In ultimatum, state comptroller reportedly warns he will back official inquiry into handling of 2014 conflict if his findings are not made public

BY TAMAR PILEGGI, TOI

State Comptroller Yosef Shapira has reportedly warned Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he will recommend a commission of inquiry into the government’s handling of the 2014 war against Hamas, should the prime minister refuse to make public a report on the 50-day Gaza conflict.

ster or his associates to block the publication of the State Comptroller report — which was expected to excoriate Netanyahu and other senior defense officials over the Israeli leadership’s performance during the conflict — could result in an official inquiry.
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By Ted Belman

Ambassador Dermer credits Clinton with Gaza ceasefire by Ben Ariel. I read the article and didn’t like what Dermer had to say. Unfortunately Dermer says what Netanyahu thinks.

Yes Clinton had a leading role in negotiating a ceasefire to the 2012 Gaza fighting which was what Netanyahu wanted. Netanyahu wanted to avoid invading Gaza during that conflict.

This speech was given at an event hosted by the S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. “A lot of lives were saved.”
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Jews Choose Trump
We are creating a grassroots coalition of American Jews from across the country to join together in declaring their choice of Donald Trump for President over Hillary Clinton. She must never be President.

Do you want to know why we are doing this, how widespread the effort has already become and who else has already signed on? Go to our website, www.JewsChooseTrump.org and see.

When we have hundreds of community members in the coalition, we will publish open letters, articles, sponsor ads, events and engage in other action-based campaigns.

Please add your name at www.JewsChooseTrump.org, or contact us at info@JewsChooseTrump.org so we can add your name to those of other American Jews who know that Trump is the one who will protect our nation and protect Israel. Hillary Clinton has already proven she will do neither.

T. Belman. I no longer take for granted that Russia is our friend. On the one hand she is supporting Iran, Syria and Hezbollah and is now trying to make an ally out of Turkey. How do we put a lid on that. How does Russia? In addition Assad just went to Moscow to discuss getting the Golan back from us. How does Israel factor into Russian plans?

DEBKA

For four days since July 25, the Syrian army has been continuously firing artillery batteries – moved close to Israel’s defense lines on the Golan border – in a manner that comes dangerously close to provoking an Israeli response. This carefully orchestrated Syrian campaign goes on around the clock.

It is the first time in the six years of the Syrian war that Bashar Assad has ventured to come near to provoking Israel. But now he appears to be emboldened by his Russian ally.
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T, Belman. So 42 F-35 planes hang in the balance at $150 million a pop.That’s about 15% of the 10 year aid package. So in effect the US Government is bailing out Lockheed Martin. Without it they may go bankrupt. If Israel threatens to take a walk, the US Government will shit its pants. The US will be hard pressed to write off $400 B already spent and they will still have to bail out Lockheed Martin. If Israel doesn’t buy the planes, who will.

And why isn’t the 33 we already have enough? We could buy maintain our other planes or replace them as needed but not with the F-35s.

In addition, if we cancelled the aid then we could take credit for saving the US taxpayer money.

The US doesn’t want us to cancel because we would then be able to compete with them. We would produce better products and lower prices. The US is rightly afraid to compete with us. They would rather keep us under their thumb.

The point is that the US aid deal is really a deal for Lockheed Martin, not for Israel. And we need to say no.

By Caroline Glick, JPOST

The National Security Council Yaakov Nagel will sit down with his US counterpart, Susan Rice, and try to conclude negotiations about a new, multi-year defense assistance package.

We must all hope that he fails.

No clear Israeli interest will be advanced by concluding the aid deal presently on the table.
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By Martin Sherman

With continuing unsolved arson attacks in Duma, seven months after a coerced confession & an indictment wildly at odds with eyewitness accounts, troubling questions must be raised  

“I saw Sa’ad and Reham burning on the ground. Next to them were TWO masked men, one beside each of them. They were dressed in jeans and black long-sleeved shirts…“Their faces were covered with a balaclava, with only the mouth and eyes visible. The street light  shone directly on them. I was horrified by what I saw. They saw me and I was frightened and ran back home. I told my brother Bishar to get help and returned to Sa’ad’s house where I no longer saw the TWO masked men – Eye-witness account of Duma arson attack by Ibrahim Dawabsheh, a relative of the victims, Amira Hass, Haaretz,  July 31, 2015. 
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T. Belman. In a press conference yesterday Donald Trump said that he wants to be friends with Russia and jointly defeat ISIS. The “friends” idea upsets a lot of people who think of Russia as an adversary. I agree with Trump on this.

In Feb of this year, I co-authored an article with Alex Maistrovoy titled, Contemplating a US-Russia Alliance in which we argued the same thing.

By Alex Markovsky

During her recent “major” speech on foreign policy, Hillary said, “Donald Trump’s ideas aren’t just different – they are dangerously incoherent… They’re not even really ideas – just a series of bizarre rants, personal feuds and outright lies.” Unable to pass beyond criticism of her opponent, she was wavering between an emotional appeal and a strategic advantage, never able to articulate neither a policy nor a strategy.

The Donald Trump problem is not lack of ideas; his problem is that his ideas, often expressed in incomplete and tactless form that allows critics to deliberately misinterpret and misconstrue them, to incite a collective antagonism of various interest groups. Herein, I endeavor to put his “dangerously incoherent ideas” in historical perspective and let the facts speak for themselves.
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By Ted Belman

Written by a Soviet emigre and scholar of Marxism, the book begins with the author’s recounting of the end of the Cold War. Despite the common perception that democracy defeated communism, the author presents evidence that the Democratic Party has adopted Marxism in a new philosophy he calls Liberal Bolshevism. Mr. Markovsky trucks the origins of Liberal Bolshevism back to the policies of Woodrow Wilson and FDR and chronicles the transformation of the Democratic Party into the Social Democratic Party. Through the prism of Marxism the author traces the rhythms and patterns of the toxic amalgamation of liberalism and socialism from Lenin to Obama and binds together the Democratic Party’s policies into a Marxist-socialist cause that American Social Democrats, just like their Soviet predecessors, are committed to achieving at all costs.
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By Lee Smith, WEEKLY STANDARD

The American foreign policy community is up in arms because Donald Trump told the New York Times he is disdainful of NATO. They’re right to be upset, but where were they when Barack Obama helped put Russia on NATO’s Turkish border with his Syria policy?

The split looks partisan—Democrats criticize Trump on NATO and give the sitting Democratic president a pass—but just last week members of the foreign policy establishment on the left and right were giddy with excitement that the president of Turkey might be toppled in a coup, thereby throwing a NATO country into chaos.
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Jewish students targeted ‘for harm’

By Adam Kredo, FREE BEACON

Anti-Semitism surged on college campuses across the United States during the first part of 2016, according to a new study that found Jewish students supportive of Israel are being targeted “for harm.”

Nearly 100 more anti-Semitic incidents were recorded on U.S. college campuses during the first six months of 2016 compared with the same period in 2015, according to the report, published by the AMCHA Initiative, a group that works to combat discrimination against Jews.
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By Michael Rubin, COMMENTARY

There are four common myths or misconceptions that infuse U.S. and European peace process diplomacy when it comes to the Israel-Palestinian conflict. The first is that there are millions of Palestinian refugees. This number is arbitrary, the result of UN sleight-of-hand. After all, the United Nations uses a different definition with regard to Palestinians than it does everywhere else in the world. The late University of Illinois Professor Fred M. Gottheil tackled this issue a decade ago in Middle Eastern Studies.
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By Evelyn Gordon, COMMENTARY

Reading the Israeli headlines lately, one can see why many American Jews are convinced that ultra-Orthodox extremism is getting worse. On Monday, the Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) parties got the coalition to pass legislation barring non-Orthodox converts from using state-run ritual baths; earlier this month, the Haredi-dominated rabbinical courts refused to recognize conversions by an esteemed American Orthodox rabbi, Haskel Lookstein; and for months now, the Haredi parties have blocked implementation of Natan Sharansky’s sensible compromise on non-Orthodox worship at the Western Wall. Yet to look only at these headlines is to miss a crucial part of the story: Younger Haredim, while remaining passionately committed to Orthodox Judaism, are increasingly rejecting their rabbinic leadership’s hardline positions on numerous issues, including work, army service, academic study, and communal isolation.
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A civilization that believes in nothing will ultimately submit to anything.

By Bret Stephens, WSJ

At last count, members of the European Union spent more than $200 billion a year on defense, fielded more than 2,000 jet fighters and 500 naval ships, and employed some 1.4 million military personnel. More than a million police officers also walk Europe’s streets. Yet in the face of an Islamist menace the Continent seems helpless. Is it?

Was France helpless in May 1940?

Let’s stipulate that a van barreling down a seaside promenade isn’t a Panzer division, and that a few thousand ISIS fighters scattered from Mosul to Marseilles aren’t another Wehrmacht. But as in France in 1940, Europe today displays the same combination of doctrinal rigidity and loss of will that allowed an Allied army of 144 divisions to be routed by the Germans in six weeks. The Maginot Line of “European values” won’t prevail over people who recognize none of those values.
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The goal of jihad is to bring about the complete subjugation of the continent of Europe and of the West in general.

By David Semple, JMA

‘Jihad with mind, money and weapons’

During the closing weeks of June 2013, there was a meeting of seventy Muslim clerics at a Syrian solidarity conference in Cairo, wherein Sunni preachers called upon their fellow jihadists to “pursue all forms of jihad” against the Syrian government. At that stage in the Syrian civil war, Islamic State had not emerged as the new caliphate which would subsequently go on to conquer large tracts of both Syria and Iraq.
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By Dr. Eric R. Mandel, JPOST

Friday night’s failed coup was Turkey’s last hope to stop the Islamization of its government…Reflexively, Western leaders rushed to condemn a coup attempt they refused to understand. Their reward will be a toxic Islamist regime at the gates of Europe.’ – US Army Lt. Col. (ret.) Ralph Peters

The mainstream account of American foreign policy in the Middle East over the past seven years is that the Obama administration has taken a hands-off, more isolationist approach, extricating America from its misguided entanglements in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In reality the president chartered a well thought-out agenda to profoundly reshape the whole Middle East, realigning relationships, redefining American interests, while endangering the fragile balance between Arab and non-Arab Muslims, Sunnis and Shi’ites. To most observers, American influence and interests have been undermined and weakened in the region.
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Maj. Gen. Gershon Hacohen says Israel should wean itself off US military aid, as government seeks to sign new Memorandum of Understanding.

By Ari Soffer, INN

As Israel’s acting National Security Council chief Yaakov Nagel heads to Washington to push for the signing of a new memorandum of understanding (MOU), one senior former Israeli general has spoken out against American aid to Israel.

Maj. Gen. (Res) Gershon Hacohen, former commander of the IDF’s Northern Command and head of the army’s war colleges, told Defense News Monday that military aid actually harms Israel more than it helps the Jewish state.

Hacohen, who has been outspoken on this issue before, called for a gradual reduction in Israeli reliance on US military aid, which “harms and corrupts us.”
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T. Belman. I never thought I would post an article by Michael Moore but here goes.

by Michael Moore 

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By Daniel Pipes, ISRAEL HAYOM

Exactly 20 years ago, a newly elected Israeli prime minister — Benjamin Netanyahu — dramatically announced the following to a joint session of Congress:

“We are deeply grateful for all we have received from the United States, for all that we have received from this chamber, from this body. But I believe there can be no greater tribute to America’s long-standing economic aid to Israel than for us to be able to say: ‘We are going to achieve economic independence. We are going to do it. In the next four years, we will begin the long-term process of gradually reducing the level of your generous economic assistance to Israel.’ I am convinced that our economic policies will lay the foundation for total self-reliance and great economic strength.”

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T. Belman. This is a shocker. The Right in Israel wants to stress our legal rights to the land starting with the Balfour Declaration. But Netanyahu shows no sign of doing so. You would think that Abbas is happy that he doesn’t do so. Yet, here is Abbas, thinking that the PA gains by attacking the Balfour Declaration rather keeping silent on what the Right think of as our trump suit.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas conveys intent to sue U.K. over Balfour Declaration that expressed sympathy for the Zionist cause

By Daniel Siryoti, Shlomo Cesana, AP and Israel Hayom Staff

Israel blamed the Palestinian Authority of being “delusional” Monday after it said it would take the United Kingdom to court over the Balfour Declaration — a document from Nov. 2, 1917 expressing the U.K.’s support for a Jewish national home in “Palestine.”
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