Thank you, Mr. President.

Distinguished delegates, I come here from Jerusalem to speak on behalf of my people, the people of Israel. I’ve come here to speak about the dangers we face and about the opportunities we see. I’ve come here to expose the brazen lies spoken from this very podium against my country and against the brave soldiers who defend it.

Ladies and Gentlemen, The people of Israel pray for peace.

But our hopes and the world’s hope for peace are in danger. Because everywhere we look, militant Islam is on the march.
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JPOST

UNITED NATIONS – Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has lost his legitimacy to speak on behalf of the Palestinian people, and his strident rhetoric at the United Nations is an effort to improve his domestic status, Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman said Monday.

Liberman, at a brief press conference in the halls of the UN an hour before Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was to address the General Assembly, characterized Abbas’s UN speech last week as a “message of hate and incitement.”

“It is clear that he has no intention to make peace with Israel,” Liberman said.

Questioning Abbas’ ability to speak on behalf of the Palestinians, Liberman said that not only does he have no control over the Gaza Strip, but that he has also postponed Palestinian parliamentary and presidential elections for more than four years.
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Defense minister says IDF killed 40 senior Hamas officials, responds to criticism of government’s decision-making during Protective Edge. Ya’alon: Gaza artillery inventory down to 20 percent

Yoav Zitun, YNET

Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon said on Monday that only 20 percent of Gaza’s artillery arsenal remained intact after Operation Protective Edge.

The defense minister recounted the military’s military achievements, saying the IDF killed “40 senior Hamas officials and 10 from Islamic Jihad. As of today, only 20 percent of the rocket and mortar inventory remains from before the operation, when there were some 10,000 rockets and mortars.”

At a Bar Ilan University conference, Ya’alon claimed that “Hamas felt it was prepared for a conflict before the operation, and when it was desperate it tried a kidnap and kill mission in the southern Strip; we tracked the preparations for this attack and we thwarted it using airstrikes, and that is how we entered the operation.”
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Bedouin leaders fire back at the minister who dared to challenge their right to marry several women.

By Shimon Cohen and Gil Ronen, INN

By Vic Rosenthal

All courses of action are risky, so prudence is not in avoiding danger (it’s impossible), but calculating risk and acting decisively. Make mistakes of ambition and not mistakes of sloth. Develop the strength to do bold things, not the strength to suffer. – Machiavelli

Recently, in response to my saying that the Palestinian Authority was more trouble than it is worth, a reader asked “what exactly is the alternative?”

To broaden his question a bit, we might ask “what is the alternative to what Israel is doing now,” which is essentially as little as possible — reacting to threats, but taking no initiatives.
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by Daniel Pipes,
Sep 28, 2014

The brief version:

Keep an eye on the ball: the Iranian nuclear build-up is 1,000 times a greater threat than ISIS.

Tehran should be left to deal with this problem, which threatens its allies in Damascus and Baghdad, and potentially even Iran itself.

Pipes’ iron rule of war: Never initiate fighting unless prepared to do what is needed to win. (I.e., don’t in advance rule out ground troops.)

The search for moderate opponents to the Assad regime is chimerical.

Destroying oil production facilities is almost always a mistake.

American efforts should be limited to (1) providing assistance to the Kurds and (2) humanitarian missions.

Analysis: Israelis and Palestinians are left with a battlefield between a government which will forever stick to status quo and a desperate PA which is fighting it, with world’s growing support. 

By Nachum Barnea, YNET

United Nations General Assembly hall is greenish – an unusual color in halls of this kind. It’s quite possible that it is green with shame. The amount of lies said in front of this wall by heads of state, each in their own language, is beyond chutzpa, is stranger than fiction.

The speakers have lied, and so have the members of the delegations in the hall, who welcomed every lie with a round of applause.

Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’ speech was no exception. Among other things, he accused Israel of waging a genocide war in Gaza. He knew it was a lie, and yet he said it, hoping that the lie would hold. Genocide is a term which must not be uttered recklessly. On the diplomatic and legal level, it’s similar to a declaration of war.
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By Ron Radosh, PJ MEDIA

Two new issues have emerged regarding the Obama administration’s policy towards ISIS, which was announced last week in President Obama’s speech to the nation. Both are connected to Iran: (a) the positions the administration will take regarding cooperation with it in fighting ISIS and (b) in negotiations regarding Iran’s nuclear centrifuges.

Should the United States accept Iran as a partner in its fight to “degrade and destroy” ISIS? Already, many self-proclaimed “realists” have argued for its necessity.

In today’s Washington Post, Fareed Zakaria states:

If President Obama truly wants to degrade and destroy the Islamic State, he must find a way to collaborate with Iran — the one great power in the Middle East with which the United States is still at odds. Engagement with Iran – while hard and complicated — would be a strategic game-changer, with benefits spreading from Iraq to Syria to Afghanistan.

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Abbas ratcheted up his rhetoric against Israel after Islamic State and other jihadists stole his thunder and took center stage.

By Chemi Shalev, HAARETZ

Taken at face value, Mahmoud Abbas’ speech before the United Nations General Assembly on Friday might legitimately be labelled “historic.” Abbas more or less buried the “peace process” that the United States has been leading for the past two decades and charted a brand new diplomatic course for the Palestinians, one of confrontation rather than conciliation, in international forums instead of U.S.-mediated bilateral negotiations. The Israeli government and its right wing adherents may be huffing and puffing in public over Abbas’ change of direction, but privately they are filled with joy: Abbas just gave them an invaluable political gift, just in time for the Jewish new year.

Contrary to the positive speech that he delivered earlier this week to American students at New York’s Cooper Union College, Abbas’ target audience now wasn’t in New York or Washington but in Gaza and Ramallah. Abbas was not appealing to supporters of the peace process in Western public opinion, as he has in the past, but to the Palestinians’ “base” of core supporters in the Arab, Muslim and Third worlds, as well as Europe. He tried to shed his popular image as a Obama and Kerry’s poodle and to recast himself as bulldog who can be just as fierce as Ismail Haniyeh or Khaled Mashaal. Read more…

Employing incendiary rhetoric, the PA president’s ‘genocide’ speech to the UN makes plain he’s done with negotiating via the Washington model

BY REBECCA SHIMONI STOIL, TOI September 27, 2014, 8:11 pm

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas delivers a speech at Cooper Union, Monday, Sept. 22, 2014, in New York. (photo credit: AP Photo/Jason DeCrow)Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas delivers a speech at Cooper Union, Monday, Sept. 22, 2014, in New York. (photo credit: AP Photo/Jason DeCrow)

Abbas, striding through the UN’s corridors Wednesday, reached the doors to the plenary together with his sizable security detail to attend the General Assembly’s opening speeches. The guards at the doors to the room told him that he could go in — but that those guys he came with needed to go around to the other door.

Abbas entered. Behind him, a brief scuffle broke out between his entourage and the UN guards. Safely inside the room, such minor unpleasantnesses literally behind him, Abbas was somehow above the fray, an elder statesman representing his people to a largely sympathetic audience.
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THE KEY POINT HERE IS THAT OBAMA, BY FIGHTING ISIS IS PROTECTING iRAN AND ITS PROXIES. I said the same thing but not as well in my recent article:

Obama started out trying to form a Sunni alliance to take down Shiite Assad and now the NYT suggests that he should form a Shiite alliance to take down Sunni ISIS.

And that is exactly what he is doing. Plus the international media is carrying water for him by focusing on the threat of ISIS and ignoring the threat of Iran. Netanyahu in his year end interview in JPOST, which should be read by all Bibi followers, stressed the greater danger. Ted Belman

By Clare Lopez. WASHINGTON TIMES– – Thursday, September 11, 2014

By Diana West, TOWNHALL

For logic-minded Americans still genuinely puzzled as to how it could be that our presidents and secretaries of state and generals and pundits keep hammering home the big lie that Islam has nothing to do with jihad, that the religion of conquest is a “religion of peace,” I have a special warning. Such widespread, politics- and mass-media-driven brainwashing is nothing new.

Just as today’s opinion-makers seek to divorce Islam from its impact — for example, brutal conquest, forced conversion, religiously sanctioned sex slavery, beheadings — past opinion-makers worked equally hard to divorce communism from its impact — for example, brutal conquest, forced collectivization, concentration camps (Gulags), mass murder.

It worked. Unlike Nazism, communism has never been judged guilty or even held responsible for the carnage and suffering it has caused. On the contrary, it remains a source of “liberal” statist ideas such as Obamacare. My book “American Betrayal” delves deeply into this dangerous double standard. In short, it not only enables collectivist policies to strangle our remnant republic, but also explains why American students can find a drink called Leninade, emblazoned with a hammer and sickle, for sale on a college campus. It is also why silkscreens of Warhol’s Chairman Mao, history’s top mass murderer, are sought-after items for the homes of the wealthy.
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Israel Tries to Convert Commercial Appeal into Diplomatic Capital

Rory Miller, FOREIGN AFFAIRS

[..]
A PIVOT TO ASIA

Thanks to Israel’s booming science and technology industries, it now enjoys thriving bilateral relations with China and India. Each country played only a small role in Israel’s economy as recently as two decades ago. But since then, the number of Israeli joint ventures with the countries’ high-tech industries — from industrial R&D and software development to telecommunications and nanotechnology — has skyrocketed. The Netanyahu government has made it a priority to further expand these ties, and its efforts have met with a welcoming response.

Take India. The country has increasingly come to rely on Israeli technology to spur economic development. Working closely with Israeli experts, several Indian regional governments have adopted Israeli innovations in drip irrigation that have significantly improved farmers’ lives. Standing beside Netanyahu during a 2012 visit to Jerusalem, India’s then Foreign Minister Shri S. M. Krishna praised Israel as a natural ally in “seizing the future,” adding: “We have learned so much from Israel, particularly in the field of agriculture and science and technology innovation.”
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Moderate direction coupled with tough talk on ‘Islamization’ helping French right-wing faction gain more support

BY CNAAN LIPHSHIZ, TOI

JTA — From the window of his Paris home, Michel Ciardi can see into the waiting room of a government welfare agency where a predominantly Arab and African crowd awaits government checks.

A former communist, Ciardi once believed the scene at the agency was a necessary element of French efforts to help integrate new immigrants. But that changed in 2000 after the second Palestinian intifada triggered a massive increase in anti-Semitic violence, much of it committed by Arab and African immigrants.

The violence was enough to shift his political allegiance to the National Front, a far-right party long demonized by French Jews as anti-Semitic and a threat to republican values.
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Understanding the Shariah Threat Doctrine

By Kyle Shideler, CSP

Following on the heels of targeted airstrikes against the Islamic State, the Obama Administration has continued to show a dramatic lack of strategic comprehension by publicly praising an Islamic cleric linked to previous calls to kill U.S. troops in Iraq. The Islamic cleric, Abdullah Bin Bayyah, was the vice president of the International Union of Muslim Scholars, led by Muslim Brotherhood chief jurist Yusuf Al Qaradawi in 2004, when IUMS called for the killing of Americans in Iraq. This is not the first time Bin Bayyah has been close to the White House, having attended a meeting with White House advisors in 2013.

At the same time President Obama was praising Bin Bayyah, the Secretary of the Department for Homeland Security Jeh Johnson was in central Ohio, meeting with representatives of the Al Noor Cultural Islamic Center. This Islamic center has a long history of ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, and extremist activity, as ably chronicled by veteran investigative reporter Patrick Poole. It was made somewhat infamous as being the mosque at the center of the Rifqa Bary case, when a young Muslim teenager converted to Christianity, and fled Ohio, fearing that she would become the victim of an honor killing.
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Senators urge the Obama administration to act to take Gaza away from Hamas and hand it over to the PA.
By Ben Ariel, Canada, INN

88 senators are urging the Obama administration to act to take Gaza away from its Hamas terrorist rulers and hand it over to the Palestinian Authority (PA), The Daily Beast reports.

In a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry obtained by the website, the 88 senators write, “We must support efforts to enable the Palestinian Authority to exercise real power in Gaza. Hamas has demonstrated conclusively both that it has no interest in peace with Israel and that it has no concern for the well-being of Gaza residents.”

The letter to Kerry was circulated in the senate by Sen. Kelly Ayotte, aRepublican and Sen. Bob Casey, a Democrat, according to The Daily Beast.
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By Raymond Ibriham, HUMAN EVENTS

A recent Gulf News report sheds some light on how and why the United States helped bring the Muslim Brotherhood and its Islamist allies to power, followed by all the subsequent chaos and atrocities in the Mideast region.

Large portions of the report follow with my commentary interspersed for added context:
Dubai: For the past decade, two successive US administrations have maintained close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Tunisia, Syria and Libya, to name just the most prominent cases.
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By Ted Belman (written Sept 20/14)

When Obama took office he set about undermining Gaddafi, Mubarak and Assad. He worked in concert with Qatar, Turkey and the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Libyan tribe that revolted against Gaddafi, probably instigated by the CIA, could easily have been crushed by Gaddafi had the matter been treated as an internal matter. But this coalition began a propaganda assault on Gaddafi claiming that there was an impending massacre.  This justified Qatar in starting a movement in the UN to impose a no-fly zone over Libya.  Pres Obama immediately imposed it and more while leading from behind. The end result is that Gaddafi is dead and chaos reigns.

In Egypt, Obama rehabilitated the Muslim Brotherhood by insisting that Mubarak allow them to attend his Cairo speech. Mubarak chose not to attend.  From that moment on the handwriting was on the wall.

The NYT reported in 2011 that U.S. Groups Helped Nurture Arab Uprisings :
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JPOST

Surprisingly buoyant, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu sits down with ?the Post? and extols policy-making based on looking at the region as it truly is, without wishful thinking.