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.

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK, NYT

BAGHDAD — The United States has conducted an escalating campaign of deadly airstrikes against the extremists of the Islamic State for more than a month. But that appears to have done little to tamp down the conspiracy theories still circulating from the streets of Baghdad to the highest levels of Iraqi government that the C.I.A. is secretly behind the same extremists that it is now attacking.

“We know about who made Daesh,” said Bahaa al-Araji, a deputy prime minister, using an Arabic shorthand for the Islamic State on Saturday at a demonstration called by the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr to warn against the possible deployment of American ground troops. Mr. Sadr publicly blamed the C.I.A. for creating the Islamic State in a speech last week, and interviews suggested that most of the few thousand people at the demonstration, including dozens of members of Parliament, subscribed to the same theory. (Mr. Sadr is considered close to Iran, and the theory is popular there as well.)
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Hamas has agreed to the establishment of a Palestinian state within the ’67 borders, Fatah negotiator says.
By Jack Khoury and Reuters, HAARETZ | Sep. 25, 2014

Fatah and Hamas negotiators Azzam al-Ahmad and Musa Abu Marzouk, September 24, 2014.

Chief Palestinian negotiator Azzam al-Ahmad (C-L) of the mainstream Fatah movement shakes hands with Hamas deputy leader Musa Abu Marzouk, September 24, 2014. Photo by AFP

Hassin Alsheikh, a negotiator on the Fatah team, told Haaretz that the Palestinian Authority will take responsibility for the reconstruction of the Strip as well as for manning the Gaza crossings “effective immediately.”

He added that Hamas also agreed to support Palestinian President Abbas’ plan for establishing a state within the ’67 borders.
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By Benjamin Weinthal, FoxNews.com

The U.S. effort to stem Islamic State’s reign of terror in Syria and Iraq has America and one of its most bitter enemies – Iran – in the same camp, which some experts warn could be a recipe for disaster.

By some estimates, Iran and its proxies are responsible for the killing of as many as 1,000 Americans since 2003, but both nations are seeking to stop the spread of the Sunni-dominated Islamic State, which has killed U.S. citizens and threatened attacks on America and has angered Iran by attacking Shia shrines and mosques. With the Obama administration seeking help from Iran’s regime, Middle East experts are raising alarms.

“Iran is at war with us,” Robert Caruso, a former Department of Defense official and an expert on Tehran’s military operations, told FoxNews.com. “Iran is actively subverting American leadership throughout the world.”
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America is at a crossroads we can choose the path of the Founding Fathers and keep a strong constitutional government that thrives on our bipartisan spirit, or opt for President Barack Obama’s dream: a nation ruled by one political party with a far left agenda.

That’s the dire warning from best-selling author and political insider Dick Morris and his co-author Eileen McGann in their compelling new book Power Grab.

The authors make a convincing case that Obama has an overarching strategy in pushing his liberal agenda, one that grabs power from our traditional and bipartisan institutions in favor of a single party: his Democratic Party.

According to Morris and McGann, Obama has promulgated his plan by:
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Shavit starts off by affirming that in the 1st day after the end of the Six Day’s War, the Left “understood that the occupation would corrupt us and the settlements were pointless.” Such affirmation needs to be challenged. With that mentality the Temple Mount was given to the Wakf. Big mistake. One could write a full article on why they were wrong then but I’ll leave that to you the readers.

Shavit excoriates the left for not seeing today’s reality and coming up with a third way like Clinton did. But he has no suggestions as to what the third way might be other than to say that “our most important national enterprise is dividing the land.” Really? Given today’s reality how is that possible or advisable? Ted Belman

Peace is dead, long live peace
Just as Clinton revived the Democratic Party in the 1990s, the Zionist left must revive itself and offer a third way.

By Ari Shavit, HAARETZ

An Israeli left wing activist holds olive branches, during a demonstration against Israel’s offensive in the Gaza Strip, in Tel Aviv, Israel. July 19, 2014. Photo by AP

The tale of the Israeli left is a sad one. In the summer of 1967, the Zionist left was correct. On the seventh day of the Six-Day War, it already understood that the occupation would corrupt us and the settlements were pointless. It fought bravely against the rejectionism of Prime Minister Golda Meir and the messianism of the Gush Emunim settlement movement, as well as the general hawkishness of Likud. But the left’s great mistake was that it conjured a magical faith in the possibility of ending the occupation via the metaphysical promise of peace now.

This serious (almost religious) faith in an immediate and comprehensive peace was shaky even at the end of the 20th century, but it has become utterly groundless in the 21st century. But the left refused to recognize this clear and bitter fact.
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