The Jordanian-Palestinian Confederation  

The Jordanian-Palestinian confederation seems the only solution that will save us from either turning into a bi-national state, or into a non-democratic Jewish state.

BY SUSAN HATTIS ROLEF, JPOST

Two weeks ago, at a meeting with members of “Peace Now” and MKs from the Zionist Union and Meretz parties, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas told his guests that US President Donald Trump’s peace envoys – Jared Kushner and Jason Greenblatt – had asked him for his views on the idea of a Jordanian-Palestinian Confederation as a solution to the Palestinian problem. Abbas reported that his answer was that he favored the idea as long as before the confederation is formed, Palestine would be recognized as an independent state, and that Israel would also join it.

The idea of a Jordanian-Palestinian state, in one form or another, is not new, and is based on the historical fact that after the First World War, the British Mandate for Palestine included the territories of present-day Israel (minus the Golan Heights), Jordan, the West Bank, and the Gaza Strip. Only in 1922 did the League of Nations decide that the area of Palestine east of the Jordan River was to form the Emirate of Transjordan to be ruled by the Hashemite dynasty under the British Mandate for Palestine, to which the Jewish national home policy would not be applied. The UN partition plan for Palestine, on November 29 1947, applied only to Palestine west of the River Jordan.
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September 12, 2018 | 1:00 pm | 1 Comment »

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REPORT: Trump furthers program for Palestinian refugees in Arab Countries  

Fatah sources told the newspaper that “Trump informed several Arab countries that the plan will include Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon.”

BY YASSER OKBI/MAARIV

US President Donald Trump announced to several Arab countries that at the beginning of 2019 he will disclose a citizenship plan for Palestinian refugees living in those countries, the London-based website Al-Khaled reported on Tuesday.

Fatah sources told the newspaper that “Trump informed several Arab countries that the plan will include Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon.” The source said that “the big surprise will be that these countries have already agreed to naturalize Palestinian refugees.”
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September 12, 2018 | 11:39 am | Comments »

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Iran’s attack on Kurds is a message to US, Saudi Arabia and Israel  

Iran has been fighting Kurdish opposition for years and in Iran there have been increasing clashes.

BY Seth J Frantzman, JERUSALEM POST

People stage a protest against the recent execution by Iran of up to 20 Kurds.
The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in Iran claimed credit for firing seven Fateh 110 ballistic missiles in an attack on Kurdish opposition groups in Koya in northern Iraq over the weekend that killed 17 and wounded numerous others. It was the first time Iranian forces had used precision missiles to attack deep inside Iraq.

The daylight attack on the city of some 100,000 in the Erbil Governorate of Iraqi Kurdistan is a message from Tehran to the region that it can do what it wants, not only in neighboring Iraq, but throughout the Middle East. In the last year, Iranian missiles and Iranian-supported groups using Tehran’s technical advisers have targeted Saudi Arabia from Yemen and Israel from Syria.
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September 12, 2018 | 5:47 am | Comments »

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“Political Islam” and “Extremist” Terrorism  

By Rachel Ehrenfeld, ACD

Seventeen years since al Qaeda terrorists used passenger airplanes to attack New York’s Twin Towers and the Pentagon, Western-style liberal democracies are failing to recognize the radical Islamist threat. While, as former President Obama reminds us, “we took out [Osama] bin Laden,” neither he, nor most Western leaders have taken measures to identify the ideological underpinning that fuel radical Islamists the world over, which to make things more difficult disguises itself as just another political movement, i.e., Political Islam.

The failure, caused by an unwillingness to identify the seditious nature of Political Islam, has prevented Western-style democracies to defend and counter the harmful rise of radical Islam. This failure has been hastened by the imposition of “political correctness” by leaders of the global Progressive Left movement, branding every attempt to identify the Islamist threat and stop it, as hateful, racist, and incredibly even Anti-Semitic.
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September 11, 2018 | 4:55 pm | 1 Comment »

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The Trump Doctrine and the End of the ‘New World Order’  

by Seth Frantzman, Jerusalem Post 

https://www.meforum.org/articles/2018/the-trump-doctrine-and-the-end-of-the-new-world-o

“Setting fire to the ground,” a “major catastrophe,” bringing “new instability” are the headlines that have greeted Donald Trump’s unorthodox decisions over the past year. Withdrawing from UNESCO, moving the US Embassy, leaving the Iran deal and cutting funding to UNRWA and funding for Pakistan were seen as extreme decisions in the Middle East and around the world. Insofar as there is a “Trump Doctrine,” it has been to call this bluff.

In the mind-set of Trump and his team, the time has come for the United States to move quickly to reverse decades of foreign policy norms, ending the status quo, and ripping up what the previous administrations did.

This is unprecedented. It could be foolhardy, say the many critics of the administration. But so far none of the threatened “chaos” and “instability” has been unleashed. Previous administrations that played it safe and sought to make minor adjustments or shift the needle a few degrees here and there found instability was unleashed regardless of what they did.
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September 11, 2018 | 4:01 pm | 2 Comments »

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Defeating Iran’s Mullahs  

By Amil Imani, AMERICAN THINKER

The Islamic Republic of Iran has entered its fourth decade, and the values and legacy of the revolution it was founded upon continue to have profound and contradictory consequences for Iranian life.  The mullahs have ruled over the defenseless Persian people with iron fists and absolute power.  As a result, millions of Iranians were forced to flee their home to the four corners of the globe.

Those remaining have been targeted in waves of arrests of largely innocent people.  They have been accompanied by widespread torture, rape, and mass executions.  Tens of thousands more were torn away from their homes and moved to Islamic dungeons.  These prisoners of conscience were forced to confess to crimes they never committed and then either exterminated or sent back to medieval Islamic torture chambers, where they simply faded away.  It is difficult for many people to even talk about these horrible tragedies under the Islamic rules in Iran.  I personally spoke with a few lucky ones who managed to flee the country in the ’90s.
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September 11, 2018 | 1:49 pm | Comments »

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Why Duterte’s visit to Israel matters  

MANILA TIMES EDITORIAL

We hope that 24 hours after the President’s return to the Philippines, the nation and members of his entourage have had enough time to reflect on and digest what they have learned from this important journey.

Let’s begin with the dollar values, which we unimaginatively tend to employ in evaluating a presidential trip abroad (many think the nation should get its money’s worth from these expensive visits to foreign places). Presidential communications have reported the following results from the visit to Israel:

1. The Philippines secured $82.9 million in investment deals and pledges from the trip. The deals, which were signed by Filipino and Israeli businessmen, cover investments in technology, military hardware, transportation and tourism.
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September 11, 2018 | 8:39 am | Comments »

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UCLA Agrees to Host Radical Anti-Israel Conference  

By Brent Sher, FREE BEACON

UCLA has agreed to host the annual conference for Students for Justice in Palestine, a radical student group that leads much of the anti-Israel campus activity at universities across the country, the Jewish Journal reports.

UCLA has been under pressure to back out of hosting the group given its history of disrupting Jewish events on campus and promoting movements such as the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, which aims to destroy Israel through economic warfare.

In its statement, the university said that it opposes the BDS campaign, but still feels obligated to host the event.
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September 11, 2018 | 7:23 am | Comments »

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ANALYSIS: Iran continues attempts to expand Islamic Revolution  

Iran threatens to attack US forces, and its proxies already have done so.

By Yochanan Visser, INN

Display featuring missiles and portrait of Iran's Supreme Leader Khameni

As was pointed out in last week’s analysis about Iran, the Islamic Republic is in deep trouble due to a huge economic crisis which is expected to worsen once the United States introduces more sanctions intended to cripple the country’s petrochemical industry.

The new sanction regime was introduced to deprive Iran of the possibility to continue its policy of expanding the Islamic revolution in the Middle East and beyond and to destabilize the regime of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
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September 10, 2018 | 3:27 pm | Comments »

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Democratic Party: America’s party of hate and subversion  

By Melanie Phillips

What’s going on in the US is simply terrifying. Almost every day seems to bring a fresh demonstration of a hate-driven stampede towards mob rule – by people who, in Orwellian fashion, claim to be acting to uphold American values.

Look at how the Senate judiciary committee confirmation hearing into the Supreme Court candidacy of Judge Brett Kavanaugh turned into a circus on day one. It is standard procedure in the US that when the presidency changes political colour, the political makeup of the Supreme Court may also change as a result.

President Trump has accordingly nominated the conservatively-minded Kavanaugh. This judge resolutely focuses on the dispassionate exercise of the law and upholding the constitution. Admirably, he refuses to deviate from those principles into ideological or political partisanship. He would seem therefore to be a stellar candidate for the Supreme Court bench.
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September 10, 2018 | 12:44 pm | 8 Comments »

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Liberalism as Imperialism  

The dogmatic utopianism of elites on both sides of the Atlantic is not without its costs.

By YORAM HAZONY

What follows is an excerpt from his book “The Virtue of Nationalism”

My liberal friends and colleagues do not seem to understand that the advancing liberal construction is a form of imperialism. But to anyone already immersed in the new order, the resemblance is easy to see. Much like the pharaohs and the Babylonian kings, the Roman emperors and the Roman Catholic Church until well into the modern period, as well as the Marxists of the last century, liberals, too, have their grand theory about how they are going to bring peace and economic prosperity to the world by pulling down all the borders and uniting mankind under their own universal rule. Infatuated with the clarity and intellectual rigor of this vision, they disdain the laborious process of consulting with the multitude of nations they believe should embrace their view of what is right. And like other imperialists, they are quick to express disgust, contempt, and anger when their vision of peace and prosperity meets with opposition from those who they are sure would benefit immensely by simply submitting.
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September 10, 2018 | 10:38 am | Comments »

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Resurgent nationalism is reason not for concern but for relief.  

By IRA STOLL, NY SUN| September 9, 2018

Many of the latest headlines boil down to a conflict about nationalism. Great Britain’s exit from the European Union. Presidentr Trump’s attempt to erect a border wall and to renegotiate the terms of international trade agreements. Russian meddling in American politics. Even public marches by avowed racists wind up being described in the press, accurately or inaccurately, as actions by “white nationalists.”

Into this fray comes Yoram Hazony, president of the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem, with a new book, “The Virtue of Nationalism,” just published by Basic Books.

Mr. Hazony argues that nationalism — “when nations are able to chart their own independent course, cultivating their own traditions and pursuing their own interests without interference” — is preferable to the alternative of imperialism, of “uniting mankind, as much as possible, under a single political regime.”
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September 10, 2018 | 10:30 am | Comments »

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U of T sides with Prof who refused to meet with Israel Hasbara fellow  

By Sue-Anne Levy, THE TORONTO SUN

After a five-month “investigation,” the powers-that-be at University of Toronto have concluded that a history professor did not discriminate against Jewish student Ari Blaff when he accused him of being Israeli government agent sent to the university to intimidate critics of the Jewish state.

In the almost laughable decision letter, acting vice-principal academic and dean Angela Lange says while the tone and the language used by Middle Eastern and Mediterranean History professor Jens Hanssen in a scathing  e-mail to Blaff, may not  have not been “civil,” he did not breach the university’s Statement on Prohibited Discrimination and Discriminatory Harassment.
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September 10, 2018 | 9:43 am | Comments »

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Upsetting the narrative  

By Vic Rosenthal

Do you want to know what your enemies are thinking?

Listen to what they say. Usually they won’t tell you where and when the next terrorist attack will be but they will tell you their intentions and their strategy.

Even when they lie through their teeth, as Yasser Arafat was accustomed to do when speaking in English, the truth is discoverable. You just have to shut down the wishful thinking centers in your brain and listen to their words.
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September 9, 2018 | 4:34 pm | 5 Comments »

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‘Peace on the Gaza border unlikely in the coming decade,’ top IDF official says  

Ted Belman. Contrast this with what Greenblatt recently said, “At the end of the day, if we don’t solve the situation in Gaza, it will be an obstacle to peace. Hamas itself is an obstacle in the road to peace … and the Palestinians of Gaza are hostage to Hamas and they suffer terribly under Hamas’ iron fist rule,”

A military campaign to topple Hamas’ regime, seize control of Gaza Strip is unlikely to change the security situation on the volatile border, GOC Southern Command Maj. Gen. Herzl Halevi says • IDF’s interest lies only with achieving security, he says.

Israel Hayom Staff

An Israeli incursion into the Gaza Strip and toppling Hamas’ regime are unlikely to change the situation in the coastal enclave dramatically, GOC Southern Command Maj. Gen. Herzl Halevi said Sunday in an interview with a local radio station.

”Hamas will continue to try us from time to time. I don’t think we’ll be seeing peace there [in Gaza] anytime in the next decade, perhaps even longer,” he said.

Commenting on the Egyptian-led efforts to broker a long-term cease-fire between Israel and the Islamist terrorist group, Halevi said, “War is also a type of arrangement in which both parties agree to fight and reach a result that is different from the prior reality. Our interests are very clear – achieving security for the Israeli public.”
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September 9, 2018 | 4:00 pm | 3 Comments »

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Fighting Anti-Zionism Slowly, Quietly, and Well  

The long march through institutions.

By Jonathan Marks, COMMENTARY

anti-BDS laws

In June, I reviewed the superb essay collection, Anti-Zionism on Campus. In it, Andrew Pessin and Doron Ben-Atar collect testimonies and reflections from faculty and students who have found themselves denounced, ostracized, and sometimes under investigation because they’ve opposed anti-Israel activity on their campuses.

As Ben-Atar, professor of history at Fordham University, says, anti-Israel radicals “have taken to threats and intimidation in their battle to establish anti-Zionism as the doctrinal orthodoxy.” Few on campus have sharp ideas about Zionism, much less consider Zionism the source of all evil, as the radicals do. But when administrators are pliant and when faculty members don’t stand up to scholar-zealots, the 32 essays in this collection show that a few people can do great damage.
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September 9, 2018 | 12:48 pm | Comments »

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While Iran’s leaders and allies confer on Idlib, Shiite Iraq implodes in their faces  

DEBKA

Tehran’s back yard, Shiite Iraq, is on the brink of a violent civil war. Anti-Iran riots were raging in the southern oil city of Basra and spreading to Baghdad when Iran’s leaders, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and President Hassan Rouhani were conferring with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Turkey’s Tayyip Erdogan in Tehran on Friday, Sept. 7 on an offensive to subdue the last rebel holdout of Idlib and so finally end Syria’s civil war.

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September 9, 2018 | 10:55 am | Comments »

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