DEBKA

The Turkish army and its surrogates took control on Sunday March 18 of the Kurdish Afrin City in northern Syria, as some 200,000 Kurds fled the town of a million inhabitants. It is unclear what happened to the Kurdish YPG militia holding the town against the Turkish invaders and their local surrogate, the “Free Syrian Army. Some say they withdrew and mingled among the constant stream of refugees fleeing north towards areas under Syrian military control; others that the YPG is regrouping for a counter-offensive. But meanwhile, Turkish bulldozers knocked over the statue of a Kurdish hero in Afrin town center and surrounding buildings were arrayed with Turkish flags.

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by Geoffrey Clarfield, NER

In George Orwell’s dystopia, written during WWII he imagines a totalitarian future where history is inverted and language is perverted. This is what we now mean by “politically correct speech.” And so we must draw inspiration from someone, who in 1984, took on the false and politically correct narrative that Israel is an occupier of Arab land where Arabs have supposedly lived in the land of Israel, since “time immemorial.”

In 1984, a successful and well-known female American journalist, who had specialized in reporting the Israeli-Arab conflict, published a book called From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict over Palestine. The journalist in question was Joan Peters, (who recently passed away). Peters had begun her career in the Middle East as a sympathizer with the Arabs of Palestine. However, the more she learned, the more she began to question the dominant anti-Israeli narrative that she had absorbed in the Arab World and she began to change her opinion. This caused her to become her own historian and to delve into the British archives for the period of the Mandate for Palestine, from 1922 to 1948.

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By Cathy Burke, NEWSMAX   

Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., will do “whatever it takes” — including filibuster — to block President Donald Trump’s nominations of CIA Director Mike Pompeo as secretary of state and CIA Deputy Director Gina Haspel to the top post of the agency.

Sen. Paul lashed out at the picks on CNN’s “State of the Union” and CBS News’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday.

“You really want a diplomat to be in charge of the State Department, not someone who is advocating for war,” he told “Face the Nation” about Pompeo’s nomination as the nation’s top diplomat.
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By Abdul Raham Al-Rashed , ARAB NEWS

Before the Saudi crown prince meets the US president on Monday, Europe rushes to reach a conclusion that appears to restrict Iran but, in fact, aims to stop the US attempt to foil the Iran nuclear deal.

The arrival of Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Washington, preceded a week ago by the departure of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, increases Europe’s fear of Washington’s determination to impose sanctions on Iran, which could eventually lead to foiling the deal.

The resolution signed in 2015 by the Iranian regime and the P5+1 (the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council plus Germany) to endorse the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action has caused the chaos we see today.

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T. Belman. I recently wrote that the US should cut a deal with Russia but I was not referring to the deal laid out here. The author suggests the goals of the US are containment of Damascus and Tehran and the maintenance of the Iran Deal. I think that Trump not be satisfied with that.  He will kill the Iran Deal and push Iran out of Syria. The US can stay ensconced east of the Euphrates River where 30% of Syria lies. It is also the most fertile land in Syria and has the most of her oil. If the US draws a red line here. No one will challenge them.

Trump will kill the Iran deal. then he will have to do something to prevent Iran from getting the bomb as he has promised. Guess what that might be. Of coarse, Israel is on board. Furthermore, Saudi Arabia and Israel want Hezbollah out of Lebanon. What kind of stability would there be if Hezbollah was allowed to keep their 150,000 missiles? Stay tuned. Things are about to heat up.

To Beat the Russians, Let Them Win

“We will put ‘made in Israel’ on countless screens around the world.”

BY Lahav Harkov, JPOST     DECEMBER 16, 2012

Anyone who’s been to Dubrovnik in Croatia in recent years can see how the HBO series Game of Thrones, part of which was filmed there, has impacted the city.

Dubrovnik’s Old City, its central tourist attraction, is filled with themed souvenir shops, and has a thriving cottage industry of Game of Thrones tours, where visitors can follow along with Cersei’s walk of shame, or sit on the balcony of the castle where Joffrey’s wedding was filmed, or see the site of the fight between The Mountain and Oberyn Martell. Tourism has gone up so much in Dubrovnik that the city has decided to cap the number of people who can enter each day.

Now imagine if the Game of Thrones effect came to Jerusalem, or if James Bond or Ethan Hunt of Mission: Impossible were filmed dashing from rooftop to rooftop in Acre.
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By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT and MAGGIE HABERMAN, NYT

Why Israeli Filmmakers Are Opting for Hollywood. The bright lights of Hollywood have proved irresistible for a group of acclaimed young directors.

By Neta Alexander, HAARETZ

NEW YORK — With the global success of Israeli cinema in recent years, a brain drain of Israeli filmmakers was all but inevitable. And indeed, the coming year will see an impressive number of Israeli directors making their international debut with A-list Hollywood stars (including Ellen Page and Kate Mara), or productions by prominent figures in cinema, like the Oscar-winning director Alejandro González Iñárritu or comedian Amy Poehler.

The main force driving Israeli filmmakers to try the craft abroad seems to be money more than politics: Its hard to argue with the fact that in Israel more and more mice want their bite of the budgetary cheese. In recent years, dozens of feature length films are produced annually in Israel, including low-budget guerrilla productions with little-to-no support from Israeli film funds. As it is close to impossible to produce a film without the help of one these funds, one can easily understand why young directors are trying to make their artistic way outside of Israel, in search of alternative resources.

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By John Hannah, FOREIGN POLICY

When U.S. President Donald Trump welcomes Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to the White House later this month, there will be no shortage of urgent issues to discuss — from the crown prince’s ambitious modernization agenda to joint efforts against Iranian aggression. But near the top of the president’s priorities should also be securing the crown prince’s commitment to lead the ideological war against the scourge of violent jihadism.

Nearly two decades after 9/11, America’s greatest failure in the war on terrorism has almost certainly been its inability to delegitimize the extremist ideas fueling groups like al Qaeda and the Islamic State. The United States has killed tens of thousands of fighters, disrupted revenue streams, and shuttered social media accounts. What it hasn’t done effectively is discredit the hate-filled doctrine that continues to draw a steady stream of recruits to the terrorist cause — leaving it to confront this unsettling reality: By an order of magnitude, al Qaeda in 2018 enjoys a larger presence in more countries across Africa, the Middle East, and Asia than it did the day the Twin Towers were felled.

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By Andrew C. McCarthy, NATIONAL REVIEW

Gates was charged with $100 million in financial crimes — and pled guilty to two minor offenses, one of them highly questionable.

These columns have many times observed Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s failure to set limits on Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. To trigger the appointment of a special counsel, federal regulations require the Justice Department to identify the crimes that warrant investigation and prosecution — crimes that the Justice Department is too conflicted to investigate in the normal course; crimes that become the parameters of the special counsel’s jurisdiction.

Rosenstein, instead, put the cart before the horse: Mueller was invited to conduct a fishing expedition, a boundless quest to hunt for undiscovered crimes, rather than an investigation and prosecution of known crimes.

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BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 769, March 16, 2018

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Modern-day anti-Semites channel their Jew-hatred into the more politically correct avenue of so-called anti-Zionism. By conflating Zionism with racism and alleged human rights abuses, they attempt to delegitimize the very existence of the state of Israel. But their indignation, no matter how persistently or how shrilly it is expressed, cannot alter the legitimacy of the Jews’ return to their ancestral homeland. The reborn state of Israel has effectively settled the matter of the “Jewish Question.”

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The war is becoming a battle against the Russian-backed Iranian axis in Syria, with US Special Forces and UK soldiers deployed in the area,

By Yochanan Visser, INN

Watching unfolding events in Syria over the past week one could be reminded of a famous ancient Midrash by Rabbi Yitzchak which predicted events prior to the redemption of the world.

“The kings of the nations of the world will provoke each other. The king of Persia (today’s ‘Iran’) will threaten the king of Arabia (today called ‘Saudi Arabia’) and because of this the king of Arabia will go to the king of Edom (Edom refers to the Christian world i.e. Europe and the USA) for advice,” Rabbi Yitzchak said almost 2,000 years ago.

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By Osama Al Sharif, AL MONITOR

Jordan is keeping a close eye on the situation in Syria’s Eastern Ghouta amid growing fears that the Syrian regime’s next move will be against the southern province of Daraa along the kingdom’s borders. On March 6, Foreign Minister Ayman Safadi called for an immediate cease-fire in Eastern Ghouta and an end to the suffering of the Syrian people.

The UN Security Council has failed to implement a resolution adopted Feb. 24 to impose a truce throughout Syria. On March 12, the United States submitted a new draft resolution to council members calling for an immediate 30-day cease-fire in the capital of Damascus and the suburbs of Eastern Ghouta.
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By Shneor Shapira, WOMEN IN GREEN

[in Issue 637 of the journal Olam Katan (to Parashat Tetzaveh):]

To date the government in Judea and Samaria is under the command of the OC Central Command. The applicable laws are a confused mixture of Israeli, Jordanian, British and even Turkish laws. For example, while Israeli tax laws are fully applicable, and residents of Judea and Samaria pay taxes like all other Israeli citizens, the Labor Law does not apply fully in Judea and Samaria. Israeli law prevents the dismissal of pregnant women? Not in Judea and Samaria, and this is only one example.

The Basic Law on the Referendum, enacted in 2014, states that in order to evacuate settlers from an area where Israeli law applies, the government must reach an agreement with the Palestinians, approve the arrangement in the government and the Knesset, and hold a referendum. The evacuation of Judea and Samaria may take place in the same format as the expulsion of Gush Katif in a political grab, and in recent years, after many years of establishing a hold on Judea and Samaria, The discourse on the right has changed. The voices calling for the annexation and application of Israeli law in one way or another are increasing. There is Bennett’s plan, and there are plans by Uri Ariel and the late Rabbi Benny Elon, and recently the Likud Central Committee has ratified a clause in the party constitution that seeks to impose sovereignty over Judea and Samaria.

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Usually, it’s the fate of a city’s impoverished areas that is uncertain. In the case of Jerusalem, a lease agreement means that over 1,000 acres of prime real estate will revert to the ownership of various churches, leaving homeowners with nothing.

By Nadav Shragai, ISRAEL HAYOM

Sometimes, a bill is enough to shake up the system, even without the legislative process being completed and it becoming law. This is what happened with a bill authored by Kulanu MK Rachel Azaria, designed to solve a crisis surrounding church-owned lands in Jerusalem. The bill was frozen before it could be presented to the Ministerial Committee for Legislation but wound up serving as a kind of loaded gun trained on everyone involved.

The government, which for years ignored the distress of thousands of Jerusalem residents who were living under the threat of evacuation because their homes were built on land the church leased to the Jewish National Fund realized that a) it could no longer ignore the legal reality that when the lease is up – 17 years from today, in some cases – the land and the buildings will revert to church ownership, and b) that the sale of some of the leased land to private developers complicates the residents’ situation still further. At least according to Azaria, some of these developers are demanding that the residents pay them hundreds of thousands of shekels.
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Donald Trump’s staff shakeup is good for hawks—and terrible for Iran

By Matthew Continetti, FREE BEACON

Mike Pompeo / Getty Images

Almost immediately after the news broke that President Trump intends to replace Secretary of State Rex Tillerson with CIA director Mike Pompeo, media figures speculated that the decision was about Russia. The argument went like this: Tillerson was fired because he had recently criticized the Russian government for its attack using a nerve agent on a former spy living in the United Kingdom. He thereby endangered détente with Russian president Vladimir Putin and so, the critics said, Trump sacked him.
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