by Jonathan Spyer, The Jerusalem Post

Events taking place in a remote stretch of southeast Syrian desert in recent days reveal the current direction of US Middle East strategy.

An observable ratcheting up of US and allied air and special forces activity in eastern Syria is currently under way. This in turn appears to derive from a new, hard-nosed understanding of the nature of the strategic game in the large, strife-ridden area covering what was once Syria and Iraq.

On Thursday, May 18th, US aircraft launched strikes on a column of Assad regime vehicles including tanks and earth-movers, 18 miles from the town of al-Tanf, on the Syrian-Iraqi border. The strikes took place after the vehicles entered an agreed deconfliction zone around the town. US and British special forces are currently training “vetted partner forces,” i.e. Syrian Sunni Arab rebels, in the town.
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This political chess game has just begun, and the opening moves have given the Muslim world an advantage. Israel, beware.

By Meir Jolovitz, INN

The irony was hard to miss. The headlines throughout the free world this week were quite similar, each a version of the following: President Trump asks the Muslim world to unite against terror. His thirty-five minute speech was the essence of the inability to accept reality. In what is sure to be called by some his ‘magnum opus,’ it was rather a case of historical amnesia.

With the lights shining brightly on his much-anticipated visit to the Middle East, Trump addressed the leaders of fifty Muslim-majority nations gathered in Saudi Arabia and decided to distance – and divorce – himself from the ‘apology tour’ untaken eight years before by his predecessor. For those who wanted so much to see a new American foreign policy as a road to peace, it required the suspension, or loss, of objectivity. And many seemed willing. For the moment.
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By Ted Belman

The NYT published a major report this week on Pres Trump’s Mid East trip which it titled “Trump Leaves Middle East With Hope for Peace, but No Plan for It”. This title didn’t reflect the article which went no farther than to say, “What Mr. Trump did not do was reveal the least hint of what, if anything, was behind it“, referring to his hope. The article later acknowledged that “strict secrecy” was a good thing.

A close scrutiny of the statements made in the last few days and the events leading up to this trip would strongly suggest that Pres Trump is right to be cautiously optimistic because he has a plan.

After relentless pressure from Pres Obama and Secretary Kerry, PM Netanyahu came close to accepting the Kerry framework based on the ’67 ceasefire lines with swaps as borders and a divided Jerusalem.
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World Health Organization passes anti-Israel resolution, ignores bombings of hospitals in Syria and Yemen

BY TIMES OF ISRAEL STAFF

The UN’s health agency buried a report praising Israel, under pressure from the regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad, UN Watch said in a statement Friday.

The report on Israel’s cooperation with a WHO mission to the Golan heights “was not published, not even the parts which had already been completed,” the NGO said. It added that the World Health Organization not only failed to table the report praising Israel, but also then went on to adopt a blatantly anti-Israel resolution.

According to the Geneva-based organization, the UN agency adopted in its annual assembly a resolution co-sponsored by Syria that targeted Israel over “health conditions in the occupied Palestinian territory, including east Jerusalem, and in the occupied Syrian Golan.”
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TV report says PM and Zionist Union leader Isaac Herzog again in contact, as opinion poll shows Israelis backing two-state deal based by 47%-39%

BY TIMES OF ISRAEL STAFF AND ERIC CORTELLESSA

With President Donald Trump pushing for Israeli-Palestinian peace progress, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is again looking to widen his coalition by bringing in politicians from the center left, a TV report said. The report coincided with a new poll showing more Israelis backing than opposing a two-state solution based on the pre-1967 lines.

The report, on Israel’s Channel 2 news on Friday night, said that Netanyahu and opposition leader Isaac Herzog spoke by phone on the eve of Trump’s visit to Israel this week, and have arranged to meet in the aftermath of Trump’s trip. Herzog, who met with Trump briefly on Tuesday, has said repeatedly in the last few days that he would back Netanyahu — from outside the coalition — were the prime minister to push for substantive progress in peacemaking with the Palestinians.
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by ANDREW C. MCCARTHY, NATIONAL REVIEW

Having failed to define the real threat — sharia supremacism — Trump walked into a trap of his own making. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeal’s ruling against President Trump’s so-called travel ban empowers both radical Islam and judicial imperialism. The combination portends lasting damage to the United States.

To rehash, the executive order (EO) proclaimed temporary restrictions (the main one, for 90 days) on travel to the United States by the nationals of six countries — Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. Those countries, along with Iraq (cited in Trump’s original executive order, but not the revised EO at issue), had previously been singled out by Congress and President Obama — not because they are Muslim-majority countries, but because
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BY OLIVIA BEAVERS, THE HILL

President Trump’s top advisers plan to set up a “war room” unit to combat negative reports resulting from the ongoing probe into possible ties between Trump’s campaign and Russia, Reuters reported Friday.

White House chief strategist Steve Bannon and senior adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner will be involved in the new messaging effort, which also aims to push Trump’s policy agenda and schedule more rallies with supporters, according to Reuters.
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By Shoula Romano Horing, AmericanThinker

President Trump was elected to lead the Western fight against radical Islam, but as president he seems to have lost his way, instead spending his energy and time in pursuing the ultimate peace deal between the Israelis, who have been fighting Islamic evil for generations, and the Palestinians, who embody this form of evil.

It was sad and disappointing that a few hours after a radical Islamist terror attack in Manchester which killed 22, and critically injured over 59, mostly aged eight to eighteen, Trump chose to meet in Bethlehem and discuss ”peace” with the Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas, the cofounder of modern Islamist terrorism. It was sad that President Trump discussed the terrorist attack in Manchester while standing next to Abbas, whose Palestinian Authority gives 300 million dollars every year to Palestinian terrorists and their families on a rising scale according to the level of their atrocities against innocent Israelis.
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By Lee Bender, AMERICAN THINKER

Are Zionists worse than Islamists?  According to how the mainstream media, the U.N., the E.U., NGOs, universities and academia, U.S. government officials, and Arab and Muslim propaganda tend to whitewash Islamism – including horrific acts of Islamic-inspired terrorism – and denigrate Zionism, the answer is yes.  Here’s a handy guide.

Islamism: Can there be any serious argument about a religious-political system that seeks to enshrine and enact its laws (sharia) on lands it occupies, and attempts to conquer through jihad (holy war)?  Sharia law essentially abuses women, endorses so-called honor killings and female genital mutilation, demands male supremacy, is biased against all “infidels,” glorifies those who chop off the heads of Jews and Christians or who otherwise murder infidels, stones adulterers, puts to death apostates, cuts off the hands of thieves, severely punishes those who criticize Mohammed or Islam, treats non-believers as second-class citizens (dhimmis), and is anti-American, anti-Semitic, and anti-democracy.  Its ultimate goal is Islamic supremacy and triumphalism.  What positive things have Islamists brought to the world at large?
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By Howard Galganov

GOOD FOR TRUMP . . . Trump was RIGHT about the Gorgeous NATO Building in Brussels, where all the NATO Leaders Posed for their Photo-Op, for which President Trump didn’t want to know how much it cost, since I think he didn’t want to PUKE Live On Camera, considering that this EXTRAVAGANT Building was MOST Probably Constructed almost ENTIRELY with American Taxpayer Dollars.

The Cost Was Somewhere Just Under $2-BILLION . . . Which Is An Obscenity.

BUT GIVEN HOW THESE EURO-CREEPS . . . are Deadbeats on their Financial NATO Commitments, it is probably not wrong to assume that Uncle Sam PAID the FULL SHOT, yet these POMPOUS Bastards Strut Around As If It Was Theirs.
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By Daniel Pipes, ME FORUM  May 21/17

Martin Sherman, executive director of the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies, has devoted a new column, “Why Palestinian Statehood Obviates Israeli Victory,” to hashing out his and my differences over something we fundamentally agree on, the goal of Israel victory.

This is the idea that the “peace process” has turned into a “war process” and that the solution to the Palestinian-Israeli confrontation lies not in more painful concessions by Israel but, to the contrary, in Israel imposing its will on its enemy and crushing the Palestinian dream to eliminate the Jewish state. Washington should encourage its Israeli ally in this. Ironically, losing is the best thing that could happen to the Palestinians, for it liberates from a destructive obsession and allows them to begin constructing their own polity, economy, society, and culture.
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By JNi.Media, JEWISH PRESS

For the first time since 1967, Israel’s Foreign Ministry has distributed worldwide the document “The legality of settlement,” which declares that the Geneva Convention does not apply to Judea and Samaria and that “at no point in history was Judea and Samaria subject to Palestinian sovereignty.”

Most of the Israeli embassies around the world have recently completed the distribution of the document, which details the legal arguments for the claim of Israel’s connection to Judea and Samaria, including citations from former US Undersecretary of State Eugene V. Rostov, who supported Israel’s right to settle in the liberated territories in “‘Palestinian Self-Determination’: Possible Futuresfor the Unallocated Territories of the Palestine Mandate” (Yale Journal of International Law, 1980).
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By Karin McQuillan, AMERICAN THINKER

The political and religious leaders of Indonesia stand out among Muslim nations in attacks on Islamic radicalism and terrorism.  We hear little about their hatred of Islamic hate and violence from our media, because it doesn’t fit the politically correct narrative that any criticism of the Religion of Peace is Islamophobic.  The Muslim Indonesians have plenty of harsh words for the ugly extremism of modern Islam, the Islam promoted around the world by Saudi and Qatar oil money, and based, they admit, on “classic Islamic law.”

While Trump was in Riyadh, trying to enlist our frenemy, the Saudis, to take responsibility for the radical jihadism they themselves spawned, across the world in Indonesia, there was an international meeting of 300 Muslim scholars to address the same issue.
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BY Prof. Hillel Frisch, BESA

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Reintegrating into the Jordanian state is an economic imperative for the Arab inhabitants of the Palestinian Authority. Only by once again becoming citizens of Jordan will they be able to challenge the economic stone wall imposed by domestic Jordanian economic lobby groups barring West Bank exports. A two-state solution would lead, not to an economy of peace, but to an economy of violence as lobby groups in both Israel and Jordan shut out the Palestinian state’s exports. The Palestinian state would inevitably react by threatening and committing violence to extract the international aid to which the PA has become accustomed.
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Trump doesn’t want to repeat the mistakes of his predecessors.

By Caroline B Glick, JPOST

On Thursday, less than 48 hours after US President Donald Trump completed his successful visit to Israel, his chief negotiator Jason Greenblatt was back in town.

On Wednesday, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson set the tone for Greenblatt’s mission when he told reporters aboard Air Force One that during his visit, Trump “was putting a lot of pressure” on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas “to get back to the table” and negotiate a peace deal.
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T. Belman. “Peace” is another word that is understood differently by Muslems and the west. According to the doctrines of Islam, peace will only be achieved in the Dar al Harb (House of War) when it submits to Islam.

Also, over the years, the Arabs and the West have never been able to agree on the definition of terrorism. For instance, they argue, that the Palestinian “resistance” is not terrorism.

“The President of the United States is being given counsel and advice from U.S. officials who appear to lack any understanding of any of this, which will lead America’s to defeat. Exactly the Islamic world’s objective.”

What follows is an eye-opening treatment by former FBI counterterrorism special agent and founder of Understanding the Threat (UTT), John Guandolo.

Not understanding the Global Islamic Movement and what drives its actions is the reason America lost the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Since 9/11, military generals, Presidents, National Security Advisors, Members of Congress, and others have been too busy to stop and actually do what the law and their Oath of Office require them to do – know all enemies or do due diligence to know all enemies.  You cannot “protect and defend against all enemies, foreign and domestic” if you do not do this.
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