A fit of high dudgeon has gripped many of my Republican friends, ex-friends, and soon-to-be-ex-friends now that Donald Trump has all but won the Republican nomination. My advice to them: get over it. This presidential race will look like Alien vs. Predator. I’m for Predator, without a second’s hesitation, because he’s our Predator. For all his faults Donald Trump would be (and I’m confident will be) an incomparably better president.
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by Vic Rosenthal, ABU YEHUDAH
On this 68th anniversary of the independence of the modern Jewish nation-state, my thoughts naturally turn to the question of how long we will be able to keep that independence, purchased at such great cost.
It’s not an issue that occupies citizens of most other states to the same degree. Although the US has major problems in several areas, I don’t hear Americans talking about losing their independence. They settled that back in the 18th century.
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By Martin Sherman, JPOST
Of all the Palestinian lies there is no lie greater or more crushing than that which calls for the establishment of a separate Palestinian state in the West Bank… Not since the time of Dr. Goebbels has there been a case in which continual repetition of a lie has born such great fruits… – Prof. Amnon Rubinstein, formerly education minister, member of the far-left Meretz faction and dean of Tel Aviv University’s law faculty, “Palestinian Lies,” Haaretz, July 30, 1976
Telling the truth about the Israeli–Palestinian conflict would affirm American support for international law, democracy, the peaceful resolution of international disputes, and the principle of equal rights for all peoples… [as well as] American opposition to aggression and terrorism. – Prof. Michael Mandelbaum, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, “The Peace Process Is an Obstacle to Peace – and it always has been, because its premises are false,” Commentary, April 14, 2016
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Sixty-eight years later, it works out there are still competing gangs trying to obligate the rest of us with their unlawful, anti-democratic and immoral behavior.
For the Obama administration, Israel’s security brass is an alternative government.
That is the lesson from an article published this week in Foreign Affairs by David Makovsky, a member of Secretary of State John Kerry’s negotiating team during his failed peace process two years ago.
Makovsky wrote that the security brass’s unbridled vilification of Sgt. Elor Azaria, for killing a wounded terrorist in Hebron in March, “captures the IDF’s growing involvement in the Palestinian issue.”
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A new poll has found that nearly three-quarters of Israelis –– 71.5% –– do not view Israel’s control of most of Judea/Samaria as “occupation.” The May Peace Index survey of the Israel Democracy Institute, released Monday, and conducted May 2-3, 2016, also found that:
Donald Trump and Paul Ryan on Thursday released a statement meant to signal their unity on Thursday following a two-hour meeting on Capitol Hill.
The statement from the presumptive GOP presidential nominee and House Speaker said the two had a “great conversation” and that they were honest over their “few differences” during two hours of meetings on Thursday.
“We will be having additional discussions, but remain confident there’s a great opportunity to unify our party and win this fall, and we are totally committed to working together to achieve that goal,” the joint statement said.
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Making sure Israeli students learn math and science at the highest levels will ensure Israel can meet any threats it may face, Education Minister Naftali Bennett says.
By Lahav Harkov, JPOST
Nearly a year after education Minister Naftali Bennett was sworn in, he seems to be enjoying every moment in the position.
Bennett seemed like an unlikely choice for the post, as someone known best for his security and diplomatic positions, and whose previous major portfolio was the Economy Ministry, but he managed to bring his own talents to the job, shifting his focus to something his predecessors had neglected: making sure Israel’s education system matches its reputation as the Start- Up Nation.
“I’m obsessed with Israel’s future,” Bennett said, presenting his vision for the Education Ministry to The Jerusalem Post from his Tel Aviv office.
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The Islamization of Britain made an immense advance this week, as a Muslim with extensive ties to jihadis and Islamic supremacists, Sadiq Khan, was elected mayor of London, just as London buses are set to carry ads proclaiming the “glory of Allah.”
It’s a sign of the times – and a sign of things to come. Is anyone really surprised? That a man such as Sadiq Khan, who has shared a platform with open Jew-haters, could still be elected mayor of London, is an indication of how far gone Britain already is. In Sadiq Khan’s campaign, his opponents brought up his close ties to jihadis, Islamic supremacists and Islamic Jew-haters as a blot on his record. Soon enough in Britain, however, that sort of thing will be a selling point for candidates appealing to an increasingly Muslim electorate.
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There are signs that aspects of the Trump phenomenon have parallels in currents of public opinion in other advanced democracies. In France, the National Front, which has been somewhat sanitized by the founder’s daughter, Marine Le Pen (who expelled her father — several years ago, when he was 87 — from the party he created, for dismissive remarks about the Holocaust), now leads the polls for next year’s elections.
In Britain, where the official opposition is in the hands of Jeremy Corbyn, who is to the left even of Bernie Sanders, Prime Minister Cameron has commended Mr. Trump as follows: “Anyone who makes it through that extraordinary contest to lead their party into a general election certainly deserves our respect.” His own respect is unconvincing, but he may detect Trumpish sentiment in his own ranks and especially in the UK Independence party.
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THE IMPROBABLE HAPPINESS OF ISRAELIS
Global surveys find Israel high on happiness and life-satisfaction rankings – despite threats all around.
By Avinoam Bar-Yosef, The Wall Street Journal
The World Happiness Report 2016 Update ranks Israel (Jews and Arabs) 11th of 158 countries evaluated for the United Nations. Israel also shines as No. 5 of the 36 Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development countries on the OECD’s Life Satisfaction Index – ahead of the U.S., the U.K. and France.
How can this be so? Israelis live in a hostile and volatile neighborhood, engaged in an endless conflict with the Palestinians and under the threat of nuclear annihilation by Iran. If you crunch the different components of these indexes, Israel falls much further down the lists. It ranks only 24th in GDP per capita, and comes in at No. 30 of the 36 OECD countries on security and personal safety. Israel has only the 17th-highest per capita income in the world.
Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump says that if he is elected, “we are going to protect Israel” • “We are going to make sure Israel is in very good shape forever,” Trump pledges, declaring that he will be visiting Israel “soon.”
Q: As we speak, today, Israel remembers the victims of war and terror. Our memorial day is today and in a few hours we will begin celebrating Independence Day. As you know, the threats facing Israel have not gone away. On the contrary. As Israelis remember their dead, and then celebrate their independence, what message would you like to send the Israeli people?
T. Belman. The Zionist Union is not a Zionist party and shouldn’t be brought into the coalition.
Susie Dym points out:
Warning: The Herzog-Livni party has-in its number 4 position – an anarchist J-Street supporter who believes that the Jewish content of Israel’s national anthem is “racist”.
The Herzog-Livni party’s faction chairman is Merav Michaeli. Michaeli is opposed to service in her own country’s army – the Israel Defense Forces. She is also against marriage (seriously!)
Another MK in the Herzog-Livni party, Zuher Bahalul, has explained that the party, despite its trendy name (“Zionist camp”) is not really a Zionist party:
MK Bahlul also gave anti-Israel activists a big present by explaining to a New Israel Fund audience that Israeli society is afflicted by “apartheid, racism and fascism” (in the Hebrew-language New Israel Fund site
But wait! Didn’t Netanyahu make a crystal clear campaign promise to the voting public that he would say NO to Herzog-Livni-Left being included in his government? Yes, he did.
Unity gov’t talks continue apace, as sources close to the prime minister say he’s made a very generous offer to opposition leader Herzog.
Intensive negotiations between Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and opposition leader Yitzhak Herzog are continuing apace, following reports yesterday that a unity government deal was “closer than ever.”
Now, the price of including Herzog’s 24-seat Zionist Union party into the Likud-led coalition is becoming clearer.
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By Dr. Michael Makovsky – The Weekly Standard
Dr. Michael Makovsky is President & CEO of JINSA.
Sunday’s New York Times Magazine story by David Samuels on President Obama’s deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes has created quite a stir. It’s not every day that a senior White House official brags about how the administration has successfully manipulated what he portrays as an ignorant and compliant media, particularly on as critical and contested an issue as last summer’s nuclear deal with Iran. The media has not taken kindly to Rhodes’ remarks, especially after so many of them carried the White House’s water.
The media’s hurt feelings aside, the 9,700-word article was more important for further revealing the Obama’s Administration’s approach to the world: undo much of the approach, strategy and achievements of seventy years of American foreign policy – the alliances and partnerships, the strength and the credibility that has kept us, and much of the world, safe.
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By Col Richard Kemp, ISRAEL HAYOM
“What kind of talk is this, ‘punishing Israel?’ Are we a vassal state of yours? Are we a banana republic? Are we 14-year-olds who, if we misbehave, get our wrists slapped? Let me tell you whom this Cabinet comprises. It is composed of people whose lives were marked by resistance, fighting and suffering.”
These were the words of Prime Minister Menachem Begin delivered to the U.S. President Ronald Reagan in December 1981. Begin, one of the greatest leaders and fighters of our times, knew the meaning of true independence.
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By Ted Belman
In 1995 Bernard Connolly wrote the book The Rotten Heart of Europe in which he had harsh words about the prospects of European monetary integration. According to the lead review in Amazon:
T. Belman. A few statements, in this otherwise good article, rankled. I have marked them in red.
The gap between the views of the General Staff and those of the public is widening rapidly.
[..] It’s impossible to understand the furor roused by Golan’s comparison between certain developments in Israeli society today and developments in Nazi Germany in the 1930s in isolation from the other storms that have hit the defense establishment’s top brass in recent months. These include, Chief of Staff Gadi Eisenkot’s speech explaining the rules of engagement that obligate soldiers; the trial of Elor Azaria, the soldier who killed a Palestinian in Hebron when the assailant was already wounded and prone; and right-wing attacks portraying Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon as a leftist stooge due to his public defense of the IDF’s values as he sees them.
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The truly sick society is that of the left.
Last year, Israeli President Rivlin denounced Israel as a “sick society” and accused Jews of having “forgotten how to be decent human beings.” Now Major General Yair Golan, the military’s deputy chief of staff, accused Israel of resembling Nazi Germany in a speech delivered on the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Israel is a sick society only to the extent that, like a fish, it rots from the heads of men like Rivlin and Golan. It is a sickness comes from members of the political elite whose views are fundamentally at odds with those of the people. The hatred that Rivlin and Golan, the beneficiaries of privilege and protektsia, feel for ordinary Israelis is unrelenting in its ugliness.
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WE progressives believe in diversity, and we want women, blacks, Latinos, gays and Muslims at the table — er, so long as they aren’t conservatives.
Universities are the bedrock of progressive values, but the one kind of diversity that universities disregard is ideological and religious. We’re fine with people who don’t look like us, as long as they think like us.
O.K., that’s a little harsh. But consider George Yancey, a sociologist who is black and evangelical.
“Outside of academia I faced more problems as a black,” he told me. “But inside academia I face more problems as a Christian, and it is not even close.”
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T. Belman. On May 1/16 I wrote Trump’s peace through strength applies to Israel as well and made the same case.
The diplomatic offensive he calls for, is basically to convince the world that we are ready to capitulate.
Better still, we should mount a diplomatic offensive to convince the world that the TSS is not a prescription for peace, that Israel has the only right to Judea and Samaria, that the Arabs and the BDS movement they finance, want the destruction of Israel not the creation of a Palestinian state and that for a lasting peace Israel must remain in control of J&S forever.
In a week or two, Israel will again be the focus of a well-dressed international lynch mob. According to news reports, US President Barack Obama intends to use the so-called Middle East Quartet, comprised of the US, the UN, Russia and the EU, as a tool to ratchet up Western condemnations of the Jewish state.
The report is expected to include even more expansive assaults on Israel for refusing to deny Jews our civil rights in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria.
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