By Ted Belman

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By Sarah Honig

Kerry & Indyk – a succession of foreign emissaries and politicos came and went but israel consistently recoiled from the notion of shuttle diplomacy, go-betweens or overseers such as Indyk.With the Syrian thriller and its spin-off machinations keeping us at the edge of our seats, who had time to at all notice much less care about the volubility of Ramallah’s honchos?

Too much distracting din made it difficult to pay much mind to Mahmoud Abbas and his Palestinian Authority cronies. But this didn’t keep them from babbling and what they revealed deserved our attention – even if the utterances in question weren’t the sort that the more politically correct in our midst prefer we dwell on.

The Palestinian al-Hayat al-Jadida daily quoted Abbas as bluntly issuing the following ultimatum when addressing a visiting Arab athletic delegation: “We told the present Israeli negotiators that if you want to go back on what was agreed with [former Israeli premier Ehud] Olmert, we will go back on our agreement for a land swap and so we will ask for all of the 1967 land as is.”
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by Stu Bykofsky, Philadelphia Daily News

A RELIGIOUS minority is being persecuted, driven from their homes, robbed, raped, murdered.

From all the faux Islamophobia hysteria, you’d think it was Muslims.

It’s Christians, under a death sentence in parts of the Muslim world. Not in every Muslim country, but in too many.

The world remains remarkably, willfully blind and mute as the faithful of the world’s largest religion are blown apart by followers of the world’s second-largest religion.

Precise Christian persecution “figures are hard to come by,” says Kiri Kankhwende, spokesman for Christian Solidarity Worldwide, in the United Kingdom. Precise or not, things have rarely been worse. And who cares?
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GLICK’S ARGUMENT IS NOT TERRIBLY CONVINCING. SHE DOES AND DOES NOT THINK ISRAEL CAN STAND UP TO AMERICAN PRESSURE ON MOST THINGS. YORAM ETTINGER BEGS TO DIFFER. PRIME MINISTERS ARE ELECTED TO STAND UP TO PRESSURE AND OFTEN HAVE. MARTIN SHERMAN AGREES WITH HIM. BUT THAT DOESN’T MEAN SHE IS WRONG. TED BELMAN

By Caroline Glick, JPOST

US President Barack Obama’s rapidly changing positions on Syria have produced many odd spectacles.

One of odder ones was the sight of hundreds of lobbyists from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee fanning out on Capitol Hill to lobby members of the House and Senate to support Obama’s plan to launch what Secretary of State John Kerry called “unbelievably small” air strikes against empty regime controlled buildings in Syria.

AIPAC officials claimed they were doing this because the air strikes would help Israel.

But this claim was easily undone. Obama and Kerry insisted nothing the US would do would have any impact on the outcome of the Syrian civil war. This was supposed to be the strikes’ selling point. But by launching worthless strikes, Obama was poised to wreck America’s deterrent posture, transforming the world’s superpower into an international joke.
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By JPOST EDITORIAL

Despite Obama’s claims to the contrary, solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not a solution to the region’s instability.

In his speech this week before the UN General Assembly, US President Barack Obama gave special attention to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

According to Obama this conflict – along with Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons – is central to peace and stability in the region. Several times during his speech he repeated this mantra.

In the opening to the central, major section of his speech, for instance, Obama declared, “While these issues [Iran and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict] are not the cause of all the region’s problems, they have been a major source of instability for far too long, and resolving them can help serve as a foundation for a broader peace.”
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By Arlene Kushner, FPM

Mahmoud Abbas – putative president of the Palestinian Authority – addressed the UN General Assembly on Thursday, focusing on the negotiations between the PA and Israel. How eminently reasonable was the tone he attempted to project. There he stood on the dais, expressing his intention to work hard for peace, even pleading for peace.

“Our quest is supportive of the path of peace,” he assured those assembled.

“I affirm before you that… we shall continue [the negotiations] in good faith and with open minds, strong determination and an insistence on success…we shall …foster the most conducive atmosphere for the continuation of these negotiations…”

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Liz Sly and Karen DeYoung, WaPo

BEIRUT — American hopes of winning more influence over Syria’s fractious rebel movement faded Wednesday after 11 of the biggest armed factions repudiated the Western-backed opposition coalition and announced the formation of a new alliance dedicated to creating an Islamic state.

The al-Qaeda-affiliated Jabhat al-Nusra, designated a terrorist organization by the United States, is the lead signatory of the new group, which will further complicate fledgling U.S. efforts to provide lethal aid to “moderate” rebels fighting to topple Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Others include the Tawheed Brigade, the biggest Free Syrian Army unit in the northern city of Aleppo; Liwa al-Islam, the largest rebel group in the capital, Damascus; and Ahrar al-Sham, the most successful nationwide franchise of mostly Syrian Salafist fighters. Collectively, the new front, which does not yet have a formal name but has been dubbed by its members the “Islamist Alliance,” claims to represent 75 percent of the rebels fighting to topple Assad. Read more…

By Jonah Goldberg, REAL CLEAR POLITICS

The only real accountability for the Benghazi scandal will have to come in 2016.

From the competing partisan reports and the congressional testimony of various officials this week, it seems fair to say that no actual crimes were committed (though you never know what you don’t know).

There were, in at least a figurative sense, criminal lapses in judgment by senior officials. Many of those lapses are recounted in the Accountability Review Board, or ARB, report. It found “systemic failures and leadership and management deficiencies at senior levels within two bureaus of the State Department” that “resulted in a special mission security posture that was inadequate for Benghazi and grossly inadequate to deal with the attack that took place.”
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By MICHAEL R. GORDON, NYT

UNITED NATIONS — The five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council have agreed on a resolution that will require Syria to give up its chemical weapons, but there will be no automatic penalties if the Syrians fail to comply, officials said Thursday.

Text of Draft United Nations Resolution on Syrian Chemical Weapons (September 27, 2013)

The agreement, hammered out after days of back-room negotiations, is a compromise among the United States, its allies and Russia about how to enforce the resolution, which would eliminate Syria’s chemical arms program.

But the deal, when approved by the 15 members of the Security Council, would amount to the most significant international diplomatic initiative of the Syrian civil war. It would also be a remarkable turn for President Obama, who had been pushing for a military strike on Syria just a few weeks ago before accepting a Russian proposal to have Syria give up its chemical arsenal.
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On the face of it, Russia’s active, aggressive and some say malevolent Middle East intervention bodes ill for the Jewish state.

‘Speech was not a speech of peace,’ says Yuval Steinitz, who also claims Israel managed to rain on Rouhani’s parade

Qatar aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood which it saw as the rising power. Obama did likewise.  In fact Obama and Qatar worked together in this gambit. Both have fallen along with the MB. To see how far Qatar has fallen, read my Dec 2012 post, Tiny Qatar casts a giant shadow.  A few months earlier I had written Obama’s Islamist connection and agenda .

See also, Meotti’s EXPOSÉ: Qatar’s takeover of Europe.

YAHOO NEWS

As far as snubs go, Egypt’s precipitous return of $2 billion in aid from Qatar earlier this week couldn’t have been any clearer. Then Egypt’s civil aviation ministry turned down a Qatar Airways request to increase the number of flights between the two countries. For weeks Egyptian authorities had been hounding Qatar’s flagship satellite news network Al Jazeera, storming its local offices, deporting its correspondents and forcing the station off the air.

Qatar, Egypt’s new leadership seems to be saying, is no longer a friend. And Egypt isn’t the only one: Libya, Turkey and Saudi Arabia all have, in one way or another, ganged up on Qatar. The tiny Persian Gulf nation that once seemed poised to take a decisive role in the politics of the Middle East by dint of its copious natural gas wealth and aggressive foreign policy was frequently said to be punching above its weight. Now it seems, others are punching back. Read more…

I think it important that many Ministers are calling for no Palestinian state now and such demands are making headlines. Little by little we will change the discourse. Ted Belman

INN

Housing Minister Uri Ariel reacted to Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’s Thursday speech at the United Nations’ General Assembly by saying, “Israel will continue to build anywhere in the state of Israel. In the Galilee, the Negev, Judea, Samaria (Shomron) and Jerusalem. Mahmoud Abbas is not the one to dictate to us how to behave in our capital city.”

The Oslo Syndrome has spread its catastrophic shadow on Netanyahu.

Mark Langfan, INN

On 5 September 1972, when barbaric Palestinian terrorists (funded by the then-terrorist paymaster, and now Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas), held Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympic 1972 Games captive, the then-Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir appealed to other countries to “save our citizens and condemn the unspeakable criminal acts committed.”
She also stated that “if we [Israel] should give in, then no Israeli anywhere in the world shall feel that his life is safe… it’s blackmail of the worst kind.”

On 1 August 2013, Tzipi Livni, speaking to Channel 10 News after meeting with PA negotiator Saeb Erekat in Washington earlier in the week, said that the 104 terrorists Israel agreed to free would be released in small groups – and only if the PA shows that it is serious during the negotiations.
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Ladies and Gentlemen,Excellencies, Ladies and Gentlemen,

I am honored to address you today, and for the first time in the name of the State of Palestine, before the United Nations General Assembly, after your historic decision last 29 November to raise Palestine’s status to that of an observer State. As representatives of your Governments and of your peoples, you have championed justice, right, and peace, and thereby affirmed your refusal of occupation, and stood for principles and ethics and on the side of peoples yearning for freedom. For this, I present you again today with my deepest thanks and gratitude, in the name of Palestine and of its people.

The Palestinian people celebrated this resolution, because they rightly felt that they did not stand alone in the world, but that the world stands with them, and because they realized that the result of your overwhelming vote meant that justice is still possible and that there still is room for hope.
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By Barry Rubin, PJ Media

Can it be more obvious? Thirteen Syrian rebel groups–including the most important in Aleppo and Damascus–demand an Islamist state in Syria and say they don’t care what the official rebel, U.S.-backed politicians say.

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By Josh Levitt, Algemeiner

French diplomat Marion Fesneau-Castaing punched an Israeli soldier in the face at the weekend prompting Israel’s Foreign Ministry to demand “an explanation of this blatant violation of diplomatic codes of conduct,” according to reports from AFP and Israel Hayom on Sunday.

Israel Hayom published footage of Fesneau-Castaing striking a helmeted border policeman on the chin with her fist. The punch was thrown on Friday, when IDF troops arrived to disperse a group of European diplomats as they tried to hand out tents and other equipment to Bedouin in Khirbet al-Makhul.
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Malaysia has 10 times as many illegals as Israel does and they are kicking them all out. How so. Their illegals aren’t claiming refugee status. In Israel the illegals claim refugee status which immediately puts the burden on Israel, according to an international treaty obligations, to give each one their day in Court to prove their lives would be in danger if sent back. Most of Israel’s illegals are economic migrants just as they are in Malaysia. Surely Israel should be able to find a way to deal with them in bulk rather than an individual basis. Ted Belman

Malaysia Launches Immigration Operation to Deport Illegal Workers
Half a Million Illegal Foreign Workers Targeted

WSJ

PUTRAJAYA, Malaysia—Malaysia launched a large scale immigration operation Sunday to flush out and swiftly deport nearly a half-million illegal foreign workers, its largest crackdown to date on low-wage migrant labor toiling at plantations and factories, at a time when the economy is showing signs of fatigue.

Suspected illegal foreign workers are arrested by Malaysian law enforcement officers during a raid in Klang, Malaysia, on Sunday.
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Tobin makes it clear that it is a mistake for the West to ignore Arab incitement. He also points out that the West and the Arabs should “accept[s] that Israel has rights in the dispute over Jerusalem and the West Bank rather than just security concerns, as Obama indicated, would be an improvement”. He even takes a swipe at the even handed rhetoric of the West saying it is hypocritical given the fact that it ignores the incitement. I would add to that list the fact that it presses Israel to release prisoners and supports the PA demand that an agreement should be based on the ’67 lines. Furthermore the West aids and abets the PA’s violation of the Oslo Accords when supporting its encroachment of Area C lands. Even handed, my foot. Ted Belman

By Jonathan Tobin, COMMENTARY