By Robert Fulford, National Post (Canada)

A word jumped off the page when I was reading Haroon Siddiqui’s column in the Toronto Star the other day: “rabid.” Describing Qatar’s attempt to steal the International Civil Aviation Organization headquarters from Montreal, Siddiqui wrote: “There’s speculation that the bid is also politically motivated, in retaliation for Stephen Harper’s rabid pro-Israeli stance.”

Siddiqui is an important Star personage, routinely billed as the paper’s “editorial page editor emeritus,” a title claimed by no other Canadian journalist. He ran the editorial page in the 1990s, and the Star apparently wants to recall those glory years every time he appears in print. What in the world makes him call the prime minister rabid?

Oxford defines that word as “Furious, raging; wildly aggressive.” Doesn’t sound like Stephen Harper. He’s cool and careful. He speaks quietly of Israel, noting that Canada doesn’t endorse all of Israel’s policies. He finds it unfair that so much criticism is directed by others against “the one country of the global community whose very existence is threatened.” He also draws a lesson from history: Those who choose the Jewish people “as a target of racial and religious bigotry will inevitably be a threat to all of us.” He believes those who target Israel also threaten “all free and democratic societies.”
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By Martin Sherman, JPOST

Alan Dershowitz’s response to his derisive reception at ‘Post’ conference in New York late underscores bankruptcy of “The Case for Two States”.

I have now joined this distinguished company of people who get booed for advocating territorial compromise in the interest of peace. That’s why I will no longer lend my support to ‘far-right pep’ rallies of the kind I spoke at last week.
– Alan Dershowitz, Jerusalem Post, May 5

In many ways, Alan Dershowitz’s somewhat puerile and petulant response to the derisive reception he was given by the audience at The Jerusalem Post Second Annual Conference in New York late last month vividly underscores just how bankrupt “The Case for Two States” has become.
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The mishandling of Benghazi undermined a prominent Muslim moderate.

By Andrew C. McCarthy, NRO

A significant point made in riveting testimony by Gregory Hicks, the State Department’s former deputy chief of mission in Libya, has largely been missed in the coverage of Wenesday’s Benghazi hearing. It is worth highlighting, not least because doing so illuminates the depth of the Obama administration’s depravity.

In its assiduous effort to defraud the American people, for 2012-campaign purposes, into believing that the Benghazi massacre was provoked by an anti-Islamic Internet video — rather than having been a coordinated jihadist attack that undermined President Obama’s claim to have decimated al-Qaeda — the administration betrayed its self-proclaimed commitment to establishing democracy in Islamic countries.
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By Caroline Glick, JWR

What “respectable” organizations — including Jewish ones — and the international media are trying their hardest to cover up

In 2010, Cpl. Eleanor Joseph became the first female Arab combat soldier in the Israel Defense Force. Joseph, a Christian Arab told Israel’s daily Ma’ariv that her good luck charm is a drawing of the Star of David with the caption: “I have no other land, even when my ground is burning.” Her commander drew it for her.

Joseph explained, “It is a phrase that strengthens me. Every time I experience hardship, I read it. Because I was born here. The people I love live here: my parents, my friends. This is a Jewish state? Yes, it is. But it’s also my country. I can’t imagine living in any other place. I think every person should serve in the army. You live here? You make your home here? Then go defend your country. What does it matter that I’m an Arab?”
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Ambassador (ret.) Yoram Ettinger, “Second Thought: a US-Israel Initiative”
Straight from the Jerusalem Boardroom #179, May 10, 2013 http://bit.ly/197mlxd

While struggling to turn around an expanding (5%) budget deficit, Israel sustains its unique role as a pipeline of commercial, defense and homeland security technologies to the US and the Free World.  Israeli technologies, shared with the US industry, have enhanced the US employment, research & development and exports.

1.  Facebook about to acquire Israel’s Waze for $1BN.  In January, Waze turned down Facebook’s offer of $500MN (Israel Hayom, May 10, 2013). Warren Buffett completed acquisition of Israel’s Iscar – $2BN for the remaining 20% of Iscar.  $4BN were paid for 80% (Globes, May 1).  NYC’s KKR Private Equity acquired (from NYC’s Warburg-Pincus Ventures) 75% of Israel’s Alliance Tires Group for $500MN (Globes, April 15).  Israel’s Prolor was merged into Miami, FL’s Opko for $480MN (Globes, April 25). San Jose, CA’s Avago Technologies acquired Israel’s Cyoptics for $400MN (Globes, April 12).  China’s Fosun Pharma acquired Israel’s Alma Lasers for $240MN (TechTime, April 29).  J.P. Morgansold 21% of Israel’s CaesarStone (held by Israel’s Tene’ Investment Fund) for $170MN, on NASDAQ(Globes, April 15). Read more…

But is keen to revile Western countries trying to defend against Islamic law

By Diana West

WASHINGTON DC. Fifteen years ago, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom opened shop with a mandate from Congress to examine the state of religious freedom around the world, and issue an annual report to the President. The idea was to provide the information necessary for the U.S. government to make religious freedom a greater factor in foreign-policy-making by highlighting the world’s worst offenders. Such offenders run, as the commission’s 2013 religious freedom report tells us, from Saudi Arabia to China to Russia to Sudan to Iran to Western Europe.

Western Europe?
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Dr. Emmanuel Navon, INN

The Institute for National Security Studies (INSS), a leading Israeli think tank, recently hosted its annual conference. This year, the conference’s main agenda was to promote the idea of unilateral disengagement from Judea and Samaria. INSS’s suggestions were summarized in a paper authored by Gilead Sher and his team: “The Palestinian Issue: Toward a Reality of Two States.”

Unilateralism is not the authors’ favorite option: such a strategy, they claim, should only be implemented if and when the Palestinian Authority rejects another Israeli peace offer –an offer that should be based on Olmert’s proposal to Mahmud Abbas in 2008.
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Israel’s Good News Newsletter to 5th May 2013

By Daniel Greenfield published a year ago

…Even as Jews remember the great triumph of Jerusalem Day, the ethnic cleansers and their accomplices are busy searching for ways to drive Jews out of Jerusalem, out of towns, villages and cities. This isn’t about the Arab residents of Jerusalem, who have repeatedly asserted that they want to remain part of Israel. It’s not about peace, which did not come from any previous round of concessions, and will not come from this one either. It’s about solving the Jewish problem.

When Jordan’s Arab Legion seized half of Jerusalem, ethnically cleansed its Jewish population and annexed the city– the only entity to recognize the annexation was the United Kingdom which had provided the officers and the training that made the conquest possible. Officers like Colonel Bill Newman, Major Geoffrey Lockett and Major Bob Slade, under Glubb Pasha, better known as General John Bagot Glubb, whose son later converted to Islam, invaded Jerusalem and used the Muslim forces under their command to make the partition and ethnic cleansing of Jerusalem possible.
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The Weekly Standard has an excellent article on the “talking points” and how they were changed to obscure the truth

After a briefing on Capitol Hill by CIA director David Petraeus, Democrat Dutch Ruppersburger, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, asked the intelligence community for unclassified guidance on what members of Congress could say in their public comments on the attacks. The CIA’s Office of Terrorism Analysis prepared the first draft of a response to the congressman, which was distributed internally for comment at 11:15 a.m. on Friday, September 14 (Version 1 at right). This initial CIA draft included the assertion that the U.S. government “know[s] that Islamic extremists with ties to al Qaeda participated in the attack.” That draft also noted that press reports “linked the attack to Ansar al Sharia. The group has since released a statement that its leadership did not order the attacks, but did not deny that some of its members were involved.” Ansar al Sharia, the CIA draft continued, aims to spread sharia law in Libya and “emphasizes the need for jihad.” The agency draft also raised the prospect that the facilities had been the subject of jihadist surveillance and offered a reminder that in the previous six months there had been “at least five other attacks against foreign interests in Benghazi by unidentified assailants, including the June attack against the British Ambassador’s convoy.”

CONTINUE

Op-ed: America’s promotion of ‘softened Arab peace initiative’ a spit in the face of Israeli democracy
Elyakim Haetzni, YNET NEWS

The buds of peace are blossoming again, and, as always, they are being irrigated with Jewish blood. Eviatar Borovsky joined more than 1,500 “victims of peace” since Oslo – a huge political experiment with humans as lab animals.

Everything is planned in advance: Obama’s visit, an onslaught of smiles and love to soften the land; the launching of the “John Kerry 1967 flight route”; flying a group of figureheads headed by the Qatari PM to Washington, supposedly on behalf of the Arab League, so they can speak of “minor” land swaps as a change in the “Arab initiative”; blowing this item out of proportion and presenting it as a “diplomatic turnaround”; making manipulative use of the term “changes to the 1967 borders” so Abbas will be able to say that his demand that the 1967 borders serve as a basis for negotiations has been accepted and Netanyahu will be able to climb down from his tree and claim that the “minor changes” mean we will not be returning to the 1967 borders; an urgent trip by Livni and Netanyahu’s adviser Molcho to Washington in order to “keep the momentum going”; the establishment of a joint Israeli-Palestinian committee to select the terrorists Israel will release as an entry pass to the negotiations; and also a referendum, so Netanyahu will be able to hind behind the nation’s back before he divides Jerusalem.
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DEBKAfile Special Report May 7, 2013, 2:19 PM

Negative diplomatic ricochets are pursuing Israel in the aftermath of its air force attacks on Syria. In the first place, they are seen to have had no effect on Hizballah’s successful military intervention on the side of the Assad regime or the Syrian war at large. In the second, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, while in Shanghai, was given a sharp dressing-down by President Vladimir Putin Monday, May 6, a warning that Russia would not tolerate further Israeli attacks on Damascus and would respond.

Putin did not say how, but he did announce he had ordered the acceleration of highly advanced Russian weapons supplies to Syria.
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By Steven Plaut

Oh dear. The Left in Israel is all upset again about yet another “fascist assault against democracy” coming from the non-left. Periodically the Left has conniptions whenever a law is proposed that would rein in the atrocities of the Left. You will recall how upset the Left got when it was proposed that transparency laws similar to those in effect in the US be introduced to require that anti-Israel NGO’s reveal the sources of their funding. Another “fascist” proposed laws that upset the Left sought to require a pledge of loyalty to the country by those sitting in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. Another proposed allowing those groups of businesses in Israel injured by the efforts of anti-Israel leftists who organize international boycotts and sanctions against Israel to sue those instigators in Israeli civil court for damages. Read more…