By Jacqueline Klimas- The Washington Times – Sunday, June 7, 2015

Most Republican 2016 presidential contenders say they support arming Kurdish fighters in the campaign against the Islamic State, marking a clear departure from President Obama’s current foreign strategy and a welcome game plan among military analysts, who say arming the Kurds is a must-do to defeat the terror organization.

The Kurdish peshmerga is already a competent fighting force ready and willing to fight the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, but often lacking the arms to do so, said Richard Brennan, a senior political scientist at RAND Corp.

Arming the Kurds would not only give Iraqi Security Forces more help in the fight against the Islamic State, but also avoid sectarian conflicts that arise when the majority-Shiite Iraqi forces must fight in Sunni areas like Anbar province, where troops are preparing to retake Ramadi, he said.
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After scarcely a week of active parliamentary work, the ruling coalition has already all but shelved two defining right-wing proposals, namely 1) legislation to allow Knesset to overrule the High Court and 2) the Nation State proposal

Also, Dropping West Bank annexation bid, Bennett turns to the Golan

BY HAVIV RETTIG GUR, TOI

The dust of seven long months of electioneering and coalition building finally settled this week. The 20th Knesset’s committees are now staffed with lawmakers after the last outstanding disagreements between coalition and opposition parties were hammered out in the Knesset last week.

On Sunday, the 34th Government’s Ministerial Committee for Legislation held its first meeting to set the government’s legislative agenda for the coming term, and on Monday, the “housing cabinet,” the committee of ministers charged with finding a solution to Israel’s runaway housing prices, will hold its first meeting.
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Erdogan-backed AKP may be forced to run a minority government or form a coalition, while early elections are also a possibility

AFP

Turkey’s Islamic-rooted ruling party on Monday weighed its future strategy after losing its absolute parliament majority for the first time since winning power 13 years ago, in a stunning election setback for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

The Justice and Development Party (AKP) won the biggest portion of the vote in Sunday’s legislative polls but came well short of a majority in seats due to a breakthrough showing by the the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP).
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A love letter to the mundane Holy City

By Matti Friedman, TABLET, May 15, 2015,

Before dawn one day early last year, I tagged along with a garbage truck picking up trash around the southern part of Jerusalem. The crew was Jewish and Arab, and so was the trash. (“Everyone eats the same potatoes,” one of the crew chiefs told me.) Spending time on the truck seemed a good way to make a point missed by most observers—that beneath the famous image of a place always on the brink, a kind of cohesion had quietly taken hold. I described that morning here.

A few months later came the events of the summer of 2014: the murder of three Jewish teenagers south of the city, the murder of a Palestinian teenager snatched from a Jerusalem street, and then rocket sirens, more attacks, and the worst spate of harassment and vandalism the city had seen in years. I had written about the growing presence of Palestinians in Jewish areas, shopping, riding the light rail from home to work; they disappeared overnight. The city’s pieces withdrew into themselves. Some predicted a new intifada.
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By Rich Cohen, TABLET,

Probably the scariest sentence in the Bible, and maybe in all of Western literature, comes early in Exodus. “Now there arose up a new king over Egypt, which knew not Joseph.” It suggests how era changes to era, way leads to way, evening darkens to night and home turns ominous and mean. Of course, in our age, it’s not the pharaoh who sits on the throne but mood, trend, fashion. And the computer is its sword, social media its scepter. All to say, it’s not as it was to be a Jew in America.

Jews began arriving in numbers here in the 1880s. There had been Sephardic Jews in the country since the beginning, German Jews since the early 19th century, but these were the shtetl masses of Poland and Russia, our grandparents with their dark eyes and longing. By 1910, there were close to a million in New York alone, crowded into tenements, filling streets and schools, enough to remake the town. The New York of Benny Leonard and Al Jolson was a Jewish metropolis where everything was possible, and in many ways, America as we know it—the dream and promise—was imagined by Jews in the city’s vaudeville houses. “Ol’ Man River” and “High Hopes.” Abraham Cahan and Benny Goodman. Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America” with its mountains and prairies and oceans white with foam.
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Sarah Palin

Video retrieved from UnknownWW2InColor

On this 71st Anniversary of D-Day, may God bless our Greatest Generation for the sacrifices they made for our freedom. Please take some time today to reflect on their courage. Thank a WWII vet and listen to their stories, tell your kids the story of D-Day, watch “The Longest Day” or “Band of Brothers,” or simply say a prayer in gratitude for the tens of thousands who made the ultimate sacrifice that day in order to liberate an entire continent from evil.
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by Jeff Jacoby, The Boston Globe

http://www.jeffjacoby.com/16687/the-case-for-israel-is-rooted-in-more-than

NOSES WENT out of joint and knickers got in a twist when Israel’s new deputy foreign minister delivered her inaugural speech to the Jewish state’s diplomatic corps.

“We need to get back to the basic truth of our right to this land,” said Tzipi Hotovely, who is running the foreign ministry’s day-to-day operations, while Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu retains the title of foreign minister. The land of Israel belongs to the Jewish people, she declared, and their claim to it is as old as the Bible. “It’s important to say this” when making Israel’s case before the world, and not to focus solely on Israel’s security interests. Of course security is a profound concern, Hotovely observed, but arguments grounded in justice, morality, and deep historical rights are stronger. She even quoted the medieval Jewish sage Rashi, who wrote that Genesis opens with God’s creation of the world to preempt any subsequent charge that the Jewish claim to the land was without merit.
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By Jeremy Bender, http://www.businessinsider.com

The Kurds desperately need an influx of arms and supplies in order to be able to continue to hold their 600-mile long border against ISIS attacks.The need for weapons has only increased over the past months as the militant group has effectively plundered Iraqi military bases after overrunning cities, Yaroslav Trofimov reports from Kurdish-controlled areas for The Wall Street Journal.
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T. Belman. I had another reaction. I don’t want to be a minority among Muslims. As the world changes, I want to hold on to what was. Does that make me a racist? Probably so. I don’t like the idea of shopping in a store where half the people serving me are wearing hijabs. I don’t want to accommodate to that. I don’t want to be constantly reminded that they are Muslims.

In Israel, at least in Jerusalem most Arab women wear them. I can tolerate that because they are a minority and we live in two different worlds.

In America twenty years ago in most schools you weren’t allowed to be tribal, i.e., wear your gang’s or tribe’s insignia. I think this is what Europe is trying to enforce. In other words, it is in the interests of peaceful relations that our differences be minimized rather than accentuated.

I believe that Israel and America should keep their numbers to a minimum in order to preserve what is. Part of the problem, as I see it is that, Islam is an enemy of my world be it secular or Jewish. I don’t buy into the idea of multiculturalism. I believe in the melting pot for America and a strong Jewish majority in Israel. I believe that it is the other who should be forced to accommodate to us, not the other way around.
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By Ted Belman

SIGN THE PETITION

PM Netanyahu recently appointed Gilad Erdan, Hasbara Minister with a budget of $25 million in the first year exclusively for coordinating international events to counter the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel.

And now PM Netanyahu warned:

“We are in the midst of a great struggle being waged against the State of Israel, an international campaign to blacken its name. It is not connected to our actions; it is connected to our very existence,”  

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T. Belman. INN just announced Reform Movement Out on Top in World Zionist Congress Elections

Reform movement takes 40% of American delegates’ seats as Conservative, Modern-Orthodox slip; two new parties represented.

The Reform Movement backs the Association of Reform Zionists of America which stands for strengthening of the people-hood of the Jews “in order to allow Jews to be free and liberated citizens of the world while also contributing to a global civilization as Jews.”

Not a word about promoting the return to Zion or the establishment of Israel as the nation state of the Jews. Its all about making Israelis embrace Reform Judaism’s progressive values. This is what it is all about. Its not about the ingathering of the exiles or strengthening the state. Read about it below.

ARZA (pronounced AHR-tzah) is a pretty clever name. It’s a Hebrew word meaning “toward the Land (of Israel),” and it’s also an acronym for the Association of Reform Zionists of America. ARZA is the national membership organization that connects Reform Jews with Israel. But what does the name mean? What is a Reform Zionist? And what’s a Zionist to begin with?
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ISIS is here. The Muslim Brotherhood is here. There’s war in the streets. And Obama is aiding and abeting terrorist groups — the very groups that actively work towards the destruction on America. –

BY PAMELA GELLER,

Bill Gertz, top Pentagon reporter for the Washington Times has just reported that “Obama secretly backed Muslim Brotherhood.”  The Brotherhood is literally a fascist Muslim radical group from the Nazi period.

Writes Gertz:

President Obama and his administration continue to support the global Islamist militant group known the Muslim Brotherhood. A White House strategy document regards the group as a moderate alternative to more violent Islamist groups like al Qaeda and the Islamic State.” (Aka ISIS).
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The War of a Million Cuts: The Struggle against the Deligitimization of Israel and the Jews, and the Growth of New Anti-Semitism by Manfred Gerstenfeld.

A review by Jerry Gordon, NER

In early June 2015 the new government of Israeli PM Netanyahu took on the international Boycott, Divestment Sanctions (BDS) action by French cell phone giant Orange. Orange was seeking to withdraw its name from an Israeli company, Partner Communications, Ltd.  The Los Angeles Times reported  this latest BDS kerfuffle involving Israel:

Orange said Thursday that it “ultimately” planned to pull its brand name from Israel, giving a boost to an international boycott movement while enraging the Israeli government and the local franchisee.

In a news release from Paris, the company said it wished to “ultimately end this brand license agreement.” It insisted it was making a business decision, saying it did not want to maintain the brand’s presence in countries where the French company does not actually operate, as is the case in Israel.
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By Anne Bayefsky, Human Rights Voices

This week Senators Lindsey Graham and Ted Cruz have posed a challenge for would-be presidents and all Americans: if the United Nations criminalizes Israel’s exercise of the right of self-defense it will pay a heavy price. The organization has no right to expect billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars to be doled out every year when they are spent undercutting our deepest values and our national security.

Graham and Cruz’s comments come after learning that UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is now weighing whether to sign off on a report emanating from an Algerian U.N. “human rights expert” that analogizes Israel to ISIS, Boko Haram and Al Qaeda. Leila Zerrougui’s rights expertise includes eight years (2000-2008) as legal advisor to Algeria’s President-for-life Abdelaziz Bouteflika.

Moreover, in the coming weeks, the U.N. will issue another report on Israel’s “criminal” response to Hamas genocidaires in Gaza, commissioned by UN Human Rights Council authorities like Russia, China and Saudi Arabia.
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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.
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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.”
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