The recent referendum for a “Free Kurdistan” in northern Iraq is another crucial link in a long chain of events that will further fracture and bleed the Middle East region. And caught in the middle is Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Many in the West are tired of Erdogan’s Ottoman revivalism, but somehow, he has outsmarted them up to now. It is said that he has dealt with opposition with an iron fist. Still, it is quite a feat to remain in power once the proponents of the “new Middle East” want you gone.
And the new Middle East is coming whether Erdogan (below) likes it or not. War is simmering in Turkey’s back yard. The second phase of the Arab Spring, the making of the new Middle East, has begun.
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If the Knesset and the government do not act immediately to end the Supreme Court’s escalating judicial coup, 10 years from now there won’t be a ceremony to mark 60 years of settlement.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had an applause line that should have brought the house down in his speech at Wednesday’s official ceremony celebrating 50 years of settlement in Judea and Samaria, the Jordan Valley and the Golan Heights.
Netanyahu was speaking before a crowd of thousands in Gush Etzion, which was destroyed by the Arab Legion in the War of Independence, and rebuilt by the children of its massacred defenders immediately after the area was liberated in the 1967 Six Day War.
Netanyahu pledged to the audience: “There will be no more uprooting of settlements in the Land of Israel.”
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By MARTIN SHERMAN
If Rabin had a crystal ball that allowed him to foresee the terrible trauma and tragedy the Oslo Agreements would cause, there is little doubt that he would have never agreed to its signature.
We have come to try and put an end to the hostilities, so that our children, our children’s children, will no longer experience the painful cost of war, violence and terror. We have come to secure their lives and to ease the sorrow and the painful memories of the past to hope and pray for peace. – Yitzhak Rabin at the signing ceremony of the Oslo I Accords, Washington, D.C. September 13, 1993.
This September marked the passing of 24 years since the signing of the Oslo Accords. Although little is left of the heady—the less charitable might say, “irresponsible”—optimism that accompanied the signing ceremony on the White House lawns on that fateful day in September 1993, the “two-states-for-two-peoples” format it forged, still – inexplicably—dominates the discourse as the sole principle upon which a resolution of the Israel-Palestinian conflict can be based.
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[MIL-EDPosting note: Confessing our Cliff Kincaid evaluation dilemma.We confess our bias.
At MIL-ED, collectively, we screen and evaluate approximately 2000 articles per day. We rate the source and we rate the content independent of the source.
We read Cliff Kincaid regularly; we read Cliff Kincaid thoroughly; we read Cliff Kincaid with a high degree of suspicion. When we assign a reliability score to Cliff Kincaid he consistently receives a rank of approximately 2/10. When we assign an evaluation of his content, he consistently scores 8, 9 or 10 out of 10.
Why this inconsistency? We confess our bias. Our initial reaction is no-no-no. However, he is factually correct and analytically perceptive. Thus, we are posting his materials without comment for your information.]
By Cliff Kincaid September 28, 2017
A reporter from Bloomberg called the other day about complaints that television producer Jerry Kenney and I had made years ago regarding the operations of Moscow-funded Russia Today (RT) television. Kenney challenged Obama’s Department of Justice to register RT as a foreign agent of influence in the U.S. I challenged the Federal Election Commission to sanction RT for interfering in the 2012 U.S. presidential election. The Bloomberg reporter was curious about the complaints because of the brouhaha that has now transpired over Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
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Maya was the Daughter of a high ranking Hamas Sheikh. Watch as Maya tells her riveting life story of suffering and redemption including her rescue through Yad L’Achim.
By Ted Belman
As you know, Mudar and I are working diligently to make our conference The Jordan Option, succeed. Everything is going fine. There is a lot of buzz and registrations are flowing in.
But there is a campaign to discredit the conference and both Mudar, and to a much lesser extent, myself. Accusations going both ways have resulted.
Caroline, citing Khaled as a “dear friend for 15 years”, did a major post on her FB page.
Caroline accepted what she was told by three unnamed sources that “Zahran is not a credible source. He is not a leader of an opposition movement. He doesn’t have an organization.”
As it happens she had previously written “I think the best way to compel Abdullah to behave responsibly, as behooves an ally in the war against jihadist terror, is to make clear to him that he isn’t the only option.”
Now she writes “My colleagues effectively told me that despite the fact that we could use an alternative to Abdullah, none exist today, at least none that are better than he.”
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Thrice fired but still loyal, Sam Nunberg says Trump is surrounding himself with people who don’t represent his ‘America First, Israel next’ base
WASHINGTON — Sam Nunberg has a “strange relationship” with Donald Trump. If anyone knows what it’s like to go through the wringer with America’s mercurial president, he does.
Currently an independent public affairs consultant based in Manhattan, Nunberg has endured three separate rounds of being hired and fired by Trump and was sued by him at one point — for $10 million — until the matter was settled amicably.
Today, he remains a strong supporter of the president, despite his disappointment with some personnel decisions and political maneuvering that he believes do not reflect the brand of politics that propelled Trump’s rise.
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America needs to form as broad an international coalition against Tehran as possible—and simultaneously to develop a strategy for the Middle East as a whole.
By Michael Doran AND pETYER rOUGH, MOSAIC
in the final years of his administration, President Barack Obama drastically reduced the aperture through which Washington viewed the Middle East. Identifying counterterrorism operations against the Islamic State as the top priority, he succumbed to a seductive vision: perhaps the Russians and the Iranians, America’s traditional adversaries, would partner with him to defeat Sunni radicalism.
Promising as it did to offer the United States a way to avoid costly troop commitments to the Middle East, this idea was as beguiling as it was wrongheaded. Obama’s pursuit of it led directly to the rise of the Russian-Iranian alliance and to a significant reduction of American influence in the Middle East.
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It is not the old fascist hate, although that exists, that led the AfD to surge in the elections. It is something much more urgent.
n the course of last year, the European Union has faced an emergency known as the so-called “populist wave”: Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, Marine Le Pen in France, Ernst Hofer in Austria, Brexit in the UK, AfD now in Germany.
The mainstream media repeats the mantra that behind this right-wing surge lies the xenophobic and fascist hate that has raised its head in Europe, citing Vladimir Putin with his hackers, Donald Trump and his tweets, and other children’s fairy tales. These are the real fake newsmongers.
Referendum results in overwhelming endorsement of split from Baghdad, after troops are sent into disputed areas
The result came after Iraq’s parliament authorised the prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, to send troops into areas disputed between Arabs and Kurds that were contentiously included in the ballot.
Euphoria on the streets of Erbil in recent days has been met with sharply increasing tension in the region, which is likely to escalate in the wake of the result.
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Kurds, Palestinian Arabs, Jews – do they all deserve a state? And did you know that the great Saladin was a Kurd?
There are over twenty Arab states throughout the Middle East and North Africa, but the world demands, in a chorus of barely disguised animosity towards Israel, that yet another Arab state be created within the mere forty miles separating the Mediterranean Sea and the River Jordan.
Remember, there has never existed in all recorded history an independent sovereign nation called Palestine – and certainly not an Arab one. The name ‘Palestine’ has always been that of a geographical territory, such as Siberia or Patagonia. It has never been a state.
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Sima Shine, Gallia Lindenstrauss, INSS Insight No. 974, September 27, 2017
After years of disagreement between Iran and Turkey, particularly regarding the war in Syria, there are many recent signs of an increase in cooperation between Tehran and Ankara. A range of developments on the ground, including the success of Iran and Russia in ensuring the continuation of the Assad regime; cooperation between the United States and the Kurds in the fight against the Islamic State; and concern about the consequences of Kurdish ambitions for independence, as well as Turkey’s decision to send armed forces to Syria to prevent this development have spurred the need for an Iranian-Turkish rapprochement and growing cooperation with Russia. This process, which is gaining momentum, does not serve the interests of Israel, and joins a range of issues that divide Jerusalem and Ankara: Turkey’s relations with Hamas, Turkish incitement against Israel during the escalation of tension around the Temple Mount, Turkey’s weak relations with Egypt, and its stance vis-à-vis Qatar in the crisis among Sunni Arab countries.>/p>
We are short $3000 to cover the costs of this conference.
Please DONATE what you can to put us over the top.
If you plan to donate $500 or more and want a US or Canadian tax deductible receipt, kindly advise be by email (tbelman3@gmail.com) of your intentions and I will advise where to do it.
What makes this conference special is that:
This event is a full day conference dedicated to presenting the ultimate alternate solution of the Arab/Jewish conflict including both the pros and the cons.
The beauty of the solution is that it doesn’t depend on the consent or agreement of the PA or King Abdullah.
A stellar group of speakers has been assembled, including leading journalists and academics, Knesset Members, Palestinians and a number of Arabs who are part of the Jordan Opposition Coalition and who hope to be part of the next government in Jordan.
In essence this solution takes its inspiration from the Feisal/Weizmann agreement of 1918. It calls for Jordan to be the Arab state and Israel to the Jordan River, to be the state of the Jews. And it calls for complete normalization between the two and considerable economic cooperation.
In the past three weeks there have been serious efforts to smear Mudar Zahran and the conference as evidenced by this post.
Caroline Glick attacks Mudar Zahran. Zahran defends himself.
But we think we have put that effort to an end. Time will tell.
In any event the list of speakers has been flushed out and the registrations are coming in.
PLEASE MAKE A CONTRIBUTION TO SUPPORT THIS GREAT CONFERENCE AND SOLUTION
Moscow says while it supports Kurdish national ambitions, Iraq’s territorial integrity must be preserved
Russia warned Iraqi and Kurdish leaders on Wednesday to refrain from actions that could destabilize the Middle East following the independence referendum in Iraqi Kurdistan.
In a statement, the Russian foreign ministry said that while it supports the Kurds’ national aspirations, it prefers maintaining Iraq’s territorial integrity and any solution to the dispute should be solved within a unified Iraqi state.
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Since 2015, Britain has been one election away from having an antisemitic prime minister.
Since 2015, Britain has been one election away from having an antisemitic prime minister backed by antisemitic voters. If current trends in the Democratic Party continue, in the not-so-distant future, the United States might be in the same position.
Two years ago, Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader of Britain’s main opposition Labor Party. That officially put an end to Tony Blair’s alignment of the Labor Party with the political center in Britain, both in economic and in foreign affairs.
Corbyn is an antisemite. He refers to Hezbollah and Hamas – two terrorist groups that openly support the genocide of world Jewry and the annihilation of the Jewish state – as “our friends.” He has shared stages with Hamas terrorists and Holocaust- deniers. Since his ascension to leadership of the Labor Party, he has overseen the mainstreaming of antisemitic actions and rhetoric by his party members and supporters.
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The attack came as Trump’s envoy is in the country trying to push forward the US administration’s diplomatic initiative.
As envoy Jason Greenblatt’s already enormously difficult task of creating an atmosphere conducive to Israeli-Palestinian negotiations just got even more difficult on Tuesday with the terrorist attack in Har Adar that left three Israelis dead.
The attack came as Greenblatt is in the country trying to push forward the US administration’s diplomatic initiative, an initiative based not on top-down negotiating breakthroughs, but rather bottom-up improvement of the atmosphere.
And the terrorist from Beit Surik just threw a huge wrench in the works.
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Regardless who is to blame for the present refugee crisis, the time has come for the international community to treat all refugees the same.
By Rachel Avraham, JPOST
Things are deteriorating by the day in Myanmar, following the situation in Rakhine State being declared a “textbook example of ethnic cleansing.” UN medics operating in Bangladesh have documented evidence of Myanmar soldiers raping hundreds of Rohingya women. Doctors operating in Bangladesh reported that the evidence includes bite marks, beatings, signs that weapons were used to penetrate the women, and even cut genitals. In one horrific case, a Rohingya woman was gang raped by at least seven soldiers and arrived in Bangladesh “extremely weak and traumatized. She said she struggled to make it to the clinic. She had a laceration on the vagina.”
However, while the international community is greatly disturbed by the plight of the Muslim Rohingya minority, they are devoting very little attention to that of the Rohingya Hindus in Myanmar, which is just as atrocious.
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Founder of HaYovel says agreeing with “replacement theology” is disagreeing with God.
By Benjamin Glatt, JPOST SEPTEMBER 26, 2017
Christians around the world must stop trying to proselytize Jews, said the founder of a nonprofit which brings thousands of Christian volunteers to help Jewish farmers in Judea and Samaria.
Just days before the High Holy Day of Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar, Tommy Waller sent out a video saying that Christian-Jewish relations have changed, and they must continue to change.
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The state’s lawyer tells the High Court that it shouldn’t interfere in Israel’s foreign relations
A Rohingya Muslim woman, who crossed over from Myanmar into Bangladesh, wipes her sweat as she waits to receive aid near Balukhali refugee camp, Bangladesh, September 25, 2017.Dar Yasin/AP
The state has not said that it will stop selling weapons to the military junta in Myanmar, despite recent reports and United Nations data on massacres the country’s military has perpetrated against the Rohingya minority, as well as systematic rape and expulsions.
Responding on Monday to a petition in the High Court of Justice from human-rights activists demanding an end to the arms sales, Shosh Shmueli, representing the state, said the court should not interfere in Israel’s foreign relations. That was a repetition of the preliminary response issued in March by the Defense Ministry, according to which the court had no standing in the “purely diplomatic” matter.
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