At meeting in Paris, FM tells US counterpart that Israel could offer “effective and reliable” help to moderate Arab states caught in extremists’ cross-hairs.

By Herb Keinon, JPOST..

Kerry meets with Liberman in France June 26, 2014.

Give up trying to broker an Israeli-Palestinian accord, and focus instead on a comprehensive regional agreement, Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman told US Secretary of State John Kerry during a meeting Thursday in Paris.

Liberman, meeting Kerry for the first time since the breakdown in March of the US-backed Israeli-Palestinian negotiations, said Israel’s ongoing conflict is not only with the Palestinians, but the entire Arab world — of which the Palestinians are a part. Read more…

In address to Congress, president talks of advancing peace with the Palestinians and uprooting global terrorism: ‘Israel does not intend to rule over other people. It stands against our values and heritage.’

Ynetnews

The Arabs are not Israel’s enemies, terrorists are, President Shimon Peres said Thursday in his final address to the American people as the president of Israel.

This statement perfectly sums up the spirit of the president’s speech at the Capitol. Speaking to both houses of Congress after being honored with the Congressional Gold Medal, Peres stressed the importance of advancing peace by uprooting terrorism.

“We must fight not only the acts of terrorism but the roots of terrorism,” he said. “And not by military means alone. But by drying up their financial resources. By sanctioning their suppliers of arms. By delegitimizing their actions. By weaving a modern regional net that can catch terrorists and protect our populations.” Read more…

By Michael Weiss, MOSAIC

There has never been any doubt in my mind that elements within Iran’s security services have facilitated ISIS,” Col. Derek Harvey told Foreign Policy, referring to the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, a terrorist network-cum-jihadist army that has now taken over territory in Syria and Iraq that, when combined, is roughly the size of Jordan. “When given opportunities to interdict, or have an effect, [the Iranians] have refrained.”

Harvey, a retired Army intelligence officer and senior Central Command advisor, was emphatic that any solution for containing the rising threat of ISIS, an al Qaeda breakaway group, must foreclose on the possibility of U.S.-Iranian collusion. His comments were echoed by two other high-ranking U.S. military officials who served extensively in the Iraq theater in the last decade and believe that Iran was the principal spoiler for American-led reconstruction efforts after the fall of Saddam Hussein.
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By Ted Belman

I haven’t posted on the hunger strike til now nor have I read anything but headlines. I didn’t realize until today that the prisoners on the hunger strike hadn’t been convicted of anything. They were being held under administrative detention without trial or charges which is legal under international law. Israel has the right to hold them for 6 months and then must get an extension of the time for another six months and so on.

America holds prisoners under administrative detention at Guantanamo Bay.

The strikers were attempting to get Israel to release them and do away with administrative detention
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Unless we fight Islam instead of Jihadists we will lose the civilization war. Thats the truth that the West is not willing to accept. What is the point of stopping them on the battlefield if we allow them to infiltrate our countries and wreak havoc on our values. Ted Belman

Modern jihadists

Clifford D. May, Israel HaYom

A secret CIA plot was revealed last week: Beginning almost 10 years ago, the agency set in motion a plan to make Osama bin Laden action figures. Over time, the paint on the faces would fleck off, revealing a demon beneath. The idea was to dissuade children in the Muslim world ?from seeing al-Qaida’s leader as a hero.

The CIA eventually decided not to proceed with the scheme, and there is reportedly only one ?two-faced prototype Osama doll left, sitting in some Langley office. But don’t count me among those making fun of this aborted “influence operation.” My only quibble: We should be targeting not just individuals but also the ideology that motivates them.

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By MICHAEL WILNER, JPOST

Sixty percent of those polled, including 55 percent in West Bank and 68 percent in Gaza, reject permanent acceptance of Israel’s existence.

A JEWISH man walks on a hilltop overlooking a suburb of Ramallah.

WASHINGTON – A clear majority of Palestinians in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip oppose a two-state solution to end their struggle with Israel, according to a poll released on Wednesday.

Sixty percent of those polled, including 55% in the West Bank and 68% in Gaza, reject permanently accepting Israel’s existence and instead suggest their leaders “work toward reclaiming all of historic Palestine, from the river to the sea.”

Two-thirds of those polled support continued “resistance” against the Jewish state. Consequentially, those who say they support a two-state solution view such a move as “part of a ‘program of stages’ to liberate all of historic Palestine later.”
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By Isi Liebler

Recent developments signal that the prospect of Europe sliding into a new Dark Age is now a horrifying reality. It is as though all the elements negating the open society have been blended into a witches’ brew to undermine Europe’s liberal cultural ethos.

First in line to suffer are the Jews, attacked from all sides, isolated, friendless and unable to adequately defend themselves. Their greatest threat is the rabidly anti-Semitic Muslims supported by anti-Semites from the far Left. This unholy alliance of religious and secular extremists employs radical anti-Israelism as a surrogate for traditional anti-Semitism and is now a fixture at Hezbollah and anti-Israeli demonstrations, where they wave placards and shamelessly accuse Israelis of emulating Nazis.
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by Jonathan Schanzer, WSJ Online

http://schanzer.pundicity.com/14957/an-unhelpful-ally

The Middle East is aflame. The rapid march of the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham, or ISIS, from Syria into Iraq has rattled Washington and Brussels. The Palestinian-Israeli conflict is also heating up, as the Jewish state searches frantically for three teens kidnapped in the West Bank. And the world powers continue to wrangle with Iran over its nuclear-weapons program.

None of these crises are easy to solve, and all three have been exacerbated by policies crafted in Europe’s backyard by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey.

The ISIS crisis in Iraq is inextricably tied to the dangerous and permissive border policies of Mr. Erdogan’s government in Turkey over the past two years. It was only last year that U.S. President Barack Obama chided Mr. Erdogan for “letting arms and fighters flow into Syria indiscriminately and sometimes to the wrong rebels, including anti-Western jihadists.”

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Israel21C

Is there a mermaid in Kiryat Yam? What is the ancient 600-year-old wheel of ghosts in the Golan Heights? And where are the Maccabees really buried?

If you’ve ever seen Raiders of the Lost Ark, you know that the history of the Holy Land is filled with intriguing mysteries. Despite Indiana Jones-style explorers’ best guesses, we don’t know where the ark and other precious furnishings from the first Holy Temple lie buried. And we’re still not certain who wrote each of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Here is a list of other perplexing mysteries in Israel, some from thousands of years ago and others as recent as yesterday’s news.

CONTINUE

ELLIOTT ABRAMS, POLITICO

There’s always Tunisia. Amid the smoking ruins of the Middle East, there is that one encouraging success story. But unfortunately for the Obama narratives, the president had about as much as to do with Tunisia’s turn toward democracy as he did with the World Cup rankings. Where administration policy has had an impact, the story is one of failure and danger.

The Middle East that Obama inherited in 2009 was largely at peace, for the surge in Iraq had beaten down the al Qaeda-linked groups. U.S. relations with traditional allies in the Gulf, Jordan, Israel and Egypt were very good. Iran was contained, its Revolutionary Guard forces at home. Today, terrorism has metastasized in Syria and Iraq, Jordan is at risk, the humanitarian toll is staggering, terrorist groups are growing fast and relations with U.S. allies are strained.
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By Ido Ben Porat, Gil Ronen, INN

Economics Minister and Jewish Home leader Naftali Bennett announced Wednesday that he intends to lead an effort to stop Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen) from continuing the policy of payment of generous monthly salaries to convicted terrorists jailed in Israeli prisons.

“Did you murder Jews? Have you abducted children? Get up to 12,000 shekels a month from Abu Mazen!,” wrote Bennett sarcastically on his Facebook page. “Meet Abu Mazen’s ‘preferred employment’ track: murderers, terrorists and child abductors. We have preferred status for gas station attendants, Abu Mazen gives it to those who pour fuel on the fires of death and destruction.” Read more…

Watch video of hundreds of Arab rioters curse and throw shoes at Jews at holy site, day after committee recommends keeping status quo.

By Shimon Cohen, Ari Yashar, INN

Jerusalem – NGO Monitor, a Jerusalem based research institute, has released evidence that anti-Jewish prejudice was prominent among the internal church advocates for boycott and divestment (BDS) efforts.

The Israel-Palestine Mission Network (IPMN), a church affiliated activist group centrally responsible for lobbying the church to divest from companies that do business with Israel and publisher of the highly controversial booklet, Zionism Unsettled: A Congregational Study, also promoted antisemitism on its Facebook page.

“The IPMN’s Facebook page is in fact a hate site operating under the protective wings of the Presbyterian Church,” said Yitzhak Santis, NGO Monitor’s Chief Programs Officer. “None of the antisemitic postings were repudiated by the IPMN leadership or other members of this Facebook group. Several Presbyterian Church senior staff members are also members of this group, and they remained silent.” Read more…

By Moshe Phillips and Benyamin Korn, ALGEMEINER

The State Department’s demand that Israel “exercise restraint” in its search for the Hamas kidnappers makes a mockery of President Obama’s pledge two years ago that he “will always have Israel’s back.”

State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki declared on June 20 that the Obama Administration is “urging all parties to exercise restraint and avoid steps that could destabilize the situation.”

That phrase “all parties” was a thin veneer of even-handedness. Everyone knows the call for “restraint” was aimed at Israel. In fact, Psaki made her slant clear in her very next words, expressing “concern” that two Palestinian Arabs were shot dead by Israeli troops. Psaki did not exhibit any “concern” for the Israeli soldiers at whom those Arabs were throwing rocks and firebombs.
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Joshua Levitt, ALGEMEINER

The National Review Online editors railed against “the world’s organized hostility to Israel” in a scathing editorial published on Tuesday after Presbyterian Church (USA) voted at the weekend to divest from three companies that do business with Israel.

The National Review Online said that it “would be kind of funny if it didn’t have such serious consequences, or potential consequences. There are some 200 nations in the world. Many of them are very bad actors: dictatorships, terror states. And it is tiny, democratic Israel that is the focus of the world’s hostility.”

With the vote by PC (USA), “thus does a major American church join the worldwide BDS movement. (‘BDS’ stands for ‘boycott, divestment, and sanctions’ — against one country, Israel.)”
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With a rapidly growing Muslim population, how will governments in forty or fifty years defend our freedoms? As for “British Values”, will Islamic values not then be British values too?

By Vincent Cooper, The Commentator

The political and media debate on the alleged Islamist Trojan Horse infiltration of Birmingham schools reveals — like no other issue regarding Islam in Britain — a deep and long-held political fear in confronting the truth about the nature of Islam and large-scale Muslim immigration.

That truth — and it has been a concern of governments for some time — is that with Britain’s rapidly increasing Muslim population, the teaching of any culturally conservative interpretation of Islam (the bare minimum that any serious Muslim would insist on) is entirely incompatible with the secular, liberal and pluralistic values that define British society, and even perhaps incompatible with the long-term political stability of the country.

In pursuit of the multicultural dream that has dominated Western political culture since the end of the Second World War, the British political class turned a blind eye to this problem.
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by Itamar Marcus and Nan Jacques Zilberdik, Palestinian Media Watch, June 24, 2014:

Only four days after the kidnapping of the three Israeli youths, Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah movement posted a video on its Facebook page promising Israelis: “Death is near.” [Facebook, “Fatah – The Main Page,” June 16, 2014]

The song promotes violence and destruction in the name of Allah, as it calls to “smash the fortress of the hopeless” and “shout: ‘Allah is Greater’” and states that “the remains of our bodies and our blood are a song of rage.”

Fatah’s military wing, the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades, is described as “the rival in the land who burns the foreign enemy” and who will “reach the enemy everywhere.” Israelis and/or Jews are addressed directly and promised death:

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By Ruthie Blum, ISRAEL HAYOM

The mother of 16-year-old Naftali Frenkel — one of three ?Israeli teens abducted nearly two weeks ago by Hamas terrorists — addressed the U.N. ?Human Rights Council in Geneva on Tuesday.

Rachel Frenkel, who holds dual U.S.-Israeli citizenship, was invited to make an appeal on ?behalf of her son (as well as 16-year-old Gil-ad Shaer and 19-year-old Eyal Yifrach) by ?U.N. Watch executive director Hillel Neuer. Neuer gave Frenkel his slot in Tuesday’s ??”debate” on Israeli aggression against Palestinians.?

?”We think the world needs to hear her voice,” Neuer told The Jerusalem Post on Monday. ??”It is a chance for [a] mother of [one of] the kidnapped boys to speak to the world and to ?ask them to do whatever they can. … This heinous act violates international ?humanitarian law, which prohibits targeting civilians and the taking of hostages.” ?

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