The latest moves by Qatar against Hamas, Muslim Brotherhood are the product of a series of setbacks the emirate has suffered.

By Jonathan Spyer, JPOST

It is still not clear whether reports in Turkish newspaper Aydinlik concerning the expulsion by Qatar of Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal are accurate. Hamas officials have indignantly denied that their leader is shortly set to quit his Doha home.

But certainly, Mashaal’s expulsion would fit with the broader pattern of recent events.

Recent months have witnessed a number of acts by Qatar suggesting it is seeking to repair relations with its fellow Gulf monarchies, and with Egypt. Hamas, the enemy of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi and the Saudis, can have no part in this.

The expulsion of Mashaal, if it takes place, will be the latest concession by Doha to the wishes of Cairo and Riyadh.

Qatar’s latest moves are the fruit of partial defeat for Doha in its regional agenda; Saudi Arabia and Egypt are the winners. Lets take a look.
Read more…

Violence fuels debate among Muslims over interpreting faith

Saudi Arabia’s top body of Muslim clerics quickly condemned Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris but only days later young Saudi whipped for insulting Islam; contradiction points to difficulties of debate on how to reject radical Islamists.

Associated Press, YNET

After gunmen in Paris killed 12 people, Saudi Arabia’s top body of Muslim clerics quickly condemned the attack and said it could have no acceptable justification. It was a signal from some of the Islamic world’s strictest voices that cartoons lampooning the Prophet Muhammad in the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo were not a reason to kill the artists.

However, only days later, Saudi Arabia sent an opposing message: On Friday, a young Saudi was whipped 50 times in a public square in the city of Jiddah, the first of what will be 20 such weekly rounds of lashes. That, along with 10 years in prison, is his sentence from the kingdom’s religious-based courts for insulting Islam, based on posts on his blog criticizing prominent clerics close to the monarchy.

The contradiction points to the difficulties at a time of a growing debate within Islam about whether and how to reject a radical minority that some fear is dragging them into conflict and wrecking the faith.
Read more…

By Bret Stephens, WSJ  Updated Jan. 9, 2015 6:55 p.m. ET

It’s election season in Israel, and so far the most talked-about campaign ad features an Orthodox politician in an unorthodox role. In a YouTube video that quickly went viral, Naftali Bennett plays a fashionably bearded Tel Aviv hipster with a compulsion to say sorry—especially when he’s the one being wronged.

A waitress spills coffee on him: He begs her forgiveness. His car gets rear-ended: He steps out to tell the offending driver how sorry he is. He sits on a park bench and reads an editorial in a left-wing newspaper calling on Israel to apologize to Turkey for the 2010 flotilla incident, in which nine pro-Palestinian militants were killed aboard a ship after violently assaulting Israeli naval commandos. “They’re right!” he says of the editorial.
Read more…

I do not recall such international support when Israel has been the subject of mass murder by terrorists. I don’t recall any world leader visiting.

All Israel Ministers are calling for massive emigration of Jews from Europe and particularly France and are willing to provide generous assistance..

Netanyahu Calls on French Jews: Come Home to Israel

JPOST 

PM Benjamin Netanyahu was prepared to fly to Paris Sunday to participate in a rally for unity against Islamic extremism, his staff said Saturday night.

Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman and Economy Minister Naftali Bennett were also set to attend the march along with various other world leaders in the wake of the terror attack that claimed the lives of 17 victims in the French capital this week. Read more…

By Martin Sherman, JPOST

One out six people all over the world is a Muslim… trying to say anything in general about this huge community – 1.5 billion people – will be wrong… The vast majority of these populations are not involved with all what’s happening with violence and terror all over the world…. I don’t think there is anything essential that connects between this huge and historically important religion and all the terrorism that’s going on
– Sami Abu Shehadeh, secretary-general of Balad, Tel Aviv-Jaffa

With these words, Sami Abu Shehadeh, of the anti-Zionist Arab party Balad, commenced a debate with me on “The rise of anti-Muslim sentiment in the West,” which took place in the i24 News studios last month.

Clearly, the events in Paris on Wednesday, in which 12 people were brutally gunned down, gave the topic new and urgent relevance.

Islam is to terror as rainfall is to flooding

Of course, there is much truth in Abu Shehadeh claim that most Muslims are not actively involved in terrorism. While this claim is factually correct, substantively it is meaningless.

For anyone with an iota of intellectual integrity and reasonably informed of world affairs, the answer to whether Islam and violence and terrorism are causally connected should be unequivocally clear. To ask whether Islam is associated with terrorism is a little like asking if rainfall is associated with flooding. Of course it is – as can be irrefutably deduced from Abu Shehadeh’s attempt to exonerate it. Read more…

For those who read this earlier, I want you to know that I left off the second page of the English translation which has no2w been added.

By Ted Belman

A person I deal with in Paris and who follows events closely and runs a major blog outing the truth about Islam, phoned me twice today in a panic for fear of what is happening to Jews in France. I asked him to send me an email in French.

I will continue to get his impressions of what is going on there and will post them

What follows is Salomon Benzimra’s translation of his remarks and then the original French.:

I just listened to the French Jewish TV. “The criminal killed people immediately upon arrival at the store.”
Read more…

On Thursday, White House press secretary Josh Earnest announced that the Obama administration would prioritize fighting Islamophobia in the aftermath of the terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo in France. Never mind that most Westerners aren’t Islamophobic, but rather GettingShotInTheFaceForExpressingMyOpinion-Phobic.

By Ben Shapiro, BREITBART

The real problem, according to the Obama administration, is lack of leadership in defending Islam:

There are some individuals that are using a peaceful religion and grossly distorting it, and trying to use its tenets to inspire people around the globe to carry out acts of violence. And we have enjoyed significant success in enlisting leaders in the Muslim community, like I said, both in the United States and around the world to condemn that kind of messaging, to condemn those efforts to radicalize individuals, and to be clear about what the tenets of Islam actually are.  And we’re going to redouble those efforts in the days and weeks ahead.

Read more…

Terror Outrages Deepen Fear Among French Jews, ‘Fanatical Islamism Always Targets the Jewish Community,’ Says Jewish Leader

Responding to Paris Terror Outrages, US Jews Highlight Centrality of Anti-Semitism to Islamist Ideology

Double hostage siege in Paris ends with 3 male Al Qaeda terrorists dead and at least 15 hostages free; four were killed in the kosher grocery attack.

By Hana Levi Julian, JP

Hyper Kacher kosher supermarket in Paris.
Photo Credit: Screenshot

As many as 15 to 20 hostages taken captive at the Hyper Kacher kosher grocery by a member of a homegrown Al Qaeda terror cell were freed, just as the sun was setting Friday evening at the start of the holy Jewish Sabbath. Tragically, four were murdered at the start of the terror attack before police were able to rescue them.

Although the terrible saga has now ended, the Association of Paris Rabbis warned members of the Jewish community to remain home and stay off the streets this Shabbat (Sabbath) because the streets are not safe in this “city still on edge.” Shops in La Marais have been ordered shut for now.   Read more…

I received this email:

“This attack only underscores the need for France to immediately engage in negotiations with French Muslims that will result in the creation of two states for two peoples, living side by side in peace and security, with Paris as a shared capital…”

If France isn’t willing or builds housing in the part the Muslims want, we will have to start a BDS movement against them.

French losing control over their country
Op-ed: France is paying the price for failing to act against a large minority taking advantage of authorities’ helpless.
CONTINUE

THE DAILY BEAST

‘Killing went on and on and on’

By Terrance McCoy, WaPo

For months, fear of Boko Haram has gripped Nigeria’s northeast. The goals of the Islamic militant group, which captured international attention through a relentless campaign of brutality, have long been about killing. But last summer, something changed. Its aspirations became as much about territory as terrorism. It no longer wants to just cripple a government. It wants to become one.

In August, Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau announced the establishment of his “Islamic Caliphate,” quickly taking over every corner of Borno State in northeast Nigeria. But one town called Baga, populated by thousands of Nigerians along the western shores of Lake Chad, held out. Anchored by a multinational military base manned by troops from Niger to Chad, it was the last place in Borno under the national government’s control. Over the weekend, that changed.
Read more…

By Ambassador (ret.) Yoram Ettinger, “Second Thought: a US-Israel Initiative”
“Israel Hayom,” January 9, 2015,

Notwithstanding the conventional claim that Israel is increasingly isolated, the multinational accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers determined that 2014 was a record year of overseas investments in Israel’s high-tech industries: $15bn in acquisitions of 52 Israeli startups  (compared to $7.6bn in 2013), in addition to $9.8bn raised by 18 Israeli companies in overseas stock exchanges (compared to $1.2bn in 2013).  Once again, Israel’s impact on global medicine, health, agriculture, irrigation, energy alternatives, science, cyber, homeland security and defense, as well as Wall Street, supersedes the impact of Gaza Strip.

But, Israel is increasingly isolated…

Since 1948, a recycled assumption has maintained (e.g., the 1975 “Zionism is racism” UN resolution) that an anti-Israel global Tsunami is about to smother the Jewish State, triggering unprecedented isolation, the collapse of its international standing and the breakdown of its ties with the US, unless it committed itself – in the unpredictable, unstable, violent Middle East – to re-dividing Jerusalem, uprooting over 500,000 Jewish settlers, and retreating to a 9-15 mile sliver along the Mediterranean, which is dominated by the mountain ridges of Judea and Samaria.

Read more…

Op-ed: Journalists murdered in Paris were not victims of a battle over freedom of press; they were victims of a war between radical Islam’s world view and Western liberalism’s world view.

This is a clash of civilizations, not a gang’s intimidation campaign.
Read more…

Ted Belman. Ben Hecht covered the trial in which Kastner’s complicity in the murder of Hungarian Jewry was determined and wrote a famous book on the whole Kastner affair called PERFIDY. or you can read it online.

Francisco Gil-White posted the entire book called Perfidy.  Hecht, according to Wikipedia was a very prolific and prominent screenwriter in the first half of the 20th Century.

Just-released 1956 cabinet minutes on assassination of journalist and public figure who was accused of collaborating with the Nazis only deepen the mystery surrounding one of stormiest affairs in country’s history.

By Ofer Aderet, HAARETZ

Paragraph 380 of the minutes of the cabinet meeting of March 11, 1957 remain classified to this day. Its heading: “Assassination of Dr. I. Kastner,” could explain why. “Dr. Kastner’s assassins have been found and confessed,” Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion said at the start of the meeting. “The individual who did the shooting carried out the work of others. There is an organization that appointed him to shoot … he did not do it of his own accord.”

Portions of the 20 pages of minutes are being published here for the first time, after the head of the State Archive, Dr. Ya’akov Lozowick, acceded to Haaretz’s request to open them to the public, except for a few sentences that are still censored.
Read more…

By Dr Reuven Berko, ISRAEL HAYOM

The Palestinian Authority’s senior officials are banging at the doors of the international world and suing for recognition, despite the fact that the unilateral move against Israel violates the Oslo Accords. Now they seek to bring Israeli leaders and their voters to international trial as war criminals. With their intentional emphasis on the formation of a Palestinian state on 1967 borders, the Palestinians know that their call is a clear violation of U.N. Resolution 242, which details Israeli withdrawal from “territories” but not “the territories.” PA President Mahmoud Abbas and his people also refused Israel’s framework proposal, which called for recognizing Israel as the Jewish state and creating a demilitarized Palestinian state based on 1967 lines with adjustments to the borders.

The Palestinian rhetoric continues to escalate. While even former Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat was documented in interviews saying he recognizes Israel as the Jewish state, Abbas refuses to do so, saying he is responsible for a million Palestinians living in Israel and the “6 million” others that are supposed to reside in it as a part of the Palestinian “right of return.” Abbas also said in his most recent speech at the U.N. that he no longer is willing to take Israel’s security needs into account. If he gets the Palestinians statehood at the U.N., he will demand control of the border crossings and the weapons of the “resistance” will flow freely.
Read more…

By Dawn Perlmutter, FPM

On January 7, 2015 two masked gunmen carrying AK 47s entered the Paris office of French satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and opened fire killing ten staff and two police officers. It was reported that the gunmen were shouting “We have avenged the Prophet Muhammad” and “Allahu Akbar”.

The newspaper previously published cartoons satirizing Islam and the Prophet Muhammad and its offices were firebombed in November 2011 after it published a caricature of the Prophet Muhammad. The Paris attack occurred a few hours after the magazine tweeted a cartoon of Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. The massacre was a preplanned sophisticated military assault that involved an escape plan significantly distinguishing it from more typical suicide missions. The perpetrators spoke fluent French.
Read more…

By: Jewish Press News Briefs

“>

Offices of Charlie Hebdo
Photo Credit: Screenshot

Eleven people have been killed and 10 – 15 people wounded, 5 of whom seriously wounded (4 critically) in a terrorist attack in the offices of the Charlie Hebdo satire magazine on boulevard Richard-Lenoir in Paris (Paris XI).

Two policemen have been killed among the 11. Read more…

By Rob Gordon, National Post

The Fort Edward blockhouse in Windsor, Nova Scotia is one of the the oldest wooden fortifications still standing in North America. It played a major role in the Explusion of the Acadians in 1755, helped defend Nova Scotia in the War of 1812 and, in a truly odd twist of history, assisted in the creation of the State of Israel.

Fort Edward sits atop a wind-swept hill over looking the former mill town of Windsor. The town has bragging rights as the birthplace of ice hockey and hometown to some of the world’s largest pumpkins.

But there is another less known boast; in the summer of 1917, Windsor was home to some of Israel’s founding fathers and the place where the forerunner of the Israeli Defence Force was forged. Read more…