By Martin Kettle, GUARDIAN

If Olaf Scholz becomes chancellor after his narrow victory, progressives across the continent will be trying to imitate him.

Germany’s general election signals far more than just the end of the Angela Merkel era. Although it will eventually produce yet another centrist coalition government, this should not be dismissed as simply the same old same-old. For the new government will represent several steps into the unknown. There will be significant lessons and lasting political consequences – for Germany above all, but also for the continent of which, in spite of everything, Britain remains part.

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T. Belman. This is why I rooted for the the AfD Party. I felt Israel and Jews had more to be concerned from the left than the right. I felt the left is more antisemitic than the right.  In the US we also have more to be concerned from the left than the right.

Israel should not be under any delusion that the Social Democratic Party has its back. If anything, the slide to the Left, as it is being called in Germany, has serious implications for the Jewish state.

By Benjamin Weinthal, ISRAEL HAYOM       September 30, 2021

The composition of the next German government remains unclear but one thing is certain: With the Social Democratic Party (SPD) securing a victory over Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative Christian Democratic Union (CSU) in the federal election, the country has undergone a Linksrutsch – a “slide to the Left.”

From the perspective of Israel’s security and defense establishment, the prospect of a left-wing chancellor beholden to an increasingly anti-Israel base does not bode well. As head of the largest party, the SPD’s Olaf Scholz has the best chance to replace Merkel after her nearly 16 years in office.

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By Ben Fox, AP             October 1, 2021

WASHINGTON (AP) — Facing bipartisan criticism over its approach to immigration, the Biden administration on Thursday announced new rules that require authorities to only pursue migrants who recently crossed into the country without permission or are deemed to pose a threat to public safety.

The new guidelines replace interim rules issued in February that were initially blocked by a federal judge in August as part of a lawsuit brought by Texas and Louisiana. They break from a more aggressive approach to immigration enforcement under former President Donald Trump, who early in his presidency directed authorities to apprehend anyone who was illegally in the country.

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by Micha Gefen, ISRAEL UNWIRED October 1, 2021

Mahmoud Abbas must be wondering why his fortunes have not shifted under a Democratic president. After all, Biden’s team are known to be pro two-state solution and view “settlements” as illegal. If it’s this bad for Abbas under Biden, the world has truly left him behind.

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By  Jonathan Davis,  CONS BRIEF     September 30, 2021<
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Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich has demanded that Maricopa County freeze all materials related to the recently completed audit of the 2020 election ahead of his office preparing litigation and additional investigation.

The Election Integrity Unit within the AG’s office sent a letter on Monday to the Arizona Senate “requesting supporting documents from the report released last week,” according to a press release. “Additionally, the EIU asked Maricopa County to preserve all documents and data related to the 2020 election.”

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by Eytan Gilboa, Middle East Quarterly
Fall 2021 (view PDF)

As the worldwide mass demonstrations during the latest war between Israel and Hamas vividly illustrate, every conflict is fought twice: first on the battlefield, then in public opinion. Having failed to destroy the State of Israel upon its birth and in ensuing decades of terrorism, the Palestinians waged a sustained propaganda battle to win over Western hearts and minds, especially in the United States, the foremost world power and Israel’s staunchest and most longstanding ally.

Turning Israel’s struggle for survival upside down—with aggressors turned into hapless victims and vice versa—the fake Palestinian narrative of unblemished victimhood has made inroads into American public opinion. This has been especially true since the onset of the Oslo “peace process,” which transformed the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) overnight from the world’s leading terror organization into a (supposed) peaceable political actor.

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Wary progressives seek assurances on separate social policy and climate package.

Sen. Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.) said he would support a $1.5 trillion social-policy and climate package, calling for a major cut to the legislation that Democrats have been preparing for weeks.

By WSJ

WASHINGTON—House Democrats dropped plans to vote on a roughly $1 trillion infrastructure bill Thursday night, as they came up short on reaching agreement around a separate social policy and climate package they hope will unite the party’s dueling factions.

Key lawmakers said they were making progress toward a framework mapping out the overall level of spending and central planks of the healthcare, education and climate package, but that the discussions required more time.

Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D., Md.) advised lawmakers shortly before 11 p.m. that the House wouldn’t hold further votes that day.

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The time for an avowedly “neutral” legal positivism has long passed, if it was ever felicitous to begin with.

By Josh Hammer, AM GREATNESS

The U.S. Supreme Court begins its new term next week, which means all eyes have again returned to the justices’ marble palace at 1 First Street, N.E. This court term, unlike the last one, promises to be a blockbuster: The hot-button issues of abortion, gun rights, and potentially affirmative action will all be on the justices’ docket. By the end of this term, we should have a definitive answer as to just how “conservative” the putatively conservative, six to three Republican-nominated majority court actually is.

And just as all eyes have returned to the court, observers of all stripes have been presented with a timely reminder as to how the court’s progressives view their jobs: to wit, as unabashed liberal partisans. That reminder has now come courtesy of the current court’s most far-left justice, Sonia Sotomayor. It follows an entire career’s worth of similar comments from Justice Sotomayor’s former colleague, the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
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RighT-wing groups slam the court’s ruling as a failure to combat the Palestinian Authority’s “creeping annexation” areas in Judea and Samaria. “Khan al-Ahmar has been, and continues to be, the test case for the larger strategic challenge,” says Regavim NGO.

By Yair Altman, ISRAEL HAYOM

The case has seen the small village emerge as the Palestinian Authority’s “flagship outpost in the systematic takeover of Area C,” which under the 1993 Oslo Accords is under full Israeli control.

Israel been trying to evict the area for years and has come under heavy criticism, with major European governments urging it to avoid the demolition of Khan al-Ahmar. The International Criminal Court’s chief prosecutor has even warned the move could constitute a war crime.

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By Michael Kimmitt, AM THINKER

The ethical corruption of our national new media has extended to a degree that once would have seemed unimaginable.  We were exposed to yet another remarkable example with the reporting on the long-awaited audit of the 2020 presidential election results in Arizona.

Widespread election fraud had been suspected in Maricopa County, the largest in the state, and the state Legislature authorized a thorough forensic investigation.  A draft of the election report was leaked to the press last week, and every news outlet quickly released selectively chosen details.  The message was straightforward.  The audit proved that Joe Biden had actually won the state’s presidential election by even more than originally reported and thoroughly discredited charges of election fraud.

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Private Israeli intelligence firm releases photographs of facility outside Tehran, where at least two members of the Iranian military were killed earlier this week

By JUDAH ARI GROSS 30 September 2021,

Before and after photographs from an explosion at an alleged Iranian missile base, on September 27, 2021. (ImageSat International)

A private Israeli intelligence firm released satellite photographs of an alleged Iranian missile production facility outside Tehran on Thursday, showing the damage at the site after an explosion there earlier in the week.

In the images, taken on Monday shortly after the blast, at least a quarter of the building — a “secret missile base” belonging to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, according to the company — can be seen completely destroyed, while additional damage can be seen on the roof along the entire structure.
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T. Belman. Abromowitz leaves out the fact that the US gave protective cover for  Islam and white-washed it.

Had America internalized the lessons of 9/11, its government would have charged the CIA, DOJ, FBI, DHS, and DOD with the task of rooting out both domestic and foreign physical terrorists, as well the cultural terror ideologies behind them.

By Ken Abromomitz, INN

We recently commemorated the tragedy of al Qaeda’s attacks on our homeland. On September 11, 2001, nineteen Islamist terrorists (fifteen from Saudi Arabia) highjacked and flew two airplanes into the Twin Towers of New York’s World Trade Center, another plane crashed into the Pentagon, and the fourth plane crashed into a field in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Nearly 3,000 innocent Americans perished that day.

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By Victor Sharpe

If we live in a nation and in a world that still consists of truly clearheaded and moral thinking people, why then would so many yet fall into a deep morass of mental idiocy and support the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians? Do they not know how violent, how racist, how brutal and how hateful towards democratic values and human rights the Palestinian leadership in both Gaza and in the Palestinian Authority truly is?

The question must be asked of such people. So why do they do it and what’s in it for them?

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In Israel, COVID is fast becoming a pandemic of the unvaccinated: Of the 644 patients in serious condition on Tuesday, 73 percent were from the small population of eligible Israelis who had not received any shots

By Sam Sokol, HAARETZ

Unvaccinated adults now account for the majority of severe COVID-19 cases and fatalities in Israel, with over six of every 10 new severe cases recorded on Tuesday linked to this group.

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by Bassam Tawil, GATESTONE INSTITUTE  •  September 30, 2021 at 5:00 am

• As far as [Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud] Abbas and the PA leadership are concerned, any Palestinian who joins the jihad (holy war) against Israel and Jews and gets killed, wounded or imprisoned is a “hero” and a “freedom fighter.” This is the same PA that the Biden administration is now working to strengthen.
• This approach by the PA leadership has sent a message to generation after generation among the Palestinians that the murder or injuring of a Jew is a noble deed that earns the perpetrator boundless respect – even adoration.
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By Geoffrey Clarfield, AM THINKER

The founding fathers did not see themselves as constituting a new version of classical Greece.  Instead, they saw themselves as biblically inspired Romans, which is to say, modern Republicans.

Paul Meany has written insightfully about how the founding fathers were enamored of the Roman Republic and how, in many ways, collectively and personally, they modeled themselves on the ancient Romans.

The Founders lavished praise upon Roman heroes who defended their government from tyranny in the Republic’s turbulent final days[.] … [M]any 18th century Americans felt an affinity for ancient Rome, there are many parallels between the two societies. Akin to the Republican Romans, 18th-century Americans were mainly rural farmers[.] … The Romans praised the virtues of independence, patriotism, and moderation, which were also cornerstones of American society[.] … By anchoring arguments for freedom to ancient precedent, Revolutionary American authors aimed to demonstrate that their arguments were timeless and firmly embedded in history. Historians like Plutarch, Livy, and Tacitus successfully encapsulated in writing the eternal and unavoidable struggle between liberty and power[.] … Many of the educated American Revolutionaries did more than just read about the Romans as a scholarly pursuit — they actively tried to emulate their behavior and virtues.

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