T. Belman. Not mentioned in this article is that Israel released some housing units east of green line with very little international opprobrium. Could Israel be giving some to get some? Netanyahu also hinted last week of unilateral moves but said they could go either way or did he mean both ways. If he is giving the PA expanded rights in Area C for permission to build in the settlement blocs, I am against it.

By Alex Fishman, YNET

Analysis: The defense establishment has already realized that Israel has no more gestures to offer the Palestinians. There are two options left: A real peace move or instructing the army to prepare to take over the West Bank completely.

The understanding among senior officials at the US State Department ahead of Secretary of State John Kerry’s visit to Israel this week is that Israel will hand additional chunks of Area C over to the Palestinians.

Such a move, if done, means expanding the Palestinian control, and mainly patting Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas on the back, as if telling him that his diplomatic efforts in the past year were not in vain.
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By Lahav Harkov, JPOST

If IDF former Chief of Staff Benny Gantz ran for prime minister, more Israelis would support him than current Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, according to a Chanel 2 poll broadcast Saturday.

The poll conducted by Dr. Mina Tzemach and Mano Geva pitted Netanyahu against various candidates for prime minister, and only Gantz surpassed him, with 44 percent choosing him rather than 32% for Netanyahu.

If Gantz were to run as the head of a center-left party, the margin between him and Netanyahu narrows to 4%, with 41% preferring the former chief of staff and 37% choosing Netanyahu.
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By Ted Belman

I have been critical of the Israel government for only acting defensively in response to Arab terror. I suggested that Netanyahu just wants to restore calm as opposed to changing the status quo in response to the terror.

Tuvia Brodie in his INN blog notes that since France has taken extreme measures to combat terror, Israel has done likewise.

How strange: Israel acts cowardly. It watches the world too closely. But sometimes, when terror strikes, it can nevertheless act with speed. This appears to be especially true when Gentiles get tough with their own terror problems.

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T. Belman. If ever there was a Trojan Horse, the mass influx of Muslims into the US will be its undoing just as it is in Europe. Not only are they assimilation resistant, they are anti American law and values and want to replace them with Sharia and Islamic values.

The Left including the Jewish establishment paint this as an humanitarian issue. Even the aspirants to the Republican nomination for President, focus on the vetting problem or the jobs problem or even the crime problem but they do not focus on the fifth column that would be created dedicated to replacing the constitution with Sharia law. Considering the extend to which the Muslims keep getting their way in America, thereby changing America, doubling their numbers in America will accelerate the process.

America should not allow Muslim immigration. These people are not refugees entitled to asylum. The can go to Jordan or Turkey where millions are now situate or they can go to 60 plus Islamic states that share their values.

The 11 million illegal aliens who are mainly Christian can easily be assimilated and present no insurmountable problems whereas one million legal Muslim immigrants would present a serious challenge to American values.

By Andrew C. McCarthy, National Review Online

The jihad is raging in Paris. President Hollande repeatedly declares that France is at war, and press reporting has highlighted the French military’s combat operations against ISIS in Syria. But what the French are most worried about — and what the Obama-friendly media are happy to gloss over while the president is pushing to import thousands of Middle Eastern Muslims into our country — is fifth-column activity, meaning French Islamists supportive of violent jihadists.
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T. Belman. As this article indicates, there is a lot of wheeling and dealing that goes into passing a budget. This article, Time to Announce the Big Winners of Israel’s New Budget shows that the coalition partners get more from the budget for their constituencies and the opposition parties get less. No surprise there.

Kahlon makes no secret of his desire for a broad coalition, which would ease his lot. His preferred partner is Zionist Union, with its many Knesset seats; and if not, then Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu.

By Yossi Verter, HAARETZ | Nov. 20, 2015

Few of the 120 MKs who took part in the all-night session this week on the exhausting and tiresome annual ritual whose outcome is a foregone conclusion – passage of the state budget and accompanying Economic Arrangements Bill – believe that this show will be repeated again at the end of next year with the same actors playing identical roles. If it’s repeated at all. In other words, either the present coalition – which is lean in flesh and spirit – will collapse during the year ahead, or it will get a lifesaving transplant.
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Raymond Ibrahim on November 19, 2015

Obama recently lashed out against the idea of giving preference to Christian refugees, describing it as “shameful”: “That’s not American. That’s not who we are. We don’t have religious tests to our compassion,” loftily added the American president.

Accordingly, the administration is still determined to accept 10,000 more Syrian refugees, almost all of whom will be Muslim, despite the fact that some are ISIS operatives, while many share the ISIS worldview (as explained below).

Yet right as Obama was grandstanding about “who we are,” statistics were released indicating that “the current [refugee] system overwhelmingly favors Muslim refugees. Of the 2,184 Syrian refugees admitted to the United States so far, only 53 are Christians while 2,098 are Muslim.”
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WATCH THE LAST 15 MINUTES. CRUZ COMMITS TO DEFEATING RADICAL ISLAMIC TERRORISM.

by Geoffrey Grider

T. Belman. Ralph Peters in his article below wrote “The generals who won World War II would start by leveling Raqqa, the ISIS caliphate’s capital.” Russia is obviously taking his advice. So should Israel.

DEBKA

Russia has launched a merciless blanket air campaign, backed by Kalibr cruise missiles fired from the Caspian and Mediterranean Seas, for the object of wiping the Islamic State’s Syrian center of Raqqa off the map, DEBKAfile’s military sources report.

Western and Middle East sources tracking the campaign since Friday, Nov. 20, report that at least 75 air sorties have been conducted and are systematically razing the town of 200,000 inhabitants 160km east of Aleppo, district by district, irrespective of civilian town dwellers.
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T. Belman. This is in contrast to this OBAMA INC: WE WON’T “STOOP” TO BOMBING ISIS CITIES
“We won’t stoop to actually winning wars”

By Lt Col (ret’d) Ralph Peters, NYPost

[..] What can be done? The answer is easy to mouth — and unwelcome to those who conduct foreign policy by platitudes (such as “there’s no military solution”). The base line is that you can’t win by playing defense. You must take the war to the enemy — without restraint. If you’re not determined to win at any cost, you’ll lose.

Our military has the resources to shatter ISIS, but political correctness has penetrated so deep into the Pentagon that, even should a president issue the one-word order, “Win!,” our initial actions would be cautious and halting. We’ve bred a generation of military leaders afraid of being prosecuted by their own government for the kind of errors inevitable in wartime. Instead of “leaning forward in the foxhole,” our leaders lean on lawyers.
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T. Belman. Obama was ineffectual because he wasn’t committed. U.S. Pilots Confirm: Obama Admin Blocks 75 Percent of Islamic State Strikes. Obama and many Sunni states wanted ISIS to defeat Assad. Russia’s actions are putting the lie to Obama.

APF

Beirut (AFP) – More than 1,300 people, around two-thirds of them combatants, have been killed in Russian air strikes in Syria since Moscow’s aerial campaign began on September 30, a monitor said Friday.

The figure supplied by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights is more that double the overall toll it gave in its last report on the Russian campaign three weeks ago.

The Britain-based Observatory said it had documented 1,331 deaths in Russian air strikes, most of them of Islamic State group jihadists or other fighters.. I HIGHLY DOUBT THIS
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By Ted Belman

Today I attended a lecture by Caroline Glick organized by The Women in Green, in which she doubled down on her solution; annex all the land and offer qualified Arabs a path to citizenship.

I have always been against offering citizenship because I felt that the Arabs living there couldn’t be domesticated, i,e turned from confrontation to cooperation.

Caroline doubled down on her solution arguing if we exercise our sovereignty and support the good Arabs rather than the bad Arabs, as we failed to do in Oslo, then the Arabs would learn to value their citizenship. Supporting the good Arabs means integrating them better into Israel. This is what Bayit Yehudi wants to do.
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“If it wants to survive, Europe must go beyond mere legal measures and constitutionality and begin examining three of the principles that are the mainstays of its culture: human rights, political correctness and multiculturalism.”

By Mordechai Kedar, INN

[..] The war is not limited to firearms and bombs. More and more people are beginning to discern the gaps allowing the enemy to breach the walls of the West’s encampment. The mass migration from Islamic lands, starting in the seventies, is well entrenched in Europe but has not integrated into European culture, has not adopted its mores and has, instead, carefully held on to its original culture, nurtured in neighborhoods where the host country’s culture is not welcome.

As a result of last weekend’s attacks, French President Francois Hollande announced that France will change its laws to allow the government to cancel the citizenship of suspected terrorists. Now they wake up? Where were they three years ago, in 2012, when Rabbi Jonathan Sandler, his two sons Arieh and Gabriel and the little Miriam Monsonego were murdered in Toulouse by a murderer who arrived from the Jihadi fields of the Middle East? Where was the French government after the murders at Hyper Cacher and Charlie Hebdo this past January? What steps were taken when Ilan Halimi was barbarically murdered in Paris in 2006? All these terrorist murders were perpetrated by Muslims who could have had their citizenship revoked. France is shutting the barn door now that the horse has bolted.
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“Abbas is not interested either in peace or in Palestinian statehood.”

By Caroline Glick, JPOST

On Tuesday night Channel 10 broadcast an interview with PLO chief and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in which Abbas admitted publicly for the first time that he rejected the peace plan then prime minister Ehud Olmert offered him in 2008.

Olmert’s plan called for Israel to withdraw from the entire Old City of Jerusalem, including the Western Wall, and from 93.7 percent of Judea and Samaria. Olmert also offered sovereign Israeli territory to the Palestinians to compensate for the areas Israel would retain in Judea and Samaria.

Abbas said his rejection was unequivocal. “I didn’t agree. I rejected it out of hand.”
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“If Israel is to survive as the nation-state of the Jewish people, it will have to contend adequately with two fundamental imperatives: the geographic imperative and the demographic imperative.”

By Martin Sherman. JPOST

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose

– attributed to Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr, (1808 –1890, editor of Le Figaro). Translated “The more it changes, the more it’s the same thing.”

Truth be told, the post-Paris imperatives for the survival of the Jewish state are, for all intents and purposes, identical to the pre-Paris ones. The only difference is that now they just might be more starkly evident.

Two fundamental imperatives: Geographic & demographic
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‘The terrorist fought to come in and slaughter us’
Witness reveals how stabber struggled at door to get in and murder even more Jews at prayer in Tel Aviv. Two Israelis murdered and one was wounded.

3 killed in Etzion Bloc drive-by shooting
A total of three people are reported killed in the drive-by shooting near the West Bank settlement of Alon Shvut, in the Etzion Bloc.

One of those killed is an 18-year-old Israeli, another is reported to be a US national, and the third is a Palestinian man.

A 50-year-old man is in critical condition at the Hadassah Ein Karem hospital in Jerusalem. At least five more people are wounded in the attack.

IDF arrests three knife-carrying Palestinian women alleged to have targeted army camp

By Andrew C. McCarthy, NATIONAL INTEREST 

As I argued in Faithless Execution, the principal constitutional duty of the chief executive is to execute the laws faithfully. President Obama, by contrast, sees his principal task as imposing his post-American “progressive” preferences, regardless of what the laws mandate.

In his latest harangue against Senator Ted Cruz (R., Texas) and other Americans opposed to his insistence on continuing to import thousands of Muslim refugees from Syria and other parts of the jihad-ravaged Middle East, Obama declaimed:

When I hear political leaders suggesting that there would be a religious test for which a person who’s fleeing from a war-torn country is admitted … that’s shameful…. That’s not American. That’s not who we are. We don’t have religious tests to our compassion.

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By Pamela Geller

This is typical. Despite the tens of thousands of deadly Islamic attacks since 9/11, never has there been a rally or movement against jihad that ever garnered more than a handful of Muslims. I remember heading down to DC in 2005 for a “major Muslims rally against terror” and no one showed up.

Instead we have come to expect wails of “fear of reprisals” and bogus “Islamophobia”claims  after every Islamic jihad terror attack. Conversely, according to the FBI “hate crimes” against Muslims has decreased. And while Muslims in the US condemn the Islamic State, where are they teaching against the ideology that gave rise to it?

Right now, nothing is being done to stop jihad recruiting in US mosques, even as several hundred young Muslims from the US have gone to wage jihad for the Islamic State.
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DEBKAfile Special Report November 18, 2015,

The secret deal for a political solution for the Syria conflict reached by Presidents Barack Obama and Vladimir Putin on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Antalya over the weekend has radically changed and intensified Russia’s air strike tactics in the last 24 h ours.

For the first time since the intensified Russian military intervention in the Syrian civil war in the last week of September, Russian air force planes took off Tuesday, Nov. 17 for attacks on Syrian rebel and ISIS targets, from a home base, the Morozovsk airbase in the southern Rostov district. Until now, the Russian bombers had taken off from Hmeymim airbase near Latakia.
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By Ted Belman

Let us say that Canada or any country for that matter decide that the only people they will allow to immigrate are whites. That would make them racist because they are choosing one race over another. Why is it morally wrong to do so? Is there an argument that supports the right to choose the racial make up of one’s country or must all counties be racially blind. I believe Japan maintains their racial make up. Are they then racists in a pejorative sense?. Why is there an imperative to be racially blind. For the record, I am not suggesting that people or countries should discriminate because of the colour of one’s skin. It is value free.

But not every distinction is value free.
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