DEBKA

Russian-Syrian success in the high-stakes Idlib offensive would give Tehran a major victory and renewed footing in Syria. This would torpedo the US-Israeli campaign to drive the Iranians out.

After a series of aerial bombardments, the Russian-Syrian-Iranian offensive to gain control of Idlib, the last rebel stronghold in Syria, is ready to go, having meanwhile gained the valuable increment of Hizballah fighters. After returning home from the Syrian battlefields, these Lebanese Shiite fighters were given fresh orders over the weekend to return to Idlib and Hama.

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America can find another way to support legitimate humanitarian aid to Palestinian civilians, while insisting on reform of their anti-Israel, anti-peace, anti-American educational system.

By Eric J Mandel, JPOST

Palestinians pass by the gate of an UNRWA-run school in Nablus in the West Bank August 13, 2018. (photo credit: ABED OMAR QUSINI/REUTERS)

Hady Amr, former Obama State Department deputy special envoy for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, wrote in The Hill that the administration’s defunding of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) undermines a “cornerstone of America’s support for stability in the Middle East and flagship of our values to provide for the most vulnerable… UNRWA is so in-sync with our (American) values that American citizens directly donate millions of dollars to UNRWA.”

While it is true that UNRWA provides important health services to Palestinian civilians, Amr chooses not to comment about the State Department designated Hamas group’s infiltration of UNRWA facilities in Gaza, or UNRWA teachers glorifying terrorism, or UNRWA refusing to take off its rolls the two million Palestinians living as full citizens of Jordan. He also ignored a 2013 UN audit that found UNRWA vulnerable to “misappropriation, graft and corruption,” while a Newsweek op-ed in 2016 asked, “Why Are American’s Paying for (UNRWA) Antisemitic Textbooks?”
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Trump’s national security adviser vows to protect US and allies ‘by any means necessary’ from prosecution at The Hague, says ‘illegitimate, dangerous’ court is ‘already dead to us’

By TOI STAFF and AGENCIES

The United States on Monday warned the International Criminal Court against prosecution of US or Israeli officials for alleged war crimes in the Middle East.

White House National Security Adviser John Bolton called the Hague-based rights body “unaccountable” and “outright dangerous” to the United States, Israel and other allies, and said any probe of US service members would be “an utterly unfounded, unjustifiable investigation.”

In the same speech, Bolton confirmed that the US is closing the PLO’s office in Washington, DC.
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U.S. Education Department decides to adopt international definition of antisemitism • Decision praised by Zionist Organization of America • Definition recognizes that Jew-hatred can be camouflaged as anti-Israelism or anti-Zionism, says ZOA.

Israel Hayom Staff

In a blow to BDS, the U.S. Education Department has adopted the international definition antisemitism Photo: Getty Images

The U.S. Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights has decided to adopt the international definition of anti-Semitism, which defines Judaism not only as a religion but also an ethnicity and includes holding Jews responsible for Israel’s actions as a form of antisemitism, Israel Hayom learned Wednesday.
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The frequency of fires has dropped, allowing authorities to assess damage • Nature reserves near Gaza have lost up to 78% of plant life, animal populations decimated • Nature and Parks Authority chief scientist: Area will never return to what it was.

By Nikki Guttman, ISRAEL HAYOM

The number of incendiary kites and balloons being sent by Palestinians over the Gaza border and causing fires in Israel has fallen in recent weeks, enabling the Israel Nature and Parks Authority to begin assessing the ecological and financial damage to Israeli parks and nature reserves.

Authorities are also working on a plan to minimize the damage if the arson terrorism campaign resumes next summer.
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Iran has been fighting Kurdish opposition for years and in Iran there have been increasing clashes.

BY Seth J Frantzman, JERUSALEM POST

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

By Yochanan Visser, INN

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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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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