The Hamas government said Sunday it was “surprised” to hear that Egypt is planning to create a buffer zone along the border with the Gaza Strip.
Ehab Ghissin, spokesman for the Hamas government, said that there should be no buffer zones “between brothers and friendly countries.”
Ghissin expressed hope that the Egyptian move would not “solidify the blockade” and increase the suffering of the people in the Gaza Strip.
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Netanyahu: Law discriminating women in West Bank to be amended
According to PM, controversial bill initiated by MK Strok to amend law discrimination women beyond Green Line will take effect by October, either by army order or by applying Israeli law on territories
Itamar Fleishman, YNET
Will the Netanyahu administration apply Israeli law in Judea and Samaria? Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced at the cabinet meeting Sunday that by the beginning of the upcoming winter session of the Knesset in October, the law discriminating between women residing within the Green Line and those residing in the territories will be amended.
The Ministerial Committee on Legislative Affairs already passed a bill to this effect, yet the committee’s chairwoman Justice Minister Tzipi Livni announced she has reservations about it, and Science and Technology Minister Yaakov Peri even filed an appeal against it.
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I chanced upon this article dated 16.12.11 in the EU Observer. I was shocked by it but shouldn’t have been. It is one thing for the EU to tell Turkey what it must do to gain membership in the EU. It is another thing to try to force Israel to be like them when we are not applying for membership. Besides who would want to be like the European countries.
BY ANDREW RETTMAN
BRUSSELS – EU countries have raised a red flag on Israel’s treatment of its Arab minority in a complaint that touches the heart of its identity as a “Jewish state.”
The deputy heads of EU embassies in Tel Aviv put forward their concerns in a 27-page-long internal report sent to the European Exernal Action Service (EEAS) earlier this month.
Israel links EU support for Palestinians to anti-Semitism
25.05.11 @ 09:32BY ANDREW RETTMAN
BRUSSELS – Israeli finance minister Yuval Steinitz has said that select EU countries’ support for Palestine’s plan to seek full UN membership is linked to ancient anti-Semitism.
By Jeff Poor, THE DAILY CALLER
Immediately following his statement from the Rose Garden on Saturday, which President Barack Obama said he would delay a strike on Syria until seeking authorization from Congress, Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer took to Fox News to slam the president.
Krauthammer criticized Obama for the way he has handled the unfolding of events surrounding the crisis in Syria.
“[T]he most astonishing thing is the lack of any urgency,” Krauthammer said. “As you say, Congress will be back in a week. He says, ‘I can strike in a day or a week or a month,’ as if he is a judge handing down a sentence and the execution can be any time in the future. There is a war going on. Do you think everybody is going to hold their breath, hold their arms, step aside until Obama decides when he wants to go to Congress?
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Over the past week, President Barack Obama and his senior advisers have told us that the US is poised to go to war against Syria. In the next few days, the US intends to use its airpower and guided missiles to attack Syria in response to the regime’s use of chemical weapons in the outskirts of Damascus last week.
The questions that ought to have been answered before any statements were made by the likes of Secretary of State John Kerry and Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel have barely been raised in the public arena. The most important of those questions are: What US interests are at stake in Syria? How should the US go about advancing them? What does Syria’s use of chemical weapons means for the US’s position in the region? How would the planned US military action in Syria impact US deterrent strength, national interests and credibility regionally and worldwide? Syria is not an easy case. Thirty months into the war there, it is clear that the good guys, such as they are, are not in a position to win.
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It is becoming increasingly difficult to respond with any degree of courteous civility to the advocates of the so-called “two-state-solution” (TSS).
Minister Naftali Bennett’s remarks, rejecting outright the vision of two states for two peoples, are stunningly shortsighted
– David Harris, American Jewish Committee executive director, June 17, 2013
Since we cannot defeat Israel in war, we do this in stages. We take any and every territory that we can of Palestine, and establish a sovereignty there, and we use it as a springboard to take more. When the time comes, we can get the Arab nations to join us for the final blow against Israel
– Yasser Arafat, Jordanian TV, September 13, 1993 (the day he signed the Oslo Accords on the White House Lawn)
The idea of a two-state solution should be dead, today, because unfortunately a Palestinian state in Judea and Samaria would bring about Israel’s demise
– Yuval Steinitz, The Jerusalem Post, September 14, 2008
It is becoming increasingly difficult to respond with any degree of courteous civility to the advocates of the socalled “two-state-solution” (TSS). Maintaining the shabby pretense is simply proving too perilous. The time has come to dispense with the false façade of social decorum and to call a spade, a spade, to deem the moronic, “moronic” and the myopic, “myopic.”
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A few months ago, Sarah Palin advised Obama to “Let Allah sort it out”. She was speaking of course about Syria.
Thursday she said: “Mr. President, please give America justification before you spend blood and treasure to intervene. Start with: who are you rooting for in this?” A pertinent demand and even more pertinent question.
And now this:
“So we’re bombing Syria because Syria is bombing Syria? And I’m the idiot?”
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IT MAKES ME SICK
Stratfor Geopolitical Weekly
August 27, 2013
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JERUSALEM (Ma’an) — The director of education in Jerusalem has urged
families with schoolchildren in Jerusalem to be aware that at least five
Palestinian schools are switching to Israeli education materials.
Sameer Jibril said the Ebin Rushd and Abdulla bin Hussain schools were using
Israeli education materials in the seventh and eighth grades. The Sour Baher
school is using them for fourth, fifth and sixth grades, and the Ibin
Khaldoun school uses it for seventh graders.
An education official told Ma’an that a meeting took place on Thursday in
Herzliya near Tel Aviv for Palestinian and Israeli principals and teachers
to discuss switching from Palestinian Authority to Israeli curricula.
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[This detailed press release means that the US will attack but with what goal.]
The United States Government assesses with high confidence that the Syrian
government carried out a chemical weapons attack in the Damascus suburbs on
August 21, 2013. We further assess that the regime used a nerve agent in the
attack. These all-source assessments are based on human, signals, and
geospatial intelligence as well as a significant body of open source reporting. Our classified assessments have been shared with the U.S. Congress
and key international partners. To protect sources and methods, we cannot
publicly release all available intelligence – but what follows is an
unclassified summary of the U.S. Intelligence Community’s analysis of what
took place.
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President Barack Obama said on Friday the chemical weapons attack in Syria threatened US allies Israel, Turkey and Jordan and that while “nobody ends up being more war weary than me” he is considering a narrow, limited US response.
Officials tell New York Times White House believes it has enough evidence to carry out limited strike that would deter Assad regime from using chemical weapons again
Erdogan: Syrian Strike Should Topple Assad
Limited strikes in Syria are not enough, declares Erdogan.
Kerry: Assad’s chemicals killed 1,429 Syrians, 426 children
DEBKA SPECIAL REPORT
Friday, Aug. 30, at a news conference in Washington, US Secretary of State John Kerry delivered a ringing statement accusing Bashar Assad of responsibility for the lethal poison gas attack on Damascus suburbs on Aug. 21. His words signaled the start of the countdown for the US military strike on Syria, which DEBKAfile’s military sources estimate could be launched from Friday night until US Labor Day on Sept. 2.
Kerry laid out the evidence put before congressional leaders that the Syrian government had that day fired chemical weapons at 11 separate sites in and around Damascus, launching them from regime-held areas against rebel-controlled neighborhoods. At least 1,429 Syrians died in the attack, 426 children among them. US intelligence had records of orders being given to chemical weapons teams to launch the attack three days earlier and shown making preparations wearing gas masks.
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Most see nothing but bad choices in Syria; Kissinger sees the way out
By Lawrence Solomon, Financial Post
“There are no good options but to do nothing is the worst,” lamented a Financial Times of London editorial this week that wrestled with how the West should respond to Syria’s use of chemical weapons. Doing nothing would be best, counters a New York Times oped, which concludes the U.S. will lose, however the Syrian civil war plays out. “Bombing Syria may be a futile gesture. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it,” argued an editorial writer for the London Telegraph. But neither does it mean we should do it, stated a Canadian Press article entitled “No good options for Syria.”
The West is right to worry about making the wrong decision in the Syrian civil war –it doesn’t want to become embroiled in another failed Middle East war, the intelligence is murky on whether the Assad regime was responsible for the chemical attack, and yet, if the West doesn’t punish Syria then Iran, Syria’s backer, will be emboldened in pursuing nuclear weapons.
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http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/171434#.UiB9QUr9WqE
The Obama administration apparently views Israel as one of the top spying threats facing its intelligence services, according to leaked documents which were exposed Thursday.
A secret budget request obtained by The Washington Post from former NSA contractor Edward Snowden lumps Israel alongside U.S. foes Iran and Cuba as “key targets” for U.S. counterintelligence efforts.
According to The Hill, the document leaked by Snowden suggests that Israel does not believe U.S. assurances that its interests are aligned with Israel’s on crucial issues such as Iran and peace talks with the Palestinian Authority.
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NATURAL GAS
Israel’s recent discovery of mega gas fields titled Tamar and Leviathan are located off the Israeli coast from Haifa. These massive discoveries will soon transform Israel as they will adequately look after Israel’s domestic needs forever and thereafter to supply foreign markets. A number of countries are pursuing involvement in these finds. Among them are Russia, China, Europe and South Korea. Putin was in Israel two months ago pursuing a contractual relationship with Israel on its gas development projects. Nothing has been signed yet.
Tamar is due to come online sometime in 2013 and Leviathan to follow in early 2014. Additional target areas are being explored all the way down the Mediterranean coast of Israel.
The likelihood is that a pipeline from the gas discovery area will be built to Cyprus and on to Greece. This will help Greece with some of its financial troubles. It is expected there will be a plant built to liquefy the gas at the Greek end of the underwater pipeline.
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SIMON PLOSKER, Honest Reporting
Timon Dias
The winner of this year’s $2000 Blankfeld Award for Media Critique has been chosen and comes from a most unlikely source. Sri Lankan-born Timon Dias was adopted in the Netherlands at the age of three months and is a Clinical Psychology Masters degree student at Leiden University.
His winning articles were all published in the Jerusalem Post and impressed the staff of HonestReporting above all of the other candidates.
In “The lack of Western disgust for Hamas,” Timon sought to explain why many Western college students and mainstream opinion makers tend not to loathe or despise Hamas in the way it deserves.
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by Michael Ordman
We will shortly bid farewell to the old Jewish Year 5773 and welcome in New Year 5774. It is a good time to look both forwards and backwards at some of the latest innovations and discoveries that are making an historic impact on our lives.
By: JTA Published: August 29th, 2013
Federal complaints accusing the University of California campuses in Berkeley and Santa Cruz of failing to curb hostile environments for Jewish students were dismissed. A complaint filed last year with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights against the Berkeley campus by two recent graduates referred specifically to the annual February Apartheid Week demonstration. It charged that the demonstration violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which bars the recipients of federal funds from discriminating on the basis of race, color or national origin.
In 2010, the U.S. Department of Education extended Title VI to include the protection of Jewish students from anti-Semitism on campuses. The Office of Civil Rights investigation, which included interviews with students and observations of the demonstrations, concluded this week that events described in the complaint did not constitute harassment but rather “expression on matters of public concern directed to the university community.” “In the university environment, exposure to such robust and discordant expressions, even when personally offensive and hurtful, is a circumstance that a reasonable student in higher education may experience,” the probe concluded. Read more…
To date, US President Barack Obama’s efforts to appease or engage Islamists have either failed or backfired. US influence in the Mideast is at an all-time low and Islamic fundamentalism continues to gain strength at an alarming pace.
Egypt, which until a year ago was regarded by the US as an ally, is perhaps the most dramatic example of Obama’s complete failure to understand the nature of the region and the steps that must be taken to stabilize it. The current horrors and barbarism in Syria should not divert attention from events in Egypt, the outcome of which is likely to have a major impact on the entire region.
Obama’s first blunder in Egypt was the antagonism he displayed toward President Hosni Mubarak. Immediately following his first election, Obama insisted on inviting members of the outlawed Moslem Brotherhood to his Cairo address. As a result, Mubarak boycotted the event.
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It’s really pretty simple. The American people understandably don’t want to go to war with Syria — not to mention with Syria’s patron, Iran — and especially not for the goal of putting the Muslim Brotherhood and murderous Islamists into power there. Going to war is a serious matter, to say the least. There’s no assurance how long it will take, how many lives it will cost, and what turns it may take. And the Middle East has just had several examples of these wars.
Iraq and Afghanistan cost a lot of money and lives as they extended for a much longer time than had been expected. In addition, they derailed the Bush administration’s electoral fortunes and domestic programs. With the main emphasis of the Obama administration being a fundamental transformation of America, such distractions are not desired.
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