When the chips are down, the neo-conservative movement has nothing to do with American power, or with Mideast oil, or with Israel. It is a cult that believes that democratic institutions as such are the solution to the world’s problems, and will continue to believe this no matter how much evidence accumulates to the contrary.

BY DAVID P. GOLDMAN, ASIA TIMES

The betting markets on the American primary elections show an 87% probability that Hillary Clinton will head the Democratic ticket and a 76% probability that Donald Trump will lead the Republicans. Between the two, Trump is the pro-Israel candidate. First, his daughter Ivanka is an observant Orthodox Jew after her conversion and marriage to Jared Kushner, the scion of a prominent family of Jewish philanthropists. Second, and most decisive, Trump feels no obligation to win favor among Muslims, proposing a temporary ban against any Muslim entering the United States. Hillary Clinton, by contrast, surrounded herself with advisers openly hostile to Israel and pondered covert funding for Palestinian civil disobedience to pressure the Israeli government.
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The government has clearly awakened to the threat of the BDS movement; but our leaders still don’t seem to recognize that the answer to hatred isn’t inclusion.

By Caroline B Glick, JPOST

At a certain point, you just have to know when draw a line in the sand.

Sloan and Guy Rachmuth, Jewish parents in Durham, North Carolina, reached that point in 2014 when they opted to walk away from their local Jewish day school and home school their two children.

The Rachmuths pulled their children out of the Lerner School when they concluded the school would not abide by its commitment to assist “all students in developing a positive Jewish identity and pride in their Jewish heritage.”
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By Richard Fernandez, PJ MEDIA

“It’s becoming evident that the European elites failed to understand how explosive the migrant issue was until it detonated full in their face. Now it is in the midst of a crisis which could literally bring down the European Union.  Why didn’t they see it coming?  Because they believed their own Narrative, even when they should have suspected it was a lie of their own making. If the PC Western elites are overtaken by a cascade similar to that which collapsed the Soviet Union, the ultimate irony will be that the very migrants which they had counted on to create the Curley Effect will turn out to be the engine of their own destruction.”
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See today’s post: Refugees attempt to breach Macedonian border

By Shmuley Boteach, JPOST

Europe has long touted itself as a beacon of human rights and freedoms. From their safe and secure area of the world, they’ve looked askance at Israel with a self-righteous smugness that proclaims, “If only we were in Israel’s position, there would have been peace and tranquility with Hamas, Hezbollah, the Palestinian Authority and all Arab nations.”
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T. Belman. So much for “all issues are to be negotiated”. Israel must not cave. It should do the opposite. The US is obviously dictaing that Jerusalem must be divided.

Ahead of Biden’s visit to Israel, Obama administration is pulling out all the stops to prevent new Jerusalem housing projects.

By David Rosenberg, ARUTZ SHEVA

US Vice President Joe Biden is scheduled to visit Israel next Sunday, and the Obama administration is launching an all-out effort to prevent a repeat of the diplomatic flare-up that marred his previous trip in 2010.

In what is likely to be the last state visit to Israel by a top-level Obama administration official, Biden’s visit closes out a rocky relationship between Israel and the White House.

Perhaps the most publicized dispute in that period was the so-called “Ramot Biden” incident in March 2010, when plans for a new housing project in the haredi neighborhood of Ramat Shlomo in Jerusalem were announced while Biden was in Israel promoting talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.
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The two navies and air forces will rehearse a multinational assault on ISIS in Libya, for which President Barack Obama is increasingly reluctant to commit US troops.

DEBKA

French-built Egyptian frigate “Tahya Misr”

The French nuclear-powered aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle is steaming through the Red Sea on its way to the Mediterranean via the Suez Canal for joint maneuvers with the Egyptian navy in preparation for a reduced coalition offensive against Islamic State’s deepening grip on Libya.

DEBKAfile’s military sources, reporting this, say it will be the Egyptian navy’s first joint exercise with a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier; and also the first drill to be conducted by the new Egyptian missile frigate Tahya Misr (Long Live Egypt!), which underwent a series of exercises after it was delivered by the French DCNS naval shipbuilders last June.
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T. Belman. Arab “resistance” is not strengthen by despair but by hope. The Iron Wall advocates killing all hope. Therefore we must kill their hope for the creation of Palestine or the destruction of Israel

By Vic Rosenthal, ABU YEHUDA

The vicious ax attack on an unarmed security guard at a mall last Thursday night stood out among the hundreds of similar incidents in the last few months because of its extreme brutality, because the terrorist and the victim worked in the same place and even had coffee together, and because it was caught on video for the entire nation to see.
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T. Belman. After the last Gaza war, I recommended that the money raised should be used for resettlement rather than rebuilding.  I suggest that all Gazans be moved out and that Israel retake Gaza for her own.

By Zalman Shoval, ISRAEL HAYOM

Gaza is in the headlines, and not just because of the tunnel issue. Maj. Gen. Herzi Halevi, head of the Military Intelligence Directorate, spoke to the Knesset’s Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee last week about the emerging economic crisis in the Gaza Strip and the potential consequences from Israel’s perspective. The government is also examining this matter seriously.

The current situation in the Hamas-ruled coastal enclave — lack of water, power outages, rapidly increasing unemployment and meager wages, in addition to rehabilitation and rebuilding efforts grinding to a complete standstill — is why hundreds of Gazans (and in the future thousands) are willing to risk their lives trying to enter Israel illegally to find work. This is the distressing reality Halevi was referencing. Indeed, the nightmare scenario in which thousands of Gaza residents rush the security fence, and the military response this would necessitate, could cause the situation to spiral in extremely undesirable directions.
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David Bedein, director of the Jerusalem-based Israel Resource News Agency as well as the Center for Near East Policy Research, spoke to Arutz Sheva on Sunday about the rampant European Union (EU) funded illegal Arab construction – and revealed Israel shares the blame.

By Eliran Aharon, INN

Research center director reveals Israel partially to blame for illegal EU construction and military plans, due to ‘quiet agreements.’

Much of the illegal EU-funded construction is in Area C of Judea and Samaria, an array of regions designated as being under full Israeli administrative control by the 1994 Oslo Accords, but as Bedein noted other EU-backed illegal building is taking place in Jerusalem.
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By Charles Krauthammer, WaPo

1. In the South China Sea, on a speck of land of disputed sovereignty far from its borders, China has just installed antiaircraft batteries and stationed fighter jets. This after China landed planes on an artificial island it created on another disputed island chain (the Spratlys, claimed by the Philippines, Malaysia, Taiwan and Vietnam). These facilities now function as forward bases for Beijing to challenge seven decades of American naval dominance of the Pacific Rim.

2. Syria. Russian intervention has turned the tide of war. Having rescued the Bashar al-Assad regime from collapse, relentless Russian bombing is destroying the rebel stronghold of Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, creating a massive new wave of refugees and demonstrating to the entire Middle East what a Great Power can achieve when it acts seriously.“China is clearly militarizing the South China Sea,” the commander of the U.S. Pacific Command told Congress on Tuesday. Its goal? “Hegemony in East Asia.”
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Yisrael Beiteinu chairman launches attack on prime minister and pretty much everyone else on the political spectrum in quadrennial party address.

By Jonathan Lis, HAARETZ

Yisrael Beiteinu chairman Avigdor Lieberman has slammed Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s security policies and said it was possible to form an alternative right-wing government without Netanyahu leading it.

Speaking at his party’s quadrennial convention in Jerusalem on Thursday evening, Lieberman also took Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon and Knesset members from the Joint Arab List and ultra-Orthodox parties to task, in an aggressive speech reflecting his party’s recent upswing in opinion polls.
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Minister Ze’ev Elkin gives speech at Bar Ilan University: Wave of terror is preview for collapse of Palestinian Authority.

By Hezki Ezra, INN

Minister for Immigration and Jerusalem Affairs Ze’ev Elkin (Likud) gave a talk at Bar Ilan University this morning (Monday), in which he presented his approach to the challenges that will face Israel once Mahmoud Abbas no longer runs the Palestinian Authority.

“The current wave of terror is a preview for the collapse of the PA. Most of the likely scenarios for the day after Abu Mazen [another name for Mahmoud Abbas] will lead to a lack of organized inheritance, to an internal fight for succession, to anarchy and the dismantling of the PA,” he said. “The ones who will have to pay the price for anarchy in the PA are Israeli citizens, particularly the communities in Judea and Samaria. We must prepare for even worse attacks.”
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By James Delingpole, BREITBART

The “Pause” in global warming is real – not an urban myth concocted by evil ‘deniers’ – a study has found, signalling the development of a major schism within the climate alarmist camp.

“It has been claimed that the early-2000s global warming slowdown or hiatus, characterized by a reduced rate of global surface warming, has been overstated, lacks sound scientific basis, or is unsupported by observations. The evidence presented here contradicts these claims,” the paper in Nature Climate Change says.

Though the paper’s findings are not controversial – few serious scientists dispute the evidence of the temperature datasets showing that there has been little if any global warming for nearly 19 years – they represent a tremendous blow to the climate alarmist “consensus”, which has long sought to deny the “Pause’s” existence.
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EUROPE is turning against Brussels with anti-EU feeling spreading through the Continent – as our exclusive map today reveals.

By CAROLINE WHEELER, UK EXPRESS

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Confirming Kerry’s comments, Channel 2 News reports Khamenei and Rouhani have decided to withdraw 2,500 fighters from Syria.

By Ben Ariel, INN

Iran is planning to withdraw its entire fighting force from Syria, which includes 2,500 fighters, Israel’s Channel 2 News reported on Sunday.

The report appears to confirm remarks made last week by Secretary of State John Kerry, who told lawmakers that Iran had withdrawn a “significant number” of its Revolutionary Guards troops from the Syrian battlefield.

According to the Channel 2 report from Sunday, the majority of Iran’s forces have already been evacuated from Syria and the rest are expected to return home imminently.
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If Jerusalem has remained ‘divided’ it is because the Arab neighborhoods have been neglected for the past 49 years.

By Moshe Arens, HAARETZ

Now that there seems to be close to universal agreement that the two-state solution is not going to be realized in the foreseeable future, attention has begun to be focused on Jerusalem. If something has to be done to move out of the present impasse, why not start in Jerusalem? To the fore come all the preconceived notions and prejudices, hidden behind a veil of liberalism and a presumed concern for the Palestinian people.
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Cabinet mulls cancelling acquisition of flawed fighter-jet rejected by most NATO air forces.

By Hillel Fendel, INN

A welcome decision made back in 2008 to purchase U.S.-made Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) jets no longer appears very attractive in 2016 – and Israel is considering backtracking on it.

So say Israeli government sources quoted by Middle East Newsline (MENL).

For one thing, the much-touted JSF has some inherent flaws, such as inadequate range, weapons payload and stealth capability. In addition, the Americans refuse to share the JSF source code with Israel. Israel would not be able to modify the platform to fit its needs, and would have to send damaged engines to Turkey or the U.S. for repairs.
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By Andrew Pessim, ALGEMEINER

The student body at Canada’s McGill University has failed to ratify Monday’s controversial Israel boycott vote by the general assembly of the student government.

According to the McGill Reporter, the online vote recorded 57 percent of students voting against the boycott motion and 43 percent voting in favor. This represents the fourth time since 2009 that the effort to persuade the student body to adopt an anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement resolution at McGill has failed.

Following the results, McGill’s Principal and Vice-Chancellor Suzanne Fortier issued a statement to the McGill community, reading, in part:
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By Mathew Continetti, NEW BEACON

President Obama is playing a cynical game. He’s consistently raised Donald Trump’s profile in an attempt to boost the mogul’s chances of winning the Republican nomination. Obama’s theory is that Trump is unelectable. And it’s true that Trump is the only candidate in the Republican field who consistently loses in general election match ups against Hillary Clinton. A Trump nomination, Democrats believe, would be the best way to hold the White House for another four years.
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