INN

Activists Yehuda Eliyahu and Betzalel Smotrich have issued a public call to the Bayit Yehudi (Jewish Home) party to break itsties to Yesh Atid.

The two activists, who head theRegavim NGO, published a letter to Bayit Yehudi saying, “It’s time to wake up, the concept of an agreement with Yesh Atid has totally collapsed.”

From the letter:

Dear friends, we are lost. The time has come to wake up, and better late than never.

The partnership with Lapid was never something natural. We abandoned our natural partners and friends for someone different – in beliefs, in worldview, and in behavior. We thought, apparently, that if we were smart, we would get something good about it, and maybe even ‘convert’ Lapid and bring him to our side.
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By Roger L Simon, PC MEDIA

It’s hard to fathom how or why our administration ever thought the Muslim Brotherhood saw democracy as other than a means to an end — and a particularly repellent one at that — in the first place.

It’s not as if the MB is subtle. They have proclaimed who they are since their founding by Hasan al Banna in 1928 and have not wavered in any significant way since in their global jihadist goals. They have also been unstinting in their massive misogyny, homophobia and rigid support of Shariah law über alles (quite literallyüber alles, since the Brotherhood were — virtually the last still unrepentant — allies of Hitler in WWII).

You know, liberal stuff. Read more…

Ruling out certain types of intervention, Martin Dempsey says striking Assad’s regime is easy, but splintered opposition groups won’t support Washington

Free Syrian Army says over 1,100 people killed, though others report lower numbers; assault comes as UN inspectors in area to probe for chemical arms use; regime denies reports

The EU published its guidelines outlawing all dealings with settlements in order to entice Palestinians back to talks, Saeb Erekat adds

By ELHANAN MILLER, TOI

In a lengthy interview with Nazareth-based A-Shams radio, Erekat said that the US had assured Palestinians in writing that talks would recognize the pre-1967 lines as the basis of a Palestinian state; would deal with all core issues (Jerusalem, refugees, borders, security and water); would take place within a six- to nine-month timetable; and would not allow for any provisional or interim solutions before a final status agreement was signed. Erekat also said that an American-Israeli agreement existed regarding settlements, but did not elaborate on its contents.
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WALTER RUSSELL MEAD, AMERICAN INTEREST

President Obama has had a rude awakening in the Middle East. The region he thought existed was an illusion built on American progressive assumptions about the way the world works. In the dream Middle East, democracy at least of a sort was just around the corner. Moderate Islamists would engage with the democratic process, and the experience would lead them to ever more moderate behavior. If America got itself on the “right side of history,” and supported this hopeful development, both America’s values and its interests would be served. Our relationships with the peoples of the Middle East would improve as they saw Washington supporting the emergence of democracy in the region, and Al Qaeda and the other violent groups would lose influence as moderate Islamist parties guided their countries to prosperity and democracy.
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By Elad Benari, INN

Gas rig in the Mediterranean

Israel news photo: Flash 90

The natural gas fields in the Mediterranean provide the United States with an opportunity to break with Turkey, according to Seth Cropsey, formerly the deputy undersecretary of the Navy in the Reagan and George H. W. Bush administrations.

“Politics and alliances in the eastern Mediterranean are shifting, and the region’s security framework is splintering,” Cropsey wrote Monday in PJ Media. “The region is now divided as much within the Muslim world as between it and the non-Muslim states.”
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by Isi Leibler

Reviewing Israel’s political situation after two weeks abroad is a disconcerting exercise.

As anticipated, the Arab Spring has devolved into a bloody nightmare that has engulfed Egypt, leaving Israel surrounded by a sea of violence and barbarism with no prospect for stability on the horizon. Yet whilst hundreds of people are being brutally killed daily, the international community remains obsessed with condemning Israel for allowing the construction of homes in the Jewish suburbs of East Jerusalem.
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Contentions

Jonathan S. Tobin

There’s some soul searching going on in the Obama administration as it ponders how they got sidelined in Egypt as the situation there got out of control in a spiral of violence. As theNew York Times details in a post-mortem of U.S. policy, the administration went all out to persuade the military that had overthrown the Muslim Brotherhood to compromise and allow the Islamists to rejoin the government. Among other efforts to cajole them or to threaten aid cutoffs, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel made 17 often-lengthy phone calls to Egyptian General Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi trying to get him to make nice with the Brotherhood. They even sent two Republican senators—John McCain and Lindsey Graham—to continue the pressure in person in Cairo. And they’re baffled as to why they were ignored as Sisi ordered police and troops to clear out the Brotherhood’s armed camps in Cairo this week. Read more…

By Elliott Abrams — COMMENTARY September 2013

In 2007, early in the improbable presidential candidacy of Barack Obama, the young first-term senator began a series of foreign-policy speeches that seemed too general to provide a guide to what he might do if elected. Aside from making it clear he was not George W. Bush and would get out of Iraq, the rest read like liberal boilerplate: “We have seen the consequences of a foreign policy based on a flawed ideology….The conventional thinking today is just as entrenched as it was in 2002….This is the conventional thinking that has turned against the war, but not against the habits that got us into the war in the first place.” In 2008, he visited Berlin and told an enraptured crowd: “Tonight, I speak to you not as a candidate for president, but as a citizen—a proud citizen of the United States, and a fellow citizen of the world…the burdens of global citizenship continue to bind us together.”
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Strategy Page

August 19, 2013: Despite decades of Arab boycotts and pressure on countries to not deal with Israel, military exports from Israel continue to grow. In the last year Israeli firms sold $1.8 billion worth of weapons to the Americas (mostly the United States, but a third of that went to South America), $1.6 billion to European customers and $200 million to African nations. About half those sales are for anti-aircraft systems. Israel has a wide range of anti-aircraft and anti-missile systems, many of them using successful Israeli air-to-air missile designs for ground based systems.

Israeli air defense technology has proved itself in combat, is famous for its reliability and technical excellence and is priced to sell. Israel is also a major exporter of military space satellites, nigh vision and surveillance gear and all manner of military communications equipment. Israel is also second only to the U.S. as a UAV exporter and was first to develop a lot of key UAV technology that the U.S. built on. Israel has also pioneered the development of add-on armor for combat and non-combat vehicles. Israel is also one of the premier developers of electronic warfare equipment (for aircraft and ground vehicles). Israel also exports warships, warplane upgrades and all manner of technical service.
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Mursi Egypt accuses Hamas of responsibility for the terrorist chaos in Sinai, and not without good cause.

By:Dr. Mordechai Kedar, THE JEWISH PRESS

Egyptian security forces arrest suspected terrorist in the Sinai. The Sinai Peninsula is a huge area, approximately 61,000 square kilometers, which is almost three times the area of the State of Israel, and its population is approximately 550,000, less than one tenth of the population of Israel. The residents of Sinai, despite being Egyptian citizens for the most part, are not of Egyptian origin: their Arabic dialect is Saudi Arabian, their culture is different from Egyptian culture and they identify with the state of Egypt about as much as the Bedouins in the Negev identify with the state of Israel.

Why is this so? The reason is that the Bedouin will never identify with a state, since the state symbolizes order and the rule of law, whereas the desert is spontaneous and the law that rules within it is the law of the tribes. Only when the Bedouin is part of the governmental system and enjoys its benefits does he identify with the state, for example in Jordan, and even there it is not always guaranteed. The Sinai Peninsula was never an integral part of Egypt; it was annexed only in the beginning of the twentieth century, when Britain – which ruled Egypt at the time – wanted to keep some distance between the Ottoman Empire and the Suez Canal.
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By Yossi Beilin, ISRAEL HAYOM

An Egyptian official told me in person that the army rigged the presidential elections in June 2012, fearing widespread riots should the Muslim Brotherhood’s candidate, Mohamed Morsi, lose the race.

According to my source, who asked to remain anonymous, Ahmed Shafik, the former air force commander and former president Hosni Mubarak’s last prime minister, actually won the race by a narrow margin. But the army generals — wanting to ensure that law and order would be upheld following the elections — feared that if Morsi was defeated, the Muslim Brotherhood would refuse to recognize the results and would end up conducting themselves just as they are now.

The official results, 51.73 percent for Morsi and 48.27% for Shafik, were almost the exact reversal of what actually happened at the polls. After the results were published, we barely heard any calls for protest or opposition among the secular-liberals, while on the religious side — loyal either to the Muslim Brotherhood or the Salafi parties — voters were happy with their achievement.
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[NOTICE HOW THE LETTER STRESSES DEMOCRATIC VALUES RATHER THAN DEMOCRACY. THIS IS A GREAT LETTER AND WILL BRING ABOUT A CHANGE IN US POLICY]

NEWSMAX

The National Salvation Front, a coalition of pro-democratic and secular parties in Egypt, set out its objections to remarks made by President Barack Obama Thursday on the escalating violence in Egypt.

Led by Ahmed Said of the Free Egyptians Party, the group issued the following letter:

“Like most Egyptians, we listened with attention to your statement on Egypt’s latest developments. As representatives of the non-Islamic political forces in Egypt, we believe in the same fundamental values on which the U.S. was founded. Be we also have 7,000 years of civilization and history that give us a special identity that we are fighting to keep since the Muslim Brotherhood came to power.
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And if the allegation is true that Israel is standing by Sisi, what’s wrong with that? What happens in Egypt is of immediate concern to Israel and it is only natural that she calls them the way she sees them. The US and the EU are wrong on the peace process and wrong in their embrace of the MB. Why should we support wrong policies? Ted Belman

From: Leo Rennert, AMERICAN THINKER

It’s the lead story on the Sunday front page of the New York Times—a lengthy piece on how frantic, behind-the-scenes efforts by U.S. and European diplomats supposedly came close to building a path toward ending the bloody conflict in Egypt between the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood and the military-backed interim government.

In the end, as we all know, external prodding failed. But in allotting blame for why diplomacy didn’t succeed, the Times gratuitously points an accusing finger at Israel and AIPAC, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, for allegedly siding with the Egyptian military and undermining U.S. diplomacy (“How a U.S. Push to Defuse Egypt Ended in Failure –Barrage of Diplomacy—Despite 17 Calls from Hagel, Cairo Chose Confrontation” by David Kirkpatrick, Peter Baker and Michael Gordon).
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Jacques Neriah, JCPA
Vol. 13, No. 23    August 15, 2013

• After largely sitting on the sidelines of the Syrian revolution, political groups from Syria’s Kurdish minority have moved decisively to claim control of Kurdish-populated areas.

• For the first time in modern Syrian Kurdish history, Kurds have created an exclusively Kurdish-controlled enclave. Kurdish spokesmen have indicated that they are planning to form a provisional Kurdish government due to the absence of any central authority.

• The Kurds have faced resistance to their new gains from the jihadist groups Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant.

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My sentiments exactly. Ted Belman

By Ari Sofer, INN

Referring to perceived sympathy for the Muslim Brotherhood by western media outlets, the statement, translated by Al Arabiya, called on the West to “read objectively the facts of events, and not give international and political cover to these terrorists and bloody groups.”

The church reaffirmed its support for the Egyptian authorities, following the ouster of Muhammed Morsi.

“The Egyptian Coptic Church is following the unfortunate developments on the ground of our country Egypt and emphasizes its strong stance with the Egyptian police, armed forces and other organizations of the Egyptian people in the face of groups of armed violence and black terrorism.
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250 of group’s members to be investigated, over 1,000 arrested, following violent weekend clashes, state news agency says. Confrontations between Morsi supporters, Egyptian security forces, leave more than 170 dead

News agencies, YNET

Egyptian prosecutors have placed 250 Muslim Brotherhood supporters under investigation for murder, attempted murder and terrorism, the state MENA news agency said on Saturday.

Police arrested more than 1,000 Brotherhood sympathisers in the wake of clashes on Friday that pitted followers of deposed IslamistPresident Mohamed Morsi against the security forces. More than 170 people died nationwide in the violence that day. 
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