By Carlotta Gall, NYT

Turkish soldiers in Idlib Province, Syria, on Monday.Omar Haj Kadour/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

ISTANBUL — Syrian government attacks on Turkish positions in northwest Syria are driving Turkey deeper into the country’s civil war, prompting it to send reinforcements to the region and press for a Turkish-controlled military zone there.

Syrian troops killed eight Turkish soldiers and a civilian contractor last week and five more soldiers on Monday. Backed by Russian bombers, Syrian forces have encircled several Turkish observation posts in the northwestern province of Idlib — posts established by agreements aimed at reducing violence.

Turkey, which supports Syria’s opposition forces, has pushed back, pummeling the advancing Syrian units with artillery and killing dozens of Syrian troops and allied fighters, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a London-based war monitor. A Syrian helicopter was shot down on Tuesday, reportedly by rebel forces.

Read more…

BY Robert Spencer, JIHAD WATCH

The death penalty for apostasy is part of Islamic law. It’s based on the Qur’an: “They wish you would disbelieve as they disbelieved so you would be alike. So do not take from among them allies until they emigrate for the cause of Allah. But if they turn away, then seize them and kill them wherever you find them and take not from among them any ally or helper.” (Qur’an 4:89)

A hadith depicts Muhammad saying: “Whoever changed his Islamic religion, then kill him” (Bukhari 9.84.57). The death penalty for apostasy is part of Islamic law according to all the schools of Islamic jurisprudence.

This is still the position of all the schools of Islamic jurisprudence, both Sunni and Shi’ite. Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the most renowned and prominent Muslim cleric in the world, has stated: “The Muslim jurists are unanimous that apostates must be punished, yet they differ as to determining the kind of punishment to be inflicted upon them. The majority of them, including the four main schools of jurisprudence (Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi’i, and Hanbali) as well as the other four schools of jurisprudence (the four Shiite schools of Az-Zaidiyyah, Al-Ithna-‘ashriyyah, Al-Ja’fariyyah, and Az-Zaheriyyah) agree that apostates must be executed.”
Read more…

US President Donald Trump’s deal of the century “will be followed by a non-aggression agreement between Israel and the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council in addition to Egypt, Jordan and possibly Morocco,” tweets Sheikh Hamad Bin Jassim.

by i24NEWS , Israel Hayom Staff

Former Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad Bin Jassim | Archives: AP

Qatar’s former prime minister claimed on Monday that a non-aggression pact between Gulf states and Israel will soon be signed and may include the North African country of Morocco.

In a statement posted to Twitter, Sheikh Hamad Bin Jassim declared: “On December 14 last year, I posted a tweet in which I spoke about the deal of the century and said that it would be announced at the beginning of this year.

“Now it will be followed by a non-aggression agreement between Israel and the countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council in addition to Egypt, Jordan and possibly Morocco.”

Read more…

Ayelet Shaked rules out joining Blue and White government

Steinitz: ‘No situation’ in which right-wing bloc will break up and some will join Gantz

Touring Arab Israeli towns, Blue and White leader says no citizens will be forced into future Palestinian state in population swap

By TOI STAFF11 February 2020, 8:35 pm

Blue and White party leader MK Benny Gantz speaks during a party campaign event in Netanya on February 5, 2020. (Flash90)

Blue and White Party chief Benny Gantz on Tuesday ruled out including the predominantly Arab Joint List in any future coalition and declared that he would implement the Trump administration’s peace plan if elected in the upcoming national vote.

But Gantz, a former army chief of staff, came out against provisions of the White House deal that suggested Arab Israeli towns could become part of a future Palestinian state.

Touring Arab Israeli communities in the country’s north, Gantz rejected the prospect of partnering with the alliance of four majority-Arab parties in any future government.
Read more…

T. Belman.  I fail to see why Israel can’t “annex” now of their own volition and then participate in detailing the Plans. When this is done, Trump can approve it. The “annexation” and the approval do not have to be done at the same time. And if the approval involves revised borders then Isrtael can simply conform to it.

The Trump administration has approached the peace plan with a level of humility lacking in Israeli politicians.

By HERB KEINON, JPOST  FEBRUARY 10, 2020

Ayelet Shaked and Naftali Bennett, 2019.  (photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM)

The Trump Administration has approached the Israel-Palestinian issue with a great deal of humility, US Ambassador David Friedman said on Sunday during a speech on the “Deal of the Century” at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.

Humility, he said, “based on the fact that we are not smart enough to know what is going to happen in this region tomorrow, a year from now or 10 years from now.”

This humility, however, is not something that has rubbed off on some Israeli politicians urging annexation now, before the March 2 election, regardless of the cost with the US Administration.
Read more…

“Diversity” is the test for being hired to teach in universities and no matter how qualified and brilliant you are, you had better be convincing about your belief in spreading it.

By Giulio Meotti, INN

German volunteer in the First World War, nationalist enlisted in the far right Freikorps, anticommunist and scholar of the greatest of the medieval German emperors Frederick II of Swabia, the historian Ernst Kantorowicz had no choice but to leave Nazi Germany in the annus horribilis 1939. It was not enough that Nazi minister Goebbels liked his great biography of the emperor. Kantorowicz was Jewish and had to leave.

He arrived in the United States, where he obtained the chair of medieval history at Berkeley. Ten years later, the university administration forced teachers to take an oath of anti-communism. Kantorowicz refused to sign it despite his famous anti-communism, because he had a horror of any type of intellectual yoke. He was fired and found a job in Princeton thanks to the intercession of the great physicist Robert Oppenheimer.

Seventy years later, Berkeley faces another type of oath called “diversity”, the powerful hegemonic ideology built to enforce all the canons and the trappings of the new anti-racism.
Read more…

by Oded Revivi , Eli Shaviro , Benny Kashriel , Asaf Minter , Igal Lahav , Shy Rosenzweig , Nir Bartal Published on 02-06-2020, Israel Hayom

We want peace, and we have always wanted peace. The Trump plan is the only vision that actually acknowledges what it will take to get peace.

Today we are a little more than one week from President Donald Trump’s presentation of his Vision for Peace.

In that week, people have proclaimed him and his team anything and everything from the Messiah to Judas. The truth is he and his team are neither. President Donald Trump, Jared Kushner and Ambassador David Friedman are loyal patriots to the United States and the greatest friends Israel has ever had in the White House.

Let’s remember where we were as recently as December 2016. We were abandoned at the UN and were dictated the terms of a UN/EU style peace plan from then-Secretary of State John Kerry. That was certainly a low point in international relations for our great state of Israel.

Since that point our Kinneret (The Sea of Galilee) has nearly filled up – we haven’t figured out how to thank Trump/Kushner/Friedman for that yet, but if we could, we would.
Read more…

By Maj. Gen. (res.) Gershon Hacohen, besa

BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 1,446, February 11, 2020

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: President Trump’s peace plan must be understood as a systemic impetus toward a new breakthrough rather than as a practical blueprint for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  

In stark contrast to the worldwide euphoria attending the 1993 Oslo Accords, President Trump’s “Deal of the Century” to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was met with global skepticism, in part because of the international circumstances that prevailed when it was announced.

In both Europe and the US, the familiar sociopolitical order faces formidable challenges and a shadow of uncertainty hovers over the future. Bloody conflict zones extend from Afghanistan to Ukraine, and prospects are dim for the recovery of Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and Libya from their prolonged civil strife. What kind of peace plan could possibly end the 100-year-long conflict in the small land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River?

Read more…

She argued “We Should NOT Impeach Donald Trump”. Fantastic.

By Marcy Oster, JTA,

A haredi mother of five won the half-marathon at the 18th annual Life Time Miami Marathon and Half Marathon event.

Beatie Deutsch, 30, finished in a time of 1:16:4 to win in the women’s category on Sunday, the Miami Herald reported.

It was Deutsch’s first race in the United States. She is working to qualify to represent Israel in the marathon at the Tokyo Olympics this summer. That race currently is scheduled for a Saturday, however, and the Sabbath-observing Deutsch would be unable to compete even if she can reach the Olympic qualifying time.

Deutsch, who moved to Israel from New Jersey in 2009, is known for running in a skirt, sleeves that fall below her elbow and a headscarf.

In May, Deutsch was the top female finisher in a 13-mile half-marathon race in Riga, Latvia, reportedly becoming the first haredi woman to win an international athletic competition.
Read more…

John Howard, BREITBART  10 Feb 2020

Chen Qiushi/YouTube

Chinese citizen journalist Chen Qiushi, who has been reporting on the coronavirus outbreak from ground zero in Wuhan, disappeared on Thursday just as public outrage was mounting over the death of whistleblower doctor Li Wenliang.

Chen’s family says he has been forcibly quarantined in order to silence him after he posted viral video reports that challenged the official narrative about the situation in Wuhan.

Chen, a human rights activist who at 34 happens to be the same age as the late Dr. Li Wenliang, has been reporting from Wuhan since the city was placed under lockdown on January 24.

“I’ve said before that I’m a citizen journalist. What kind of journalist am I if I don’t rush to the front line when there is a disaster?” he said in his first dispatch from Wuhan. Another early video denounced the government for abusing Wenliang and seven other whistleblowers who tried to give an early warning of how dangerous the virus was.
Read more…

His tweet warning against unilateral annexation of territory in Judea and Samaria prior to Israel’s March 2 election “wasn’t a threat,” but “lets people know where we stand,” says U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman.

BY ISRAEL KASNETT, jns

U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman addresses the Kohelet Forum Conference at the Begin Heritage Center in Jerusalem on Jan. 8, 2020. Photo by Olivier Fitoussi/Flash90.<
>
(February 10, 2020 / JNS) U.S. Ambassador to Israel David Friedman set off a firestorm on Sunday when he tweeted, “The application of Israeli law to the territory which the [U.S. peace] Plan provides to be part of Israel is subject to the completion [of] a mapping process by a joint Israeli-American committee. Any unilateral action in advance of the completion of the committee process endangers the Plan & American recognition.”

Much ado was made about the tweet and how it was a threat directed at Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. There are some who have tried to make it seem as if Netanyahu and U.S. President Donald Trump are now on bad terms and that Netanyahu has failed his constituency because he is unable to deliver on annexing the Jordan Valley and parts of Judea and Samaria. The reality, however, is far different, and Friedman has outright denied such assertions.
Read more…

Cash from the Gulf states has been smoothing over the roughest edges of the region’s failed economies. But the oil that paid for it won’t last much longer

By David Rosenberg, HAARETZ

Flying high for now in Doha. Corinna Kern/Reuters

Around the world, they are known as the GCC, for Gulf Cooperation Council. But in the Middle East, a more apt acronym for these rich petro-states might be ATM. Since at least the 1970s, Saudi Arabia & Company have spread their wealth around the region, buying friends and influence, and putting out fires.Oil wealth is such a given that Donald Trump’s Peace to Prosperity Plan unveiled last month, nonchalantly assumes that the Gulf Arab states will foot much of the $50 billion in aid to get the State of Palestine on a firm economic footing. Indeed, keeping the GCC’s wallets open is probably the main reason why the White House thwarted Netanyahu’s annexation plans.

Trump isn’t the only one counting on Gulf money. Hamas and Israel are relying on Qatar to deliver suitcase loads full of cash to keep Gaza one step removed from humanitarian disaster and all-out war with Israel. It was $23 billion in Gulf money that kept the Egyptian economy from collapsing in the wake of Abdel Fattah al-Sissi’s coup. Lebanon has long counted on Gulf aid and until recently hoped to get some bailout money to avoid default.
Read more…

T. Belman. Friedman’s answers raised more questions.. Since Israel must maintain a freeze in the land designated for the statelet, how much land is included with the settlements that they can extend sovereignty over, for future construction. Is there enough to keep them busy for 4 years?

In my reading of the P2P after 4 years there is no longer a freeze or any other restriction but Friedman again muddies the water. He was asked “And what happens after the four years? Will Israel get a green light to apply sovereignty over the remaining parts of the West Bank?” and said:

‘Not necessarily’,

“At the end of four year years, if there is no progress and no basis to extend that period of time — and that would be an extension the parties themselves would have to agree to — then it would return to what it is today,” the ambassador said.

The areas Israel will not have annexed by then would continue to be administered by COGAT, the Defense Ministry unit currently in charge of implementing Israeli government policies in the West Bank, according to Friedman.

He begs the question of whether the US will support Israel’s “annexation” of the rest after the 4 years. Why did he not simply say “yes”? Instead he said “not necessarily”.

Why does Trump’s plan allow the Israelis to annex soon but have a Palestinian state only arise in four years? To ‘bridge the asymmetry’ between the two sides, David Friedman says

By RAPHAEL AHREN, TOI

The White House’s so-called deal of the century strongly favors Israel because it is a democracy that can be relied upon to uphold any agreement, whereas the Palestinians have a long way to go before they are trustworthy partners, US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman said Sunday.

Critics of US President Donald Trump’s peace plan often lament that it grants Israel the right to annex the parts of the West Bank that the proposal earmarks for Israel to retain, while the Palestinians would only get their state at the end of four years — and then, only if a long list of conditions have been meet.

Read more…

Biden, Buttigieg and Sanders say they would not have killed the Iranian terror master

The Editorial Board    Feb. 9, 2020 6:03 pm ET

Iranians rally in Tehran holding images of Qasem Soleimani.Photo: Rouzbeh Fouladi/Zuma Press

One of Vice President Joe Biden’s better lines in 2012 was “Osama bin Laden is dead, and General Motors is alive.” The crowd at the Democratic convention loved it. This year it sounds like the Democratic campaign theme may be that Iranian terror master Qasem Soleimani is dead and the world is more dangerous because of it.

That’s a fair judgment from Friday’s debate in New Hampshire when ABC’s David Muir asked the candidates “if your national security team came to you with an opportunity to strike, would Soleimani have been dead or would he still be alive under your Presidency?”

Pete Buttigieg responded: “In the situation that we saw with President Trump’s decision, there is no evidence that made our country safer.” He deplored Soleimani’s “murder and mayhem” but then zagged to the Iraq war, the Iranian nuclear pact, and a wounded veteran friend he saw in an airport. Mr. Muir tried again, but the former mayor came down with a decisive, “It depends on the circumstances.”
Read more…

But overall amount of land advertised by Israel Lands Authority was down sharply in January from a year ago

The West Bank settlement of Efrat.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is pushing for the annexation of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, and the Israel Lands Authority appears to be doing its part to help. In January, two-thirds of the land the government agency offered for residential construction was over the Green Line.

All told, the ILA last month advertised land designated for 3,254 housing units, 2,136 of them in settlements, including Karnei Shomron, Givat Ze’ev, Ma’aleh Adumim and Efrat.

The figures came as Netanyahu said over the weekend that Israel has begun to draw up maps of land in the West Bank that will be annexed in accordance with U.S. President Donald Trump’s proposed peace plan. Netanyahu is courting settler votes ahead of the March 2 election.
Read more…

The Judge is at her best. Romney deserved it then and deserves it now. Watch this video and the next one.

High Court President Esther Hayut confronted Likud lawyer Avi Halevi about Avichai Mandelblit’s line of argument

By YONAH JEREMY BOB, JPOST

MK Heba Yazbak of UAL-Balad – (photo credit: Courtesy)

A special expanded nine justice panel of the High Court of Justice on Sunday green-lighted Heba Yazbak, by a narrow 5-4 vote, to run for the Knesset with the Israeli-Arab Joint List despite her statements against Israel and the IDF.

She had petitioned to the High Court to intervene after the Central Election Committee disqualified her.

While normally only three justices hear a case, nine justices are reserved for issues of major constitutional importance.
Last week, Likud lawyer Avi Halevi told the High Court that Yazbak had more than crossed the line with her public statements and posts supporting terrorists Samir Kuntar and Dalal Mughrabi and refusing to repudiate physical resistance against the IDF.
Read more…

T. Belman. Finally, a Def Minister who does his job.  Apparently Netanyahu is letting him do so whereas he ordered others not to do so.

Taking a page from President Trump’s book, Defense Minister Bennett applying maximal pressure to the PA to end its support for terrorism.

By Yochanan Visser, INN  09/02/20 21:49

Defense Minister Bennett, Ariel Hermoni, Defense Ministry

Since he became Israel’s Defense Minister at the end of 2019, Naftali Bennett has introduced a new doctrine against the Palestinian Authority and their allies which is similar to the ‘maximal pressure’ campaign the US Administration of President Donald J. Trump is using against Iran.

At the end of December 2019 Bennett started his campaign against the Palestinian Arab’s leadership by freezing the transfer of NIS 650 million of taxes and import fees Israel collects on behalf of the Palestinian Authority (PA) annually.

This amount of money is roughly equal to the funds the PA sets apart for its pay to slay policy, the monthly stipends the PA uses to pay to Palestinian terrorists in Israeli prisons and their families.

In 2019, for example, the PA paid 517.4 million Shekels to these terrorists and those who were released from an Israeli jail after serving their sentences.
Read more…