They expect American protection but aren’t prepared to defend their own countries.

By Walter Russell Mead, WSJ       Feb. 17, 2020 

NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg takes part in a panel discussion at the Munich Security Conference, February 15.

How solid is the West? At last weekend’s Munich Security Conference, the world’s largest gathering of security policy makers and officials, the theme was “Westlessness,” referring to the sense of disorientation that many Europeans feel in this age of America First.

Since the 1940s, U.S. leadership in the service of a united and secure Europe has been the one unchanging feature in the Continental landscape. For generations, the U.S. committed to protect Europe from Russia, maintain bases in Germany to prevent it from threatening its neighbors, and promote European integration. Now Europeans don’t know where they stand, and a mixture of bafflement, anger, disappointment and fear fills the atmosphere at conferences like the one in Munich. Read more…

By John Eidson, AMERICAN THINKER

Given America’s deplorable history of slavery and segregation, all Americans should be proud that their country had the courage to elect its first black president.  With invaluable assistance from a cheerleading media, a young and charismatic Barack Obama was swept into the most powerful job in the world with the enthusiastic endorsement of a sizable majority of the American electorate.  More than three years after leaving office, he remains one of the most influential political figures in America.

But is that plaudit warranted? These days, a look at his past suggests an exceptionally anti-American orientation, and as Obama’s Democrats now swing even farther left, this history is worth a look.

Presenting himself in 2008 as a political moderate who fully embraced America’s two-party constitutional democracy and its free-market capitalist economy, Obama’s ideological beliefs were never closely examined by the mainstream media.  But as his presidency unfolded, serious questions began to pile up about who he really was, specifically how closely he was aligned with the oppressive theories of Marx and Lenin.  Obama denied being a Bolshevik, but many objective people doubted that assertion based on the long trail of troubling circumstantial evidence.
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Should Likud leader be tasked with building coalition after March election, attorney general won’t oppose it, despite criminal proceedings, TV report says

By TOI STAFF

Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit holds a press conference at the Justice Ministry in Jerusalem, announcing his decision to indict Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust in three corruption cases, November 21, 2019. (Hadas Parush/FLASH90)

Attorney General Avichai Mandelblit is expected to inform the High Court of Justice that he believes Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu can legally form a government despite having been indicted in three criminal cases, and with his trial set to open next month, Channel 12 news reported Tuesday evening.

The network did not cite any sources for its reporting, nor did it provide any further details.

In January, the High Court rejected a petition that urged it to announce that Netanyahu cannot form a government after the March 2 election due to the charges against him. At the time, the court said a decision on the matter was “premature.”
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It appears even the Europeans are fed up with the Palestinian method of “human rights activist by day and terrorist by night” – not to mention the demand to keep funding it.

by Shai Har-Zvi, ISRAEL HAYOM

Throughout the years, the European Union has provided economic support in the tens of millions of shekels to Palestinian civilian organizations based on a standard stipulation applied to NGOs worldwide: To receive financial aid, they must have no affiliations with terrorist elements.

Lately, Palestinians have been outraged over an additional, legitimate stipulation the EU has introduced: The beneficiaries of EU grants must make sure that third-party elements (such as subcontractors, workshop participants and the like) with ties to them, who indirectly benefit from European funds, aren’t on the EU sanctions list. The Palestinians are furious and have outright refused to sign on the clause. They completely reject the European decision that groups such as Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine are terrorist organizations because from their perspective they are legitimate political parties.

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Bennett says Tehran’s efforts to establish a permanent military presence to Israel’s north are ‘weakening,’ Jerusalem will step up its fight against it

By JUDAH ARI GROSS Today, 1:34 pm

Defense Minister Naftali Bennett speaks at the Institute for National Security Studies think tank’s annual conference in Tel Aviv on January 29, 2020. (Ariel Hermoni/Defense Ministry)

Defense Minister Naftali Bennett on Tuesday said Israel was beginning to see signs of Iran reconsidering its efforts to establish a permanent military presence in Syria.

“I can tell you that we are seeing the initial indications of Iran weakening and considering a new tack in Syria,” Bennett said, speaking at the New-Tech 2020 military technology conference in Tel Aviv.

Bennett indicated that this potential change in direction is due to Israel’s efforts to counter Iran’s strategy, though other defense officials and analysts have said it is likely the result of the death of the commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force, Qassem Soleimani, in an American airstrike last month. Soleimani, as the head of the expeditionary Quds Force, was largely responsible for developing and executing Iran’s policies in Syria.
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By Karen D. Hurvitz and Ilya I. Feoktistov, AMERICAN THINKER

Louis Shenker, a 21-year-old junior at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst,  just wanted his MAGA hat back from the graduate student who ripped it off his head on campus. He wore the hat to a December 6, 2018 protest organized by the university’s graduate student union against Trump and local police. Video shows that when Louis, who is 5’6’’ and 140 pounds, arrived wearing the MAGA hat and holding a large sign, he was immediately surrounded by a hostile mob of older grad students cursing at him and calling him a white supremacist. A woman lunged from the mob and snatched Louis’s MAGA hat. Careful not to get caught on camera hitting Louis with their hands, they instead mobbed him like a colony of enraged penguins, using their bodies to push him from all sides, occasionally pecking at his head with their cardboard signs, and chanting in unison: “THE PEOPLE, UNITED, WILL NEVER BE DEFEATED.”
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By Mudar Zahran – June 20/16

Many Western and Israeli journalists paint a rosy picture of a Jordan’s “peaceful regime” and “stable throne.” As you will see in the next few lines, those descriptions are very far from the truth.

Even worse, some journalists, do claim “authority” on Jordan’s politics despite failing to do the proper groundwork and research, assuming that spending a week in a five-star hotel in Jordan entitles them to judge the status quo. Some claim authority about Jordan just because they can read Arabic and then translate Jordan’s official state media stories as “exclusive analysis” of their own.

Such practice of deliberate misinformation should worry every American and Israeli, as it does end up feeding wrongful information to the public opinion and eventually influencing decision makers into taking the wrong actions. Therefore, those either uninformed, ignorant or simply sell-out journalists do threaten American, Israeli and Jordanians’ interests.

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The frightening visions of the new peak progressives will ensure the reelection of Donald Trump, as well as either the likely end of themselves—or else a collective dystopian nightmare.

By Victor Davis Hanson, AMERICAN GREATNESS

In 2020 we have finally hit peak progressivism. The adjective “peak”—apex or summit— is often used to describe something that has reached its maximum extent but thereafter will insidiously decline—like supposed U.S. domestic oil production in 2000 when more oil was purportedly taken out of, rather than still in the ground. While the idea of peak oil in the days before fracking and horizontal drilling proved vastly premature, we likely are witnessing something like “peak progressivism” today.

By that I mean the hard-left takeover of the Democratic Party and the accompanying progressive agenda now have reached an extreme—beyond which will only result in the steady erosion of radical ideology altogether.
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By David Solway, AMERICAN THINKER

To describe Canada as a totalitarian state-in-progress sounds like a gross and indeed absurd exaggeration. Yet many premonitory signs are present. In the words of political philosopher William Gairdner, author of The Book of Absolutes, The Great Divide and The Trouble with Canada, Canada “has just crossed the red line between soft-socialism and soft-totalitarianism.”

Gairdner has assembled a virtual mountain of evidence for his claim: Bill C-25 seeking to impose “diversity” on all corporations; financial penalties against organizations that do not comply with government programs; a teeming brigade of government surveillance “Inspectors,” that is, spies — wage spies, speech spies, feminist spies, pay-equity spies, Human Rights spies; paralegal bodies known as Human Rights Tribunals with the power to levy crippling fines, bankrupt families and shut down businesses, to impose prison time for contempt of court, and to compel conformity via “re-education.”
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The MEMRI Daily: February 17, 2020

• Palestinian-Lebanese Scholar Ali Al-Yousuf: We Will Rip Out The Israelis’ Spleens And Livers; We Refuse To Accept Repatriation In Lebanon

• Iranian Researcher Ali Akbar Raefipour: Iran Will Empty Its Missile Stockpile On Israel’s Head If It Faces Collapse; Environmentalists Arrested In 2018 Were Spies Searching For Our Secret Missile Cities

MEMRI TV Clip No. 7802

Palestinian-Lebanese Scholar Ali Al-Yousuf: We Will Rip Out The Israelis’ Spleens And Livers; We Refuse To Accept Repatriation In Lebanon

Palestinian-Lebanese Islamic scholar Sheikh Ali Al-Yousuf, who is a member of the International Union for the Support of Jerusalem and Palestine, said in a February 6, 2020 interview on Channel 9 (Turkey) that the Palestinians will rip out Israel’s livers and spleens and deliver a “mighty and deadly” blow to its heart in a fashion similar to how Israeli forces shot Muhammad Salman Al-Haddad, a Palestinian 17-year old who was killed by Israeli forces during a February 5 protest in the West Bank. Sheikh Al-Yousuf said that the Palestinians in Lebanon still “erupt like a volcano” and fight on the Palestinian front while simultaneously fighting on the Lebanese front against injustice, tyranny, and oppression and against those who want to “restrain” and “neuter” the Palestinians by getting them to accept repatriation in Lebanon. He added: “We continue saying: No to repatriation, no to deportation, yes to returning to Palestine.”
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Trump attends wedding of immigration hard-liner Stephen Miller and Pence’s press secretary Katie Waldman at one of his hotels

By AGENCIES and TOI STAFF

In this Sept. 20, 2019, file photo, President Donald Trump’s White House Senior Adviser Stephen Miller, left, and Katie Waldman arrive for a state dinner with Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison and Trump at the White House in Washington. Trump went from the Daytona 500 on Sunday, Feb. 16, 2020, to attending the wedding of the two top members of his administration, Miller and Waldman, press secretary for Vice President Mike Pence. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File)

US President Donald Trump went from the Daytona 500 on Sunday to attending the wedding of two top members of his administration, senior adviser Stephen Miller and Katie Waldman, press secretary for Vice President Mike Pence.

Shortly after landing at Andrews Air Force Base after a busy day in Florida, the president made a quick stop at the White House. The presidential motorcade then made a five-block jaunt to the Trump International Hotel where the White House announced after press queries that the president was attending “the wedding of Mr. and Mrs. Stephen Miller.”

Both Miller, 34, and Waldman, 28, are Jewish and descendants of immigrants. Rabbi Aryeh Lightstone, who is a senior adviser to David Friedman, the United States ambassador to Israel, officiated, The New York Times reported.
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The lack of a core curriculum in the haredi sector for boys is one of the biggest restraints on the integration of men from the community into the workforce, and on their earning capacity.

By JPOST EDITORIAL

Schoolchildren stand in the doorway and watch as ultra-Orthodox Jews prepare matza in Bnei Brak near Tel Aviv March 30, 2015.- (photo credit: BAZ RATNER/REUTERS)

Everything is interconnected in Israel. One of the catalysts of the year-long electoral roller coaster has been the continued reluctance of haredim (ultra-Orthodox) to integrate into society, including serving in the IDF and entering the workforce.

The issue is Yisrael Beytenu leader Avigdor Liberman’s redline: He has not wavered on his refusal to sit in a government with the religious parties that avoid military service at the expense of the rest of the country.

Likewise, this is one of the tenets of Blue and White co-founder Yair Lapid. More than anything else, the haredi issue is the one that has kept both sides of the political playing field from gathering enough partners to form a coalition. Read more…

The overwhelming majority of ultra-Orthodox high-school aged pupils do not study core curriculum subjects such as math, English and science.

By Jeremy Sharon, JPOST

A HAREDI child reads from the Bible during a reading class at the Kehilot Ya’acov Torah School for boys in Jerusalem in 2010 -(photo credit: RONEN ZVULUN / REUTERS)

In what could be a major turning point for ultra-Orthodox education, senior United Torah Judaism MK Moshe Gafni said that the senior rabbinic leadership of the haredi community has approved the study of “secular” subjects, such as Math, English and others, in elementary boys’ schools.

Gafni made his comments when asked recently about the frustration among a growing number of ultra-Orthodox parents with the lack of core curriculum subjects offered in haredi schools.

The UTJ MK said he had spoken with the directors of the so-called “Independent Education” system of ultra-Orthodox elementary schools about the possibility of setting up new schools which would include secular studies.
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With Iran closing the military gap with Israel, IDF launches new ‘Iran Command’ and strategic plan to counter Tehran.

By Yochanan Visser, INN

F-35 fighter jets – Stock

Last week, two important events regarding Israel’s struggle against Iran occurred.

The first was the roll-out of the Israel Defense Forces new multi-year strategic plan dubbed ‘Momentum’, and the second was the announcement that the IDF now has a special Iran Command that will focus on detecting and analyzing threats posed by the Islamic Republic.

The plan was drawn up by Aviv Kochavi, the IDF’s Chief of Staff, and approved by Defense Minister Naftali Bennett. It is now awaiting final approval by the Israeli cabinet.

A part of the plan has already been carried out and it will significantly improve the capabilities of the Israel military versus the Iranian axis in the field of lethality, intelligence, cyber-warfare and, aerial superiority. Read more…

T. Belman Obama was corrupt before he got to be president. He was a community organizer who followed Rules for Radicals and supported the Palestinian Authority and the Muslim Brotherhood. Plus he had shady dealing with his slumlord client Tony Rezko.

By J.B. Shurk, AMERICAN THINKER

The national media are flabbergasted that Americans won’t consent to President Trump’s removal from office.  How can so many of his compatriots be indicted and so many government bureaucrats condemn his behavior without giving them what they desire: self-assurance that they are “on the right side of history”?

If they ever wish to understand, the critical starting point in their education is not the current presidency, but the last one.  Although there are numerous ways to describe the present divide in America, one of the simpler is thus: those Americans who take Barack Obama at his word that his presidency was historically “scandal free” and those Americans who see the unrelenting stream of Deep State attempts to take down President Trump as a continuing coup and the natural extension of an unethical, criminal, and at times unconstitutional Obama presidency.
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Bernie Sanders is riding the intellectual currents that the party and its elites have nurtured.

The Editorial Board

Sen. Bernie Sanders takes the stage with his spouse Jane O’Meara Sanders during a primary night event in Manchester, NH, Feb. 11.

Bernie Sanders’s victory in New Hampshire on top of his tie in Iowa makes him a favorite for the Democratic presidential nomination. Hard to believe, but in a winnable race against President Trump the opposition may nominate a socialist who wants the government to control energy production and health care, who wants nationwide rent control, and who calls America a “racist society from top to bottom.” No wonder Democrats like James Carville are in agony.

The Vermont revolutionary’s victory portends a long primary battle, unless Democratic voters elevate a single mainstream candidate who can challenge him. Mr. Sanders will get his 25% to 30% primary after primary, racking up delegates on his way to the convention. If other candidates keep dividing the other votes, he will be hard to stop, as Mr. Trump was for Republicans in 2016. Even if a single alternative emerges, Mr. Sanders won’t go down without a ferocious intra-party fight.
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US President Donald Trump plan creates the danger of a Palestinian state – Minister Bezalel Smotrich wants to forestall this by adopting the sovereignty parts of the plan here and now.

By BEZALEL SMOTRICH, JPOST

Transportation Minister Bezalel Smotrich- (photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM)

US President Donald J. Trump’s diplomatic plan, known as the “Deal of the Century,” has met with mixed and nuanced responses from the right. Transportation Minister Bezalel Smotrich is convinced that it is important to distinguish between the good and bad in the plan. With all the good that the plan offers, he says, it also contains a serious pitfall that must be avoided.

Smotrich prefers to introduce his comments with a premise familiar to us all regarding the persistent Arab refusal to agree to a compromise of any kind, as expressed by the stream of harsh invective Palestinian Authority Chairman Abu Mazen recently hurled at the plan and the American president.
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