DEBKA

In readiness for a prospective showdown for control of southeast Syria, US Special Forces have set up a forward base at Al-Zukf in the Syrian Desert, DEBKAfile’s military and intelligence sources report. The location is 70km northwest of the Syrian-Iraqi-Jordanian border triangle and the Al Tanf crossing, which is controlled by US, Western allied and Jordanian special forces, together with a US-trained Syrian rebel unit, which calls itself the Revolutionary Commando.
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Ignoring security challenges, Jordan is denouncing Israel for its own political ends. Some of the hostility goes beyond mere words.

By Noah Beck, INN

Jordan, a country that has had a formal peace treaty with Israel since 1994, has seen an uptick in anti-Israel hostility.

Last month, Jordan condemned the killing of a Jordanian-Palestinian attacker who was filmed stabbing an Israeli policeman multiple times before he was shot, calling it “a heinous crime.” In September, Israeli police killed a Jordanian tourist who attacked with a knife. Jordan described this act of self-defense as a premeditated and “barbaric act of the army of the Israeli occupation.”

Israeli analysts disagree whether Jordan’s rhetoric is a cause for concern.
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Defense minister says Israel’s relations with moderate Arab states must not be contingent on Palestinian statehood, reverses concerns about Saudi arms deal

By Marissa Newman, TOI

Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman on Monday said the diplomatic fallout between several Arab states and Qatar had created opportunities for Israel to collaborate with others in the region to combat terrorism.

Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the UAE, Egypt, Yemen and the Maldives all announced they were cutting ties to Qatar and booting the country from an Arab coalition fighting in Yemen early Monday on allegations of supporting terrorism and destabilizing the region, amid a deepening fissure.
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By Zvi Bar’el, HAARETZ

The sudden breaking of diplomatic ties between Qatar and its neighbors Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and Egypt places a serious dilemma at the U.S. president’s doorstep. Only three weeks ago, at a Gulf summit in Riyadh attended by Donald Trump on his first state visit, his people lavished praise on Qatar. Earlier, his defense secretary, James Mattis, declared that relations between Washington and Doha were good and would only get better.

Trump and his administration were pleased with the show of unity organized by the Saudis, who a year earlier had established the “Sunni coalition” designed to block Iran’s influence in the Middle East and combat terror. Qatar was a member of this coalition before Monday’s great rift. The question now is whether the Saudis will want to leverage the huge investments they promised Trump – more than $300 billion for arms purchases and $40 billion for investing in U.S. infrastructure – to demand that Washington follow suit and add Qatar to its list of states supporting terror.
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By Daniel Greenfield

Islam is peaceful. Just ask Rafiqi Islam, a loving husband, who told his wife that he had a present for her, blindfolded her to make it a surprise and then cut off her fingers. Then the rest of the Islam family mopped up the blood, while Mr. Islam threw her fingers into the trash, and after a few hours took her to the hospital where they warned her to tell the doctors that she had an accident.

The proximate cause of this event was that Mrs. Islam wanted to continue her education and Mr. Islam being a good Emirati Muslim was not so fond of the idea.

This is the sort of thing that Mr. Islam does from time to time. Diners in London got a surprise from Mr. Islam, three of him, who began stabbing and slashing their way through some trendy nightspots. The blindfold had been slapped on them by their own government and their own media.
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Islamic terrorism has become routine, but the West fails to understand its roots – Western intellectuals ignore the human longing for a life filled with faith, content, and ideals, whether good or bad.

By Rabbi Eliezer Melamed, INN

Islamic Terrorism
The rise of terror in Europe raises the need to speak about the social and religious circumstances which bring about these horrific attacks.

The Growing Tension between the West and Muslims

There was nothing new about the terrorist attacks in London. For years, Muslim terrorists have murdered hundreds and thousands of people every month. They murder members of other religions, and moreover – members of rival factions in Islam. The number of murdered people is steadily increasing, and is spreading to other countries.

Nevertheless, the leaders of the powerful countries in the West, despite the shock, continue business as usual. They think these are simply frustrated, emotionally disturbed people who are unemployed, or an oppressed “people” demanding its “rights” from the Jews who conquered their homeland. They ignore the sheer hatred that the Muslims openly express – towards the West in general, and Israel in particular.
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– But Rather Believers And Idealists Who Commit Horrific Murders For A Cause And Sacrifice Their Lives For A Utopian Future: A World Ruled By Their Faith

By: Yigal Carmon, MEMRI

Just like Barack Obama, Francois Hollande and David Cameron, who denied that the jihadi bombings in the West were in any way connected to religion, Donald Trump and Theresa May now also insist on mischaracterizing the jihadi phenomenon, calling the jihadis by different names such as “evil losers” (Trump) and “sick cowards” (May).

During his campaign Trump spoke in different terms (“radical Islamic terrorism”) – but since then he has evidently adopted the approach favored by the other Western leaders, who consider any reference to the religious roots of terror as “unhelpful.” Like them, he is apparently motivated by the understandable need to avoid offending 1.4 billion Muslims.
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By Vic Rosenthal

I felt sorry and sad when I saw the 16-year old Arab girl lying in the road after she was shot. She was someone’s daughter and she could have had a life. She stabbed a soldier getting off a bus at Mevo Dotan in Samaria and tried to stab another.

After she was shot, the soldiers called for medical assistance. Before it arrived, one or two of the soldiers or civilians present cursed her, told her to die and called her a particularly offensive name in Arabic (video here). She received first aid, and was evacuated to a hospital where she later died.
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As European NATO members confront rampant materiel shortages, officials acknowledge Trump has a point in calling for more military spending

By Anton Troianovski in Berlin and Robert Wall in London, WSJ

A Leopard tank and Tiger helicopter of the German Armed Forces participating in military exercises in October near Bergen, Germany. Photo: Alexander Koerner/Getty Images

Soldiers in Germany’s Light Infantry Battalion 413 near the Baltic Sea coast complained last year that they didn’t have enough sniper rifles or antitank weapons or the right kind of vehicles.

During exercises, they told a parliamentary ombudsman, their unit didn’t have the munitions to simulate battle. Instead, they were told to imagine the bangs.

Across Europe, similar shortfalls riddle land, sea, air and cyber forces following years of defense cutbacks.
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Striving for Land Corridor From Tehran to Beirut

By Amos Harel. HAARETZ

By Linda Goudsmit

European societies lead by left-wing liberal globalist leaders (the hare) are bragging about their tolerance, virtue, humanity, as they continue the mass importation of Muslim immigrants with cultural norms hostile to their own. The Europeans (the forest animals) are excited about the race and support their leaders   by welcoming the hostile immigrants to their forest. The Europeans believe in the superior abilities of their leaders and laugh with derision at the idea that the immigrants (tortoise) could possibly pose a threat.
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The Jordanian Opposition Coalition

The Jordanian Opposition Coalition (JOC) Office of the National Director of Intelligence (ONDI)

Jordan‘s Shadow Government

Summary: Jordan’s king has deep problems with Saudi Arabia because of its push to ban and exterminate the Muslim Brotherhood and its willingness to establish peace with Israel prior to the establishment of a Palestinian state. The king’s vision for peace is based on the 2002 peace initiative of a two-state based on 1967 borders. That initiative was launched by Saudi Arabia but is no longer supported by the current Saudi king, Salman Ben Abdel Azeez, or his son Mohammad Ben Salman.

The king’s drift with the Saudi royal family became most visible in the recent Muslim-American Summit in Riyadh, which President Trump had attended. During that summit, Jordan’s king referred to the Prophet Muhammad being “a Hashemite,” a term used to describe Jordan’s royal family. ONDI sources have confirmed that the term used was a premeditated provocation for the Saudi royals; the King was reminding them that he “is the alleged” descendant of the Prophet and therefore, entitled to rule all of Arabia. King Salman’s response was very firm and amounted to public ridicule of Jordan’s king in the presence of president Trump and all Muslim leaders. Read more…

By Ali Waked, BREITBART

TEL AVIV — One of the most widely respected journalists in the Arab world, London-based Abdel Bary Atwan, has warned of a potential scenario in which Arab states launch a military assault on Qatar.

The assault, Atwan contended, could come as a result of the recent discord between Saudi Arabia and Qatar that emerged due to comments attributed to Qatar’s ruler, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, which the Qataris claimed were old and only resurfaced after the official Qatari news service was hacked.
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By ROBERT SPENCER, JIHAD WATCH

It looks as if the Justice Department swamp not only has not been drained, but is full of more voracious crocodiles than ever before. This case started during the Obama administration, but it is the Trump administration’s Justice Department that is handing down this ruling. President Trump needs to repudiate it, or else he owns it.

In battles over mosques all over the country, the elephant in the room is not allowed to be discussed: the connections of the mosque leaders to the Muslim Brotherhood and other jihad groups. People don’t oppose these mosques because of “racism” or “bigotry,” but because they’re concerned about jihad terror. With most of the mosques in the U.S. getting funding from Saudi Arabia and surveys having shown that most mosques in the U.S. preach hatred of Jews and Christians and the necessity ultimately to replace the U.S. Constitution with Islamic law, these are legitimate concerns, but discussion of them is foreclosed as “Islamophobic.”
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By Terence Corcoran: NATIONAL POST

Remember the United Nations’ Kyoto Protocol? It landed in 1997 — amid alarming forecasts of rampant eco-disasters, rising sea levels, desertification, hell on earth — with commitments from leading nations to control their carbon emissions. And it crashed in 2012 — expired, they said.

Canada embraced Kyoto Protocol targets, deemed essential to help save the planet from environmental crises. During the first commitment period ending in 2012, Canada had signed on to carbon-emissions reductions of six-per-cent below 1990 levels. In 2012, Canada reported an emissions increase of 18-per-cent above 1990 levels. Canada got out of Kyoto in 2011.
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By Barry Shaw, JPOST

With President Trump’s visit to Jerusalem and then Bethlehem, it set me thinking about these places and Palestinian demands for a capital of a non-existent state. 

Bethlehem is the place that Trump met Abbas, the capital-demanding Palestinian leader. 

The world is myopic if not deranged, in declaring Jerusalem’s Jewish Temple site Islamic and that the Kotel, the western retaining wall supporting the Temple Mount built by Jewish kings and recaptured from Jordan fifty years ago on June 7 in a defensive war forced onto Israel by aggressive Arab armies bent on our destruction, as not being part of Israeli territory.
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By Ted Belman

Pres Trump just pulled America out of the Paris Accord. He avoided, throughout the whole speech, of any mention of the science debate. His case doesn’t rest on debunking the science. He simply made the point, as he did with TPP, that the agreement is bad for American workers.

This agreement was an albatross around America’s neck making it more difficult for it to compete with other nations. No wonder China, India and Russia and most other countries joined.

Also the thrust of this agreement was wealth redistribution.
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T. Belman. For those of you not familiar with the author Conrad Black, I highly recommend you read about this fascinating character. He was at one time the owner of a huge media empire including the Jerusalem Post. He is a published historian, a convicted criminal, a British Peer, etc.,
and so much more.

By CONRAD BLACK, Special to the NY SUN

The American withdrawal from the Paris Agreement to fight climate change came as the bunk about impeachment and collusion of the Trump campaign with the Kremlin dies down, and on a day when the United States moved to all-time stock market highs as measured by Dow-Jones, NASDAQ, and S&P, and the Commerce Department posted stunning 3.8% annual economic growth figures.

In the same week, the British election suddenly went wobbly, Canada elected a new federal opposition leader, and curiosity about the improbable couple that has just moved into the Élysée Palace, residence of French presidents, has torqued up appreciably.
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