“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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THIS HAPPENED IN 2013
By Zach Pontz.
This year’s valedictorian at the Technion University, known as “the MIT of Israel,” would likely displease those intent on framing Israel in the most unflattering of terms, writes Diana Bletter for The Huffington Post.
That’s because the Valedictorian is an Islamic woman named Mais Ali-Saleh who grew up in a small Arab village outside of Nazareth, in Israel’s Galilee.
BENGHAZI, KHATTALA, ISIS not only disproves claims made by Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movements, that Israel is an apartheid state and that its academic institutions should be boycotted, but she put it best when she said, “An academic boycott of Israel is a passive move, and it doesn’t achieve any of its purported objectives.” Read more…
Menachem Schneerson transformed a small sect into a world Jewish movement—but was he also the Messiah?
By DARA HORN
‘Are you Jewish?” If you’ve lived in a large American city in the past 30 years and look the part, chances are that a young Hasidic man has approached you with this question. Men who answer “yes” are given a quick tutorial in donning tefillin, ritual objects worn by Jewish men during prayer; women receive Sabbath candles with instructions to recite ancient blessings. It all seems suspiciously cultlike, but these bearded enthusiasts aren’t out to convert anyone. They are emissaries of Chabad (also known as Lubavitch), a religious movement whose goal is to expose more Jews to Judaism—unconditionally.
My Rebbe
By Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz
Shefa/Maggid, 246 pages, $24.95
Schneerson speaks to his followers in Brooklyn in January 1992 about the everlasting nature of the soul on the fourth anniversary of his wife’s death.Corbis Images
Their approach has succeeded in a secular age when hundreds of other Jewish organizations have failed. A recent Pew study of American Jews showed a dramatic attenuation of communal ties, and other religions have also seen declining institutional involvement, but Chabad has built thriving outposts from Anchorage to Zimbabwe, touched the lives of millions, and become ubiquitous almost to the point of comedy. On a recent trip to Australia, I discovered that the building adjacent to my hotel in Melbourne was an exact replica of 770 Eastern Parkway, Chabad’s legendary Brooklyn headquarters. Two excellent new biographies of Chabad’s great 20th-century leader, the Lubavitcher Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson (1902-94), help explain how one man turned a decimated sect into a world-wide presence.
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The reputation of a great Zionist founding father has suffered from three stereotypes. None is true.
By Hillel Halkin, MOSAIC
When speaking of Vladimir Jabotinsky (1880-1940), Menachem Begin habitually referred to him by the traditional rabbinical honorific of rabi v’mori, “my master and mentor.” And yet Begin was in some ways, as Daniel Gordis writes in his recently published biography, “the most Jewish prime minister that Israel has ever had,” while Jabotinsky, in the eyes of many of his contemporaries and not a few historians of our own time, was the “least Jewish” Zionist leader of his age. Did Begin deliberately overlook this in honoring the man whose follower he was as a young Polish Zionist in the 1930s? Did he misunderstand Jabotinsky? Or did he understand him better than others did?
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Tanker Carrying Kurdish Oil Zigzags Mediterranean Amid Iraqi Threats
Oil Odyssey Offers Glimpse of Kurdish Independence in Iraq
This is important. It thwarts the US who considers it illegal to buy the oil from Kurdistan. Ted Belman
The SCF Altai tanker was anchored near Ashkelon port early on Friday morning, ship tracking and industry sources said.
A tanker delivered a cargo of disputed crude oil from Iraqi Kurdistan’s new pipeline for the first time on Friday in Israel, despite threats by Baghdad to take legal action against any buyer.
The SCF Altai tanker arrived at Israel’s Ashkelon port early on Friday morning, ship tracking and industry sources said. By the evening, the tanker began unloading the Kurdish oil, a source at the port said.
The port authority at Ashkelon declined to comment.
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Since signing the Oslo agreement in 1993, Israel has made a series of astounding concessions, which did nothing but produce further Palestinian demands for even more far-reaching concessions.
Compare the substance of the sentiments conveyed by the vitriolic anti-Zionist Knesset Member Hanin Zoabi of the Balad list (more on its roots later), with those conveyed by well-known columnist, Gideon Levy of the Israeli daily, Ha’aretz.
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It only took the Taliban six months to move from the Bamiyan Buddhas to the World Trade Center. Al-Qaida is stronger now than ever before. And Iran is on the threshold of a nuclear arsenal.
Watching the undoing, in a week, of victories that US forces won in Iraq at great cost over many years, Americans are asking themselves what, if anything, should be done.
What can prevent the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) – the al-Qaida offshoot that President Barack Obama derided just months ago as a bunch of amateurs – from taking over Iraq? And what is at stake for America – other than national pride – if it does? Muddying the waters is the fact that the main actor that seems interested in fighting ISIS on the ground in Iraq is Iran. Following ISIS’s takeover of Mosul and Tikrit last week, the Iranian regime deployed elite troops in Iraq from the Quds Force, its foreign operations division.
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Israel should start assassinating the leaders of Hamas until the boys are returned. Ted Belman
The alternatives: At a time when al-Qaeda is gaining momentum in the region, conquering large parts of Iraq and in fact controlling the area from Aleppo in Syria to the area north of Baghdad – and threatening to expand to Jordan as well – Israel should take into account that destroying Hamas will not create a void filled by the Palestinian Authority but rather a space usurped by al-Qaeda. For when a radical organization falls, it is usually replaced by an even more exteme one.
Hamas knows very well that the kidnapping of the three Israeli teens is not a tactical incident like firing Qassam rockets, but a pivotal strategic incident which Israel sees as a reason for war.
There is a possibility that the organization has chosen to adopt al-Qaeda’s working method: Encouraging independent actions from the ground, which work according to instructions from the top but are difficult to prevent. Sometimes, as a result, the acts are authorized and responsibility is taken only after they are committed.
In the wake of the abduction, Israel faces a complicated and challenging test. From a broad, strategic perspective, I’m not sure that what Israel needs right now is a sweeping act of revenge in a military operation against Hamas in Gaza, as some people have called for.
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This Heritage event on Benghazi has gotten a lot of press over the last day or two, with the left claiming the event turned ‘ugly‘ and that the Muslim woman was ‘pounced on’ and ‘bullied’ by members of the panel.
But after watching it myself, that characterization couldn’t be more wrong. In fact Brigitte Gabriel’s answer to this Muslim woman is perhaps the best answer I’ve ever heard to the ‘peaceful Muslims’ question.
Demographic Upheaval: How the Syrian War is Reshaping the Region
By Pinhas Inbari
The current political and military upheavals in the Middle East are producing new and far-reaching demographic realities.
The communities in Syria are consolidating as the Alawite-Shiite components gain strength; the Sunnis are leaving for Lebanon and undermining Hizbullah’s status; in Jordan the relative weight of the Palestinians has declined and the “Jordan is Palestine” threat has diminished; and the West Bank is undergoing emigration pressures which will certainly be copied in Gaza if emigration is allowed.
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Erik Rush sees president facilitating new rise of caliphate
By now, we are quite familiar with the exploits of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) and the fact that their leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, was released from detention by the Obama administration in 2009. These savages have cut a swath from northern Syria through northern Iraq, engaging in the most grotesque mass murder along the way, and by all accounts – including photographs and video footage of their own making – reveling in doing so.
While many, for some unfathomable reason, remain wedded to the idea that this and countless other developments involving the Obama administration are the result of its incompetence, others have reached the point where their ability to suspend their disbelief has been stretched beyond the breaking point, and they no longer believe it is a matter of political ineptitude or poor leadership. Read more…
By Dick Cheney And Liz Cheney, WSJ
In Iraqi soldier in Baghdad with volunteers to fight the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, June 17. Photo: Reuters
As the terrorists of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) threaten Baghdad, thousands of slaughtered Iraqis in their wake, it is worth recalling a few of President Obama ‘s past statements about ISIS and al Qaeda. “If a J.V. team puts on Lakers’ uniforms that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant” (January 2014). “[C]ore al Qaeda is on its heels, has been decimated” (August 2013). “So, let there be no doubt: The tide of war is receding” (September 2011).
Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many. Too many times to count, Mr. Obama has told us he is “ending” the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—as though wishing made it so. His rhetoric has now come crashing into reality. Watching the black-clad ISIS jihadists take territory once secured by American blood is final proof, if any were needed, that America’s enemies are not “decimated.” They are emboldened and on the march.
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ERBIL, Iraq — Meeting with the American ambassador some years ago in Baghdad, Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki detailed what he believed was the latest threat of a coup orchestrated by former officers of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party.
“Don’t waste your time on this coup by the Baathists,” the ambassador, Zalmay Khalilzad, chided him, dismissing his conspiracy theories as fantasy.
Now, though, with Iraq facing its gravest crisis in years, as Sunni insurgents have swept through northern and central Iraq, Mr. Maliki’s claims about Baathist plots have been at least partly vindicated. While fighters for the extremist Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, once an offshoot of Al Qaeda, have taken on the most prominent role in the new insurgency, they have done so in alliance with a deeply rooted network of former loyalists to Saddam Hussein. Read more…
Iraq is under siege. The radical al-Qaeda offshoot known as the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL or ISIS) has swiftly captured large swaths of territory in the north and west, taking Iraqi security forces — and western officials — by surprise.
The terrorist group first gained notoriety for its ability to fuel a sectarian civil war in Iraq after the American invasion in 2003. Ten years later, the group decided to join the fight in Syria, changing its name to ISIL to reflect a new ambition: to take advantage of the chaos of the Syrian civil war to establish an Islamic state spanning the Iraq-Syria border.
SEE ALSO: Iraq Implodes: What You Need to Know
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READ WITH A GRAIN OF SALT
By ARIEL BEN SOLOMON, JPOST
Gen. Hassan Firouzabadi: ISIS is Israel’s cover up for distancing the revolutionary forces from Israeli borders. Armed Forces Chief of Staff Hassan Firouzabadi
Armed Forces Chief of Staff Hassan Firouzabadi Photo: Reuters Iranian Army Chief of Staff Gen. Hassan Firouzabadi claimed Wednesday that Israel created and supports the terrorist Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.
“ISIS is Israel’s cover up for distancing the revolutionary forces from Israeli borders and creating a margin of security for the Zionists, and the Zionist media have also admitted this fact,” he said, Fars News Agency reported.
ISIS recently took areas in northern Iraq.
“The only way for the Iraqi people to overcome this problem is unity, resistance, and suppression of these modern-day ignorance fighters,” added Firouzabadi.
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The Zionist Organization of America issued a harshly worded condemnation of the kidnapping of the three Israeli teens Eyal Yifrach, Gil-Ad Shaer and Naftali Frenkel, and slammed the US’ policy as “nothing less than a diplomatic Kristallnacht.”
In the statement, the group described Hamas, which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has said is responsible for the kidnapping, as “Nazi-like”.
Taking cue from the official government position, the group also said it views Abbas as responsible for the kidnapping. ”
The Zionist Organization of America condemned the kidnapping, as well as Mahmoud Abbas’ Palestinian Authority (PA) for its obscene and incendiary newspaper cartoon celebrating and trivializing this horrendous, appalling crime,” the statement said, referencing a caricature published on the Fatah’s paper Facebook page.
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As the massive search for the three kidnapped teenagers Gil-Ad Sha’ar, Naftali Frenkel and Eyal Yifrach, went into its sixth day Wednesday, June 8, Israelis were getting impatient and skeptical about the prospects of finding them. Ten IDF brigades plus special operations units have been mobilized to scour the Hebron district, where the boys disappeared on June 12, and are keeping its population of 300,000 under curfew. So why, people are asking, has the army expanded the hunt to the northern West Bank towns of Nablus and Jenin?
Another 65 mostly Hamas activists were detained Tuesday overnight across the West Bank. Of that number, 51 were former prisoners released by Israel in the 2011 trade for the Israel soldier Gilead Shalit.
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu stressed that the special message conveyed by these arrests is part of the all-out military effort to recover the three boys and break up the Hamas organization in Judea and Samaria.
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By Caroline Glick, JewishWorldReview.com |
‘Peace’ and compromise agitators reveal their true colors Is anybody paying attention?
Three Jewish boys were abducted by Palestinian terrorists while trying to catch a ride home from school Thursday night. And as far as the foreign press is concerned, it’s their own damned fault.
As Honest Reporting documented, everyone from The Guardian to CNN, to Sky News to the Christian Science Monitor blamed Eyal Yifrach, Gil-Ad Shaer and Naftali Frankel for their victimization.
The boys deserve whatever they get, according to the media, because they are Jews and Jews have no right to be located anywhere that the Palestinians demand be cleansed of Jewish presence. And the Palestinians demand that Gush Etzion be emptied of Jews. So the boys, who dared to be located in Gush Etzion, had it coming.
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