by Clifford Smith and Jonathan Spyer, National Review,   February 1, 2023

Last week, Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdo?an, threw the international community into a tizzy when he announced that Sweden should “not expect” Turkey’s support to join NATO after a far-right politician burned a Quran at a protest in front of the Turkish Embassy, ironically, in protest of Turkey’s duplicity concerning Sweden’s bid to join NATO. For months, the addition of Sweden to NATO was treated as a fait accompli by the West, perhaps just requiring a little more cajoling of Ankara, even though Turkey had not technically taken final steps to admit Sweden.

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by Marilyn Stern, Middle East Forum Webinar,   January 30, 2023

https://www.meforum.org/64120/seth-frantzman-on-drones-and-the-transformation

Seth Frantzman, a Middle East correspondent at the Jerusalem Post, executive director of the Middle East Center for Reporting and Analysis (MECRA), and author of Drone Wars: Pioneers, Killing Machines, Artificial Intelligence, and the Battle for the Future, spoke to a January 30^th Middle East Forum Webinar (video) about the significance of evolving drone technology and its impact on global conflicts. The following is a summary of his comments:

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By Col (Res.) Dr. Raphael G. Bouchnik-Chen     February 8, 2023

BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 2,179, , 8 February, 2023

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Israeli public diplomacy is often severely lacking in the face of Palestinian propaganda campaigns designed to blame Israel for collateral damage that sometimes occurs during surgical counterterrorist operations in the West Bank. In the case of several recent tragic incidents in which civilians were killed, Israel missed the opportunity to leverage the dimension of doubt to its own benefit. Israel must be ready to refute and contain biased Palestinian propaganda campaigns before they become rooted in the international consciousness. 

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Sarah Sanders delivers Republican rebuttal to Biden’s SOTU address

By Mordechai Nisan, NEWSMAX

The Israel West Bank Barrier, a symbol of the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine. (Sean Pavone /Dreamstime.com)

Like most things about Jews, their politics in Israel are also unusual, different, and idiosyncratic. While much of the modern appurtenances of democracy apply to the political conduct of public affairs — human rights, free elections, with a robust party system — there is a noticeable streak of anti-democratic impulses in the body politic.

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Col Douglas Macgregor explains how the US caused this war.
He puts all the blame on the US. 

Jeffrey Sachs

BLAMES THE US FOR THE PRESENT WAR.

US EXPANDED NATO EASTWARD CONTRARY TO ASSURANCES TO RUSSIA.

T. Belman. Netanyahu reportedly accepts Biden administration request to ‘pause’ demolition of illegal Arab homes and Judea and Samaria construction. Fir how long. Smotrich and Ben Gvir will never agree to this.

Presumably this “pause” is intended to give time to the US to negotiate a compromise.

Why didn’t Israel demand that illegal Arab construction be stopped.

It is very doubtful the Biden administration can prevent a major outbreak of violence in eastern Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria ahead of Ramadan.

By  Yoni Ben Menachem, IH   7.2.23

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken returned to Washington disappointed following his meeting in Ramallah with Palestinian Authority chairman Mahmoud Abbas, which was intended to bring about calm in the Palestinian territories and restore security coordination with Israel.

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by Judith Bergman, GATESTONE  •  February 7, 2023

Russian President Vladimir Putin (L) and Chinese President Xi Jinping pose for a photograph during their meeting in Beijing, on February 4, 2022. (Photo by Alexei Druzhinin / Sputnik / AFP)

• Just 20 days before [Russia’s invasion of Ukraine]…, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping signed a statement that said their cooperation had “no limits… no forbidden zones.”
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By Andrea Widburg, AM THINKER

Many people still sneer at Justin Trudeau for his silly costumes; soft-spoken, even boyish, demeanor; and overt love for all leftist tropes, whether racial, sexual, religious, or anything else. Those people are fools. Trudeau is a dangerous man who is rapidly creating a totalitarian government that grants rights only to those who march in lockstep with Trudeau’s leftist political and social beliefs.

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E. Kossian. We were all lied to but not everyone swallowed the lies, hook, line and sinker.
Every relative I know except one took the experimental gene change shot. Most took on the advise of relatives in their 50’s in medical profession. If I start the conversation now with “ we were all lied to” they readily agree. 8 mo ago they would have argued. A whole bunch of them just got covid.

For me the fear mongering was a tip, though that part I did initially believe and that caused me to do more research on how to prevent covid. The suppression of alternative thought was the strongest warning flag to me, when doctors should have been encouraged to experiment widely. When I finally got covid oct 2021, the hospital did a pcr test and confirmed I had it ( I had severe flu symptoms). I then asked for the number of cycles the pcr was run at. The response from the lab was “ we don’t know”.

By ROBIN KOERNER   JANUARY 31, 2023

Scott Adams is the creator of the famous cartoon strip, Dilbert. It is a strip whose brilliance derives from close observation and understanding of human behavior. Some time ago, Scott turned those skills to commenting insightfully and with notable intellectual humility on the politics and culture of our country.

Like many other commentators, and based on his own analysis of evidence available to him, he opted to take the Covid “vaccine.”
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Scott Ritter –
MOST OF THE WORLD SUPPORTS RUSSIA.
WE ARE HEADED TO A MULTI-POLAR WORLD.

BY ALEXANDER MAISTROVOY

For the third time in its short history, Israel, by the will of fate or metaphysical destiny, once again finds itself in the epicenter of the struggle of the Western world with supranational totalitarian systems. The first time, it became an outpost in the way of the powerful Soviet empire, which sought to establish a communist world dictatorship. The second time, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was attacked by Islamic jihadists, who practiced against it the most monstrous methods of “fighting the infidels.” This onslaught was repulsed, and the jihadists were at least temporarily weakened. The new attack was marked by the advent of yet another, perhaps the most sophisticated, totalitarian ideology: globalism. And again, as before, the Jewish state has become the main battlefield.

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by Dr. Eric R. Mandel, MEPIN

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken discusses the protests in Iran with Iranian-American writer Roya Hakakian, Iranian-American activist Sherry Hakimi, and British-Iranian actress and activist Nazanin Boniadi at the State Department in Washington on October 14, 2022.

It would be a shame to miss the present opportunity to support the Iranian protesters fighting for their lives. For close to half a year, the Iranian people, first led by their women and then young adults, have called not only for better economic conditions, as they have in the past, but for wholesale regime change.
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by Steve Kramer

There’s way too much hysteria from the left wing over proposed legislation in Israel’s parliament, the Knesset. Where do world leaders like Secretary of State Antony Blinken and French President Emmanuel Macron get the hutzpah to lecture Israel’s elected representatives? It’s bad enough that the leaders of Israel’s previous left wing coalition  are acting as if the Supreme Court rules cannot be modified. This frenzy over the government’s projected but unspecified alterations to Israel’s Supreme Court is not the end of democracy – as is claimed – but the exercise of democracy. (This right wing government has a larger majority, 65 to 55, than the current American administration or the previous left wing Israeli administration.)
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Kyiv also reportedly says government must agree to treat wounded soldiers, loan $500 million and more, with meeting between Eli Cohen and Zelensky hanging in balance

By ASH OBEL, TOI   

Foreign Minister Eli Cohen arrives for the weekly cabinet meeting at the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem on January 15, 2023. (Yonatan Sindel/Flash90)

Kyiv has formulated a list of demands it wants fulfilled by Foreign Minister Eli Cohen ahead of an expected visit to Ukraine, among them a public denunciation of the Russian invasion and hundreds of millions of dollars in loans.

The requests, which also include an expression of support for the country’s territorial integrity, medical treatment in Israel and the development of anti-missile technology, fall short of previous asks Kyiv has made for defensive weaponry, but may still force Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government into an uncomfortable stance as it seeks to navigate between the warring allies.

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