A unique, funny and disarming man gets to the parts of America that Obama seems not to have noticed, even those populated by African-Americans.

By Prof. Phyllis Chesler, INN

Many serious people have researched and written about anti-Semitism—but only a handful have attained a large, popular audience. This is understandable since the subject is sobering, even frightening. Often, our most distinguished experts find themselves preaching to the converted or only to other scholars who specialize in this area. How can we wake civilians up if they glaze over at our footnotes, taste despair, not triumph, in our documentation, and fail to understand our complex analyses?

And then there are the gatekeepers who refuse to review such work—and if they do, make it a point to find just the right kind of critic, (often someone Jewish), who will mock and minimize the idea that contemporary anti-Semitism exists, or that it endangers Jews or the Jewish state. They tend to deem such work “hysterical,” “Cassandra-like,” lacking in nuance, utterly misguided.

Enter Tuvia Tenenbom.
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T. Belman. Talk about fake news. Add man-made climate change to the list. All antisemitism derives from fake news. The distorted opinions on Trump are part of this story. So is the Palestinian narrative.

The infamous Joseph Goebbels said “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

And thus all lies are supported by limiting free speech and advocating political correctness.

You will recall the Torah words “na’aseh v’nishma“ – “We will do and we will hear/understand.” I just read an article which mandates advocates to win people over on an emotional level because once you have their heart they are oblivious to truth.

In other words, fake news captures the heart. What comes later has little effect.

by DEROY MURDOCK, NATIONAL REVIEW  October 16, 2014 4:30 PM

So why did his administration sit on the evidence of Saddam Hussein’s WMDs? New media accounts — including coverage by NRO’s Patrick Brennan — confirm what I repeatedly have written since the depths of Operation Iraqi Freedom: The late dictator Saddam Hussein did have weapons of mass death, and the United States of America was correct to invade Iraq, find these toxins, and destroy them.

Also vital: padlocking this Baathist general store for militant-Islamic terrorism. As I explained on July 17, 2006: While the liberal press gently sleeps, evidence continues to mount that Hussein had WMDs, though perhaps not in quantities that would bulge warehouses.
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Two new projects seek to stop the dramatic drop in water levels at the world’s lowest point.

By Zafrir Rinat, HAARETZ | Feb. 24, 2017

It has been hard to find reasons for optimism about the Dead Sea in recent years. Its water level has continued to fall at a rate of over a meter per year, while thousands of sinkholes are appearing in the dried-out areas around its shores – systematically destroying the tourism and transportation infrastructure in the region.

Until recently, plans to artificially stream water into the Dead Sea looked like a distant dream. But all those involved in trying to save the sea are convinced such a project is feasible, although they admit concerns about possible environmental dangers.

Next week, a special issue on the matter will be published by the Israeli journal Ecology & Environment. The journal will provide an up-to-date and extensive picture of the reality at one of the world’s most important natural wonders.
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Column: How conservatism is changing in the Trump era

By Matthew Continetti, NEW BEACON

Decades of intellectual and political activity preceded the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. William F. Buckley Jr. founded National Review in 1955. A little less than a decade later, National Review publisher William Rusher helped orchestrate Barry Goldwater’s presidential nomination. The following year, 1965, Buckley ran for mayor of New York City and Irving Kristol, then still a member of the anti-Communist left, founded The Public Interest. The year after that, Reagan was elected governor of California. The 1970s saw the proliferation of single-issue interest groups that comprised the New Right. The first Conservative Political Action Conference was held in 1973. In 1977, a year after losing the Republican nomination to incumbent Gerald Ford, Reagan addressed the conference. “The new Republican Party I am speaking about,” he said, “is going to have room for the man and the woman in the factories, for the farmer, for the cop on the beat, and the millions of Americans who may never have thought of joining our party before, but whose interests coincide with those represented by principled Republicanism.” When President Reagan took office in 1981, he could count on 25 years of accumulated conservative thought, argument, rhetoric, policy proposals, and political experience. The movement came first. The voters followed.
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T. Belman. This is beyond belief.

 By Ed Straker, AMERICAN THINKER

President Trump’s new National Security Advisor doesn’t believe it is “helpful” to say the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism.”

President Trump’s newly appointed national security adviser has told his staff that Muslims who commit terrorist acts are perverting their religion, rejecting a key ideological view of other senior Trump advisers and signaling a potentially more moderate approach to the Islamic world.

The adviser, Lt. Gen. H. R. McMaster, told the staff of the National Security Council on Thursday, in his first “all hands” staff meeting, that the label “radical Islamic terrorism” was not helpful because terrorists are “un-Islamic,” according to people who were in the meeting.
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TIME.COM

Bret Stephens delivered the Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture this week at the University of California, Los Angeles. Read the full text of his remarks below:

I’m profoundly honored to have this opportunity to celebrate the legacy of Danny Pearl, my colleague at The Wall Street Journal.

My topic this evening is intellectual integrity in the age of Donald Trump. I suspect this is a theme that would have resonated with Danny.

When you work at The Wall Street Journal, the coins of the realm are truth and trust — the latter flowing exclusively from the former. When you read a story in the Journal, you do so with the assurance that immense reportorial and editorial effort has been expended to ensure that what you read is factual.
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T. Belman. Not mentioned here is the effect of his changes to the trade policy.. Will keeping jobs at home, thereby increasing labour costs, retard the economy.

By LAWRENCE KUDLOW, Special to the NY Sun | February 25, 2017

Virtually the whole world is beating up on the Trump administration for daring to predict that low marginal tax rates, regulatory rollbacks, and the repeal of Obamacare will generate in the years ahead economic growth of between 3% and 3.5%.

In a CNBC interview last week, Treasury Secretary Mnuchin held the line on this forecast. He also argued the need for dynamic budget scoring to capture the effects of faster growth. Good for him.

What’s so interesting about all the economic-growth naysaying today is that President Obama’s first budget forecast roughly eight years ago was much rosier than Mr. Trump’s. There was nary a peep of criticism from the mainstream press outlets and the consensus of economists.
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Economist Intelligence Unit

— Surging investment aswell as stronger external demand and continued robust consumption have ensured that the Israeli economy has continued to outperform government expectations and most other developed economies.

Fourth quarter 2016 annualised real GDP growth of 6.2% according to the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) has left annual growth at 4% for the year as a whole, its strongest performance since 2013. However, some elements of Israel’s growth are unlikely to be sustainable at the levels seen in 2016 in the longer term, and the strength of the economy also poses its own challenges.

The new data have led the CBS to revise its figure for overall growth in 2016 to 4% from an earlier estimate of 3.6%, which itself was considerably higher than government growth projections earlier in the year of below 3%. These relatively gloomy forecasts followed on from the sluggish performance of 2015 when the economy grew by 2.5% in real terms. The main factor behind the surge in growth in the fourth quarter was the continued high
level of consumer expenditure, which has characterised much of the year, but which also drew in imports at a rapid pace, putting a brake on the overall rate of GDP growth. However, although private consumption growth rates peaked earlier in the year-private consumption was 7.4% higher in the first half of the year compared with the second half of 2015 but rose less sharply, by 4.9%, between the first half and the second half of
2016-investment and exports of goods and services have stayed high.
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ADL’s Greenblatt takes on the president’s policies; ZOA’s Klein defends them.

BY GARY ROSENBLATT, JEWISH WEEK

That is, it has changed who’s in and who’s out in terms of White House preference, from the ADL (Anti-Defamation League), a legacy institution now more in the role of outsider given its feisty readiness to openly criticize the president’s policies, to the ZOA (Zionist Organization of America), which in recent weeks has moved from the communal wilderness on Israel issues to best reflect the emerging views of the new administration on the Mideast.

In fact, ZOA is to the Trump White House what J Street was to the Obama White House: the go-to Jewish organization on Israel.
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by Vic Rosenthal, Abu Yehuda

On Tuesday, a military court pronounced sentence on Sgt. Elor Azaria, called in Israel’s media “the soldier who shot in Hevron.”

Azaria was convicted of manslaughter after he put a bullet into the head of an Arab terrorist who had been wounded after he stabbed and injured an IDF soldier in March of last year. The incident was filmed by a Palestinian working for the left-wing NGO B’tselem. The video was shown on Israeli television and a massive media/political circus ensued. Even before the IDF investigation was finished, the army Chief of Staff and the Defense Minister made public statements accusing Azaria of misconduct in the harshest terms.
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Paul Schnee letter to L.A. Jewish Journal

Dear Sirs,

David Suissa’s article should really have been entitled, “Is Trump Worse Than Obama?” but that would have forced him to list all of Obama’s lies from, “If you like your doctor; you can keep your doctor” to his “bullshit”, as Mr. Suissa puts it, during the 2012 election campaign about his intention to dismantle Iran’s nuclear capabilities. In between and extending far beyond those two bookends was the moving curtain of lies which characterized the grievous, suppurating and poisonous national wound of Barack Obama’s presidency.

When listening to President Obama one always had to keep the lines from George Orwell’s novel, 1984, firmly in mind, “The essential act of the party is to use conscious deception while retaining the firmness of purpose that goes with complete honesty…” otherwise one would be unable to penetrate the membrane of deceit with which his entire administration was shrouded. A good example of this was when Susan Rice appeared on five, count them, Sunday morning news programs to tell us that it was a thirteen minute trailer about a movie making fun of Mohammed that caused the attack on our facility in Benghazi where our ambassador and three other brave Americans were deliberately killed. On the Richter Scale of Lies & Bullshit this performance registered at 100 and is never likely to be surpassed by any of President Trump’s hyperbolic spasms.
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Yoram will be in the US in March, May and August, 2017, available for speaking engagements.

By Ambassador (ret.) Yoram Ettinger, “Second Thought: US-Israel Initiative”
Straight from the Jerusalem Boardroom #218,

1. Notwithstanding Israel’s unique challenges of the chaotically unpredictable state of the Middle East, the Islamic and Arab onslaught, the scarcity of natural resources (other than brain power), the UN enmity, the European appeasement of rogue regimes, systematic criticism by the “elite” media and the attempt to boycott, divest and sanction, the independent, non-partisan quarterly, The American Interest, stated on January 24: “This is there is a new name on our list of The Eight Greats, Israel….

“Israel is a rising power with a growing impact on world affairs…. Large off-shore discoveries of natural gas and oil are turning Israel into an energy exporter [e.g., a $3.5bn-$4bn dollar initiative was just concluded to expand Israel’s natural gas fields]…. Turkey’s ties with Israel strengthened…. Israel’s newfound clout comes from the rise of industrial sectors and technologies that good Israeli schools, smart Israeli policies and talented Israeli thinkers and entrepreneurs have built…. The rise of domestic cybersecurity and infotech economy…. Private investors all over the world look to invest in Israel’s tech startups…. It’s not just America; India, China and Russia want a piece of Israeli tech wizardry…. In the Middle East, Israel has been transformed from a pariah state to a kingmaker…. Never has Egypt-Israel security cooperation been as close as it is today…. The rise of Iran has made Israel critical to the survival of the Sunni Arabs, including the Gulf States…. Israel begins 2017 as the keystone of a regional anti-Iran alliance, a most-favored-nation in the White House and a country that enjoys good relations with all of the world’s major powers bar Iran….
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By MARTIN SHERMAN

The “Humanitarian Paradigm”, advocating funded emigration for the resolution of the “Palestinian problem”, will be the most humane of all options if it succeeds, and the least inhumane if it does not.

Even if the Palestinians agree that their state have no army or weapons, who can guarantee that a Palestinian army would not be mustered later to encamp at the gates of Jerusalem and the approaches to the lowlands? And if the Palestinian state would be unarmed, how would it block terrorist acts perpetrated by extremists, fundamentalists or irredentists? –Shimon Peres, The New Middle East (1993), on the perils of the two-state prescription.

Free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities. Among a people without fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion, necessary to the working of representative government, cannot exist. –John Stuart Mill, On Representative Government, (1861) on the perils of the one-state prescription.
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T. Belman. And what happens if they don’t abide like they didn’t with Oslo requirements? Who decides if they are in compliance. Israel should be able, in its discretion, to decide and then to build houses and start the 10 year period again. Of course the PA will never agree to this. Also if we are going to allow them to build in area C we should also be allowed to build there beyond the settlements.

The reason that the left and the right differ so much is that the left values peace the right values the land first and foremost. The left is so enamoured with the TSS that they ignore the danger to Israel it brings with it. The right value the land so much they are prepared suffer the slings and arrows emanating from the international displeasure whereas the left can’t stand the ostracism..

Israeli opposition leader’s plan: Sides will agree on decade of calm, during which time West Bank will be a violence and incitement-free zone; settlement construction outside blocs will be frozen, with more powers to Palestinians – only then negotiations.

By Isaac Herzog, HAARETZ

A few days ago a dramatic report by Barak Ravid appeared in this newspaper about a secret summit meeting, held about a year ago in Aqaba by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, King Abdullah of Jordan and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi.

It was on the basis of this meeting, whose occurrence the prime minister has confirmed, together with other steps taken at the same time, that I was prepared to examine with Netanyahu a national unity government in the period March-May 2016.

The information published in Haaretz on February 19 exposed a small part of the great opportunity Israel had to change the face of the entire Middle East, and which could have brought great hope to our people and to the nations of the region. The historic move, which for obvious reasons was covert, was intended to prevent more rounds of violence and bloodshed.
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DEBKA

The director of Saudi Arabia’s General intelligence agency, Khalid Bin Ali Al Humaidan, paid surprise visits to Ramallah and Jerusalem on Tuesday and Wednesday, Feb. 21-22. Neither Palestinian nor Israeli officials have confirmed that the visit took place.

Last week, DEBKA Weekly carried an exclusive report that Iranian engineers were working round the clock on a project dubbed “Riyadh First,” for adding an extra 100km to the intermediate range of the Scud-C (600km) and Scud-D (700km) surface missiles, to enable them to reach the Saudi capital and explode in the center of Riyadh.
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By David Israel, JEWISH PRESS

The Committee for Selecting Supreme Court Justices on Wednesday evening announced its four new appointments: Jerusalem District Court Judge Dr. David Mintz, Haifa District Judge Yael Willner, President of the District Court in Haifa Yosef Elron, and Tel Aviv District Court Judge George Kara.

The new judges will replace outgoing justices Naor, Rubinstein, Jubran and Zilbertal.
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Mammoth American multinationals depend on ingenuity from small Israeli startups to drive their businesses forward.

By Abigail Klein Leichman, ISRAEL 21c

To understand the strong and rising impact of Israeli startups on the US tech scene, consider this month’s Super Bowl LI.

Intel and FOX Sports unveiled a 360-degree “Be the Player” replay technology  giving viewers an unprecedented, immersive player’s-eye view on the football championship.

The groundbreaking technology was first developed in Israel by eight-person Replay Technologies in collaboration with Intel, which then developed it further with a large team after buying the 3D video technology startup in March 2016 as the cornerstone of its new Intel Sports Group.
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WHAT HE SAYS IS ALL TRUE BUT THIS PANEL NEVER TOOK PLACE

By Daniel Greenfield

Palestine is many things. A Roman name and a Cold War lie. Mostly it’s a justification for killing Jews.

Palestine was an old Saudi-Soviet scam which invented a fake nationality for the Arab clans who had invaded and colonized Israel. This big lie transformed the leftist and Islamist terrorists run by them into the liberators of an imaginary nation. Suddenly the efforts of the Muslim bloc and the Soviet bloc to destroy the Jewish State became an undertaking of sympathetically murderous underdogs.

But the Palestine lie is past its sell by date.
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T. Belman. I totally agree. Regional Arabs will act in their best interests without an Israeli sweetener. They need us and we don’t need them. I have often stated that a deal with the region’s Arabs will not bear fruit and that the region is as intransigent as ever. Keep an eye on Saar.

Poll shows former minister is front-runner to replace Netanyahu.

BY GIL HOFFMAN, JPOST

Israel should not be forced to pay a diplomatic price for security cooperation with moderate Sunni states in the region, former minister Gideon Sa’ar said Tuesday at an international conference on Strategic Challenges in the Eastern Mediterranean,organized by the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies and B’nai B’rith International, at Bar-Ilan University.
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