By Eric R Mandel, FORWARD

Last summer, a fierce debate in the pro-Israel community over how to best curtail the Iranian nuclear program took place. On July 14, 2015, after 20 months of arduous talks, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) between Iran, the P5+1 countries, and the EU was announced. On the deal’s anniversary, we asked two pro-Israel leaders, one on the right and one on the left, to share their thoughts on how the deal is working one year later. To read the other perspective, click here.

President Obama “has bet global security and his own legacy that one of the world’s leading state sponsors of terrorism will adhere to an agreement to curtail its nuclear program.”

Jeffrey Goldberg, The Atlantic

“In the United States, support is growing for the notion that (President Obama) has failed to hold Tehran accountable for nuclear violations, downplayed Iran’s economic windfall from sanctions relief, and ignored the deal’s negative regional implications for state sponsorship of terrorism.”

Raymond Tanter, Foreign Policy Magazine
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Likud MK Yoav Kisch to present coalition faction leaders with the bill designed to make political activity by foreign-funded groups subject to existing campaign finance restrictions • Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants to fast-track legislation.

By Shlomo Cesana, ISRAEL HAYOM

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is promoting a bill that would prohibit activity by the V15 organization in the next Knesset election. The bill is the brainchild of MK Yoav Kisch and is designed to address foreign-funded groups that attempt to influence the outcome of Israeli elections by treating them as organizations that are subject to the restrictions of the Campaign Finance Law. A loophole in the current law gives groups like V15 a free hand.

The legislation says that “according to the existing law, promotional activity in an election that is not tied to a [specific] party but contribute to one party or political bloc is not subject to the restrictions that apply to parties, even if its purpose is very similar or identical — to influence the election results. So there’s a ‘back door’ around the instructions laid out in law.”
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By J.E. Dyer, LIBERTY UNYIELDING

Has anyone ever been as preternaturally well prepared for a coup as Recep Tayyip Erdogan seems to have been in the last 24 hours?

The key to understanding what just happened is the handful of things Erdogan did, immediately, that he didn’t have to do, as a response to a coup attempt by the military.

Until a few hours ago, we might have thought theprompt detention of more than 2,700 judges and prosecutors in the Turkish judicial system was chief among those.  That’s a lot of judges and prosecutors to run out and arrest right away – within hours – after a coup planned by a rogue element in the military.  It sure looks like someone was just waiting to execute an order on that one.
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By Tova Lazaroff, JPOST

scrambling to save the West Bank outpost of Amona — which is slated for demolition by the end of December — even if it means standing in opposition to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

On Sunday they hope to present a bill to the Ministerial Legislative Committee which would retroactively legalize settler homes built on private Palestinian land, such as in Amona’s case, in exchange for granting compensation to the original land owners.

The Palestinian land owners would be given the option of an alternative plot of land close to their homes or financial compensation.
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Behind the News in Israel

Both houses of Congress are at work to modify funding bills for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), as part of an effort to investigate the very legitimacy of the decades-old agency, Michael Wilner reported in the Jerusalem Post Friday. Both the House and the Senate want the State Department to, once and for all, define the term “Palestinian refugee,” and while they’re at it, reveal how many are receiving aid from UNRWA.

UNRWA was established in 1948 to assist the 750,000 Palestinians who had left Israel. Since then UNRWA has been a promoter of the Palestinian cause, funding as many as 5 million “refugees,” the majority of whom never left the homes where they were born in the Gaza Strip, the “West Bank,” eastern Jerusalem, or other Arab countries, to the tune of $1.23 billion annually, $250 million of which is donated by US taxpayers.
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Industry Braces for Losses, Layoffs as Result of ‘Buy America’ Spending Provisions

Barbara Opall-Rome, Defense News

TEL AVIV — Israeli industry is bracing for lost funding and layoffs as a result of a proposed $38 billion, 10-year US military aid package that rescinds Israel’s ability to convert a significant portion of US grant dollars into shekels for local research, development and procurement.

While Israel still hopes to prevail upon the White House to bump its top line closer to $40 billion over 10 years, government and industry sources hold little hope of US President Barack Obama’s administration wavering on Buy America demands. The proposed deal aims to follow the current $30 billion memorandum of understanding inked by both countries in 2007, which expires October 2017.
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BY David P. Goldman, ASIA TIMES

Yet another criminal known to security services has perpetrated a mass killing, the Tunisian Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel. Why did the French police allow a foreign national with a criminal record of violence to reside in France? Apart from utter incompetence, the explanation is that he was a snitch for the French authorities. Blackmailing Muslim criminals to inform on prospective terrorists is the principal activity of European counter-terrorism agencies, as I noted in 2015. Every Muslim in Europe knows this.

The terrorists, though, have succeeded in turning the police agents sent to spy on them and forcing them to commit suicide attacks to expiate their sins. This has become depressingly familiar; as Ryan Gallagher reported recently, perpetrators already known to the authorities committed ten of the highest-profile attacks between 2013 and 2015.
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T. Belman. Its about time we learned what Sharia is about. If someone has a link to another aricle which presents a different picture, please put the link in a comment.

By Toni Johnson, and Mohammed Aly Sergie, CFR

Introduction

Sharia, or Islamic law, influences the legal code in most Muslim countries. A movement to allow sharia to govern personal status law, a set of regulations that pertain to marriage, divorce, inheritance, and custody, is even expanding into the West. “There are so many varying interpretations of what sharia actually means that in some places, it can be incorporated into political systems relatively easily,” said CFR’s Steven A. Cook. Sharia’s influence on both personal status law and criminal law is highly controversial. Some interpretations are used to justify cruel punishments such as amputation and stoning, as well as unequal treatment of women in inheritance, dress, and independence. The debate is growing as to whether sharia can coexist with secularism, democracy, or even modernity, an idea that is being tested by several countries in the Middle East in the wake of popular uprisings and civil wars.

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By Ben Kamisar – THE HILL

Donald Trump has a secret weapon as he seeks to burnish his image in Cleveland: his daughter Ivanka Trump.

A mogul in her own right, Ivanka Trump has become her father’s most effective surrogate, softening the edges of Donald Trump’s brash and often controversial presidential campaign.

And she’s being called upon to play that role again in the spotlight of this week’s Republican National Convention.
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T. Belman. Gen Paul Vallely on behalf of StandUpAmericaUSA wrote,

“Declare war on ISIS and any other radical Islamic organization and country that harbors or supports them!”

Let me encourage you to improve upon this. Gingrich says outlaw people who support sharia law. CSP focuses on fighting Jihad. You want war on violent Jihad.  What about war on the stealth Jihad? What about outlawing the ideology just as America outlawed Communism.

What about passing laws that prevent Saudi Arabia from teaching the Wahabbi doctrine. And so on.

War on ISIS falls way short.

By Mitchell Bard, TOI

A lot has been made of the president’s irrational refusal to say that radical Muslims are responsible for the terrorist attacks they commit. He has rationalized that the semantics don’t matter, and argues that he does not want to create the perception that we are in a war with Islam, even as Muslim states openly engage in a war against these extremists. Obama is wrong, misleading the American people and sewing confusion as to the threat we are confronting.
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As the Left showed on Tuesday, yet again, it has no intention of cleaning up its act. Subversion is the only card it has left.

By Caroline B Glick, JPOST

It was an ironic coincidence that the same day the Knesset passed the updated, watered down “NGO law,” the US Senate Permanent Select Committee on Investigations published its final report on the Obama administration’s use of an Israel-registered NGO to run a campaign to bring down Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the 2015 election.

Hours after opposition leader Isaac Herzog hysterically and falsely alleged, from the Knesset podium, that “the blossoms of fascism are rising in Israeli society,” the Senate committee announced that the OneVoice organization unlawfully used US taxpayer money to conduct a political campaign to bring down Netanyahu in 2015.
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Turkey coup: Live updates

LATEST REPORTS SAY COUP HAS FAILED

On Friday afternoon, an as-yet unidentified faction of the Turkish military launched a coup attempt aimed at toppling President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government.

The coup leaders, claiming to speak for the entire Turkish Armed Forces, said they’d done so in the name of protecting democracy — despite the fact that Erdogan and his party were democratically elected.

“Turkish Armed Forces have completely taken over the administration of the country to reinstate constitutional order, human rights and freedom,” the statement said.

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By Louise Mensch, HEATSTREET,  |10:50 am, July 15, 2016

HEAT STREET EXCLUSIVE – A French government committee has heard testimony, suppressed by the French government at the time and not published online until this week, that the killers in the Bataclan appear to have tortured their victims on the second floor of the club.

The chief police witness in Parliament testified that on the night of the attacks, an investigating officer, tears streaming down his face, rushed out of the Bataclan and vomited in front of him just after seeing the disfigured bodies.

The 14-hour testimony about the November attacks took place March 21st.
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CLARION PROJECT

Here are the top five reasons why the Islamic State attacked France.

France has been fighting the Islamic State and other Islamists.

French President Francois Hollande led his country into airstrikes against the Islamic State, bombing targets in Syria for the past two months. It was the first country in Europe to join America in bombing ISIS targets in Iraq and has so far been the only European country to join airstrikes against ISIS in Syria.

France also led the fight against Islamists in North Africa, it was French soldiers that liberated Timbuktu from Islamist insurgents belonging to al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb in Mali.

The Islamic State is therefore fighting those who fight it the most, in an effort to persuade the civilian population of France that the war is about French foreign policy and not about a global Islamist Caliphate and to cow them into submission through terror.
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U.N. body’s 21-member World Heritage Committee seeks to pass a resolution declaring holy Jerusalem site sacred to “Muslims only” as part of calls for a return to the “historic status quo” • Israel expresses concern over EU’s backing of the move.

By Shlomo Cesana, ISRAEL HAYOM

Israel on Thursday was outraged to learn that the U.N.’s heritage body was planning to adopt a resolution declaring the Temple Mount sacred to “Muslims only.”

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s 21-member World Heritage Committee is set to vote on the resolution, a joint Palestinian-Jordanian initiative, during its annual meeting in Istanbul, which began on Sunday and runs through next week. The resolution calls for a return to the “historic status quo” on the Temple Mount, which it sees as favoring Muslims.
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by Vic Rosenthal

When the Zionists began to build the yishuv, the enterprise that would become the Jewish state, they had to develop an economy, a political system, an army for defense, a legal system, an educational system, a transportation network, a postal service, and countless other things. They got help, first from wealthy benefactors like Montefiore and Rothschild, and later – when they needed to resettle hundreds of thousands of often penniless refugees from the Holocaust and, later, from the Muslim world – from organized appeals in the Diaspora. In a highly controversial arrangement, Holocaust survivors in Israel also received billions as reparations from Germany (the state also received several hundreds of millions).
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HAARETZ

The proposed ‘Joint Implementation Group’ would be headquartered near Amman, Jordan, and would see the former Cold War foes sharing intelligence and targeting information.

The United States is offering Russia a new military pact against the Islamic State and Al-Qaida in Syria, according to a leaked U.S. proposal.

If finalized, the arrangement could dramatically alter America’s role in the Arab country’s five-year civil war.
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