The only tide that is ‘receding’ is U.S. influence.

WSJ

Another day, another installment in what President Obama likes to call the “receding” tide of war. On Wednesday, John Kerry threatened to cut U.S. aid to Baghdad unless the Iraqi government blocks overflights of Iranian planes suspected of ferrying military supplies to Damascus. But Baghdad isn’t budging. Welcome to the post-American Middle East, Senator.

“If so many people have entreated the [Iraqi] government to stop and that doesn’t seem to be having an impact,” said the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee at a confirmation hearing for the new U.S. Ambassador to Iraq, then it “seems to send a signal to me maybe we should make some of our assistance or some of our support contingent on some kind of appropriate response.”
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The Iranian president, who should be in the dock of the accused, will instead be given a podium.
IRWIN COTLER, JPOST

Irwin Cotler is a Canadian member of Parliament and is the former minister of justice and attorney-general of Canada. He is a professor of law (Emeritus) at McGill University and has written extensively on Iran and has previously prosecuted for incitement to genocide. He is a former Canadian justice minister and currently a co-chairman of the Inter-Parliamentary Group for Human Rights in Iran.

When Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad arrives in New York to address the UN General Assembly, a man who should be in the dock of the accused will instead be given an international podium – a cruel parody of law and justice that will put us on the wrong side of history.
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To “warn” is to threaten and to intimidate. If Republicans support Israel more it is only right that Israel support them more. To ask Israel to be blind to the difference is to ask for a licence to keep beating up on Israel. Positions should have consequences. The Democrats don’t own Israel or American Jews. Given the fact that the Democratic Party and their leaders wanted to remove Jerusalem as the undivided capital of Israel from their platform, Israel is fully justified in turning to the Republicans. Ted Belman

By Julian Pecquet, THE HILL – 09/24/12 05:00 AM ET

Top Jewish Democrats are squarely standing by President Obama’s decision not to meet with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and warning Israel to butt out of the U.S. presidential race.

The White House has been on the defensive ever since Israeli officials publicly complained last week after Obama refused to adjust his schedule to meet with Netanyahu at the United Nations General Assembly in New York next week. Republicans quickly pounced, urging Obama to reconsider and inviting Netanyahu to meet with them at his convenience.
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By Col. (ret.) Dr. Jacques Neriah, JCPA

While some 90 percent of Egyptians are Sunni Muslims, the number of Shia in Egypt has been estimated at up to 2.2 million, including “Twelvers” and Ismailis. A Shiite dynasty, the Fatimids, conquered Egypt in 969 and ruled the country for 200 years.

The new Muslim Brotherhood President of Egypt, Mohammad Morsi, is reported to have said that the Shia are more dangerous to Islam than the Jews, while former Muslim Brotherhood leader and presidential candidate Abdel Moneim Abul Fotouh warned during the campaign that Shiism must not be allowed to enter Egypt.
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Fire in the belly. Speech delivered in April 2011

This Report was published on April 15/12. So May has come and gone and so has the summer. Thus it could happen at any time now. Ted Belman

Moment of truth is near

TIMES OF ISRAEL, APRIL 15/12

The report, screened on the main evening news of Channel 10, was remarkable both in terms of the access granted to the reporter, who said he had spent weeks with the pilots and other personnel he interviewed, and in the fact that his assessments on a strike were cleared by the military censor.

No order to strike is likely to be given before the P5+1 talks with Iran resume in May, the reporter, Alon Ben-David, said. “But the coming summer will not only be hot but tense.”

In the event that negotiations fail and the order is given for Israel to carry out an attack on Iranian nuclear facilities, “dozens if not more planes” will take part in the mission: attack and escort jets, tankers for mid-air refueling, electronic warfare planes and rescue helicopters, the report said.
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By Ted Belman

Mordechai Kedar in his recent article, Sic Transit Gloria Mundi, reviews the decline in American power and will to protect its values from her defeat in the Vietnam War to the present. It is long but worthwhile. He ends it with:

The conclusion that Israel must draw from all of this is clear: It’s security must not depend on the ever-dissipating American determination, because some Americans who determine policy have the tendency to throw their friends – as in the case of Mubarak – under the bus. There are more than a few people in the American political community who are not at all convinced that Israel’s existence serves the interests of the United States, and especially if their support of Israel might anger the Muslims.
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Ajami doesn’t bother to mention that Obama practically begged the Arab countries and the PA to make minor good will gestures to Israel when he was asking that Israel advance the peace process and they slammed the door in his face. Ted Belman

We can’t declare a unilateral end to our troubles, or avert our gaze from the disorder that afflicts the societies of the Greater Middle East. “It is always about the man at the helm.”

FOUAD AJAMI, WSJ

This is not a Jimmy Carter moment—a U.S. Embassy and its staff seized and held hostage for 444 days, America’s enemies taking stock of its weakness, its allies running for cover. But the anti-American protests that broke upon 20 nations this past week must be reckoned a grand personal failure for Barack Obama, and a case of hubris undone. No American president before this one had proclaimed such intimacy with a world that stretches from Morocco to Indonesia.

From the start of his administration, Mr. Obama put forth his own biography as a bridge to those aggrieved nations. He would be a “different president,” he promised, and the years he lived among Muslims would acquit him—and thus America itself. He was the un-Bush.
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This interview is torrid.

Pamela Geller knows her stuff and expresses herself well.  The interviewer was bent on smearing her, and defending Muslims. Jihad and CAIR.  CNN cut out half the interview starting with Geller’s attack on CAIR.

By Daniel Greenfield

Responding to the Sydney Mohammed riots featuring bloodied police officers and Muslim children holding beheading signs, Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard said, “What we saw in Sydney on the weekend wasn’t multiculturalism but extremism.”

Muslim extremism is multicultural. It is the essence of their approach to multiculturalism. Only through, what Gillard calls extremism, do an Egyptian, a Pakistani and a Malay have anything at all in common with one another.
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By Greg Richards, AMERICAN THINKER

Newt Gingrich has and excellent analysis on what we face from his book Winning the Future published in 2006:

“We have two immediate opponents, the irreconcilable wing of Islam and the rogue dictatorships that empower the radical Islamists. The irreconcilable wing of Islam considers America the great Satan. The Islamists cannot reconcile with a secular system of laws. They cannot tolerate a West that maintains a presence in the Arabian Gulf or that would defend Israel’s right to survive as a country. They cannot tolerate freedom of speech, freedom of religion, or freedom for women. In short, their demands are irreconcilable with the modern world.
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By CONRAD BLACK, Special to the Sun

[..]
With the first Gulf War and the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1990 and 1991, the United States arrived at the undisputed summit of the world, with dissident students in Prague and even Moscow uplifting themselves by reading aloud the works of Lincoln and Jefferson, and with the surge of prestige that accrued to the United States as its only remaining rival crumbled.

But the United States has fumbled away its gentle overlordship of the world these last 15 years. Huge current account deficits and colossal federal budget deficits arose, and while the United Sates is generally successful in real wars, its habit of calling policy attacks on sociological problems “wars” has led to the conspicuous failures of the wars on crime, poverty and drugs.
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[THIS IS ALSO WHAT ROMNEY SUPPORTS]

By Greg McDonald, NEWSMAX

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is calling for an immediate change in U.S. policy toward the Middle East, including a stronger commitment to Israel’s security, a complete cut off of aid to Egypt, a reassessment of strategies in Iraq and Afghanistan, and a new energy policy “that decisively liberates us” from relying on the region.

“I think we should have a total reassessment of our entire strategy for the region,” Gingrich said Thursday in response to the administration’s late acknowledgement that the attacks on the Libyan consulate that left four Americans dead was an act of terrorism.
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Yitzhak Benhorin, YNET

WASHINGTON – A first-of-its-kind event focusing on Jewish refugees who fled Arab countries was launched Friday at the United Nations headquarters in New York, despite strong Arab pressure.

After an Arab demand to call off the event was rejected, the Arab League asked the UN Secretariat for permission to hand out press releases at the entrance to the Israeli event , but that request was turned down as well.

The Palestinian UN observer emailed reporters covering the organization on Thursday night, and attached an article published by senior Palestinian official Hanan Ashrawi on the Huffington Post, in which she accuses Israel of cynically using the term “refugee”.
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This enormous turnout of Arab Israelis shows the power of Islam even in Israel. At least they weren’t violent. Ted Belman

YNET

Some 30,000 people attended a Northern Islamic Movement rally held in Umm al-Fahm, in northern Israel, in protest of the film mocking Prophet Mohammed.

The film, titled “Innocence of Muslin,” has sparked Muslim riots worldwide. The violence has so far claimed the lives of over 30 people, including US Ambassador to Libya Christopher Stevens and three other American diplomats.
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