The fighting also underscores the strategic paradox in which the West (together with Russia) is focusing on the war against ISIS while the Syrian regime continues to massacre Syrian civilians.

By Zvi Barel, HAARETZ

The cease-fire agreement signed at the end of February between the warring sides in Syria has long become meaningless. Each side still continues to count the breaches of the other – but the term “the other side” is also a hazy one. According to the agreement, the rebels are not to be bombed or fought against, except for Islamic State and the Nusra Front (which is affiliated with Al-Qaida).

In the same accord, the city of Aleppo, which Syrian President Bashar Assad’s forces had surrounded on the agreement’s eve, is included in the cease-fire. But as the days passed and the breaches persisted, local battles developed not only between Assad’s army and the rebels, but among groups of rebels. Over the past three weeks it has become clear that Aleppo is also the focus of intense fighting, with the Syrian army operating freely together with the Russian Air Force in the city.
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By Reza Parchizadeh, AMERICAN THINKER

The Westphalian System is a doctrine in international law that has been the generally accepted norm for the world order in the past couple of centuries. The basis of this doctrine is the Peace of Westphalia that put an end to the Thirty Years’ War in Europe in 1648.

The Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648) proved to be one of the most devastating wars in Europe’s history, one that left around eight million casualties. The war initially started over post-Reformation religious disputes between the Protestant and the Catholic states in the Holy Roman Empire. However, it later grew into an ongoing continental power struggle between the Habsburg Empire and the Bourbon Empire for the fate of Europe, where the Habsburgs and their Catholic allies closed ranks against an alliance of the Protestant anti-Habsburgians and the Catholic Bourbon Empire. That bloody war was concluded by the Peace of Westphalia.
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T. Belman. I strongly support any proposal to get them recognized as Jews. Their children should grow up being part of the Jewish people. I would rather embrace them as fellow Jews than embrace anti-Israel Jews. If they remain as Israeli non Jews, just imagine the intermarriage which will take place with Israeli Jews.

Halevy, Norman warn that the country could lose its Jewish majority within decades.\

By Steve Linde, JPOST

Unless the State of Israel changes its policy on converting immigrants from the former Soviet Union and Ukraine to Judaism, the country could lose its Jewish majority in the coming decades, leaders of the Triguboff Institute have warned.

“One has to revert in one way or another – and I’m not going to say what exactly the form should be – to the approach that conversion is a national necessity for Israel without which Israel will not have a Jewish majority in this country in the foreseeable future,” said Efraim Halevy, the chairman of the institute and a former Mossad director, in an exclusive interview with The Jerusalem Post last week.
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By Ted Belman

JPOST published an article over the weekend titled Time for an Israeli strategy for the next American administration. I did not agree with the strategy set out and normally would not have made mention of the article except that it was written by Eric Mandel.

Not only is he the director of MEPIN™ which is read by members of Congress, their foreign policy advisers, members of the Knesset, and journalists, he is also the Northeast Co-Chair of StandWithUs, an international organization dedicated to educating the public about Israel, while fighting the BDS movement. His views and policy prescriptions should not be ignored.
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In a globalised era, even a country as big as America can feel small. Mark Mazower on why politicians such as Donald Trump are in fashion

By Mark Mazower, FP

The flags are flying, the anthems ring out. We live in the time of the homeland, of Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen and the Freedom party’s presidential candidate Norbert Hofer, fresh from his resounding victory in the first round of the Austrian presidential poll. Trump has called on Americans to resist “the false song of globalism”. “In a huge number of European countries, patriotic movements are surging vigorously,” was how Le Pen greeted news of Hofer’s victory last weekend. Nationalism is back like it never went out of fashion and, with it, the head-scratching, the puzzlement. How to explain the irrational, the commentators ask. Doesn’t the Brexit camp realise leaving the European Union is a crazy idea? Don’t Trump’s millions understand that he is promising the impossible?

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By Ted Belman

Commentary has taken the trouble to assemble these critical articles on Trump’s major policy proposals. A lot more could be said but these critiques say a lot. Like I said in one of my critiques, “easier said than done”.

What Trump has going for him is not whether he can fulfill his promises but that he has identified and cashed in on, the popular discontent.

• Taking Trump Seriously on Trade
  SCOTT LINCICOME

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DEBKA

SIS fighters smashed a force of Italian and British Special Ops troops on Wednesday, April 27 in the first battle of its kind in Libya, DEBKAfile’s military and intelligence sources report. This battle will result in the delay of the planned Western invasion of Libya, as the encounter proved that European forces are not ready for this kind of guerilla warfare. The sources also said the planners of the invasion were surprised by the high combat skills of the ISIS fighters.

Our sources report the following details:
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By Jerry Gordon, NER

The following is an excerpt from a speech given by Ze’ev Jabotinsky in Warsaw, Poland on Tisha B’Av in 1937. [Two years before the Nazis invaded Poland.]

“… it is already three years that I am calling upon you, Polish Jewry, who are the crown of world Jewry. I continue to warn you incessantly that a catastrophe is coming closer. I became gray and old in these years, my heart bleeds, that you, dear brothers and sisters, do not see the volcano which will soon begin to spit it’s all consuming lava. I know that you are not seeing this because you are immersed in your daily worries. Today, however, I demand your trust. You were convinced already that my prognoses have already proven to be right. If you think differently then drive me out from your midst.

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BY JONATHAN S. TOBIN, COMMENTARY

Palestinians try to demolish part of Joseph’s Tomb in October 2000. AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis

In the West Bank city of Nablus, Arabs rioted on Thursday. Were they complaining about Jewish settlements or the lack of a Palestinian state? No. Their issue was the fact that a group of Jews had entered the city, and as is their right under agreements concluded with the Palestinian Authority, sought to pray at the Tomb of Joseph, an ancient Jewish site of worship.

Palestinians threw rocks and burned tires. But Israeli troops defended the pilgrims and, thanks to the army’s efforts to prevent injuries on either side, no Palestinians were reported hurt. This wasn’t the first time Palestinians sought to prevent Jews from praying at the tomb. There was a similar incident in February. Prior to that, the tomb and the synagogue that encompasses it were burned last October as well as in 2000 in a bloody riot at the start of the second intifada.
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T. Belman. This article is remiss in not stressing that the Golan is covered by Res 242 which grants Israel the right to retain some of the lands and to have defensible borders. Based on this alone we can claim that the border must be drawn so that the Golan remains part of Israel.  We can insist on this forever.  So in effect Israel is offering peace for peace and not land for peace.  As I said before, Israel would rather have the Golan than a peace agreement with Syria. There are many land disputes around the world that remain disputes.

As for Baker’s remarks that extending Israeli law to the Golan falls short of annexation, that was so because the Golan is occupied territory of another country. But extending Israeli law to Judea and Samaria would effectively annex such lands because they were not the lands of another party and in fact were part of the land of Israel. Israel didn’t annex the land it acquired in the War of Independence either. It merely extended Israeli law to such land right up to the Armistice lines in accordance with Ben Gurion’s Law.

Howard Grief z”l explain’s this law in David Ben-Gurion’s Forgotten 1948 Land of Israel Proclamation for the Annexation of Judea and Samaria.

Although PM says Heights will remain under state’s sovereignty forever, expert stresses situation on the ground has not changed and land was never annexed

BY JOSEF FEDERMAN, TOI

AP — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has sparked a new diplomatic brushfire by declaring that the Golan Heights, seized from Syria in the 1967 Six Day War, is and should remain “under Israel’s sovereignty permanently.”

But following tough international criticism, Israeli officials said Netanyahu’s statements had been misconstrued and that a 1981 decision to apply Israeli law to the strategic plateau fell short of annexation.
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By Sierra Rayne, AMERICAN THINKER

Far from being benign, or even positive, as some commentators in the liberal media claim, a new survey of Canadian Muslims should give many pause for thought.

Keep in mind that there are already more than one million Muslims in Canada, and their rate of population growth is doubling every 10 years, meaning that — if century-long trends continue — Canada will be a majority Muslim nation by 2050. Since the last census of the Muslim population was in 2011, the current number is likely in the neighborhood of 1.5 million, or more than 4% of the total population.
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by Vic Rosenthal

The relationship of Israel to the UN has always been difficult. Over the years, the organization has both reflected worldwide anti-Jewish prejudice and provided a focus for intervention against Israel’s interests.

UN General Assembly resolution 3379 which in 1975 declared Zionism “a form of racism and racial discrimination” was finally repealed sixteen years later thanks to the efforts of US Senator Daniel P. Moynahan, Assistant Secretary of State John Bolton and President George H. W. Bush, a president not generally considered particularly pro-Israel.
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By Udo Gollub at Messe Berlin, Berlin, Germany

I just went to the Singularity University summit and here are the key learnings.

In 1998, Kodak had 170,000 employees and sold 85% of all photo paper worldwide. Within just a few years, their business model disappeared and they got bankrupt. What happened to Kodak will happen in a lot of industries in the next 10 year – and most people don’t see it coming. Did you think in 1998 that 3 years later you would never take pictures on paper film again?

Yet digital cameras were invented in 1975. The first ones only had 10,000 pixels, but followed Moore’s law. So as with all exponential technologies, it was a disappointment for a long time, before it became way superior and got mainstream in only a few short years. It will now happen with Artificial Intelligence, health, autonomous and electric cars, education, 3D printing, agriculture and jobs. Welcome to the 4th Industrial Revolution.
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The intractability of the 100-year dispute between Jew and Arab over the Land of Israel is rooted not in its complexity, but its brutal simplicity.

By Martin Sherman, JPOST 

 Until 1967, Israel did not hold an inch of the Sinai Peninsula and the West Bank, the Gaza Strip or the Golan Heights. Israel held not an acre of what is now considered disputed territory. And yet we enjoyed no peace. Year after year Israel called for – pleaded for – a negotiated peace with the Arab governments. Their answer was a blank refusal and more war… The reason was not a conflict over territorial claims. The reason was, and remains, the fact that a free Jewish state sits on territory at all. – Prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, before a joint session of the US Congress, January 28, 1976 
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By Ambassador (ret.) Yoram Ettinger, “Second Thought: a US-Israel initiative”
“inFocus Quarterly Journal,” Spring 2016, vol. X number 2, http://bit.ly/1UehaHm

In 2016, Israel is a major contributor to – and a global co-leader with – the USA in the areas of research, development, manufacturing and launching of micro (100 kg), mini (300 kg) and medium (1,000 kg) size satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), as well as joint space missions, space communications and space exploration sounding rocket and scientific balloon flights. According to NASA Administrator, Charles Bolden, “Israel is known for its innovation. The October 15, 2015 joint agreement gives us the opportunity to cooperate with Israel on the journey to Mars, [highlighting Israel’s unique, extremely lightweight technologies, which conserve energy]….”

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Activists from US coast to coast robotically parrot the same lies, employ the same tactics of bullying, intimidating and silencing pro-Israel activists and speakers on campus after campus.

By Caroline Glick, JPOST

To defeat the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign against Israel, it is first necessary to understand it. The BDS campaign is an extraordinary phenomenon.

Activists from US coast to coast robotically parrot the same lies, employ the same tactics of bullying, intimidating and silencing pro-Israel activists and speakers on campus after campus. Their goals are uniform. They seek to silence pro-Israel voices in US academia as a means to destroy general public support for Israel in America.
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Western governments continue mass aid for PA after it promised to stop paying jailed terrorists’ salaries, but new report exposes the lie.

By Ari Yashar, INN

A shocking report on Wednesday reveals that the Palestinian Authority (PA) has fooled Western governments, raking in over a billion dollars in aid from them annually despite breaching their demands that it stop paying salaries to terrorist prisoners.

The report by Palestinian Media Watch (PMW), which can be read in full here, exposes how the PA has coped since August 2014, when – in the face of demands by the US and European donor countries that it stop paying salaries to jailed terrorists – it announced it would stop the terror funding.
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There is no friendship without disagreements and there have been plenty of those in Israel’s history of relations with the USA.

By Raphael Medoff, INN

Vice President Joe Biden’s declared “frustration” with the Israeli government may have insulted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but he is only the latest in a long line of Israeli prime ministers in whom the White House has found fault at one time or another.

Ironically, many of the Israeli leaders with whom past U.S. presidents have clashed were from the leftwing Labor Party, not the rightwing Likud.

Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, was the first Israeli leader to find himself at odds with Washington. In the spring of 1948, President Harry Truman instructed the State Department to pressure Ben-Gurion to postpone declaring the establishment of Israel. If the Zionist leaders refused to back down, “they need not expect anything from us,” Truman told the State Department’s Dean Rusk.
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T. Belman. Noticeably absent from the speech was any reference to the UN or to the Israel/Arab conflict. Nor did he comment on what he planned for Syria.

Commentary: Trump’s Flawed Foreign Policy

National Review: Trump’s ‘Foreign Policy’: Incoherent and Shallow

GOP front-runner calls for expanding the size of the military, while pulling back from global hotspots

By DAMIAN PALETTA and PETER NICHOLAS, WSJ

Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump, emboldened by fresh primary wins this week and pivoting toward a likely general-election fight, called Wednesday for the U.S. to pull back from its global engagements, marking a decisive break from recent Republican orthodoxy.

Mr. Trump’s first major foreign-policy address outlined a series of blunt principles, some of them arguably contradictory, and was notable for its willingness to excoriate the vision of former President George W. Bush, as well as President Barack Obama.
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M E M R I

Iranian Daily ‘Kayhan’:

Iran Asked Russia To Intervene In Syria; Moscow Must Not Reach Any Agreement On Syria With Washington At Assad’s And Iran’s Expense; Tehran Is Providing Assad With Strategic Weapons

In its April 11, 2016 editorial, the Iranian daily Kayhan, the mouthpiece of Iran’s ideological camp which is led by Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, discussed Russia’s interests in Syria and the Middle East, and Iran-Russia relations. The editorial warned Moscow not to reach a secret agreement with Washington at the expense of Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad and Iran in exchange for Washington’s lifting its pressure on Russia over Ukraine and Crimea. It also underlined that such an agreement would in any case be doomed to failure, because it would not have Tehran’s knowledge or agreement, and stated that Tehran is opposed to Russia’s federal plan for Syria.
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