by Daniel Pipes

Since General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi overthrew Mohamed Morsi on July 3, the military-led government has been engaged in a ferocious crackdown of the Muslim Brotherhood and more broadly of Islamists (though some, like the Salafis of the Nour party, playing their hand carefully, have generally avoided trouble so far).

Not only has this assault been violent, with hundreds of deaths, and legal, with the Brotherhood banned and its top leadership jailed, but it has also been broadly cultural, economic, and religious. Even the mildest approbation of the Muslim Brotherhood can get one in trouble, with one’s neighbors if not with the state. A very large swath of the population supports the crackdown and pushes for it. A few of the many, many examples:
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Confronting anti-Semitism and Israel hatred in the UK

Anyone who spends a lot of time in Israel or with Israelis living in Europe or the USA will know that a very sizable number (especially those under 40) have been indoctrinated with left-wing (and at times extremely anti-Zionist) views that would put most Guardian readers to shame. It can also be surprising to discover, given that they are effectively ‘living in the eye of the storm’, how little those same Israelis know of the extent to which Islamists hate them and want them destroyed.

This is especially true of many in Tel Aviv. The main stream Israeli newspapers and TV channels are not much different to those in the UK both in their left-wing bias and in covering up Jihadist activities around the world (e.g. still no main stream comment anywhere on theJihadist suicide bombing in Beijing which the BBC -when it mentioned it –  tried to convince viewers was down to ‘democracy dissidents’).

By MARTIN SHERMAN, JPOST

The first order of business would be to devise and deploy a political “Iron Dome” to protect Israel from the incoming barrages of delegitimization and demonization. Israeli government at the Knesset, April 22, 2013.

The State of Israel, the country that represents Jews throughout the world as much as its citizens, is slowly but surely abdicating its role by its action or perhaps better said inaction vis-a-vis public diplomacy. What has happened to the leadership of the past, men and women who were not afraid to state their minds and fight for what has always been rightfully ours? We are no longer respected and are at the mercy of a leftist faction and media who will stop at nothing to help in our destruction. – Naomi Romm, in a Facebook response to my previous column, “Dereliction of Duty”

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By Caroline Glick, JWR

President Barack Obama views lies as legitimate political tools. He uses lies strategically to accomplish through mendacity what he could never achieve through honest means.

Obama lies in both domestic and foreign policy. On the domestic front, despite Obama’s repeated promises that ObamaCare would not threaten anyone’s existing health insurance policies, over the past two weeks, millions Americans have received notices from their health insurance companies that their policies have been cancelled because they don’t abide by ObamaCare’s requirements.

The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board explained that Obama’s repetition of this lie was not an oversight. It was a deliberate means of lulling into complacency these Americans, who opted to buy their insurance themselves on the open market in order to stick them with the burden of underwriting ObamaCare.
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Arutz Sheva

At the Jewish National Fund (JNF) AnnualConference, Chairman of the Board Ronald Lauder decried global anti-Semitism and called for realism in confronting threats to Israel. However, concerns have been raised about JNF’s commitment to confronting threats to Jewish land ownership in Israel.

[..]

However, JNF resolve in fulfilling its charter mission of purchasing the land of Israel for the Jewish people has been questioned lately.

Following pressure from Bedouin land thieves, the JNF stopped a forestation project in the Negev in early 2012, in opposition to its stated mission of redeeming the land of Israel. Read more…

New English Review

Jerry Gordon, the author of The West Speaks, a collection of his more prominent interviews, interviews Dr Daniel Mandel, Director of the Z0A Center for Middle East Policy.

Gordon: To begin why did the Obama Administration pressure Israel for a new round of negotiations with the Palestinians, the first in three years?

Mandel: I think it was Abba Eban who once said of the British Foreign Office that its traditions mature early and die hard. That’s what you have in successive American administrations regarding Oslo. It’s a paradigm from which people seemingly can’t escape. The idea that here are two negotiating partners who are willing and able to conclude a negotiated and genuine peace resulting in a peaceful Palestinian state alongside Israel is fiction. It isn’t going to happen because nothing that has caused the failures of the past seventeen years has actually changed. This is persistence with a failed paradigm. John Kerry has clocked up a number of frequent flier miles since becoming Secretary of State to pursue this venture, this Sisyphean task of Middle East peace. There has clearly been a great deal of American pressure behind the scenes to bring about an Israeli unilateral concession to entice the Palestinian Authority –– not to do anything in return, not to make a concession of its own, merely to return to the talks.
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By Anne Bayefsky, FOX NEWS

This week Israel caved in to European and American pressure to further subject itself to egregious discrimination at the United Nations. The move was in response to a twisted appeal to Israel to preserve the fiction of a U.N. human rights system committed to equality.

On October 29, 2013, Israel ended 18-months of non-participation with U.N. human rights mechanisms that are dedicated to its demonization and defeat.

The surrender spawned victory laps by the U.N., the State Department and bigots in foreign ministries across Europe.
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Lapid: “How can this country be Jewish if it also wants to be a democracy?” • Ultra-Orthodox parties: “This bypasses rabbinical authority.”

Hezi Sternlicht, Gideon Allon and Yehuda Shlezinger, ISRAEL HAYOM

Following his party’s advancement of the civil marriage bill, Finance Minister and Yesh Atid Chairman Yair Lapid addressed the issue of religion and state Tuesday at the Prime Minister’s Conference on Partnership and Growth at Tel Aviv University, which dealt with the integration of minorities into the economy.
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By: Rabbi Shmuley Boteach

Rabbi Eric Yoffie is one of those courageous souls, prepared to throw stones while living in a glass house. Not content to criticize the Chabad movement as offering feel-good, commitment-free, money-chasing Judaism (“Reform rabbis tell me of Chabad rabbis who come into their communities and spend most of their time cultivating a handful of very wealthy people”), the former head of American Reform Judaism has now turned his sites on Sheldon Adelson, the global Jewish philanthropist, who he believes should be all but ostracized from Jewish communal dialogue (“Perhaps the time has come for important leaders of our community to decline invitations to appear at Mr. Adelson’s side.”)

I do not know Rabbi Yoffie but mutual acquaintances tell me he is a good, measured, and decent man. But surely he is aware that radical attacks on movements and individuals with impeccable credentials of dedication to the Jewish community, however imperfect, will lead others to examine his own record of leadership, particularly given the reverberations of the recent Pew Research report that paints so devastating a portrait of the state of Reform Jewry of which Yoffie, according to his Wikipedia page, served as “unchallenged head… from 1996 to 2012.”
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by Michael Ordman

Discover TV

October 29, 2013 – It is 6 times larger than the Bakken, 17 times the size of the Marcellus formation, and 80 times larger than the Eagle Ford shale.All told the recent discovery outside a sleepy Australian town contains more black gold than in all of Iran, Iraq, Canada, or Venezuela.

The current estimates of 233 billion barrels are just 30 billion barrels shy of the estimated reserves in all of Saudi Arabia.

Now, one renowned international energy expert predicts the proven reserves will be much bigger.

“The find may land at 300 or 400 billion barrels, making it one of the greatest unconventional oil discoveries any of us will see in our lifetimes,” says Dr. Kent Moors and advisor to six of the top 10 oil producers and active consultant to 20 world governments. Read more…

By JPOST EDITORIAL

Israel has switched tack and 2 days ago defended its record in a UNHRC hearing that descended into a kangaroo court.

Israel had compelling reasons to avoid any dealings with the misnamed UN Human Rights Council. Israel, and has, indeed stayed away from UNHRC forums since March, 2012. But on Tuesday, Israel relented, despite the absence of compelling reasons for an about-face.

Fellow democracies, which hardly dominate the council, had exerted excruciating pressure on Israel to cooperate with the UNHRC, lest it be seen as setting a precedent for rogue regimes.
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Ted Belman. Washington is determined to divide Jerusalem and produce an agreement based on ’67 lines plus swaps. So much for Bibi thinking he will be able to build in areas we know we are going to keep, in exchange for agreeing to the prisoner release. America is dictating. We have lost our independence. We must not succumb to American pressure. End the peace process.

Herb Keinon says US knew of settlement construction plans

Yitzhak Benhorin, YNET

WASHINGTON – US State Department Spokesperson Jen Psaki responded Wednesday to Israel’s announcement of building 1,500 units in east Jerusalem saying “We do not consider continued settlement activity or east Jerusalem construction to be steps that create a positive environment for the negotiations.”

At no time in the course of pursuing negotiations toward a two-state solution have we condoned settlement activity or east Jerusalem construction,” she added.
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by Michael Freund, JPOST

Even for an electorate that has grown accustomed to profound political hypocrisy, the Israeli government’s release of Palestinian prisoners this week proved to be breathtakingly scandalous and disturbing.

Consider the following: among the 26 Palestinian thugs, murderers and terrorists set free was Kassem Hazem Shabir, who picked up an axe and struck Yitzhak Rotenberg, a 67-yearold Holocaust survivor, in the back of the head, smashing his skull and killing him together with an accomplice in March 1994.

Rotenberg, a Polish Jew, had survived the horrors of the Sobibor death camp where most of his family was murdered before escaping to join the anti-Nazi resistance. After the war, he was interred by the British for attempting to move to the Land of Israel, but later managed to join the Israeli army and take part in the 1948 War of Independence.
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IMRA: The fifth prototype of the Sukhoi T-50, a multi-role fifth generation aircraft with stealth technologies and nanotechnology-based developments which will be the core of Russia’s future fleet of fighters, underwent a successful test flight

Ami Rojkes Dombe, Israel Defense News 30/10/2013

Flight cadets and reserve fighter pilots should probably learn about the
Sukhoi T-50 closely, as it will likely be flown by pilots of Arabian states
across the skies of the Middle East in the not-too-distant future. As
Russia’s future fighter, it is intended to compete with the US F-35, and
countries that the US is not fond of will stand in line at the gates of
Sukhoi’s factories. And yes, the T-50 is expected to be a stealth fighter.

The Moscow Times reported that according to the aircraft manufacturer
Sukhoi, the fifth prototype of the T-50 (also known as Pak Fa) flew for the
first time at the production plant in a Far East country.
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Jonathan S. Tobin, COMMENTARY

As the New York Times reports today, Naftali Bennett, the head of the right-wing Habayit Hayehudi Party, is getting blasted in the Israeli media as a hypocrite for opposing the Israeli government’s decision to honor its promise to release more Palestinian terrorist murderers. Bennett happens to be a member of that government and his critics may have a point when they say that if he is as outraged about the release as he purports to be, he can always resign his Cabinet post. It is in that context that the Times and other outlets prefer to view the protests about the freeing of these killers as mere exploitation of the anguish of the families of their victims rather than an expression of genuine outrage, as it probably deserved to be understood.
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By Ari Yashar, Arutz Sheva Staff

As negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority continue amid international calls for a 23rd Arab state in the Judea and Samaria (West Bank) region – which would leave Israel with the territory it held prior to the 1967 Six-Day War – familiar calls from within Israel are being heard warning of the “indefensible borders” the Jewish State would be left with in such an eventuality.

It is not a new claim. Israel’s former Foreign Minister Abba Eban famously referred to the so-called “’67 borders” as “Auschwitz borders,” provocatively expressing the fears of many Israelis that a return to the 1949 Armistice lines would leave them perilously vulnerable to attack in a neighborhood which has proven all too often to be hostile to their very presence.
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