Right-wing organization says EU trying to establish “facts on the ground;” EU says it is providing “humanitarian assistance.”

By HERB KEINON, TOVAH LAZAROFF, JPOST

The blue EU logo seen on new modular structures in an illegal Beduin encampment in the Judean hills outside the Ma’alen Adumim settlement. . (photo credit:TOVAH LAZAROFF)

The EU is building hundreds of illegal structures in the West Bank, which the government has not removed in order to avoid a diplomatic tangle with the Europeans, according to a report released Friday by the NGO, Regavim. The structures are being built near Ma’aleh Adumim and its E1 area.
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By Chaim Weizmann, FOREIGN AFFAIRS, January 1942

ALMOST half the Jews in the world find themselves today under the Nazi heel. It is impossible to determine the rate at which their physical destruction is proceeding. Nor is it possible to visualize the condition in which the Jewish masses of Poland, Rumania, occupied Russia and even Hungary will be found when the pall of darkness is finally lifted from Nazi-occupied Europe. Tragic as is the position of the Polish peasant, he is rooted in his native soil — at least where he has not been dragged away from it and made to slave in an armament factory.

The Jew in his Ghetto, on the other hand, finds himself despoiled of everything. Deprived of his meagre possessions, driven from his home, torn from his family, he has become the most abject of all the abject victims of the terror. In the reconstruction of a new and — let us hope — a better world, the reintegration of the Jew will thus present a peculiarly difficult problem, and one which is likely to tax both the energies and the good will of the countries of Eastern and Central Europe.
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By David M Weinberg, ISRAEL HAYOM

John Baird, the Canadian foreign minister who announced his retirement from politics this week, was more than a very good friend to the State of Israel.

Baird is proof positive that it is possible to engage in moral diplomacy in a cynical world. He demonstrated that it is possible to be solidly pro-Israel and simultaneously gain a respected role on the international stage and maintain excellent ties with the Arab world.

No country has been as trailblazing in its support of Israel in recent years as Canada. Baird and his boss, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, have spoken out and acted to defend Israel, without apologies or hesitations. They have never felt the need to be politically correct and to “balance” their statements with (im)moral ambiguities about the Arab-Israeli conflict.
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by Raymond Ibrahim, FrontPage Magazine
February 6, 2015

http://www.meforum.org/5015/obama-were-no-better-than-islamic-state

^{Originally published under the title, “Obama: Christianity No Different Than the Islamic State.”}

As the world reacts with shock and horror at the increasingly savage deeds of the Islamic State (IS)—most recently the immolation of a captive—U.S. President Obama’s response has been one of nonjudgmental relativism.

Speaking at the National Prayer Breakfast on February 5, Obama counseled Americans to get off their “high horse” and remember that Christians have been equally guilty of such atrocities:

Unless we get on our high horse and think this [beheadings, sex-slavery, crucifixion, roasting humans] is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ.

There is so much to be said here. First, the obvious: the wide gulf between violence and hate “justified in the name of Christ” and violence and hate “justified in the name of Muhammad” is that Christ never justified it, while Muhammad continuously did.
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By Eli Lake, BLOOMBERG

Way back in the George W. Bush administration, his progressive critics used to call themselves members of the “reality based community.” The phrase was first popularized by Ron Suskind in a lengthy criticism of Bush’s so-called war on terror. Bush and his team were blinded by the moral certainties of ideology, whereas their critics understood the world as it is.

Reading through President Barack Obama’s new 2015 National Security Strategy, I think it’s time to resurrect the phrase, because this document bears very little relation to reality, at least in the Middle East.
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T. Belman.  It is troubling that it needed an expose by Regavim before Netanyahu ordered demolition.  It must be election season.  First of all the construction has been reported many times and in fits and starts Israel has been demolishing some of it. Secondly, once the housing is erected, the High Court won’t let Israel destroy it. We will have to see just how many of these structures Netanyahu will actually destroy.

European Union official defends unlicensed construction in Area C, says Palestinians have a right to build there

BY JUSTIN JALIL AND JTA, TOI

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu instructed Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon to move forward with a plan to demolish some 400 Palestinian structures built in the West Bank with European funding, Israeli media reported Friday.

The prime minister’s order came shortly after a Thursday exposé in the Daily Mail claimed that the EU sank tens of millions of euros into homes which were not granted building permits by the Israeli government.
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By Mort Klein and Elizabeth Berney

Harold Goldmeier’s article on the World Zionist Congress elections, “Making the WZO Relevant Again,”) falsely claims that the Zionist Organization of America filed election complaints to disqualify slates that “even merely favor” a Palestinian state or take positions that are “not to ZOA’s liking.”

Although the ZOA is opposed to a terrorist Palestinian Arab state, it never sought to disqualify any slate for supporting a Palestinian Arab state.

The ZOA only filed to disqualify one slate — the so-called “Hatikvah slate” — because its constituent members promote discriminatory boycotts, divestment and sanctions, which is a violation of the World Zionist Organization’s fundamental anti-discrimination membership requirements.
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By Patrick J. Buchanan

Seeing clips of that 22-minute video of the immolation of the Jordanian pilot, one wonders: Who would be drawn to the cause of these barbarians who perpetrated such an atrocity?

While the video might firm up the faith of fanatics, would it not evoke rage and revulsion across the Islamic world? After all, this was a Sunni Muslim, in a cage, being burned alive.

As of now, this cruel killing seems to have backfired. Jordan is uniting behind King Abdullah’s determination to exact “earth-shattering” retribution.
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NEWSMAX

President Barack Obama stirred outrage with his speech at the National Prayer Breakfast Thursday, comparing the atrocities committed by ISIS to those of Christians “in the name of Christ.”

“Unless we get on our high horse and think that this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ,” Obama said. “In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”

“So it is not unique to one group or one religion,” Obama said. “There is a tendency in us, a simple tendency that can pervert and distort our faith.”
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By Editorial Board, WaPo,  February 5

By S.Fred Singer, AMERICAN THINKER

Europe is leading the way on a path to oblivion: economically, culturally, and demographically.

My background is basically European—and more specifically, Western European. I have lived and worked in many of those countries, and I know most of the major cities intimately—from Stockholm in the north, Newcastle, London, Paris, The Hague, Munich, Vienna, to Rome and Erice, Sicily in the south. I have also spent several months in Moscow and in Jerusalem as a guest of academic institutions.

Economic Suicide
The economic suicide story is based on a faulty understanding of the climate issue by most Western politicians and on their extreme policy response about fossil fuels, based on emotion rather than logic and science. The major European economies have reacted irrationally to contrived, unjustified fear of imagined global-warming disasters.
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By Ted Belman

Sky News Arabia reported:
35 Islamic State fighters said killed in Jordanian airstrikes

Israel Radio reports:
25 IS-linked jihadists said killed in Sinai

In both cases we are not told who gave this info, nor are we told who counted them nor how they determined casualties were Islamic Jihadists nor whether there was any verification.

But when it comes to Israel, we know the media accepts what Hamas tells them and Hamas tells them they were civilians.

Yoram Ettinger

Conventional wisdom suggests that US-Israel ties constitute a one-way-street: The US gives and Israel receives. However, in recent years the one-way-street has been transformed into a two-way-street, mutually-beneficial, win-win set of ties:
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Today Israel’s closest ally is Egypt; under Obama, the US is a force to be worked around, not worked with.

By Caroline Glick, JPOST

On Wednesday, Hamas leader in Gaza Mahmoud Zahar called on Hamas terrorists in Lebanon and Syria to attack Israel “to help us liberate Palestine.”

At the same time, Zahar denied that Hamas has been involved in the terrorist insurgency in Egypt. As he put it, “Our guns are always trained on the enemy,” that is, Israel.

The Egyptian regime was not impressed by Zahar’s protestations.

Last Saturday, an Egyptian court upheld an October 2014 decision by the Egyptian government to outlaw Hamas’s terrorist shock forces Izzadin Kassam, and designate it a terrorist organization.

Both the government’s initial designation and the court’s decision were in some sense, watershed events. They represent the first time an Arab regime ever defined any Palestinian terrorist organization as a terrorist group.
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Over the past few decades a considerable number of former generals and heads of intelligence services have been chewed up and unceremoniously spat out by the Israeli political system.

By Martin Sherman, JPOST

[Isaeli] security experts didn’t anticipate one major event in the Middle East in the past 50 years.

– Economy Minister Naftali Bennett, Saban Forum, December 2014

Allow me to begin this week’s column with three somewhat lengthy excerpts from an essay, “Israel: The Case for Defensible Borders,” published in the influential journal Foreign Affairs.

‘One does not have to be a military expert…’

The selected excerpts relate to three topics:

(a) The indefensible pre-1967 lines

“One does not have to be a military expert to easily identify the critical defects of the armistice lines that existed until June 4, 1967. A considerable part of these lines is without any topographical security value; and, of no less importance, the lines fail to provide Israel with the essential minimum of strategic depth. The gravest problem is on the eastern boundary, where the entire width of the coastal plain varies between 10 and 15 miles, where the main centers of Israel’s population, including Tel Aviv and its suburbs, are situated, and where the situation of Jerusalem is especially perilous…”

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SEE ALSO: EU Funding Illegal Bedouin Villages…

T. Belman. By doing so the PA and the EU are violating the Oslo Accords.

By HERB KEINON, TOVAH LAZAROFF, JPOST

The EU is building hundreds of illegal structures in the West Bank, which the government has not removed in order to avoid a diplomatic tangle with the Europeans, according to a report released Friday by the NGO, Regavim. The structures are being built near Ma’aleh Adumim and its E1 area.

This report is just one of a number the group – a right-wing organization which describes itself as a “research-backed, legal advocacy organization focused on land ownership issues” – has released in recent months.
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UN Watch, NGO Monitor say UN probe of Israel’s ‘war crimes’ against Hamas must be canned, in light of anti-Israel chief’s resignation.

By Hillel Fendel, INN

NGO Monitor, an independent research institution that tracks NGOs involved in the Arab-Israeli conflict, says the UN should suspend its investigation against Israel, and investigate its own corruption and immorality.

At the same time, Geneva-based human rights group UN Watch calls on UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon to investigate the extent of the anti-Israel bias in the inquiry and scrutinize the flawed process by which a known anti-Israel personage was chosen to head it.
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By Evelyn Gordon

That depends on how you define democracy – which is why the ‘Jewish vs. democratic’ debate has become so fraught

In response to my column last month on the false choice between Israel’s Jewish and democratic characters, a reader asked a logical question: You yourself argued that Israel has no raison d’etre if it isn’t a Jewish state; being just another Western democracy isn’t enough. So why do you think “Jewish” and “democratic” deserve equal weight, instead of prioritizing Israel’s Jewish character?

Answering that requires defining “democracy,” because in recent years, two almost antithetical concepts have been sloppily – or perhaps maliciously – subsumed under this term. One of these concepts is frequently at odds with Israel’s Jewish character. But the other is as vital to the Jewish state’s continued existence as the body is to the soul.
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by Michael Freund, JPOST
Jerusalem Post

If several alarming media reports are true, US President Barack Obama is moving perilously closer to a nuclear deal with Iran that will endanger Israel and all of Western civilization.

Far away from the glare of the cameras, it appears that the commander-in-chief and his colleagues are swiftly caving in to the ayatollahs, hoping to buy some short-term quiet by allowing Iran to remain a threshold nuclear state.

In a chilling exclusive filed on Tuesday, the Associated Press revealed that Washington and Tehran “are discussing a compromise that would let Iran keep much of its uranium-enriching technology but reduce its potential to make nuclear weapons.”
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By Adam Kredo, The FREE BEACON

A top Iranian military leader claims that U.S. officials have been “begging us” to sign a nuclear deal during closed door negotiations with Tehran over its contested nuclear program, according to recent comments made to the Iranian state-controlled media.

Mohammad Reza Naghdi, the commander of the Basij, a paramilitary group operating under the wing of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corp (IRGC), recently claimed that the “Americans are begging us for a deal on the negotiation table,” according to comments published in Persian and independently translated for the Washington Free Beacon.

Naghdi added that American officials routinely “plea” with Iran in talks and that the United States is negotiating from a position of weakness, according to his comments, which follow earlier reports claiming that Iran’s leading negotiator “frequently shouts” at U.S. officials.
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