By Dr. Netanel Avneri, ISRAEL HAYOM

Head of the Prime Minister’s Office speaks with Arutz Sheva about the urgent need to increase enforcement against illegal Arab building.

By Hezki Baruch, INN

Director-General of the Prime Minister’s Office Eli Groner spoke with Arutz Sheva about the urgent need to increase law enforcement against illegal Arab building.

“A debate is raging right now in the Interior Committee because people don’t understand that the Order and Building Enforcement Bill is vital – especially for the Arab sector. This will create order, the likes of which has not been seen for many years.”
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by ANDREW C. MCCARTHY, National Review

Trump’s goal is not to exclude Muslims from our country; it is to exclude sharia supremacists, a significant subset of Muslims.

President Trump’s temporary ban on entry into the U.S. by various categories of aliens has caused a firestorm. That owes in part to the rash implementation of perfectly legal restrictions, but the hysteria is out of proportion to the minimal harm actually done.
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Palestinians threaten America

By Barry Shaw,

When the incoming Trump Administration spoke about the possibility of moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem the Palestinians began making threats.

Hamas, the Islamic terror regime that controls the Gaza Strip, threatened a new upsurge of violence and terrorism by saying that the move would ”open a new chapter of conflict” and “add fuel to the fire.”
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The current media and left-wing uproar over the executive order US President Donald Trump signed on Saturday is extraordinary on many levels.

BY CAROLINE B. GLICK, JPOST

Donald Trump the new Franklin Delano Roosevelt? Does his immigration policy mimic Roosevelt’s by adopting a callous, bigoted position on would-be asylum seekers from the Muslim world? At a press conference on June 5, 1940, Roosevelt gave an unspeakably cynical justification for his administration’s refusal to permit the desperate Jews of Nazi Germany to enter the US.

In Roosevelt’s words, “Among the refugees [from Germany], there are some spies… And not all of them are voluntary spies – it is rather a horrible story but in some of the other countries that refugees out of Germany have gone to, especially Jewish refugees, they found a number of definitely proven spies.”
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Israel sometimes lives in West Bank world and sometimes in Judea and Samaria world.

BY YONAH JEREMY BOB, JPOST

For fifty yeaqrs, Israel has walked a tightrope of international law between the “West Bank world” and “Judea and Samaria world.”

The so-called “settlement regulation bill” snaps that tightrope and forces Israel to make a choice.

On one hand, Israel has implemented a “belligerent occupation” of the West Bank. That neutral legal term is not to be confused with political accusations of being an “occupier.” It means that Israel – since the 1967 Six Day War – has had certain legal rights and obligations, as long as it controlled the West Bank.
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Op-ed: As always, European countries are funding bodies that issue reports allegedly about ‘human rights,’ while in fact waging a campaign against Israel’s existence.

By Ben-Dror Yemini, YNET

The European Council, a body that is made up of all European countries and is wider than the European Union, has adopted a report written by Eva-Lena Jansson, a representative of Sweden’s Social Democratic Party, which accuses Israel of engaging in “an appalling pattern of apparently systematic unlawful killings” of innocent civilians.

The report is based on the Al-Mezan NGO, which is supported by Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark, Norway and the Netherlands. The NGO itself supports the BDS Movement and is part of the campaign that is based on denying Israel’s right to exist.
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By Maj. Gen. (res.) Gershon Hacohen, BESA, January 30, 2017

BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 401

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: With the start of a new era in the White House, Israel must let go of the two-state solution as defined by the Clinton Parameters. It is time for a reassessment of Rabin’s approach, which stressed the importance of the preservation and development of Area C in Judea and Samaria under Israeli control as a prerequisite for defensible borders.

The entry of President Trump into the White House marks a new era in the US and around the world, giving rise to crises and upheavals as well as new opportunities. The demands of the State of Israel, in the context of its overall vital interests in the region, will be reviewed and reassessed. It is imperative that Israel formulate a clear stand on central issues based on wide public support. As a first step, Israel must let go of the two-state solution as laid out in the Clinton Parameters.
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by Daniel Pipes, Middle East Quarterly, Spring 2017

Building on his earlier notion of “extreme vetting,” the order explains that

to protect Americans, the United States must ensure that those admitted to this country do not bear hostile attitudes toward it and its founding principles. The United States cannot, and should not, admit those who do not support the Constitution, or those who would place violent ideologies over American law. In addition, the United States should not admit those who engage in acts of bigotry or hatred (including “honor” killings, other forms of violence against women, or the persecution of those who practice religions different from their own) or those who would oppress Americans of any race, gender, or sexual orientation.

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The Kurds, Baluchi, and Ahwazi aspirations have never received the attention the Palestinians have by the International community.

By Joseph Puder, FPM

The Islamic Republic of Iran appears in its aggressive arrogance as a solid and intimidating force. There are however, chinks in the Iranian regime’s armor – it is beset by rebellious minorities who seek self-determination from the Tehran regime.  On December 3, 2016, an international conference on Ahwaz was held in Tunisia by the Euro-Arab Center for Studies, in conjunction with the Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahwaz.  The conference was titled “Ending the Occupation and Restoring the Country – An Historic Duty”

The Ahwazis are an Arab minority in a predominantly Persian state.  In 1925, Shah Reza Pahlavi annexed the area known historically as Arabistan to Iran, and gave it the name Khuzestan.  Ahwaz is the capital of the province, which is bordering Iraq to the West, the Persian (Arabian) Gulf to the Southwest, and the Zagros Mountains to the East, North, and Southeast, which separate it from Iran (Persia).  Arabistan was a British protectorate that was governed until 1925 by Sheikh Khazaal bin Jabber, whose family ruled Arabistan for over a century. The British, interested in preserving its oil interests in Iran, gave the Shah a green-light to occupy the province.
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By Selwyn Duke, AMERICAN THINKER

The irrational left, which means virtually all the left, is apoplectic over President Trump’s executive order halting immigration from terrorist-spawning countries. Its minions are complaining that the move is “un-American,” which in their world apparently involves playing Russian roulette with American lives.

The New York Times just ran a teary-eyed piece lamenting “immediate collateral damage imposed on people who, by all accounts, had no sinister intentions in trying to come to the United States,” as the paper put it. The fake news is right there — “by all accounts” — slipped in casually in the hope the reader will slide by it unthinkingly. In reality, there are many people, from intelligence experts to politicians to social commentators to Muslims themselves, warning that there’s no way to truly know these people’s “intentions.”
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Israeli group finds PA, Hamas partly responsible for crisis, but puts lion’s share of blame on Israel

BY DOV LIEBER, TOI

Gaza’s energy, water and sewage systems are on the verge of collapse, a new report by an Israeli group said, placing the lion’s share of the blame on Israel.

The Gisha organization, which released its report, “Hand on the Switch: Who’s Responsible for Gaza’s Infrastructure Crisis?” on Tuesday, said the 1.8 million inhabitants of the Strip are plagued by frequent blackouts, undrinkable water and an outdated cellular network.
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AL MONITOR

Russia seizes diplomatic momentum on Syria

UN Syria envoy Staffan de Mistura praised the Russian-brokered Syria talks in Astana, Kazakhstan, which ended Jan. 24, as a “concrete step” toward implementation of United Nations Security Council resolutions dealing with Syria, commending Russia, Turkey and Iran for setting up a mechanism to ensure compliance with the cease-fire announced last month.

Russia’s diplomatic blitz did not end in Astana, however. On Jan. 27, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov met with Syrian opposition parties in Moscow for further discussion of a Russian draft of a new Syrian Constitution that had been offered in Astana. While representatives of the Saudi-backed High Negotiations Committee of the Syrian opposition and the National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces refused to attend, the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), which Turkey had excluded from the Astana talks, participated in the Moscow meeting.
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By Evelyn Gordon

It’s hard to imagine a former justice in any other democracy trying to orchestrate a mass judicial resignation

Note: After Mosaic published my essay “Disorder in the Court” in early December, the magazine invited two people to respond to it, Haviv Rettig Gur and Jeremy Rabkin. The piece below is my response to their responses.

Many thanks to Haviv Rettig Gur and Jeremy Rabkin for their thoughtful responses to my essay, “Disorder in the Court.” Both make valuable points. If I begin with and focus the major part of my comments on Gur, it is because he rightly highlights a major contributor to the problem of judicial activism: namely, the Knesset.
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By David Goldman, PJ MEDIA

President Trump kicked over a hornet’s nest by imposing a 90-day ban on immigration from selected Muslim countries in keeping with his campaign pledges. Andrew McCarthy, the federal prosecutor who convicted the blind sheikh and his accomplices of the first World Trade Center bombing, explains why the ban is legal–despite a federal judge’s restraining order against implementation of the order. I’ll leave it to the legal experts to explain why this is yet another outrageous abuse of power by the judiciary.

The legal issues will be sorted out soon enough. It’s the right policy, despite liberal whining and some conservative complaints.

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T. Belman. Haaretz is unrelenting in its attempts to smear Netanyahu and Trump. It keeps talking about Netanyahu’s guilt even before he is indicted let alone convicted. This Opinion piece on Trump is rife with accusations and conclusions but devoid of any facts which substantiate them. It pushes the narrative that Trump has a “nefarious purpose”, “American democracy is imperiled”, “long-held white-nationalist ideology”, “bigoted”, “dictatorship”, and “the extremism of Trump and his personal Goebbels, Steve Bannon”. It goes on and on.

The author is particularly vexed with Trump’s recent temporary ban on some Muslims saying “That measure also gave explicit preference to Christians, a religious test for admission that has never existed in American history.” The reason Christians are preferred is that Obama denied Christian refugees while green-lighting Muslim refugees. That aside, this is not a religious test, it is an ideology test. At its root is to ban all pro-sharia Islamists. From my perspective,all antisemites should be banned. We know from polls taken that 75% of Muslims from these countries are antisemetic. It rankles that the liberal Jews, Haaretz included, are chomping at the bit to support their entry.

Furthermore, All Trumps’ initiative are in line with his campaign promises that got him elected. Which returns us to the claim that Trump and his supporters are deplorables. The left and the democrats believe that they are right thinking and cannot accept the rule of the majority.

All cultures and all religions are not equal.

The only safe position for the opposition is to assume that every Trump gambit, no matter how seemingly spontaneous, fits a larger, nefarious purpose.

By Samuel G. Freedman. HAARETZ

During Donald Trump’s improbable and inflammatory rise to the presidency, a truism emerged to explain the polar reactions to him: The media takes Trump literally but not seriously, and his supporters take him seriously but not literally.

What this bon mot meant was that journalists made far too much of Trump’s promises to build a wall, ban Muslims, erect trade barriers, destroy Obamacare and so forth, while Trump’s electoral fan base never believed in all details but did see the candidate as a serious figure rather than the demagogic, incoherent clown of liberals’ scorn.
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With Netanyahu’s backing, controversial legislation that would recognize 4,000 West Bank housing units set to become law

BY TIMES OF ISRAEL STAFF

The Knesset this week is set to pass into law a controversial bill that would legalize some 4,000 housing units in the West Bank built on privately-owned Palestinian land.

The so-called Regulation Bill was put on ice in December until US President Donald Trump entered the White House on January 20.

On Saturday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu instructed coalition chairman David Bitan (Likud) to bring the proposed legislation to its second and third readings in the plenum this week, according to Hebrew reports.
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BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 403

By Dr Max Singer

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: The US is usually thought to be biased in favor of Israel, even after its recent acceptance of UNSC Resolution 2334. But for many years, the US has been a big part of the reason why the diplomatic world accepts a false narrative of the Arab-Israeli conflict that harms Israel and makes it harder to achieve peace. Washington should move to a truth-telling strategy to dismantle the structure of false views that slander Israel and stand in the way of peace.
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By Philip Rucker and David Filipov, WaPo