By Gene Schwimmer, AMERICAN THINKER

Rarely is a speech widely praised before it is even delivered.  But such was the case for the speech Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal delivered to the Henry Jackson Society, a London-based think-tank, on January 18.  In that speech, Jindal spoke forthrightly about the rising menace of “Islamic extremism.”

And the critics, as the saying goes, went wild.  Larry Kudlow’s article, “Jindal’s Brilliant Take on Radical Islam,” exemplifies the reaction of conservative pundits to Jindal’s speech.  In his article, Kudlow specifically praises this quote (emphasis mine):

Muslim leaders must make clear that anyone who commits acts of terror in the name of Islam is in fact not practicing Islam at all.  If they refuse to say this, then they are condoning these acts of barbarism.  There is no middle ground.

Read more…

By Cliff Kincaid, NEWS WITH VIEWS
January 22, 2015

The disease known as political correctness has infected Fox News. First, anchor Bret Baier withdrew from a Catholic conference under pressure from his management and the homosexual lobby. Now, Fox News has bowed to pressure from the Muslim Brotherhood lobby, issuing an embarrassing “correction” that was not warranted for having reported factually on the existence of Muslim-dominated “no-go zones” in Europe.

These zones, which are better understood as Muslim-dominated enclaves or ghettos, were the scene of much-publicized violent riots in France in 2005.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) decided to target Fox News after several programs featured commentators who noted the existence of no-go Muslim-dominated areas where Islamic terror cells take root and find recruits.

Read more…

Amid Threats, Jewish Blogger Returns To Brandeis.  Did Daniel Mael’s right-wing, pro-Israel politics play a role in backlash against him?

‘We have a fundamental difference with the Palestinians about their path to statehood, a thoroughly unapologetic John Baird tells The Times of Israel

BY RAPHAEL AHREN, TOI,  January 21, 2015,

Canada’s Foreign Minister John Baird meets with Israeli Minister of Defense Moshe Ya’alon at the Ministry of Defense in Tel Aviv on January 19, 2015.

John Baird has no intention of apologizing. The Palestinians would like the Canadian foreign minister to say he’s sorry for his government’s unabashedly pro-Israel stance. They shouldn’t hold their breath.

In fact, Baird is waiting for an apology from Ramallah — not for having his car pelted with eggs and shoes Sunday during his visit there, but for a top Palestinian official’s comparison between Israel and terrorists of the Islamic State.

“People may disagree with our position with respect to Israel, but so be it,” Baird said Tuesday in Tel Aviv, as he wrapped up a three-day visit to the region. “It’s always wise to speak with moral clarity,” he submitted, adding that despite Ottawa’s unflinching friendship with the Jewish state, “we have a pretty good relationship with most of the Arab countries in the region.”
Read more…

By DEB RIECHMANN

WASHINGTON (AP) — Senators in both parties squared off with the Obama administration Wednesday about whether the threat of new sanctions would scuttle nuclear talks with Iran as House Speaker John Boehner, without consulting the White House, invited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address Congress.

Running together, Netanyahu’s and Bennett’s parties would be the largest Knesset faction by far

By Stuart Winer, TOI

A joint campaign list of the ruling Likud party and Jewish Home would win 40 seats in the coming elections, far ahead of the rival Labor-Hatnua joint Zionist Camp list, a Knesset Channel published Tuesday found.

Running independently, Likud, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, polled at 23 seats while the national-religious Jewish Home party, led by Economy Minister Naftali Bennett, came in with 16 slots in the survey. The poll found that the two would gain an extra seat by uniting to pull further ahead of the Zionist Camp, which polled at 24 seats.
Read more…

By Susan Warner, Olive Tree Ministries, FPM

It is not a secret that Jesus was Jewish.  Reliable scholarly sources validate this incontestable fact.

His genealogies are posted in the books of Matthew and Luke. These alone are sufficient to corroborate the authenticity of Jesus’s Jewish lineage.

Archeology and historical geography confirm that the regions of Judea and Samaria are the ancient stomping grounds of Jewish heroes. The Romans plowed under the city of Jerusalem, which Hadrian renamedAelia Capitolina in 135 CE. He subsequently renamed the entire region Syria Palestina. For the following 1,800 years until the end of the Turkish Ottoman Empire in 1918, the land was overrun by marauding armies, Islamic hoards or Christian crusaders of various flavors. There is nothing new here.
Read more…

By Eugene Kontorovich, WaPo 

The ICC’s Prosecutor announced today the opening of a “preliminary examination” into “the Situation in Palestine.” This means she will consider, on jurisdictional, evidentiary and policy grounds whether to open an investigation into crimes that may have been committed during this summer’s Gaza conflict. Opening such an investigation is a fairly standard step after receiving a declaration of acceptance of jurisdiction under Article 12(3) of the Rome Statute, and would not normally warrant much notice (other preliminary investigations also involve alleged crimes by the U.S. in Afghanistan and the U.K. in Iraq, though precious few Americans or British are aware of this).

But this decision of the prosecutor is quite different, and extremely significant. The decision to open the inquiry involved the prosecutor determining that the Palestinian Authority is in fact a “state,” a necessary precondition to jurisdiction under the Rome Statute, the Court’s constitutive treaty. Read more…

DEBKAfile Special Report
January 20, 2015, 6:55 PM (IDT)

Israel Tuesday, Jan. 20, used Western and Arab media outlets for “clarification” to Tehran of the purpose of its air strike over the Golan Sunday, asserting that Revolutionary Guards Gen. Mohammad “Ali Allah Dadi and his staff of five were not known to be traveling in the Hizballah convoy and were not the target.

“We thought we were hitting an enemy field unit that was on its way to carry out an attack on us at the frontier fence,’ a senior security official in Tel Aviv informed the media. “We went on the alert, we spotted the vehicle, identified it as an enemy vehicle and took the shot,” he said, adding: “We saw this as a limited tactical operation.”

This semi-apology, say DEBKAfile’s military and intelligence sources, was intended to tell Tehran that had Israeli intelligence identified the group of high-ranking Iranian officers in the Golan convoy, the air strike would have been called off. There was no reason why an intelligence mistake should cause a broad or even a limited military showdown between Iran and Israel, was the implied message.
Read more…

Terrorist, 22, stabbed passengers on #40 bus on Begin Road. At least four are seriously wounded. Suspect shot in leg, caught.

By Gil Ronen, Ari Yashar

A terrorist stabbing attack took place Wednesday morning on a bus in centralTel Aviv, on Begin Road, near Beit Maariv. The terrorist in an Arab man, reportedly from Judea and Samaria.

A video uploaded to Facebook by Jerusalem Councillor Arieh King shows the terrorist after his arrest.

Ten to 15 people were reported wounded in the stabbing. Four, perhaps six of them, are suffering from serious wounds. The wounded were taken to Ichilov and Tel Hashomer hospitals. The number of the wounded being reported has been changing since the attack took place, apparently due to initial confusion.
Read more…

Israeli military confirms reports of Gazan terror group rebuilding tunnel infrastructure, approves expansion of specialized subterranean engineering unit.

By Yoav Zitun, YNET

its underground activities beneath Gaza, more than a month afterPalestinian sources told Ynet that the terror group was rehabilitating its tunnel infrastructure.

“The other side has not neglected this capability,” warned a senior engineering officer on earlier in the day. On Monday, Israeli intelligence officials confirmed the developments to the British newspaper The Times.

Al-Qassem Brigades showing off new tunnels (Photo: Reuters)

Meanwhile, the IDF decided to expand its special engineering unit (Yahlom) by hundreds of combat and support troops. The senior officer said the threat posed by the tunnels was ongoing. “I believe that Hamas learned from the (past) campaign and it will only improve this capability ahead of the next round.”  Read more…

By James Corsi, WND

“The shocking part, maybe even a violation of international law that the Obama administration has been terrified to have fully revealed, is that Stevens as part of his duties as a State Department employee was assisting in the shipment of arms first into Libya for the al-Qaida-affiliated militia, with the weapons shipped subsequently out of Libya into Syria for use by the al-Qaida-affiliated rebels fighting Assad,”

NEW YORK – The Obama White House and the State Department under the management of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton “changed sides in the war on terror” in 2011 by implementing a policy of facilitating the delivery of weapons to the al-Qaida-dominated rebel militias in Libya attempting to oust Moammar Gadhafi from power, the Citizens Commission on Benghazi concluded in its interim report.

In WND interviews, several members of the commission have disclosed their finding that the mission of Christopher Stevens, prior to the fall of Gadhafi and during Stevens’ time as U.S. ambassador, was the management of a secret gun-running program operated out of the Benghazi compound.
Read more…

The problem and solution reside with the people of the Islamic religion themselves.

By Larry Kudlow, NRO

‘Let’s be honest here. Islam has a problem.”

Those are key sentences in an incredibly hard-hitting speech that Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal will give in London on Monday. It is the toughest speech I have read on the whole issue of Islamic radicalism and its destructive, murdering, barbarous ways which are upsetting the entire world.

Early in the speech Jindal says he’s not going to be politically correct. And he uses the term “radical Islamists” without hesitation, placing much of the blame for the Paris murders and all radical Islamist terrorism on a refusal of Muslim leaders to denounce these acts.

Jindal says, “Muslim leaders must make clear that anyone who commits acts of terror in the name of Islam is in fact not practicing Islam at all. If they refuse to say this, then they are condoning these acts of barbarism. There is no middle ground.”
Read more…

Ted Belman. This is a very important article.

By SERAP MERVE DOGAN, MAXIME GAUIN, JPOST

As everybody knows, the once-flourishing Turkish-Israeli alliance has encountered serious problems during the past few years. To attempt to solve the issue, misunderstandings on both sides should be avoided. Turkey – which saved tens of thousands Jews during the Second World War – was never at war with Israel, unlike the Arab world. Ankara recognized Israel as early as 1949 and signed its first bilateral agreement with the Jewish state in 1958. In spite of all the Arab pressures, the diplomatic relations were never severed, either after the Six Day War or after the Yom Kippur war.

Zionism has historically attracted quite diverse supporters in Turkey, such as the ideologue of Kemalism, Tekin Alp (who was Jewish), president Celâl Bayar (1950-1960) and Turgut Özal, prime minister (1983-1989), president of Turkey (1989-1993) and even today, a reference for the AKP – the nationalist politician Alparslan Türke? (admirer of the IDF and of Israeli hi-tech), or even the ideologue of the secular far Right, Nihal Ats?z, who moved after 1945 to a staunch admiration for Jews and Israel. On the other side, David Ben-Gurion had the best of relations with the Ottoman authorities until 1914 and saw Atatürk as an example.
Read more…

PJ MEDIA

With all due respect to Lone Survivor and Zero Dark Thirty (and I have paid mad respect to both), Clint Eastwood’s amazing American Sniper is the film for the war on terror.

But it’s more than that. It is a timeless American war movie that explores the necessity of having men who are–and bear the burden of being–really really good at killing bad guys.

In fact, this is easily one of the ten best American war movies of all time. (I won’t place it any higher than that until I’ve had the chance to see it again and let the initial emotional impact wear off; but right now, I can’t think of three I would rate above it.) Read more…

By Thomas Sowell, Townhall

By Ariel Schmidberg, ISRAEL HAYOM

A few days after the murderous bombing at the Jewish community center in Buenos Aires in 1994, a terrorist attack that killed 85 innocent people in the blink of an eye, hundreds of thousands of people gathered in the main squares across Argentina to protest and demand justice. This was the first step in a long, painful and frustrating and journey that ended this week, after more than 20 years, on a shameful note.

At the start, moments of silence were observed in honor of the victims. With time, the commemoration changed: In some of the ceremonies, the moment of silence was replaced with a moment of a deafening crying out meant to “wake up” the government. But to no avail. On the cold and gray morning of July 18, 1994, the face of an already scarred Argentina changed forever, after many long years of cruel dictatorship that made sure to “eliminate” anyone suspected of subversion.
Read more…

Israel’s Good News Newsletter to 18th Jan 2015

In the 18th Jan 2015 edition of Israel’s good news, the highlights include:

• Two Israeli biotechs are at the forefront of a new method for destroying cancer cells.
• A 16-year-old Israeli girl has just started medical School.
• 65% of Israel’s Arabs say they are proud to be Israeli.
• An Israeli T-shirt monitors your heart.
• Drivers can see five times further with an Israeli night vision system.
• Israel has discovered another massive natural gas field.
• Two Israelis, who escaped Nazi Germany, celebrate the birth of their 100th great-grandchild.

• Last week’s JPost Israel Good News descriptive summary.Click here for “How lucky is Israel?” (fast-loading version, no adverts).  Also on Jerusalem Post, IsraPundit and San Diego Jewish World.
• Click here to see the newsletter on Jewish Business News, IsraelSeen, Ruthfully Yoursand United With Israel.

Page Down for more details on these and other good news stories from Israel.
Read more…

Last night I gave my talk to a large knowledgeable audience. Judging by the rapt attention and feedback, I was a great success.

One attendee who is a member pf Professors for a Strong Israel (PSI) sent me this email;

Thank you for last night.
It was a real tour de-force—you were great.
I learned a few new things…though not necessarily pleasant.
My guest was very glad I had invited him.
Keep up the good work.
Chodesh Tov,

Part 1
[jwplayer mediaid=”63604016″]
Part 2
[jwplayer mediaid=”63604033″]
The sound quality sucks because there was a breakdown in the intended recording device and one person in the audience happened to record it on a small device. Thank g-d for that.