Yaalon’s green light to the city is connected with Kerry Plan Focuses on Jordan Valley. Bibi probably was forced into making this concession. Ted Belman
Yaalon Gives Green Light to PA City in Jordan Valley
Yaalon: No to Criminal Sanctions Against Hareidi Draft Evaders
Ya’alon: Russia won’t send S-300 to Syria until 2014
Ya’alon: As Long as Palestinians Teach Children to Hate Israel There Will be No Peace
I have known and corresponded with Howard for over five years. He was truly dedicated to Israel and the Jewish people. His work is of enormous importance to Israel for he was a legal pioneer. The Levy Report drew heavily on his work. He will be sorely missed. Ted Belman
By Gerald Honigman, US Political Newswire
[..] Is it not a concern that the same scholars, diplomats, organizations, and other would-be sources of ethical enlightenment who enjoy taking Israel to task never seem interested in turning this issue around on the Arabs’ own nationalist agenda?
After all, there is no doubt that Arabs have too often acted as if lands that they had no prior connections to–but conquered and forcibly Arabized (clear up to the present day) from scores of millions of native, non-Arab peoples– were lands without peoples (at least peoples deserving of any of their own political rights) for a people not without land–but claiming all other peoples’ lands in the region as merely additional Arab possessions as well. The following is a typical example of how the Arabs and Arabized explained this…
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His second term is coming undone not because of scandal but because of decisions made in the previous four years.
John Dos Passos, the novelist and historian, once said: “Often things you think are just beginning are coming to an end.” His observation was made in the 1960s. But it’s true today of Barack Obama’s presidency and the promise of a bright future for his second term.
Mr. Obama’s re-election stirred grand expectations. The vote heralded a new liberal era, or so it was claimed. His victory was said to reflect ideological, cultural and demographic trends that could keep Democrats in the majority for years to come. His second four years in the White House would be just the beginning.
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Nor has Palestinian rhetoric changed for the better. The eliminationist desires of the Palestinian leadership—and I’m not talking here about Hamas, but about our ostensible peace partner, the PA—remain as ingrained as ever. At the end of April, for example, Rabi Khandaqji, the PA governor of the West Bank City of Qalqilya, reaffirmed that the Palestinians would never abandon the so-called “right of return.” Palestinian refugees, Khandaqji declared, would return “to Haifa, Nazareth and Acre”—all cities that lie inside the pre-1967 borders of Israel. This isn’t code for the destruction of Israel. It’s an explicit call for the destruction of Israel.
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Have the Arab uprisings made their way to Turkey? It seems the Turkish people took a page out of the Arab peoples’ playbook, with large numbers demonstrating in the streets in order to bring about political change. The protesters seem to be made up of more secular Turks affiliated with the opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), founded by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in 1924.
Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) is acting according to character, defying the pressure and promising to plow ahead with his plans to build at the Istanbul Park. He painted the protesters as criminals: “They are burning, damaging the shops. Is this democracy?” he asked. Read more…
DEBKAfile Special Report June 2, 2013,
Israel’s Arrow II missile interceptor
“Syrian batteries are in a high state of operability, ready to fire at short notice,” said Israel Air Force Colonel Zvika Haimovich in special briefings to international media Friday. He disclosed that Israel tracks every missile fired in the Syrian civil war, since southward launches would give Israel mere seconds to determine it was not the true target. “All it would take is a few degrees’ change in the flight path to endanger us.”
Speaking at the Palmachim air and missile base south of Tel Aviv, Col. Haimovich explained that long-range radars feed real-time data on the barrages to the base command where officers are braced to activate Arrow II. Read more…
A tiny camera receives visual information from the environment and transmits signals to a bionic contact lens.
By Dan Even, HAARETZ
Israeli scientists have developed a technology that may enable people who are blind from birth to see, with the help of a bionic contact lens.
The new technology, developed by a team at Bar-Ilan University, has yet to receive approval for clinical trials, but its feasibility is currently being tested on seeing individuals, with the aid of a model simulating the bionic lens.
The technology consists of a tiny camera that receives visual information from the environment and transmits signals to a bionic contact lens. The lens passes the signals via electrodes to the cornea and from there to sensory brain areas, generating a stimulus that simulates visual information.
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We are blind to the contradictions in welcoming an immigrant but not making him one of us.
Multiculturalism — as opposed to the notion of a multiracial society united by a single culture — has become an abject contradiction in the modern Western world. Romance for a culture in the abstract that one has rejected in the concrete makes little sense. Multiculturalists talk grandly of Africa, Latin America, and Asia, usually in contrast to the core values of the United States and Europe. Certainly, in terms of food, fashion, music, art, and architecture, the Western paradigm is enriched from other cultures. But the reason that millions cross the Mediterranean to Europe or the Rio Grande to the United States is for something more that transcends the periphery and involves fundamental values — consensual government, free-market capitalism, the freedom of the individual, religious tolerance, equality between the sexes, rights of dissent, and a society governed by rationalism divorced from religious stricture. Somehow that obvious message has now been abandoned, as Western hosts lost confidence in the very society that gives us the wealth and leisure to ignore or caricature its foundations. The result is that millions of immigrants flock to the West, enjoy its material security, and yet feel little need to bond with their adopted culture, given that their hosts themselves are ambiguous about what others desperately seek out.
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As Germany joins other EU countries backing special designation for settler goods, ADL chief deplores unique focus on Jewish state
New moves in the EU toward requiring products originating in West Bank settlements to be labeled as such for the European market constitute anti-Semitism, the head of the Anti-Defamation League said Sunday, since they represent “efforts at singling out Israel” when there is no outcry over so many human rights abuses elsewhere.
Speaking amid reports that the German government recently passed legislation in support of the EU labeling scheme, ADL national director Abraham Foxman said Sunday: “If the only country you want to single out is Israel, that’s anti-Semitism.”
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Not that that makes him special; the medical technology to do it has been available for years. But Dr. Meretzki can take excess body fat, extract mesenchymal stem cells from it, and grow custom-made bone, outside the patient’s body. It even comes complete with the patient’s own blood vessels, and once grafted, it will grow the patient’s own bone marrow.
That is what’s unique, and it all started when Meretzki was studying biotechnology and chemical engineering at Technion Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel, about 15 years ago. What if it were possible, he thought, to grow cells in three dimensions rather than the traditional two-dimension method?
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He fails to discriminate between friends and enemies.
Did you catch Senator John McCain’s much-heralded (by Senator McCain) trip to the Syrian civil war — by way of our NATO ally Turkey, the lifeline of the Hamas terrorist organization? Yeah, Senator McCain blew into town to prove that all of us dissenters from his latest adventure in “Democracy, Sharia Style” are wacko birds. Surely, the Forward March of Freedom can work just as well in Damascus as it has in Benghazi, Cairo, Baghdad, and Kabul.
Well, he’s probably right about that. Read more…
By Robbie Sabel, JCPA
Interview of Mamoun Fandy
Dr. Mamoun Fandy is a senior fellow at the Baker Institute and a specialist on Middle East politics, as well as a professor of Arab politics at the Near-East South Asia Center for Strategic Studies at the National Defense University. In this interview, he discusses the Salafist ideology and its more radical roots in the Muslim Brotherhood and teachings of Sayyid Qutb. Fandy explains how these extreme movements have become more mainstream over time. “If you look at Al Qaeda today in the Arab and Muslim world, it has moved from an extreme to mainstream,” he says. “Most young people think being affiliated with Al Qaeda is cool. It is something to be proud of. They’re wearing T-shirts with pictures of Osama on it.” This interview was conducted on Oct. 18, 2004.
What is Salafism?
The word salafi means the past, the previous generations, if you will. So Salafis are those people who believe in the teachings of Islam based on the dictates of the previous generation. And by the previous generations, they mean the generations of the followers of the prophet who came after him, in the eighth century. So that’s the literal translation of it; that those who subscribe to the notion of Salafism are those who are unhappy with the interpretation of Islam today, and they want to go to the origins of Islam and what was intended to be in the time of the prophet and his companions.
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I was interviewed by Radikal, possibly the best Turkish newspaper today.
What is your assessment of the current state of relations between Turkey and Israel?
Relations will remain bad because Prime Minister Erdogan wants it to be that way. No matter what Israel does—as we have just seen—he will find excuses to do so.
Are relations as tense as they seem or both parties play the tough guy before the cameras whereas they enjoy better relations behind the scenes?
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The Emirate of Qatar is located on the shore of the Persian Gulf, and lives on top of a large gas well. The tremendous amount of money that flows into this country has enriched its two hundred thousand citizens incredibly: they do not pay taxes, they enjoy free educational and health services and laugh all the way to the bank. The money enables them not only to purchase anything they want, but also to have a dramatic influence on the Middle East. As a result of this, the ruler of Qatar has become the most influential person in the Arab World, and he is an active partner in significant international processes.
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By REUTERS, JPOST
BAGHDAD – More than 1,000 people were killed in violence in Iraq in May, making it the deadliest month since the sectarian slaughter of 2006-07, the United Nations said on Saturday, as fears mounted of a return to civil war.
Nearly 2,000 people have been killed in the last two months as al-Qaida and Sunni Islamist insurgents, invigorated by the Sunni-led revolt in Syria and by Sunni discontent at home, seek to revive the kind of all-out inter-communal conflict that killed tens of thousands five years ago.
“That is a sad record,” Martin Kobler, the UN envoy in Baghdad, said in a statement. “Iraqi political leaders must act immediately to stop this intolerable bloodshed.”
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Projectiles fired by rebels trying to overthrow Assad target Lebanon area controlled by Shiite group. Sunni Muslim cleric al-Qaradawi says Alawite sect ‘more infidel than Christians and Jews,’ Hezbollah ‘party of the devil’
Syrian civil war spills into Lebanon: Eighteen rockets and mortars rounds from Syria slammed into Lebanon on Saturday, the largest cross-border salvo to hit a Hezbollah stronghold since Syrian rebels threatened to retaliate for the Lebanese terror group’s armed support of Syrian President Bashar Assad. On Sunday two rockets exploded in a Hezbollah-controlled area of Beirut.
The rockets targeted the Baalbek region, the latest sign that Syria’s civil war is increasingly destabilizing Lebanon. On Friday, the Lebanese parliament decided to put off general elections, originally scheduled for June, by 17 months, blaming a deteriorating security situation in the country.
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DEBKAfile Special Report May 31, 2013, 8:00 PM (IDT)
On minute, Russian spokesmen declare that Moscow is only filling standing contracts with Syria for the sale of weapons, i.e. – S-300 anti-air missiles; the next, that delivery will take place only in the second quarter of 2014 (ahead of Syria’s presidential election). Then, after those spokesmen previously declared that Russia would only fill outstanding arms contracts, Serge Korotkov, head of the MiG company came out with the news Friday, May 31, that a Syrian delegation was in Moscow to discuss “a new contract” for the sale of “more than 10” MiG-29 M/M2 fighters. Read more…
History is made of biographies of men and women who failed to forecast the future. – Shimon Peres, Amman, May 26, 2013
My good friends, for the second time in our history, a British prime minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honor. I believe it is peace for our time. – Neville Chamberlain, September 30, 1938
The Arab Peace Initiative is a meaningful change and a strategic opportunity. It replaces the strategies of war with the wisdom of peace….History will judge us not by the process of negotiations, but by its outcome. – Shimon Peres – Amman, May 26, 2013
To: Shimon Peres, President of Israel
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