When nuance is black and white.

BY ABE GREENWALD, COMMENTARY

A host of progressive organizations use their ostensible Jewishness as cover or sanction for their campaigns against Israel. J Street, which calls itself “pro-Israel” and “pro-peace,” is perhaps the best known among them. There’s no better example of how this works than J Street’s recent launch of a program to compete with Birthright Israel, the 20-year-old organization that’s provided free trips to Israel for more than 600,000 young Jews around the world.

According to J Street, “the omission and erasure of Palestinian perspectives and narratives on these [Birthright] trips creates a political environment that allows home demolitions, settlement expansion, and other destructive policies of occupation to continue unchallenged.” Instead, the group says, “organized educational trips for young American Jews must present a robust, nuanced and honest view of the current realities on the ground in Israel and the Palestinian Territory.”
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NATO’s objective should be to outlast Erdogan and his provocative behavior.

By Walter Russell Mead, WSJ

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Ankara, July 10. Photo: Associated Press

Today’s crisis with Turkey over Russian weapons could be as consequential. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s decision to import the S-400 antiaircraft system, designed to shoot down the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s airplanes, is a fundamental challenge to the West. Mr. Erdogan’s move to drill for natural gas in Cyprus’s waters has also driven a wedge between Turkey and its erstwhile allies, with the European Union now looking to cut funding to Turkey.

Ankara is likely to lose access to the coveted American-made F-35 aircraft which, like the British ships in 1914, have been paid for but not delivered. The Trump administration is also required by law to impose economic sanctions on Turkey in response to its Russian weapons purchase, though it can choose from options ranging in severity. The Turkish economy is already shrinking, with inflation at nearly 16% and unemployment at 14%. Even mild sanctions could spook investors and send the lira and stock market into free fall.
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T. Belman. Evidently it is racist to attack Jew-haters as racist.  Long live Trump.

These Jewish voices would rather attack Israel-loving Trump than Jew-hating Muslims and fellow travellers. They function in solidarity with the Demnocratic Party rather than the Jewish people.

In a series of follow-up tweets, Trump said the representatives all “hate Israel with a true and unbridled passion” and have “made Israel feel abandoned by the U.S.”

BY JOSEFIN DOLSTEN/JTA/ JPOST

President Donald Trump’s comments on Sunday calling for some Democratic congresswomen to “go back” to their countries of origin have been widely condemned as racist.

“Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came,” the president wrote on in one of a number of tweets aimed at what he called “‘Progressive’ Democrat Congresswomen.”

Despite not naming them all, most have assumed Trump was referring to four women of color: Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan. They are all U.S. citizens and only Omar was born abroad, in Somalia.
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Sharia justice in the UK.

By Robert Spencer, FPM

As Tommy Robinson headed into court for his sentencing Thursday, he wore a t-shirt that read: “Convicted of Journalism.” And it’s true. Tommy Robinson is heading back to jail for doing what journalists routinely do: ask questions of defendants heading into courtrooms. The gaggle of establishment media journalists who peppered Tommy himself with questions as he entered the court have not been arrested.

British authorities claimed that Tommy Robinson had prejudiced the outcome of the trial of several members of a Muslim rape gang. This is arrant nonsense: the trial had been completed, and Tommy was asking them what they thought of their having been convicted. There was, however, a gag order on the proceedings, and it was on the basis of the claim that Tommy violated that gag order that he is now back in prison.
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There’s a quadruple standard at work: a double standard within a double standard.

AHMAD GHARABLI/AFP/Getty Images.

Michel Gurfinkiel’s essay in Mosaic on Jerusalem’s status in international law provides excellent insight into the incoherent approach adopted by many of the world’s governments to Israel’s sovereign rights in and to its own capital. His analysis is particularly fascinating in demonstrating the outsized role played by the Catholic Church since 1948 in the persistent demands for Jerusalem’s internationalization.

In what follows, I’ll explore further the convoluted case for special treatment of Jerusalem on the basis of international law—an inquiry that can teach us a great deal about international-law claims against Israel in general.

Gurfinkiel questions in passing whether international law even exists, but (as he also concedes) we need not linger over such ontological considerations. Just as debates over whether contemporary art is really “art” can be profitably set aside, at least initially, in favor of direct assessments of the aesthetic value and appeal of particular works, we can focus on concrete and self-styled applications of international law while stipulating for the purposes of discussion that international law does exist, although it is vague and provides far fewer conclusive answers than its acolytes claim for it.

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By Thomas Lifson, AMERICAN THINKER

I strongly recommend a long interview with Michael Oren, and American-born Israeli, who has served as Israel’s ambassador the United States and currently is a Member of the Knesset and Deputy Minister in the Prime Minister’s Office. He speaks veryfrankly on many issues, and provides perspectives that I found fascinating and useful.

I had never before seen the website Ocatavian Report that published the interview, but I am impressed with it and will be returning.

Here is a short sample of Oren’s perspectives on matters of current concern:
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THE CLARION PROJECT

School children in Fairlawn, Ohio (Photo: Duane Prokop/Getty Images )

Qatar’s vision for America is now being peddled through our children’s classrooms, targeting a pliable population and one with a long shelf life.

Beyond its media empires and bought-off D.C. influencers and think tanks, Qatar has set its sight on the next generation of Americans.

In the last 10 years, Qatar has given over $30 million to public schools and over $1.4 billion to universities. Those universities include:

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I was born in Somalia and grew up amid pervasive Muslim anti-Semitism. Hate is hard to unlearn without coming to terms with how you learned it.

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali, WSJ

I once opened a speech by confessing to a crowd of Jews that I used to hate them. It was 2006 and I was a young native of Somalia who’d been elected to the Dutch Parliament. The American Jewish Committee was giving me its Moral Courage Award. I felt honored and humbled, but a little dishonest if I didn’t own up to my anti-Semitic past. So I told them how I’d learned to blame the Jews for everything.

Fast-forward to 2019. A freshman congresswoman from Minnesota has been infuriating the Jewish community and discomfiting the Democratic leadership with her expressions of anti-Semitism. Like me, Ilhan Omar was born in Somalia and exposed at an early age to Muslim anti-Semitism.

Some of the members of my 2006 AJC audience have asked me to explain and respond to Ms. Omar’s comments, including her equivocal apologies. Their main question is whether it is possible for Ms. Omar to unlearn her evident hatred of Jews—and if so, how to help.
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By Gerald Honigman

An insightful article by Moshe Phillips in the July 6^th Jerusalem Post announced that former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger would be honored as the featured speaker at the prestigious Jewish Leadership Conference, a conservative think tank, in November 2019.

If you had any doubts about Dr. Kissinger, please read the Phillips piece  in addition to what follows and which appeared in its first version back in 2013.

Besides Soviet Jewry and Yom Kippur War issues focused upon by the author, I had additional problems regarding him eating away at my gut. While this doesn’t detract from his abilities as a political science, security, and foreign policy honcho for a number of American leaders (doing much to shape American positions for decades), those pluses only added to the problems discussed below. Before that, however, a bit of history may be enlightening…

In 1498, Nicolo Machiavelli, emerged in Florence, Italy as the main voice of modern political thinking. His Il Principe (The Prince) had lessons world leaders have carefully studied regarding power politics, waging war, and obtaining and keeping the good will of the people to maintain power to this very day.
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Obama’s plans put undue pressure on Israel, America’s closest ally. His policies granted massive amounts of financial support to Iran, America’s greatest enemy.

BY MARTIN OLINER, JPOST

When Barack Obama was president of the United States, too many Americans, especially American Jews, adopted his policies and plans blindly.

Obama’s plans put undue pressure on Israel, America’s closest ally. His policies granted massive amounts of financial support to Iran, America’s greatest enemy.

But in the eyes of Obama’s supporters, this was all kosher, because it came from a man who could seemingly walk on water.

Now that Donald Trump is president of the United States, this has all been reversed.
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By Jack Hellner, AMERICAN THINKER

In 2016, President Obama dictatorially stopped an eight-year investigation into a billion-dollar-per year drug running operation by the terrorist Hezb’allah Organization to appease Iran because Obama thought an Iran deal would enhance his legacy.

The secret backstory of how Obama let Hezbollah off the hook

An ambitious U.S. task force targeting Hezbollah’s billion-dollar criminal enterprise ran headlong into the White House’s desire for a nuclear deal with Iran.

In its determination to secure a nuclear deal with Iran, the Obama administration derailed an ambitious law enforcement campaign targeting drug trafficking by the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah, even as it was funneling cocaine into the United States, according to a POLITICO investigation.

The campaign, dubbed Project Cassandra, was launched in 2008 after the Drug Enforcement Administration amassed evidence that Hezbollah had transformed itself from a Middle East-focused military and political organization into an international crime syndicate that some investigators believed was collecting $1 billion a year from drug and weapons trafficking, money laundering and other criminal activities.

Over the next eight years, agents working out of a top-secret DEA facility in Chantilly, Virginia, used wiretaps, undercover operations and informants to map Hezbollah’s illicit networks, with the help of 30 U.S. and foreign security agencies.

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FOR THE FIRST 7 MINUTES.

In remarkable recent comments, Baghdad’s US envoy listed good reasons for a detente with Jerusalem; though he wasn’t punished for his remarks, normalization still seems far off

By RAPHAEL AHREN, TOI 11 July 2019, 

Shiite fighters of paramilitary units burn an Israeli flag drawing during a rally to mark al-Quds Day em), a commemoration first initiated by Iran in 1979 to fall on the last Friday of the holy month of Ramadan, in the capital Baghdad on June 8, 2018. / AFP PHOTO / AHMAD AL-RUBAYE

That Israel and the Sunni-Arab Gulf states cooperate closely is the Middle East’s worst-kept secret. Despite the absence of formal diplomatic relations, everybody knows Jerusalem has clandestine yet robust ties with Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, Manama and other capitals in the region, due to shared concerns about an increasingly belligerent Iran.

The most striking indication of this Arab-Israel detente was the US-led economic workshop last month in Bahrain, during which the kingdom’s foreign minister declared that his government views Israel as an integral part of the Middle East and desires closer ties with it.
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Published on 21 Mar 2015

Political turnabout – Does Trudeau allow Liberal candidates freedom of conscience on abortion, LGBTQ2?

By Diane Bederman, BEDERMAN BLOG

In 2014, prior to the election, Liberal Leader, Justin Trudeau, declared “…opponents of abortion need not apply to run for the Liberal Party in the next election because he wants to form a government that is ‘resolutely pro-choice’… I have made it clear that future candidates need to be completely understanding that they will be expected to vote pro-choice on any bills…We check on a number of issues: How do you feel about the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, how do you feel about same-sex marriage, how do you feel about pro-choice, where are you on that?”

These Liberal values are so important that last year, the Liberal Government, under the Canada Summer Jobs (CSJ) programme offered financial aid ONLY to organizations that respect individual human rights in Canada, including the values underlying the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms as well as other rights. These include reproductive rights and the right to be free from discrimination on the basis of sex, religion, race, national or ethnic origin, colour, mental or physical disability or sexual orientation, or gender identity or expression.
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