By Ted Belman

As a result, I haven’t been posting or moderating comments. I am catching up now. What did I miss?

Belabored Siege of Jerusalem Holds Promise for Israel’s Captive Audience

By Avi Zimmerman, Exec Dir Friends of Israel, Ariel Development Fund

The 10th day of the Hebrew month of Tevet commemorates an important precursor to the current siege that surrounds Jerusalem. Important, not because of the similarities between today and then but because of the refreshing opportunity implicit in the post-Modern siege, both for Israel and for those who seek to impede its actions.

Regional conquest and domination were the obvious goals and, ultimately, results of Nebuchadnezzar II‘s siege of Jerusalem on the Tenth of Tevet, 588 years B.C.E. Ancient Babylonia was building its empire, and Jerusalem was not to stand in its way. To this day Jews the world over fast on the Tenth of Tevet, aligning their worldview with that of their biblical prophets who viewed the siege as a harbinger of the Temple’s destruction, the fall of Jerusalem and the Jewish exile. But must a siege always spell doom?
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Prof Paul Eidelberg makes the point that Israel needs A Distinctively Judaic National Goal. Then he lays out what Israel should do to achieve it.

He writes “Israel needs an entirely new system of governance, one that will:”

(1) Enact a law that affirms Israel’s raison d’être as a Jewish Republic, one that rejects multicultural moral relativism.

(2) Enact, as a legal qualification for voting in Israeli elections, an oath of loyalty to Israel as a Jewish Republic.
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YNET

Despite a report that the US and Russia had reached an agreement on a plan by which Syrian President Bashar Assadwould step down and a transitional government would assume power, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said that neither side would win the civil war in Syria, and that China and Russia would be unable to persuade Assad to quit if they tried.

Russia has been rowing back after the Kremlin’s Middle East envoy was quoted as saying earlier this month that the rebels could defeat Assad’s government and that Russia was preparing for a possible evacuation of its nationals, the strongest signs yet that Russia is positioning itself for a post-Assad Syria.

“Listen, no one is going to win this war,” Lavrov told reporters aboard a government plane en route to Moscow from the Russia-EU summit in Brussels.  Read more…

by Michael Meunier, Special to IPT News

When Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton visited Egypt last July, she was met with widespread protest from Coptic Christians and secular activists objecting to what they all believed was the Obama administration’s role in helping the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) ascend to power in Egypt.

The secretary asked to meet with 10 Christian leaders, myself included. All of those invited refused to meet with her and boycotted her visit. Most of us had been both publically and privately warning members of Congress and the administration of the danger the Muslims Brotherhood poses and about their desire to turn Egypt into a theocratic Islamic fascist country. Yet we were ignored.

Going back to April 2007, Democrats made special efforts to link up with the MB when visiting then-House Majority Leader Rep. Steny Hoyer, D-Md., met with Saad el-Katatni, the MB’s parliamentary leader, at former U.S. Ambassador Francis Ricciardone’s home, at a time when then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has publically refused to meet with the Brotherhood.
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By announcing plans for the construction of thousands of units east of the green line and showing no signs of backing down, the PA has no choice to but to hit Israel with all they’ve got. This is a classic showdown. This battle will determine the winner. If Israel backs down, she is finished. She will be forced to capitulate on all matters. If she stands her ground and continues building unabated and takes the heat and the sanctions, she will have won the right to build and the war.

Not only will Israel be staring down the PA, she will be staring down the international community. This is Israel’s second war of independence. Ted Belman

YNET

Emboldened by their newly upgraded status at the United Nations, the Palestinians are talking of filing war crimes charges against Israel, staging mass demonstrations in the West Bank, encouraging the international community to impose sanctions, and ending the security cooperation that has helped preserve quiet in recent years. 

These plans, combined with growing international impatience with Israeli settlement construction, could spell trouble and international isolation for the Israeli leader. In a series of interviews with The Associated Press, a number of Palestinian officials all voiced a similar theme: Following the UN General Assembly’s recognition of “Palestine” as a nonmember observer state in November, the status quo cannot continue.  
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By Alex Joffe • Thursday, December 20, 2012

One of the most consistent and depressing aspects of U.S.-Middle Eastern relations is the determination of our intellectuals and officials to defend Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood.  When Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi made his recent power grab, for example, immunizing his decrees from judicial review, Yale law professor Noah Feldman, said that Morsi merely“overreached”—and did so “in the service of preserving electoral democracy.”  State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland lamely characterized Morsi’s actions as a “far cry from an autocrat just saying my way or the highway.”
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After Bennett won the leadership of his party, I wrote to him and suggested that: “Lowering the cost of housing should be your central plank. This issue is connected to strengthening the Jewish majority in Jerusalem and also to annexing Area C. Likud is not doing enough. You could upstage them.” He wrote back to thank me. Ted Belman

By DAVID HOROVITZ, TOI, December 20, 2012,

With a month to go before Israel’s elections, Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to merge his Likud party list with Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beytenu is looking wiser by the day — because the Jewish Home party, once a marginal player to the Likud’s right, is getting stronger by the day. Read more…

By Rob Miller, AMERICAN THINKER

The situation in the Syrian insurgency has changed in an interesting way.

We started out with the Obama administration actually supporting Bashar Assad — remember Secretary of State Hillary Clinton referring to Assad as a “reformer” and Senator John Kerry shilling for U.S. aid to him?

The next twist in the road was the Obama administration supporting the insurgents, consisting of the Syrian National Council (SNC) and the Syrian Free Army, a group put together at the insistence of President Obama’s closest friend among foreign leaders, Tayyip Erdo?an, and the Islamist Turkish government.  The U.S. government has been supplying them with arms and some training via Turkey and Jordan while Qatar and the Saudis have been supplying most of the funding.
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Poll- PA Can’t Be Trusted to Keep a Deal

By David Lev

A new poll by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs shows that the vast majority of Israelis are opposed to an Israeli withdrawal from Judea and Samaria. The poll, taken in November, showed that 76% of all Israelis (83% of Israeli Jews) do not believe that a withdrawal to the 1948 armistice lines will bring Israelis a secure peace.

The Palestinian Authority has repeatedly declared that it will not compromise on its demand that Israel withdraw from all land liberated in the 1967 Six Day War. In addition, the PA is demanding that Israel compensate it for its losses, and admit hundreds of thousands of Arabs to Israel, so they can return to homes their ‘ancestors’ abandoned in the 1948 War of Liberation. Read more…