T. Belman. This is an anti Israel site but the article sheds some insights to what’s at play in Syria.

The Kurds aren’t playing Damascus like a fiddle just yet, but they’re coming dangerously close.

By Andrew Korybko, GLOBAL RESEARCH

[..]

Spheres Of Influence

That, with all due respect to Damascus, is a risky supposition to make (to help the Kurds)  because it overlooks the nuances of the Russian-Turkish Strategic Partnership and Ankara’s legitimate claims about fighting Kurdish terrorists, which everyone should be reminded were passively approved by Moscow withdrawing its military forces from Afrin and de-facto greenlighting the “Operation Olive Branch”. Turkey does not intend to “annex” any part of Syria like some misleading infowar voices claim but it admittedly wants to establish a sphere of influence within the country by replacing the PYD-YPG with pro-Turkish Kurds and Arabas afterwards. They’re not the only one gaming to set up their own ‘fiefdom’ in the country, though, since the Kurdish “federalists” themselves already allowed 2000 US troops to deploy to 10 bases in the agriculturally and energy-rich northeastern one-third of Syria.
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By Jeff Crouere, CFP

On Friday, President Trump addressed the largest crowd of conservative activists in the history of CPAC. It was another memorable Trump speech, listing his many accomplishments and encouraging the crowd to support Republican candidates in the mid-term elections. For 80 minutes, the President discussed an array of issues such as tax cuts, judicial appointments, immigration and the strong economy.
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By Prof. Paul Eidelberg

Let’s begin with a brief definition of moral relativism and show how it affected Supreme Court rulings in the United States as well as in Israel.

Moral relativism is a university-bred doctrine which has dominated the social sciences and the humanities for many decades. Its clearest definition appears in the work of the seventeenth-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes.  In his famousLeviathan, Hobbes writes:

Whatever is the object of any man’s appetite or desire, that is it which he for his part calleth good; and the object of his hate or aversion, evil … For these words of good [and] evil … are ever used with relation to the person that useth them: there being nothing simply and absolutely so, where there is no commonwealth.

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By David Solway, AMERICAN THINKER

Over half a century after the “Red Scare,” playwright and memoirist Lillian Hellman, whose name is often coupled with her adversary Senator Joe McCarthy, seems to have emerged relatively unscathed in the court of elite progressivist opinion despite the exposure of her manifold fabrications and deceptions.  The liar, it appears, is the incarnation of a higher truth.  Such is the power of the press and the cultural salience of left-wing attitudes in America.

Hellman, a passionate supporter of the Soviet Union even when Stalin’s crimes had been widely publicized, was subpoenaed before the House Un-American Activities Committee by McCarthy and was subsequently lionized by the media, the commentariat, and the entertainment industry from the 1950s to the present for refusing to name names.  She was elevated to the plinth of truth and courage while McCarthy was effectively consigned to the Eighth Circle of the Inferno as an evil counselor and a sower of discord.

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(A) AN APPEAL – PLEASE HELP “LEVEL THE PLAYING FIELD”

In the coming weeks, the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS)) will be conducting an ongoing appeal for funding to sustain and expand its ongoing activities – including the publication of the weekly INTO THE FRAY column, the NewsMax blog, UNDERSTANDING ISRAEL, our video production series, and our televised interviews and debates.

IISS has an ambitious program for the future – with only the lack of resources preventing its implementation. Please remember, we are engaged in an ideo-intellectual battle with adversaries that far-outstrip us in terms of physical and financial resources—and we need the support of like-minded benefactors to help “level the playing field”.

In ensuing posts, we will be presenting the various aspects of IISS’s operations and objectives, underscoring why it is a unique ideo-intellectual enterprise in Israel’s political landscape, and how its message is crucial for Israel’s long-term survival as the nation-state of the Jewish people.

In the meantime, for those of you who are already familiar with IISS activities and identify with IISS aims, please make your donation (tax-deductible in the US) today.

Kindly click here to make your donation by PayPal, check, or wire transfer.
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NEWSMAX

Friction between U.S. President Donald Trump and two top aides, the National Security Adviser and the Chief of Staff, has grown to a point that either or both might quit soon, four senior administration officials said.

Both H.R. McMaster and John Kelly are military men considered by U.S. political observers as moderating influences on the president by imposing a routine on the White House. They have also convinced Trump of the importance of international alliances, particularly NATO, which he has criticized as not equally sharing its burdens with the United States.

However, all the officials were quick to add that the tensions could blow over, at least for now, as have previous episodes of discord between the president and other top officials who have fallen out of favor, including Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
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by Linda Goudsmit, PUNDICITY

The Humanitarian Hoax is a deliberate and deceitful tactic of presenting a destructive policy as altruistic. The humanitarian huckster presents himself as a compassionate advocate when in fact he is the disguised enemy.

The ideological strivings of our Founding Fathers were rooted in freedom, liberty, limited government, and the separation of church and state. They sought to create a more perfect union – a society of individuals cooperating by mutual consent. Psychiatrist Lyle Rossiter’s stunning book The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness details America’s extraordinary achievement of ordered liberty, how its infrastructure complements the nature of man, and how the collectivist liberal narrative is pathologically antithetical to ordered liberty.

The ideological moorings of ordered liberty require consensus on what is real. This is no small thing. Language is based on consensus of what is real. Laws are based on consensus of what is real. Without agreement on what is real there is no societal order only chaos.
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5 minute video

Minister Ayelet Shaked on appointment of new judges: The new Supreme Court echoes legal concepts that have not been heard for a long time.

By Justice Min. Ayelet Shaked, INN

Exactly a year ago to this day, I began the process of changing the face of the Supreme Court by appointing four new judges. This evening the move concludes with the appointment of two additional judges. These appointments are the additional storey in the edifice of the new Supreme Court.

The new Supreme Court is good news for Israeli democracy. It restores the judiciary to its so important role: Interpreting the norms set by the legislative branch and not replacing it.
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The deep state is waging war on Trump and Netanyahu.

By Daniel Greenfield, FPM

In a year and a few months, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will have spent more time at the helm of the Israeli government than any other man. The other man is David Ben-Gurion, the Socialist leader who repressed Zionist nationalist movements in Israel by fiat, by law and, as in the Altalena, by murder.

That factoid may not matter much to most people, even most Israelis, but it matters a great deal to the remnants of Ben-Gurion’s regime, the leftists who don’t win elections, but do control the government. Until ’77, Israel’s Prime Ministers came from the Labor Party. The last Labor Prime Minister left office in 2001. It’s not just that Netanyahu is eclipsing Ben-Gurion, but that Labor has become irrelevant.
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South Carolina senator said that UNIFIL has been a “miserable failure” in preventing terrorism from southern Lebanon.

BY HERB KEINON, JPOST

NRT24

With a growing split between the Iraqi government and the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) since a failed secession attempt, the Pentagon has announced that they are not including any funding in their budget to pay for Kurdish peshmerga salaries anymore.

Pentagon Not Budgeting Paying Kurdish Peshmerga Salaries

US stopped paying Kurdish paramilitaries in September.
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By Evan Sayet, TOWNHALL

Leftist friends (as well as many ardent #NeverTrumpers) constantly ask me if I’m not bothered by Donald Trump’s lack of decorum. They ask if I don’t think his tweets are “beneath the dignity of the office.”

Here’s my answer:

Right-thinking people have tried dignity.  There could not have been a man of more quiet dignity than George W. Bush as he suffered the outrageous lies and politically motivated hatreds that undermined his presidency.

We tried statesmanship. Could there be another human being on this earth who so desperately prized “collegiality” as Ronald Reagan?

We tried propriety – has there ever been a nicer, respectful and decent human being than Mitt Romney?

And the results were always the same. This is because, while we were playing by the rules of dignity, collegiality and propriety, the Left has been, for the past 60 years, engaged in a knife fight where the only rules are those of Saul Alinsky.
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By Prof. Paul Eidelberg

Back in September 1976, I asked Defense Minister Shimon Peres’ political adviser, Asher Ben-Natan, “What is Israel’s major problem?” He replied: “We can’t lie as well as the Arabs.”

Mr. Ben-Natan’s reply actually reveals the basic cause of Israel’s malaise: the failure or inability of Israel’s ruling elites to tell the truth about the one issue on which Arabs allegedly excel Jews, namely, mendacity. But this means that, year after year, Israel’s ruling elites have been deceiving the public, indeed, the free world, about the nature of the Israel-Arab conflict.

The truth is that peaceful coexistence between Jews and Arabs is impossible so long as Arabs remain Arabs, steeped in Islam’s 1,400-year ethos of Jihad – homicide.
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   By: Z. Harel*, MEMRI

Introduction

For years, Jordan has been in economic crisis, with a budget deficit and a large public debt. Most of the revenue for the budget comes from aid in the form of grants from its allies, primarily the U.S. and Saudi Arabia, but these have been reduced in recent years. As part of reforms that Jordan is carrying out under pressure from the IMF, in January 2018 the government passed a series of austerity measures that included cuts in state spending. Under a new budget, fast-tracked and passed by the parliament on December 31, 2017,[1] the subsidy for flour was eliminated, leading to a 65% to100% rise in the price of bread.[2]Additionally, sales tax was raised 6% to 10% on 160 goods and services, and a 4% to 5% sales tax was levied on products that had previously not been taxed.[3] In early February, fuel and electricity also went up, as did taxes on public transportation.[4]
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