Film Exposé of J Street Reveals Decaying Core of Moral Narcissism

The film uses scholars, activists and carefully selected film clips to unravel the magical marketing mystery of J Street, which promotes an empty bottle as the elusive elixir of Middle East peace.

By Lori Lowenthal Marcus . JP

At 2013 J Street Conference this panel discussed how to subvert Birthright Israel trips, according to “The J Street Challenge” film. Photo Credit: Screen capture from J Street Challenge Is it really possible to get all of the most important information about the no-longer upstart, but still disingenuous J Street into a one hour film, one that provides sufficient background information for the uninitiated to be able to grasp just what could be wrong with the organization that promotes itself as “pro-peace, pro-Israel”? It is.

The Boston-based Americans for Peace and Tolerance have done it. Here’s how they did it with the film “The J Street Challenge.”

They used a secret weapon: truth.
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By Tuvia Brodie, INN

The subtitle of this essay is, ‘Measure-for-Measure’

Yair Lapid, the Head of Israel’s Yesh Atid political party, is also Israel’s Finance Minister. Since beginning his term as Israel’s premier ‘bean counter’ (March 2013), he has proclaimed his dedication to sound fiscal planning. He will control Israel’s expenses. He will punish welfare cheats. He will reduce Israel’s budget deficit.

He will save Israel.

He starts his path to Glory with those welfare cheats. He has found thousands of them.
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Jonathan Pollard is now in his 29th year in prison only because of
thinly camouflaged anti-Semitism.

The Jerusalem Post – Editorial – February 16, 2014

Odds are that convicted spy Jonathan Pollard is now in his 29th year
in prison only because of thinly camouflaged anti-Semitism. That is the learned opinion of James Woolsey, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

Woolsey has said so in interviews to Channel 10, as well as to The Jerusalem Post. He went on the record and without beating around the bush. He thus gave an authoritative voice to what many suspected and hinted at for years.

Woolsey may be the only higher-up in the US security establishment to head-on cite anti-Semitism, but he is not the only one to have called for Pollard’s release on the grounds that he had served an unreasonably and disproportionately long sentence in comparison to the time other spies for US allies spent behind bars.
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By Daniel Gordis, JPOST

Have you read a single book by a committed Palestinian who says that just as the Palestinians have a right to a state, so too do the Jews, and it’s time for Palestinians to recognize Israel as a Jewish state? Neither have I.

In his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Humboldt’s Gift, Saul Bellow’s main character Von Humboldt Fleisher is the consummate American. He cares about America more than anything else. He also reads voraciously, but the more he reads, the more despondent he becomes – because he’s not seeking that sort of complexity. He wants a simpler universe. “History,” Bellow says of Humboldt the American, “was a nightmare during which he was trying to get a good night’s sleep.” Fifty years before Bellow’s novel, in 1907, Ze’ev Jabotinsky wrote his third and final play, A Strange Land. In it, he introduces the young Russian Jew, Gonta, just back from several years in America. Gonta had gone to America “to forget,” he says. And when asked what it was that he was hoping to forget, he responds, “Who I was.” Read more…

By Ted Belman

US Framework to Demand that PA Recognize Israel as Jewish State

US Ambassador Dan Shapiro declares that PA must recognize Israel under framework agreement – despite their open opposition to it.

This bothers the hell out of me. Same goes for security discussions. Same goes for Kerry’s recent statement that supports Netanyahu’s contention that no Jews will be uprooted.

Why? Because underlying such statements is the fact that they presuppose Israel will agree to borders based on ’67 lines with swaps so that the major settlements blocks remain part of Israel. Under that formula we are already told that 150,000 Jews would end up living in Palestine. And mark my words, it presupposes that Jerusalem will be divided.

By Sima Kadmon, YNET NEWS

Op-ed: Yair Lapid sees the ‘equal share’ law as a historic triumph, but even he knows it doesn’t consider seculars and haredim equal.

On Tuesday, Netanyahu asked his people to summon Lapid. He was looking for a way out. A compromise which would make him look the way he likes to look: Okay with everyone.

But the attempt to get Lapid, Bennett and Lieberman to sit down, in order to formulate something that everyone would accept, failed. Lapid refused to show up. “There is nothing to discuss,” he said. “There will be no compromise.”

I had no doubts, Lapid explains, for the simple reason that I had announced that without criminal sanctions we would disband the government. The moment that was said out loud, the indecision was over. I apologize to Lieberman for the plagiarism, but I am also a man of my word.
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Haaretz

[..] Earlier on Thursday, Abbas’ spokesman said that the Palestinians “will not accept any agreement, whether a framework or a final deal, unless it includes the firm Palestinian and Arab positions that are based on international resolutions.”

In a statement published by the official Palestinian news agency WAFA, Nabil Abu Rudeineh repeated demands that east Jerusalem must be the capital of a future Palestinian state whose borders are based in the 1967 lines, that Israeli settlements are illegal, that Palestinian prisoners must be released and that there must be a “just solution” to the issue of Palestinian refugees.

Abu Rudeineh also restated Palestinian opposition to recognizing Israel as a Jewish state, a key Israeli demand.
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[WhatsApp – The inside story]

Deal that translates into about 11% of social networking company’s value will be its largest acquisition

BY BARBARA ORTUTAY February 20, 2014,

NEW YORK (AP) — Facebook is buying mobile messaging service WhatsApp for $19 billion in cash and stock, by far the company’s largest acquisition and bigger than any that Google, Microsoft or Apple have ever done.

The world’s biggest social networking company said Wednesday that it is paying $12 billion in Facebook stock and $4 billion in cash for WhatsApp. In addition, the app’s founders and employees — 55 in all — will be granted restricted stock worth $3 billion that will vest over four years after the deal closes.

The deal translates to roughly 11 percent of Facebook’s market value. In comparison, Google’s biggest deal was its $12.5 billion purchase of Motorola Mobility, while Microsoft’s largest was Skype at $8.5 billion. Apple, meanwhile, has never done a deal above $1 billion.
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by Mark Steyn

Paris 2012: Jewish parents and teachers try to determine whether it’s safe for pupils to leave the school on the day four Jews are killed in Toulouse by one of Abe Foxman’s “anti-government, anti-immigration, neo-Nazi nationalists” – or, as his friends call him, Mohammed.

When my troubles with the Canadian Islamic Congress and the “human rights” commissions began up north, I quickly learned something my comrade Ezra Levant was already well up to speed on – that Canada’s “official Jews” (as he calls them) were among the most useless people on the planet. Under Bernie Farber, for example, the Canadian Jewish Congress was obsessive about the last three neo-Nazi losers living in their mum’s basement and contributing unread blog posts to obscure “white supremacist” websites. But it had nothing to say about the broad-daylight mass Jew-hatred and, indeed, brazen incitement to murder of large groups of people parading through downtown Calgary, Toronto and Montreal. Farber & Co were cardboard warriors, capable only of fighting the battles others had already won long ago.
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Obama to Erdogan: Resolve crisis with Israel

Kerry: Evictions of Jews May Not be Required

PA Official: Abbas Ready for Israel as a Jewish State

Hareidi Media Reacts as Criminal Sanctions Voted In

Robert Spencer, JIHAD WATCH 

We tried to tell you. From The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War On America, by Pamela Geller with Robert Spencer:

Early on in his campaign, Obama named Robert Malley one of his primary foreign policy advisers – to the immediate consternation of Israeli officials. One Israeli security official noted in February 2008: “We are noting with concern some of Obama’s picks as advisers, particularly Robert Malley, who has expressed sympathy to Hamas and Hizbullah and offered accounts of Israeli-Palestinian negotiations that don’t jibe with the facts.”

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By Ted Belman,

Donate to the JUDEA SAMARIA FUND. Here’s why.

I use Israpundit to defend Israel and to assert its historical and legal rights to Judea and Samaria. I also use it to confront the lies emanating from the Arab world, the diplomatic world and the main-stream media.

Israel is in need of all the help it can get.

With the rise of antisemitism, the attempts to deligitimate and demonize Israel, the growth of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions Movement, known as BDS and the anti-Israel propaganda on American campuses, the need is urgent.

I work with various NGO’s in Israel who are fighting the same battle. They are accomplishing great things with the little money they have managed to raise. They produce an enormous bang for their buck.

I want to use the funds donated to further support their work.
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…It took Williams much of an opinion of 5,000 words to sketch the sleaziness, the slyness of the semantic evasions, by which the government broke its promises. To those of us invested in both the American Constitution and the Jewish struggle, it was a heart-breaking picture.

By Seth Lipsky, HAARETZ.

Jonathan Pollard is in the news again this week, after our former director of Central Intelligence, James Woolsey, told Israel’s Channel 10 that he suspects anti-Semitism could be a factor in America’s refusal to release the spy from his life sentence. I hadn’t ever heard such a blunt statement from any high government officer. It sent me back to the court record – and to Shakespeare’s Macbeth, in which the witches introduce the drama with the warning that “fair is foul, and foul is fair.”

Macbeth got into it because of a memorable dissenting opinion by a judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. That’s the bench sometimes referred to as the mini-Supreme Court, in that it gets a lot of the disputes that directly involve the federal government. It was the court that spurned Pollard’s appeal for a new sentencing hearing and, in effect, doomed him to a life sentence on a plea bargain on a single count.
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Phone calls between Merkel and Netanyahu have degenerated into shouting while discussing Israeli policies toward Palestinians, according to Der Spiegel.

HAARETZ

Eleven civilians, seven policemen died in what was Ukraine’s bloodiest day since it gained independence in 1991.

‘
Jerusalem, February 18, 2014…

Israeli Ministers Avigdor Liberman, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Tzipy Linvi, Minister of Justice and Dr. Yuval Steinitz, Minister of Intelligence and Strategic Affairs, as well as Opposition Leader Yitzhak Herzog and Mayor of Jerusalem Nir Barkat addressed leaders of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations in briefings today in Jerusalem.  The group also attended a discussion at the Knesset with members of the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee.

Foreign Minister Liberman issued a dramatic call for Israel to contribute one million dollars per day for Jewish education abroad and shared his vision that an additional 3.5 million Jews from the Diaspora move to Israel in the coming years in order to boost the population of Israel to more than 10 million.
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BY Clare Lopez, CENTER FOR SECURITY POLICY

Muslim Brotherhood affiliates scored a major victory in their efforts to degrade U.S. national security measures in early February 2014 when the Obama administration decided to override by fiat portions of the U.S. Criminal Code and immigration policy pertaining to individuals who provide “material support to terrorism.”

As published in the Federal Register on February 5, 2014, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of State issued a joint notice that, henceforth, certain asylum seekers and refugees who only provided “limited material support” to terrorism would be allowed into the U.S.

The earlier law as written, The Real ID Law of 2005, states quite explicitly that the definition of engaging in terrorist activity includes: Read more…