By Barry Shaw

Show your passionate support for Israel by making this brand new pro-Israel book an international best seller!

Win yourself a prize while enjoying a great read. How to do it?

BDS for IDIOTS is a seriously funny humiliation of BDS campaigners. This is a cause we can all get behind. What better way is there to educate people to the lies of BDS than gifting them a copy if this hilarious book.

I am giving away, to three lucky winners, two signed copies of my other books – Israel Reclaiming the Narrative and Fighting Hamas, BDS and Anti-Semitism – for free!

That’s three books for the discounted price of my new motivational book – BDS for IDIOTS.
Read more…

[See also: Erdogan calls on US to choose between Turkey or Syrian Kurds]

Ankara’s hostility to Kurdish fighters is hampering the bid to sharpen campaign against Islamic State, U.S. officials say

By DION NISSENBAUM and CAROL E. LEE, WSJ

Smoke rose late last month over Diyarbakir in southeastern Turkey, where Turkish forces have been battling militants with the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK. PHOTO:ILYAS AKENGIN/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

Turkey’s growing hostility to one of America’s most effective allies in the fight against Islamic State—Syrian Kurdish fighters—is undermining efforts to step up the campaign against the extremist group, U.S. officials say.

The tensions, and the strains they have put on U.S.-Turkish relations, bubbled to the surface when U.S. Vice President Joe Biden flew to Istanbul late last month to talk with Turkish leaders about the campaign. According to U.S. and Turkish officials involved in the talks, Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu and his top advisers showed a specially prepared map of the Turkey-Syria border that identified several places where they said Syrian Kurdish militants had smuggled weapons meant to battle Islamic State into Turkey.
Read more…

By Howard Richman and Raymond Richman, AMERICAN THINKER

During Saturday’s Republican presidential candidate debate in New Hampshire, Donald Trump was asked:

Mr. Trump, you’ve heard the argument from many of the candidates on this stage that you’re not a true conservative. Tell the voters watching tonight why you are.

He replied:

“Well, I think I am, and to me, I view the word conservative as a derivative of the word “conserve.” We want to conserve our money. We want to conserve our wealth. We want to conserve. We want to be smart. We want to be smart where we go, where we spend, how we spend. We want to conserve our country. We want to save our country. And we have people that have no idea how to do that, and they are not doing it, and it’s a very important word and it’s something I believe in very, very strongly.”

Read more…

T. Belman. Bennett wants to embrace Arabs whereas Herzog wants to separate. Israelis, I think, prefer to separate than to embrace.

Bennett calls on Cabinet to add 100,000 Arab workers, claiming financial incentives will quell terror and those with permits don’t attack.

By Ari Yashar, ARUTZ SHEVA

Jewish Home chairperson and Education Minister Naftali Bennett on Sunday made a proposal for “solving” the scourge of terrorism by illegal Arab workers, by calling to more than double the work permits handed to Arab residents of Judea and Samaria.

At the weekly Cabinet meeting on Sunday a discussion was held on increasing the punishment for those who provide housing for Arabs from the region who illegally enter sovereign Israeli territory, and in many cases utilize their illegal entry to launch terror attacks.

Bennett proposed a solution according to The Marker, saying that in addition to increasing the punishment for those who hire Palestinians illegally, the quota on legal work permits allowing entry for Judea and Samaria Arabs should be raised by another 100,000 workers.
Read more…

[T. Belman. This plan will have great appeal for Israelis. The Right must respond if they want to lead the next government.]

Opposition chairman attacks government as Labor convention approves his separation plan.

By Hezki Ezra, ARUTZ SHEVA

The Labor party’s convention on Sunday evening officially approved its chairman Yitzhak Herzog’s “separation” peace plan.

Herzog’s plan, which he recently discussed with Secretary of State John Kerry, would form a regional security committee consisting of Egypt, Jordan and Israel together with other Arab states in an effort to eventually establish a Palestinian state.
Read more…

DEBKA

The five-year Syrian civil war, faces its most critical moment. Saturday, Feb. 6, a combined force of Syrian army and Hizballah troops and an Iraqi Shiite militia under Iranian officers, were led by Russian air and Spetsnaz (special forces) officers into pressing forward to encircle 35,000 rebels trapped in Aleppo, the country’s largest city. As they tightened the siege, 400,000 Syrian civilians were also trapped and forced to bear heavy Russian air bombardment and savage artillery fire from the ground forces closing in on the city.
Read more…

T. Belman. Min Erdan is so wrong to say: “It’s inconceivable that President Obama has any such intention (of imposing a solution) given that he and his administration emphasize that the solution to the conflict requires direct negotiations and compromise between the two sides themselves.” Obama has been trying to impose a solution from day one even though he called for “direct negotiations”. Obama now backs facts on the ground instead of direct negotiations.

Netanyahu’s actions show how much they are determined by international pressure.

Top minister dismisses Army Radio report, which comes hours after similar claims by Channel 2 were denied by the State Department

TOI

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is worried that the Obama administration will use its final weeks in office to back UN Security Council decisions and other measures detrimental to Israel, Army Radio reported on Sunday.

Netanyahu has therefore been trying to persuade his ministerial colleagues to approve a series of measures to boost the West Bank economy and show Israel’s commitment to improving the Palestinians’ lives, but has been stymied by opposition in the security cabinet by ministers including Naftali Bennett, Ayelet Shaked and Ze’ev Elkin, the report said.
Read more…

The forces laying siege to the war-torn country’s one-time commercial hub are loyal to Tehran and Hezbollah, not the Assad regime

By Avi Issacharoff, TOI

The torrent of refugees fleeing Aleppo to the Turkish border may herald the pending fall of Syria’s financial capital to Shiite hands – Iran, Hezbollah, plus what is left of President Bashar Assad’s army and the Russians.

Conquering Aleppo would establish the Assad regime’s control over the entire northwestern part of Syria, the Latakia area that came to be known as “Alawistan,” after the Alawite sect from which Assad hails.
Read more…

Read more…

By Bruce Walker, AMERICAN THINKER

Gallup, like virtually every other major polling organization that has looked at the ideological makeup of America, has reported in virtually every poll that conservatives dramatically outnumber liberals in America. Gallup’s reports the data on a state-by-state basis, and in all of the Gallup Poll surveys in the last decade, only a tiny handful of states show more respondents as liberal than conservative.

Nothing, really, has changed. The Gallup Poll survey conducted at the end of 2015 reports that 47 of the 50 states have more conservatives than liberals, and only three states – Vermont, Rhode Island, and Massachusetts – have more respondents calling themselves liberal than conservative. In two of those three states, Rhode Island and Massachusetts, the liberal advantage is tiny.
Read more…

By David Singer, CFP

The UN Security Council and the Quartet—Russia, America, the United Nations and the European Union—have ended any expectations they had of successfully negotiating a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation – after failing to categorically reject UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon’s highly offensive remarks before the Security Council and in the New York Times.

Ban told the Security Council on January 26:

“Palestinian frustration is growing under the weight of a half century of occupation and the paralysis of the peace process.

Some have taken me to task for pointing out this indisputable truth.

Yet, as oppressed peoples have demonstrated throughout the ages, it is human nature to react to occupation, which often serves as a potent incubator of hate and extremism.”

Read more…

T. Belman. Absolutely, this pipeline should be resurrected. The oil and gas arriving in Haifa, could travel to Europe and Turkey through the same pipeline Israel, Cyprus, Egypt and Greece are planning for their gas fields in the eastern Mediterranean. This would cement the budding relationship between Israel, Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia into a major regional military and economic power.

The war in Syria is currently being won by the Russian/Iran axis. Saudi Arabia must decide to cede Alawite Syria to Russia/Assad/Iran and work toward a Sunni state in the rest combined with the Sunni in Iraq.

The question becomes should that part of Syria adjacent to Israel be ceded to the Russian/Iran axis or to the new Sunni state. Israel does not want the Iranians on their northern border and so must get involved to prevent it from happening.

An out-of-the-box idea for cementing a relationship with the anti-Iran Arab states.

By Mark Langfan, ARUTZ SHEVA

In World War II, British tanks in Egypt heroically battled Rommel’s tanks coming east from Libya.  There have been many movies and TV shows made about these grand battles.

No one seems to have asked a simple question: Where did the British get the raw unrefined oil, and then the refined oil to fuel their tanks and battleships of the Mediterranean Sea?

Answer: The 500,000 Jews of Mandate Palestine saved Palestine from the Nazi-lover Jerusalem Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini by refining the oil that was transited by a pipeline from the Mesopotamian oil fields to Haifa.  Without the 500,000 Jews of 1930-1940 pre-Israel Israel, Great Britain would have been wiped out of the Eastern Mediterranean before the War began.
Read more…

After visiting the family of Zidan Seif, the brave Druze policeman who stopped the massacre at the Har Nof synagogue, giving his life for Jewish worshipers, Rabbi Yaakov Kermaier saw an opportunity to bring Jews and Druze together for Jethro’s Shabbat, when the story of Moses’ father-in-law, and the founder of the Druze religion, is told.

By Yifat Erlich, YNET

Rinal Seif (center) with younger brother Kinan and her baby. At left: Shabbat host Tova

Rinal Seif has worn only black for 13 months, during which she mourned the death of her husband the police officer, Master Sergeant Zidan Nahad Seif, who was killed while attempting to stop the terrorist attack at the synagogue in Jerusalem’s Har Nof neighborhood.

“I didn’t go to parties, I didn’t wear makeup. I mourned. I went back to live with my parents and they’re helping me raise our baby daughter,” Rinal says, sitting at the Shabbat table at the Nissim family home, in Jerusalem’s Arnona neighborhood.
Read more…

T. Belman. I don’t get it. Of what value are normalized relations with Turkey. We don’t need Turkey for anything. They need us. They want our gas and our tourists and our drones. What do we want from them that we just can’t buy.

By Yossi Melman, JPOST

Last month, the Director of the CIA, John Brennan, held a secret meeting with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and his counterpart, the director of Egyptian Intelligence, Maj.-Gen.Khaled Fawzy. During the meeting, Brennan promised to increase CIA aid to Egypt to bolster its struggle against Islamic State terrorist activity in Sinai.

Brennan’s visit is yet another indicator that the US administration is making an effort to improve relations with Cairo following a few cool years that were the result of President Barack Obama’s opposition to Sisi’s ouster two years ago of president Mohamed Morsi, who, sponsored by the Muslim Brotherhood, was chosen in free and democratic elections.
Read more…

By David Weinberg, ISRAEL HAYOM

By Jonathan Spyer, The Jerusalem Post

UN Special Envoy on Syria Staffan de Mistura this week announced the suspension of just-convened peace talks in Geneva intended to resolve the Syrian civil war.

The failure of the talks was predictable and foreseen by most serious analysts on Syria. Diplomacy requires compromise. But the forces of President Bashar Assad, Russia, Iran and Hezbollah are advancing in both northern and southern Syria.

The dictator and his allies, as a consequence, see no reason to abandon their core aims or accept a political process leading to a transition of power.
Read more…

by Michel Gurfinkiel, The Daily Caller

In 2009, the American journalist Christopher Caldwell famouslycharacterized the changes that a massive non-European, non-Judeo-Christian, immigration was forcing over Europe as a “revolution.” We may now be on the brink of a counter-revolution, and that can be as violent and far-reaching as revolution itself.

Last year’s massacres in Paris (the attacks on satirical cartoonists and a kosher supermarket’s customers in January 2015, then the November 13 killing spree) were a tipping point : the French – and by extension, most Europeans — realized that unchecked immigration could lead to civil war.
Read more…

The Left’s whiny war on free speech, and the Israeli Right’s inept, and often cowed, response.

By Martin Sherman, JPOST

You [Im Tirzu] are the cancer in our society. You are the real foreign agents…. A few days ago you gave license for the killing of my grandfather and others. People who have different opinions than yours. In the case of those targeted they were also lovers of Israel and of their fellowman and Zionists. But even if they were not[,] it is their right not to be incited against. 

– Dean Oz-Salzberger, grandson of Amos Oz, The Jerusalem Post, January 31, in response to the student organization Im Tirzu criticizing Oz’s affiliation with B’Tselem, a foreign-funded NGO critical of Israeli policy and IDF actions.

... the time has come to call this monster by its name. We wanted to be like all other nations, we longed for there to be a Hebrew thief and a Hebrew prostitute – and there are Hebrew neo-Nazi groups. Perhaps the only difference is that our neo-Nazi groups enjoy the backing of numerous nationalist lawmakers – maybe even racist.

– author Amos Oz, The Telegraph, May 11, 2015 Read more…

T. Belman. Under no conditions should Israel let Turkey into Gaza, or apologize for killing 9 Turkish terrorists on the Mavi Marmara, or pay damages to the family of the terrorists. Nor should Israel participate in bolstering Turkey’s popularity in the Arab world which making a deal with Turkey on her terms would do. Turkey wants to buy Israeli gas because she is fighting with her current suppliers, Russia and Iran. She doesn’t need rapprochement for that.

Amid rapprochement talks with Israel, Turkish team meets with Hamas officials to plan seaport – even though Israel adamantly opposes.

By Ari Yashar, ARUTZ SHEVA

In the midst of ongoing normalization talks with Israel, Turkey is planning to invest $5 billion in reconstructing the Hamas stronghold of Gaza including a seaport – which Israel has fiercely opposed due to the blatant threat of weapons smuggling.

The Turkish Hurriyet Daily News on Friday reported that a team of the Union of Chambers and Commodity Exchanges of Turkey (TOBB) announced the expensive rebuilding plan, which is being prepared by the Center for Multilateral Trade Studies at the Economic Policy Research Foundation of Turkey (TEPAV).
Read more…

By Dan Calic, AMERICAN THINKER

The US and others, while suggesting they are strong supporters of Israel and its need for security, in reality are not promoting peace. Their policies are actually sustaining and rewarding terror.

Let me explain…

President Obama for example has repeatedly stated throughout his administration  America’s commitment to Israel’s security is unshakable. No doubt these are reassuring words to Israel and its friends around the world. However,  his actions contradict his words.
Read more…