Jonathan S. Tobin..Commentary Magazine..
17 December ’13..

One of the leading talking points of Israel-bashers these days is the treatment of African economic migrants who have illegally crossed into the Jewish state. Nearly 60,000 of these people who are for the most part from the Sudan or Eritrea and have no ties to the country or claim on its people have made their way to Israel in the last several years. In a nation of only seven million people living in a country the size of New Jersey, that’s the equivalent of about 2.7 million illegal immigrants showing up in the Garden State. As such, a group of this size arriving uninvited present a huge problem for any nation, even one whose entire identity is based on immigration, as is Israel’s. Read more…

NGO Monitor said “legislative proposals that go beyond democratic transparency and accountability for these NGOs are ill advised, not enforceable, and damage Israel’s vital national interests.” I beg to differ. at least I hope they’re not right. Israel doesn’t exist to defend democracy but to defend itself. I don’t want Israel to be as “democratic” as European countries. I want Israel to defend itself from subversion, government financed or otherwise. I know that Weinstein also says unenforceable. But is it? A democracy can impose martial law or restrict freedoms to a lesser extent based on its threat appraisal. It is commonly acknowledged that the movement to deligitimate Israel and Zionism is an existential threat to the State of Israel. Surely this is enough justification for the legislation. If anyone can find a legal opinion on the matter, cough it up. Ted Belman

Israelis are debating the role of foreign government funding for political advocacy NGOs, including proposed legislation that would impose major penalties on groups that support BDS and “lawfare.”

As NGO Monitor has repeatedly stated, legislative proposals that go beyond democratic transparency and accountability for these NGOs are ill advised, not enforceable, and damage Israel’s vital national interests. At the same time, the concerns about European government-funded political warfare must be taken seriously.
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By Ben Caspit, Al Monitor

Despite the relative quiet, Israel keeps a very watchful eye on Hamas. The security assessments in Israel place Hamas at one of its most serious nadir points. High-ranking Israeli security officials quote what Hamas militants are saying in closed forums: “We have moved from growth to survival mode.” Hamas focuses squarely on surviving and holding on to power. It desperately attempts to improve the economy, urgently seeking new diplomatic, logistical and military support because all its other crutches — Egypt, Syria and Iran — snapped almost simultaneously.

Israeli security official analyzed Hamas’ situation, describing it in almost historical terms. “Until recently, Hamas spoke with pathos and conviction about achieving the goal ‘in our time,’” he observed, “but ever since Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi was ousted and the Muslim Brotherhood was banished from power in Egypt, this has become a whole new ball game. Almost overnight, the momentum has switched into defeat, the euphoria dissipated and replaced by concern verging on panic.”
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Israel should never tolerate such threats. No doubt the EU told the PA to drop its demand for a freeze on settlement construction and that the EU would use economic pressure to create the freeze. The EU also encourages and finances Palestinians encroachment into Area C in violation of Oslo.How dare they insist that negotiations end in a deal. The EU also finances activities of subversive NGO’s.

A party to negotiations always has the right to reject any offers made. The EU and the US are trying to ram ’67 lines plus swaps down our throats. Some negotiations! They are forcing us to walk the plank. We should never have got on the plank, otherwise known as agreed to negotiate, in the first place. The outcome has largely been predetermined without out consent. Israel must announce settlement construction and follow through with it. We can’t allow ourselves to be dictated to. Its time to bite the bullet. Ted Belman

Israel Hayom

The European Union yesterday said it had asked Israel not to announce any new West Bank settlement construction following an expected Palestinian prisoner release, warning it would be blamed for any resulting failure in the Mideast peace talks.
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17th and 18th century anti-clerical European philosophers started the downward slope from Old Testament values to post-modernity’s relative morality.

By Prof Paul Eidelberg, INN

The Jewish “Old Testament” provided America’s moral compass via the Declaration of Independence.

No doubt Arab student organizations and Arab faculty, funded partly by Arab states such as Saudi Arabia, are contributing to the eruption of anti-Semitism on US campuses. This antisemitism is magnified by the atheism that dominates the Liberal-Left in academia.

However, it needs to be emphasized that the backdrop of this antisemitism involves the moral relativism that has permeated American “higher” education” since the early 20th century. It was then that European doctrines, such as German Historicism (historical relativism) and English Positivism, invaded academia along with evolutionary Darwinism.
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[Shoebat published Hillary’s Brotherhood Connection: More Coming… two days ago.]

By Walid Shoebat and Ben Barrack

The recent claims attributed to the wife of ousted Egyptian president Mohammed Mursi are shocking – very shocking. If they are true, they would be extremely damaging to the Obama administration generally but perhaps even more so, to Bill and Hillary Clinton. Naglaa Mahmoud is reported to have divulged some extremely specific details. While we wait to see the story develop, we thought we’d research secondary evidence in an attempt to discredit or bolster Mahmoud’s charges.

Hillary and Mursi: Close friends since the 1980?s? Read more…

By EREZ WINNER, JPOST

Dear Mr. Secretary of State,

We don’t know each other personally, but in my position as assistant to the IDF chief of General Staff, I have been closely following your every move. When you met, as a senator, with Bashar Assad in Damascus, I was flabbergasted when you proclaimed that this was a great opportunity to make peace with Syria’s modern and moderate leader.

Over the past few months, I’ve been listening very closely to your speeches and statements about events in the Middle East and what actions you think Israel should take. I would like to describe to you a slightly different reality, one which I’ve experienced through the various senior IDF positions I’ve held, through the military reserve duty which I still actively carry out and from living with my family in Beit Horon, a community situated between Jerusalem and Modi’in (you’d probably call it a West Bank settlement) where we have been living alongside Palestinian neighbors for many years.
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By Elad Benari, INN

An Iranian political analyst claimed last week that if a deal between Iran and the West over Iran’s nuclear program had not been reached in Geneva, Iran would have annihilated Israel.

The comments by Mohammad Sadeq Al-Hosseini, a former political advisor to Iranian President Khatami, aired on Syrian News TV on December 11. They were translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI).

In fact, said Al-Hosseini, had a deal not been reached in Geneva, President Barack Obama would have had to kiss the hands of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah in order to prevent an Iranian attack on Israel.

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[Jewish leaders refuse to accuse Muslims or Islam for the rise in antisemitism today.]

By Joanne Hill, Jewish Tribune

Dr. Andrew Bostom, author of The Legacy of Jihad, The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism and Sharia Versus Freedom, has a new monograph, The Mufti’s Islamic Jew-Hatred: What the Nazis Learned from the ‘Muslim Pope.’

Jewish and non-Jewish political and religious leaders are in denial about the real source of Islamic antisemitism, according to Dr. Andrew Bostom.

Bostom is the author of The Legacy of Jihad, The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism and Sharia Versus Freedom. His new monograph, The Mufti’s Islamic Jew-Hatred: What the Nazis Learned from the ‘Muslim Pope,’ consists of the first authoritative English translation of a 1937 religious proclamation by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, followed by Bostom’s analysis and footnotes.

The Jewish Tribune interviewed Bostom by phone from Rhode Island after his appearance at an event in Toronto held by the Jewish Defence League. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
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by David P. Goldman, PJ Media

http://www.meforum.org/3698/settlements

Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria, the misnamed occupied territories, are not the obstacle to peace between Israelis and Palestinians. They are the acid test of peace. To argue that peace is conceivable unless the bulk of the settlements remain in place constitutes stupidity or hypocrisy. Leave aside the issue of whether Jews have the right to live in the historic homeland of the Jewish people. Ignore the fact that the settlers live overwhelmingly on what was waste land and turned into gardens, vineyards, and industries which have uplifted the lives of Palestinian Arabs more than all the aid that has passed through (or rather stuck to) the fingers of the kleptocrats of the PA. Leave aside also Israel’s requirement for defensible borders: that is a critical issue but not identical to the continued presence of settlements. Read more…

CHLOE VALDARY PRODUCED AND NARRATED THIS VIDEO.

By William Jacobson, Legal Insurrection

historic highs and cuts across both political parties. American civil and political society stands with Israel.

The hatred of Israel is not a significant part of our national landscape, except in some parts of academia and the BDS movement.
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There is nothing so paralysing as a fear borne of fatalism. When our power, as at all our greatest moments, is generated primarily by a confidence in our values, then the failure any longer to believe in those values is capable of shutting us down

By Robin Shepherd, COMMENTATER

INSS Insight No. 499, December 17, 2013
Itamar Rabinovich

The transition to a new phase in the Syrian civil war was marked by the regime’s victory in al-Qusayr in June 2013. A massive effort by Iran and its proxy, Hizbollah, secured control of a strategic location and was followed by slow, gradual advances in other areas. The fighting continues and opposition groups have scored achievements, but overall the regime is moving ahead in its effort to obtain control of Syria’s central axis from Damascus to Aleppo, with extensions westward towards the Alawite region and the coast and southward in the direction of Daraa. The victory in Qalamun near the Lebanese border was the regime’s latest achievement.
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In 2009 I wrote Obama intends to impose a solution. Then in Aug 2013, I wrote How Obama boxed Netanyahu in to an imposed solution and Obama to impose a solution if necessary . They are a little redundant but each offers new evidence. Glick says its about to happen. Ted Belman

By CAROLINE B. GLICK, JPOST

Facing the Palestinians’ continued defiance of the very notion of peaceful coexistence with Israel, Kerry is planning to present his own peace deal next month and try to force Israel to accept it. Kerry and Netanyahu in Jerusalem,

There was a ghoulish creepiness to US Secretary of State John Kerry’s visit to Israel last week. Here we were, beset by the greatest winter storm in a hundred years. All roads to Jerusalem were sealed off. Tens of thousands of Jerusalemites and residents of surrounding areas were locked down in their houses, without power, heat, telephone service or water.
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Israel must never be betrayed

By MICHELE BACHMANN, JPOST

Unfortunately, recent actions of the Obama administration represent a sharp reversal of the historical precedent of unshakable support to the Jewish state.

Since its rebirth on May 15, 1948, Israel has stood as an immensely strong democratic ally, and unqualifiedly a best friend to the United States of America.

Unfortunately, recent actions of the Obama administration represent a sharp reversal of the historical precedent of unshakable support to the Jewish state, and have left Israel vulnerable and more isolated in the region than ever before in its history.
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by Efraim Inbar, Israel Hayom

The media reported that Mahmoud Abbas, head of the Palestinian Authority (PA), rejected the peace proposals submitted by US Secretary of State John Kerry. The Palestinians leaked that Abbas sent a letter to Kerry reiterating his complete opposition to the demand to recognize Israel as a Jewish state. This was declared a “red line” that the Palestinians will not cross.

This “red line” is not just about semantics, but rather the essence of the conflict. The Palestinian position amounts to denying the Jews the right to establish their state in their homeland. It also indicates without any doubt that the Palestinians, despite the conventional wisdom, are not ready to reach a historic compromise with Zionism, the Jewish national revival movement. Therefore, a stable peace based on mutual recognition and ending all demands is not in the cards. The weak PA seems to accept partition of Mandatory Palestine into two states – perhaps in accordance with the PLO’s stages approach – but it still refrains from accepting the legitimacy of the Zionist enterprise.
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I introduced Chloe to my readers a couple of years ago and raised some money for her. Little did I realize how unique she was. She has accomplished a great deal since then while studying toward an undergraduate degree. In reading this article I am amazed how knowledgeable she is given her young years. Read it carefully. Ted Belman

BY CHLOE VALDARY, INN

Historical Contexts: Brewing a Deadly Potion

Violins and Gas Chambers

In 1892, cofounder of the World Zionist Organization and social critic Max Nordau wrote his most famous work, Degeneration, which presented a scathing critique of European society as it devolved into what he described as a “horrible train of murder, incendiarism, rapine, [and] torture.” Nordau systematically analyzed and dismantled theories put forth by elite thinkers in his time, such as Nietzsche and Tolstoy. Specifically, Nietzsche’s premise, that, ‘there is no good and there is no evil,’ and his praise of sin as man’s ‘great consolation,’ was what Nordau found repugnant. The explicit approval of such notions was visible in European art and literature. In French society, for example, the “contempt for traditional views and customs of morality” led to conspicuous consumption and a devaluation of moral virtue, and by extent, a deterioration of societal structures which had till then promoted social cohesion.
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By S. Fred Singer, WASHINGTON TIMES

by Michael Freund, The Jerusalem Post

Torrential rains and heavy snow were not the only forms of precipitation to strike the Jewish state last week, leaving the country gripped with fear and trepidation. Adding insult to injury, US Secretary of State John Kerry decided to pay yet another visit to the region, this time to hurl a wad of New England spit upon one of Israel’s most basic and essential security needs.

According to various press reports, Kerry put forward a proposal under which Israel would forgo sovereignty over the Jordan Valley and instead maintain a security presence in the area for 10 to 15 years, one that would ostensibly be bolstered by various technological gizmos designed to enhance border defense.

Of all the dumb and dangerous designs to emerge from the depths of the US State Department, Kerry’s latest scheme is one of the more dreadful duds in recent memory.
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