By: Seth J. Frantzman, DEFENSE NEWS   February 18

Israeli soldiers from the Golani Brigade take part in a military training exercise near the border with Syria on Jan. 19, 2015. (Jack Guez/AFP via Getty Images)

JERUSALEM — Israel has announced a new multiyear plan to restructure its armed forces to face existing and potential future adversaries for decades.

The plan, called “Tnufa” in Hebrew and “Momentum” in English, has been a priority for Lt.-Gen. Aviv Kochavi, the Israel Defense Forces’ chief of the General Staff, over the last year. The plan envisions fighting a multi-front war and harnessing the latest technologies to bring the most effective firepower from the largest number of different units to the forefront of the battlefield.

Momentum also seeks to shorten the time of a conflict while achieving more success on the battlefield and lessening the impact of war on civilians. Forces will be streamlined with the goal of a “swift and massive use of force against enemy systems,” the IDF said during a briefing about the plan.

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‘We’ll have 61 seats without Netanyahu, Dery or Litzman,’ kingmaker in previous elections says of chance to build a coalition after the March 2 vote

HAARETZ

Lieberman speaks at the Maariv Business Conference 2030, Herzliya, February 26, 2020.Tomer Appelbaum

Yisrael Beiteinu Chairman Avigdor Lieberman, who emerged as kingmaker in Israel’s two previous elections this year, said on Wednesday that he is ruling out the possibility of forming a unity government with Benny Gantz’s Kahol Lavan and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud after the March 2 ballot.

Speaking at the Ma’ariv Business Conference 2030 in Herzliya, Lieberman said: “Gantz and Netanyahu together reached 65 seats [in the last election], and I told them to form a government, but they preferred to argue over who would be first and who would be second,” Lieberman said.

“There is no more unity government. It’s clear that nothing can be built with those two, so we’re preparing ourselves,” the former defense chief added. “We’re ready for the day after the election. We will have 61 Knesset seats without Netanyahu, Dery and Litzman,” referring to the heads of the two ultra-Orthodox parties, Shas and United Torah Judaism.

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BY ANDREW HARROD

“Islam is dead,” the “mosques are empty,” and “no one follows Islam inside of Iran,” an unidentified Iranian church leader stated in the 2019 film Sheep Among Wolves Volume II. The film marks a widely observed trend in recent decades of Iranians abandoning the cruel theocratic faith of Iran’s 1979-established Islamic Republic for Christianity.

“God is moving powerfully inside of Iran,” the church leader stated as the documentary examined how “Muslim-background Iranians are leading a quiet but mass exodus out of Islam.” Christian evangelists, who reach Iranians via means such as television broadcasting, have for several years reported on Iranians leaving Islam for Christianity. Other media reports have noted that Iranians “are leaving the mosques in droves” as atheists.
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By Victor Rosenthal

As Purim approaches, Bernie Sanders, the Jewish front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, said:

[Moving the US Embassy back to Tel Aviv is] something we would take into consideration …

I am very proud of being Jewish. I actually lived in Israel for some months, but what I happen to believe is that right now, sadly, tragically, in Israel, through Bibi Netanyahu, you have a reactionary racist who is now running that country …

Our foreign policy in the Mideast should be about absolutely protecting the independence and security of Israel, but you cannot ignore the suffering of the Palestinian people.

If there was any doubt before, we know now where Bernie stands. Jerusalem is always a litmus test. The American Congress demanded that the US government recognize reality about Jerusalem all the way back in 1995. That was a quarter of a century ago. Until Trump cut the Gordian Knot, three presidents withheld that recognition. The waivers supposedly related to “national security,” but everyone knew that it was a nod to the Arabs and others who opposed any Jewish sovereignty, not just our control of Jerusalem. Proof of that was the ridiculous opinion of the State Department that Israel was not sovereign in any part of Jerusalem, even the Western part that it has held since 1948 and in which its Knesset is located. And the fact is that there have been no adverse consequences for “national security.”
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T. Belman. Ganz differs from Bibi in that he wants to show zero tolerance to balloons and rockets and no cash for quiet. Right. As for the Trump plan, he differs from the Right in that he accepts a Palestinian state which Yamina rejects totally, but accepts sovereignty over settlements and the Jordan Valley. He left out working with the international community but he included working with Abbas should aAbbas come to the table.

By Christina Wong, BREITBART

Mark Wilson/Getty Images

President Trump’s firing of John Rood, the top policy official at the Pentagon, is a sign the agency is not immune from an effort to purge from influential positions across the administration “snakes” who do not support the president, according to four current and former officials.
Rood had been on the chopping block for months, but his firing just last week amid a spate of other personnel changes shows that the president is finally ready to clean house at a department that has tried to distance itself from politics, they said.

“All of them are getting tossed,” a senior administration official told Breitbart News. “You’re either on the team or you’re out, everywhere.”

Political appointees like Rood serve the administration and at the president’s prerogative. However, it was well-known at the Pentagon and beyond that Rood was not a supporter of the president.
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With the electoral crisis growing and no real winner showing in the polls leading to next week’s vote, all signs point to a real possibility that Israel will need yet one more national election to nail down a government.

By Prof. Dov Fischer, ISRAEL HAYOM

With Israel’s third national election in a year, it may be dispiriting to consider that it actually will take yet a fourth election to finally nail down a national government. However, if it does come to that – and it very well may – the good news is that the fourth try should be the charm.

Months of Israeli electoral surveys by the country’s wide range of pollsters all point to one constant: no one is blinking and no one is backing down, from electoral stalemate to electoral stalemate. Thus, Blue and White endlessly jostles back and forth with Likud for bragging rights as the larger party, with each scoring 32-36 seats.

Avigdor Lieberman repeatedly scores 6-9 seats for his Yisrael Beytenu party that appeals primarily to older immigrants from the former Soviet Union, who are right wing politically and secular theologically. And the Joint Arab List now scores 12-14 seats. Read more…

The one-sided pro-“Palestine” madness on American campuses is a virus which shows no sign of quitting anytime soon. But now we have some professors who are fighting back publicly. Newman, in her late seventies, and a survivor, has filed a lawsuit.

By Prof. Phyllis Chesler, INN

Newman is a long-time professor of French and Cultural Studies and Chair of the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, who has just sued Point Park University claiming “employment discrimination based on her Jewish and Israeli ancestry and alleging that there has been a concerted effort led by anti-Zionist faculty and students to create a hostile work environment.”

She is also a savvy Holocaust survivor who has certainly learned her lessons. What’s more, she lives and works in Pittsburgh, where white nationalist, Robert Gregory Bowers, unleashed a Jew-hating massacre at the “Tree of Life” synagogue on a Sabbath in October of 2018.

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Not even the victory of a Socialist backed by a coalition of Israel haters will persuade liberal Jews to abandon their party, let alone vote for a president they hate.

By Jonathan S Tobin, jns

(February 24, 2020 / JNS) This is a scary moment for centrist and pro-Israel Democrats. Sen. Bernie Sanders’s overwhelming victory in the Nevada caucuses, coupled with the disastrous debut of Michael Bloomberg in last week’s Las Vegas debate, has forced the party’s establishment to confront reality.

It’s true that the Democratic race is still in the early stages. But the momentum Sanders has established and the inability of moderate Democrats to settle on a single alternative set up a dynamic that makes the septuagenarian Socialist not merely the current frontrunner, but the most likely

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A major clash between Sanders and AIPAC won’t just hurt the organization’s bipartisan bona fides in the short run. It could also come to define AIPAC for an entire generation of young American voters

By Amir Tibon, HAARETZ

Bernie Sanders speaks during a campaign rally at the University of Houston in Houston, Texas, U.S., February 23, 2020. REUTERS/Mike Segar

WASHINGTON – Bernie Sanders’ announcement that he won’t attend this year’s AIPAC conference in Washington did not come as a surprise to anyone: In his three decades as an elected official in Washington, Sanders had never attended the gathering, and there was no reason to think this year would be his first time, especially in light of his recent statements regarding U.S. military aid to Israel.

But what did surprise the powerful pro-Israel lobby was Sanders’ decision to make a political statement out of not attending its policy conference. This year’s event, which is expected to attract as many as 18,000 people, will take place this weekend – just 48 hours before Super Tuesday, the most important day on the Democratic presidential primary calendar. Currently, it’s not clear if any of the party’s presidential contenders will choose to waste precious campaigning time ahead of that day at a conference in Washington. Read more…

About 2,500 Americans staff base near Riyadh, launching F-15s and manning Patriot missile batteries, despite history of Islamist opposition

By Jared Malsin, WSJ
Feb. 26, 2020 5:30 am ET

PRINCE SULTAN AIR BASE, Saudi Arabia—Nearly 17 years after U.S. troops largely pulled up stakes from the kingdom, the U.S. is now back in force.

A jet of the F-15E Strike Eagle Squadron, which is flying missions against Islamic State over Iraq and Syria. The squadron has moved to the base from the neighboring U.A.E.

Here in a base of tents in the desert about 60 miles southeast of Riyadh, some 2,500 U.S. military personnel are launching F-15 fighter jets in soaring arcs overhead and manning Patriot missile batteries in shifts. Or they play chess and video games to pass the hours, with an NFL-themed video game splashed on a flat-screen TV inside a recreation tent.

The return of the U.S. troops—after maintaining a much smaller footprint for nearly two decades—reflects the alarm of Saudi and American leaders at the current threat posed by another regional power: Iran.

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Apparent gesture to settlers 6 days before elections would connect Ma’ale Adumim to East Jerusalem, bisecting a future Palestinian state

By Jacob Magid, TOI

View of the settlement of Ma’ale Adumin, in the West Bank overlooking the E1 area on January 4, 2017. (Yaniv Nadav/Flash90)

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced on Tuesday that he had ordered the promotion of a plan for some 3,500 homes in a contentious West Bank area that has long been frozen due to objections from governments around the world supportive of a two-state solution.

The project in the so-called E1 area between East Jerusalem and the Ma’ale Adumim city-settlement would bisect the western West Bank, substantially curbing the possibility for development in the center of a future Palestinian state if one were to be created.

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By Prof. Hillel Frisch, BESA February 25, 2020

Helium balloons bearing flammable materials launched from Bureij, Gaza Strip, drifting to Israel, July 2018, photo via Wikipedia

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Hamas is probably getting the lion’s share of the 268 million shekels provided by Qatar to Gaza, according to a senior Hamas official. Israel allows the transfer of this “protection” money—but instead of giving Israel “protection”, the devastating trickle of missiles from the pre-2014 period is back augmented by daily batches of incendiary balloons. Only another massive round of fighting will bring quiet to Israel’s southern front.

As Israelis in the Gaza border communities—caught between missile launches and flights of incendiary balloons—ponder the meaning of the “hasdara”, or arrangement, brokered by Egypt between Israel and Hamas, the Blue and White and Likud parties are busy launching rhetorical salvos at one another. Hamas and its allies, meanwhile, are sure they landed a great deal. Read more…

By Jack Hellner, AMERICAN THINKER

The media is outraged that former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich only had to serve eight years out of a fourteen-year sentence for corruption. They say it sends a bad message that political corruption is OK. But what is outrageous and sends a message that political corruption is OK is when the Justice Department, most of the media, and other Democrats didn’t care about the massive political corruption of Barrack Obama throughout his political life and supported him no matter what he did.

Obama was above the law.

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T. Belman.  Time and again, Netanyahu fails to take action and blames international pressure.  To me he is a status-quo nik. and I don’t like it.

Netanyahu said international pressure prevented announcement until less than 2 weeks before elections, but report says he knew White House had already okayed controversial project

By TOI STAFF Today, 10:02 am

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stands at an overview of the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Har Homa where he announced a new neighborhood is to be built, Feb. 20, 2020. (Debbie Hill/Pool via AP)

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reportedly received the green light from the US to lift restrictions against the construction of a controversial neighborhood in East Jerusalem more than a year and a half ago, but delayed the announcement until last week, less than two weeks before the elections.

The plan for construction in Givat Hamatos was first brought forward in 2012, earning widespread condemnation in the international community over its cutting off of the Palestinian neighborhoods of Beit Safafa and Sharafat from the West Bank, in a manner that critics said placed a nail in the coffin of a two-state solution based roughly on the pre-1967 lines.

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T. Belman.  Suzann Kossian has been informing from day one about the magnitude of this crises.  I advised her  “I have been very cautious is publishing your stuff as I wanted to see it take the test of time.  I am now ready to disclose more.”

Yesterday I sent her this video by Rush Limbaugh “The Truth about Coronavirus.” He said that it is beng blown out of proportion to tank the US economy and thus to hurt Trump’s reelection.

Suzann Kossian. Feb 24/20

Hi Ted, thanks for sharing. Well, what can I say? I love Rush. He has done more to fight the Left and explain Conservatism than probably any one person with the possible exception of Reagan . I think he is very funny and he drives the left nuts. I am deeply saddened he has stage 4 lung cancer. All though cigars.

He may be partially right on this.

Importantly Rush I think is wrong on the %2 death rate not being a big deal. That is a death rate 10 x as high as seasonal flu which so far this winter has killed 12,000 in USA which is pretty normal (1oK – 25K and on a bad year, 65K dead) China and complicit political hacks at WHO report only a few hundred cases a year despite 4 x the number of people and far worse medical care. LOL) The point is Rush is buying China numbers. We don’t know what the real numbers are until we see the transparency of them in Western countries. That is true of the RO (how many new cases result from each infected person.) the Flu is about 1 to 1. This is at least 3 from what I have seen from credible sources and could be as high as 6. Anything over 2 is very difficult to stop. Especially true since the infector may have no symptoms until 14 days, meanwhile infecting others. And eve after symptoms stop, China now quarantining another 14 days as still can be infecting!  So when you have huge numbers getting it, even a 2% death rate mean a very large number of serious cases (as is evidenced by what is happening on the ground in China – I think I sent you today (from my work email Eric@insurepro.info) teh CCP propaganda video of the military nurses in hospital. …if not please let me know.   certainly not the flu: here is case of emergency room nurse infected (and talks of other medical personnel infected too – all young and healthy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMMP84S7lGc In anohter video today of the same couple, she is improving and he says top medical teams are coming to Wuhan now from all over China (so this is hardly over)
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Iran faces anti-terrorism sanctions, voter discontent, and a rising death toll from the Coronavirus outbreak.

By Yochanan Visser, ARUTZ SHEVA

Missiles in Tehran  Reuters

Watching events in Iran over the past few days, one cannot escape the impression that the country is facing a modern-day Purim scenario whereby the country is imploding and is hit by a range of disasters.

It is not Israel that is threatened with annihilation but the regime of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, just as the Jewish people in ancient Persia escaped unhurt while the Persian leader Haman who plotted their annihilation was hanged in the Purim tale in the book of Esther.

While the US Administration of President Donald J. Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is working to strangle the Islamist regime to death by trying to scuttle the so-called Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (the 2015 landmark nuclear deal) altogether by convincing the United Nations that it should invoke snapback sanctions over Iran’s many breaches of the deal a global financial watchdog just returned Iran to its blacklist of countries supporting terror.
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The U.N. anti-Israel blacklist asserts that the most basic essentials—food, water, transportation, communication—raise “particular human rights concerns.” But if every human activity is a “human rights concern,” then nothing is.

By Evelyn Gordon

If you want to understand just how outrageous the U.N. blacklist of businesses operating in Israeli “settlements” really is, forget for a moment about its anti-Israel bias and its warping of international law, important though these issues are. Instead, simply evaluate it on its own terms, as a compilation of companies engaged in “activities that raised particular human rights concerns.”

So what horrendous activities do these 112 companies engage in? Well, there are several supermarket chains, which sell groceries to both Israelis and Palestinians in the West Bank, Golan Heights and eastern Jerusalem. There are several fuel companies, which operate gas stations where both Israelis and Palestinians fill up their cars.

There are several bus and rail companies, which provide public transportation used by Israelis and Palestinians alike. There are phone companies (cell and landline) that provide general communications services. There are banks, which provide basic banking services. There’s a water company, which provides potable drinking water and sewage solutions.
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Donald v Bernie

By Phillip Baram 1/20/2020

1. I think come November 2020

it’s going to be

a shouting match

no, a bloody duel

between Trump and Sanders

The Donald versus uncle Bernie

Queens versus Brooklyn

show-off goy versus big-mouth jew

big alpha male capitalist

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