By: Alberto M. Fernandez*, MEMRI

Much of the recent media coverage of the new Trump administration has an air of hysteria about it. The barbarians are seemingly at the door and are actually taking over, the lights are going out over America and being replaced by darkness. This hyperbole seems to extend across the board, including speculation about the future course of U.S. foreign policy and the running of the Department of State.

The coverage on State has included some naïve (or intentionally ill-informed) pieces on the incoming Administration demanding political appointee ambassadors leave no later than Inauguration Day and on the Trump transition team requesting details about programs and personnel related to Countering Violent Extremism or gender issues.[1] Most of this has been presented in ways that seem to be both alarmist and often ignorant of the way government actually works and how incoming administrations function.
Read more…

NGO MONITOR

Despite its stated opposition to BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions) campaigns against Israel, the European Union (EU) is a major financial backer of organizations that advocate for the country’s economic isolation, according to a new research report published today by NGO Monitor.

NGO Monitor reviewed a number of recent EU regional funding programs designated for Israel, the West Bank, and Gaza, and found that 29 out of 100 EU grants administered through the frameworks reviewed, funnel funds to BDS organizations (€16.7 million out of €67.1 million – roughly 25%). 42 out of 180 EU grantees in total support BDS – either through participation in activities and events, signing of petitions and initiatives, and/or membership in explicit BDS platforms. Several organizations were the recipients of more than one grant.
Read more…

By Dale Hurd, CBN NEWS

LONDON — Some scandals are so massive that they’re simply hard to believe. As many as one million white English children may have been the victims of Muslim rape gangs, better known as grooming gangs, in towns up and down Great Britain.

Policy analyst George Igler says, “When you encounter an issue that is just so unbelievable, just so outside your frame of reference and understanding, the immediate human reaction is just one to not believe it at all.”

Perhaps even harder to believe is that while there have been prosecutions, the British government has still not stopped this criminal activity.
Read more…

DEBKAfile Exclusive Report

Although Vladimir Putin’s spokesman spoke reservedly Saturday, Jan. 21, about Donald Trump’s inauguration as US president the day before – It would be “an illusion” to expect Russian-US ties to be “free of disagreement” – Moscow’s actions in Syria were clearly designed to meet the new US president more than half way.

Trump in his inauguration speech pledged to wipe radical Islamist terrorism “off the face of the earth.”

His words were still reverberating when Russian long-range Tu-22M3 bombers flying in from bases in Russia smashed Islamic State targets in the eastern Syrian province of Deir ez-Zour the next day. The bombers hit ISIS base camps, weapons stockpiles and armored vehicles, covered overhead by Russian fighter jets from their Syrian air base at Hmeimim. After the sortie, the Tupolev bombers flew home.
Read more…

By Yoram Ettinger,ISRAEL HAYOM

In order to avoid the failed Middle East track record of all U.S. presidents since 1948, President Donald Trump should refrain from — rather than repeat — the systematic errors committed by his predecessors. They were misguided by the political correctness and conventional wisdom of the State Department, which courted Saddam Hussein until the 1990 invasion of Kuwait, embraced Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, betrayed the Shah of Iran, identified with Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, deserted Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, heralded PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat as a messenger of peace, facilitated the Hamas takeover of Gaza, and welcomed the Arab tsunami as an “Arab Spring, a transition toward democracy.” The State Department has sacrificed the 1,400-year-old complex, disintegrating, unpredictable, volcanic, violently intolerant and frenzied Middle East reality on the altar of well-intentioned but oversimplified and futile attempts to reset the Middle East in accordance with a Western state of mind and values.
Read more…

Israel cannot claim to be a democracy as long as nearly a half-million of its citizens are under the IDF’s anti-settlement judicial dictatorship.

By Moshe Dann, JPOST

In response to calls from the international community and anti-Israel organizations to “end the occupation,” referring to the presence of Jews in Area C of Judea and Samaria, aka “the settlers,” supporters of Israel respond: “We are not occupying someone else’s land; this land belongs to Israel and the Jewish people by law and by history.”

But the IDF’s judicial system in Area C, aka “the occupied territories,” which represents the state, composed of the Military Advocate General (MAG), the IDF Prosecutor’s Office, and the Civil Administration takes a position in line with Israel’s critics and the international community. As MAG’s website states, Area C, in which all settlements are located, is “subject to belligerent occupation,” which means “the occupation of territory belonging to another country.”
Read more…

The synthesis of Zionism and socialism has disintegrated, making way for a winning symbiosis of religion and strong ethno-nationalism.

By Shlomo Sand, HAARETZ

How Israel went from atheist Zionism to a Jewish state
It’s sad to read the recent complaints of Israeli intellectuals about the collapse of the only Jewish democracy in the Middle East. The secular melancholy is likely to arouse identification among readers – but not to enlighten them, alas.

It sometimes seems that words are nothing more than props in the hands of talented circus acrobats. For example, there is a profound connection between the terms secularism and atheism, but they are by no means congruent or identical. Among Israeli intellectuals, and not by chance, the differences between the two are far more vague than in other areas of the national discourse.
Read more…

By Elizabeth Harrington, NEW BEACON

The Trump administration is seeking major cuts to federal spending upon taking office, with plans to eliminate agencies and programs to reduce the budget by over $10 trillion. The National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities would be eliminated, according to a new report on the administration’s spending priorities published by the Hill. Both arts agencies have budgets of roughly $147 million.

The NEA awards millions of dollars worth of grants for art projects each year, which have included plays about assassinating Christopher Columbus, food stamps, and gun-control activist lesbians, climate change poetry, and “Doggie Hamlet.” Aside from the art agencies, the Hill reported the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, home of PBS and NPR, would be privatized, and the Commerce and Energy departments would “see major reductions in funding.”
Read more…

Netanyahu asks Minister Bennett to postpone a vote on annexing Ma’ale Adumim, says Trump’s advisers asked him not to surprise the incoming U.S. administration with unilateral steps, Haaretz learns.

By Barak Ravid and Jonathan Lis,  HAARETZ, Jan 21, 2017 8:28 PM

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is trying to torpedo a bill to annex the West Bank settlement of Ma’aleh Adumim, slated to come up for a vote Sunday in a ministerial panel. Haaretz has learned that Netanyahu spoke by phone Friday with Education Minister Naftali Bennett (Habayit Hayehudi) and asked him to postpone discussion of the bill in light of messages conveyed by advisers of U.S. President Donald Trump.

Netanyahu told Bennett that Trump’s advisers said no unilateral steps should be taken by Israel before the Netanyahu-Trump meeting, scheduled to take place in the first week of February, but rather to coordinate and cooperate.

“I’m getting messages from Trump not to jump in head first,” Netanyahu told Bennett.
Read more…

An expert weighs in on the “plagiarism” allegations.

By Matthew Vadum, FPM

The plagiarism allegations CNN leveled against conservative commentator Monica Crowley were part of a “political hit job,” according to a publishing law attorney with expertise in plagiarism cases.

Crowley, a popular TV pundit and Washington Times editor who holds a Ph.D. in international relations, previously worked for former President Richard Nixon years after he resigned his office.

Trump’s transition team stood by Crowley when the controversy erupted, stating, “Any attempt to discredit Monica is nothing more than a politically motivated attack that seeks to distract from the real issues facing this country.”
Read more…

The Clinton policy to create Muslin Kosovo and Muslim Bosnia in the nineties “is widely seen today as the key which in recent years unlocked continental Europe to the influx of millions of Muslim migrants and refugees from the Middle East and Africa.”

DEBKA

Just six days before Donald Trump’s inauguration as US President, a Serbian train took up position on the Kosovo border. It was painted ostentatiously with the slogan “Kosovo is Serbian” in several languages along with national Serbian and Orthodox Christian emblems.

The train has been stationary since Friday, Jan. 14. Kosovan security authorities are blocking its advance along the new 213km long rail link from Belgrade to Mitrovica, a town in Muslim Kosovo which has a large Serbian population.
Read more…

As Trump vows to radically change America’s approach to the Middle East, Theresa May’s Britain and Malcolm Turnbull’s Australia defy international consensus on the peace process, irking Ramallah

BY RAPHAEL AHREN, TOI

It’s springtime for Israel’s relations with the Anglosphere. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu loves to talk about burgeoning ties with the Arab world, but in the months and years ahead, a newly formed pro-Israel triumvirate of English-speaking countries looks set to form the backbone of international support for the Jewish state.

The first and most important indication of this trend is, of course, the change in the White House. Arriving on Friday, the Donald Trump administration has made plain its intention to shut out the public daylight that Barack Obama introduced between Washington and Jerusalem, vowing all but total support for Netanyahu’s policies.
Read more…

By Mathew Continetti, THE NEW BEACON

Donald Trump’s inaugural address was a stirring call for national unity and a declaration of war against the establishment in Washington, D.C. The speech was vintage Trump: politically incorrect, critical of both parties, amped up, biting, strongly delivered, and wildly ambitious. Anyone who believed Trump would change his beliefs or style when he assumed the office of the presidency was proven wrong. He’s not going to change. And he’s not going to let up.

Trump espoused his worldview in remarkably few words. He is a vituperative critic of the post-Cold War international system. Where the architects of that system see it as a bulwark of stability and global prosperity, Trump sees it as diminishing the United States in favor of foreign countries and an international class of wealthy political and financial elites. Washington has been serving its own interests, he said, and not the people’s. That ends now. His America will turn inward, focusing on domestic stability, education, infrastructure, and jobs. The one exception will be the fight against Islamic terrorism, where Trump is prepared to join with autocracies in pursuit of common goals.
Read more…

By Andrew Rice, The New Yorker

Jared Kushner at a press conference shortly after Donald Trump won the New York presidential primary. Photo: Mark Peterson/Redux

Until very recently, and to all outward appearances, Jared Kushner was just another socially striving young businessman with inoffensively Bloombergian political values. But over the past year, something seems to have changed — in his beliefs, in his manner, in his relationship to his peers among New York City’s elite. On a frigid day in December, Kushner visited the Times Square headquarters of Morgan Stanley to address a private meeting that the Partnership for New York City, which represents the interests of the business community, convened to discuss the outcome of the presidential election. More than 400 executives, many of them CEOs of major corporations, crowded into the bank’s wood-paneled dining hall to hear first from Charles Schumer, soon to be the Democratic leader in the Senate, and then from Kushner, representing his father-in-law, Donald Trump, soon to be the most powerful man in the world.

Read more…

Why Integration Makes Secession More Appealing

By Edoardo Campanella, FOREIGN AFFAIRS

[EDOARDO CAMPANELLA is an economist in the financial industry and a shortlisted author for the 2015 Bracken Bower Prize, awarded by the Financial Times and McKinsey.]

On top of the many economic and political challenges Europe will face in 2017 is secessionism. At present, there are about 100 [1] active autonomist groups across Europe—although with varying degrees of popular support and commitment—and Catalonia and Scotland are once again at the epicenter. In a New Year’s speech [2], Catalonian President Carles Puigdemont promised to hold in September a “legal and binding” referendum on the territory’s secession from Spain. Meanwhile, Nicola Sturgeon [3], Scotland’s first minister, has made clear that a hard Brexit, involving an outright withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union and the single market, would trigger a second referendum on Scottish independence. Although a number of legal and political obstacles are likely to frustrate Barcelona’s and Edinburgh’s irredentist plans, secessionism will remain a major threat to European integrity in the years to come. And here is the Catch-22: The more Europe integrates, the more the nations within it disintegrate.
Read more…

The duty of the Israeli government today is to come up with new ideas.

By Gideon Saar, JPOST

Will today be remembered as a dramatic turning point in US policy regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict when Donald Trump enters the White House? So much depends on the meeting between the new president and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that is scheduled to take place next month.

Many Israelis have high hopes for the Trump era. But the main question is whether the Israeli government is ready to dissociate from the “two states” paradigm, and reject the dangerous idea of establishing a Palestinian state in the heart of Israel? Theoretically, the conditions are ripe for such a move.
Read more…

It’s not easy when boycotts can cost people their jobs.

By Mordechai Kedar, INN

The supposed goal of the BDS Movement is to force Israel to leave the “Palestinian territories” and to establish a Palestinian state, but the basic real motivation behind the movement’s activities is hatred of Israel and of Jews, and the openly expressed desire to rid the Middle East of Israel.

For years the movement seemed relegated to the sidelines and had little influence . However during the last two years, mainly after Operation Protective Edge in Gaza and the negative publicity it engendered, the movement increased its activities, its donations grew significantly and so did the number of its volunteers. The organization’s success on North American, Canadian and European academic campuses was especially pronounced, due to the large number of Muslims and Arabs enrolled on campus and the current fashion of putting everything in the context of human rights (as long as we are not talking about Jews, that is), in addition to traditional anti-Semitism and the presenting of Israel as an illegitimate state, scofflaw and a danger to world peace.
Read more…

T. Belman. This article ignores the fact that in many if not most jurisdictions in the West, where a person, in good faith builds on someone else’s land, the owners, once determined, would be forced to receive generous compensation for that part of their lands, affected. That is what the Regulation Law seeks to accomplish. And remember that applies only to privately owned Palestinian lands. Israel also has the right to build on public land.

By: Prof. Amichai Cohen, IDI

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict might be facing a legal escalation. Recent events surrounding the evacuation of the Israeli settlement of Amona have ignited a long-simmering debate within Israeli society regarding the construction of a small portion of settlements on privately-owned Palestinian land in Judea and Samaria.

The Settlement Regulation Bill, which has caused a firestorm of controversy in Israel, is aimed at addressing this issue. It stipulates that no demolition orders will be carried out for a period of one year, during which time efforts shall be made to ascertain the ownership of disputed plots of land. At the end of the period, land found to be privately owned will be expropriated from its owners in exchange for an appropriate financial compensation. Due to strong opposition by legal experts, the version of the bill currently under consideration will not apply to Amona and a small number of similar cases, regarding which a Supreme Court ruling to evacuate already exists.
Read more…

New poll finds that 75% of Israelis support sovereignty in Judea and Samaria in some form, while only 7% support a Palestinian state.

By Shimon Cohen, INN

A new poll finds that the vast majority of the Israeli population would like to see Israeli sovereignty being applied over Judea and Samaria. Only seven percent of the public is interested in establishing a Palestinian state in these areas.

The poll, released on Thursday, was conducted between January 10 and 15 among a representative sample of the adult Jewish public in Israel, by the Maagor Mohot Research Institute directed by Prof. Yitzhak Katz. The poll surveyed a random probability sample of 514 responders online, with a 4.5% margin of error.
Read more…