PLUS: Roundup of regional chatter – Iran, Lebanon, Israel, Palestinians

By Omri Ceren, TIP

It’s been a few hours, so we’re now entering that news cycle gray zone between “what happened” and “what does it mean,” without having definite answers on either.

“What happened”: Israel’s top security figures – PM Netanyahu, DM Ya’alon, and IDF Chief of Staff Gantz – have reportedly wrapped up their meetings in Israel’s military headquarters, the Kirya, for now. Israel has confirmed that 2 soldiers were killed, and at least 7 more were injured (some severely). Hezbollah’s initial attack appears to have involved firing a fourth generation Kornet anti-tank missile against the Israeli jeep, with additional chaos and cover provided by an IED and mortar fire. Hezbollah media outlets are triumphantly running screencaps of the Israeli vehicle on fire, which they scraped from Israeli TV. There are reports that Hezbollah chief Nasrallah will make a speech before the week is out, though similar reports over the last few weeks have proven false.
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By Sharona Schwartz, THE BLAZE

A former Obama campaign strategist is working in Israel as an adviser to a group determined to unseat Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the upcoming Israeli elections.

Former Obama campaign strategist Jeremy Bird is consulting for an Israeli group that wants to unseat Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

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Anyone who watches this video will recognize that Sarah Palin is a serious contender and should be taken seriously.

But cheap oil and sanctions will.

by Mark Dubowitz and Jonathan Schanzer, The National Interest

As President Obama made clear in his State of Union address on Tuesday, U.S. officials are reasonably confident that they have Iran just where they want it. They say the Iranian economy is reeling from a 60 percent drop in the price of oil, Tehran’s most valuable asset, which accounts for about 50 percent of its government budget.

The White House and its allies, in an ongoing effort to prevent Congress from passing new Iran sanctions, are now using this drop in oil to their advantage. They argue that oil markets are inflicting serious economic pain on the Islamic Republic, and that this should be enough to convince Iran to reach a nuclear deal.

It’s a compelling story, and useful to an administration that has threatened to veto new Senate legislation that would impose additional sanctions on Iran if no deal is reached by the White House’s self-imposed deadline of June 2015. The problem is that the story doesn’t hold up.
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T. Belman. SPLC would never say the same about Islam or even what is called radical Islam but should and then some.

Evangelical political operative planned 9-day freebie trip for national committee members, on behalf of the conservative Christian AFA group which blasts Muslims, gays. SPLC rights group staffer: Our issue is not with the trip, but with the ‘heinous beliefs’ of those sponsoring it.

By Debra Nussbaum Cohen, HAARETZ

NEW YORK – Some 60 members of the Republican National Committee, including its chairman, are heading to Israel at the end of the month on a trip fully paid for by an organization described as a “hate group” by the Southern Poverty Law Center.

The trip is being organized by the American Renewal Project, an endeavor housed in and financed by the American Family Association, a conservative Christian group in Tupelo, Mississippi. The AFA is described as a “hate group” and “extremist group” by the SPLC, an Alabama-based civil rights nonprofit, because of statements it made that are deemed anti-LGBTQ, anti-Latino and anti-black, and which suggest that the United States is a country for Christians only.
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The right-winger chooses a former Labor Party activist to replace a candidate close to the rabbis, soon after tapping a former soccer star.

By Chaim Levinson, HAARETZ

Habayit Hayehudi leader Naftali Bennett has tapped a right-wing author for the 15th spot on his party’s ticket, demoting another woman whom he considers too conservative, political sources told Haaretz.
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Monarch tied to anti-Semitic Muslim clerics, funding of jihad

BY: Adam Kredo, NEW BEACON

King Salman, Saudi Arabia’s newly crowned monarch, has a controversial history of helping to fund radical terror groups and has maintained ties with several anti-Semitic Muslim clerics known for advocating radical positions, according to reports and regional experts.

Salman, previously the country’s defense minister and deputy prime minister, was crowned king last week after his half-brother King Abdullah died at the age of 90.

While Abdullah served as a close U.S. ally and was considered a reformer by many, Saudi Arabia has long been criticized by human rights activists for its treatment of women and its enforcement of a strict interpretation of Islamic law.
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Ben-Ari has made clear that he would not join any coalition unless firm ideological red lines were set, such as not releasing terrorists, not freezing construction, not holding negotiations with the Palestinian Authority (PA), and not letting Hamas survive another operation – all of which the outgoing coalition did.

Where does Bennett stand on these red lines? Remember Bennett is concerned with broadening the appeal of Bayit Yehudi, rather than narrowing its appeal.

Most recent polls have put Yachad just under the electoral threshold, while Otzma is not polling more than two seats and will definitely fail to enter the Knesset if it does not join with Yachad.

By By Ido Ben-Porat, Ari Yashar, INN

After weeks of tension and public calls for former MK Dr. Michael Ben-Ari’s Otzma Yehudit and MK Eli Yishai’s Yachad – Ha’am Itanu to run on a technical bloc joint list, negotiations have fallen through after Yishai’s party made surprising last minute demands on Ben-Ari.

The two parties were in zero hour talks on Tuesday night ahead of a Thursday deadline to submit a joint list, when Yishai made an odd offer giving nationalist activist Baruch Marzel the fourth spot instead of Ben-Ari, who would get the sixth spot.

But that apparently isn’t what caused the talks to break down – instead, it was that Yishai and his associates MK Yoni Chetboun and Rabbi Moshe Hager demanded that Otzma Yehudit members obligate themselves, and announce to the media, that they will permanently not ascend to the Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism. Read more…

by Tarek Fatah, The Toronto Sun
January 27, 2015

http://www.meforum.org/4995/shame-and-scandal-in-saudi-arabia

^{Originally published under the title “Shame and scandal in Saudi Arabia.”}

There is a disgraceful spectacle unfolding in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, in which some of the leading lights of the West are playing the role of medieval court jesters, singing platitudes to tyrants in a demonstration of subservience that shames the rest of us.

Ostensibly, the American, British, French and other European leaders travelled to the medieval monstrosity we call Saudi Arabia to offer condolences to the family of the late King Abdullah.

But the reality is different. They are there because the Saudis have money and oil.

On one hand the West claims it is fighting to destroy Islamic State (ISIS), yet it strengthens its ties with the very people who have spent an estimated $100 billion to spread Wahhabism, the foundational Islamist creed of ISIS, the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaida, Boko Haram and the Taliban.
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Omri Ceren of TIP wrote to me to advise:

The White House has been exerting pressure on Senate Democrats to stay frozen on the sidelines. Instead 10 of them committed to voting on pressure in roughly 8 weeks, which is at most a couple weeks after even the best-case scenario for pressure advocates (the calendar was already filled up through February with Keystone, DHS/immigration, etc). The bill will now proceed to markup in Banking on Thursday, and the letter signatories indicate that it will come out of committee with bipartisan support.

It’s easy to see why the Kirk-Menendez side is claiming a modest victory and pointing to the letter as positive momentum.

Senate Democrats give Obama an Iran deadline
By Kristina Wong – 01/27/15 01:56 PM EST

Ten Senate Democrats warned the White House in a letter Tuesday that they will support legislation imposing new sanctions on Iran if a framework to roll back the country’s nuclear program isn’t reached within two months.
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See also: The media’s denigration derby vs. Netanyahu
by Michael Freund

THOMAS ROSE, BREITBART

Just days after the Obama White House accused House Speaker John Boehner of “breaking protocol” by inviting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address a joint session of Congress, a team of up to five Obama campaign operatives has reportedly arrived in Israel to lead a campaign to defeat the Israeli Prime Minister in upcoming national elections scheduled for March 17.

The anti-Netanyahu, left wing Israeli newspaper Haaretz reports a group called “One Voice,” reportedly funded by American donors, is paying for the Obama campaign team. That group is reportedly being led by Obama’s 2012 field director Jeremy Bird.

As Jerusalem Post columnist and putative Knesset candidate Caroline Glick reported on her Facebook page, “Obama won’t meet Benjamin Netanyahu in Washington when he addresses the Joint Houses of Congress in March because of Netanyahu’s visit’s proximity to the Israeli elections. And Obama, of course believes in protocol and propriety which is why he won’t get involved.” And yet, Glick adds, “He’s just sending his 2012 field campaign manager to Israel to run a campaign to defeat Netanyahu.”
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By Michael :edeen, PJ MEDIA

The real threats to us, and how to deal with them, that is. Lots of well-known former foreign policy/national security officials don’t, or feel obliged to appear “realistic” (diplospeak for “don’t do anything, keep talking”). Some former military officers do, although only up to a point.

Three duly respected policy professionals, Denis Ross (Obama’s — and plenty of others’ — Middle East guru for a few years early on), Eric Edelman (Bush’s under secretary of defense and earlier ambassador to Turkey), and Ray Takeyh of the Council on Foreign Relations (who recently published a very important story detailing the background of the Iranian occupation of the US Embassy in Tehran in ’79), tell us it’s time to get tougher with Iran:

[It’s] time to acknowledge that we need a revamped coercive strategy, one that threatens what the Islamic Republic values the most—its influence in the Middle East and its standing at home.

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APPARENTLY OBAMA IS THREATENING THEM

BY: Adam Kredo, NEW BEACON

UPDATE 4:58 P.M.: Following initial publication this report, Schumer spokeswoman Meredith Kelly told the Washington Free Beacon in an email that the senator “plans to co-sponsor Sen. Menendez’s new sanction legislation when it is introduced.”

Kelly did not respond to subsequent questions about why Schumer had not already signed on to co-sponsor the legislation, which has been public and in the works for months. Kelly did not specify if Schumer would sign onto the legislation that will be up for a vote in the Senate Banking Committee later this week, which Menendez may not back.

Sen. Mark Kirk (R., Ill.) is poised to file new Iran sanctions legislation on Monday with or without the support of key Democrats who have backed the bill in the past, including Sens. Robert Menendez (D., N.J.) and Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.), according to sources familiar with the ongoing negotiations.
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By Jonathan S Tobin, COMMENTARY

What was an Iranian general doing hanging around on the Syrian side of the Golan Heights border with Israel? The answer is that, along with several high-ranking figures in the Hezbollah terrorist group, General Mohammed Ali Allahdadi, a reputed ballistic missiles expert, was there helping to set up a missile base from which the terror group would, with Iranian aid and instructions, strike at the State of Israel. But before he completed his mission Allahdadi was killed along with some of the Hezbollah personnel in an Israel strike on their base near the town of Quenetra. The mission nipped the Iranian scheme in the bud but it’s doubtful that anyone in the Israeli government is under the impression that the strike ended the threat of attack from Iranian forces and their auxiliaries. But the revelation of the Iranian effort near the Golan is significant because it illustrates how deeply involved Iran is in fomenting a new terror war against Israel as well as the peril presented by Western policies that would, at best, make Iran a threshold nuclear power in the years to come.
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By Herb Keinon, JPOST

Baku — Azerbaijan views Israel as a “very important” ally and strategic partner, Ali Hasanov, a senior adviser to President Ilham Aliyev, said on Monday.

Hasanov’s comments followed a meeting he had with a small Israeli delegation to Baku, led by Acre Mayor Shimon Lankry, who is building a community center in his town for the some 9,000 Azerbaijani Jews – or 20 percent of his city – who live there.

Hasanov said the ties between his country, a secular Muslim state that borders Iran to the north, and Israel will continue to develop and flourish “despite the pressures.”

“We have relations with all countries of the world according to our interests,” he said, including countries that are enemies and rivals of one another.
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Ted Belman. Contrary to what the media would have you believe, the people in attendance loved the speech. As Palin often says, she wasn’t interested in the media’s opinion of her, she was interested in the opinion of Iowans who will vote in the first Republican primary. In that she succeeded admirably.

By a Palin supporter

By now I’m sure most of you have read or heard of Byron York’s hit piece on Governor Palin’s speech in Des Moines this Saturday. (I won’t link to it because it’s gotten enough traffic as is.) I’ve learned one way you can tell if a journalist is being fair in an article is by whom they quote. Byron York quotes one Iowan by the name of Sam Clovis, who trashes Palin’s speech along with other nameless “activists”.

[York wasn’t alone in trashing her. A search of her name in the last 24 hours reveals a preponderance of articles which also trash her with words like, rambling, incoherent, stumbles, slips into self parody etc.]
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Al Monitor

In a normal democracy, it would be unthinkable for a political party with a projected vote count of some 9% to be left out of parliament. In Turkey, however, it is possible, because the country’s parliamentary electoral threshold, the world’s highest, stands at 10%. The latest debate sparked by the threshold involves the Kurdish-dominated People’s Democracy Party (HDP) and its chances of entering parliament in the June 7 general elections.

Turkey’s Kurdish parties have never managed to reach the 10% mark, but they won parliamentary representation at the polls in 2007 and 2011, when the parties won seats by fielding independents, a method that allowed them to get around the threshold requirement. In 2011, the Peace and Democracy Party, from which the HDP branched off, garnered only 6% of the vote but managed to get 36 candidates into parliament. In 2007, its predecessor, the Democratic Society Party, used the same method to clinch 20 seats, while receiving about 4% of the vote.
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The EU is ready to declare economic war on Israel

By Uri Savir, Al Monitor

Speaking on condition of anonymity, a senior source in the Brussels European Union foreign policy team has shared with Al-Monitor their thinking over resuming the peace process once the next Israeli government is established: “Watching the Israeli election campaign, we are dismayed by the fact that all the parties seem to ignore the central issue concerning Israel’s future — as we see it — namely, resolving the conflict with the Palestinians. Come May, Europe will not be able to ignore this anymore. We have on our hands a major strategic challenge in relation to the Arab and Muslim world. We are engaged in a fight against terror, both domestically and in the Middle East. And in this context, resolving the Palestinian predicament is of pivotal importance.”
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