T. Belman. When the Sheikh says that what’s need is “reform in Islam that will restore its original tolerant character”, he is of course referring to the peaceful verses and Hadiths in the Koran which predate the war-like rules which came after. In 2007, MEF published Peace or Jihad? Abrogation in Islam. 

“Rather than explain away inconsistencies in passages regulating the Muslim community, many jurists acknowledge the differences but accept that latter verses trump earlier verses.[14] Most scholars divide the Qur’an into verses revealed by Muhammad in Mecca when his community of followers was weak and more inclined to compromise, and those revealed in Medina, where Muhammad’s strength grew.”

This is called the doctrine of abrogation. This sheikh is suggesting that Abrogation be reversed.

MEMRI

In a February 22, 2015 article in the Saudi daily Al-Riyadh, Sheikh ‘Adel Al-Kalbani, the former imam of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, attacked the extremism of the Islamic State (ISIS) and groups like it. He said that it takes more than mere words, condemnation, and even fatwas to halt the spread of ISIS’s ideas and prevent young people from joining its ranks – it requires reform in Islam that will restore its original tolerant character.

Stating that Islam is fundamentally tolerant and that the Prophet and his Companions were lenient with those who disagreed with them, Al-Kalbani added that today the Muslims are shackling themselves to the strict interpretations by “unrivaled leading scholars” and see any other interpretation  as deviation from the straight path. Such strict interpretation, he said, serves extremists, who go so far as to behead those who disagree with them.
Read more…

By Daniel Greenfield, FPM

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam.

Obama introduced himself to the nation as the son of black and white parents. He has gone back and forth between Christianity and Islam like a philanderer in a bar.

Now he has added a third religion and race to complete his identity politics trinity.

At the last White House Chanukah dinner, he claimed to have a Jewish soul. At a synagogue speech last month, he called himself “an honorary member of the tribe”. Now his former senior advisor has quoted him as saying, “I think I am the closest thing to a Jew that has ever sat in this office.”
Read more…

Please add your voice to this Petition to PM Netanyahu. “We demand that you vastly increase Israel’s Hasbara Budget.”

Just one ministry official is in charge of the fight, now aided by a diplomatic cadet. ‘We feel like soldiers in a battle, but without resources,’ say staffers.

By Itamar Eichner, YNET

[..]
This incident, however, represents merely a small victory in the comprehensive battle in which Israeli embassies around the world are currently embroiled. And Israel’s ambassadors are at the forefront of this battle essentially alone, without the necessary budgets and resources to stem the rising international tide.

Soldiers without resources
Two years ago, the Israeli government decided to place responsibility for combatting the boycott and BDS movement in the hands of the Strategic Affairs Ministry, now the Strategic and Intelligence Affairs Ministry. The previous minister, Yuval Steinitz, tried to formulate a comprehensive plan to fight the boycott – but nothing much came of it due to lack of government funding.
Read more…

By unleashing his clerics on one of Modern Orthodoxy’s icons, Arye Deri has picked a fight he cannot win, and the Chief Rabbinate might not endure.

By AMOTZ ASA-EL, JPOST

Most Israelis don’t know their town rabbi’s name, and many don’t even know he exists – but in Efrat, the suburb of some 8,000 residents south of Jerusalem, everyone knows the rabbi: This stocky, bespectacled and outgoing man, unlike most other local rabbis, was actually among the founders of the town – where he led many others while giving countless lectures, routinely sitting with the community’s kids when they turn bar or bat mitzva, comforting those in mourning, bridging financial, residential and marital conflicts, and shoring up the town’s sensitive relations with its Palestinian neighbors.
Read more…

Israel’s response to the Palestinian initiative to suspend it from FIFA epitomized everything that is wrong with its public diplomacy.

By Martin Sherman, JPOST

We the Palestinians are the enemies of Israel. There is no going back to negotiations. Listen. We as yet don’t have a nuke, but I swear that if we had a nuke, we would have used it this very morning.
– Jibril Rajoub, head of the Palestine Football Association (PFA) on Lebanese TV station Al-Mayadeen, April 30, 2013

Any activity of normalization in sports with the Zionist enemy is a crime against humanity.
– Jibril Rajoub, Facebook, September 8, 2014

I appeal to Jibril Rajoub – I want us to work together, I want us to cooperate, I want us to hug and embrace each other.
– Ofer Eini, head of the Israel Football Association (IFA), in response to Rajoub’s attempt to suspend Israel from FIFA, The Telegraph, June 2, 2015
Read more…

If only Glick had demanded an increased budget for pro-Israel hasbara. Sign the Petition to PM Netanyahu: We demand you vastly increase the Hasbara budget.

By Caroline Glick, JPOST

Prime Minister Netanyahu’s new government is less than a month old, but it’s already apparent that it is different from its predecessors. And if it continues on its current diplomatic trajectory, it may do something that its six predecessors failed to accomplish. Netanyahu’s new government may improve Israel’s position internationally.

The stakes are high. Over the years, Israel has largely concentrated its efforts on developing the tools to contend with its military challenges. But as we have seen over the past decade and a half, Israel’s capacity to fight and defeat its enemies is not limited principally by the IDF’s war-fighting capabilities.
Read more…

In a first, Breaking the Silence briefs White House and State Dept. officials on its allegedly false testimony against the IDF.

By Ari Yashar, INN

In an unprecedented first, White House and State Department officials were given a briefing by members of the radical leftist Israeli NGO Breaking the Silence, which infamously gathers allegedly false testimony from anonymous IDF soldiers to accuse the army of improper conduct.

The White House and the State Department both confirmed to Haaretz on Friday that the briefings took place this week, and centered on the NGO’s report released last month which accuses the IDF of breaches and infractions in last summer’s counter-terror Operation Protective Edge in Gaza.

The meeting took place in Washington, with members of the National Security Council (NSC) being briefed in a non-governmental building instead of in the White House before State Department officials likewise were briefed by the radical NGO.
Read more…

By Vic Rosenthal

This past week Barack Obama laid bare the pincer maneuver he is executing against Israel. As he explained it in an interview with Ilana Dayan on Israeli TV, he intends to squeeze Israel between a nuclear Iran and a terrorist base next door to Tel Aviv.

The precise nature of the Iranian threat is important for understanding Obama’s strategy. Although one can’t completely discount the possibility, Iranian officials have been relatively honest when they say that they don’t intend to nuke us: they would prefer to see us wiped off the map conventionally by their non-state proxies. The bomb will primarily be used to threaten the Sunni states and as a deterrent against Israel’s option to (in the words of the previous Saudi king), cut off the head of the Iranian snake.
Read more…

Former Israeli diplomat Yoram Ettinger said that President Barack Obama has been dead wrong on every Middle East issue during his term.

By Yaakov Levi, ISRAEL NATIONAL NEWS

Yoram Ettinger, a former Israeli diplomat who was stationed in Washington for many years, said that US President Barack Obama’s interview on Channel Two earlier this week was a showcase for his complete lack of understanding on the situation in the Middle East.

“After all, this is the president who claimed that the Arab Spring uprisings in Tunisia, Jordan, Egypt, Bahrain, Syria, Iraq and elsewhere would lead to democracy in the Arab world,” he toldArutz Sheva.

“This is the president who, in his famous speech in Cairo five years ago, proclaimed that ‘Islam has always been part of American history,’ when of course any grade school student knows that this is not the case,” Ettinger asserted.
Read more…

By Ted Belman

Human Rights Voices is a new site created by Anne Bayefsky, a fellow Canadian lawyer, who has been at the forefront in the fight for human rights her entire career. She tells me, “It’s a major database that has literally taken me years to create – and we add research to it all the time.” Presently, it contains 20,000 pages relevant to human rights issues.

She was formerly a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute^[3].

Currently, she is the Director of the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust.
Read more…

By Harsh V Pant, NDTV

In a historic first, Narendra Modi is set to visit Israel later this year. He will become the first prime minister of India to visit the country. Ahead of Modi’s visit, External Affairs Minister, Sushma Swaraj will visit Israel, Jordan and the Palestinian territories.

Modi had visited Israel as chief minister of Gujarat in 2006. And as Indian Prime Minister, he had met his Israeli counterpart, Benjamin Netanyahu on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly’s annual session last year. Home Minister Rajnath Singh had visited Israel in November to boost counter-terror cooperation.

A hallmark of Modi’s foreign policy has been a self-confident assertion of Indian interests. This is reflected in his government’s moves vis-a-vis Israel, marking a distinct break from unnecessary and counterproductive diffidence of the past. Despite sharing 23 years of diplomatic ties and working closely on defence, counter-terrorism, agriculture and energy related issues, no Indian Prime Minister or President has ever visited Israel.
Read more…

Israel Behind the News

Thousands of young people are now employed on campuses around the world, well financed and well organized, in an unprecedented effort that challenges the very legitimacy of Israel on every possible academic and economic front.

They call their new movement: BDS – Boycott, Divestment and Sanction

Over the next few days, Mr. Sheldon Adelson and Mr. Haim Saban have called an emergency meeting of organizations concerned about BDS to answer two questions.

Where does the finance and organizational support for BDS emanate from?
Read more…

Israel’s NGO Transparency Law requires organizations to disclose direct and indirect funding from foreign governmental bodies • According to the Foreign Ministry, many of the organizations receiving massive funding promote anti-Israel activity.

By Shlomo Cesana, ISRAEL HAYOM

An anti-Israel demonstration

Some 24 Israeli non-governmental political advocacy organizations dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict reported a total of nearly 105 million shekels ($27 million) in direct and indirect funding from foreign governments, especially in the European Union, from 2012 to 2014, according to an NGO Monitor report from earlier this year.

The organizations are required by Israel’s NGO Transparency Law to disclose funding from foreign governmental bodies. NGO Monitor collected and analyzed the data provided about donations given directly by foreign governments and those given via governmental conduits.
Read more…

By Lahav Harkov, JPOST

The boycott, divestment and  sanctions movement is the new anti-Semitism and wants to destroy Israel, Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked said on Wednesday, in response to a motion to the agenda from coalition and opposition MKs calling to fight those who seek to delegitimize Israel.

The discussion was marked by shouting matches over whether BDS is an anti-Israel and anti-Semitic movement or simply seeks to bring an end to Israel’s presence in areas liberated in 1967.

“BDS opposes Israel as the Jewish state. It wants to blacken us and destroy us as a Jewish and democratic state,” Shaked explained. “The boycotters don’t talk about Judea and Samaria, they talk about the State of Israel.”
Read more…

By Evelyn Gordon

Commenting last week on Israel’s surprising ninth-place Eurovision finish, achieved thanks to votes from millions of usually anti-Israel Europeans, Avshalom Halutz of Haaretz wrote sarcastically that the dramatic improvement over previous results “seems to validate Israel’s decision…to send its carefree ‘Golden Boy’ party anthem to Eurovision, after years of trying in vain to find favor with the Europeans with apologetic and hypocritical songs about peace and tolerance, and failed gimmicks like candlelight or a duet between a Jewish and an Arab singer.” Despite being an exaggeration, there’s something to what he says. And it’s something that goes to the heart of what’s wrong with Israel’s public diplomacy effort.
Read more…

The deputy IDF chief’s assertion that the Syrian civil war has improved Israel’s security shows that the country we once knew no longer exists as a single, sovereign entity.

By Yossi Melman, JPOST

Israeli soldiers stand atop tanks in the Golan Heights near Israel’s border with Syria

Deputy IDF Chief of Staff Maj.-Gen. Yair Golan said Monday that Israel’s security situation on the northern border has improved as a result of the Syrian civil war, which has served to drain the blood of Hezbollah.

This notion was strengthened yesterday by a very senior security official. Both spoke about the situations in Syria and Lebanon. Regarding Lebanon, despite inflammatory remarks made recently by Hassan Nasrallah warning Israel that if another war broke out it would suffer a major blow, the Israeli intelligence estimate is that Hezbollah has weakened and would not dare initiating hostilities with Israel.
Read more…

By Yaakov Lappin, JPOST

In the event of a new conflict with Hezbollah, the IDF would seek to evacuate more than a million civilians in south Lebanon within 24 hours before proceeding to strike thousands of Hezbollah targets in some 240 villages and built-up regions, a senior military source said on Wednesday.

Large-scale Hezbollah rocket and missile fire would be met with civilian evacuations, massive Israeli aerial strikes, followed by a ground offensive, he said.

Discussing a new strategy for dealing with Hezbollah’s battle doctrine of using civilian built-up areas as military bases to rain death and destruction upon Israel, the source spoke as the IDF approached the conclusion of a weeklong drill simulating conflict on multiple fronts, including the Israel Air Force practicing striking of large numbers of targets and simulating conflict in northern combat arenas.
Read more…

By Einat Paz-Frankel, NoCamels

Clinical trials of a new drug cocktail have been shown to cure 58 percent of terminally-ill patients by shrinking cancerous tumors or eliminating them altogether. The scientific community is hailing this discovery as a major breakthrough in cancer research.

The new cocktail is a form of immunotherapy, a relatively new class of drugs that harness the body’s immune system to extinguish fatal tumors. Israeli researcher Prof. Jacob Schachter, who took part in the development of the drug and in the recent clinical trials, told Israel’s Channel 10 that the newfound drug cocktail could serve as the basis of treatment for many types of cancer, potentially replacing chemotherapy. “It’s an explosion,” he said.

In one of the trials, over half of the terminally ill patients saw their tumors shrink or disappear completely .
Read more…

by Frances Martel, BREITBART

In her new book, Living History: On the Front Lines for Israel and the Jews 2003-2015, best-selling author, lecturer, columnist and retired psychotherapist Dr. Phyllis Chesler explores the growth of the anti-Israel campus movement and the alliance of leftist academic intellectuals with leaders of anti-Semitic Islamist movements in the East.

Speaking to Breitbart News via email, Chesler expands on the “cognitive war” being waged against Israel and the West, the startling growth of leftist pro-Palestinian movements on campus, and the nature and appeal of the anti-Israel “death cult” that has taken advantage of young college students looking to empathize with the oppressed.

Q: The book is a series of essays from the past twelve years that gives the reader a wide breadth of how expansive the propaganda war, as you call it in the book, against the state of Israel is. It covers everything from your first experiences with the anti-Israel movement on campus to events as recent as Prime Minister Netanyahu’s speech to Congress on the Iranian nuclear talks earlier this year. My first question to you is a simple one: why this compilation of essays now?
Read more…

The secret of Netanyahu’s charm is that while he systematically lies to all sides, his lies neutralize each other: Arabs don’t believe him even when he talks in favor of a Palestinian state, and the right doesn’t believe him even when he denies ‘two states.’

By Elyakim Haetzni, YNET

Benjamin Netanyahu did it again: A “zig” in the election campaign (there will be no Palestinian state) and a “zag” in front of the European Union’s foreign minister, Federica Mogherini (two states). In other countries, such a conduct by a misleading prime minister would have led to a governmental crisis, or at least a public row. Here, it didn’t even raise an eyebrow.

It’s true that former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir declared that “it is permitted to lie for the Land of Israel,” but he was never caught lying against the Land of Israel.

The secret of Netanyahu’s charm is that while he systematically lies to all sides, the lies neutralize each other: The Arabs don’t believe him even when he talks in favor of a Palestinian state, and the right doesn’t believe him even when he denies the “two states.” That’s the reason why no one gets excited anymore.
Read more…