By TOVAH LAZAROFF, JPOST

Ephraim Karsh just wrote a very scholarly article in support of the claim that “Palestinian Leaders Don’t Want an Independent State ” which was published in MEForum’s Middle East Quarterly

He concludes:

For nearly a century, Palestinian leaders have missed no opportunity to impede the development of Palestinian civil society and the attainment of Palestinian statehood. Had Hajj Amin Husseini chosen to lead his constituents to peace and reconciliation with their Jewish neighbors, the Palestinians would have had their independent state over a substantial part of mandate Palestine by 1948, if not a decade earlier, and would have been spared the traumatic experience of dispersal and exile. Had Arafat set the PLO from the start on the path to peace and reconciliation instead of turning it into one of the most murderous and corrupt terrorist organizations in modern times, a Palestinian state could have been established in the late 1960s or the early 1970s; in 1979, as a corollary to the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty; by May 1999, as part of the Oslo process; or at the very latest, with the Camp David summit of July 2000. Had Abbas abandoned his predecessors’ rejectionist path, a Palestinian state could have been established after the Annapolis summit of November 2007, or during President Obama’s first term after Benjamin Netanyahu broke with the longstanding Likud precept by publicly accepting in June 2009 the two-state solution and agreeing to the establishment of a Palestinian state.

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By Marissqa Newman, YNET NEWS

Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman lambasted the UN Security Council and Human Rights Council Tuesday, asserting that the appearance of Rachel Fraenkel — the mother of kidnapped teenager Naftali Fraenkel — in Geneva at a summit on behalf of the abductees was likely to go unheeded.

“The Security Council, like the Human Rights Council, doesn’t operate according to moral codes, and not according to justice, but according to political interests,” the foreign minister told Israel Radio.

“Therefore, while Israel must fight in the international arena, to have its voice heard, it has to understand that this is the reality,” he added.
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HERB KEINON, JPOST
Netanyahu gov’t fears implications of US inability to train Arab forces; says failures in Iraq evidence against proposed US security plan for the Jordan Valley.

By Mark Steyn

 So whose fault is the implosion of Iraq? Bush? Obama?

Back in the real world, Republicans don’t lose wars and Democrats don’t lose wars; America loses wars – which is how US allies and enemies alike judge what’s happening in Iraq right now, and how it will be recorded in the history books. There is certainly something to Robert Tracinski’s analysis – that this was a wish-fulfilling prophesy for Obama, and that, in some deep primal sense, for the Democrats it was necessary ultimately for the Iraq war to be lost. Undeniably lost. And to be seen to be undeniably lost – even if it took five-and-a-half years after Bush’s departure from office, or about the length of the entire Second World War.

Let it be said that there is more than enough blame to go round. I see Senator Lindsey Graham has been all over the airwaves saying we need to work with Iran to help save Iraq from ISIS. This is the same Lindsey Graham who’s been calling for the US to assist Syrian rebels in trying to overthrow Assad, Iran’s client. The Syrian resistance is dominated by the same guys currently overrunning Iraq – the Sunni jihadists of the “Islamic State of Iraq and Syria”. Consider the now largely erased Syrian/Iraqi border: On the eastern side of this vanished line, a disaffected Sunni who takes up arms against an Iranian client in Baghdad is an enemy of theUnited States whom we must join with Iran in destroying; but, on the western side of this vanished line, a disaffected Sunni who takes up arms against an Iranian client in Damascus is a plucky Arab Spring freedom fighter entitled to the full support of the United States. Granted that this isn’t the easiest part of the world in which to distinguish friend from foe, the way around this abiding problem is not to locate both of them within, literally, the same person. Read more…

By Dr Ashraft Ramelah, CFP

As the live airwaves of Egypt’s state TV deliver the Al Ahzar lectures cautioning against apostasy and Atheism to all those carrying state-issued I.D. cards indicating Egypt’s official religion, Egypt’s newly installed president, Abdel Fatah Al-Sisi, foregoes public prayers and mosque attendance as the first modern leader ever to skip over this tradition within his initial days of office.

Since the uprising of January 2011 against former President Mubarak—propelled by a platform of human rights, equal rights, secularism and religious freedom which in turn brought down Mubarak’s successor, Mohammed Morsi—more and more Egyptians have fled Islam by quietly claiming Atheism and enduring the harassment that comes with it.

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Diana West, TOWN HALL (first published in 2007)

Only one faith on Earth may be more messianic than Islam: multiculturalism. Without it — without its fanatics who believe all civilizations are the same — the engine that projects Islam into the unprotected heart of Western civilization would stall and fail. It’s as simple as that. To live among the believers — the multiculturalists — is to watch the assault, the jihad, take place un-repulsed by our suicidal societies. These societies are not doomed to submit; rather, they are eager to do so in the name of a masochistic brand of tolerance that, short of drastic measures, is surely terminal.

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From Pamela Geller

      American Freedom Defense Initiative   

AFDI’s Truth About CAIR Ad Defaced: Anti-Semitic Vandelism

Our new Truth About CAIR ad campaign is running on Washington DC buses, train dioramas and New York subway platforms.

AFDI’s Truth about CAIR advertisements have been defaced with anti-Semitic vandalism, including hammers and sickles and the phrases “No to Zionism” and “Long live Palestine.” Supporters of the Hamas-CAIR terror-aligned organization are flagrant anti-semites. The vandalism demonstrates yet again the desperate insecurity and authoritarian tendencies of the foes of the U.S., Israel and freedom.
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Ziad Awad, released in Shalit deal, accused of shooting off-duty police officer Baruch Mizrahi; suspect’s son also held; PM orders their home demolished

BY MARISSA NEWMAN, TOI

by Jonathan Spyer, The Jerusalem Post

The stunning collapse of the Iraqi army in Mosul, and the rapid advance of the fighters of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) through Tikrit and toward Baghdad has created a new reality in Iraq.

ISIS advances have continued this week; the organization has now taken the town of Tel Afar, with its 200,000 inhabitants, located west of Mosul.

Iraq is now divided on a de facto basis into a Shi’ite south and center, including Baghdad, a Sunni, ISIS-dominated west and a Kurdish-ruled north.

The biggest winners from this situation, apart perhaps from ISIS itself, are the Iraqi Kurds. The conflict between the Sunni jihadis and the Iran-supported Baghdad authorities has enabled the Kurds to add a number of key building blocks to the nearly completed edifice of Kurdish independence in the area once known as northern Iraq.
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CNN

Baghdad, Iraq (CNN) — Militant fighters tightened their grip Sunday on western Iraq as security forces withdrew from a handful of towns in Anbar province, moving closer to Baghdad.

The news that Iraqi forces withdrew from at least three towns in the province raised questions about whether Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki’s government is giving up on the region.

It also comes the same day that Iran’s religious leader condemned any U.S. involvement in Iraq, saying al-Maliki’s government can handle its own problems.

“The United States is trying to portray this as a sectarian war. But what is happening in Iraq is not a war between Shiite and Sunnis,” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said in a statement carried by the state-run IRNA news agency Read more…

Dozens of tunnels were hidden behind furniture, washing machines; IDF looking for volunteers to help search for kidnapped teens.

By Yaakov Levi, INN

The IDF is seeking to expand the number of people searching for three teens kidnapped ten days ago by Hamas terrorists – and is turning to volunteers who are familiar with the Hevron area for help. The army hopes that the volunteers will help in the discovery of clues that could indicate where the teens are.

In the meantime, the army said, the intense searches in the Hevron area have yielded a great deal of information and new discoveries – such as the discovery of a network of tunnels in the Hevron area that the IDF did not know existed.
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Hannity Discussion: 2/3 of Muslims from Morocco to Indonesia Want a Caliphate; 91% of Iraqis/99% of Afghans Want Sharia Post U.S. Liberation

By Andrew Bostom

During an often contentious discussion (embedded below) that aired Friday night (6/20/14) on Fox News’ Hannity about the worldwide ravages of Islamic jihadism, I injected some hard data into the harangue about two critical matters: (1) the broad desire for a Caliphate amongst Muslims from Morocco to Indonesia, i.e., 2/3 in favor; (2) the overwhelming desire for application of the Sharia—Islam’s liberty-crushing, religio-political totalitarian system that encompasses the smallest details of religious practice, to the largest issues of politics—in U.S.-liberated Iraq and Afghanistan, favored by 91% in Iraq and 99% in Afghanistan.

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We don’t have a leadership vacuum in the Middle East. What we have is a reality vacuum.
By Andrew C McCarthy, NRO

The vacuous “vacuum” chatter is back, reappearing in the Iraq debate after its long run as the all-purpose explanation for internecine Islamic bloodletting in Syria. That should make perfect sense since Iraq is Syria: same players, same bloodletting. Yet, the “vacuum” is wildly different from place to place, which also makes perfect sense . . . but only because the idea of a “vacuum” is nonsense on stilts.

Syria, we are told, disintegrated because President Obama’s abdication created a leadership void — “the vacuum” — that al-Qaeda rushed in to fill. The “moderate” Sunni “rebels,” the story goes, were poised to fulfill America’s top priority, undermining Iran, by overthrowing the Shiite regime the mullahs control in Damascus. But the president failed to back “moderate” Sunni “rebels,” who threw in their lot with al-Qaeda — strictly, we are to believe, owing to Obama’s default, not to the ideological harmony of the “rebels” with the jihadists.
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Analysis: With nothing left to lose, Hamas will hope to improve relations with Egypt while Israel will attempt to deal death blow to Palestinian terrorism.

By Ben Yishai, YNET NEWS

“A large operation in Gaza is a real possibility even in the near future,” suggested a senior security source over the weekend.

This analysis is based on two developments over the last few days – one of which is the daily firing of rockets and mortars into Israeli territory from Gaza.

The fire is actually being perpetrated by what’s called, “rogue organizations’ led by the Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Popular Resistance Committees (PRC), and other militant Salafi Muslim organizations that are active in Gaza in constant attempts to incite further conflict between Israel and Hamas.
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“CenterVision” is a new micro-series produced by The United West which airs weekly. “CenterVision” will present a short, insightful video analysis of critical national security issue featuring subject-matter experts from the preeminent national security think tank in Washington DC,  The Center for Security Policy, thus the name, “CenterVision.”
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