It’s difficult to overstate the potential importance of the Egyptian president’s New Year speech on Islam – and equally important to avoid overly optimistic expectations as to its practical impact.

It is possible that $1.6 Billion people [Muslims] should want to kill the rest of the world’s inhabitants – that is 7 billion – so that they themselves may live? Impossible!” – Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, Al-Azhar, January 1

“O ye who believe! Fight those of the disbelievers who are near to you, and let them find harshness in you, and know that Allah is with those who keep their duty.” – Koran, Sura 9:123

“Violence… occurs between Muslims, on the one hand, and Orthodox Serbs in the Balkans, Jews in Israel, Hindus in India, Buddhists in Burma and Catholics in the Philippines. Islam has bloody borders.” – Samuel Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?” Foreign Affairs, 1993
Read more…

ICC prosecutor opens a preliminary probe into possible war crimes committed by Israel. Netanyahu: This decision is scandalous.

By Elad Benari, INN

AFP reports.

The prosecutor, Fatou Bensouda, said her office would conduct its “analysis in full independence and impartiality”.

Her decision comes after the Palestinian Authority (PA) formally joined the ICC earlier this month allowing it to lodge war crimes and crimes against humanity complaints against Israel as of April.

At the same time, the PA also recognized the ICC’s jurisdiction retroactively, to cover the period during last summer’s war in Gaza.

“A preliminary examination is not an investigation but a process of examining theinformation available in order to reach a fully informed determination on whether there is a reasonable basis to proceed with a (full) investigation,” Bensouda was quoted as having said.

Depending on her findings, Bensouda will decide at a later stage whether to launch or quash the investigation, based on the initial probe, the report added.
Read more…

Ted Belman: Victor Sharp wrote to me,

This article was written last Summer after my visit to Israel and my tour of Area C with Women in Green. I thought you might like to read it in case you did not see it the first time it was published in Arutz Sheva.

I have updated it and it needs to see the light of day again, especially in view of the potential of French and European Aliyah and the deplorable statement by Livni, Herzog and the Left that they will petition against French Aliyah living in Yehuda and Shomron.

By VICTOR SHARPE

“Then said Satan: This besieged one, how shall I overcome him?
He has courage and ability, he has weapons and imagination.

“So he said: I shall not take his strength, nor muzzle nor bridle him.
Nor soften nor weaken his hands, only one thing I shall do;

“I shall dull his brain and he will forget that he is in the right.”

So wrote the Israeli poet, Natan Alterman, in his poem,Gone like a Dream. He was expressing his deep anxiety over the weakening resolve of Jews in Israel and in the Diaspora to support the reconstituted Jewish state.
Read more…

Yoram EttingerJanuary 16, 2015

In 539 BCE, Babylonian King Belshazzar ignored the writing on the wall – as interpreted by the Prophet Daniel – and was, therefore, annihilated by the Persians (Book of Daniel, Chapter 5).

In 2015, Western civilizations must read the writing on the wall, desist from ambiguity, denial and political correctness and embrace clarity, realism and political incorrectness, in order to survive and overcome the clear and present lethal threat of Islamic takeover, which gathers momentum via demographic, political and terroristic means.

While medical ambiguity, and the failure to diagnose lethal disease, cause personal misfortune, policy-making ambiguity and denial could trigger national and international calamities.

History proves that Western ambiguity and the refusal to identify enemies – due to ignorance, gullibility, oversimplification, appeasement, delusion and wishful thinking – have taken root, yielding major strategic setbacks and painful economic and human loss.  When it comes to reading the writing on the wall, Western eyesight has been far from 20:20, dominated by modern day Belshazzars, ignoring modern day Prophet Daniels.
Read more…

Ted Belman. I received a Press Release informing me of this visit and inviting me to the offices of the Voice of Israel where these young kids from both South Africa and Israel were being interviewed and hosted for lunch. I decided to go and brought along with me Jan Sokolovsky who was also a tennis fan and who had a close connection to South African tennis because her late husband was involved with it before he made aliya.

What a happening place it was. Ruthie Blum was also visiting. I hooked up with some of the stars of VOI like, Dan Diker, Yishai Fleisher, John Hastings and Jeremy Gimpel. I highly recommend that you visit VOI and tune into their broadcasts live or through podcasts.

ISRAEL TENNIS CENTER

For the ITC, the New Year began with a historic moment as a team of children and their coach from Soweto, South Africa traveled to Israel for 10 days of training with ITC junior players at our ITC centers throughout Israel. It is part of a unique Children to Children Tennis Diplomacy Exchange Program just launched by the ITC that will create lasting friendships and ambassadors for Israel around the world.
Read more…

Valls words were uplifting; But it is hard to see how they change the basic reality that the Jews of France face.

By Caroline Glick, JPOST

Protesters gather at Place de la Republique

January 16 is the nine-year anniversary of the beginning of the Ilan Halimi disaster.

On January 16, 2006, Sorour Arbabzadeh, the seductress from the Muslim anti-Jewish kidnapping gang led by Youssouf Fofana, entered the cellphone store where Halimi worked and set the honey trap.

Four days later, Halimi met Arbabzadeh for a drink at a working class bar and agreed to walk her home. She walked him straight into an ambush. Her comrades beat him, bound him and threw him into the trunk of their car.
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
Read more…

Yisrael Beytenu boss, fighting for his political life, accuses would-be annexationist Naftali Bennett of risking an apartheid state

BY RAPHAEL AHREN, TOI

Avigdor Liberman dropped the A-bomb on Thursday. Israel’s hard-line, unabashedly nationalistic, settlement-residing foreign minister joined the camp of those warning that an Israeli annexation of the West Bank would lead to an apartheid state.

Avigdor Liberman, left, and John Kerry meeting in Washington on Wednesday, September 18, 2014. photo credit: Jordan Silverman/Foreign Ministry)

“What [Naftali] Bennett and his Jewish Home party are proposing is a classical bi-national state,” Liberman declared of his Orthodox-nationalist rivals during a press conference in Tel Aviv, and he didn’t mean it as a compliment. “They need to decide if they’re talking about a bi-national state between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean such as the president [Reuven Rivlin] speaks about, or whether they’re talking about an apartheid state.”

Applying sovereignty over the West Bank without granting the right to vote to everyone living there, Liberman warned Thursday, would immediately provide fodder to Israel’s critics across the globe. (In Rivlin’s conception, all residents of an expanded Israel would be given equal citizenship, drastically reducing its Jewish majority. Many in Bennett’s far-right party advocate annexing the entire West Bank, home to some 2.75 million Palestinians according to the IDF, though party chairman Bennett himself currently calls only for the annexation of Area C, covering some 60% of the West Bank where about 350,000 Jews and 80,000 Palestinians reside.) Read more…

Kill the terrorists before they reach the West

By Matthew Continetti, FREE BEACON

Argue about the limits of free speech, the definition of “true” Islam, whether terrorists are lunatics or rational, or the social and political repercussions of terrorism as much as you’d like. The truth is that such debates are irrelevant to the core security problem: There is a growing and energetic movement of radical Muslims dedicated to killing as many people they can and imposing their will on the rest.

And there is really only one way America can respond to this challenge. We need to kill them first. We need to kill them on a field of battle whose contours are determined not by the terrorists but by us. We need to kill them over there—in the Middle East—before they reach the West.

I realize that for at least the next two years what I propose is wishful thinking. American policy has reverted to a defensive condition in which Islamic terrorists set the terms of conflict. We have been here before. Until 2001, the United States treated Islamic terrorism as a matter of law enforcement. When our embassies were raided or bombed, when our barracks were destroyed, when our soldiers and sailors were murdered, when our World Trade Center was attacked, when our destroyer was damaged, we treated the assailants as members of an Arabic-speaking mafia, as criminals to be apprehended, tried, and punished.
Read more…

Change the rules in Europe and change them now.

By Mordechai Kedar, INN

The situation in Europe is intolerable. At any given moment one of the thousands of Jihadists living in Europe can be annoyed by a movie, article or caricature published in a newspaper, grab the closest Kalashnikov and spread death and destruction in editorial offices, shops, museums, schools and on the streets.

He can hurl bombs – homemade or imported – into restaurants, movie houses, theaters, railroad stations, pour oil on highways and perpetrate other terrorist acts which will not be enumerated here so as not to give him any ideas.

There are various factors that indicate the potential for a major explosion:

1. The enormous number – tens of millions – of Muslims in Europe, a large number to take into account even if only a small fraction of them turn radical. Look at it this way: if, of the fifty million Muslims in Europe, only one in a thousand becomes a Jihadist, that means there are still fifty thousand Jihadists like the ones who turned Paris into an urban battleground last week.
Read more…

“The Palestinians have discovered that the UN is the gift that keeps on giving,”

By Elad Benari, INN

Israel’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Ron Prosor, warned the world body on Thursday that it was encouraging the Palestinian Authority (PA) to run away from peace negotiations.

Speaking to the UN Security Council, Ambassador Prosor said the PA sees the UN as its “personal vending machine” and stressed that it is the PA which continuously refuses to engage in peace talks with Israel.

“In 1967, eight Arab heads of state attended a summit in Khartoum to formulate the policies of the Arab states in conflict with Israel. They emerged with their famous three ‘no’s’ – no negotiations, no recognition of Israel, and no peace. Even when it seemed impossible, Israel continued to strive for peace,” said Prosor.
Read more…

NO WEAPON FORMED AGAINST YOU, ISRAEL, SHALL PROSPER’

By Stan Goodenough, International Christian Zionist Center

For 25 years now, I have watched a weapon being developed whose purpose is to destroy the Jewish state. This weapon has been shaped and maneuvered and pushed ahead with until today it stands on the brink of production.

Virtually the whole world supports – and many nations have lent a willing hand to assist in – the manufacture of this weapon, even though its raison d’être to ensure Israel’s eradication has been openly and clearly declared. More than this, we can all testify to the fact that Israel’s very acquiescence under unrelenting international pressure along the stages of production of this weapon has increased the threat to Jewish life and in fact led to a terrifying number of deaths of Jews (and Arabs too).

The weapon is the State of Palestine – one of the components the world is determined will comprise the Two State Solution.

I feel to write a brief but direct letter in the face of resistance that will almost certainly come from some quarters to the ‘Australia Initiative’ that has now gone out to raise up Christians – beginning in Australia and going around the world, to stand strongly and unequivocally with Israel’s right to her land.
Read more…

by Jonathan Spyer, PJ Media, January 12, 2015

IRAN CAN BUILD NUCLEAR PLANTS BUT ISRAEL CAN’T BUILD SETTLEMENTS

OMRI CEREN, TIP:On Tuesday Rouhani announced that Iran is building two new reactors. Yesterday the announcement hit the news cycle here in town. This morning the WFB published the State Dept’s response. The full article is pasted below. Key line:

“We are aware of the announcement and are reviewing the details,” said the official, who was not authorized to speak on record. However, “in general, the construction of light water nuclear reactors is not prohibited by U.N. Security Council resolutions, nor does it violate the JPOA,” the official said.

Remember that the Iranians accomplish a number of things when they bolster their nuclear infrastructure. Substantively, they inch closer to a bomb (or in the case of new reactors, they give themselves excuses to inch toward a bomb: they’re already saying they need more enrichment capacity for their reactors).

Diplomatically, new infrastructure gives the Iranians more leverage in negotiations. The more they have, the more they have to bargain with. The JPOA was supposed to freeze the Iranian program to prevent them from improving their position as talks proceeded. It failed. Instead the Iranians spent the last year building up their nuclear program – and their leverage – across all areas:
Read more…

WEEKLY QUOTES from ISRANET Daily Briefing

By Arlene Kushner

Read more…

Kulanu leader has recently portrayed himself as the real, moderate Likud, but in an interview with Haaretz he outlines a hawkish agenda.

By Ilan LIor, HAARETZ

Moshe Kahlon, who set up the Kulanu party for the upcoming elections, said on Wednesday that he sees no possibility of reaching a peace agreement with the Palestinians in the foreseeable future. The former Likud communications minister also said he is in favor of continued construction in the settlements.

In recent campaign speeches, however, Kahlon said he represents the real, moderate Likud.

“At the moment we have no partner and there’s nobody to talk to on the other side,” Kahlon said in an interview to Haaretz Wednesday.

“A courageous leader must stand up and recognize Israel as a Jewish state and agree to a united Jerusalem and large settlement blocs (in the West Bank),” he said. “They must renounce the refugees’ issue and understand that there’s no return to the 1967 borders. The Kulanu party will support any arrangement that strengthens Israel’s security.”
Read more…

Belman to Gordon: I am glad you wrote this article and was more than happy to post it.

Nevertheless I don’t agree with everything in it.

I take the position that there is no conflict between the two in most instances, but if I had to choose which was more important I would choose the Jewish character.

I can think of instances where there is a conflict such as JNF land that was purchased with Jewish money for Jews. Because these lands are administered by the Israel Land Authority the courts say that the lands must be made available to both. I say, nothing doing.

Furthermore, when the High Court considers legislation using the measuring stick of “dignity” as the only criteria, it often rules against particularistic legislation. It is important that another value be considered and that is the desire to preserve the Jewish nature of the state. Some argue, like Joel Golovensky that these values should be given equal weight. I disagree, so does Caroline Glick. The courts are predisposed to giving more weight to the value of “dignity”. I on the other hand want being a Jewish state to be the supreme value.

The proportion of Jews who value both equally has plunged, due to years of being told it’s either-or

By Evelyn Gordon

The 2014 edition of the Israeli Democracy Index, released last week, offers both encouraging and disturbing findings. The latter include a dramatic drop over the last five years, from 48.1% to 24.5%, in the proportion of Jews who accord equal weight to Israel’s Jewish and democratic characters. Though the figure has declined steadily since 2010, last year was the first time “both equally” failed to win a plurality. In fact, it dropped to last place, behind both those who prioritize Israel’s Jewish character (38.9%) and those who prioritize its democratic character (33.5%).

In part, this is because the Israel Democracy Institute’s researchers deliberately worded the question to minimize the number of people choosing “both equally.” The question asked was, “Israel is defined as both a Jewish and a democratic state. Which part of this definition is more important to you personally?” Thus respondents weren’t given the option of “both equally”; they were instructed to choose either Jewish or democratic, and were recorded as valuing both traits equally only if they volunteered that view despite it not being listed. Had “both equally” been offered as an option, more people would certainly have chosen it.
Read more…

By Yaacov Lappin, JPOST

The IDF must be preparer for three principal security scenarios in the near future, former national security adviser Maj.- Gen. (res.) Yaakov Amidror has said, naming them as a large-scale ground war against Hezbollah in Lebanon, attrition against Hamas in Gaza, and the possibility of a military operation in Iran.

The military must prepare for these challenges while providing ongoing security, Amidror, a senior researcher at the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, said in a report published on the center’s website.

The feat “will be neither easy nor cheap,” he added.
Read more…

JANET LEVY: James Corbett is a 9/11 Truther who is featured regularly on the KGB-controlled RT and Global Research. He has a marked anti-Western, anti-Semitic bias and appeared recently with Sibel Edmunds and Lew Rockwell (who works for Ron Paul and consorted with David Duke until he was publicly outed).

A Canadian security analyst wrote: “I suggest that you look at Mr Corbett’s bio, at http://www.corbettreport.com/about/.

by James Corbett
corbettreport.com
November 19, 2014

CENTRAL ASIA AND THE CAUCASUS

Central Asia is a vast expanse of the map whose defining characteristic is its ability to defy characterization. Stretching from the shores of the Caspian Sea in the west to the border of China in the east, and from Iran and Pakistan’s doorstep in the south to Russia’s in the north, it encompasses everything from the snow-capped slopes of Victory Peak in Kyrgyzstan to the remarkable “door to hell” in Turkmenistan’s Karakum Desert to the sprawling grasslands of the Kazakh Steppe. Settled by migrants from the Persian, Turkic, Chinese and Slavic civilizations, its inhabitants speak Kyrgyz, Kazakh, Russian, Tajik, Uzbek and Turkmen and include Muslims, Christians, Jews, Hindus and Buddhists.

The much smaller Caucasus region, a narrow land bridge sandwiched between the Black and Caspian seas, is equally diverse. The region contains over 50 ethnic groups and is home to three local language families and several dozen languages, from the obscure Bohtan Neo-Aramaictongue with less than 500 native speakers to the more widely spoken Azerbaijani and Armenian languages.
Read more…