Israeli Air Force holds week-long exercise amid regional tensions; Senior officer: We won’t shoot at Russian planes.

By Yoav Zitun, YNET

A senior officer in the Israeli Air Force (IAF) said Thursday after the completion of a major exercise simulating thousands of attacks within hours that there was very close coordination with the Russian Air Force. The officer added that there was no chance that an Israeli plane would shoot at or shoot down a Russian plane.
Read more…

IAF’s Tel Nof airbase drills massive strike capability this week; “We can hit thousands of targets in a few days in a future war,” senior source says.

By Yaacov Lappin, JPOST

Tel Nof Air Base central Israel, Tuesday: A siren wailed through the base, as soldiers, technicians, ground crews, and pilots scrambled, honing their responses to a mock air assault on this strategic target south of the city of Rehovot.

It was only a drill, but an important one, simulating a full-scale conflict on the northern front.

The drill enabled the base’s munition assembly crews to practice their critical role in any future war: putting together guided bomb kits and churning out hundreds of the precision- guided weapons per day.
Read more…

T. Belman. I am all in for Cruz. A month ago he was interviewed by Caroline Glick and this is what he said of the PA/ Israel conflict:

I believe that nobody wants to see peace more than the Israeli people. The barrier to peace is not the government of Israel. The barrier to peace is Palestinians who refuse to renounce terrorism and refuse to even acknowledge Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.

As it regards to US policy, I think for far too long, American presidents have attempted to dictate the terms of a peace settlement. In my view, America has no appropriate role dictating the terms of a peace settlement.

If Israel chooses to negotiate and reach a settlement with the Palestinian Authority, that is Israel’s right as a sovereign state, and America can help provide a fair forum for negotiations.

But it is not the role of the American government to attempt to lecture the Israeli people or dictate terms of peace.

No one has a greater incentive to seek peace than the people of Israel, who have lived with the daily threat of rocket attacks or knifings or terrorist bombs.

Exactly what it should be.

By David Goldman, PC MEDIA

A month ago I predicted a Cruz-Rubio ticket. Now that Cruz has overtaken Carson to run neck-and-neck with Trump in the Iowa Quinnipiac University poll, Cruz is looking a lot like a winner. Here are my top 10 reasons to back him.

10. He really knows economics–not the ideologically driven pablum dished out at universities, but the real battlefield of entrenched monopolies against entrepreneurial upstarts. As Asheesh Agarwal and John Delacourt reported in this space, he did a brilliant job at the Federal Trade Commission: “Cruz promoted economic liberty and fought government efforts to rig the marketplace in favor of special interests. Most notably, Cruz launched an initiative to study the government’s role in conspiring with established businesses to suppress e-commerce. This initiative ultimately led the U.S. Supreme Court to open up an entire industry to small e-tailers.” Anyone can propose tax cuts. It takes real know-how to cut through the regulatory kudzu that is strangling America enterprise.
Read more…

By Ted Belman

I listened to the debate in the UK Parliament today on whether the UK should join the coalition bombing ISIS in Syria. If you have the time, I highly recommend it to you. At one point, PM Cameron said we have to fight the ideology but didn’t expand.

He said we can’t wait for an agreement to emerge between all the players on what to do with Syria to end the war.. But he did suggest that what Syria needs is a new government representing all the people and that this wasn’t possible with Assad at the head of it.

Since the Alawites constiute only 20% of the population, it would mean that the sunnis would be in the majority. This would mean the end of the Iranian influence and Syrian support for Hezbollah. The sunnis in Syria would look to diminish the influence of Hezbollah in Lebanon.
Read more…

EXCELLENT. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Numa’s earlier fiasco took place in early August, when he was the anonymous IDF source who leaked to the media about “Jewish terrorists” who allegedly burned down a home in Duma village. No arrests have been made.

By JEWISH PRESS

Roni Numa receiving his appointment as Major General from former COS Benny Ganz

On Wednesday, Ha’aretz and Ynet reported that Israel’s security apparatus had formulated a range of benefits for the Palestinian Authority which include providing additional weapons to the PA security services, and the release of Arab security prisoners, many of whom have been behind bars for decades. The reports named no official source for this information.

It was a shocking story, which smacked of the failed policies of so many past Israeli governments, including, until very recently, Benjamin Netanyahu’s 4th term at the helm. And so the story reverberated for an overnight throughout the Israeli media, until Netanyahu’s office came out with a denial of the story stating clearly that there would be no transferring of weapons to the PA and no prisoner release. As to issuing new construction permits to PA Arabs, those had been conditioned by Netanyahu in his meeting with Secretary of State Kerry on approval for new construction in the Jewish settlements block.
Read more…

By Greg Richards, AMERICAN THINKER

[..] Liberalism can liquidate a society.  It cannot build one.  The Syrian refugees are an opportunity for liberals to push further toward liquidation of the American Experiment.

That is the result, but we still have to articulate the conservative argument: why is it a bad idea to welcome a migration of Muslims into America?  Conservative resistance to this is characterized by liberals as bigotry.  We know it isn’t that.  So what is it?

The problem is that Islam is a culture alien to the culture of America.  Ours is a culture that has been built up:

• over 3,500 years in terms of Judaism – i.e., the Ten Commandments;
• over 2,000 years in terms of Christianity;
• over 500 years in terms of Protestantism;
• over 300 years in terms of the Scottish Enlightenment – i.e., the primacy of the individual over the state;
• over 250 years in terms of America itself, of liberty and constitutional republicanism, of the rights of minorities in the face of the majority.

Read more…

T. Belman. I am adamantly against allowing the so-called Syrian refugees into the US or Canada for a multitude of reasons.

1. Islamists will get in in significant numbers thereby posing a serious threat,
2. 35% of Muslim migrants are supportive of the islamists to one degree or another,
3. more than 50% of them want to be governed by Sharia law,
4. They don’t want to assimilate
5. They are not satisfied with reasonable accommodation, they want domination.
6. More than half of them are not Syrian
7. As their numbers increased they will transform our law and values just as they did in Europe.

Only those who are prepared to accept our values and law should be admitted.

The author of Muslim Immigration Now vs. Jewish Immigration. argues that the motivation to ban Jews from immigrating to Canada and the US then was antisemitism. No one thought the Jews were a danger to the host country. Today Muslim immigration poses a significant danger to America or Canada for the reasons I have set out and should be denied entry on such grounds.  

To compare the two is to compare apples to grenades.

By Nathan Guttman, FORWARD

On the face of it, Morton Klein would seem to embody everything that has driven most Jewish communal organizations to oppose the current call to stop admitting refugees from Syria into America.Klein, who leads the right-wing Zionist Organization of America, was born in a displaced persons’ camp in Germany after World War II. He arrived in New York at the age of four as a refugee with his two Holocaust survivor parents.
Read more…

CANADA, UNDER PM TRUDEAU, VOTED “NO” ON ALL 6 RESOLUTIONS

‘Surreal’? Israel should hand Golan Heights to Assad regime, and has no right to sovereignty in Jerusalem, according to General Assembly.

By Ari Soffer, INN

By Steve Kramer

The ESRA Hiking Club (esra.org.il) ventured south to the hills of the northern Negev recently for one of the most beautiful hikes that I’ve done in Israel. We were heading towards the Yeruham Park and Lake, where there are green groves and a manmade lake in the middle of the desert. After years of neglect, a sewage recycling plant was finally constructed on the outskirts of Yeruham by KKL/JNF (Jewish National Fund), helping to revive the lake and make this park an unexpected pleasure.

The Negev Desert accounts for more than half of Israel’s land mass. It was included in the territory allotted to a Jewish State in the 1947 UN Partition Plan and was hotly contested in Israel’s War of Independence. The Negev extends all the way to Eilat on the shores of the Red Sea. Developing the sparsely populated Negev was the dream of David Ben-Gurion, the monumental Zionist figure and the first prime minister of Israel.
Read more…

By Alexander Maistrovoy, CFP –

“France is at war,” President Francois Hollande said after the Paris ISIS attack (as if Islamic terrorism hadn’t struck before:  – 9/11; Madrid in 2004; London in 2005; Boston in 2003; the Boston Marathon bombing’; countless acts of terrorism in Israel, Russia, Kenya, Nigeria, and finally “Charlie Hebdo”). Hollande is awakening from a dream, like the West is awakening in general. Similar to carefree and capricious Olympic Gods, the West has found itself in the epicenter of the storm and now repeats the same question feverishly and desperately: “How one can fight with ISIS?”. But the question is much more complicated and deeper: “For the sake of what one should fight?”. Such is the existential question of the Western civilization (with the exception, perhaps, of the Eastern Europe and Israel).

People fight for certain ideals: the Motherland, national dignity, religion (as Muslims do today), ideology – in our case, Liberal values and Democracy.
Read more…

By Evelyn Gordon, COMMENTARY

In confronting the current onslaught of lone-wolf attacks, the tactics Israel has used successfully against terrorist organizations have so far proven ineffective. That begs the question of what it should be doing instead. I have no solutions for the short run, but there’s one obvious step Israel must take if it wishes to prevent attacks like these over the long run. That step emerges from two of the most salient features of the current violence: Permanent residents of Israel have committed a huge proportion of the attacks, but citizens of Israel have committed very few.

The permanent residents in question are mainly east Jerusalem Arabs, and they have committed more than eight times as many attacks as Arab citizens have, even though Arab citizens outnumber permanent residents by more than 4:1. This enormous gap certainly can’t be explained by the popular fallacy that terror is motivated mainly by economic concerns; as permanent residents, east Jerusalem Arabs enjoy the same access to jobs, the same freedom of movement throughout Israel and the same health and welfare benefits that citizens do. Granted, Arab citizens are generally better off, but the difference isn’t dramatic enough to explain the dramatic gap in terrorist activity.
Read more…

As the EU buckles under the pressure of existential crises, the only unifying issue is the obsessive need to pressure Israel into accepting compromises and agreements which could jeopardize its existence.

By Eldad Beck, YNET

BERLIN – The obsessive welcome the European Union’s bureaucratic establishment has given the settlement product labeling issue in the past few years is very concerning.

At a time when the EU is buckling under the pressure of existential crises – the terror threats, the euro crisis, the Ukraine crisis, the Greece crisis, the refugee and illegal migrant crisis, the undermined democracy crisis – the only issue which succeeds in creating almost complete unity is the obsessive need to pressure Israel and make it accept compromises and agreements which could jeopardize its existence. It’s like they are saying: If Europe is sinking, let’s make sure Israel drowns before us.
Read more…

The current anti-Semitism is an eruption of barbarism into European civilization.

By Guilio Meotti, INN

In Rome there was a Muslim rally to protest against the Paris attacks. Not more than 500 participants, equal to nothing from an Islamic Italian community of 1 million people. Among them there was someone holding a placard saying: “No to Bataclan, no to Gaza”. This is the inner and untold mood in Europe: The Parisian theatre where 100 Frenchmen were slaughtered by Islamic State has been compared to the Palestinian Arabs under Israeli assault.

Welcome to Eurabia’s war against the Jewish descendants of the Holocaust, the wonderful and brave State of Israel.
Read more…

Report says Israel looking into transferring part of Area C to the PA. Minister Ariel: That will cost Netanyahu his coalition.

By Nitsan Keidar, INN

Agriculture Minister Uri Ariel Israel is considering the possibility of transferring land from Area C, which is under complete Israeli control in accordance with the Oslo Accords, to the Palestinian Authority, Channel 2 News reported on Tuesday.

Agriculture Minister Uri Ariel later made clear that if Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu goes through with the plan, he will not have a coalition.

According to the report, the Civil Administration is looking into the idea of transferring some 10,000 dunams of land in Area C which are either state-owned land or private Palestinian Arab land that borders Areas A and B.
Read more…

Knesset subcommittee debates problem of EU funding PA land grab on Israeli-controlled land – why is there no enforcement?

By Hezki Ezra, INN

T. Belman. There are no quotes in this article, only contradictions. On the one hand there is reference to “no settlement freeze” and later “should recognize Israel’s construction in the settlement blocs”. Kerry fully condemned terror but di not threaten Abbas with anything.

According to Israeli official, Netanyahu told US diplomat there will be no settlement freeze, PA religious incitement is at root of attacks

BY RAPHAEL AHREN AND JOSHUA DAVIDOVICH

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told US Secretary of State John Kerry on Tuesday that Israel would only implement trust-building measures with the Palestinians when the violence against Israelis abates entirely, a senior Israeli official said.
Read more…

T. Belman. Two days ago in my preface to an article, I said “If he is giving the PA expanded rights in Area C for permission to build in the settlement blocs, I am against it.” That wasn’t the only place that I or some of the commenters saw this coming.

In my article What Netanyahu Wants, I wrote:

So both he and Netanyahu are jointly negotiating what will replace negotiations. Obama wants Israel to only build in the settlement blocs and to cede much of Area C, over which Israel has full control pursuant to the Oslo Accords, to the Palestinians. He also wants Israel to stimulate economic growth for the Palestinians. This is what is referred to as Plan B.
So in effect, Plan B is being negotiated by Israel and the US
Whether the US and Israel can come to an agreement on Plan B remains to be seen.

On October 28, I wrote “Pressure is mounting to limit Israel’s construction to the settlement blocs” and discussed these negotiations there.

Israeli official says Netanyahu made request two weeks ago in Washington, will bring up issue again Tuesday in meeting with Kerry

BY TIMES OF ISRAEL STAFF AND JTA

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has reportedly demanded that Washington accept Israeli construction in the large settlement blocs in exchange for a series of Israeli measures in the West Bank to alleviate recent tensions with the Palestinians.

According to a report in Haaretz on Tuesday, which quotes a senior Israeli official, Netanyahu first made the demand to US Secretary of State John Kerry two weeks ago when they met in Washington, and will bring the issue up again on Tuesday when the two meet as part of Kerry’s Mideast tour.
Read more…

T. Belman. The real issue is whether Iran will agree to a replacement of Assad who will depart from Assad’s pro-shiite policies.

By Melissa Dykes, D.C. CLOTHESLINE

Over the weekend at a press conference in Kuala Lumpur, President Obama called out President Putin in regards to making a decision as to whether or not Russia would continue to support the Assad regime in Syria.
Read more…

By Edward Alexander, ALGEMEINER

The Wall Street Journal of November 14-15 carried an astute article by Roger Kimball (editor of the New Criterion)entitled “The Rise of the College Crybullies.” The lethal mixture of trembling sensitivity and mob ruthlessness in these student insurrectionaries has turned the country’s universities into a vast bedlam with a thousand wards. He tells how “the crybully…has weaponized his coveted status as a victim” with two calling cards: race and gender. He uses these to exploit to the fullest extent what Joseph Epstein has called “the unassailable virtue of victims.”
Read more…