By Rafael Castro, BESA

BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 877, June 28, 2018

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Anti-Semitism is the most insidious hatred in history. Aversion to Jews has flourished under so many circumstances that it is hard to find a common denominator accounting for its manifold manifestations. However, there have been periods when non-Jews showed strong sympathy and solidarity towards Jews. Perhaps the best illustration of this friendship is modern America.

There are precedents showing that America’s willingness to befriend the Jews is not a unique case in history. Calvinist Holland and Puritan England also displayed friendship and solidarity towards Jews, a sympathy that was expressed by fervent Christians. The fervor of those Christians was as strong as that of Catholics who burned conversos at the stake and of Orthodox Christian clergymen who intimidated Jews throughout Eastern Europe.

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By DAVID FRENCH, NATIONAL REVIEW

In Janus v. AFSCME, the court struck a strong blow against government-compelled speech for the third time this term.

Perhaps the worst government affront to the rights of conscience, far worse than mere censorship, is compelled speech, the practice of forcing Americans to fund or express ideas they find abhorrent. It’s one thing to tell a man or woman that they can’t speak. It’s another thing entirely to compel them to use their voice, their artistic talents, or their pocketbook in support of a cultural, political, or religious enterprise with which they disagree.
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By Tabitha Korol

Several recent studies have revealed the increased number of public school and college students who are experiencing various forms of mental illness, such as depression, anxiety, attention deficit disorder, and others. A Wall Street Journal report claims as many as 25 percent in elite colleges are thus classified, and require accommodations for exam taking, seating preference, quiet private rooms, and comfort animals. Steve Schlozman and Eliza Abdu-Glass, authors of The College Mental Health Crisis: Focus on Suicide, disclosed the thousands of suicides on college campuses each year, about two to three every day. Their emphasis is on students’ inadequate counseling, but we should ask why this generation, specifically, is so unstable and why the obvious signs have been ignored.

Is it possible to identify what could be so threatening?
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Who won the public diplomacy battle during the latest border conflict? Depends who you ask.

BY YONAH JEREMY BOB, JPOST

israeli hasbara (public diplomacy) regarding the Gaza border crisis is truly a tale of two cities.

From a unique Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) conference on Monday – hosting top spokespeople from the Prime Minister’s Office, the Foreign Ministry and the IDF – at times it seemed that Israeli hasbara had operated at the highest possible level given various messaging advantages that the Palestinians have.

At other times, from listening to various international and Israeli journalists and some INSS analysts, it seemed that Israel had won militarily, but utterly lost the public relations war due to a string of errors.

Which narrative is correct? And how will all of this impact Israel’s legitimacy, particularly from the perspective of the International Criminal Court’s probe of alleged war crimes?

As is often the case with such complex issues, there is likely some validity to both perspectives.
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The Left now is taking into mainstream everyday society the totalitarianism, public shaming, and repression that it has been imposing on your kids in college these past ten years since the Age of Obama dawned.

By Rabbi Prof. Dov Fischer, INN 

My first paid job came in my late teens when I was hired to be a counselor at Yeshiva Rambam Day Camp in Brooklyn.  I was put in charge of a group of nine-year-olds.  One of them was named Jacky.

Jacky had a vocabulary consisting mostly of two words. He was not on the Asperger spectrum, just difficult and it just seemed that those two words sufficed to get him through nine-year-old life.  Whenever anything or anyone disagreed with him — and everything did — Jacky would respond with his expansive vocabulary.

“Jacky, c’mon, get ready. We’re off to softball right now. You’re holding us all up.”

Jacky: “Your mother.”

“Jacky, shouldn’t you eat something at lunch besides cookies?”

“Your mother.”
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A new book documents the spread of a vicious practice into the West

By Ibn Warrick, CJ
 A Family Conspiracy: Honor Killing, by Phyllis Chesler (New English Review Press, 348 pp., $28.75)

Phyllis Chesler pioneered the study of violence against women in the late 1960s, concentrating on women living in North America and Europe. By 2003, she was writing about honor killings, based on newspaper accounts, Internet sources, interviews, and memoirs. She then embarked on a series of equally pioneering, meticulously researched, academic studies of honor killings in the West, but also in the Middle East and South Asia. These studies and over 90 articles on the same subject are collected for the first time in A Family Conspiracy: Honor Killing.
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By Ze’ev Jabotinsky, ISRAEL HAYOM

Prince William’s historic Israel visit is part of Britain’s efforts to contend with the consequences of its withdrawal from the European Union. The British are acting out of a clear interest in improving ties between the two countries, as a result of Israel’s growing economic and political prowess – the product of many years of effort by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Britain’s ties to Zionism began when the Zionist movement sent thousands of Jewish volunteers from around the world to fight with British forces against Germany and its allies in World War I. Thanks to their joint efforts during the war, Zionist leaders like Joseph Trumpeldor and my grandfather and namesake were able to establish the Jewish Brigade they had always dreamed of.
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A Bavarian uprising within German leader’s coalition could topple the government if EU summit fails to ease refugee crisis

By Bojan Pancevski, WSJ

DORFEN, Germany—When Angela Merkel opened Germany’s borders to thousands of asylum seekers in the late summer of 2015, people in the southernmost state of Bavaria rushed to help in such numbers that authorities had to briefly turn back offers of clothing and food.

Today, after the thousands became more than a million and as immigration redraws Europe’s political landscape, Bavaria has become the springboard for an insurgency that is threatening the German chancellor’s job.

Ms. Merkel is under fire from her conservative allies in Bavaria, who are part of her government and control the Interior Ministry in Berlin. They have given the chancellor until this weekend to strike an unlikely European deal that puts a lid on immigration or closes the border to certain immigrants. Failure could bring about a collapse of her fragile coalition.
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By Times of London Diplomatic editor Roger Boyes

William of Arabia, aka the Duke of Cambridge, heads out to dusty Ramallah tomorrow to meet the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas. It’s a remarkable encounter for the second-in-line to the throne and not just because the Palestinian is a nasty piece of work (doctoral dissertation: “The secret relationship between Nazism and Zionism”). The sheer political sensitivity of an official trip to modern Israel and to the Palestinian Authority on the West Bank is such that no member of the royal family has ever undertaken it.

A shift in geopolitics has made the visit possible — and a cultural change in the Foreign Office, which has for many decades advised the royal household that it is better to don the appropriate headgear and butter up Arab autocrats than engage with the gritty detail of the Israeli-Palestinian relationship. The fear of giving offence to princelings has been the defining trait of the so-called camel corps of Britain’s Arab enthusiasts within the Foreign Office. It has, with flanking assistance from oil men and aerospace executives, become an almost institutional lobby that sees Israel as the troublemaker of the region and Arab leaders as being deeply misunderstood.
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By Tyler Durden

June 26, 2018 “Information Clearing House” – Someone finally asked Obama administration officials to own up to the rise of ISIS and arming jihadists in Syria. 

In a wide ranging interview titled “Confronting the Consequences of Obama’s Foreign Policy” The Intercept’s Mehdi Hasan put the question to Ben Rhodes, who served as longtime deputy national security adviser at the White House under Obama and is now promoting his newly published book, The World As It Is: Inside the Obama White House.
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ISRAEL ON TRIAL

In 2018, the State of Israel turned 70, but it has never been fully accepted as a member of the international community. Notwithstanding peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan, conflict between Israel and some of its neighbors in the region is looming. And peace between Israel and the Palestinians seems as far away as ever. Why?

Since the 1970’s, the idea has developed that international law requires resolution of the Arab/Israeli conflict by creating a State of Palestine with East Jerusalem as its capital and borders based on the “1967 lines” – the so-called “two-state solution”. Israeli settlements are regarded by many as illegal and an impediment to this solution.
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(JTA) — On June 10, 2002, Charles Krauthammer delivered the Distinguished Rennert Lecture upon receiving the Guardian of Zion Award from Bar-Ilan University’s Ingeborg Rennert Center for Jerusalem Studies. Below is an excerpt from the lecture titled “He Tarries: Jewish Messianism and the Oslo Peace.”

Charles Krauthammer delivering a lecture at Israel’s Bar-Ilan University in 2002. (Yoni Reif)

In the 1990s, America slept and Israel dreamed.

Like the left and like the reverie that we had in the United States, secular messianism was intoxicated with the idea that history had changed from a history based on military and political conflict to one in which the ground rules were set by markets and technology. This was the infatuation with globalization as the great leveler and the abolisher of things like politics, war and international conflict. This kind of geo-economics was widely accepted in the early post-Cold War era.
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By Sohrab Ahmari, COMMENTARY

Bernard Lewis issued a startling prediction in 2010: Iran—the land of scowling ayatollahs and flag burnings—would abandon Islamism by the end of the decade, while Turkey—Washington’s stalwart Cold War ally—would turn away from the West and burrow deeper into its Muslim identity. Lewis is no longer with us, and there are still a few years left in his wager, but events in both countries are proving him remarkably prescient.

On Turkey, Lewis has already been vindicated. Witness the ballot-box triumph of Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development Party, or AKP. In the presidential contest over the weekend, Erdogan thumped his opponent, Muharrem Ince of the Republican People’s Party, 53% to 31%. A smattering of pro-Kurdish and secular candidates divided the remaining ballots. Erdogan’s AKP and its allies also locked a majority of seats in Parliament.
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By Martin Williams, CHANNEL 4 FACT CHECK  APRIL 4/18

President Trump has claimed that Iran is the world’s “leading state sponsor of terror”.

But is that fair?

Before he became president, Trump said the “world’s biggest funder of terrorism” was Saudi Arabia – not Iran. So is his latest claim is just political rhetoric?

There are no “right” or “wrong” answers here, because it depends how we interpret Trump’s claim. For instance, does “leading sponsor” mean the country that channels the most cash to terrorist groups? Or does it refer to the biggest strategic threat to America?
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T. Belman. A few months after Saudi Arabia pledged to stop funding Islamic extremism, a July 5/17 report in the UK found Saudi Arabia largest funder of extremism in UK,. Six months later FT reports Saudi Arabia struggles to check extremism in schools.

By MICHAEL BRENDAN DOUGHERTY NATIONAL REVIEW

On the Korean Peninsula, he does, changing America’s posture toward the totalitarian regime, to the dismay of our allies.

Sometimes you think about the cosmic roulette wheel. Or at least I do. Who could have predicted in 2013 that the next Republican president would almost certainly be unable to make a state visit to the United Kingdom but would meet with Kim Jong-un and refer to him as a man who “loves his people”? What were the odds?

Donald Trump promised change, and you can’t deny that change has come. At home, corporate taxes were slashed. Obamacare’s mandates have been altered beyond recognition. He quickly put Neil Gorsuch in a Supreme Court seat Obama had reserved for Merrick Garland. And of course, as we’ve seen this week, Trump is willing to change the patterns of enforcement at America’s border.

Abroad, he’s using authority long ceded by Congress to implement a series of trade measures against friend and rival alike. Canadian softwood lumber, steel — coming are levies on Chinese tech too.
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Strategic Culture Foundation

An activist protests near the meeting place for the conference of the Bilderberg Group meeting in Sitges, Spain, Thursday, June 3, 2010. The Bilderberg Group is an unofficial conference of around 130 invitation-only guests who are insiders in politics, banking, business, military and the media. The group’s meetings are held in secret and are closed to the public. (AP Photo/Manu Fernandez)

The beginning of the end of the Bilderberg/Soros vision is in sight. The Old Order will cling on, even to the last of its fingernails. The Bilderberg vision is the notion of multi-cultural, international cosmopolitanism that surpasses old-time nationalism; heralding the end of frontiers; and leading toward a US-led, ‘technocratic’, global economic and political governance. Its roots lie with figures such as James Burnham, an anti-Stalin, former Trotskyite, who, writing as early as 1941, advocated for the levers of financial and economic power being placedin the hands of a management class: an élite – which alone would be capable of running the contemporary state – thanks to this élite’s market and financial technical nous. It was, bluntly, a call for an expert, technocratic oligarchy.
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