State Department slams Human Rights Council for ‘longstanding bias’ against Jewish state that ‘threatens its credibility’

TOI

The US on Monday issued a strongly worded statement accusing a United Nations body of longstanding bias against Israel.

Amid threats from Secretary of State Rex Tillerson to withdraw entirely from the United Nations Human Rights Council, the State Department announced it would boycott the council’s entire Monday discussion about alleged human rights abuses committed by Israel and vote against any resolutions that came from it.

“The United States strongly and unequivocally opposes the existence of the UN Human Rights Council’s Agenda Item Seven: ‘Human rights situation in Palestine and other occupied Arab territories,’” acting spokesperson Mark Toner said in a statement.
Read more…

DEBKA

The Israeli drone that targeted the Syrian militiaman Yasser Sayad outside the Golan town of Quneitra Sunday, March 19, reinforced the message first carried by the Israeli Arrow 2 which shot down a Syrian SA-5 anti-air missile Friday. The Israeli ambassador was called twice to the Russian foreign ministry.

Both hits were precise: Sayad was on his way to join the Hizballah forces who are trampling Syrian rebel villages on the Hermon slopes to clear their path to the Golan; and the Syrian SA-5 was intercepted microseconds before hitting the Israeli jets attacking a consignment of Hizballah weapons outside the Syria T4 base near Palmyra, where a Russian contingent is also housed.
Read more…

A former Russian Jewish refugee who lives in San Diego, received an invitation from his synagogue to attend an event geared toward helping the Muslim refugees.

He replied:

Dear Jewish Federation, Anti Defamation League,

Unfortunately I will not be able to attend this evening’s “Immigrants and Refugees, a Jewish call to action” community event that you are organizing. In lieu of attending. However, I would like to share some thoughts I have on the subject. I hope that you take those thoughts into consideration both in tonight’s program as well as any further community outreach programs.

As a former refugee myself I believe I have some valuable insights to add to this discussion. I presume that the current call to action and tonight’s discussion were spurred by the recent temporary ban placed by President Trump on entrants from the following 7 countries: Yemen, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Sudan, Somalia and Lybia. There have been some very emotional claims made about this ban both in the media as well as Jewish community so I think it would be useful to analyze the facts.
Read more…

CONSERVATIVE TRIBUNE

Many of us will likely always remember where we were and what we were doing when we realized then-candidate Donald Trump had beaten Democrat Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, but one Trump staffer, in particular, has the memory etched in forever.

Kellyanne Conway, Trump’s campaign manager and current White House counselor, was the one who answered the 2:30 a.m. concession phone call from the Clinton campaign.

At the National Review Institute’s recent Ideas Summit in Washington, Conway reminisced about the special moment and how it played out, according to the U.K. Daily Mail.
Read more…

Samaria Regional Council head says Trump Administration may condemn ‘settlements’, but will be much friendlier to Israel.

By Shimon Cohen, INN

Jason Greenblatt, US President Donald Trump’s Special Representative for International Negotiations, was not content with his meetings with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu or Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas, but also met with several leaders of the Jewish communities of Judea and Samaria. Samaria Regional Council head Yossi Dagan, one of the regional heads who met with Greenblatt, spoke with Arutz Sheva about his meeting with the US representative.

While Dagan is careful not to reveal specific details of the conversation, he said that the conversation was conducted in a pleasant atmosphere, and that the US envoy “was attentive and asked questions. He is a serious individual and a lover of Israel.”
Read more…

Common wisdom is that if the threat is real, Netanyahu’s motive is not his aversion to the public broadcaster, but a looming indictment on graft charges ? But this still doesn’t explain his timing.

By Yossi Verter, HAARETZ

Any attempt to explain, clarify, place in a logical framework or make order in what is happening in Israeli politics over the past few days is doomed. It’s not political analysis that is needed here, it’s a psychologist. And not a child psychologist working in a quarter-time position in public service, but an entire department in a closed institution. The cuckoo’s nest is here.

Two years and two days ago, Israel held unnecessary elections because the prime minister wanted to prevent damage to the newspaper that is his private mouthpiece, Israel Hayom. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu admitted this after the fact. Now he is threatening elections if the broadcasting corporation, which he hates, does not close down.
Read more…

“… a dangerous hub of Hezbollah activity.”

by Yochanan Visser, WESTERN JOURNALISM

Russia’s Foreign Ministry summoned Israel’s ambassador in the country after Friday’s unprecedented missile clash that involved Israel’s most advanced missile interception system — the Arrow 3 — which reportedly downed as many as three Russian made S-200 surface-to-air missiles after Israeli warplanes attacked a Hezbollah-bound weapon convoy in the area of Palmyra.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Mikhail Bogdanov discussed with Ambassador Gary Koren “recent developments in Syria,” a statement by the Russian Foreign Ministry said.

The rare Russian move indicated two things.
Read more…

DEBKA

Israel finally took a hand in the swiftly moving events looming from Syria over its northern borders by launching multiple air raids against the key northern Syrian air base known as T4 near Palmyra early Friday night March 17.

Those events are spearheaded by the pro-Iranian Hizballlah’s drive to capture the Golan in line with its war of “resistance” on the Jewish state. This fixation came into sharp focus the day after the air strike in a rare admission by Hizballah of the loss of a commander. He was named Badee Hamiyeh and was described as having been killed “in the southern Syrian region of Quneitra near the Israeli-held Golan Heights.” This was the first anyone had heard of any recent battle on the Golan.
Read more…

After unprecedented missile clash, PM says Israel will continue to operate against weapons transfers from Assad regime to Shiite terror group

BY STEVE WEIZMAN, TOI

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Friday the Israeli strikes on several targets in Syria earlier that day targeted weapons bound for Lebanon’s Hezbollah, and that the Jewish State would do the same again if necessary.

The Israeli airstrike prompted retaliatory missile launches, in the most serious incident between Syria and the Jewish state since the Syrian civil war began six years ago.

Syria’s military said it had downed an Israeli plane and hit another as they were carrying out pre-dawn strikes near the famed desert city of Palmyra that it recaptured from jihadists this month.
Read more…

By Raymond Ibrahim, PJ Media

Donald Trump’s new national security advisor, Lt. General H.R. McMaster, has made troubling remarks — such as “the Islamic State is not Islamic” — that one expects from the D.C. establishment. However, a hearty endorsement that he gave to a 2010 book points to the totality of McMaster’s views on security issues as being worse than simply his parroting politically correct memes on Islam.

The book in question is Militant Islamist Ideology: Understanding the Global Threat. Written by CDR Youssef Aboul-Enein, it was published by the Naval Institute Press in 2010. I read and reviewed it back in 2012 and found its claims — many of which the Obama administration followed to disastrous results — to be incorrect and problematic.
Read more…

A political declaration of Israeli sovereignty over all the land of Israel can only come after a long process of shaping our national identity • But this sovereignty is the only way for us to avoid the existential threat a Palestinian state would pose.

By Dror Eydar, ISRAEL HAYOM

1. As expected, U.S. President Donald Trump will not be doing the dirty work for us. He will not hand us sovereignty over the entirety of our land. He will not be taking responsibility over reinforcing the settlement enterprise. He has his own problems in his own country. It is up to us, just as it has been throughout history. Fifty years after the Six-Day War — our war of redemption — and our return to those parts of our historic land that represent the cradle of our birth as a people, Israel is now taking its time when it comes to cementing our hold over those swathes of land. True, there are strong voices in favor of Israeli sovereignty, but frankly, the voices speaking out against it are no less powerful.
Read more…

By David M. Weinberg, ISRAEL HAYOM

Israeli and American negotiators are currently negotiating “agreed-upon” contours of Israeli settlement activity in Judea and Samaria.

“We want to reach a series of agreed-on principles so as not to return to the Obama period during which there was conflict over every balcony in the territories,” one official in the Prime Minister’s Office said this week.

Reportedly under discussion are a range of limits: limiting construction to current borderlines of built-up settlements; or to the jurisdictional lines of the settlements (which are more expansive); or to the outlines of large settlement blocs such as Maaleh Adumim, Gush Etzion and Ariel.

None of these options will be easy to swallow, neither for the right-wing public in Israel nor for the international community.
Read more…

By Jonathan S Tobin ISRAEL HAYOM

When Defense Minister Avigdor Lieberman told the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee last week that a push toward annexation of Judea and Samaria would result in “an immediate crisis” with the Trump administration, he provoked a firestorm of criticism from many within the Netanyahu government. Members of the Likud and Habayit Hayehudi parties decried what they felt was a timid approach that would squander a presumed historic opportunity to create new facts on the ground with the approval or indifference of the new American president.

But while that point of view may echo some of the more extravagant hopes of U.S. President Donald Trump’s American Jewish supporters, Lieberman isn’t wrong. Israelis may well celebrate the marked shift in tone from former President Barack Obama’s attitude, but they would be foolish to think Trump has any intention of handing them a blank check. The reasons need to be understood in the context not only of the chaos that is the Trump administration’s early days but also Israel’s strategic needs.
Read more…

DEBKA

The Israeli military said its fighter jets had struck several targets in Syria early Friday, March 17, and were back in Israeli-controlled airspace, when Syria launched several anti-aircraft missiles toward the Israeli jets. Israel’s Arrow air defense missile intercepted one of the missiles, the army said, but would not elaborate on whether any other hostile missiles had struck Israeli territory. The safety of Israeli civilians and the safety of the Israeli aircraft “were not compromised,” the IDF spokesman stressed.
Read more…

Everyone should calm down and stop jumping to conclusions with every phone call, visit or remark.

BY MELANIE PHILLIPS, JPOST

President Donald Trump continues to be the focus of confusion and division, not least within the Jewish world.

At first he was hailed as massively pro-Israel. He said he was opposed to the Iran deal and Israel’s treatment by the UN, promised to move the US Embassy to Jerusalem and appointed as US ambassador a bullish supporter of the settlers. Jews on the Right were thrilled, Jews on the Left were dismayed.

But then he invited Mahmoud Abbas to the White House and sent his envoy Jason Greenblatt to make nice with him in Ramallah, asked Benjamin Netanyahu to hold back on settlement building and back-pedaled on moving the embassy. Jews on the Right are now dismayed, Jews on the Left are thrilled.
Read more…

Holland’s current ruckus with Turkey is only the tip of the European iceberg, most of which is already under water.

By Dr Mordechai Kedar, INN

Sometimes it’s a good idea to take a step backwards, look at reality from a distance, and see the larger picture, taking in the whole forest rather than just the individual trees. If we attempt to review what has been going on in the world since the British decision to leave the European Union and since Donald Trump’s November 16th election victory, it is just possible that the picture emerging is that of a West beginning the fight against Islam after 8 years of submission disguised by a fragile mask of political correctness.

A not insignificant number of factors add up to a wide and inclusive picture: the fact that it is now permissible to say the words “Islamic terror” in the USA, the attempts to limit Muslim immigration to that country, Trump’s decision to finish off ISIS, the strengthening of rightist parties in Europe, the unsuccessful but serious possiblity that Geert Wilders might have been elected in Holland, the discovery of a gigantic weapons cache in Spain – these are only a small example of the issues that have been part of public discourse over the last few months.
Read more…

The Saudis, Egyptians and Jordanians are working with Israel on countering Iran because they need Israel to help them to weaken Iran.

BY CAROLINE B. GLICK, JPOST

There are iron rules of warfare. One of the most basic rules is that you have to know your enemy. If you do not know your enemy, or worse, if you refuse to act on your knowledge of him, you will lose your war against him.

This basic truth appears to have eluded Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

This week we have been beset by the bizarre and sudden appearance of Jason Greenblatt, President Donald Trump’s negotiations chief.

Greenblatt’s mission is apparently to reinstate the mordant peace process between Israel and the PLO.
Read more…