Muhammad's closest companions, he quoted Abu Bakr, Islam's first "righteous caliph," telling someone, "Go suck on al-Lat's clitoris!" Al-Lat was a pre-Islamic goddess of Mecca, whose image was subsequently destroyed on Muhammad's orders.

When Abu Sufyan finally converted to Islam and asked Muhammad what he should do about the large idol statue of al-Uzza, another pre-Islamic female goddess of Arabia, Islam's second "righteous caliph," Omar al-Khittab, responded, "Go take a sh*t on it!"

Abu Islam is not the only popular Muslim cleric to justify his foul mouth by referring to Islam and its founders. Here, for example, is popular Sheikh al-Huwaini—who likens the face of women to their vulvas—also quoting and explaining the "Bite your father's penis" hadith in graphic detail.

Al Azhar graduate and professor of Islamic interpretation Sheikh Abdullah Badr is also on record trying to justify his use of foul language by referring to the same hadiths (he got in trouble when he publicly referred to a popular Egyptian actress as a "whore.") Ironically, he is also the same sheikh who publicly swore to Allah to cut the tongue out of the mouth of anyone who insults Islam and its Sharia.

As a more moderate cleric pointed out in a TV show dealing with Sheikh Badr's claims that the prophet and his companions were cursers and insulters, "If one of Islam's opponents made such assertions, the whole world would have stood up in objection to such words."

Indeed, while non-Muslim YouTube videos portraying Muhammad in unflattering terms prompt riots, deaths, and groveling Western politicians, Muslim portrayals of the prophet and his companions as vulgar and foul-mouthed pass in silence.

Which leads to the greatest irony of all—a sort of "strike back" from the God of the Bible: the same Abu Islam who tore and desecrated the Bible, unwittingly went on to tear into and desecrate the image of his beloved prophet Muhammad. Recall that, after he quoted Muhammad's words "Bite your father's penis, and do not whitewash," Abu Islam insisted that he could not bring himself to say "penis," but did whitewash, constantly using the word "male private member." As he put it: "You see how well-mannered I am—I cannot even bring myself to use the words the prophet commanded me to use on you. I just can't do it!"

The meaning of this is clear: the foul-mouthed, rape-advocating, Bible-tearing Abu Islam—who, as a Muslim cleric, is charged with guarding the sanctity of Muhammad's image—actually sees himself as more moral and "well-mannered" than his prophet. Is this not a greater insult to Muhammad than a movie made by non-Muslims who may be expected to be irreverent?

The article above was written by Raymond Ibrahim who is a Middle East and Islam specialist and author of Crucified Again: Exposing Islam's New War on Christians (2013) and The Al Qaeda Reader (2007). His writings have appeared in a variety of media, including the Los Angeles Times, Washington Times, Jane's Islamic Affairs Analyst, Middle East Quarterly, World Almanac of Islamism, and Chronicle of Higher Education. He was born and raised in the U.S. by Coptic Egyptian parents born and raised in the Middle East, which has provided him with equal fluency in English and Arabic. His understanding of the two, the Western and Middle Eastern mindsets, positions him to explain the Middle Eastern culture to the West. This article appeared March 28, 2013 and is archived at
http://www.raymondibrahim.com/from-the-arab-world/islams-outrageous-obscenities/


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ACCEPT THE JEWISH STATE

Posted by UCI, March 28, 2013

The article below was written by Daniel Pipes who is an American historian, writer, and political commentator. He is the president of the Middle East Forum, and publisher of its Middle East Quarterly journal. His writing focuses on the American foreign policy and the Middle East. He is also an Expert at Wikistrat. After graduating with a PhD from Harvard and studying abroad, Pipes taught at a number of universities. He then served as director of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, before founding the Middle East Forum. His 2003 nomination by U.S. President George W. Bush to the board of directors of the U.S. Institute of Peace was protested by Islamists, Arab-American groups, and Democratic leaders, who cited his oft-stated belief that victory is the most effective way to terminate conflict. The Bush administration sidestepped the opposition with a recess appointment.

Pipes has written a dozen books, and served as an adviser to Rudolph Giuliani's 2008 presidential campaign. He was in 2008—11 the Taube Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. This article appeared March 26, 2013 in the Washington Times and is archived at
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/mar/26/obama-to-palestinians-accept-the-jewish-state/

One key shift in U.S. policy was overlooked in the barrage of news about President Obama's eventful 50-hour visit to Israel last week. That would be the demand that Palestinians recognize Israel as the Jewish state, called by Hamas leader Salah Bardawil "the most dangerous statement by an American president regarding the Palestinian issue."

First, some background: Israel's founding documents aimed to make the country a Jewish state. Modern Zionism effectively began with the publication in 1896 of Theodor Herzl's book "Der Judenstaat" ("The Jewish State"). The Balfour Declaration of 1917 favors "a national home for the Jewish people." U.N. General Assembly Resolution 181 of 1947, partitioning Palestine into two, mentions the term Jewish state 30 times. Israel's Declaration of Establishment of 1948 mentions the Jewish state five times, as in "we hereby declare the establishment of a Jewish state in Eretz-Israel, to be known as the State of Israel."

Because of this tight connection, when Arab-Israeli diplomacy began in earnest in the 1970s, the Jewish state formulation largely disappeared from view. Everyone simply assumed that diplomatic recognition of Israel meant accepting it as the Jewish state. Only in recent years did Israelis realize otherwise, as Israeli Arabs came to accept Israel, but reject its Jewish nature. For example, an important 2006 publication from the Mossawa Center in Haifa, "The Future Vision of Palestinian Arabs in Israel," proposed that the country become a religiously neutral state and joint homeland. In brief, Israeli Arabs have come to see Israel as a variant of Palestine.

Awakened to this linguistic shift, winning Arab acceptance of Israel no longer sufficed; Israelis and their friends realized that they had to insist on explicit Arab acceptance of Israel as the Jewish state. In 2007, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert announced that unless Palestinians did so, diplomacy would be aborted: "I do not intend to compromise in any way over the issue of the Jewish state," he emphasized. The Palestinian Authority immediately and unanimously rejected this demand. Its head, Mahmoud Abbas, responded: "In Israel, there are Jews and others living there. This we are willing to recognize, nothing else."

When Benjamin Netanyahu succeeded Mr. Olmert as prime minister in 2009, he reiterated this demand as a precondition to serious negotiations: "Israel expects the Palestinians to first recognize Israel as a Jewish state before talking about two states for two peoples." The Palestinians not only refused to budge, but ridiculed the very idea. Again, Mr. Abbas: "What is a 'Jewish state?' We call it the 'State of Israel.' You can call yourselves whatever you want. But I will not accept it. ... It's not my job to provide a definition for the state and what it contains. You can call yourselves the Zionist Republic, the Hebrew, the National, the Socialist [Republic], call it whatever you like, I don't care."

Only six weeks ago, Mr. Abbas again blasted the Jewish-state concept. The Palestinian rejection of Jewish statehood could not be more emphatic. (For a compilation of their assertions, see "Recognizing Israel as the Jewish State: Statements" at DanielPipes.org.) American politicians, including both George W. Bush and Mr. Obama, have since 2008 occasionally referred to Israel as the Jewish state, even as they studiously avoided requiring Palestinians to do likewise. In a typical declaration, Mr. Obama in 2011 sketched the ultimate diplomatic goal as "two states for two people: Israel as a Jewish state and the homeland for the Jewish people, and the state of Palestine as the homeland for the Palestinian people."

Then, in his Jerusalem speech last week, Mr. Obama suddenly and unexpectedly adopted in full the Israeli demand: "Palestinians must recognize that Israel will be a Jewish state."

That sentence breaks important new ground and cannot readily be undone. It also makes for excellent policy, for without such recognition, Palestinian acceptance of Israel is hollow, indicating only a willingness to call the future state they would dominate "Israel" rather than "Palestine."

While not the only shift in policy announced during Mr. Obama's trip (another was telling the Palestinians not to set preconditions for negotiations), this one looms largest because it starkly contravenes the Palestinian consensus. Mr. Bardawil may hyperbolically assert it "shows that Obama has turned his back to all Arabs," but those 10 words, in fact, establish a readiness to deal with the conflict's central issue. They likely will be his most important, most lasting and most constructive contribution to Arab-Israeli diplomacy.

Contact UCI at voices@unitycoalitionforisrael.org


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A REVIEW OF ISRAEL APARTHEID WEEK (IAW)

Posted by Barbara Sommer, March 28, 2013

The article below was written by Alexander H. Joffe who is an archaeologist and historian of the Near East. Joffe grew up in Newton, Massachusetts, graduated from Cornell University in 1981 with a B.A in History and received an M.A. and Ph.D. in Near Eastern Studies from the University of Arizona in 1991. He has participated in and directed archaeological research in Israel, Jordan, Greece and the United States, at Tel Miqne, Tel Dor, Tel Yaqush, Tel el-Hammeh, Beersheva, Tel Rekhesh, Megiddo, Ain Ghazal, and elsewhere. He has written extensively on Near Eastern archaeology. He has been an associate at the Harvard Semitic Museum in Cambridge, Mass. and the Albright Institute of Archaeological Research in Jerusalem, as well as the Department of Archaeology at Boston University. Dr. Joffe has taught at Pennsylvania State University and SUNY Purchase. This article appeared March 24, 2013 in the Middle East Forum and is archived at
http://www.meforum.org/3476/israel-apartheid-week

The return of Israel Apartheid Week (IAW) makes it necessary to review some of the better and less well-known features of this annual, global event. By doing so, it will become possible better to understand the nature and scope of the problem and to improve our focus on potential responses.

The first and most important fact regarding IAW is its clearly stated goal of destroying Israel. This is sometimes glossed over by individual events and specific speakers. It may also be lost in the emotionalism that surrounds the agit-prop rhetoric and guerilla theatrics. But the "Basis of Unity for IAW International Coordination" makes the goals and methods of IAW and its local affiliates clear:

We are against the racist ideology of Zionism, which is the impetus for Israeli colonialism, because it inherently discriminates against those who are not Jewish. We are against all forms of discrimination, and believe that there can never be justice without the restoration of full rights for everyone, regardless of religion, ethnicity, or nationality. Our demands are based upon the Palestinian Civil Society Call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel, issued on 9 July 2005 by over 170 Palestinian organizations, which states that:

Boycott, divestment and sanctions should be imposed and maintained until Israel meets its obligation to recognize the Palestinian people's inalienable right to self-determination and fully complies with the precepts of international law by:

1. Ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands, dismantling the Wall and freeing all Palestinian and Arab political prisoners;

2. Recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality;

3. Respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN General Assembly resolution 194.

To be part of the Israeli Apartheid Week International Network, organizations should commit to:

a) the basis of unity above

b) coordination with the international network

c) building, as part of Israeli Apartheid Week activities, local BDS awareness and campaigns.

As will be noted below, the nature of these goals raise questions regarding responses from pro-Israel and pro-peace supporters.

Another obvious but unappreciated feature is that IAW is a highly professional, coordinated international effort with unknown sources of funding. It is not a series of loosely affiliated grassroots initiatives that happens to be taking place simultaneously in over 100 cities around the world. It is explicitly based on the "Palestinian Civil Society Call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel" of 2005, which in turn was based on the "Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel" of 2004. But the roots of these efforts have been traced by IAW organizers back to at least 2000, who also make reference to two additional sources of legitimacy, international efforts that opposed apartheid in South Africa and, more ominously, United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379 of 1975 that declared "Zionism is Racism."

Thus, in ideological and practical terms the IAW movement justifies itself in two ways. Firstly, that it promotes the will of Palestinian organizations that supported the first call. These are primarily professional, trade and labor organizations controlled by the Fatah movement and other members in the Palestine Liberation Organization, as well as non-governmental organizations in Israel and the Palestinian territories that receive American and European funding. Secondly, IAW sees itself as part of the anti-apartheid tradition endorsed by the international community. This is of course part of the movement's name and a key element in its marketing. But the lineage back to Resolution 3379 is another indication of the IAW's true origins and goals.

IAW is also an explicit structural as well as ideological component of the global boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement. The ideological and practical links between IAW and the BDS movement are seen in the regular use of the same speakers at events. Professional activists such as Omar Barghouti, and academics such as Ali Abunimah, Judith Butler, and Saree Makdisi are among the notable individuals who have appeared at IAW and BDS events recently. The rhetoric of IAW differs slightly from that of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, which calls for the "right of return" and BDS activities but which also emphasizes Palestinian and broader Arabic culture as well as political lobbying in the United Kingdom.

Espousing the dissolution of Israel and the "right of return" in favor of single state explicitly denies Jews the right to political sovereignty. Since only Jews are denied this right, IAW and BDS are explicitly antisemitic. The lack of any clear political proposals on the part of IAW, in the form of the desired unitary state, such as "secular" and "democratic," or any articulation of its political and legal systems, not least of all protections of minorities, is another indication of the IAW's nature and goals. IAW is fundamentally antinomian, that is, it is more opposed to the existence of Israel than it is in favor of concrete and workable, much less fair, solutions to the Arab-Israeli conflict. This, along with the explicit situation of BDS as part of anti-colonial, indigenous rights, and anti-globalization movements, speaks to BDS and IAW as heirs to the Soviet tradition of antisemitism in the guise of anti-Zionism, which reached a peak with Resolution 3379, and its current position firmly within the global left.

In the past, the relationship between IAW and actual BDS efforts has been obscured by its guerrilla theater tactics. More recently, however, divestment proposals put forward in student governments at American universities appear more carefully timed to coincide with IAW. The failure in March 2013 of one proposal at Stanford University has now been matched by a success at the University of California at San Diego. Such resolutions have had no practical effect on university investment policies but will continue to influence the general university environment, particularly among students.

How IAW actually works remains unclear, since the international and local organizers do not reveal their names in most publicly accessible sources. Organizing local events is conducted in a cell-like manner, and parties interested in participating or contributing must approach local organizers through email or Facebook. This closed structure is a key operating procedure that creates an air of elitism and secrecy to insiders and consistently creates surprises for outsiders. Many of the same individuals appear repeatedly as grassroots activists but at different academic institutions, for example across undergraduate and graduate careers, suggesting a guiding hand as well as sources of support.

IAW's sources of funding are unknown. It does not fundraise on its international or local websites nor does it tout grants it has received. A brief search of reports filed by non-profits with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) does not show IAW registered as a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) organization under that name or any close approximation. Organizations may of course be registered as non-profits under whatever name they choose.

The organizational links to the BDS movement, which as noted include sharing speakers, may extend to funding. The funding of the BDS movement is only slightly better understood. For example, the "U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation" is supported by a 501(c)(3) organization called "Education for Just Peace in the Middle East," whose president is Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C. But while these organizations are required to file reports with the IRS outlining their activities and expenditures, they are not required to list their donors.

Given the uncompromising nature of IAW's beliefs and its party-like structure, its range of negative tactics and strident rhetoric, it must be asked what sort of responses the pro-Israel and pro-peace community should muster. Responding to IAW is therefore a subset to what has become a broader debate regarding pro-Israel and pro-peace tactics on American campuses. To what extent should IAW simply be ignored, or responded to by positive programming such as Israel "buycotts"? Is there a place for negative counterprogramming, regarding for example the abuse of women and gays in Palestinian society or racism generally in the Muslim world?

There are no clear guidelines except the suggestion that every campus is different, in terms of its social and political structures, and these should help shape responses. A corollary observation is that any and all responses will be automatically inverted as negatives or pointed to as a deliberate distraction; for example, even a positive discussion of the status of gays in Israeli society will elicit the accusation of "pinkwashing." Such chilling effects are unquantifiable but run deep. Little need be said regarding IAW's abuse of human rights rhetoric and explicit denial of any rights to Israelis, or its demands for free speech, and denial of the same to others. Physical violence from pro-Palestinian protestors is not uncommon and must be counted as another chilling effect.

With respect to IAW specifically, one must ask whether any form of direct engagement, in the form of debate or discussion, is worthwhile. With their propensity for dirty tricks, such as the recent posting of mock eviction notices on the doors of Jewish students at Harvard, and their regular use of mock apartheid walls and checkpoints on college campuses, it is clear that they are true believers with unchangeable minds. To this extent, does engagement in debates or discussions on the part of pro-Israel and pro-peace supporters play into IAW's hands by legitimizing their viewpoints, rhetoric and tactics?

The explicit entrapment of pro-Israel and pro-peace supporters, in particular Jewish and Jewish Studies faculty members, by BDS supporters generally is an obvious issue but one that is rarely discussed. Faculty members are regularly drawn into to stacked debates or worse, kangaroo courts. If they refuse to participate,this gives anti-Israel organizers the fig leaf of having sought balance and the license to put their own extremism on full display. There is, in a sense, no winning, except through continually exposing IAW's fundamental bigotry, mendacity, and unfair tactics.

Having said this, it is also necessary correctly to assess IAW's impact, at least on broader American society. Recent polls have shown, for example, that American sympathies with Israel are matching their all-time high, and that sympathy for Palestinians remains extremely low. Though IAW takes place publicly and not just on campuses, it is there that the impact is most visible. Other sectors that should be kept in view, however, are labor unions and Protestant churches, where BDS efforts have been focused for many years, as well as in the Democratic Party both at the national and local levels, where support for Israel has been dropping. Other impacts are occasionally seen in the entertainment industry, where, for example, calls are regularly issued to petition or boycott artists who perform in Israel.

At present, the overall failure of IAW and the BDS movement to change American public opinion and behavior as a whole is striking. Ensuring that failure continues and expands is no small task, but this is vital if the cause of peace between Israelis and Palestinians is to advance.

Contact Barbara Sommer at lsommer_1_98@yahoo.com


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SPME FACULTY FORUM: A REVIEW OF ISRAEL APARTHEID WEEK (IAW) 2013

Posted by Spme.net, March 28, 2013

Some of our grandparents who once lived in Eastern Europe used to tell how Holy Week, the week before Easter became a time of fear. When Holy Week began, particularly in the countryside, they shut themselves up in their homes in fear of their physical safety. This was a time of incitement against the Jews and the season of the blood libel. Today, Jews who live in free and democratic societies would prefer not to relive these memories.

Unfortunately, Jewish students on American university campuses are being confronted with a new annual ritual which bears some similarity to the oppression which their ancestors experienced during Holy Week. Israel Apartheid Week (IAW) involves intimidation and fear, not the least because of confrontations which take place at symbolic campus "roadblocks." Despite all disclaimers, IAW possesses a strong undercurrent of anti-Semitism passing under the guise of a progressive humanitarian objection to the alleged racism of Israeli society.

This year, the annual IAW takes place in March in over 200 cities. So far, one of its most successful accomplishments was the success of Palestinian advocates to get the University of California San Diego to adopt a "socially responsible" resolution in favor of divestment of the University's assets from Israel. IAW was also observed at McGill University in Montréal, and San Francisco State University. In Cambridge, MA, the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee posted mock eviction notices on the doors of Jewish students as well as some others.

Incitement to hatred and, potentially, violence is objectionable and represents a new challenge to which all citizens of good faith should respond. There are several aspects of this problem. For the most part, university administrators have been passive. Their acquiescence has brought criticism particularly in the cases of Brooklyn College and Harvard University. At the same time, the American Jewish community has yet to respond with a coherent strategy.

Israel's adversaries are well organized, decentralized, and use the methods of an underground movement. These are the findings of Alex Joffe whom we have invited to submit a special report for the Faculty Forum. Separately, we are running a report on UCSD which board member and UCSD professor , Shlomo Dubnov, and Asaf Romirowsky, our Acting Executive Director, recently published.

We also make special mention of an essay, "Sitting beside a BDS Leader," which our good friend, Eran Shayshon, the director of the Reut Institute of Tel Aviv wrote for The Daily Beast. By chance, Eran found himself sitting next to a BDS leader on a long flight. At first, their conversation was not so pleasant, but after while they began a meaningful exchange. During this discussion, Eran asked, at what point would the BDS advocates be satisfied and willing to end their campaign against Israel. He then recounted the unsettling reply he received, "I never got a clear answer from her, or from other BDS supporters I have spoken with, regarding the circumstances under which they would stop advocating for BDS. What would need to happen? My flight companion claimed that the boycott campaign targeted the 'occupation,' while acknowledging that she and others don't believe in the two-state solution. So which occupation was she referring to? Is it only the West Bank that is occupied, or also Tel Aviv? Is it about the occupation or about the State of Israel?"

There is a serious disconnect here, because we are repeatedly confronted with the intransigent Palestinian objection to the existence of the State of Israel, the state of the Jewish People. During the 1970s, Yehoshefat Harkabi, who wrote the pioneering studies of Arab attitudes toward Israel, observed that "The Arabs can present their case in simplistic slogans. At most they have to try to conceal that their grievance, the redress of which in their version would be a matter of justice, is an unlimited grievance, which the opponent cannot redress to their liking and yet stay alive. Thus Israel's reluctance to abide by their demands is represented by them as only capricious, whereas actually it is an existential imperative." [Arab Strategies and Israel's Response (New York: Free Press, 1977), 101.]

There are several corollaries to this position. "Justice" from the Arab point of view means the destruction of Israel, and because the "injustice" of the birth of Israel was of such a scale, all means can be used in order to undo it. According to their logic, the end justifies the means. For them, all means fair and foul, -- including terror, -- are acceptable.

Since the 1960s, and even before the founding of the PLO, this has been the Arab position. Now, the Palestinians and their advocates have given it new packaging, this time in the form of Israel Apartheid Week. After the failure of the Second Intifada [The Second Armed Uprising] and with Durban Conference which followed (2001), they have resorted to a sustained, global propaganda offensive. One consequence has been the spread of anti-Semitism and an assault on the civil rights of Jewish students on the American campus. They have opened a political war, but we must neutralize this challenge and prevail. We must study their tactics and defeat their strategy.

Contact Spme.net at SPME-replies@spme.net


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THE REAL ISLAMOPHOBIA

Posted by Richard H. Shulman, March 28, 2013

The FBI and the military have failed to apprehend some Islamist terrorists until they act, although they did not hide their jihadist inclinations. The main reason is that from the President on down, the U.S. government refuses to acknowledge Radical Islamic motives and ways of operation. The government refuses to discuss the issue publicly. President Obama called Maj. Nidal Hasan's murder of 13 troops "workplace violence."

The investigation of the Muslim major's attack ignored the obvious signs of a coming attack and the jihadist orientation. One warning sign was Hasan's email to the charismatic Muslim cleric Awlaki, that he wished to become a martyr. Hasan wrote other things, such as discussing religious murder, indicating he was planning to attack. The investigation's excuse was that Awlaki did not actually direct Hasan to make that attack. But Awlaki taught jihad, or the duty to slay their enemies, and let his acolytes pick their targets. His being instrumental in certain attacks was known in advance of Maj. Hasan's. Yet the investigation called him merely a propagandist.

The investigation's further excuse that Hasan's emails were just research and that confronting Hasan would have tipped off Awlaki. Monitoring need not have been confrontational, until a dismissal and arrest were decided upon. Obviously Hasan was preparing himself to make an attack, not doing academic research. They knew that Awlaki was charismatic, so they should have suspected that Hasan already was radicalized.

None of the investigators were experts on jihad, so the report emphasized other policies and procedures. The report seems to have emphasized civil liberties as if the main consideration. The report appended one paper, a paper from the ACLU, which seems to consider effective anti-terrorism as a violation of civil liberties. The investigation found no culpability in officials who ignored the warning signs. Nor did it ask why the signs were ignored. The report emphasized all sorts of motives for terrorism but jihad.

Senators Lieberman and Susan Collins found that the FBI should have realized that Maj. Hassan had become radicalized. All the recommendations of the investigators would not prevent another attack like his.

"Islamists often raise the specter of 'Islamophobia' whenever any legitimate question about or criticism of Islam is broached. But real Islamophobia stalks the corridors of Washington and other Western capitols: The fear of upsetting Muslims of any stripe is so rampant that the security of the American citizenry has been compromised." (Teri Blumenfeld, Middle East Quarterly, Spring 2013, pp. 13-18 (view PDF)

http://www.meforum.org/3478/fbi-islam-terrorism .)

Why does Pres. Obama undermine our anti-terrorist efforts instead of leading them? President Obama is a leftist. Contemporary leftists carry multi-culturalism so far as to shut their eyes to foreign cultural threats to our own culture. They are so anti-Zionist and against U.S. assertion of power to protect its national security, as to favor American enemies and enemies of peace, including the Palestinian Arabs. Obama shares some of these views and appeases some of these leftists, now powerful within his political party.

That still does not explain enough. Obama was raised as a Muslim. He learned Arabic to become more familiar with the language of the religion's sacred documents. He cannot be ignorant of jihad, a major principle of that religion.

Many of Obama's policies undermine our military as well as our domestic resistance to jihad. He helped overthrow regimes that were followed by Islamist rule. He kept our security forces from rescuing the ambassador in Libya. He gives arms to Islamists in Egypt and the P.A.. He conveniently got our four best generals out of service, their minor embarrassments too minor to accept their resignations. He let the surge in, but undermined it by announcing (to the Taliban) that it was temporary (so they need not engage our troops until the troops left), and he offered to keep so few troops in Iraq hat Iraq realized it was not going to get protected by the U.S. at all. Draw your own conclusion about Obama!

An amusing postscript. Some Lyndon Larouche followers had a table on a street I passed. They were calling for the impeachment of Obama. They have been calling for every President's impeachment. Their own program sounds populist, but Mr. Larouche originally had Communist sympathies, if I recall, but seems to have become more of a nihilist.

I approached one of the barkers and asked what specific high crime and misdemeanors they would base the impeachment on. He did not answer that. He just said that the U.S. will be ruined if we don't remove Obama. I agree, but that is no basis for impeachment.

Incidentally, as an example of what we have to prevent, he referred to the Cyprus bank problem. That problem has nothing to do with Obama. Opportunistic thinking.

Richard Shulman is a veteran defender of Israel on several web-based forums. His comments and analyses are a regular feature on Think-Israel. He provides cool information and right-on-target overviews. He distributes his essays by email. To subscribe, write him at ricshulman@aol.com.


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THE HANANOSAURUS

Posted by Steven Plaut, March 29, 2013

  • Member of the Palestinian Legislative Council

  • Holocaust denier

  • Apologist for Palestinian terror

A self-identified Christian and feminist, Hanan Ashrawi was born on October 8, 1946 in Nablus, a city in the West Bank. Her father, Daoud Mikhail, was a co-founder of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Ashrawi earned a master's degree in literature at the American University of Beirut, where, during her student days, she dated Peter Jennings of ABC News, who was stationed there as his network's bureau chief.

When the Six-Day War broke out in 1967, Ashrawi, who was then in Lebanon, was declared an "absentee" by Israel and was denied re-entry to the West Bank until 1973, when she was permitted to return under terms of the family reunification plan. During her six-year absence, Ashrawi had earned a Ph.D. in Medieval and Comparative Literature from the University of Virginia. She also had spent time working as a spokeswoman for the General Union of Palestinian Students in Lebanon, helping to organize women's revolutionary groups, and serving as a guide to foreign reporters visiting Palestinian refugee camps.

Upon returning to the West Bank, Ashrawi established the Department of English at Birzeit University, where she would remain on the faculty until 1995. In 1974 she founded the Birzeit University Legal Aid Committee and Human Rights Action Project.

During the First Palestinian Intifada in 1988, Ashrawi joined the Intifada Political Committee and served there until 1993. In 1991 Yasser Arafat appointed her as Official Spokesperson of the Palestinian Delegation to the "Middle East Peace Process." She also served as the PLO's Minister of Higher Education and Research, and for one year she was the head of its Political Committee.

Ashrawi has long defended Hamas as a legitimate component of the Palestinian "political spectrum." She unequivocally does not "think of Hamas as a terrorist group." "We coordinate [with Hamas] politically," she said in April 1993, "... the people we know and talk to are not terrorists."

Also in 1993, Ashrawi justified the PLO's practice of murdering Palestinians whom it suspected of "collaboration" with Israel.

From 1993 to 1995, after the Oslo peace accords had been signed by Yasser Arafat and Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, Ashrawi headed the Preparatory Committee of the Palestinian Independent Commission for Citizens' Rights in Jerusalem. In 1996 she was elected to the Palestinian Legislative Council's Jerusalem Governorate, where she continues to serve to this day.

Also in 1996, Ashrawi was appointed as the Palestinian Authority Minister of Higher Education and Research, though she resigned the post two years later in protest against Arafat's handling of the peace talks with Israel.

In 1998 Ashrawi founded MIFTAH, an NGO that seeks to undermine Israel's legitimacy and refers to that nation's 1948 creation as "Al Nakba," or "The Catastrophe." Ashrawi refuses to recognize Israel's legitimacy within any set of borders whatsoever, and has called for Israel "to ... admit its responsibility and culpability for the plight of the millions of Palestinian refugees who are dispossessed and dispersed and who have lived ... in atrocious conditions and tremendous pain and oppression, totally deprived of any rights."

Ashrawi has long been a Holocaust denier. In the July 2, 1998 edition of the official Palestinian Authority newspaper Al-Hayat Al-Jadeeda, she published an article calling the Holocaust "a deceitful myth which the Jews have ... exploited to get sympathy."

In 2001 Ashrawi became a spokeswoman for the Arab League, an organization of Arab dictatorships that consistently expressed solidarity with Saddam Hussein.

Ashrawi favors the Palestinian "right of return" to Israel, which would render the Jews a permanent minority in their own country and would thus spell the end of Israel.

In speeches she has delivered on various occasions, Ashrawi has accused Israel of "carrying out ethnic cleansing in Jerusalem"; "shooting at civilians"; "besieging the towns and cities and camps of the Palestinians"; "occupying other people's lands"; and "enslaving" Palestinians.

Ashrawi views virtually all Palestinian attacks against Israelis as understandable and justifiable. For example, when Palestinian mobs tortured, mutiliated, and lynched two unarmed Israeli reserve soldiers in Ramallah in October 2000, Ashrawi defended their actions.

Ashrawi once signed a petition against suicide bombings targeted at Israeli civilians, leading many in the media to view her as a moderate. But in fact, that petition actually did not condemn suicide bombings in principle; rather, it argued that the timing for such attacks was wrong from a practical standpoint — because they would inevitably harm the Palestinians by generating bad press and Israeli reprisals.

Steven Plaut is an American-trained economist, a professor of business administration at Haifa University and author of "The Scout." He frequently comments — both seriously and satirically — on Israeli politics and the left wing academic community. Write him at splaut@econ.haifa.ac.il His website address is http://www.stevenplaut.blogspot.com.


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RECORD TOURISM IN GUSH ETZION

Posted by Arutz Sheva, March 29, 2013

A record number of tourists visit the Judea region and Gush Etzion. Most popular: Herodium, Deer Land. New minister among visitors.

Caption Text

A record number of visitors toured the Gush Etzion region of Judea this week during the intermediate days of Passover. Local authorities estimated tourism at 15,000 visitors, from Israel and around the world.

Many local sites saw high levels of interest, among them the regional bike trail and freshwater springs.

One of the most popular sites was the Herodium, the ruins of an ancient palace and town built by Herod on a hilltop in the Judean desert. Thousands of visitors came to the site each day.

Another popular destination was Havat Eretz Haayalim — Deer Land — which had to close its gates to newcomers as roughly 6,000 people came to visit. Deer Land boasts many attractions, including a climbing wall, carousel, and bungee trampoline.

Site manager Lior Levi said, "As happy as we were to see so many people visiting the farm, we had to close earlier than we thought because there was no room left. We left disappointed faces, who heard about the farm by word of mouth."

Levi added, "We invite everyone to come visit during the rest of the year."

One of the visitors was new Education Minister Shai Piron of Yesh Atid, who came with his family. The family started at the Herodium and continued with a jeep tour of the Maaleh Amos region in the Judean desert. They went on to visit a local dairy farm and a historic site dedicated to those who fell defending Gush Etzion in the War of Independence.

Piron also met with Davidi Perl, head of the local Regional Council, to talk about education in the region.

minister piron

council  piron

Maayana Miskin writes for Arutz-Sheva, where this article appeared March 29, 2013. It is archived at
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/166653#.VbfnYryVsWM. Contact Arutz Sheva at news@israelnationalnews.com


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VETERANS NEED NOT APPLY!

Posted by FSM Security, March 29, 2013

The article below was written by Colonel Kenneth Allard who is a widely known commentator on foreign policy and security issues. For more than a decade, he was a featured military analyst on NBC News, MSNBC and CNBC. That experience provided the backdrop for his most recent book, Warheads: Cable News and the Fog of War. This article appeared March 29, 2013 in Family Security Matters and is archived at
http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/veterans-need-not-apply?f=must_reads

It was hard to listen to that Sunday's Lenten sermon because I was sulking. With our condo lease expiring, my wife and I were torn between renting and buying. The stunner pictured here was a perfect purchase. But the owners turned us down flat on Saturday afternoon, the latest in a long series of disappointments.

Caption Text

Was the Christian life really supposed to be this hard? My Jesus-take-the-wheel moment had come seven years before; ever since, it felt like the wheel was mounted on the motorcycle driven by Steve McQueen during The Great Escape. The spiritual odyssey had included divorce, identity theft, health problems, a close call with Hurricane Katrina and sudden relocation to San Antonio. As FSM readers will remember, my ten-year career as an NBC News military analyst ended after a libelous "expose" by the New York Times, followed by four Federal investigations that provided slow but complete vindication. A recession especially unkind to aging Baby Boomers meant that the ratio of resumes and cover letters to return calls from recruiters was running against me.

purchase carpet

Those challenges had been accompanied by the unexpected blessing of finding and marrying Betsy, whose Christian journey made mine seem tame. But so what if I was "The Colonel" who once appeared before national TV audiences? Now I couldn't even purchase my wife her own home! Kim, our long-suffering real estate lady, explained that VA mortgages - the only kind I could afford - were somewhat unusual these days. The reason: Despite more than a decade of war, only 1% of Americans ever serve in uniform. "Well," I replied sadly, "then maybe veterans need not apply."

Just last year, things seemed to be slowly turning around. Half my military retirement pay was restored under near-miraculous circumstances. My car had been rescued from divorce/repo and I began drawing Social Security. ("No, I'm NOT retiring. I just want my money before the Chinese re-possess!") There was even enough income for my 'financial advisors' (a term that always convulsed me) to do credit checks confirming no debts, no defaults and no late payments. Even so, we were clearly marginal home buyers, barely a step ahead of other Americans who hadn't been as fortunate. So on Monday we began checking out other rentals - though without much enthusiasm.

suddenly room

Now I knew perfectly well how the Bible's most compelling stories often began with the words, "But suddenly..." Even so, when the phone rang suddenly late on Monday afternoon, I just assumed that Kim was calling back to discuss more modest listings. Instead she said, "Ken, the owners have just turned down two other offers to accept the one from you and Betsy. Do you still want that house?" When my powers of speech returned, I stammered that, yes, we sure did! Once the finance folks worked their magic, it turned out that our monthly VA mortgage payment would cost almost $100 less than our current rent!

I cannot explain in earthly terms why the sellers re-considered and chose us when they could easily have held out for better offers from wealthier buyers. But I also remember another film, Forrest Gump, and his side-kick, Lieutenant Dan, who often reminds me of myself. Railing at God to protest the injustice of the war wounds that left him crippled, Lieutenant Dan shakes his fist from the crow's nest of their shrimp boat. With a hurricane closing in, Forrest dead-pans his funniest line: "And just then, God showed up!"

But in the weeks between signing the contract, getting the loan approved and preparing for closing, I kept expecting things to go wrong. So many agendas, so many signatures, so many opportunities for mischief or misadventure! During our final inspection, the owner called me aside - but only to ask if I would accept his grill and patio set as a parting gift. And closing? It went off without a hitch, even moved up a day because everything was in perfect order.

distress

I remembered not only Lieutenant Dan but also those Psalms where God rescued David from one tight spot after another. My favorite is Psalm 118, "I called upon the Lord in my distress; He answered me and set me in a large place."

For Betsy and me, that large place is called Texas. And last week, we moved into a small piece of paradise, recognizing that - mortgage notwithstanding - this house really was a gift. For us it is the micro-illustration of the much larger truth summed up by Good Friday and Easter. Grace is what happens when God does for us that which we don't deserve, cannot expect and could not possibly achieve through our own merits.

Contact FSM Security at info@familysecuritymatters.org


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THE TRUE OBSTACLE TO PEACE BETWEEN ISRAELIS AND PALESTINIANS

Posted by Asaf Romirowsky, March 29, 2013

With the completion of Barack Obama's first Presidential visit to Israel, as expected there was a great deal of symbolism reinforcing the bond between the two allies. Yet still, doves on both sides acknowledge that peace is hardly around the corner.

Understanding the true barriers to a comprehensive agreement is key to knowing where the pressure to compromise will be coming from. Contrary to popular belief, the core of the conflict is not borders, Israeli settlements, or the status of Jerusalem.

An honest look at the relationship between Israelis and Palestinians requires Obama to understand two major things before he attempts to jump-start any peace process. One is that the two state model today is only applicable to Israel and the West Bank; there can be no contiguous Palestine state between the West Bank and Gaza with Hamas in power. This would represent a threat to both Israel and to Palestine.

Second, the crux of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is rooted in the Palestinian "Right of Return," the collective belief in a legal and moral right for Palestinian refugees, and more importantly their descendents from around the world, to return to ancestral homes in Israel that were once part of Mandatory Palestine. The "right of return" is central to Palestinian national identity and is a high barrier to any peace agreement.

This is underscored in a recent telling statement made by Hamas leader Mahmoud Al-Zahar on the Ezzedeen Al-Qassam Brigade's website. He said that that Israel's attempts to end the UN classification of the Palestinian refugees is doomed to fail because of how Palestinian identity is linked to the Right of Return for eternity. "The Palestinian refugee is a citizen forcibly displaced from his land and his return is one of the constants that cannot be controlled by the occupation; it is sacred like our faith... Our grandfathers were once in their land and their grandchildren will return to it no matter how long it takes."

This is a quasi-religious belief that crosses all sectors of Palestinian society, and which is endlessly reproduced in Palestinian media, education and culture, and which is endorsed by UNRWA, the UN organ charged with maintaining health, welfare and education services for those it has deemed Palestinian refugees.

But Al-Zahar is also misinformed regarding the Israeli position. Recent Israeli governments have been forthright in stating that there is no "right of return" and increasingly they point to it as one of the most formidable obstacles to making peace between the Israeli and Palestinian states, as well as peoples. But there have been no official Israeli efforts to end or even curtail UNRWA. Only recently has former Member of Knesset Einat Wilf called attention to UNRWA's administrative decisions to extend refugee status to additional generations of Palestinians, creating more "refugees" and extending its own mandate. Wilf notes correctly that UNRWA's endorsement of the "right of return" lies at the root of the Arab-Israeli conflict and not co-incidentally UNRWA's continued existence. Important legislation to reform UNRWA has also come from U.S. Senator Mark Kirk but has not yet succeeded in passing through the Congress.

But Al-Zahar understands the problem in the most fundamental way, that the "right of return" — and until then, "refugee" status guaranteed and funded by the international community — are the cornerstones of Palestinian national identity. From his perspective, of course, it is therefore necessary to put the onus entirely on Israel for the "Nakba," the "catastrophe" of 1948 and Israel's creation, as opposed to seeing any Palestinian and Arab responsibility or agency in the matter. If this is the core of Palestinian identity, that can be satisfied only by exercising the Palestinian "right of return" and the destruction of Israel, then there is no room for compromise.

To understand the core of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Obama administration would be wise to listen to Al-Zahar, as well as Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas who stated "I have never and will never give up the right of return." Abbas's statement is as important as Al-Zahar's since he was forced by Palestinian and Arab outrage to clarify an earlier comment where he had appeared to waver on the "right of return."

In the meantime, UNRWA will continue to support continuing generations of "refugees," the majority of whom were born outside of Palestine, a large proportion of whom are national citizens of other states. In fact, UNRWA's former general counsel James Lindsay has observed that "In truth, the vast majority of UNRWA's registered refugees have already been "resettled" (or, to use the UN euphemism, "reintegrated")" and that "only thing preventing all of these citizens from ceasing to be "refugees" is UNRWA's singular definition of what constitutes a refugee."

Understanding how a UN agency is an integral ingredient of a long-term Arab strategy to perpetuate the misery of the Palestinians, and to keep this humanitarian burden at the center of the Arab-Israeli conflict is another key for President Obama to keep in mind as he visits Israel, and perhaps the West Bank. This has been the Arab world's biggest success against Israel, only at the expense of the Palestinians. If Obama truly wants to move the peace process forward it would behoove him to look at what our taxpayer dollars are buying in UNRWA, and at those who are truly being served. Until he understands that the "right of return" is the essence of the conflict, and that we need to start changing this core Palestinian belief, President Obama should not expect any change in the near future.

Asaf Romirowsky is an adjunct scholar at the Middle East Forum. Alexander Joffe is a Shillman-Ginsburg Fellow at the Middle East Forum. This article appeared March 26, 2013 in Pundicity Informed Opinion and Review and is archived at
http://www.romirowsky.com/13119/peace-israelis-palestinians


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PASSOVER'S ETERNAL FLAME

Posted by Hebron, March 29, 2013

The article below was written by David Wilder who is spokesman of The Jewish Community of Hebron. You can contribute directly in Israel to The Jewish Community of Hebron, POB105, Kiryat Arba-Hebron 90100, email: hebron@hebron.org.il or phone: 972-52-431-7055. In USA, write to The Hebron Fund, 1760 Ocean Ave., Brooklyn, NY 11230, email: hebronfund@aol.com or phone: 718 677 6886.

This time of the year is always special. Spring is arriving, the weather becoming really beautiful, and lots and lots of people in Hebron.

spring rally

Hebron's Passover celebration included, this year, well over 50,000 people. Wednesday and Thursday were the 'big days' with all of Ma'arat HaMachpela open to Jewish visitors, including the Isaac Hall, open to us only 10 days a year.

Thursday's music festival didn't leave any of the tens of thousands disappointed. The shows began at 12:30 in the afternoon and continued until almost 7:30, when Lipa Schmeltzer put on a show never to be forgotten. First he sang and danced a duet with Chaim Yisrael, and then continued by himself. It was a huge amount of fun.

singer

As were the children's events, tours, and just seeing so many wonderful people walking the streets of Hebron's Jewish community, following in the footsteps of Abraham and Sarah, King David, and multitudes of Jews over the centuries.

That having been said, I must admit that, with all its energy and fun, and as much as I look forward to and enjoy these days, this year, my favorite event didn't occur in Hebron.

Those of you who have read these articles over the years may remember numerous essays about Gush Katif. My favorite place in Gush Katif was, as I described it many times, the Garden of Eden in Gaza, a community called Kfar Darom. My family vacationed there several summers, having befriended a delightful family, who had adopted my oldest daughter, Bat-tzion, when she spent her year of volunteer service there.

Several articles featured the Sudri family, and among others, their oldest daughter, Tamar.

The last time I wrote about her was a few years ago, after her marriage to a wonderful man named Oneg. A couple of years ago they had their first child, a little girl.

Child

Last week, Tamar gave birth to their first boy. Today was his 'brit' — circumcision. A few of us from Hebron traveled an hour and a quarter, south, to the festivity.

After the destruction and expulsion from Kfar Darom, the Sudri family was moved to an apartment building in Ashkelon. From a nice house, to an apartment. Not great, but 'temporary.'

Honestly, I don't remember how long they were there. Many too many years. The new homes in a new community, as they'd been promised, never materialized. About two years ago they finally received a 'kara-villa- that is, a so-called fancy mobile home, outside a community called Nir Akiva, east of Gaza, near Netivot and Beer Sheva. The called the new community Shavei Darom, 'Returning South.'

Speaking to one of the men there this morning, I asked about permanent housing. He pointed in the direction of a big empty area, and said, 'there.' "Has anything started, any building?" He shook his head no. "When?" He just shrugged his shoulders.

I get very emotional at Gush Katif — Kfar Darom events. They bring back many many memories. I walked into the small synagogue and immediately noticed the plaque on the wall. I remembered it from the Kfar Darom synagogue. A memorial sign, for those people from the community, killed there by terrorists.

Caption Text

On another wall, letters spelling out 'Kfar Darom, M'az u'le'tamid' —' Kfar Darom, from then and forever.' Including, of course, photos of the community sites and people.

festive

The baby's brit didn't take too much time. A great grandfather held the infant, who was named Tzvi. Afterwards, we participated in the festive meal, before heading back to Hebron.

Before the meal I asked Tamar's mother who the baby was named for and she didn't know. I mentioned, 'well, Eretz Yisrael is compared to a Tzvi — a deer, I wouldn't be surprised if that's what's behind the name. That would be fitting of Tamar. Later, when Oneg spoke, he did say that one of the reasons for the name was the idea I'd spoken of.

Actually, as much as I enjoyed seeing my friends, the Sudris, and participating in the celebration, my real focus was on Tamar. I'd known her since she was a little girl and had witnessed her evolvement through the most horrible events that can be imagined. Rocket attacks, terror attacks, culminating in expulsion.

joy mother and child

I've seen her every once in a while, but this was special, seeing her with her husband and two small children. She glowed, radiating joy.

How? How does one reach such bliss with so many scars?

The answer, I think, is not difficult to fathom. We are in the midst of the Passover holiday, celebrating the exodus from Egypt. Jews had been enslaved for hundreds of years, had almost entirely lost their Jewish identity, having assimilated into the Egyptian culture. Yet they never gave up hope of redemption, and the Divine hand of G-d did redeem them, removing them from foreign bondage with miracles galore.

That is, in brief, the history of the Jewish people, time and time again. Could anyone have imagined that three years after a holocaust, the Jewish people would be able to found a State and victoriously fight a war of independence?

That flow of optimism, being able to see the light, even in the darkest of rooms, keeps us going; that's what, I believe, keeps Tamar going. We all blessed the family that their next simcha — celebration, should take place back in Kfar Darom, including Tzvi's Bar Mitzva and wedding.

And it will happen. We will go back to Kfar Darom, and Netzarim, and Neve Dekalim and all the other communities destroyed, they will be rebuilt and repopulated, they will grow and thrive, it will happen. Just as we were redeemed from Egypt — will will go back home to Kfar Darom.

eternal.israeli.flag

Seeing Tamar, with her husband Oneg and their two small children — this is the eternal flame, this is the result of what happened some 3,300 years ago, that we still celebrate today.

This is what made this year's Passover special for me.

Contact Hebron at hebron@hebron.com


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OBAMA SAID THE PALESTINIANS MUST ACCEPT ISRAEL AS A JEWISH STATE.

Posted by Ted Belman, March 29, 2013

Daniel Pipes had this to say in the Washington Times:

Then, in his Jerusalem speech last week, Obama suddenly and unexpectedly adopted in full the Israeli demand: "Palestinians must recognize that Israel will be a Jewish state."

That sentence breaks important new ground and cannot readily be undone. It also makes for excellent policy, for without such recognition, Palestinian acceptance of Israel is hollow, indicating only a willingness to call the future state they dominate "Israel" rather than "Palestine."

While not the only shift in policy announced during Obama's trip (another: telling the Palestinians not to set preconditions for negotiations), this one looms largest because it starkly contravenes the Palestinian consensus. Bardawil may hyperbolically assert that it "shows that Obama has turned his back to all Arabs" but those ten words in fact establish a readiness to deal with the conflict's central issue. They likely will be his most important, most lasting, and most constructive contribution to Arab-Israeli diplomacy.

Unfortunately he is sticking with '67 line with swaps and a divided Jerusalem

The article above was written by Ted Belman who is a retired lawyer and the Editor of Israpundit. He made aliya from Canada last year and now lives in Jerusalem, Israel. Contact him at tedbel@rogers.com. This article was published March 26, 2013 in Israpundit and is archived at
http://www.israpundit.com/archives/53722


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TERRORIST LINKED TO 9/11 BEFORE DINING AT PENTAGON

Posted by Mailbox(TTG), March 29, 2013

The article below was written by Bob Unruh who joined WND in 2006 after nearly three decades with the Associated Press, as well as several Upper Midwest newspapers, where he covered everything from legislative battles and sports to tornadoes and homicidal survivalists. He is also a photographer whose scenic work has been used commercially. This article appeared March 28, 2013 in WND and is archived at
http://www.wnd.com/2013/03/al-awlaki-linked-to-911-before-pentagon-invitation/

New documents obtained through the federal Freedom of Information Act about Anwar al-Awlaki reveal that his banking activity and other links to several 9/11 hijackers were known to the FBI weeks before he was invited to lunch at the Pentagon during an "outreach" to Muslims.

The documentation was obtained by Judicial Watch, the government watchdog agency that investigates and reports on government corruption.

"The more we learn about Anwar al-Awlaki, the more questions arise not only about his activities before and after 9/11, but also about the al-Qaida operational and support network still active in the United States," said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.

"It is now even more concerning that al-Awlaki was invited to the Pentagon after 9/11 and then let go by the FBI despite warrants for his arrest."

It was reported in 2010 that Al-Awlaki was a lunch guest of military brass at the Pentagon months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks that killed nearly 3,000 Americans in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

At that time, it was revealed that documents, including an FBI interview conducted after Nidal Hasan's terror attack on members of the military at Fort Hood in 2009, show that al-Awlaki was taken to the Pentagon as part of the military's outreach to the Muslim community after 9/11.

Just what is Islam? Find how in Robert Spencer's "Did Muhammad Exist?"

The report said that at that time al-Awlaki "was considered to be an 'up and coming' member of the Islamic community," and he "was invited to and attended a luncheon at the Pentagon in the secretary of the Army's Office of Government Counsel."

Al-Awlaki is a Yemeni-American who was born in Las Cruces, N.M. He was interviewed by the FBI several times in the weeks after the attacks because of his ties to the three hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Hani Hanjour.

The three were aboard Flight 77 that slammed into the Pentagon.

Now, Judicial Watch says it has documents from the FBI that pose new questions about the ties between al-Awlaki, who was killed by a U.S. drone attack ordered by President Obama in Yemen on Sept. 30, 2011, and the others.

The documents are part of Judicial Watch's ongoing investigation of al-Qaida operations in the U.S.

Judicial Watch said an FBI document dated only nine days after the attack showed al-Awlaki regularly patronized a gas station in La Mesa, Calif., where hijacker Nawaf al Hazmi worked, "as did probably 9/11 co-conspirator Mohdar Abdullah."

Another document obtained by Judicial Watch suggested a transfer of funds from al-Awlaki to a hijacker. It revealed a payment from al-Awlaki of $281.50 to an intermediary and then a check from the intermediary to al-Hazmi only weeks before the attack.

"There is no additional information about the transactions. The FBI apparently found the transaction to be of investigative interest because, depending on the identity of the intermediary party, it could indicate direct assistance from al-Awlaki to al Hazmi," Judicial Watch reported.

Another document showed that the FBI searched a vehicle al-Awlaki had rented in San Diego only three days before the attacks.

"While there is no report regarding the results of the search, the action highlights the FBI's interest in al-Awlaki and suspicions about his trip to San Diego, home to both al Hazmi and al Mihdhar leading up to the attacks," Judicial Watch said.

Finally, a document from Oct. 24, 2001, six weeks after the attack, revealed that "the bureau became aware three days after the 9/11 attacks ... that al-Awlaki had rented a Mailboxes Etc. mail drop in Falls Church, Va."

"The mail box was the subject of a federal grand jury subpoena," the document said.

Judicial Watch said an earlier release of documents showed that only two weeks after the terror attack, the FBI was aware al-Awlaki had bought airplane tickets for three of the hijackers, including mastermind Mohammed Atta.

"Subsequent to the FBI's discovery, al-Awlaki was detained and released by authorities at least twice and had been invited to dine at the Pentagon," Judicial Watch said.

Contact Mailbox(TTG) at mail@trudelgroup.com


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AAH SPRING IS IN THE AIR

Posted by Fred Reifenberg, March 29, 2013

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Contact Fred Reifenberg by email at freify@netvision.net.il


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JORDAN'S KING WARNS OBAMA; AMERICA BACKS MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD AGENT AS SYRIA'S NEXT RULER

Posted by UCI, March 29, 2013

Barry Rubin passed away on February 3rd, but we honor his memory by leaving his insightful commentary available to our readers, including his last post, which follows below.

—His fellow PJM editors

While we see few occasions of consciousness—and certainly few publicly expressed—from Arab and Muslim intellectuals of what is really going on, they still do take place. For example, in a December 30, 2013, interview that aired on CBC TV, Egyptian novelist Youssef Ziedan said:

We should reconsider our notions regarding the Jewish question. We are not even aware how much this affects us. [Antisemitism] has become a common trade, benefiting all our politicians. Any politician who wants to gain popularity curses Israel, but when he comes to power, he has no problem with Israel.

That's stupidity. That's stupidity which is connected to the ignorance of the people. We should reconsider this. Nobody looks out for our interests. We should be aware of this.

In other words, Ziedan shows keen consciousness of political movements and how leaders manipulate them.

Basically, the Zionism question is manipulative. The interviewer asked Ziedan,"What did you mean when you talked about 'Jewish issues'?" Ziedan replies,

Anything that has to do with the Jewish question: the hadiths adopted from Jewish and Christian traditions, our shared history, the so-called Middle East problem, which I do not consider to be a problem at all.

The Nasserists have been oppressing the people for 60 years under the pretext of the Middle East problem.... Wars were fought, and people were killed.

Where does the problem lie? The Jews settled in Palestine and declared their state in 1947. Why did the Jews do that? After all, they had lived in Arab countries. They say that this land was promised to them. They say it appears in the Old Testament, which the Christians also believe in.

The interviewer responds, "There was also Balfour."

Ziedan then continues,

Forget about Balfour and his declaration for a moment. We were indoctrinated at school: "What do you think about the Balfour Declaration?" According to the system of ready-made answers, we were expected to respond: "He gave what he did not own to those who did not deserve it." That's it. There could be no other answer."

There are, however, three powerful forces that block this admission.

1. The way this society works, one of dictatorship

2. The repression

3. The way the leadership works

Leaders, systems, rule of the masses, and demagoguery.

"Don't scare anyone. But once you gain ground then move ahead. You must utilize as many people as possible who may be of use to us." — Joseph Stalin to future Communist dictator of Hungary Matyas Rakosi, December 5, 1944.

It really isn't hard to understand what is happening in the Middle East if you gather the facts:

1. Jordan's King Abdullah — whom President Barack Obama just visited — is clearly telling us what's going wrong: the Muslim Brotherhood is dangerous, and the United States is supporting it. Presumably, this is what Abdullah told Obama.

2. U.S. policy is now escalating support for a Muslim Brotherhood regime in Syria, and the Syrian rebels increasingly have open Brotherhood leadership.

3. Repression is gradually escalating in Egypt, with arrests of moderates, Islamists being sent to the military academy, and many other measures.

Regarding Jordan, Jeffrey Goldberg has written an extremely valuable profile of Abdullah. The Jordanian monarch is telling Western visitors that their countries are making a huge mistake by supporting the Islamists. He complains that the U.S. State Department is ignoring him, and further, that U.S. officials are telling him: "The only way you can have democracy is through the Muslim Brotherhood."

Abdullah responds: the Brotherhood wants to impose anti-American reactionary governments, and his "major fight" is to stop them. No margin may be left for relative moderate and pro-American states between a Sunni Islamist alliance led by Egypt and including Turkey versus a Shia Islamist alliance led by Iran, says Abdullah. And he's right. The only differences, Abdullah explains, between the Turkish and Egyptian regimes are their timetables for installing dictatorships.

And Egypt's new president, says the king, is obsessed with a hostile view of Israel.

(Here's the delicious irony: Last August, Jordanian Prime Minister Fayez Tarawneh launched a ferocious personal attack on me. Why? Because I said that the Sunni-Shia battle was going to replace the Arab-Israeli conflict. Well, his king just concurred with me. LOL.)

Meanwhile, while President Barack Obama was love-bombing Israel during his visit, U.S. policy was helping to install a Muslim Brotherhood supporter as the putative next leader of Syria. Obama's strategy — with appropriate adjustments to the national scene — is the same as his disastrous policy in Egypt.

The new leader of the Syrian opposition coalition is Ghassan Hitto, an obscure figure who has long been a resident of the United States. His actual election contained two hints:

— He only received 35 votes from 63 members of the Syrian National Coalition. That show of support matches the number of Muslim Brotherhood supporters there.

— Only 48 out of the 63 even cast a ballot at all, showing lack of enthusiasm and possible U.S. pressure on groups to abstain rather than oppose Hitto.

During the Cold War, American policy toward Third World countries frequently looked for a "third way" democratic alternative — leaders who were neither Communists nor right-wing authoritarians. Today, however, the Obama administration doesn't do the equivalent at all, despite pretenses to the contrary. Rather, it seeks leadership from the most seemingly moderate people ... who represent Islamist groups. Of course, this moderation is largely deceptive.

That was the pattern in Egypt; now it is the same failed strategy in Syria.

Hitto is a typical example of such a person. He has lived in the United States and went to university there, so presumably he knows the West and has become more moderate by living there. He is involved in high-tech enterprises, so supposedly he is a modern type of guy.

Remember how now-dictator of Syria Bashar al-Assad was lavishly praised because he studied and lived in London and was supposedly interested in ... the internet?

In addition, nobody has (yet) uncovered an outrageous Hitto statement. His ties to the Brotherhood are not so blatant — even though they are obvious.

Yet the connections between Hitto and the Muslim Brotherhood — and those are only the ones documented quickly following his election — are extensive:

— He is founder of the Muslim Legal Fund of America, largely directed by Muslim Brotherhood members.

— He was a secretary-treasurer of the American Middle Eastern League for Palestine (AMELP), which is closely linked to the Islamic Association of Palestine (IAP), which supports Hamas and terrorism against Israel.

— Hitto was vice president of the CAIR Dallas/Fort Worth chapter, and director of the Muslim American Society (MAS) Youth Center of Dallas, which was a Muslim Brotherhood front group.

The list goes on and on.

To sum up the situation, Hassan Hassan of the United Arab Emirates newspaper The National published an article titled "How the Muslim Brotherhood Hijacked Syria's Revolution."

Contact UCI at voices@unitycoalitionforisrael.org


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SENSELESS & SPINELESS: SPEAKING TRUTH TO POWER

Posted by Martin Sherman, March 29, 2013

Into The Fray: Israel's abject apology to Erdogan conveys an unequivocal message to both friend and foe: If confronted with sufficient resolve, the Jews will capitulate.

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...Shut up. Go back to Auschwitz!

Radio transmission from the 2010 Gaza-bound flotilla, in response to the Israel Navy's warning that it was entering area under maritime blockade.

God forbid we apologize. National pride is not just something people say on the street... it has strategic significance. If Erdogan goes around afterward and says that he brought us to our knees, he will appear as a regional leader.... He won't leave it alone, even after we apologize.

- Moshe "Bogey" Ya'alon, Haaretz, August 17, 2011 — then deputy prime minister

You can take the Jew out of the ghetto, but you cannot take the ghetto out of the Jew.

— A derogatory dictum of undetermined origins.

This is a column I write with a profound sense of sadness and bitter disappointment — bordering on despair — with people I have held in the highest regard. It is a column I would have preferred not to write, but events dictate speaking truth to power.

Stupid and servile

Indeed, given the recent apology issued by Prime Minister Netanyahu to his Turkish counterpart, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, one is compelled to question whether there is any limit to the depths of selfdefeating stupidity and self-debasing servility that the Israeli leadership is willing to sink to.

No less troubling — and depressing — than the ignominious decision itself, is the warm endorsement it received from virtually all government quarters, including those that in the past expressed vigorous opposition to it. Indeed, given the vehemence of previous denunciations of any apology by senior government ministers, who now seem to have elected to underwrite it, we are once again compelled to question whether there is any principle they will not sacrifice in order to preserve positions of personal prestige and power.

For it is difficult to imagine how this unbecoming climb-down could result in any substantial upside for Israel — other than a brief, condescending pat on the head for obsequious obedience.

By contrast, the potential for a downside is enormous — and is immediately beginning to manifest itself.

Submission of the infidel

Israeli officialdom has scrambled to try and explain the reasons for this inexplicable debacle and provide excuses for this inexcusable capitulation. It is a futile effort.

The verbatim text of the PM's apology, the possible nuances of mitigating interpretations that can be ascribed to it, or any allegedly extenuating subtext that can be read into it, are of little relevance.

Attempts to invoke them ring hollow.

What really counts is the big picture. And they speak for themselves, without accompanying clarifications to convey their significance.

For the undeniable portrait that is being publicly conveyed — and internalized — is one of a triumphant Erdogan, on the one hand, and a humbled Israel in humiliating retreat, on the other.

Having wrung the unwarranted apology from Netanyahu, the Turkish Islamist premier is not only backing away from his commitments to normalize relations with the Jewish state, but is brashly strutting around, brandishing his achievement of coercing the infidel adversary to submit to his will. Even more gallingly, he is declaring himself the adjudicator of Israel's good behavior, according to which he will deign to honor his normalization pledge — or not.

Unsurprisingly, Israel's enemies across the region are jubilant. Indeed, one can hardly conceive of a better boost for the morale of the myriad of malevolent malefactors who wish it ill. By submitting to Erdogan's demands, Israel has sent an unequivocal message to its foes and friends: If confronted with sufficient resolve, the Jews will capitulate to the will of their adversaries, no matter how absurd or outrageous their terms.

Collapse of credibility

All of this seems to have provoked a belated expression of justifiable exasperation from newly appointed minister Naftali Bennett, who hitherto has expended much of his energies on boycotting haredim and empowering Yair Lapid, rather than bolstering Netanyahu's right/hawkish flank.

Bennett remarked: "It seems that since [Netanyahu's] apology, Erdogan is doing everything to make Israel regret it," sternly warning, "It must be clear to Erdogan that if Israel encounters any future terrorism, our response will be no less severe [than against the Mavi Marmara flotilla in May 2010]."

And that is precisely the problem. What possible weight can any proclamation by any Israeli minister have, after the government's systematic retreat from one firmly stated position after another over the past two decades. It first prohibited, then endorsed, negotiations with the arch-terrorist Arafat and his murderous PLO; it first opposed, then embraced, the establishment of a Palestinian state; it first firmly forswore, then conceded to, Hamas's demand for mass prisoner releases in exchange for Gilad Schalit.

It has stood by while the Palestinians violated virtually every clause of the agreements with them — from Judeophobic incitement in their education system and official media; through the size of their armed forces; to the kinds of weaponry they were to be armed with.

Moreover, after virtually every coercive encounter with terror, no matter how severe the losses/damage inflicted by the IDF, poor political leadership has left the terrorists better off than they were before.

Thus, the 2006 Second Lebanon War left Hezbollah in a perceptibly enhanced position, both militarily and politically — with its arsenals replenished and its influence on government in Beirut increased; the Cast Lead and Pillar of Defense operations in Gaza in 2008/9 and 2012, respectively, left Hamas firmly entrenched, having won wider international recognition and with far-reaching benefits for local farmers and fisherman in the wake of the fighting; even the Gaza-flotilla interception, undertaken to enforce the quarantine of the Hamas-held territory, resulted in substantial easing of the blockade.

Collapse (cont.)

Israel has given its adversaries little reason for concern. For, if war is, as Clausewitz remarked, merely the continuation of politics by other means, Israel has been defeated resoundingly and repeatedly.

True, it has forced both Hezbollah and Hamas to regroup, redeploy and rearm.

But that should not be confused with having deterred them — for their will to fight remains undiminished.

In this regard, Israel's latest display of submission is particularly untimely and uncalled for. It is untimely, because it can only raise the spirits and stiffen the resolve of those seeking to undermine its security and the safety of its citizens. It is uncalled for, since the Gaza flotilla incident was one of the rare occasions in which Israel was accorded at least partial justification by a UN-entity for coercive measures it undertook to ensure its security.

In a rare display of something approaching balance, the UN-appointed Palmer Commission determined that "Israel faces a real threat to its security from militant groups in Gaza... The naval blockade was imposed as a legitimate security measure in order to prevent weapons from entering Gaza by sea and its implementation complied with the requirements of international law."

Although the commission did determine that Israel used "excessive" force (leaving one to wonder precisely what level of force would be "appropriate" to prevent oneself from being disemboweled by a frenzied lynch mob such as the IDF commandos encountered on the Mavi Marmara), the report stopped significantly short of calling for an Israeli apology.

Likewise, prominent legal experts — Professors Alan Dershowitz (Harvard), Eric Posner (University of Chicago), and Ruth Wedgwood (Johns Hopkins) — have endorsed this position, stipulating that the naval blockade and boarding in international waters were in accordance with long-standing international law and precedent.

Both Dershowitz and Posner defended the specific use of force as legal.

In a stroke, this has been sacrificed.

Rather than seize the access to the high moral ground it had been granted, and fight for its honor and good name, Israel opted for surrender, pleading guilty despite being largely exonerated — eroding even further whatever remains of the country's badly shredded credibility.

Myth of "common interests"

The unanticipated ignominy of the apology left many Israelis shaking their heads in bewilderment, and hanging them in shame.

Reflecting these sentiments is this remark from The Jerusalem Post's diplomatic correspondent Herb Keinon: "Not Netanyahu, International Relations Minister Yuval Steinitz, Naftali Bennett, who is charged with public diplomacy, or even Tzipi Livni, the justice minister... bothered to explain to the Israeli public why Israel said it was sorry, and what — indeed — it was sorry for."

In an unpersuasive endeavor to rationalize the apology, the idea that rapprochement between Israel and Turkey is necessary because the countries share "common interests" has been widely invoked. This should be summarily dismissed for the claptrap that it so obviously is.

Indeed, we have seen incontrovertible proof of how little store the regime in Ankara places on those alleged "common interests."

After all, it proved willing to forgo these much-vaunted "interests" if such an apology was not forthcoming — underlining how hopelessly precarious any alliance with it will be.

In the past, I have staunchly supported a Turco-Israeli alliance. But that was when Turkey was a secular, Western-oriented Kemalist state. But virtually the only thing that has remained unchanged since the ascent of Erdogan's party to power is its geographical location.

Today, moving steadily toward an Islamic theocracy, Turkey is a very different country, with very different interests. Few, if any, of them are concomitant with those of Israel. As I pointed out in a previous column, "Turkish tantrums" (September 10, 2011): "The loss of Turkey as a strategic ally is a huge blow. But it is a result of what Turkey has become, not what Israel has — or has not — done." It is futile and foolish to believe otherwise.

Not the "responsible adult"

Some claim that Erdogan's hostility is unrepresentative of overall sentiment in Turkey and that Israel has much latent support in many sectors of the population.

Even if this is true, one can hardly conceive of a more counter-productive move than meekly handing him what is perceived as a huge victory.

After all, this can only serve to elevate his status and further entrench his antagonistic regime in power, making the chance of empowering more supportive elements commensurably more remote.

By acceding to Turkish demands and US pressure, Israel has not assumed the role of the "responsible adult." Responsible adults protect their interests. They do not bow to puerile petulance.

Moshe Ya'alon was absolutely correct when, as deputy PM, he rejected any idea of apology, declaring: "National pride...

has strategic significance."

Regrettably, as minister of defense he seems to have retreated from that commendable position, opting to support Netahyahu's untenable move.

Sadly, disregarding the strategic significance of national pride is likely to have strategic consequences far more tangible than the mere loss of prestige entailed in national humiliation.

Obama an excuse not a reason

Of course, apologists for Israel's apology will protest that it was the result of pressure from Obama. But US pressure is a poor excuse, not a persuasive reason.

After all, leaders are elected to resist pressure, not to submit to it; to sidestep it, not to succumb to it; to divert it, not to yield to it. With Israel's favorable ratings at almost unprecedented highs in the US, one would have thought that transforming this popular support into commensurate political clout would not be an insurmountable challenge.

One would hope that after seven decades of independence and staggering achievement, Israel and Israelis would have emerged from the clutches of the pliant galut exilic mentality. One would hope Israel would no longer conduct itself as some servile shtetl-state that can be bullied into submission. One would hope...

The article above was written by Martin Sherman who is in the Department of Political Science at Tel Aviv University. He has written extensively on water, including "The Politics of Water in the Middle East," London: Macmillan, 1999. He was a senior research fellow at the Interdisciplinary Institute in Herzliya and Academic Coordinator of the Herzliya Conference in 2001 and 2002. He is currently Academic Director of the Jerusalem Summit. This article appeared March 28, 2013 in the Jerusalem Post and is archived at
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Into-the-fray-Senseless-and-spineless-308055


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CAMPUS ARABISTS FEIGN FEAR FOR FREE SPEECH

Posted by Richard H. Shulman, March 29, 2013

UC Berkeley School of Law held an event supposed to be about "the Israel Lobby's Threat to Free Speech on Our Campus," especially about the Palestinian Arabs, and about alleged efforts to delay the appointment of Defense Sec. Hagel and to criticize Brooklyn College's political science department for co-sponsoring a talk on boycotting Israel.

Panelists did not discuss what was billed, falsely. They discussed other "paranoid fantasies about being 'silenced," even though they were at "a well-publicized event at a prestigious law school on a campus where the Palestinian narrative is constantly promoted both inside and outside the classroom."

The Arabist complaint is so preposterous as to be hilarious. [So are Arabists' and leftists' long-winded, stilted, irrelevant, and false statements. My condensation of the article spared you their quotations.]

The main speaker was senior lecturer Hatem Bazian, an anti-Israel activist. In 2004, he had called for an Intifada in the U.S.. He complained that pro-Israelis label Saudi donations to Middle East studies centers as "blood money." Actually, donations from such a despotic and pro-jihad donor fit the description.

Mr. Bazian also wants to change the university grading system to counter "colonial discourse." He described the Academic Bill of Rights, which discourages one-sided indoctrination, as "controlling the discourse intellectually" and eliminating "academic freedom in the classroom." Examples? None stated.

He criticized the California State Assembly and other legislatures against anti-Semitism in state colleges. He complained that such efforts prompted graduates to find professions instead of becoming activists. Heaven forbid that they prepare for productive life!

"Far from producing examples of anti-Israel academics, activists, and students at UC Berkeley who have been 'silenced,' the panel discussion was nothing more than a workshop on how to promote the 'Palestinian revolution' on campus—in part by using the field of Middle East studies as a vehicle... If this is the extent of the 'Israel Lobby's' impact on how 'Palestine' is discussed on campus, it poses no threat to the legions of anti-Israel advocates" (Lee Kaplan, FrontPage Magazine, 3/29/13 http://frontpagemag.com/2013/lee-kaplan/israel-lobby-threatening-free-speech-at-berkeley/ http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/12930).

The Israel lobby did not do anything on the Hagel nomination, which cried out for strong expose. It did not involve itself in the Brooklyn College issue. There, the issue was the college hosting an event that is part of jihad or plays into the hands of jihadists. Both Hagel and the College were criticized, but not by the lobby.

The lobby is too weak to stop most arms deals for the Arabs, even the gift of F-16s and tanks to Egypt's already powerful military, now under Islamist control. Such a sale helps enemies of the U.S.. To blame that lobby as being anti-American has it backwards. Accusing it of being almost all-powerful is just antisemitic.

The real problem is: (1) Extensive infiltration of American campuses by Islamists, who neglect their subjects to try to impose jihadist indoctrination there, including in the classroom; (2) Campus control by the Left, which denies tenure and most jobs to conservatives; and (3) Silencing of dissenters, including by physical intimidation.

There are campus watch organizations here and in Israel that monitor leftist performance and report it to the public. That is an exercise of freedom of speech and press that the Left pretends silences it. But mere reporting should not silence it and doesn't.

There can be questions raised by such reporting. Is the Left stifling dissent? Is tenure granted politically? Do teachers abuse their power and indoctrinate? Are students getting educated, or do the teachers ignore their subjects in order to wage jihad? Are campuses quietly using tax funds and donor funds to finance destruction of the government or Israel? People have a right to know and to reform what needs reforming.

The Left likes to pretend it is brave to speak out, but really people are brave to speak out against the Left on campus. Few people know Israel's case, but who doesn't know the Palestinian Arabs' case? Whom do you think is likelier to be hounded off campus, a Zionist speaker or an anti-Zionist speaker? Q.E.D. /p>

Richard Shulman is a veteran defender of Israel on several web-based forums. His comments and analyses are a regular feature on Think-Israel. He provides cool information and right-on-target overviews. He distributes his essays by email. To subscribe, write him at ricshulman@aol.com.


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'ISRAEL LOBBY' THREATENING FREE SPEECH AT BERKELEY?

Posted by Barbara Sommer, March 29, 2013

The article below was written by Lee Kaplan who is an investigative journalist and columnist who writes for Isracampus.org.il, Israel National News, and the Northeast Intelligence Network. He is a Fellow at the American Center for Democracy and the founder of DAFKA.org and StoptheISM.com. He wrote this article for Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum. This article appeared March 28, 2013 in Frontpage Magazine and is archived at
http://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/183410/israel-lobby-threatening-free-speech-berkeley-lee-kaplan

Are sinister Jewish forces really silencing people from speaking about Palestine?

discussion

The title of a recent panel discussion at the University of California, Berkeley was ominous: "SHHHH! Don't Talk About Palestine: Chuck Hagel, Judith Butler, and the Israel Lobby's Threat to Free Speech on Our Campus." Taking place in Boalt Hall at UC Berkeley's School of Law and sponsored by Students for Justice in Palestine, the event drew what appeared to be sixty hardcore anti-Israel activists—most in their early twenties—eager to embrace the notion that UC Berkeley is under siege by "pro-Israel advocates seek[ing] to silence debate about Palestinian human rights and divestment from Israel's occupation."

Although the event was billed as a discussion about the (nonexistent) efforts by the "Israel Lobby" to delay the appointment of Chuck Hagel as secretary of defense and its criticism of the political science department at Brooklyn College for co-sponsoring a recent talk on Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) by UC Berkeley rhetoric professor and anti-Israel activist Judith Butler, neither subject arose. Instead, the panel engaged in paranoid fantasies about being "silenced," which, given that this was a well-publicized event at a prestigious law school on a campus where the Palestinian narrative is constantly promoted both inside and outside the classroom, were patently and even hilariously false.

Hatem Bazian, a senior lecturer in the departments of Near Eastern and ethnic studies, was introduced as the main speaker, one the "500 most influential Muslims in the world," and, in a false claim, the originator of the term "Islamophobia." While the latter is untrue, Bazian does have the dubious distinction of directing UC Berkeley's Islamophobia Research & Documentation Project.

Announcing that, "I come first to discuss this subject as a Palestinian and a Muslim," Bazian launched into the usual accolades surrounding the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley during the 1960s. Far from being a free speech advocate facing censorship, Bazian is an activist who uses his academic position to advance an anti-Israel agenda. A promoter of the BDS movement and executive director of the Holy Land Foundation-linked American Muslims for Palestine, he is infamous for having called for an "Intifada in this country!" at a San Francisco anti-war rally in 2004.

In an attempt to conflate the unrelated issue of affirmative action with the "Palestinian narrative," Bazian hailed a failed court challenge to Proposition 209, which put an end to race, gender, and ethnicity-based quotas in California universities in 1996, describing it melodramatically as having given a "voice to the voiceless against an attempt to erase people from history."

Demonstrating the myopia that afflicts Middle East studies academics who believe, against all evidence, that the Arab-Israeli conflict is the central focus of the region, he continued:

The Palestinian narrative also faces the euphemism in the university of the term, 'Middle East studies' [sic] that often erases the people and is inclusive by means of omission.

He went on to maintain that, "In the 60s and 70s, anyone who spoke about Palestine were [sic] considered communists and harassed and not allowed to speak." If such a claim were true, clearly it's no longer the case, as Bazian himself establishes on a daily basis.

After praising the writings of the late Columbia University English professor and Orientalism author Edward Said and the late Kansas State University political science professor Michael Suleiman, both contributors to the politicization of Middle East studies, Bazian launched into an incoherent tirade against Middle East scholar and reformer Martin Kramer:

The future of Middle East studies always had Palestine surrounding it. Martin Kramer blasted academia for not predicting the [1979 Islamic] revolution in Iran as if academia was directing things. The academic discourse was always saying to support the Shah [Mohammad Reza Pahlavi]. Martin Kramer and his ilk were always supporting the Shah, and Middle East studies [sic] was challenging Palestine by using non-governmental sources and U.S. sources

Given that Martin Kramer was a graduate student at Princeton University at the time of the Iranian revolution, he was hardly in a position to "support the Shah," unless, by that, Bazian meant his opposition to the ascendance of Ayatollah Khomeini and the resulting theocratic and bellicose regime.

Bazian then turned to Saudi funding for UC Berkeley's Center for Middle East Studies, accusing critics or, as he put it, "the Israel camp," of labeling the donations "blood money." Considering the despotic nature of the Saudi regime and the apologist bent of the Middle East studies academics benefitting from its agenda-driven generosity, "blood money" is an apt description. Bazian, however, maintained that such opposition creates a "toxic" climate on campus by implying that Arab and Palestiniangoals are negative and, in a nonsensical claim given America's military alliance with Saudi Arabia, discourages funding for the academy in order to promote national defense.

Intoning the need to "liberate people," Bazian called for a transformation of the university grading system in order to counter what he called "colonial discourse." He described the Academic Bill of Rights, which was created by the David Horowitz-initiated Students for Academic Freedom for the purpose of discouraging one-sided indoctrination, as "controlling the discourse intellectually" and eliminating "academic freedom in the classroom."

He berated "agencies of the government," and in particular the California State Assembly, for passing laws intended to combat anti-Semitism in state colleges such as HR 35. The result of these efforts, he claimed, was that graduates ended up seeking out a profession rather than becoming activists. As he put it:

If you get a B.A., you get a cubicle for your job when you graduate. If you get a Master's, you get a cubicle with a window. And if you get a PhD, you get a cubicle with a window and a bathroom.

Apparently, for Bazian, becoming a productive member of the work force is a worst-case scenario.

Another panelist, UC Berkeley Associate Professor of Rhetoric Samera Esmeir, after noting proudly that she was one of the first founding members of the national chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, explained that she wanted to take a different route in promoting the Palestinian cause:

For my part, it was not a question of presenting criticism of Zionist or Israeli policies, but to utilize speech that addresses Palestinians. . . . My hope is to speak in Jeffersonian ways about Palestine. . . . What we need is empowerment.

Accusing Palestinian campus groups of being equally problematic in their approach, Esmeir was opposed to framing the dispute as "between two entities: Israel-Palestine or Palestinians and Israelis." She complained that the "rhetoric of the conflict" promoted the idea that two populations were competing over the same land and that it "gave credibility to Israel as a state that was born out of colonization and apartheid." Employing garbled language to try and compare the Israeli perspective to that of a slave holder, she then posed the question,"Did we ask African [sic] slave-landholders to give white people's takes on slavery?"

Esmeir favored using the concept of a struggle against oppression over that of Palestinian victimhood. She cited how in 1973 at the World Festival of Youth and Students in East Berlin, the late Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) leader Yassir Arafat, radical activist Angela Davis, and representatives from various leftist movements met at the Berlin Wall where it was decided that "the PLO would take up the global struggle from the Vietnamese and the struggle for Palestine would change Palestinians from refugees to 'freedom fighters.'"

She was indeed promoting a strategy that had already been implemented. According to terrorism expert Yosef Bodansky, Arafat sent lieutenants to Vietnam in the 1970s to study how North Vietnamese intelligence reconstructed communist goals into a national liberation movement. Those lessons turned the tide for the PLO on the world stage by changing its image from that of a terrorist to a liberator. As early as the late 1960s, Arafat, as described by Ion Pacepa, a director of the Romanian intelligence services who later defected from the Soviet bloc, was "being financed and manipulated by the KGB."

Despite Esmeir's prompting, the youthful audience likely remained either oblivious to or undeterred by the communist-inspired origins of the language of "liberation" against a "colonial occupier" they themselves employ in advocating for a Palestinian state.

Far from producing examples of anti-Israel academics, activists, and students at UC Berkeley who have been "silenced," the panel discussion was nothing more than a workshop on how to promote the "Palestinian revolution" on campus—in part by using the field of Middle East studies as a vehicle. Tellingly, the concept of peace for two states living side-by-side never arose. If this is the extent of the "Israel Lobby's" impact on how "Palestine" is discussed on campus, it poses no threat to the legions of anti-Israel advocates.

Contact Barbara Sommer at lsommer_1_98@yahoo.com


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PENN HILLEL PROVIDED PLATFORM TO VENOMOUS 'BREAKING THE SILENCE'

Posted by Barbara Sommer, March 29, 2013

The article below was written by Lori Lowenthal Marcus who is US correspondent for The Jewish Press. She is a recovered lawyer who previously practiced First Amendment law and taught in Philadelphia-area graduate and law schools. You can reach her by email: Lori@JewishPressOnline.co. This article appeared March 29, 2013 in the Jewish Press.com News of the Jews, Israel & the World and is archived at
http://www.jewishpress.com/news/penn-hillel-provided-platform-to-venomous-breaking-the-silence/2013/03/29/

The Hillel board was conned into believing that Breaking the Silence was needed to amplify the tintinnabulation of hatred already ringing across U.S. campuses from such groups as the BDS movement and the annual Israel Apartheid Week hate fiestas.

In yet another example of academia succumbing to a flawed battering ram of freedom of speech, the Hillel of Greater Philadelphia was outsmarted by J Street U which guilted them into providing a home for an event the sole purpose of which is to indict and delegitimize the defense forces of the Jewish State.

On Thursday evening, March 28, Steinhardt Hall — the Hillel building at the University of Pennsylvania — provided the platform for the pro-Palestinian J Street U to defile the integrity of the Israel Defense Forces through a well-funded delegitimization organization known as Breaking the Silence.

The "silence" that the group supposedly "breaks" is the unspoken criticism of Israel and Israel's military. Yes, that's right — without Breaking the Silence, one would never hear a negative word about the IDF, because the New York Times, the United Nations Human Rights Council, the EU, the Guardian, the Iranian regime, the Arab League, the Huffington Post, CNN, El Mundo, El Diario or just about any other entity with a microphone or a media outlet never criticizes the IDF.

Well, that's what the young whippersnappers at J Street U were able to convince the grownups on the board of the Hillel of Greater Philadelphia.

Breaking the Silence, which was created in 2004, exists to shout from the rooftops that the IDF is not a "defense" force but is instead an immoral military force that is dedicated to "annexation of territory, terrorizing and tightening the control over the civilian [Arab] population."

NGO Monitor is a non-profit organization that provides information on, analysis of and promotes accountability for the reports and activities of NGOs (non-governmental organizations) which claim to advance human rights and humanitarian agendas, but which instead so frequently primarily promote the vilification of Israel.

According to NGO Monitor, the 2010 publication created by Breaking the Silence, "Occupation of the Territories — Israeli Soldier testimonies 2000-2010," suffers from several fatal flaws: all testimony is anonymous, and almost none provide a date, location or context for the incidents being described. In addition, of the 183 incidents mentioned in the report, only 16 were reported to superiors at the time, which makes it especially difficult to rely on the credibility or motivation for the late, non-reported, anonymous "episodic" revelations.

The effort of Breaking the Silence to smear the IDF as an immoral military force falls apart most decisively when a careful reading of the many violations it claims to catalogue reveal that all — to the extent they are real — are themselves violations of IDF policy, so while problematic, they are evidence solely of errors and missteps engaged in by individuals.

Even the indefatigably leftist Haaretz expressed disdain for the repeated claim by Breaking the Silence that it is a human rights organization:

"Breaking the Silence...has a clear political agenda, and can no longer be classed as a 'human rights organization.' Any organization whose website includes the claim by members to expose the 'corruption which permeates the military system' is not a neutral observer.

The organization has a clear agenda: to expose the consequences of IDF troops serving in the West Bank and Gaza. This seems more of interest to its members than seeking justice for specific injustices."

And yet, the board of the Hillel of Greater Philadelphia was conned into believing that Breaking the Silence, whose sponsors include not only J Street U, but also the New Israel Fund, the European Union, the UK, Spain, the Netherlands, NDC (funds from Sweden, Switzerland, Netherlands, Denmark), and George Soros' Open Society Institute was needed to amplify the tintinnabulation of hatred already ringing across U.S. campuses from such groups as the BDS movement and the annual Israel Apartheid Week hate fiestas which vilify every move taken by Israel and the IDF to protect Israeli citizens — Jewish, Muslim, Christian and others — from Arab Palestinian terrorism.

Although the HGP several years ago crafted and approved a policy that explicitly stated it would not lend its space for events or organizations the primary goal of which was to delegitimize Israel, J Street U succeeded in persuading the board that their point of view — that is, explicitly and simply, that the IDF is a terrorist, expansionist militaristic entity — does not get enough play at the University of Pennsylvania. While the HGP board initially refused to allow the event in the building, the board members' hesitation was eventually drowned out.

The J Street U students claimed that the Breaking the Silence speakers "shed light on the price of military occupation for both Israelis and Palestinians and argue that bringing it to an end is in Israel's best long-term interests. The most important goal of Breaking the Silence is to foster dialogue and awareness about the facts on the ground." Ah, but that's only true if the "facts" being presented are credible. Even Haaretz distrusts their motivation and their facts.

J Street U's front man at the Penn Hillel event was Oded Naaman, who hasn't lived in Israel in years and who served in the Israel Defense Forces a decade ago. Na'aman claims to be one of the co-founders of Breaking the Silence.

So how is it that a group of pushy students were able to hoodwink Penn Hillel board members into allowing a political opportunist to add to the festering cesspool of anti-Israel invective in the very building created as a safe haven for Jews, a place where they are expected "to engage in a process of Jewish self-authorship"? Even though the Penn Hillel mission statement mentions neither Israel or the Jewish Homeland, one might be forgiven for expecting the Hillel to be a place where Jewish self-authorship included a respect for, and support of, Israel and its defense forces.

In an opinion piece that ran in the University of Pennsylvania newspaper on Wednesday, March 27, over the signature of no single individual, but simply the "J Street U Penn Executive Board," the group revealed their strategy. On one hand, they claimed to have the support, at least eventually, of many "student leaders" — none of whom are named. But then the J Street Utes make clear what it was that worked. They issued that irresistible campus battle cry, the "demand" for "free speech" in "our building."

Freedom of speech is a constitutional guarantee that the government will not prevent speech. That freedom battering ram — for that is how it is used — does not apply in the Hillel building — which does not get university or government funds, but instead is entirely donor funded. Yes, donor funded, those same donors who J Street U condemns for daring to set standards in the building they paid for. This is from the Daily Pennsylvanian, printed on Wednesday, March 27:

In all, we collected 27 signatures of Penn Hillel student leaders spanning a broad range of Jewish denominational affiliations, political views on Israel and types of involvement in the Jewish community. These signatures, including those from leaders of other pro-Israel organizations at Penn, finally pushed the HGP board to recognize that the Jewish student community is much too strong to succumb to a fear of ideas. We are ready to demand free speech in our building and to engage in challenging conversations about Israel. Indeed, open discourse and constructive criticism, rooted in love, are the only ways for us to achieve a brighter and safer future for the State of Israel. Like similar events being held by J Street U chapters on campuses across the country, our success in bringing Breaking the Silence to Hillel exemplifies the gradual mending of a still broken dialogue on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

For anyone who wished to check out the Penn Hillel website during this week of Passover, the time of liberation from earlier oppressors of the Jewish people, they would be struck by an incongruity. The site announces "Welcome to the Jewish Community at Penn!" And then the enticing words follow, "Penn Hillel is a warm and welcoming place to spend Passover. We have options for people from all backgrounds and everyone is welcome!" These words were accompanied by a scrolling events calendar, one of which was, on March 28: "Breaking the Silence: A conversation with an IDF veteran on the price of occupation." Welcome!

Contact Barbara Sommer at lsommer_1_98@yahoo.com


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"ISLAM'S FLAG WILL BE RAISED ABOVE THE WHITE HOUSE"

Posted by Raymond Ibrahim, March 29, 2013

A video recording from a recent Friday sermon in Egypt, where the imam swears to Allah several times that the flag of Islam will be raised above the White House of America, recently appeared on the Arabic Internet. According to the imam preaching, all Muslims need do is be patient and continue working towards this goal.

Raymond Ibrahim is a Middle East and Islam specialist and author of Crucified Again: Exposing Islam's New War on Christians (2013) and The Al Qaeda Reader (2007). His writings have appeared in a variety of media, including the Los Angeles Times, Washington Times, Jane's Islamic Affairs Analyst, Middle East Quarterly, World Almanac of Islamism, and Chronicle of Higher Education. He was born and raised in the U.S. by Coptic Egyptian parents born and raised in the Middle East, which has provided him with equal fluency in English and Arabic. His understanding of the two the Western and Middle Eastern mindsets positions him to explain the Middle Eastern culture to the West. This article appeared April 16, 2014 and is archived at
http://www.clarionproject.org/videos/islams-flag-will-be-raised-above-white-house


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ANOTHER TACK: BEWITCHED, BOTHERED AND BEWILDERED

Posted by Robert Hand, March 29, 2013

This article was written by Sarah Honig who is a veteran columnist and senior editorial writer who joined The Jerusalem Post while still in her teens. She served for many years as The Post's political correspondent (a position she also held on the now-defunct but once-influential Davar), headed the Tel Aviv bureau at thePost and wrote daily analyses of the political scene, along with in-depth features. Honig is a mother, an artist and an avid collector of antique and vintage dolls. View Sarah's website at www.sarahhonig.com This article appeared March 28, 2013 in the Jerusalem Post and is archived at
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Another-Tack-Bewitched-bothered-and-bewildered-308044

Too many Israelis who should have known lots better were reduced to the infatuation of a bewitched, bothered and bewildered teenager.

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How American President Barack Obama stroked our ego with all those smiles, all the photos he obligingly posed for, all the seemingly folksy chitchats, all that backslapping, all those effusive flatteries, all the facile historic allusions, all the Hebrew words he was painstakingly taught to enunciate by his Jewish aides — most of them left-wingers with well-known Peace Now sympathies.

It worked, at least for the short haul — like it did for Pal Joey in his very calculated and cynical pursuit of older-woman Vera Simpson. In the Rodgers and Hart1940 musical adaptation of John O'Hara's joyless book, Joey is a manipulative but charming heel. He starts out by insulting Vera but then plots with sly sentimentality to wow her. Vera, no ingénue, knows that Joey's sweet nothings are insincere but she nevertheless surrenders to them because she loves to be loved.

Owning up to her own frailties, she belts out:

"I'm wild again,

Beguiled again,

A simpering, whimpering child again,

Bewitched, bothered and bewildered am I!

...Seen a lot.

I mean I lot,

But now I'm like sweet seventeen a lot.

Bewitched, bothered and bewildered am I!"

Too many Israelis who should have known lots better were likewise reduced to the infatuation of a bewitched, bothered and bewildered teenager.

Nothing exemplified this better than the rousing applause which followed each mention of the name "Palestine" in Obama's hour-long showpiece speech at the Jerusalem International Convention Center.

True, his audience of mostly students was scrupulously sifted a priori and was anything but a representative sample of the Israeli aggregate. Ariel University students were shamefully barred — an affront which should have spurred fellow students into a boycott as a minimal show of solidarity. However, all the others were screened out as well, assuring Obama of a friendly if bogus forum. Beside the affectation of straight-talking to the commoners, it's obvious why the Knesset was a far less desirable option for his purposes. At least some of our parliamentarians weren't likely to obsequiously acquiesce to the sham.

Obama was seeking out a quasi-Vera who'd be thrilled out of her mind by his attentions. It's evident that his Israeli listeners were indeed suitably enthralled and hence the rapturous ovations at the mention of the synthetic Palestine, with which the enemies we prefer to call peace-partners want to replace the Jewish state.

It's hard to imagine that any Arab or Muslim audience anywhere would so enthusiastically acclaim the mention of Israel. But that's only one anomaly that the supposedly critical thinkers from the halls of academe failed to consider.

There was plenty else in Obama's efforts to make friends and influence people that shouldn't have gone down well with Israeli students, regardless of their political orientation. It boggles the mind that any Israeli who occasionally listens to the news or glances at a newspaper didn't feel badly stung by descriptions of how we supposedly oppress the downtrodden Palestinian masses wallowing in the misery of our occupation.

Simplistically deceptive Obama appeared to tug at the heartstrings of his captivated Israeli Vera: "the Palestinian people's right to self-determination and justice must also be recognized. Put yourself in their shoes — look at the world through their eyes. It is not fair that a Palestinian child cannot grow up in a state of her own, and lives with the presence of a foreign army that controls the movements of her parents every single day. It is not just when settler violence against Palestinians goes unpunished. It is not right to prevent Palestinians from farming their lands; to restrict a student's ability to move around the West Bank; or to displace Palestinian families from their home. Neither occupation nor expulsion is the answer. Just as Israelis built a state in their homeland, Palestinians have a right to be a free people in their own land."

Obama's crude one-dimensional assertions might indeed suffice to sway a just-landed Martian. But Israeli students should have at least experienced acute nausea.

Did Israel prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state? Did the so-called Palestinians not violently reject the UN Partition plan of 1947 geared to set up both Jewish and Arab states in this land? Did the Arab world not launch a bloody war to destroy the day-old Jewish state? Was their purpose to found a Palestinian state or to obliterate the Jewish state? Why did Obama's long ramble include no reference to the repeated Arab onslaughts on Israel?

And why on earth was that purportedly coveted Palestinian state not created between 1948 and 1967 when Arabs held all the territory now piteously yearned for? Who impeded Palestinian self-determination for 19 whole years?

But then we get to the cloying emotional exploitation about the child, her parents, their curtailed movement, the foreign army, the frustrated farmers, the alleged displacement of families and settler violence. All this is presented detached from any context, as if it's all factually accurate and, to boot, the product of arbitrary Israeli hardheartedness.

The absence of any causality leads to outright distortion. That's a given always. Deep suspicions should be aroused whenever historical background is opportunely deleted. Obama may be the Israeli Vera's darling Pal Joey but, endearing as he strove to be, he twisted and warped the truth. By dramatically reiterating Palestinian accusations, divorced conveniently from any perspective, Obama misrepresented our reality.

His Israeli listeners, though, should not be gullible saps. All of them, radical left-wingers included, know full well that until terror was unleashed in our streets, Arabs from the so-called occupied territories entered Israel utterly unhindered every day. No roadblocks or checkpoints interfered with anyone's routine.

Things only changed when buses started exploding here, when going to the supermarket or school became perilous, when a family outing could mean gruesome carnage. But did Obama appraise Palestinian inconvenience versus Israeli lives? He knows why things are the way they are. By pretending not to be aware, he proved himself disingenuous in the extreme.

His rhetoric about settler violence is just as dishonest. Has Obama weighed the marginal misdemeanors of a minority of settlers against the officially-sponsored terror worship of Mahmoud Abbas's Palestinian Authority? Schools, the media and the mosques all glorify mass-murderers and incite to hate under Abbas's auspices.

And, for Obama's edification, there are no ruthless expulsions of Arab families, but there are ruthless expulsions of Jewish families. Moreover, were Obama's wishes to come true, hundreds of thousands of Jews would be rendered homeless because they reside beyond the Green Line. This includes entire densely inhabited Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem.

There was more artful feigning of innocence. In apparent deadpan earnest, Obama argued: "Of course, Israel cannot be expected to negotiate with anyone who is dedicated to its destruction. But while I know you have had differences with the Palestinian Authority, I believe that you do have a true partner in President Abbas and Prime Minister Fayyad."

Really? The adamant refusal to at all recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state betrays the perception of Israel as a temporary de facto entity to be Arabized in future via the influx of millions of hostile "repatriated refugees." This doesn't betoken peace but another route to our destruction.

And who does Abbas speak for? He has lost Gaza. His term of office in Ramallah has expired years ago. He still postures only because Israel props him up. He is as much a peace partner as an effigy of our making would be.

But that's hardly the worst of Obama's propaganda offensive. Imagine if Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu had appeared before a gathering of hand-picked American students and appealed to them to oppose what their elected leaders consider to be the most vital existential interests of the United States?

What if Netanyahu addressed specific controversies uppermost on the US agenda? What if he dissected each issue and told the students that their leaders are wrong, that they should prod these leaders to reverse the very positions which won electoral support, that they should overrule their leaders and in effect sabotage their government's policy?

The outcry in every corner of each of the 50 states would be thunderous. In Israel too Netanyahu would be mercilessly pilloried. When a visiting foreign dignitary exhorts to dissent against the host country's democratically elected government, he is rightly seen as having crossed every line of both protocol and principle.

Yet this is precisely what Obama felt free to do here when, with ostensible high-mindedness, he pontificated: "political leaders will not take risks if the people do not demand that they do. You must create the change that you want to see." Needless to stress, the risks are to the people's very continued survival.

Obama's message could not be more transparent. Without much ado he urged the students to go up against Israel's current leadership. Obama appeared to have forgotten that Israel's citizenry had just reelected Netanyahu. He likewise forgot that Meretz, whose platform appears to be what Obama ardently recommends, was once again relegated to the opposition as a fringe Knesset faction. By going over the head of Israel's new government, Obama disrespected if not disparaged our democracy.

Remarkably, there was no earsplitting outcry. Obama laid it on so thick and was so syrupy, that the Israel's proverbial Vera wasn't going to make a fuss about her dishonor.

The only hope is that even those spellbound and mesmerized by the American president's undisguised cajolery, will eventually come to their senses. The original Vera did. After lots of sordid twists and turns of the storyline, she ditched her delusions and changed her tune.

When it was all over she exclaimed:

"Wise at last,

My eyes at last,

Are cutting you down to your size at last.

Bewitched, bothered and bewildered no more!"

Contact Robert Hand by email at borntolose3@att.net


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WHILE OBAMA CANCELS KID'S TOURS AT WHITE HOUSE AND BLAMES ON THE SEQUESTER, GUESS WHERE HIS KIDS, SASHA AND MALIA ARE.

Posted by Israel Commentary, March 29, 2013

The article below was posted by Jerome S. Kaufman National Secretary of the Zionist Organization of America. This article appeared march 27, 2013 in Israel Commentary and is archived at
http://israel-commentary.org/?tag=kids-previous-trip-to-mexico-with-12-friends-and-lumteen-secret-service-men-with-armed-weapons

Watchdog group Judicial Watch has filed Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests of President Barack Obama's administration for expense details on first daughters Sasha's and Malia's spring break vacation, the organization's president Tom Fitton told Breitbart News.

"The Obamas' unnecessary personal luxury travel is an abuse of office in this age of sequester, unemployment, and out-of-control government debt," Fitton said, giving his reason for the investigation. "Taxpayers are right to wonder why the Obamas repeatedly take personal trips with seemingly little regard for the resulting drain on precious tax dollars."

Breitbart News broke the story Monday that Sasha and Malia are spending their spring breaks at the ritzy Atlantis Paradise Island in the Bahamas. Secret Service spokesman Bryan Leary declined to answer when Breitbart News asked him for details on the cost of the trip and how many Secret Service agents or other resources are assigned to this trip, instead saying the agency would not confirm or deny trip details for anyone under its protection including Sasha and Malia.

First lady Michelle Obama's spokeswoman, who speaks on behalf of the first family on matters such as these, similarly did not provide those details when asked.

When Malia Obama went on a spring break trip to Mexico last year, she brought at least 12 friends and 25 Secret Service agents. According to Judicial Watch's findings, the cost of that trip was $115,500.87.

Per Judicial Watch, specific details for Malia's Mexico trip include:

Ground transportation: $23,964.81

Lodging: $21,682.92

Airfare: $47,767.34

"Vouchers": $21,636.14 (not itemized)

Support Charges: $449.66 (travel for one from Mexico City to Oaxaca, not itemized)

Contact Israel Commentary at israelcommentary@comcast.net


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ADL SLAMS MUSLIM GROUP FOR "MALICIOUS AND FALSE" ADS IN NY TRAIN STATIONS

Posted by Algemeiner, March 29, 2013

The article below was written by Zach Pontz who is a freelance journalist and writer, amateur doodler, and from time-to-time devoutly inert. You can check out his musings on his blog. This article appeared March 29, 2013 in the Algemeiner and is archived at
http://www.algemeiner.com/2013/03/29/adl-slams-muslim-group-for-malicious-and-false-ads-in-ny-train-stations/

The Anti-Defamation League issued a statement Thursday slamming an American Muslim group for posting billboards in New York train stations that accuse Israel of apartheid.

"We are deeply disturbed that American Muslims for Palestine is undertaking a billboard campaign that falsely accuses Israel of 'apartheid.' Their ad campaign ignores the complicated nature of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and is part of the campaign to delegitimize and demonize the Jewish state," the statement read in part.

The AMP billboard, which has been posted in 25 Metro-North Stations, reads: "Americans give Israel $3 billion per year! End Apartheid now!" and includes a quote from South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, a prominent critic of Israel. The posters were put up on Monday, shortly before Passover commenced, a fact the ADL also knocked. "It shows a profound lack of sensitivity that they chose the first day of the Jewish holiday of Passover to announce this malicious and false ad campaign."

Meanwhile, a group known for its public criticism of Islamism has launched its own offensive. The American Freedom Defense Initiative, which caused a furor when it posted billboards last year in New York City subway stations that referred to Jihadists as "savages," has created new billboards that feature disturbing images under the headline: "This is Islamic apartheid."

One of the images shows two blindfolded men having nooses placed over their heads. Below the image, it reads, "Gay under Islamic law (Sharia).

Another picture shows a woman dressed in a white burqa getting whipped, above the words: "Under Islamic law rape victims are tortured or killed unless they agree to marry their rapist."

Pamela Geller, head of the AFDI, told the New York Post she wants the ads in the same stations as the AMP posters, but was unsure when they would go up.

Contact Algemeiner at editor@algemeiner.com


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BRITISH JUSTICE DENIES JEWISH SELF-DETERMINATION

Posted by Ted Belman, March 30, 2013

The article below was written by Ronen Bergman who is an Israeli investigative journalist and author. He is a senior political and military analyst for Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel's largest-circulation daily. Bergman has written for The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, and Newsweek in the United States, and for The Times, The Guardian, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and the Sueddeutsche Zeitung in Europe. He is also interviewed frequently by the media in the United States and Europe, and his work is often quoted in Middle Eastern newspapers in Arabic and Persian. He has published four books in Hebrew, which were all well received, and which topped Israeli non-fiction best-seller lists. His books cover corruption in the Palestinian Authority, the 1973 Yom Kippur War, the Iranian nuclear project, and Israeli POWs and MIAs. This article appeared on Israpundit and is archived at
http://www.israpundit.org/

On Nov. 26, 2013, three days after the signing of the interim agreement (JPOA) between the powers and Iran, the Iranian delegation returned home to report to their government. According to information obtained by Israeli intelligence, there was a sense of great satisfaction in Tehran then over the agreement and confidence that ultimately Iran would be able to persuade the West to accede to a final deal favorable to Iran. That final deal, signed in Vienna last week, seems to justify that confidence. The intelligence—a swath of which I was given access to in the past month—reveals that the Iranian delegates told their superiors, including one from the office of the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei, that "our most significant achievement" in the negotiations was America's consent to the continued enrichment of uranium on Iranian territory.

That makes sense. The West's recognition of Iran's right to perform the full nuclear fuel cycle—or enrichment of uranium—was a complete about-face from America's declared position prior to and during the talks. Senior U.S. and European officials who visited Israel immediately after the negotiations with Iran began in mid 2013 declared, according to the protocols of these meetings, that because of Iran's repeated violations of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, "Our aim is that in the final agreement [with Iran] there will be no enrichment at all" on Iranian territory. Later on, in a speech at the Saban Forum in December 2013, President Barack Obama reiterated that in view of Iran's behavior, the United States did not acknowledge that Iran had any right to enrich fissile material on its soil.

In February 2014, the first crumbling of this commitment was evident, when the head of the U.S. delegation to the talks with Iran, Wendy Sherman, told Israeli officials that while the United States would like Iran to stop enriching uranium altogether, this was "not a realistic" expectation. Iranian foreign ministry officials, during meetings the Tehran following the JPOA, reckoned that from the moment the principle of an Iranian right to enrich uranium was established, it would serve as the basis for the final agreement. And indeed, the final agreement, signed earlier this month, confirmed that assessment.

The sources who granted me access to the information collected by Israel about the Iran talks stressed that it was not obtained through espionage against the United States. It comes, they said, through Israeli spying on Iran, or routine contacts between Israeli officials and representatives of the P5+1 in the talks. The sources showed me only what they wanted me to see, and in these cases there's always a danger of fraud and fabrication. This said, these sources have proved reliable in the past, and based on my experience with this type of material it appears to be quite credible. No less important, what emerges from the classified material obtained by Israel in the course of the negotiations is largely corroborated by details that have become public since.

In early 2013, the material indicates, Israel learned from its intelligence sources in Iran that the United States held a secret dialogue with senior Iranian representatives in Muscat, Oman. Only toward the end of these talks, in which the Americans persuaded Iran to enter into diplomatic negotiations regarding its nuclear program, did Israel receive an official report about them from the U.S. government. Shortly afterward, the CIA and NSA drastically curtailed its cooperation with Israel on operations aimed at disrupting the Iranian nuclear project, operations that had racked up significant successes over the past decade.

On Nov. 8, 2013, Secretary of State John Kerry visited Israel. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saw him off at Ben Gurion Airport and told him that Israel had received intelligence that indicated the United States was ready to sign "a very bad deal" and that the West's representatives were gradually retreating from the same lines in the sand that they had drawn themselves.

Perusal of the material Netanyahu was basing himself on, and more that has come in since that angry exchange on the tarmac, makes two conclusions fairly clear: The Western delegates gave up on almost every one of the critical issues they had themselves resolved not to give in on, and also that they had distinctly promised Israel they would not do so.

One of the promises made to Israel was that Iran would not be permitted to stockpile uranium. Later it was said that only a small amount would be left in Iran and that anything in excess of that amount would be transferred to Russia for processing that would render it unusable for military purposes. In the final agreement, Iran was permitted to keep 300kgs of enriched uranium; the conversion process would take place in an Iranian plant (nicknamed "The Junk Factory" by Israel intelligence). Iran would also be responsible for processing or selling the huge amount of enriched uranium that is has stockpiled up until today, some 8 tons.

The case of the secret enrichment facility at Qom (known in Israel as the Fordo Facility) is another example of concessions to Iran. The facility was erected in blatant violation of the Non Proliferation Treaty, and P5+1 delegates solemnly promised Israel at a series of meetings in late 2013 that it was to be dismantled and its contents destroyed. In the final agreement, the Iranians were allowed to leave 1,044 centrifuges in place (there are 3,000 now) and to engage in research and in enrichment of radioisotopes.

At the main enrichment facility at Natanz (or Kashan, the name used by the Mossad in its reports) the Iranians are to continue operating 5,060 centrifuges of the 19,000 there at present. Early in the negotiations, the Western representatives demanded that the remaining centrifuges be destroyed. Later on they retreated from this demand, and now the Iranians have had to commit only to mothball them. This way, they will be able to reinstall them at very short notice.

Israeli intelligence points to two plants in Iran's military industry that are currently engaged in the development of two new types of centrifuge: the Teba and Tesa plants, which are working on the IR6 and the IR8 respectively. The new centrifuges will allow the Iranians to set up smaller enrichment facilities that are much more difficult to detect and that shorten the break-out time to a bomb if and when they decide to dump the agreement.

The Iranians see continued work on advanced centrifuges as very important. On the other hand they doubt their ability to do so covertly, without risking exposure and being accused of breaching the agreement. Thus, Iran's delegates were instructed to insist on this point. President Obama said at the Saban Forum that Iran has no need for advanced centrifuges and his representatives promised Israel several times that further R&D on them would not be permitted. In the final agreement Iran is permitted to continue developing the advanced centrifuges, albeit with certain restrictions which experts of the Israeli Atomic Energy Committee believe to have only marginal efficacy.

As for the break-out time for the bomb, at the outset of the negotiations, the Western delegates decided that it would be "at least a number of years." Under the final agreement this has been cut down to one year according to the Americans, and even less than that according to Israeli nuclear experts.

As the signing of the agreement drew nearer, sets of discussions took place in Iran, following which its delegates were instructed to insist on not revealing how far the country had advanced on the military aspects of its nuclear project. Over the past 15 years, a great deal of material has been amassed by the International Atomic Energy Agency—some filed by its own inspectors and some submitted by intelligence agencies—about Iran's secret effort to develop the military aspects of its nuclear program (which the Iranians call by the codenames PHRC, AMAD, and SPND). The IAEA divides this activity into 12 different areas (metallurgy, timers, fuses, neutron source, hydrodynamic testing, warhead adaptation for the Shihab 3 missile, high explosives, and others) all of which deal with the R&D work that must be done in order to be able to convert enriched material into an actual atom bomb.

The IAEA demanded concrete answers to a number of questions regarding Iran's activities in these spheres. The agency also asked Iran to allow it to interview 15 Iranian scientists, a list headed by Prof. Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, whom Mossad nicknamed "The Brain" behind the military nuclear program. This list has become shorter because six of the 15 have died as a result of assassinations that the Iranians attribute to Israel, but access to the other nine has not been given. Neither have the IAEA's inspectors been allowed to visit the facilities where the suspected activities take place. The West originally insisted on these points, only to retreat and leave them unsolved in the agreement.

In mid-2015 a new idea was brought up in one of the discussions in Tehran: Iran would agree not to import missiles as long as its own development and production is not limited. This idea is reflected in the final agreement as well, in which Iran is allowed to develop and produce missiles, the means of delivery for nuclear weapons. The longer the negotiations went on, the longer the list of concession made by the United States to Iran kept growing, including the right to leave the heavy water reactor and the heavy water plant at Arak in place and accepting Iran's refusal of access to the suspect site.

It is possible to argue about the manner in which Netanyahu chose to conduct the dispute about the nuclear agreement with Iran, by clashing head-on and bluntly with the American president. That said, the intelligence material that he was relying on gives rise to fairly unambiguous conclusions: that the Western delegates crossed all of the red lines that they drew themselves and conceded most of what was termed critical at the outset; and that the Iranians have achieved almost all of their goals.

Ted Belman is a retired lawyer and the Editor of Israpundit. He made aliya from Canada last year and now lives in Jerusalem, Israel. Contact him at tedbel@rogers.com or tedbel1@israpundit.net


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THE ISLAMIC REPUBLIC OF IRAN — ALARMING DRAMA IN THE MIDDLE EAST

Posted by Darlene Casella, March ##, 2013

Shakespeare wrote "Hell is empty, and all devils are here." He could have been writing about the Middle East.

Ancient Persia extended from the Persian Gulf, to the Caspian Sea to the Euphrates River; with dominion over Egypt and Greece. Cyrus the Great conquered the Babylonian Empire, and was welcomed by the Jews, as he respected various religions. The U N declared that the first human rights document was from the rule of Cyrus, 540 BC.

Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was overthrown and Persia became the Islamic Republic of Iran in 1979. Iran sits on the Persian Gulf between Iraq and Pakistan, the size of Alaska. Supreme Ayatollah Khomeini became the Chief of State and established theocratic Shia Islamic law. After the embassy hostage situation the US cut relations and Iran is designated as a terrorist state.

President Barak Obama and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed to give Tehran continued nuclear diplomacy until after the Iranian Presidential Elections in June, 2013. The P5 + 1 (US, Russia, France, UK, China, and Germany) is negotiating with Tehran. This affords Ayatollah Khamenei and the Revolutionary Guard a strong appearance during the election campaign; not making concessions on the nuclear program. According to Debkafile sources, Ayatollah Khamenei offered Obama a similar courtesy during his presidential campaign. Khamenei and Ahmadinejad are at odds in this election.

Publically Netanyahu agreed to the June date, in spite of Israel's concern regarding Iran's nuclear capabilities. He said "The clock is ticking. There must be a clear and credible threat of military action." Obama said "There is still time for diplomacy. But Iran must know this. Time is not unlimited. Whatever time is left, there's not a lot of time. All options are on the table. Each country has to make its own decisions when it comes to engaging in military action. And Israel is differently situated than the United States."

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei's televised response to the Netanyahu/Obama announcement was "At times the officials of the Zionist regime threaten to launch a military invasion. But they themselves know that if they make the slightest mistake, the Islamic Republic will raze Tel Aviv and Haifa to the ground."

Ahmadinejad made the following comments regarding his vision for the new world order:

.The United States is following an international policy of bullying. The system of empires has reached the end of the road. The U.S. and the traditional powers play a smaller role and every country has equal standing - with the exception of Israel.

·None of the three nuclear powers in Iran's neighborhood --Israel, Pakistan, and India -- has signed the nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty. Iran condemns the double standard. Iran will keep its right to scientific progress and proceed with its nuclear program.

Khamemei backed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the 2009 Presidential election, with massive protests by the Green Movement. Dozens were killed, thousands arrested and tortured to suppress the movement.

Traditionally no one could become President without the Ayatollah's approval. Ahmadinejad cannot run again after two consecutive terms, and wants his own protégé in the office. Is Ahmadinejad trying a Putin? He backs his brother in law, Esfandiar Rahim Mashaei. In four years he could return to Presidency. The Ayatollah backs candidates Saeed jalili and Ali Larijani. High profile mudslinging between Ahmadinejad and Larijani and other contenders close to the Khamenei family continues. Citizens vote for candidates that have been approved by the Guardian Council, which can veto any candidate. Reformist candidates remain under house arrest.

Ahmadinejad is the first non clerical president. He separated Mosque and state, making Khamenei the spiritual figure; and increasing power of the President. A devote Muslim, Ahmadinejad glorifies pre Islamic civilizations, and enrages Khamenei and many Islamic clerics.

Iranian media is under attack. There have been public lashings and executions of journalists across the country. Two months ago 12 journalists were arrested for being part of a network to destabilize the country. Khamenei does not want a repeat of the 2009 demonstrations, and is cracking down in advance. Ahmadinejad allies have been jailed. Ali Akbar Javanfekr was jailed for writing an article questioning the mandatory hijab Islamic dress for women.

At the funeral of anti American Venezuelan Hugo Chavez, Ahmadinejad said Chavez would be resurrected with Jesus Christ, and The Perfect Human (Shiite Islam's 12th Imam). In Tehran these comments were denounced as heresy. On the airwaves clerics castigated Ahmadinejad and reminded Iranians that Chavez was not a Muslim. Clerics raged. It was headline news with front page photos of Ahmadinejad touching the hands of Chavez's mother in violation of Islamic law. Men cannot touch any unrelated female.

The anti Israeli, anti American, pro nuclear pot boils in Iranian political circles. "All the World's a stage, and all the men and women merely players; they have their exits and their entrances and one man in his time plays many parts." Which parts will Netanyahu, Obama, Ahmadinejad, and Khamenei play on the world stage?

Darlene Casella was, before her retirement, an English teacher, a stockbroker, and president/owner of a small corporation. She lives with her husband in La Quinta, California, and can be reached at darlenecasella@msn.com


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HAGGADAH:A SURVIVAL GUIDE FOR JEWS IN EXILE

Posted by Moshe Dann, March 30, 2013

Cryptic messages in Passover text provide links to national history, homeland for "strangers in strange lands".

rare haggadah

The Haggadah as we know it is a product of Diaspora Judaism, written during the Gaonic period (8th-9th century CE) in Babylon. Based on Talmudic and other sources, its authors compiled an extraordinary document which is followed by Jews around the world and constantly inspires new interpretations. It has, however, a hidden message.

On a simple level it tells the story of the Exodus from Egypt and the origins of the Jewish people. But it is not chronological and jumps from one episode to another without a clear line of development. Intended for the Passover Seder ('Order of Passover'), it seems not in order.

Full of metaphors and historical events, it's strange that the critical figure in the Exodus, Moses, is missing, along with Aaron. Instead, the Haggadah focuses on rabbis from the second and third centuries, parables about committed and alienated children — insiders and outsiders, and Lavan the Aramean — providing our first clue about why the Haggadah was composed.

The historic center of Aramean civilization was Babylon, where the authors of the Haggadah lived. Exiled from Eretz Yisrael in the 6th century BCE, Jews had built there a vibrant and cohesive Torah- based community which provided critical leadership that lasted for a millennium. Toward the end of the Gaonic period, however, plagued by assimilation and threatened with destruction, Babylonian rabbis saw the writing on the wall and composed a code-book for Jewish survival in immanent and future exiles.

The Haggadah provides a compact guide for Jews running for their lives, unable to carry libraries, often isolated and needing to teach their children the basics of Judaism. Using stories and songs, focused on family units, the Haggadah's deeper message provides concise tools needed to instill Jewish historical awareness and identity. And, built on a prophetic vision of Redemption, it is focused on the Jewish homeland, Eretz Yisrael.

As the Haggadah reminds us, Jewish history begins in Mesopotamian idol worship and Egyptian slavery. The Exodus from Egypt not only expresses freedom, but is also the beginning of Jews as a nation and as a People. The paradigm of Exile-Redemption provides a context for understanding how Jewish history works: nationhood is determined by geography, the occupation of space, and peoplehood, a spiritual/cultural creation, exists in time. Nationhood is building civilization — political, judicial, economic institutions, civic organizations; Peoplehood is transcendent, founded on history, memory and a sense of destiny.

An instruction manual on how to survive as strangers in strange lands, the Haggadah's focus is the centrality of Eretz Yisrael and an understanding of Judaism and Jewish history. Its reference points are rabbis who led the Jewish people following the destruction of the Second Temple to Yavneh and through the Bar Kochba rebellion and exile: Rabban Gamliel, Rabbi Akiva, Rabbi Tarfon, Rabbi Eliezer, Rabbi Yehoshua and Rabbi Elazar. Quoted through- out Talmud and in Pirke Avot, their prominence in the Haggadah indicates an emphasis on the trauma of dispersion and the basics of Jewish education.

Children's stories and songs in Haggadah are para- bles illuminating dark paths of suffering with rays of hope. As individuals and as a people we are all of the four children, simple, angry, rebellious and faithful. What unites us is a common belief in One God, as expressed in the Shema. And this became, in Exile, a simple way of attachment.

Reciting the Haggadah with his colleagues, Rabbi Akiva, who would be martyred as he uttered Shema, is called upon by his students: "It's time to say the Shema!" This affirmation of faith is the Jewish beginning and end, in prayer, in life and death. The Shema, however is not only about monotheism — God is One — but also about community, "Hear O Israel," a unifying connection as a People, even in exile. For Jews in Exile, despite oppression and suffering, often with few Jewish resources, this one phrase contained identity and purpose.

THE AUTHORS of the Haggadah understood that under pressure, isolated, without teachers and schools, things had to be reduced to essentials. Eating matzot requires no belief, but the reason we eat matzot (and refusal to eat bread) could become a dialogue that leads to study and commitment. Symbols replaced actions, prayers substituted for Temple worship, the real thing — the world minimized, but enough.

Matzot is also a paradox. It represents freedom, yet is the "bread of slavery," as if to say that in Exile, we need to move towards Redemption. But how? Eat it, the Haggadah instructs, with maror, bitter-sweet, and with the korban — the ritual sacrifice offered in the Temple in Jerusalem — places that might be far away and nearly forgotten, yet which connect us to God, to the Jewish People, and to Eretz Yisrael.

Amid destruction and chaos the Haggadah asks: Where have you come from and where are you going? As Jews we remember not only that we are chosen as messengers of Torah, living examples of ethical monotheism, but our heritage and our national homeland.

Moreover, Pessah is not an isolated holiday, but the beginning of a 50-day period culminating in Shavuot, which celebrates receiving the Torah. It is also a time when the first fruits of Eretz Yisrael were brought to the Temple in mass offerings of thanksgiving and faith that resonate throughout the year.

The Haggadah teaches us the history of Jewish persecution through songs about animals and natural symbols: a goat bought for two zuzim (a zuz was a silver coin struck during the Bar Kochba revolt; two were equivalent to a half-shekel which Jews were commanded to contribute to the Temple every year for purchasing public sacrifices); a cat (Egypt); a dog (Assyria); a stick and fire (Babylon); water (Persia and Media); an ox (Greece); the slaughterer (Rome); Crusader, Muslim, Nazi and Soviet murderers (The Angel of Death) and the final stage, Redemption.

"Who knows One?" teaches about essential elements in Judaism by numbers: the tablets Moses received on Mount Sinai, three Patriarchs, four Matriarchs, five books of Torah, Mishnah, Shabbat, brit milah, months required for birth, Ten Commandments, stars (constellations), tribes, and the attributes of God.

"Dayenu" (it's sufficient) is not just about appreciating freedom and survival in the desert, but highlights (at the end) the purpose: Torah, Shabbat, Eretz Yisrael and the Temple.

These stories and songs retell the history of Jews as a People and a Nation, in slavery and freedom, in despair yet full of hope, scattered throughout the world and home.

The Haggadah reminds us that "once we were slaves," in Exile, but that's not where we belong. Our Seder table is the mechanism for transporting us back into history and propelling us toward the future.

"Next year in Jerusalem," the fulfillment of God's promise, is ours, too.

HISTORICAL NOTES: There are references in the Haggadah to traditions which go back to the end of the Second Temple period when little was written. Some form of the Haggadah may have existed following the Roman destruction, mostly as an oral tradition passed down through Tannaim and Amoraim, using whatever texts were available. R. Yehuda bar Ela'ai (around 170 CE) is the last Tanna to be quoted in the Haggadah.

Around 200 CE Rabbi Yehuda Hanasi ("Rebbe") organized and edited the Mishna, which was later elaborated in the Talmud based on written and oral sources. These sources provided basic halachot (laws) for observing Pessah which were incorporated into the Haggadah.

Disputes about the Haggadah between the leaders of two great Babylonian communities, Rav (Abba) (in Sura) and Shmuel (in Nehardea) show that different traditions had developed and remained unresolved.

The Malbim believed that the arguments were about interpretation, not compilation, and therefore assigns the Haggadah to Rebbe.

References in Haggadah to Rav Nachman (Pesachim 116a) could refer to Rav Nachman bar Yaakov, the son-in-law of the Resh Gakusa (head of the nation in exile) (about 280 CE) or Rav Nachman bar Yitzhak (360 CE).

Moshe Dann is a PhD historian, writer and journalist. He can be contacted at drmoshedann@gmail.com. This article appeared March 29, 2013 in the Jerusalem Post and is archived at
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Haggadah-A-survival-guide-for-Jews-in-Exile-308106


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SECOND THOUGHTS ABOUT APOLOGY TO TURKEY

Posted by Richard H. Shulman, March 30, 2013

Like Daniel Pipes, I considered PM Netanyahu's apology to Turkey not just unwarranted but also a blunder. Although Turkey's PM Erdogan had demanded an apology, the incident to be apologized over is not the cause of poor bilateral relations but the result of it. The poor bilateral relations result from the Islamist regime's religious and imperialist ideology and Erdogan's bullying bluster. Therefore, an apology would not heal relations.

The apology would worsen relations. The demand for an apology over Israeli self-defense from an Islamist attack is an Islamist tactic of humiliating the enemy.

As Israel should have learned from its sad experience with Muslim Arabs, treat them with decency, and they consider you weak. Israel gives free medical care to thousands of Palestinian Arabs. Nevertheless, Muslim Arab hatred of Jews has not noticeably abated.

Acting strong gets condemned but is respected, perhaps feared. Acting weak may get condemned and does get exploited, not appreciated. Now think of the whole Israeli policy of waiting for a peace deal instead of finding a Zionist solution and setting up more Jewish communities in the Territories.

If you seem weak, they become emboldened. If you make a concession, they demand another. If you make a sacrifice for peace, they feel vindicated in their desire to conquer you. If you withdraw from territory they demand, they attack you. The withdrawal from Gaza was only the latest such fiasco.

The text of Netanyahu's apology was not craven. It did not admit to any guilt. But to consider it a well crafted document is to regard it from Western eyes. Its recipients are anti-Western. They don't care about what its words mean, they care about who is appeasing whom. They spin it against Israel. They distort it. They see it as a victory for Islam. I see it that way, too.

Netanyahu gave up the high ground. He lost the opportunity to make Israel's case. He also had forfeited the opportunity, each time he publicly refused to apologize, to show Israeli decency and to show what is wrong with the Islamists. People are going to assume that Israel acted wrongfully, that the ship had a legitimate purpose, and that the activists did no wrong.

Already the New York Times mentions that although a UN report acknowledged that the IDF had a right to defend itself, the report also accused the IDF of excessive force. Killing nine out of a hundred Turks, after embattled IDF commandos had been wounded, beaten, and some of their pistols taken, is not excessive. (I want to challenge my friends to demand that that newspaper stop taking UN reports about Israel seriously.)

Therefore, Netanyahu should have made these points:

1, Terrorist passengers intentionally mobbed the few Israeli commandos with clubs and knives, wounding some savagely. The commandos defended themselves. Therefore, Turkey, which more or less sponsored the ship, owes Israel an apology. Not the reverse.

2. Israel's blockade of Gaza was to keep out war material. That is legal. Gazans were not starving. There was no justification for attempting to run the blockade. Turkey owes Israel another apology over that.

3. Israel's intent was peaceable. Its commandos descended on the ship wielding paint guns and packing holstered pistols. So when PM Netanyahu said he regrets errors the IDF made, he should have specified that Israel's failure was in not realizing how violent Islamists are; he should have had the commandos descend in greater numbers and with sub-machine guns at the ready.

Now Dr. Pipes reconsiders the apology as perhaps resulting in a sobering lesson for Israel. He reports that Ankara posted billboards taking pride in Erdogan's victory in having extracted the apology.

It's not a matter of who deserves an apology, it's a matter of who can extract it.

Erdogan ratcheted up the apology to claim it has changed the balance of power in the Arab-Israeli conflict, that it gave Turkey responsibility for solving it, and that Israel had agreed to cooperate with Turkey on this. [All that from such a minimal apology? Do you recall that Palestinian Arabs would make all sorts of claims about their negotiations with Israel, often retracted or refuted?]

Now Erdogan demands that Israel pay $1 million to the families of the slain Turks; Israel had offered $100,000. Erdogan is not fully restoring diplomatic ties with Israel and he is not yet dropping plans to prosecute Israeli generals involved in the incident. He also intends to visit Gaza, where he will crow over his victory. Ask yourself why President Obama pushed Netanyahu to apologize.

Here is the positive side of the apology. Before the apology, Israelis might have supposed that an apology could restore good relations with Turkey. Turkish bragging and rubbing it in may be disillusioning Israelis with that uninformed expectation. Thus "Naftali Bennett, Israel's Minister of economy and trade said: "Since the apology was made public, it appears Erdoğan is doing everything he can to make Israel regret it, while conducting a personal and vitriolic campaign at the expense of Israel-Turkey relations. Let there be no doubt — no nation is doing Israel a favor by renewing ties with it. It should also be clear to Erdoğan that if Israel encounters in the future any terrorism directed against us, our response will be no less severe."

Have Israelis learned the lesson that Turkish leaders "are Islamist ideologues with an ambitious agenda." (Daniel Pipes, 3/29/13, Cross-posted from National Review Online, The Corner http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2013/03/on-second-thought-maybe-that-israeli-apology-to).

But the basic lesson is to study enemy culture to understand how they would react.

Israel would be unwise to consider bilateral relations restored enough to sell advanced arms to Turkey.

Richard Shulman is a veteran defender of Israel on several web-based forums. His comments and analyses appear often on Think-Israel. He provides cool information and right-on-target overviews. He distributes his essays by email. To subscribe, write him at richardshulman5@aol.com.


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'ACTIVISTS' HOPING TO HELP BREACH GAZA BLOCKADE, RAPED IN BENGHAZI

Posted by Lori Lowenthal Marcus, March 30, 2013

The convoy which seeks to breach the legal Israeli blockade of Gaza, was organized by the IHH. The IHH claims to be a humanitarian agency, but is described by experts as a radical Islamist terrorism financing organization.

Convey

Three female British nationals who had been attempting to take part in yet another effort to breach the Israeli blockade of Gaza were brutally gang raped when, blocked from leaving the Libyan border, they were abducted and assaulted. Early reports are that the men who abducted and attacked the women are Libyan soldiers.

The women were part of a ten vehicle convoy which had been wending its way through southern Europe and northern Africa towards Egypt, allegedly seeking to bring in "humanitarian" aid to Gaza. Typically these efforts to break the legal blockade of Gaza carry little of real value, any of which can be brought in through other points of entry.

This vehicular convoy was organized by the Turkish nongovernmental organization IHH, which describes itself as a humanitarian relief organization, but which terrorism experts consider a "a radical Islamist group masquerading as a humanitarian agency."

According to terrorism financing expert Jonathan Schanzer, the IHH belongs to a Saudi-based umbrella organization known to finance terrorism called the Union of Good. Schanzer wrote that "the Union is chaired by Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, who is known best for his religious ruling that encourages suicide attacks against Israeli civilians." Qardawi is alleged to have personally transferred millions of dollars to the Union in an effort to provide financial support to Hamas.

The IHH, of course, is the same "humanitarian" agency that had organized the Gaza Freedom Flotilla in late May, 2010. During that effort Israeli naval forces repeatedly informed those on board the ships that they had to turn back and all goods could be distributed if they docked at the Israeli port of Ashdod. When the flotilla ships refused to turn back, Israeli naval commandos boarded the ship, where they were brutally attacked. The Israelis eventually opened fire, leading to the death of 9 aboard the ship, and injury to many more, including to the Israeli soldiers.

The "aid" convoy of approximately ten trucks left Britain on February 25, but had been detained for many days along the Libyan-Egyptian border. Egyptian border guards refused to allow them to cross into that country. The convoy was named the "Mavi Marmara" after the ship on which the Israeli and Turkish nationals had been injured during the 2010 confrontation.

The British nationals, frustrated by the long wait at the Egyptian border, went to Benghazi, hoping to make arrangements to fly back to Britain. It was in Benghazi that the five were abducted, and the three women, two of whom are sisters and who were accompanied by their father, were sexually assaulted. The father was present and witnessed the horrific assaults on his daughters.

The IHH allegedly mediated for the release of the captives, and they were released to the Turkish Consulate in Libya, where they are currently reported as safe and waiting to return to the UK.

The Libyan Deputy Prime Minister, Awadh al-Barassi, said he had been to visit the women who had been assaulted and their family was "in a very bad psychological state."

"Sadly [the perpetrators] belong to army, but they don't reflect the ethics of Libya army," Mr al-Barassi said in an interview with the national Libya al-Hurra television channel.

Lori Lowenthal Marcus is the US correspondent for The Jewish Press. She is a recovered lawyer who previously practiced First Amendment law and taught in Philadelphia-area graduate and law schools. You can reach her by email: Lori@JewishPressOnline.com. This article appeared March 26, 2013 in the Jewish Press.com News of the Jews, Israel & the World and is archived at
http://www.jewishpress.com/news/activists-hoping-to-help-breach-gaza-blockade-raped-in-benghazi/2013/03/30/


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NETANYAHU PULLED PUNCHES WITH OBAMA

Posted by Richard H. Shulman, March 30, 2013

In recent months, P.A. terrorism, including gunfire and fire bokmbs against Israelis, has increased in the Territories. Earlier this year, a few dozen people, mostly from in and near the village of Beit Fajr, were arrested and confessed.

The Netanyahu regime did not disclose those arrests until after Pres. Obama finished his visit. During that visit, Obama touted P.A. head Abbas and his lieutenants as true peace partners for Israel. Netanyahu did not contradict him. But Abbas is head of the terrorist organization Fatah, to which the arrested people belong (IMRA, 3/30 from http://www.israeldefense.com/?CategoryID=483&ArticleID=2036).

And the New York Times credited the P.A. with making Israel secure from terrorism. I had credited the IDF and the fence for keeping P.A. terrorism ineffective. To be fully informed, the New York Times should subscribe to IMRA.

Do you think PM Netanyahu did the right thing in not challenging the veracity of Obama's praise for Abbas? I think he did the wrong thing.

True, Netanyahu wanted the visit to go well. But the visit was about burnishing the credibility of an anti-Zionist U.S. President and the reputation of Abbas, the old terrorist. And the praise of Abbas was about renewing pressure on Israel to make dangerous concessions to Abbas. Netanyahu should not have cooperated with those endeavors.

Suppose Netanyahu would politely have replied: "It would be nice if Abbas were a peace partner. I was not going to bring this up, but it would be dangerous to leave intact the mistaken notion of Abbas wanting peace. Israeli security forces in the past couple of months have arrested a few dozen terrorists in the P.A., from the area around Beit. They fired guns at Israelis, threw firebombs, and were plotting more attacks. They confessed. They all belong to Fatah, Abbas' terrorist organization, some in Fatah's Tanzim militia. This is nothing new. Abbas' Fatah has never changed.

"Abbas not only heads that terrorist organization, but he constantly honors terrorists of the most murderous types. His regime indoctrinates in hating Jews based on Islamic scripture. It teaches their children to want to take over all of Israel, not just the territories.

"Those are the facts. I've been willing to negotiate with Abbas, and he has refused, but to expect peace from him is futile. To make concessions to him would be folly.

I had thought that building up the P.A. economy would redirect Palestinian Arab energy from jihad to building prosperity. But the P.A. neglects its potential prosperity to prepare for war. It's a mistake to subsidize the P.A..

"Americans are a decent people. Thank you for wanting to help solve this problem, but it is not a territorial problem, as the proposals for negotiations assume. It is a religious one. In the P.A., such religious imperialism is hardening. Jihadist sentiment is rising. We need a new approach, one that does not assume goodwill by the totalitarians we face."

What do you think? It's factual, logical, and objective. It does not insult Obama. But it would reduce his ability to make mischief.

Richard Shulman is a veteran defender of Israel on several web-based forums. His comments and analyses are a regular feature on Think-Israel. He provides cool information and right-on-target overviews. He distributes his essays by email. To subscribe, write him at ricshulman@aol.com.


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THE NARCO-TERRORISM NEXUS & THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION

Posted by ACD/EWI, March 31, 2013

"Terrorists use drug profits to fund their cells to commit acts of murder," said President George W. Bush, on December 14, 2001. "It's so important for Americans to know that the traffic in drugs finances the work of terror, sustaining terrorists."

On March 19, 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft went on to say: "Terrorism and drugs go together like rats and the bubonic plague.... They thrive in the same conditions, support each other, and feed off each other."

Alas, the water flowing through the Potomac seems to have swept this acknowledgement down to Chesapeake Bay, off to the Atlantic Ocean.

Incredibly, twenty-one years later, on March 20, 2013, Marine Corps Gen. John F. Kelly, commander of U.S. Southern Command, gave a press conference at the Pentagonto voice his concern about "A potentialconnection between crime syndicates and terrorists in Latin America."

Contradicting himself, Kelly added, "We do know that some terrorist organizations are able to skim off fairly substantial sums of money from the drug profits.... And so there has to be kind of a network for that to happen."

Kelly explained, "Drugs are the basis for this wealth and the drug-related money coming out of the United States." A criminal network (which one?) "transports tons of drugs into the United States and Europe and moves bales of money back out."

The sums are "astronomical.... I mean palettes of money," he said. "For a buck, anything can get on the [drug transport] network." Kelly concluded, "The point of it all is the network is a very dangerous thing to have working as effectively as it does, because anything can get on it."

Already in 2002, twelve of the thirty-six groups on the U.S. Department of State's ForeignTerrorist Organizations List were identified as being involvedin drug trafficking.In October 2002, a Colombian courier for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (FARC), which is funded mostly by drug trafficking, was arrested in the U.S. for having attempted to transport €182,000 (Euros) into the country. The money was confiscated.

In another case, U.S. law enforcement derailed an al-Qaeda plot to exchange "9,000 assault weapons, such as AK-47 rifles, submachine guns and sniper rifles; 300 pistols; rocket-propelled grenade launchers; 300,000 grenades; shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles and 60 million rounds of ammunition,"for $25 million dollars in cash and cocaine.

Since then, the cooperation between international drug trafficking has been cemented to share the "astronomical" amounts of money generated by drug trafficking, arms and people smuggling the worldover.

If Kelly's worry about such a "potential" link strikes you as odd, it should.

At the same press conference Kelly was arguing that "The reality on the ground [Latin America] is that Iran is struggling to maintain influence in the region, and that its efforts to cooperate with a small set of countries with interests that are inimical to the United States are waning."

He went on to explain that Iran have increased its "attempt to evade international sanctions and cultivate anti-U.S. sentiment," Iran succeeded in establishing relations with "Venezuela, Bolivia, Ecuador, and Argentina." However, he noted, "This outreach has only been marginally successful...and the region as a whole has not been receptive to Iranian efforts."

Kelly seemed oblivious to Iranian proxy Hezbollah's longstanding involvement in drug trafficking and many other criminal activities criminal fundraising efforts in Latin America.

What to think of this? It was surely an example of both the current administration's humoring of Iran (Kelly paraphrased: I'm not saying that Iran is sponsoring terrorism in Latin America. I'm only talking about 'potential') and an expression of just how far behind the curve the U.S. military will be when it comes to handling future events.

The fact that Hezbollah is Iran's principal agent both in Latin America and a good number of other places worldwide was established decades ago. Since 9/11 Hezbollah's activities and partnership with drug cartels in pursuing criminal activity of all sorts in the tri-border region have been documented in "Funding Evil; How terrorism is Financed — and How to Stop it," and in many congressional hearings, by the Congressional Research Service, reports by the Drug Enforcement Administration, and many studies, reports and media accounts.

On March 17, 2009,a former commander of U.S. Southern Command, Navy Adm. James G. Stavridis testified before the House Armed Services Committee

"He noted the direct link between the illicit drug trade and the terrorist groups it bankrolls, noting the threat posed by Islamic radical terrorism, and emphasized that "Identifying, monitoring and dismantling the financial, logistical and communication linkages between illicit trafficking groups and terrorist sponsors are critical to not only ensuring early indications and warnings of potential terrorist attacks directed at the United States and our partners, but also in generating a global appreciation and acceptance of this tremendous threat to security." Strangely, Gen. Kelly knows nothing about this.

Former assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs Roger Noriega recently testified before Congress on the Iran/Hezbollah/ Venezuela nexus. Noriega noted the Iran has laundered billions of dollars through the Venezuelan financial sector and is currently stashing "hundreds of millions" in "virtually every Venezuelan bank," some of which have corresponding branches in the U.S.

In addition to Venezuela, where Hezbollah has close ties to Chavez's likely successor, Vice President Nicolas Maduro, there are credible reports of Hezbollah's presence in Nicaragua, Belize and Mexico.

In April 2010, U.S. defense officials were cited by the U.S. Boarder Control website, saying that "Hezbollah is working with Mexican narcotics syndicates that control access to transit routes into the U.S, [and] ...to smuggle drugs and people into the United States." Moreover, he "warned that al Qaeda also could use trafficking routes to infiltrate operatives into the U.S." (see the map above).

One can only wonder why the Administration is considering Iran's penetration of Latin America, as well as Hezbollah's and other terrorist groups involvement in the narco-terrorism nexus, a matter of "potential." It has long been a fait accomplish.

Dr. Rachel Ehrenfeld is the Director of the New York-based American Center for Democracy (ACD) and the Economic Warfare Institute (EWI). She has authored hundreds of articles and several books on terrorist financing and political corruption. This article appeared March 31, 2013 on the American Center for Democracy (ACD) website and is archived at
http://acdemocracy.org/latin-americas-narco-terrorism-nexus-the-obama-administration/


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HOW THE EXODUS STORY CREATED AMERICA

Posted by Michael Freund, March 31, 2013

Narrative of the ancient Israelites influenced the Pilgrims; A bond that remains a "godsend".

Caption Text red sea

OF ALL the festivals on the Jewish calendar, it is Passover which contains some of the boldest and most powerful imagery.

The departure of our ancestors from Egypt, their pursuit by Pharaoh and his chariots, and the climactic splitting of the Red Sea, are just some of the themes that we continue to celebrate more than 3,300 years later.

Indeed, it is a testimony to the power of Jewish memory as well as the potency of the Passover saga that even after so many generations, we continue to retell and relive this crucial part of our ancient past.

After all, how many other nations on earth go to such great lengths to reenact the experience of their forebears, discussing it in detail late into the night while also trying to instill the next generation with a sense of historical continuity? Clearly, the deliverance of our forefathers from bondage left a deep imprint on the collective psyche of the Jewish people. Our experience with slavery and the yearning for freedom led many Jews of later generations to place themselves at the forefront of various struggles for human liberty and progress.

Not surprisingly, though, the Exodus tale has also ignited the imagination of others throughout history, encouraging them to stand up to tyrants and seek their own liberation.

Perhaps the most resounding instance is to be found in the annals of America and the men who helped to bring it into being, many of whom looked to the story of the exodus for inspiration.

Take, for example, the Pilgrims, who set sail on the Mayflower in September 1620 from the port of Plymouth in southern England in search of a haven where they could practice their religion free of persecution.

As Bruce Feiler, the author of America's Prophet: How the Story of Moses Shaped America, has noted, the Pilgrims viewed themselves as reliving the exodus saga.

"When they embarked on the Mayflower in 1620," Feiler writes, "they described themselves as the chosen people fleeing their pharaoh, King James. On the Atlantic, their leader, William Bradford, proclaimed their journey to be as vital as 'Moses and the Israelites when they went out of Egypt.' And when they arrived in Cape Cod, they thanked God for letting them pass through their fiery Red Sea."

Subsequently, when Bradford wrote Of Plymouth Plantation, his historical account of the Pilgrims' settling of America, he suggested that there were compelling parallels between the experiences of his own community and that of the ancient Israelites.

A decade later, in 1630, a second wave of Pilgrims made their way across the Atlantic on board the Arbella While en route to the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop delivered a sermon to the passengers entitled "A Model of Christian Charity," in which he too invoked comparisons with the Children of Israel.

"We shall find," he said, "that the God of Israel is among us, when 10 of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies, when He shall make us a praise and glory, that men shall say of succeeding plantations: 'The Lord make it like that of New England.'" As if to underline the point, Winthrop concluded his sermon by quoting from "Moses, that faithful servant of the Lord, in his last farewell to Israel."

By all accounts, the Pilgrims were driven by a deep-seated belief that they had a divinely-appointed mission. The early settlers were known to refer to Plymouth colony as "Little Israel," and many spoke of Bradford, who became its governor, as "Moses."

THE MASSACHUSETTS Bay Colony, which was located north of Plymouth, was equally imbued with a strong sense of biblical consciousness and identification.

As Dr. Gabriel Sivan wrote in his monumental work, The Bible and Civilization, "No Christian community in history identified more with the People of the Book than did the early settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who believed their own lives to be a literal reenactment of the biblical drama of the Hebrew nation."

The Pilgrims, argues Sivan, saw themselves as "the children of Israel; America was their Promised Land; the Atlantic Ocean their Red Sea; the Kings of England were the Egyptian pharaohs; the American Indians the Canaanites..."

Moreover, he suggests, they "saw themselves as instruments of Divine Providence, a people chosen to build their new commonwealth on the Covenant entered into at Mount Sinai."

It was this vision and sense of purpose which eventually served as one of the foundations of what came to be known as American Exceptionalism — the belief that the United States is a unique nation blessed by the Creator with a special role to play in the world.

More than a century and a half after the Pilgrims' arrival, the American colonies went to war against their British colonial masters in a struggle for independence, and the revolutionaries were also very much stirred by the story of the Israelites.

In his pamphlet Common Sense, which was published in January 1776 and had a galvanizing effect on American public opinion, Thomas Paine described King George III as the "sullen tempered pharaoh of England."

On July 4, 1776, just moments after formally adopting the Declaration of Independence, the Continental Congress appointed a committee consisting of three illustrious people — John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin — to create "a seal for the United States of America."

On August 20 of that year, the committee members presented their recommendations to the Congress, with Franklin proposing that the seal depict, "Moses standing on the shore, and extending his hand over the sea, thereby causing the same to overwhelm pharaoh who is sitting in an open chariot."

Jefferson suggested a similar theme for the seal, which would portray "The children of Israel in the wilderness, led by a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night."

Though neither of these ideas was accepted, the very fact that they were even considered demonstrates the pervasive influence of the biblical exodus on America's Founding Fathers as well as their strong affinity with the story of the Israelites.

Even after the war was over and America gained its independence, this linkage continued to predominate. On March 4, 1805, in his second inaugural address, President Thomas Jefferson said, "I shall need, too, the favor of that Being in whose hands we are, who led our fathers, as Israel of old, from their native land and planted them in a country flowing with all the necessaries and comforts of life."

The fact that America's Founding Fathers were so deeply influenced by the narrative of the ancient Israelites should serve as a source of pride to us all. It is a tangible example of how the saga of the Jewish people in Egypt influenced the course of world history, thousands of years after the events themselves.

To be sure, America, perhaps more than any other Diaspora country, has been a source of great blessing to Jews, providing unprecedented freedom and opportunity.

But in light of the prominent part played by the story of the Jewish people's forebears in shaping the beginnings of America, it seems fair to say that the bond between Israel and the United States is one that has been a godsend for all concerned.

Michael Freund served as Deputy Communications Director in the Israeli Prime Minister's Office under Binyamin Netanyahu. He is the founder and chairman of Shavei Israel/Israel Returns -- www.shavei.org and www.IsraelReturns.org -- a Jerusalem-based organization that searches for and assists the Lost Tribes of Israel and other "hidden Jews" seeking to return to Zion. In addition, Freund is a correspondent and syndicated columnist for The Jerusalem Post. A native New Yorker, he is a graduate of Princeton University and holds an MBA in Finance from Columbia University. He has lived in Israel for the past 16 years and remains an avid New York Mets fan. Email Michael at msfreund@earthlink.net. This article appeared March 29, 2013 in The Jerusalem Post and is archived at
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/How-the-exodus-story-created-America-308136


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ARAB APARTHEID OR WHY DON'T ARABS CARE ABOUT THE PALESTINIANS UNLESS JEWS ARE INVOLVED?

Posted by Midenise, March 31, 2013

ARAB APARTHEID or why don't Arabs care about the Palestinians unless Jews are involved?

It began with the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948. The popular misconception is that the Arab states invaded to help the Palestinians. Actually, they intended to carve up Palestine for themselves, NOT to create a Palestinian state.

JIJ From 1949 until 1967, Egypt could have given Gaza to the Palestinians for a state, just as the Jordanians could have created a Palestinian state in the West Bank. Neither did, but no one in the world cared because the Palestinians were not interested in a state and the occupiers were Arabs.

The lack of concern for the Palestinians was also evident after the 1967 War when the UN adopted Resolution 242, which has been the basis for all peace negotiations, yet does not mention the Palestinians.

When the PLO tried to overthrow Jordan's King Hussein in 1970, the world did not show concern for the thousands of Palestinians who were killed by the king's forces. The exact figure is unknown, but the number may be greater than the total for all of the conflicts with Israel put together.

Yet another example of the disinterest toward the Palestinians occurred when Kuwait expelled 300,000 Palestinians for supporting Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. This made no headlines and generated no UN resolutions. The world was only concerned with the killing of Palestinian refugees in the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps in Lebanon because Jews were in the vicinity. The murderers were Lebanese Christians; nevertheless, it was Israel that was blamed.

After more than 700 Palestinians have been killed in Syria, survivors are fleeing the country. Have you heard any concern for them or for how the Palestinian refugees have been treated for decades in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan? Israel offered to allow some of the refugees from Syria to go the West Bank, but Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas rejected the idea.

Of course the Palestinians have controlled all the refugee camps in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip for almost 20 years and done nothing to move the people into permanent housing and close the camps. They prefer to keep the camps as breeding grounds for terrorists and as examples of victimhood.

The Arab states are full of bluster on the Palestinian issue, but, besides rhetoric, the Arab states provide only token amounts of money so they can say they are contributing to the cause. They have repeatedly pledged aid to the PA, but not made the payments. And, given the wealth of the Gulf states, the amount of these pledges is embarrassing. On January 14, 2013, Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad said his government might not meet its obligations to its people because of the failure of Arab League members to deliver the $100 million they promised.

Another inconvenient truth is that the world is indifferent to Arabs slaughtering Arabs. We continue to see this in Iraq, Egypt, Libya, Yemen and other Arab countries. The usual explanation is essentially a racist one; that is, Arabs are expected to behave in this way whereas Jews are held to a higher standard and that is why their involvement merits worldwide attention.

The irony is that the people who care the most for the Palestinians are probably American and Israeli Jews. In the United States, Jews are among the most vociferous supporters of the Palestinians. The Jewish establishment organizations are also pro-Palestinian, advocating a two-state solution that would give Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza the same freedoms Israelis enjoy, but are currently denied to them by their own leaders.

In Israel, many Jews advocate for the Palestinians: Israelis represent them in the courts, join them in protests and speak out on their behalf in the press and the Knesset. The many Arab-Jewish coexistence projects are nearly always initiated by Israeli Jews.

With the slaughter in Syria, Palestinians can see who their real friends are, and most are not the ones they expect.

Contact Midenise at midenise@zahav.net.il


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FLOTILLA 3.0: TO SAIL OUT OF GAZA

Posted by Udi Schayat, March 31, 2013

The following message is about the United Nations has ruled that the Israeli blockade on Gaza is legal and..international activists [leftists] work with Hamas affiliates to sail out of Gaza with a "new flotilla ark": The blockade of Gaza was enforced by the Israeli authorities to prevent weaponry or material to be imported by sea into Gaza. Since then, Hamas has continued to use illegally imported weaponry to indiscriminately target Israeli citizens with rocket fire, often also hitting Palestinians in Gaza at the same time. Recently, even the United Nations has ruled that the Israeli blockade is legal - a blow to campaigners who persistently use 'international law' to demonize the Jewish state. Since 2008, Israel has enforced a limit of between six and three miles for fisherman off the coast of Gaza due to fears that weaponry or material that could be used for weapons could be imported by sea.

A new propaganda initiative designed to test the resolve of the Israeli blockade on Hamas in Gaza is seeking to highlight how trade from Gaza has been affected by Israel. The focus of the 'Gaza Ark' is the fact that while goods do indeed enter the Hamas-run, Palestinian enclave, goods are said to rarely ever leave. The premise of the trip is that Gaza wants to trade with the world, rather than receive aid. Critics have called the trip "intentionally misleading", pointing to the fact that on a weekly basis, dozens of trucks export products from Gaza.

These facts haven't stopped the 'Gaza Ark' committee, however, a group which is supported by the hard-Left Noam Chomsky and disgraced Baroness Jenny Tonge. The organisation's "Who We Are" section also lists the public relations head of the Hamas-run Gaza Chamber of Commerce, Maher Al-Tabaa, and 'one-state solution' advocates such as Haidar Eid, who also works at the Al-Aqsa University, an institution that Hamas boasted about 'taking over' in 2009.

The Gaza Ark initiative is led by international anti-Israel activists, rather than ordinary Palestinians. Gaza's Ark entails "purchasing a run-down boat from a local fishing family," says Michael Coleman, a member of Free Gaza Australia and on the Gaza's Ark steering committee.

"The refurbishing will be done by Palestinians in the port of Gaza, and the sailing will be with a mixed crew of Palestinians and internationals," says David Heap, spokesperson for Gaza's Ark in Canada and Europe. The sailing date has not been announced yet. The Ark initiative includes exporting a token amount of trade goods from Palestinians, an act which Coleman admits is purely "symbolic".

Since 2008, boats have sailed, or attempted to sail, to the Gaza Strip in provocation of the ongoing blockade of terrorist outfit Hamas. The Free Gaza boats of 2008-2009 were followed by the Freedom Flotilla of 2010, and various attempts to cause havoc in the region. A video of the Mavi Marmara flotilla shows that rather than being 'peace activists', those aboard attacked Israeli soldiers with batons, stun grenades and even boxes of plates.

In 2011, evidence was uncovered linking Hamas to the flotilla campaigns. The blockade of Gaza was enforced by the Israeli authorities shortly after terrorist outfit Hamas was elected and violently seized control in 2007. Since then, Hamas has continued to use illegally imported weaponry to indiscriminately target Israeli citizens with rocket fire, often also hitting Palestinians in Gaza at the same time. Recently, even the United Nations has ruled that the Israeli blockade is legal - a blow to campaigners who persistently use 'international law' to demonise the Jewish state.

Since 2008, Israel has enforced a limit of between six and three miles for fisherman off the coast of Gaza due to fears that weaponry or material that could be used for weapons could be imported by sea. The "Gaza Ark" has not yet been given a date to sail and fundraising for the boat itself continues. The organisers are said to be looking to raise at least $100,000 for the "symbolic" move, money which critics note would be better spent elsewhere in helping Gazans and attempting to wrestle control of the Gaza strip from Hamas..

Contact Udi Schyat at udischayat@yahoo.com


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RUSSIA LAUNCHES SURPRISE MILITARY EXERCISE IN BLACK SEA

Posted by Arutz Sheva, March 31, 2013

black sea Caption Text

Russian President Vladimir Putin surprised his defense minister in the wee hours of Thursday morning last week with an order for surprise military drills to test battle readiness in the Black Sea. Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu was awakened at 4:00 a.m. local time with sealed orders to activate 7,000 troops, 36 ships, up to 20 fighter jets and helicopters and 50 pieces of artillery.

Aviation, paratroopers and special forces are involved in the exercises, which were launched immediately according to Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, who said "We are talking about major exercises, intended as a check," according to Russian news agencies.

"According to international practice, exercises involving up to 7,000 people do not require us to inform our partners in advance," Peskov noted. He added that the drills would take place on three military test ranges on Russian territory and are expected to last about a week.

Russia has been heavily involved in protecting Syria's President Bashar al-Assad from international ire at the United Nations Security Council, but as Assad's grip on power has increasingly weakened, and fragmented rebel forces gain control over more territory in the country, Moscow has begun to quietly evacuate its citizens from Damascus and surrounds. Likewise Putin has joined discussions over what may become of Syria's lethal arsenal of chemical weapons of mass destruction, a rising concern in the international community.

The Black Sea is a strategic waterway bounded by Europe, Anatolia and the Caucasus, and connects to the Atlantic Ocean via the Mediterranean and Aegean Seas and two straits known as the Turkish Straits — the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles. The Bosphorus Strait, which flows through the middle of Turkey, connects it to the Sea of Marmara. The Strait of the Dardanelles connects that sea to the Aegean Sea region of the Mediterranean, which separate eastern Europe and western Asia. Countries with shoreline along the Black Sea include Turkey, Ukraine, Bulgaria and Romania, in addition to Russia.

Late last year Turkey requested -- and received -- authorization to deploy a number of batteries of Patriot missile defense systems along its border with Syria. The batteries, contributed by NATO allies that included the United States, were installed in January 2013.

Chana Ya'aar is a columnist for Arutz-7 (www.think-israel.org). The article appeared March 31, 2013 in Arutz Sheva and is archived at
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/166671#.VbqFFryVsWM


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THE PC MAKE-OVER OF PASSOVER(RE-POST FROM A FEW YEARS BACK)

Posted by Steven Plaut, March 31, 2013

In recent years, Passover has undergone a make-over in the American Jewish non-Orthodox community, one that has converted it largely into a holiday devoted to celebrating human rights, protesting a long list of human rights abuses and promoting fashionable causes. The remake seems designed to make Passover a cosmopolitan holiday, one with a universal message in which all can join, in essence the Jewish answer to the Declaration of the Rights of Man of the French Revolution.

Back in the 1960s, a series of Political Correctness Haggadahs were written, in which the message of Passover was turned into a celebration of the civil rights movement in the United States. Arthur Waskow, the guru of the Tikkun-"Renewal" crowd, wrote at the time a Black Liberation Passover Haggadah, celebrating black militants like the Black Panthers, who were themselves coincidentally calling at the time for the annihilation of Jews. Later Political Correctness Haggadahs were devoted to homosexual rights, women's liberation, and assorted other faddish causes, not least of which was Palestinian "liberation". No doubt, this year will see Abandon Iraq and Restore Saddam Haggadot or No War for Oil ones. "Multicultural" Passover seders became fashionable in some circles, in which the seder became a mixture of acclamations for human rights and freedom, taken from a wide variety of non-Jewish sources.

As yet another illustration, a few years back, the Passover cause celebre of American Jewish liberals was Tibet, with Tibetan officials invited to Passover seders, and where the leftist Religious Action Center (RAC) of the Reform synagogue movement called on Jews to hold Tibetan-freedom Passover seders in solidarity with Tibet. The RAC is devoted to the proposition that Jewish values are nothing more and nothing less than this year's leftist political fads, including gay "marriage", supporting affirmative action apartheid programs, and opposing all welfare reform. Its head, Rabbi David Saperstein was quoted with approval a few years back by the American Communist Party's weekly newspaper.

In all of these attempts to recast Passover as the celebration of human rights, the Professional Liberals of the American Jewish Establishment (or PLAJEs, for short) seem to be overlooking one little point. And that is that Passover has absolutely nothing to do with human rights and is not at all a celebration of human freedom. Not that there is anything wrong with celebrating human rights, mind you. I would certainly not object to creating such a holiday, and my personal preference would be to hold it on Hiroshima Day, the day in which the A-bomb saved countless human lives and created the conditions by which freedoms could be extended to many millions of oppressed Asians.

For the record, Passover is the celebration of Jewish national liberation. It is one of three such Jewish holidays devoted entirely to celebrating Jewish national liberation, the other two being Hannuka and Purim, and the only one with Torah foundations. It is not the celebration of generic civil rights, nor even the celebration of freedom and dignity for oppressed peoples around the globe. It is the celebration of Jews achieving national self-determination and taking their homeland back by force of arms.

The only role that human rights play in the story of Passover is in showing that, under certain circumstances, human rights may be trampled upon for the greater good - namely, for Jewish national liberation. In order to achieve Jewish national liberation, God ran roughshod over the human rights of the Egyptians. He afflicted them with a series of plagues. He then killed all Egyptian first-born. While Pharaoh no doubt deserved everything he got, the entire Egyptian people were completely innocent, hardly responsible for Pharaoh's human rights abuses, subjects of collateral damages. They paid the price for Pharaoh's crimes and God saw this as necessary and just. The innocent first-born of all these innocent Egyptian parents, no doubt themselves nearly as badly treated by Pharaoh as the Hebrew slaves, were killed. And while it is not clear, apparently the first-born of the non-Jewish slaves were also innocent victims. And then, even the first-born of the animals in Egypt were killed, a development that would no doubt have driven Professor Richard Schwartz and the animal rights movement to hysterical outrage. What on earth did those poor animals do to deserve such a punishment?

While all of the above involve the Almighty's decision to violate the legitimate human rights of the Egyptian people, human rights abuses in the Passover story are not restricted to the divine. The Jewish slaves, before taking to the road, also take away the wealth and savings of the Egyptian people. While Pharaoh no doubt owed them some back wages, this wealth was in essence being taken from the innocent Ordinary Egyptians, and not necessarily only from the yuppie upper classes.

Incidentally, The poor sons of Haman, the 75 thousand or so Persians who get killed and the others who have their property confiscated by the Jews according to the Scroll of Esther, and all those innocent Greek Seleucid Republican Guards getting knocked off by the Maccabee Green Berets are other examples of human rights going out the window when Jewish national liberation and independence is pursued.

Passover is, of course, hardly a glorification of these human rights abuses. It is simply a celebration of Jewish national liberation even when it was pre-conditioned upon a certain necessary amount of moral tradeoffs and realpolitik. The lesson is clear: When there is no choice, squeamishness over the "human rights" of innocent people is out of place. The human rights of the Egyptians in the story of Exodus count for no more than the human rights of innocent Germans and Japanese getting the hell bombed out of them in World War II, or innocent residents of Baghdad getting bombed by the Coalition forces. Such things are necessary in the real world. Human rights sometimes need to be compromised to protect Jews and achieve Jewish self-determination and other goals.

All of which is of course lost upon all those self-righteous PLAJEs whining about Israel shooting rubber bullets and tear gas at the Arab rioters and the fascist Palestinian hordes. And the lesson that innocent humans sometimes must be abused and have their rights compromised will no doubt serve as a refreshing reminder for all those urchins marching in the current "peace marches" in solidarity with Saddam and Sheikh Yassin.

The real lesson of Passover is that Jewish national liberation and freedom does not come cheaply. The real world involves difficult choices and moral compromises and tradeoffs. Achieving a higher moral end often involves taking steps that would themselves be abusive or immoral on their own grounds, but are required in order to achieve the greater good. Such tradeoffs are the stuff with which moral posturers and self-righteous practitioners of recreational compassion cannot deal. It does not fit into their simplistic worldview and lazy armchair moralizing.

It is the great tragedy of the American Jewish community, or at least the non-Orthodox majority therein, that it is so overwhelmingly dominated by assimilated Professional Liberals and self-righteous practitioners of recreational liberal compassion, people whose understanding of political tradeoffs and public policy analysis never go any deeper than a good bumper sticker.

Steven Plaut is a professor at the Graduate School of the Business Administration at the University of Haifa and is a columnist for the Jewish Press. A collection of his commentaries on the current events in Israel can be found on his "blog" at www.stevenplaut.blogspot.com. The article above first appeared April 05, 2004 in Frontpagemag.com and is archived at
http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=13530


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DAYENU! ENOUGH!

Posted by Sergio Hadar Tezza, March 31, 2013

The article below was written by David M. Weinberg who is a lead columnist for The Jerusalem Post and Israel Hayom newspapers, writing on Israeli diplomacy, defense and politics; on religion and state; and on Israel-Diaspora relations. In addition to writing his widely-read newspaper columns (which are syndicated across the Jewish world) and to public speaking, Weinberg serves as director of public affairs at Bar-Ilan University's Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies; Israel office director of Canada's Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs; and senior advisor of the Tikvah Fund in Israel.

Oh, how we have compromised and conceded so much for the sake of peace with the Palestinians!Two decades ago, they told us that talking directly to the Palestine Liberation Organization was necessary for peace, despite that organization's monstrous terrorist record. Creating the first self-governing authority in Palestinian history, in the Gaza Strip and Jericho, also was necessary for peace, they told us.

And we said dayenu — we've had enough of the conflict; we will live with this, for the sake of peace.

Arming Yasser Arafat's police force with tens of thousands of rifles and other military equipment was said to be necessary for peace too. Even when this "police" force and other Palestinian Authority security forces mushroomed far beyond the numbers permitted by accord with Israel, and even when these "police" fired on Israeli soldiers and civilians, we said dayenu — somehow, we will live with this. Peace requires us to look the other way.

Turning a blind eye to PA human rights abuses, Holocaust denial, and virulent anti-Semitic propaganda also was necessary for peace, it was explained to us. And we reluctantly said dayenu — we will live with this.

Next, it was imperative to give Arafat more land in Judea and Samaria so that he could "solidify his regime." So we signed the Oslo II accord, handing over more than 30 percent of the West Bank, despite the fact that the PA had failed to live up to its original Oslo treaty obligations. And again we said dayenu — we will live with this.

The PA's commitment to fighting terror proved spotty and sporadic. Pot-shot shootings at Israeli passenger cars and roadside bombing attempts became so routine that these ceased to make headlines. Next, the City of our Patriarchs was handed over to the PA, with minimalist security arrangements in place for the protection of Hebron's Jewish residents.

But we said dayenu — we will live with this, in the hope that peace will yet come.

The Wye accord committed us to three more staged withdrawals: first an additional 13% of territory, then another 9%. This put 98% of the Palestinian population of the territories under Arafat's control, along with about 45% of the land and some important mountain aquifer resources. Some Jewish towns became isolated pockets within Palestinian-controlled territory. Arafat again promised to live up to his original treaty obligations.

And we said dayenu — we will live with this.

As a gesture of our goodwill, we began freeing from jail Palestinian security offenders "without blood on their hands"; then we released Palestinian murderers who had Palestinian blood on their hands; then we freed terrorists whose hands had spilled Jewish blood. We gritted our teeth and said dayenu — we have no choice but to live with this.

We turned a blind eye to the creeping but clear PA takeover of Jerusalem, our "united capital." We stood by haplessly as the PA built a "parliament" building on the borders of Jerusalem; as PA security men became the real enforcers in the Old City; and as the waqf undertook massive illegal construction on the Temple Mount, along with purposeful destruction of Jewish relics and layers of archaeological history going back to Temple times.

It was hard, but we said dayenu — we'll stomach the insult because peace requires compromise.

In the summer of 2000, Arafat started to huff and puff and threaten Israel, talking about renewed armed conflict and a unilateral declaration of statehood. Again, we were supposed to say dayenu — we will swallow this for the sake of peace. But our forbearance began to wear thin.

We suffered more than two years of terrorist violence and suicide bombings before launching Operation Defensive Shield and then beginning to build the security fence. Israel had been pushed too far, and people began to question and protest the peace process.

At Camp David in 2000, Taba in 2001, and Jerusalem in 2008, the PA turned down Israeli offers of statehood that would have given them a state in virtually all of the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem. The PA also lost Gaza to Hamas control.

In 2009 the Palestinians set impossible and outrageous preconditions for entering any peace talks with Israel. Basically, they demanded that Israel concede every point of contention such as borders and settlements in advance of the talks: a state in all of the West Bank and Gaza Strip with only "possible minor and mutually agreed upon land swaps of equal size and value"; the "right of return to Israel for refugees as specified in the Arab Peace Initiative," and so on and so forth.

At this point, most Israelis said dayenu — we've truly had enough. The peace process is a mirage.

In 2012, Abbas and Fayyad sought to turn the established framework for peace upside-down; to get their statehood "declared" by the international community without having to compromise with Israel; to claim the end result of the "peace process" without having to engage in any process.

Abbas went before the U.N. General Assembly and called upon the international community to "compel the government of Israel to respect the Geneva Conventions" and "impose a solution" (a Palestinian state) on Israel. He accused Israel of numerous crimes, including ethnic cleansing, terrorism, racism, inciting religious conflict, apartheid, house demolitions, dispossession, imprisoning "soldiers of freedom," settlement colonization and more. He threatened to "criminalize and penalize Israel's presence as an occupying power in all of the occupied Palestinian territory" through the International Criminal Court. The U.N. then "recognized" some sort of virtual PA state, against Israel's objections. Abbas, of course, stuck by his refusal to enter direct and unconditional peace talks with Israel.

Israelis were well past dayenu at this point. No peace process seemed relevant or possible.

Yet still, Israel continued to transfer hundreds of millions of shekels to prop up the Palestinian economy, to initiate and encourage international development projects in the PA, to back PA requests for mega-loans and grants from the International Monetary Fund and donor countries, and more. And the world? It continued to demand Israeli gestures and concessions and withdrawals to prop-up the PA and the "process." U.S. President Barack Obama arrived to lecture Israel on "justice" for the Palestinians and the need for Israelis to "demand" that their leaders push harder for peace. Enough of the "occupation," Obama said.

What happened then? Well, last night I had a dream. And in this dream, this is what happened. An Israeli backlash developed. The people of Israel awoke from its slumber and said dayenu! Enough is enough! One million Israelis turned out for a mass rally in Tel Aviv to declare that no amount of Palestinian threatening or violence, nor any degree of international pressure, would succeed in pushing us beyond our security red lines or strip us of our national and religious treasures.

We'll make peace with Palestinians, Israelis overwhelmingly declared, but there will be no return to the 1967 borders; no destruction of Israeli cities in Judea and Samaria; no influx of Palestinian refugees; no relinquishment of sovereignty in Jerusalem; and no real diplomatic process until Hamas is neutered, Gaza is demilitarized, and peace education replaces anti-Semitic incitement in the PA. Dayenu, they proclaimed!

And faced with a determined Israeli consensus, the PA sued for peace on reasonable terms, and quiet reigned in the Land of Israel.

Contact Hadar Tezza at nutella59@UCLA.edu


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THE STATE OF THE WORLD SUMMARISED IN A SINGLE PHOTO

Posted by Fred Reifenberg, March 31, 2013

world

Contact Fred Reifenberg by email at freify@netvision.net.il


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DOES THE P.A. KEEP ISRAEL SAFE FROM TERRORISM OR NOT?

Posted by Richard H. Shulman, March 31, 2013

Thomas Friedman is one of the latest to assert that P.A. cooperation with Israeli security services ensured that terrorists killed no Israelis in Judea-Samaria in 2012.

Actually, the P.A. does not cooperate with Israel against terrorist organizations. It helps only with ordinary crime, such as car theft. The P.A. considers ordinary law enforcement but not anti-terrorism legitimate, according to Gen. Yaakov Amidror, Security Advisor to PM Netanyahu. U.S. commentators and officials do not grasp this distinction [or they don't want to acknowledge it].

The P.A. does not define any organization as terrorist. It has no law against money laundering for terrorists. When the P.A. fights against Hamas members, it is not because of ideology or opposition to terrorism [but to protect its reign from rivals]. Actually, the P.A. tries to cooperate with Hamas on "security."

Terrorists from Judea-Samaria have attacked Israel, but less often than before and mostly unsuccessfully. Why unsuccessfully? The IDF patrols and monitors more widely in Judea-Samaria. Israeli troops, for example, are stationed in Beit Jallah, a suburb of Jerusalem. Hence the PLO no longer uses that suburb as a firing platform into Jerusalem.

Now suppose that, under the influence of Mr. Friedman's [and Pres. Obama's] false notions about P.A. head Abbas being a peace partner, Judea-Samaria is given independence. The IDF would have to withdraw from the new sovereign Muslim state. Nobody would be fighting terrorists on their own ground and before they can launch attacks.

What about the U.S.-trained P.A. forces? The U.S. had trained P.A. forces before, the ones that succumbed to a tenth their number of Hamas forces in Gaza. Again the U.S. has trained P.A. forces. We cannot depend on them to fight hard against Hamas. The main reason is cultural. Arabs don't have some abstract loyalty to a state or to the P.A.. They are loyal to their clans. Clan members join both Hamas and P.A. forces. Members of P.A. forces will not want to shoot fellow clan members in Hamas.

As the P.A. runs out of money, P.A. security forces seek other jobs. Commanders have been corrupted by criminal gangs. In P.A. cities, they engage in extortion and smuggling. [So much for the P.A. effort against ordinary crime.]

As Abbas strives for statehood, he reduced security cooperation with Israel sharply late in 2012. His officers helped or joined Hamas in attacking Israelis or in preventing Israeli capture of suspected terrorists. Arabs involved in such attacks are let into the P.A. forces and for U.S. training. [So much for vaunted U.S. vetting of recruits.]

Abbas uses his security forces to bar Jews from religious sites [that Oslo authorizes their right to visit], arrest Arabs who sell land to Jews, and arrest rivals or those who accuse him of corruption. [So much for the notion that P.A. Prime Min. Fayyad has eliminated corruption.]

Thanks to Qatar and Iran, Hamas does not run out of money. Funds give Hamas leverage to increase its influence within P.A. security forces. Some P.A. security men secretly work for Hamas. Some near Hebron give P.A. intelligence to Hamas. That's the real P.A. "security cooperation."

Now that the P.A. allows Hamas to hold huge rallies in Judea-Samaria, Hamas can recruit members there. The rallies end up confronting Israeli troops.

Hamas is setting up military cells in Judea-Samaria. The P.A. shares foreign aid with Hamas. Hamas has gained control of many mosques in Judea-Samaria. P.A. leader Nabil Shaath has urged joint war on Israel. Don't rule that out, inasmuch as the P.A. has turned its forces against the IDF before. Next time, the P.A. forces may be better armed and trained, thanks to a more intense U.S. effort.

What does Pres. Obama do? He gives the P.A. and its forces more revenue (David Bedein, Israel Resource News Agency & Center for Near East Policy Research www.israelbehindthenews.com , 3/31/13) and seeks to increase our taxes.

What a difference between the facts and prevarication by major media and officials! If only knowledgeable people such as David Bedein were in the major media!

We see that the Palestinian Arabs are clan-oriented. Their drive for statehood is for jihad, not nationalism. Nationalism is the reason they give because Westerners fall for it.

Israel's security fence also hinders terrorism.

Israel would be foolish to share military intelligence with the P.A.. PM Rabin once did it, and the PLO used it to liquidate Israel's Arab agents.

Richard Shulman is a veteran defender of Israel on several web-based forums. His comments and analyses are a regular feature on Think-Israel. He provides cool information and right-on-target overviews. He distributes his essays by email. To subscribe, write him at ricshulman@aol.com.


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WHAT EXACTLY IS OBAMA'S TRACK RECORD?

Posted by Israel Commentary, March 31, 2013

The article below was written by John W. Whitehead who is an attorney and author who has written, debated and practiced widely in the area of constitutional law and human rights. Whitehead's concern for the persecuted and oppressed led him, in 1982, to establish The Rutherford Institute, a nonprofit civil liberties and human rights organization whose international headquarters are located in Charlottesville, Virginia. Whitehead serves as the Institute's president and spokesperson, in addition to writing a weekly commentary that is posted on The Rutherford Institute's website (www.rutherford.org), as well being distributed to several hundred newspapers, and hosting a national public service radio campaign. Whitehead's aggressive, pioneering approach to civil liberties issues has earned him numerous accolades, including the Hungarian Medal of Freedom. Whitehead has been the subject of numerous newspaper, magazine and television profiles, ranging from Gentleman's Quarterly to CBS' 60 Minutes. Articles by Whitehead have been printed in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post and USA Today, among others. - See more at: https://www.rutherford.org/about/about_john_whitehead#sthash.fC8Fuas6.dpuf .This article appeared March, 2013 in the Whistleblowers Magazine and is archived at
http://israel-commentary.org/?p=6260

Four years after Barack Obama was elected on a platform of "change you can believe in," he's now promising America that the "best is yet to come." However, on almost every front — fiscally, militarily, politically, socially — the country is in a state of disarray.

Most troubling, however, is the state of our freedoms. Indeed, during Obama's first term, our civil liberties were utterly and completely disemboweled. The great irony, of course, is that this happened with a self-proclaimed constitutional law professor at the helm — a man who was supposed to understand and respect the rule of law as laid out in the U.S. Constitution.

Not only did Obama continue many of the most outrageous abuses of the George W. Bush administration (which were bad enough), including indefinite detention and warrantless surveillance of American citizens, but he also succeeded in expanding the power of the "imperial president," including the ability to assassinate American citizens abroad and unilaterally authorize drone strikes resulting in the deaths of countless innocent civilians, including women and children.

Obama has a lot to account for over the course of his first four years in office, particularly in terms of the erosion of our civil liberties. Just consider some of the assaults on our freedoms that took place under Obama's watch, either as a result of his continuing Bush's policies, enacting his own misguided policies or simply because he did nothing to counter them.

In March 2009, only two months after being elected, Obama defended Bush's unconstitutional National Security Agency spying program in court. Obama went so far as to insist that actions authorized by the president, including illegally spying on American citizens, should be free from any judicial scrutiny whatsoever.

In April 2009, the Department of Homeland Security launched a program, Operation Vigilant Eagle, which calls for surveillance of military veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, characterizing them as extremists and potential domestic terrorist threats because they may be "disgruntled, disillusioned or suffering from the psychological effects of war." Coupled with the DHS' report on "Rightwing Extremism," which broadly defines right-wing extremists as individuals and groups "that are mainly anti-government, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely," these tactics bode ill for anyone seen as opposing the government — whether it be an Occupier, Tea Party supporter or a free speech protester.

In July 2009, Obama threatened to veto an oversight bill that would have required the president to inform lawmakers about covert CIA activities.

In December 2009, Obama, recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, announced his intention to ramp up the military industrial complex's war in Afghanistan and subsequently followed through on his plan.

In February 2010, the Department of Defense issued a U.S. Army field manual detailing the prospective internment and resettlement of American citizens in the event of another terrorist attack or natural disaster on U.S. soil. The leaked document confirmed the fears of many government critics, "from the Patriot movement on the right to Occupy on the left to Anonymous, anarchists, organized racists, survivalists, and plain old conspiracy theorists in between."

In March 2010, the Department of Homeland Security began rolling out controversial full-body scanners to American airports. Despite an initial outcry about the invasive nature of the scanners and the enhanced pat-downs of American citizens, government officials continued to tout the machines as safe and effective. A year later, an investigative report by ProPublica/PBS NewsHour, revealed that six to 100 U.S. airline passengers each year could get cancer from the machines, which were purchased with Obama's stimulus funds.

In July 2010, the Obama administration arrested 23-year-old Army soldier Bradley Manning on charges that he leaked classified military and diplomatic documents to the anti-secrecy website, Wikileaks. Held in maximum solitary confinement for close to a year, treatment normally reserved for the most violent or dangerous of criminals, Manning has yet to be put on trial. His treatment was intended to send a clear warning to all those who would challenge the military empire: "Don't even consider it."

In May 2011, Obama expanded the war effort, with bombings in Libya, Somalia, and Yemen. Later that month, Obama signed a four-year extension of three controversial provisions in the USA PATRIOT Act that authorize the government to use aggressive surveillance tactics — even against American citizens — in the so-called war against terror. That same month, the U.S. Supreme Court in an 8-1 ruling in Kentucky v. King effectively decimated the Fourth Amendment by giving SWAT teams more leeway to break into homes or apartments in search of illegal drugs when they suspect the evidence might be destroyed. The Court, at the urging of the Obama administration, sanctioned warrantless raids, saying that police had acted lawfully and that was all that mattered.

In June 2011, a Department of Education "SWAT team" forced their way into the home of a California man, handcuffed him, and placed his three children in a squad car while they conducted a search of his home, allegedly over falsified student loans. Raids of this type are becoming increasingly common — more than 50,000 such raids occur every year in America — with federal agencies such as the State Department, Department of Energy, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and the National Park Service laying claim to their own SWAT teams. Also in June 2011, the FBI granted its 14,000 agents expansive additional powers, allowing them to investigate individuals using highly intrusive monitoring techniques, including infiltrating suspect organizations with confidential informants and photographing and tailing suspect American citizens, without having any factual basis for suspecting them of wrongdoing.

In September 2011, two American citizens were killed during a drone attack in Yemen as part of a government "kill list" operation in which Obama personally directs who should be targeted for death by military drones. Drone strikes, a signature policy of the Obama administration, have tripled since Obama took office.

In December 2011, the Senate passed the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, which mandates that anyone suspected of terrorism against the United States be held in military custody indefinitely. This provision extends to American citizens on American territory. It was quietly signed into law by Obama on New Year's Eve.

In February 2012, Obama signed the FAA Reauthorization Act, which opens up American skies for the domestic use of armed surveillance drones, a $30 billion per year industry. Incredibly, no civil liberties protections for Americans were included in the legislation. By 2020, it is estimated that at least 30,000 drones will be crisscrossing the nation's skies equipped with anti-personnel weapons and surveillance devices.

In March 2012, Congress overwhelmingly passed and Obama signed the anti-protest "Trespass Bill" — legislation that makes it a federal crime to protest or assemble in the vicinity of protected government officials. The bill's language is so overly broad as to put an end to free speech, political protest and the right to peaceably assemble in all areas where government officials happen to be present. That same month, Obama issued an executive order stating that in the case of a war or national emergency, the federal government has the authority to take over almost every aspect of American society.

In April 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court — again at the urging of the Obama administration — declared that any person who is arrested and processed at a jail house, regardless of the severity of his or her offense (i.e., they can be guilty of nothing more than a minor traffic offense), can be subjected to a strip search by police or jail officials without reasonable suspicion that the arrestee is carrying a weapon or contraband.

In July 2012, the Obama administration began allowing the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) to store and "critically assess" information on innocent Americans for up to five years. Data recorded by the NCTC includes "records from law enforcement investigations, health information, employment history, travel and student records," among other things.

In September 2012 and in the months preceding it, in major cities across the country, including Boston, Miami, Little Rock, and Los Angeles, the U.S. military carried out training exercises involving Black Hawk helicopters and uniformed soldiers. The exercises occurred in the middle of the night, with the full cooperation of the local police forces and generally without forewarning the public.

In October 2012, it was revealed that the Obama administration has been "secretly developing a new blueprint for pursuing terrorists, a next-generation targeting list called the 'disposition matrix.'" The matrix goes beyond the president's kill list to detail suspects beyond the reach of American drones. This disposition matrix is also overseen by the NCTC.

So what does the future hold? Unless President Obama changes course — and drastically so — freedom as we have known it will become extinct.

Contact Israel Commentary at israelcommentary@comcast.net


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LEADER OF THE FREE WORD

Posted by StandWithUs News, March 31, 2013

The article below was written by David Suissa who is a branding and new media consultant, the founder of OLAM magazine and a weekly columnist for the Los Angeles Jewish Journal. This article appeared March 22, 2013 in Stand With Us and is archived at
https://www.standwithus.com/news/article.asp?id=2645

convention Caption Text

Words matter, especially when spoken by people of power. I once read a book that dissected the 271 words of President Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. Would that speech have become historic if, instead of phrases like "a new birth of freedom," he had used phrases like "a reaffirmation of our values"?

Would Martin Luther King's famous "I Have a Dream" speech have the same power had he said, "I'm looking forward?"

President Barack Obama is a man who understands the power of words. He introduced himself to Americans with words that electrified a nation. He did the same in Israel.

"Barack Obama came to Jerusalem to win over the Israeli people," Yossi Klein Halevi wrote in The New Republic, "and with a single speech he did. ... It may have been the most passionate Zionist speech ever given by an American president."

Halevi wrote that Obama's embrace had "an explicit message for Israelis: Don't give up on the dream of peace and don't forget that the Palestinians deserve a state just as you do. But as the repeated ovations from the politically and culturally diverse audience revealed, these are messages that Israelis can hear when couched in affection and solidarity. After four years of missed signals, Obama finally realized that Israelis respond far more to love than to pressure."

To express this love, Obama used all kinds of words — he used words in Hebrew, words from Abraham Joshua Heschel, words from the Bible, words from his heart.

As I reflected on the power of his words, it struck me that, as much as bombs and rockets play a part in the Arab-Israeli conflict, words play an equally important part.

Duplicitous words from a man named Yasser Arafat convinced America and Israel to deal with a man known globally as a terrorist.

Sincere words from a man named Anwar Sadat convinced the Jewish nation to give up the Sinai and make peace with their Egyptian enemy.

Hopeful words from President Clinton convinced much of the world that peace between Israel and the Palestinians was possible, and oh, so close.

Israeli Jews have had an ambivalent relationship with words. On one hand, words have expressed their hopes and dreams and captured their highest aspirations. Words that speak of the Jewish yearning to return to Zion — "If you will it, it is no dream"— can produce goosebumps. So can words that inspired the Jews to make a desert bloom while fighting off invading armies.

But words can also deceive. They can inflate expectations. They can lead to disappointment and cynicism.

This ambivalence — this complex and tortured relationship with words — is what greeted President Obama when he came to Israel.

Israelis wanted to dream with him. They wanted to follow his lead that we're not just allowed to dream, we must dream.

But other words kept interfering.

While Obama was speaking of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas as a "true partner" for peace, the words swirling in many Israeli heads were those of Abbas denying any Jewish connection to Jerusalem, or honoring the memories of Palestinian terrorists with the blood of Jewish children on their hands.

While Obama spoke with hope and cautious optimism about the Arab Spring, Israelis could hardly forget the words of hatred that have come their way for decades from the 22 Arab countries that surround them, many of them now in turmoil.

When Obama spoke with empathy about the plight of the Palestinians — "Put yourself in their shoes. Look at the world through their eyes" — the words of a heckler who interrupted the president provided a rude awakening.

"Are you really here to promote the peace process or are you here to give Israel more weapons to kill the Palestinian people with?" Rabiyah Aid, an Arab-Israeli student from Haifa, shouted to the president.

Whose words were more significant? Those of the leader of the free world expressing empathy for the Palestinians, or those of an Arab-Israeli rejecting that empathy?

Obama's reaction to the heckler was telling — he used it to make a point about freedom of expression in democracies.

Yes, in democracies, words are indeed free. But in much of the Middle East, the words that are free are those that express hatred for Jews and for Israel. Words of love for the dreaded Zionist enemy, well, those are very expensive — they can easily land you in jail.

President Obama came to this crazy land armed with a laptop full of beautiful, powerful, evocative words that make people dream. And his words did put up a good fight against the words of cold reality.

But in the end, peace in the Middle East will come only when all the peoples of the region will be free to speak words of love — words that would make Lincoln, King and Obama proud.

Contact StandWithUs News at news@standwithus.com


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PASSOVER GUIDE FOR THE PERPLEXED 2013

Posted by Algemeiner, March 31, 2013

The article below was written by Ambassador Yoram Ettinger who is a consultant on US-Israel relations as well as the Chairman of Special Projects at the Ariel Center for Policy Research. Formerly the Minister for Congressional Affairs to Israel's Embassy in Washington, DC, Ettinger also served as Consul General of Israel to the Southwestern US. He is a former editor of Contemporary Mideast Backgrounder, and is the author of the Jerusalem Cloakroom series of reports. Contact him at yoramtex@netvision.net.il This appeared March 31, 2013 in the Algemeiner and is archived at
http://www.algemeiner.com/2013/03/31/passover-guide-for-the-perplexed-2013/

Caption Text

1. A central Passover lesson: Liberty entails responsibility, communal-awareness, blood, sweat and tears; not complacency, wishful-thinking or egotism. Sustaining liberty obligates free people to assume the cost, risks and sacrifice of self-reliance, including forty years in the desert and the defiance of great powers, lest they forfeit liberty and risk oblivion. The Hebrew word for "responsibility" consists of the word "liberty" reinforced by the first Hebrew letter which is the first letter of the Hebrew words for God, faith, Adam, human-being, father, mother, light, soil, land, love, tree, covenant, soil, credibility, awesome, power, courage, spring, unity, horizon, etc.

2. The Passover-US-Israel connection: Moses, the US Founding Fathers and Israel's Founding Father, Ben Gurion, were challenged by the "loyalists," who were intimidated by the cost of liberty, preferring subjugation to Egypt, the British King and the British Mandate.

3. Passover highlights the fact that the Jewish People were passed-over by history's angel of death, in defiance of conventional wisdom. Non-normative disasters have characterized Jewish history ever since slavery in Egypt and the Exodus: the destruction of the two Temples, exiles, pogroms, expulsions, the Holocaust, anti-Semitism, daily Arab/Muslim terrorism and wars, etc. The 1948 re-establishment of Jewish sovereignty — against global, regional, economic and military odds — constituted a modern day Exodus and Parting of the Sea. Principle-driven tenacious defiance-of-the odds constitutes a prerequisite to Jewish deliverance in 2013, as it was during The Exodus some 3,450 years ago.

4. Passover's centrality in Judaism is highlighted by the first, of the Ten, Commandments: "I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery." The Passover ethos is included in daily Jewish prayers, Sabbath and holiday prayers, the blessing over the wine, the blessing upon circumcision, the prayer fixed in the Mezuzah (doorpost) and in the annual family retelling of the Exodus on the eve of Passover. Passover symbolizes the unity, interdependence and straight line/direction between the People of Israel, the Torah of Israel and the Land of Israel. In Hebrew, Israel means "straight," "overcoming" and the acronym of the names of the Jewish Patriarchs and Matriarchs.

5. David Ben Gurion, the Founding Father of the Jewish State, Passover and the reaffirmation of Jewish deed over the Land of Israel: "More than 300 years ago, a ship by the name of the Mayflower left Plymouth for the New World. It was a great event in American and English history. I wonder how many Englishmen or how many Americans know exactly the date when that ship left Plymouth, how many people were on the ship, and what was the kind of bread the people ate when they left Plymouth.

"Well, more than 3,300 years ago, the Jews left Egypt...and every Jew in the world knows exactly the date we left. It was on the 15th of [the month of] Nisan. The bread they ate was Matzah. Up to date all the Jews throughout the world on the 15th of Nisan eat the same Matzah, in America, in Russia. [They] tell the story of the exile from Egypt, all the sufferings that happened to the Jews since they went into exile. They finish by these two sentences: 'This year we are slaves; next year we will be free. This year we are here; next year we will be in Zion, the land of Israel.' Jews are like that (The Anglo-American Committee, March 11, 1946)."

Rabbi Gamliel, Head of the Sanhedrin, mid-first century: "In each generation, every individual must consider himself as if he/she personally participated in the Exodus from Egypt."

6. President Ezer Weizman, Passover and the avowal of Jewish roots in the Land of Israel, Jewish unity and collective-responsibility: "Only 150 generations passed from the Pillar of Fire of the Exodus from Egypt to the pillars of smoke from the Holocaust. And I, a descendant of Abraham, born in Abraham's country, have witnessed them all. I was a slave in Egypt. I received the Torah at Mount Sinai. Together with Joshua and Elijah, I crossed the Jordan River. I entered Jerusalem with David, was exiled from it with Zedekiah, and did not forget it by the rivers of Babylon. When the Lord returned the captives of Zion, I dreamed among the builders of its ramparts. I fought the Romans and was banished from Spain. I was bound to the stake in Mainz. I studied Torah in Yemen and lost my family in Kishinev. I was incinerated in Treblinka, rebelled in Warsaw and migrated to the Land of Israel, the country whence I had been exiled and where I had been born, from which I come and to which I return.... And, like our forefather King David who purchased the Temple Mount, and our patriarch Abraham who bought the [Hebron] Cave of Machpelah, we bought land, we sowed fields, we planted vineyards, we built houses, and even before we achieved statehood, we were already bearing weapons to protect our lives...(German Bundestag, January 16, 1996)."

7. "Next Year in the rebuilt Jerusalem" concludes the annual reciting of the Haggadah, the Passover saga. It reaffirms the ancient Jewish commitment to build homes all over Jerusalem, the 3,300 year old indivisible capital of the Jewish people.

8. Passover's centrality in the American ethos inspired the Puritans, the Pilgrims, the Founding Fathers and contemporary American morality and state of mind.

The Pilgrims — beginning with William Bradford's "Mayflower" and John Winthrop's "Arabella" — considered Britain "modern day Egypt," the British king was "the modern day Pharaoh," the sail through the Atlantic Ocean was "the modern day parting of the sea" and America was "the modern day Promised Land."

The Founding Fathers were significantly inspired by Moses and the Exodus. In 1775, the president of Harvard University, Samuel Langdon, said that "the Jewish government [that God handed down to Moses] was a perfect republic." Thomas Paine's "Common Sense" (the cement of the 1776 Revolution) referred to King George as "the hardened, sullen tempered Pharaoh of England." The term Federalism is based on "Foedus," the Latin word for "The Covenant." The Founding Fathers studied the political structure of the semi-independent 12 Tribes (colonies), which were governed by tribal presidents (governors) and by Moses (the Executive), Aaron (the Judicial) and the 70 Elders (Legislature). John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin proposed the "Parting of the Seas as the official US seal. George Washington and John Adams, the first and second presidents, were compared to Moses and Joshua. Washington was eulogized as Moses and Virginia was compared to Goshen.

Yale University President, Ezra Stiles stated (May 8, 1783): "Moses, the man of God, assembled three million people — the number of people in America in 1776."

"Let my people go" and "Go down Moses" became the pillar of fire for the Abolitionists. "Proclaim liberty throughout all the Land unto all the Inhabitants thereof" (Leviticus 25:10) is inscribed on the Liberty Bell. The Statue of Liberty highlights a Moses-like tablet. The biography of Harriet Tubman, who dedicated her life to freeing other slaves, is called The Moses of Her People. Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, was motivated by the laws of Moses, which condemn slavery. Martin Luther King was considered the Moses of his age.

Daniel Boone was referred to as "The Moses of the West."

A statue of Moses stares at the Speaker of the House of Representatives, is featured (along with Maimonides) in the US House of Representatives Rayburn Building subway station, towers above the Supreme Court Justices (in addition to seven additional Moses statues in the Supreme Court Building) and is found in the Main Reading Room of the Library of Congress. A Ten Commandments monument sits on the grounds of the Texas and the Oklahoma State Capitols. Cecile DeMille's hit movie, The Ten Commandments, promoted US liberty, morality and freedom of religion and expression, in contrast to Soviet oppression.

Theodore White wrote in The Making of the President: "It is as if Kennedy, a younger Moses, had led an elderly Joshua [LBJ] to the height of Mount Nebo...and there shown him the Promised Land which he himself would never enter, but which Joshua would make his own."

9. Moses, the hero of Passover, has been a role model of effective leadership, highlighting humility, faith, principle and endurance-driven leadership, along with human fallibility. Moses' name is mentioned only once in the Passover Haggadah, as a servant of God, a testimony to Moses' humility. The only compliment showered upon Moses, by the Torah, is "The humblest of all human beings."

10. The Exodus is mentioned 50 times in the Torah, equal to the 50 years of the Jubilee, a pivot of liberty. 50 days following the Exodus, Moses received the Torah (Pentecost Holiday), which includes — according to Jewish tradition — 50 gates of Wisdom. Where does that leave the 50 States?!

11. Passover highlights the centrality of spiritual, social and national Liberty. The difference between the spelling of Ge'oolah ("deliverance" in Hebrew) and Golah (Diaspora in Hebrew) is the first Hebrew letter, Alef. (Please see #1 above).

12. Passover — the role model of liberty — interacts with Shavou'ot/Pentecost — the role model of morality. Liberty and morality are mutually-inclusive. The liberty/morality interdependence distinguishes Western democracies from rogue regimes.

13. The Exodus took place around 1,400 BC, establishing the Jewish People in the forefront in the Clash of Civilizations between democracies and rogue regimes. Passover is celebrated on the 15th day of the Jewish month of Nissan × ×™×¡×Ÿ — the first month of the Biblical Jewish year and the introduction of natural and national spring (Nitzan is the Babylonian word for spring and the Hebrew word for bud). Nissan (Ness — × ×¡ is miracle in Hebrew) is the month of miracles, such as the Exodus, the Parting of the Sea, Jacob wrestling the Angel, Deborah's victory over Sisera, Daniel in the Lion's Den, etc.

14. The 15th day of any Jewish month features a full moon, which stands for optimism — the secret Jewish weapon — in defiance of darkness. It is consistent with the 15 parts of the Hagaddah (the Passover saga); the 15 generations between Abraham's message of monotheism and Solomon's construction of the first Temple; the 15 words of the ancient blessing by the Priests and the 15th day of the Jewish month of Shvat, Arbor Day — the "Exodus" of vegetation. The Hebrew value of 15 corresponds to two Hebrew letters which are the acronym of God™ and ".

15. Passover has four names: The holiday of Pesach ("Passed-over" and "sacrifice" in Hebrew), the holiday of liberty, the holiday of Matzah and the holiday of spring. The number 4 features in the Passover Saga, representing the four women who shaped the life of Moses (Batyah — Pharaoh's daughter, his savior, Yocheved — his mother, Miriam — his sister and Ziporah — Jethro's daughter, his wife); Joseph's four enslavements- twice to the Midianties, once to the Ishmaelites and once in Egypt; the 4 times that the word "cup" was mentioned by Pharaoh's jailed wine-butler when recounting his dream to Joseph; the 4 Sons (human characters) of the Haggadah; the 4 glasses of wine drunk on the eve of Passover; the 4 Questions asked on the eve of Passover and the 4 stages of the divine deliverance from Egyptian bondage. The 4th Hebrew letter (×") is an acronym of God.

16. Passover is celebrated in the spring, the bud of nature. Spring, Aviv in Hebrew consists of two Hebrew words: Father of 12 months/tribes. The word spring is mentioned 3 times in the Torah, all in reference to the Exodus. Passover — which commemorates the creation of the Jewish nation — lasts for 7 days, just like the creation of the universe. Passover is the first of three Jewish pilgrimages, succeeded by Shavou'ot/Pentecost, which commemorates the receipt of the Ten Commandments, and Sukkot/Tabernacles, named after Sukkota — the first stop in the Exodus.

"Next Year in the rebuilt Jerusalem."

Happy Passover.

Contact Algemeiner at editor@algemeiner.com


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NY TIMES IS STILL PEDDLING FILTH

Posted by Roberta E. Dzubow, March 31, 2013

Below is a letter that no one will SEE in the New York Times. Please read it and send it far and wide. The New York Times has gone over to "the dark side" peddling lies of Arab victimhood at the hands of Israel. That is their consistent stance. It is not just shoddy, inaccurate reporting, as knowledgeable people know. The New York Times is a direct and purposeful Islamic propaganda tool — censoring the Israeli side of the story.

Advertisers should withdraw, letters of complaint should be sent to them directly — it does no good to write to the New York Times itself. Subscriptions should be canceled — please alert anyone you know about this "censorship by omission" practiced by this hate-filled front group for the Muslim world.

p.s. When you read this line below : 30-Mar-13: "To see the New York Times gloss over this travesty of justice is journalism of the most amoral sort" do remember that deliberate deception is not ever "amoral."

The editors of the New York Times Magazine chose two weeks ago to publish a partisan, tendentious and extraordinarily selective piece of advocacy journalism about the village of Nabi Saleh. Located a few kilometers north of our home in Jerusalem, it's a place that holds significance for us since almost all its residents share the same surname: Tamimi.

One of those Tamimis is the person who engineered the massacre of women and children in which our much-loved child Malki was murdered at the age of fifteen in August 2001 at Jerusalem's Sbarro restaurant.

We published a response to that article ["17-Mar-13: A little village in the hills, and the monsters it spawns"]. It evoked a response beyond anything else we have written before: many thousands of views here on our blog; thousands more on several other magazines and blogs that cross-posted it on their sites.

The editors of the New York Times did not respond to it. Nor did they react to a letter that Frimet submitted to them ten days ago. Tomorrow's New York Times Magazine is now online, and with it the letters (3 of them) that the editors have chosen to publish. We assume they received many more. We're confident none would have spoken in the voice of a mother whose child was brutally killed by a woman from the village whose promoters revel in the use of the bogus descriptor "non-violent". It's the alleged non-violence of the village and its people that underpins the article's premise.

Here below is the letter Frimet submitted - and that was rejected at the New York Times. Please consider passing it along to your friends, particularly those friends who read the Times and fall victim to its highly selective presentation - over many years - of the realities of the conflict between the Arabs and Israel.

Jerusalem

March 20, 2013

The Editors,

NY Times

Ben Ehrenreich's article ["Is This Where the Third Intifada Will Start?"] is a brazen quest for confirmation of his preconceptions about the Palestinian Israeli conflict: politics blended with fantasy and embellished with every tear-jerking cliche in the book. Smiling, frolicking children; poetic "activists"; generous hostesses plying their delicacies at every turn. It is a bucolic scene that is frequently painted in anti-Israel publications. But how does the NY Times publish a piece that plays so fast and loose with fact and history?

Sadly, I am well-equipped to offer some corrections and details omitted by Ehrenreich.

Ahlam Tamimi, the villager whom Ehrenreich described as a woman who "escorted a suicide bomber", is in fact the self-confessed engineer and planner of a bloody terrorist attack. By her own account and after several scouting forays, Tamimi selected a target: the Sbarro restaurant in the heart of Jerusalem, on a hot August afternoon in 2001.

Tamimi has said she chose it because she knew it would be teeming at the appointed hour with women and children. She transported the bomb, enhanced with nails and bolts to maximize the carnage, from Ramallah across the Qalandia security checkpoint and into Israel's capital. Israeli soldiers still waived females through without inspection in those days.

Tamimi and her weapon, the bomber, both dressed in Western garb and chatting in English to appear as tourists, strolled through the city center. At the entrance to Sbarro, she briefed him on where and when to detonate, instructing that he wait 15 minutes to allow her a safe getaway. Fifteen men, women and children were murdered that afternoon. My teenage daughter Malki was among them. Ehrenreich, who writes warmly about Nabi Saleh's children, displays a cold detachment when relating to the bombing's victims, the youngest of whom was two years old: "Fifteen people were killed, eight of them minors."

Tamimi, on the other hand, has focused hard on the children. Filmed in an Israeli prison, she smiled broadly when an interviewer informed her that 8 children were murdered, and not merely the 3 she had known about. Since her release in the 2011 Gilad Shalit deal, Tamimi has repeatedly and publicly boasted of her deed, adding: "I have no regrets. I would do it again."

Tamimi has always lived in Amman, other than two years in Nabi Saleh while attending university. Israel 'exiled' (to adopt Ehrenreich's term) her to Jordan where her father and brothers reside. Since her release she married another Tamimi, also a convicted murderer freed in the Shalit deal. He too is a home-town hero in Nabi Saleh. The host of her own weekly show on Hamas TV, she travels freely throughout the Arab world to address her many fans, accepting accolades and trophies while urging others to follow in her footsteps.

For a mother to bury her loving, gentle child is torture. To watch the murderer walk triumphantly free and enjoy life rubs salt into that wound every day. But to see the NY Times gloss over this travesty of justice with a cover story that showcases this woman's many admirers in Nabi Saleh — that is journalism of the most amoral sort. You ought to be ashamed of it.

Frimet Roth - Jerusalem

Contact E. Dzubow at roberta@adgforum.com


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GREEKS FIND CAUSE OF ALL THEIR WOES: THE JEWS

Posted by YogiRUs, March 31, 2013

The article below was written by Abraham Cooper and Harold Brackman. Rabbi Abraham Cooper is associate dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Center Dr. Harold Brackman is a historian who serves as a consultant to Simon Wiesenthal Center. This article appeared March 29, 2013 in the Times of Israel and is archived at
http://www.timesofisrael.com/greeks-find-cause-of-all-their-woes-the-jews/

Caption Text insignia /center>

In 2011, the Holocaust Memorial of Thessaloniki — where 46,000 Jews were rounded up and deported by the Nazis in 1943 — was desecrated. Tragically, seven decades later, too many young Greeks have unlearned the lesson not to demonize Jews.

At the start of Greece's economic meltdown around 2009, Greek Jews already thought their country was in a bad way politically when the extreme right-wing Popular Orthodox Party (LAOS) came out of virtually nowhere to win seven percent of the national vote. Back in 2001, LAOS leader and MP Georgios Karatzaferis had raised the question of Jewish complicity in the 9/11 attacks in Parliament, stating that "the Jews have no right to provoke, because they have filled the world with crimes."

But worse was to come. LAOS has now been overshadowed by Chrisi Avgi or "Golden Dawn," a party that that bolsters its grassroots support by demonizing Jewish ghosts: Its high-flying leader Nikolaos Michaloliakos declares: "There were no ovens. This is a lie. I believe that it is a lie....There were no gas chambers either."

Winning 5.3 percent of Athens' municipal vote in 2010 (and as much as 20 percent in some neighborhoods with large immigrant communities), the Golden Dawn Party exploited economic chaos to make a national electoral breakthrough in 2012. It gained 21 parliamentary seats in the May elections and ended with 18 after a follow up vote one month later.

Golden Dawn's flag closely resembles the Nazi swastika. It campaigned heavily on an anti-immigrant platform under the slogan: "So we can rid this land of filth." Golden Dawn's leaders proudly unleashed the Nazi salute and its charter limits membership to "only Aryans in blood and Greeks in descent." With the impunity granted by his parliamentary immunity, Golden Dawn MP Ilias Kasidiaris approvingly read excerpts from that notorious forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, into the parliamentary record.

The Greek Socialist Party (PASOK) — no longer as hostile to Israel as it was during the heyday of Premier Andreas Papandreou — has joined the new "unity" government. Into the vacuum on the opposition left has stepped the Coalition of the Radical Left (SYRIZA), now Greece's largest opposition party with around 25 percent support. The problem with the main opposition? The vehemently anti-Zionist SYRIZA promises to drastically downgrade relations with "aggressive" Israel.

The Greek political center is, if anything, more troubling. The center-right New Democracy Party has been a favorite of Greek Jews since the early 1990s when its Prime Minister Mitsotakis upgraded diplomatic relations with Israel and also practiced domestic fiscal sanity. But now, the New Democracy has admitted to its ranks some former MPs belonging to LAOS including Thanos Plevris, son and ally of Greek's leading anti-Semitic lawyer-politician, Konstantinos (Kostas) Plevris, a self-declared "Nazi, fascist, racist, anti-democrat, anti-Semite."

As the German people learned between the world wars: after the center collapses — what remains standing against the extremes?

In September of that fateful year 1943, the leader of the Greek Jewish community, Asher Moissis, who prided himself on his dual Hebraic-Helenic heritage, secretly paid his last visit to Archbishop Damaskinos. It was clear that the Germans would soon extend the deportations from Salonika to Athens. Moissis asked the religious leader to intervene. The elderly but unwavering Archbishop agreed to try to intercede with the Germans to delay Athens Jewry's death warrant. Knowing, however, about the massive deportations that had already occurred in the North, he urged the entire Jewish community to flee and instructed Greek Orthodox priests to speak out against the deportations of the Jews.

Both Moisses and Archbishop Damaskinos have long gone to their reward. But what must they have thought looking down from Hebraic-Hellenic heaven in 2010 when Greek Orthodox Bishop Metropolitan Seraphim of Piraeus said on Greek television that Jews "control the international banking system," and that "Adolf Hitler was an instrument of world Zionism and was financed from the renowned Rothschild family with the sole purpose of convincing the Jews to leave the shores of Europe and go to Israel to establish the new Empire." In response to criticism, he issued a statement denying that he was anti-Semitic but also equating Zionism to "Satanism."

Of course, the Archbishop was rebuked by leaders of the Greek Orthodox Church.

No one will argue against the importance of helping the Greek people get through the crippling economic mess. But it is also time for the world community to hold to the fire the feet of Greece's leaders in both priestly and parliamentary offices.

Contact YogiRUs@aol.com


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ISLAMISTS IN SYRIA AND IN THE U.S. DEMOCRATIC PARTY

Posted by Richard H. Shulman, March 31, 2013

Syria

The opposition coalition seeking to rule Syria has elected a Syrian-born U.S. citizen, Ghassan Hitto, as interim prime minister. Mr. Hitto has worked on or for several U.S. Islamist organizations, such as Council of American-Islamic Relations, Islamic Society of N. America, and North American Islamic Trust, all unindicted co-conspirators involved in the Hamas-funding Holy Land Foundation (HLF). He also was involved with the Muslim Brotherhood's Muslim American Society. Other American Islamists are influential in the Syrian opposition

hitto syrianCaption Text Left: Ghassan Hitto also was a founder of the Muslim Legal Fund of America, which has supported the HLF defendants and other jihadist luminaries. Right: In a demonstration of cultural fortitude, English families object to a fully halal menu at Larkswood Primary School [in Britain].

National Democratic Party

Nancy Pelosi led a May 2012 fundraiser for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. There was announced the formation of the National Muslim Democratic Council. A U.S. Islamist organization, CAIR, asserts that 85% of U.S. Muslims voted for Obama. The fundraiser included CAIR executive director Nihad Awad and colleagues.

New York Democratic Party

linda sarsourCaption Text Left: Known for pushing conspiracy theories, spouting anti-Israel rhetoric, and being "too busy to get her facts straight," Linda Sarsour was honored by the White House as a "champion of change" in 2011. Right: Muslim taxi drivers snarl traffic around Manhattan's Madina Masjid.

The Muslim Democratic Club of New York opened last March. On hand were two mayoral candidates and City Council candidate Zead Ramadan, a member of CAIR. Active in it is Linda Sarsour, photo above. She wants the new club to oppose "NYPD surveillance of the Muslim community." She is involved in a report critical of police counter-terrorism. It urges mosques to declare informants unwelcome (David J. Rusin, 3/31/13 http://www.islamist-watch.org/blog/2013/03/iw-news-brief-syrian-rebel-pm-is-ex-cair-official).

It is frightening that Democratic officials, especially Pres. Obama, cannot distinguish Islamists from moderate Muslims. He keeps appointing or honoring Radical Muslims. In his first term he emphasized that he understands Islam. He doesn't seem to. But what if he really does?

The U.S. government, egged on by the Wall St. Journal, is aiding the Syrian opposition coalition. That will help Islamists.

The NYC Police Dept. is not perfect. But it has protected us remarkably from terrorist plots. Unfortunately, Radical Muslim organizations have had some success with naïve Americans in getting the consider resistance to jihadist disinformation campaigns and even terrorist activities as prejudiced. Our politicians are not clever enough to ask publicly when has CAIR and its allies opposed jihad. All CAIR does is defend its supporters and malign its opponents.

Richard Shulman is a veteran defender of Israel on several web-based forums. His comments and analyses are a regular feature on Think-Israel. He provides cool information and right-on-target overviews. He distributes his essays by email. To subscribe, write him at ricshulman@aol.com.


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HOW WRONG YOU ARE... PLEASE WRITE A RETRACTION ABOUT POLLARD'S PLIGHT

Posted by Roberta Dzubow, March 31, 2013

Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal wrote an error filled column about Jonathan Pollard. Many of us, Pollard supporters, were aghast at such poor scholarship and understanding of Pollard's Kangaroo Court and Arab-friendly media manipulation. This is one comment from a prominent Philadelphia Attorney ...

I am a fan of Bret Stephens, but I almost threw up when I read his outrageously stupid analysis of the Pollard case. The Pollard trial was a shameful excursion of the American justice system into Nazi justice. To hear an intelligent commentator like Stephens endorse Nazi justice in the US was nauseating. Alan

... I wrote my own letter — it is below..... I am sending it to you in case some of the facts of the case are not known to you...........

Thirty years ago you were not the critical thinker that you are today. Growing up you heard Jonathan Pollard denounced as " Public Enemy # 1" —it ran over and over without stop. It was a sophisticated public relations campaign to embarrass Israel and Jews. It worked. Jews were intimidated and Jewish "Defense Organizations" hid in shame. They feared "dual loyalty" accusations. They still hide in shame allowing the lies to go on.

Over all 30 years (from day of arrest November 21, 1985) the " smear -Pollard/ smear -Israel " story is played and replayed. It has been repeated to insure that Pollard never gets out and never gets to tell what he knows. That is why he was kept in solitary from the day of his arrest, for his first seven years. The Pollard story (and a lot of it IS a story) is a tragedy for him and for our country. It is a deliberate manipulation to convince all that Pollard— and Israel by extension — are unfaithful dangerous entities.

You, personally, bought half the planted story. Israel being a threat to the US did not compute with you, but you were convinced Pollard was a traitor. That part of the story is not true, either.

You repeated so many of the lies the public was fed:

It does not help Israel to make a hero of a compulsive liar and braggart, NO, neither liar nor braggart)- US Patriot (Yes!) and Zionist (Yes!!)....HERO" You Bet) (Gas masks manufactured for every citizen - Arab as well as Jew - from knowledge of Iraq gas build-up. Gas cribs devised for babies, small children, pets, etc.— "Safe, Sealed Rooms Prepared" thanks to Pollard — gas masks called "Pollies." When Saddam bombed Israel the streets were totally quiet, all in homes/shelters and prepared.

fond of cocaine (NO) ,

who violated his oaths (Technically yes/ but NO) Oath to protect US safety and security upheld. —Giving info not in his job description to give — yes — never gave sources/methods —sentencing guidelines call for a maximum sentence of ten years (Disproportionate sentence to Plea Agreement - One count — Info to friendly nation in Peacetime (Not enemy nation — not traitorous acts as John Walker, Michael Walker, Jerry Whitworth, Robert Hanssen, Aldrich Ames etc.).

, spied on his country, (NOT AGAINST) Yes, he took info: poison gas build up in Iraq, USSR weapons to Syria, known planned attacks on Israelis, tried to get superiors to warn Israel as US publicly announced policies promised — US officials/ Weinberger/Bobby Ray Inman/ Navy officials - privately withheld : "Jews are smart: they'll figure it out."

inflicted damage that took billions of dollars to repair, (NO) Totally exaggerated lies.

accepted payment for his spying (NO) NEVER FINED by Judge Robinson as NO PROFIT - (money to bribe Saudi Arabian Embassy aide - Weinberger visited S.A. Embassy every Friday and gave secret Israeli classified information to Saudis - SecDef Weinberger , chief denouncer, was a US Traitor..... (can't let Pollard tell this to the world)

, jeopardized Israel's relationship with its closest ally, (NO) Used as excuse to pull security clearances/promotions from Jews in government- another "win" for Arab PR

failed to show remorse at the time of his sentencing (NO) Absolutely NOT and over and over since, has apologized and expressed remorse — more lies!

, made himself into Exhibit A of every anti-Semitic conspiracy nut, (NO) He did not do this — but the anti-Jewish/anti-Israel Weinberger campaign added fuel to this fake fire

and then had the chutzpah to call himself a martyr to the Jewish people. (NO) NEVER!!!!!!! Over the years, when it looked as if Israel would "give' something to gain his freedom — he said 'ABSOLUTELY NOT' He REFUSED Israel to harm itself — to help him. Just amazing self sacrifice (at least two times that I know of)....

Bret, I hope that you will write another column to set the record straight. Do not allow yourself to be used. The Pollard story is a very frightening one. IT IS THE STORY OF HOW ISRAEL IS PORTRAYED TODAY. The Arab campaign to destroy Israel is, as CAMERA says. "War by Other Means." The lies, omissions, half-truths, exaggerations, planted "facts" and etc., Pollard is one of the "assets" to the Islamic push.

Jonathan Pollard's punishment is the result of evil manipulation of US Courts and Law, public information, and good people like Bret Stephens. Please do your part to help set Jonathan Pollard free.

Contact Roberta Dzubow by email at Roberta@adgforum.com


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