Material Support to Terrorism: The Case of Libya

Libya in 2011 marks the place and the time that the United States (U.S.) and the Obama administration formally switched sides in the Global War on Terror (GWOT). A mere 10 years after al-Qa’eda (supported by Hizballah and Iran) attacked the American homeland in the worst act of terrorism ever suffered by this country, U.S. leadership decided to facilitate the provision of weapons to jihadist militias known to be affiliated with al-Qa’eda and the Muslim Brotherhood in order to bring down a brutal dictator who also just happened to be a U.S. ally in the GWOT at the time.

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See also:
Hillary Clinton should be worried as Benghazi coverup unravels

By Kenneth R. Timmerman

BY LAWRENCE SELLIN, PHD , FSM

Both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton had a vested interest in lying about Benghazi and permanently concealing the truth, Obama to ensure his reelection prospects in 2012 and Hillary to protect hers for 2016.

It is noteworthy, however, that Hillary Clinton was the first administration official to associate the video with the Benghazi attack, she was clearly its most aggressive and persistent advocate and, later, the most defensive (“what difference does it make”) when doubts were raised in Congressional hearings.

All of the following denote the time in Washington, DC.

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By Paul Miller, NY POST

Aging rocker Roger Waters is peeved that the equally aging Rolling Stones plan to play Tel Aviv this summer; he just wrote a public letter castigating the band for defying his anti-Israel boycott. Hey, Roger: You might want to look at what the under-40 crowd is doing.

For those who don’t live in Israel, the few artists heeding the Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions movement by refusing to perform there might seem to take center stage. But the big nay-sayers (aside from Waters) include Stevie Wonder, Carlos Santana and Elvis Costello. It’s safe to say that music fans not yet members of AARP won’t be greatly affected.

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By David Bensoussan, ASIA TIMES

There has been a Jewish presence in Arab-Muslim countries since well before Islam was introduced and it dates back to before the 6th century before the current era. These communities have disappeared or are in the process of disappearing in the majority of Arab-Muslim countries. In fact, 865,000 Jews found themselves excluded in the very countries they were born in and felt that they had to leave. [1,2] 

The traditional legal status of non-Muslims in Muslim countries
Non-Muslim minorities in Muslim countries have the status ofdhimmi, which means “tolerated” or “protected”. This flows from the assertion that Jewish and Christian scripture was distorted by their unworthy depositories. It is legislated under the Pact of Umar which was amended several times with the addition of other discriminatory measures.

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Republican lawmaker submits bill which would ban the US gov’t from funding international projects which boycott Judea and Samaria.

By Ari Soffer, INN

US lawmakers are to consider a bill banning the US government from funding any international projects which discriminate against Israelis in Judea and Samaria.

Republican Congressman Steve Stockman, who represents the 36th District of Texas, tabled the proposal, which “terminates US government funds for any international project that prohibits participation of Israeli organizations operating beyond the 1949 armistice line,” according to a statement by his office.

The proposed law was submitted in response to what Stockman said amounted to anti-Israel discrimination by certain international institutions. He singled out the European Union and other European countries in particular, noting the double-standard they apply regarding projects in “occupied territories.”

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DEBKA

[..] Tehran is pinning high hopes on the visit to Israel this week by US National Security Adviser Susan Rice and the senior US negotiator Wendy Sherman on a twofold mission:

1. To try and talk Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu out of his absolute conviction that the accord to be signed, which will acknowledge Iran as a nuclear threshold state, is bad and harmful to Israel’s and world security.

2. If that doesn’t work, Rice and Sherman will try and obtain an Israeli pledge not to resort to a military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities, an action that would scuttle the Obama administration’s entire Iran strategy.
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By Elliot Abrams, ISRAEL HAYOM

U.S. Senator Rand Paul has tried to attain some pro-Israel credentials by introducing S 2265, the Stand With Israel Act of 2014. The bill would cut off every cent of aid to the Palestinian Authority unless various conditions were met. As Paul put it, “Today, I introduced legislation to make all future aid to the Palestinian government conditional upon the new unity government putting itself on the record recognizing the right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state and agreeing to a lasting peace.” The bill covers “the Palestinian Authority, or any affiliated governing entity or leadership organization.”

Why is this not smart legislation? Among other things, it is not smart because it would force a cutoff of any U.S. assistance to the Palestinian security forces.
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By Nadav Shragai. ISRAEL HAYOM

“Queen has fallen,” was the radio transmission from Aliza Feuchtwanger from the burning bunker at Kfar Etzion on May 13, 1948. “Queen” was the code name for the Etzion bloc. For about half a year, its defenders sacrificed their lives to hold their positions against larger and better-armed Arab forces, and on the verge of the war’s end and the country’s independence they could hold out no longer. “A desperate Masada-like battle is taking place in the village,” Feuchtwanger told headquarters in Jerusalem in her final transmission. “The Arabs are everywhere. There are thousands of them.” A few minutes later, she climbed onto the roof of the bunker and placed a white, blood-drenched sheet on the bunker’s antenna to signal surrender.
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By Abraham H Miller, AMERICAN THINKER

In some deep corner of hell, Hitler is smiling. One Hundred and Fifty Thousand Muslims gathered in Paris to attend the Union of Islamic Organization’s Thirty First Congress. It was advertised as a gathering about immigration, assimilation, and culture, but it soon descended into an anti-Semitic hate fest.

When the “Jew” was cast into the convention’s spotlight, the crowd was whipped into frenzy with as much emotion as Albert Speer could have ignited from his Nazi rallies orchestrated with cascading lights and burning torches. The atrocities in Syria, the bloodbaths in the streets of Cairo, the barbaric behavior of Boko Haram in Nigeria, and all the evil and wanton cruelty in the Islamic world that daily leap out at us from television, print, and the Internet, all of this was explained as being guided by an invisible hand, the Jew.
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What perverse logic. Netanyahu is gratuitously offering the freeze to get Abbas back to the table. Why? To what end? Three possible reasons: 1 He really does want to try to make a deal, 2. He wants to extend talks in order to eat up more of Obama’s term or 3. He wants to take some heat off Israel. All three are lousy reasons. I do not believe that BB is motivated by weakness but by a desire to consummate a deal. Ted Belman

Prime Minister Netanyahu imposed a building freeze in Judea and Samaria after talks with the PA fell apart several weeks ago.

By Yaakov Levi, INN

In a near-counter-intuitive move, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu imposed a building freeze in Judea and Samaria after the talks with the Palestinian Authority fell apart several weeks ago. Ironically, it was just such a freeze that the PA had demanded as the price for keeping the talks going.

As a result of the freeze, Housing Minister Uri Ariel on Sunday abstained in a vote to allocate a budget to buy a plane for the use of Netanyahu, sources told Arutz Sheva Sunday.

Ariel in recent days has had numerous discussions with Netanyahu, trying to persuade him to take advantage of the cesssation of the talks to go on a major building campaign in Judea and Samaria. The plane, which would be used by Netanyahu on his trips abroad, will cost the government NIS 70 million.
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By Matthew M. Hausman, J.D., INN

The only honest message to come out of the latest round of diplomatic misdirection was the Palestinians’ refusal to recognize a Jewish state under any circumstances – and by extension Israel’s right to exist.

When Mahmoud Abbas proclaimed yet again that the Palestinians would never recognize a Jewish state or relinquish their unfounded “right of return,” he effectively denied Israel’s right to exist, demanded her demographic destruction, and indicated the pointlessness of negotiations.

Rather than chastise Abbas, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry admonished Israel for insisting on recognition in the first place, and thus validated Arab rejectionism and the revisionist Palestinian narrative.
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I think this was written a number of years ago. The situation in the years following has only gotten better.

The Middle East has been growing date palms for centuries. The average tree is about 18-20 feet tall and yields about 38 pounds of dates a year. Israeli date trees are now yielding 400 pounds/year and are short enough to be harvested from the ground or a short ladder .

Israel the 100th smallest country, with less than 1/1000th of the world’s population, can lay claim to the following: The cell phone was developed in Israel by Israelis working in the Israeli branch of Motorola, which has its largest development center in Israel .

Most of the Windows NT and XP operating systems were developed by Microsoft-Israel.
The Pentium MMX Chip technology was designed in Israel at Intel.
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Senator Rand Paul’s ‘Stand With Israel Act’ is part of the battle for supremacy in foreign affairs between Congress and the White House.

By Seth Lipsky

Senator Rand Paul’s “Stand With Israel Act” reminds me of a pickle I got myself into after the Six Day War. I’d reached Israel three weeks after the fighting and an escort had taken me onto the liberated Golan Heights. When we stopped near a burned-out tank, I hopped out of our jeep and dashed over to take a look, until I realized that people were shouting at me to stop. Your tyro of a correspondent had walked into a minefield.

So has Senator Paul with his bill to block foreign aid to the Palestinian Authority. He’s sallied onto what I’ve taken to calling the most dangerous ground in the Middle East. It’s not Judea, Samaria, Gaza, or the Golan. Rather it’s the ground between the White House and the United States Congress. They are battling for supremacy in foreign affairs, and this is territory where one really wants to watch one’s step.
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This law is potentially of huge significance. The High Court will now have to decide on the validity of laws based on two criteria namely, its Jewish character and purpose and secondly, democracy. Before it only had to uphold democracy. But in practice the Court may still favour democracy at the expense of “Jewish”. So there is much work to do.

Secondly, he rejected the idea that Israel should be a bi-national state. Only Jews will have collective rights. The others will just have individual rights. Ted Belman

PM vows to defend ‘the right to settle in the Land of Israel’ in new Basic Law to make Israel a Jewish nation-state.

By Tova Dvorin, INN

“Despite this, the existence of the State of Israel as a Jewish state does not actualize itself enough in our Basic Laws, which is what the proposed law aims to fix,” Netanyahu stated.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu (Likud) addressed the fundamental proposal to declare Israel a Jewish state on Sunday, at the start of his weekly Cabinet meeting.

Netanyahu began by defining, in his view, the basic nature of the State of Israel.

“The State of Israel is Jewish and democratic,” he began. “Our Basic Laws give us full expression of the democratic side of our country; we do this by giving full and equal rights to every Israeli citizen.”
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By Emily Amrousi, Israel Hayom

In 1986, a 78-year-old man named Moshe Kraus died in Jerusalem. You probably don’t recognize the name. He was never commemorated in any way. He is not mentioned in any Holocaust encyclopedias. But Moshe Kraus is responsible for the largest rescue operation during the Holocaust, on a huge scale. German industrialist Oskar Schindler, with his resourcefulness and courage, managed to save 1,200 Jews; Kraus saved tens of thousands.

Historians are divided on the exact number, but the most conservative estimate talks about at least 40,000 people, and some estimates are even as high as 100,000 Jews who escaped the Nazis in Hungary thanks to this daring man.
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In allocating blame to Israel, the US official said: We didn’t realize [that] continuing construction allowed ministers in [Netanyahu’s] government to very effectively sabotage the success of the talks. There are a lot of reasons for the peace effort’s failure, but people in Israel shouldn’t ignore the bitter truth: the primary sabotage came from the settlements. The Palestinians don’t believe that Israel really intends to let them found a state when, at the same time, it is building settlements on the territory meant for that state. We’re talking about the announcement of 14,000 housing units, no less. Only now, after talks blew up, did we learn that this is also about expropriating land on a large scale. That does not reconcile with the agreement.

THE JEWISH PRESS

JERUSALEM – A report released last week by the radical left-wing Peace Now movement claims that during the nine months of negations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority the Netanyahu Government promoted plans and tenders for at least 13,851 housing units in Judea and Samaria and east Jerusalem, an average of 50 units per day and an unprecedented 1,540 units per month. Responding to this report, the Yesha Council, the umbrella organization of municipal councils of Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, stated that this report was part of an effort by Peace Now to malign the State of Israel. Their response states that “while some of the facts that appear in the report are correct, others have been deliberately manipulated and distorted in order to mislead the reader.”
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By LAHAV HARKOV, JPOST

This week’s convention to vote on letting deputy defense minister call meetings on ‘ideological matters’ several times this year. Deputy Defense Minister Danny Danon voting at the Likud elections, June 30, 2013.

Deputy Defense Minister Danny Danon could receive key powers as head of the Likud central committee Wednesday, including calling votes on matters of diplomacy and security, if votes go his way at the party’s convention.

Likud released the agenda for its convention on Saturday night, two days after Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu agreed to make concessions to Danon, who has turned into his most active adversary in the party, even taking the prime minister to the Supreme Court over the central committee’s power.
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Had Obama not supported ’67 lines plus swaps, Israel would not now be painted as the bad guy. Ted Belman

In anonymous briefing to top columnist, members of Kerry’s team slam Netanyahu, empathize with Abbas, warn Palestine will rise ‘whether through violence or via int’l organizations’

American officials directly involved in the failed Israeli-Palestinian peace process over the last nine months gave a leading Israeli columnist a withering assessment of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s handling of the negotiations, indicated that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has completely given up on the prospect of a negotiated solution, and warned Israel that the Palestinians will achieve statehood come what may — either via international organizations or through violence.

Speaking on condition of anonymity to Nahum Barnea, a prominent columnist from Israel’s best-selling daily Yedioth Aharonoth, the officials highlighted Netanyahu’s ongoing settlement construction as the issue “largely to blame” for the failure of Secretary of State John Kerry’s July 2013-April 2014 effort to broker a permanent peace accord. Read more…

By Jonathan Tobin, COMMENTARY

After explaining Israel’s position:

Quoting the insightful Elliot Abrams, Jennifer Rubin  explains that pulling the plug on all U.S. aid to the Palestinians is not something the Netanyahu government wants. Some of the money goes to help fund the PA security forces that cooperate extensively with the Israelis. Without these funds the PA could collapse and leave the Israelis with the messy job of having to administer the territories as well as depriving them of the assistance that the Palestinians provide in keeping a lid on terror in the West Bank.

Thus, while the Israelis have been denouncing the PA in the last week since Abbas announced the deal with Hamas that put a formal end to the peace talks sponsored by Secretary of State John Kerry, they actually don’t want anyone in Washington to act on those complaints, at least with regard to the money that the U.S. funnels to the PA.

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