T. Belman. I’m with Glick on this. Bennett should not accept this deal. A fifth election won’t solve anything other than to keep Netanyahu as PM for another few months. It is more likely, in my opinion that he will get less votes then.

Just because Shaked supports Bennett totally, doesn’t mean that they have decided to join Lapid.

The best outcome is that Netanyahu resigns to make way for a solid right wing coalition.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is not expected to return mandate early.

By GIL HOFFMAN, JPOST  APRIL 22, 2021

YESH ATID Party head Yair Lapid addresses a conference in Jerusalem last week.

President Reuven Rivlin will give Yesh Atid leader Yair Lapid the mandate to form a government the day after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s mandate ends on May 4, sources close to Rivlin said on Thursday.

Netanyahu’s associates have admitted that he has given up on forming a government but said he does not intend to return the mandate early and take the advice of advisers who told him it would catch Lapid and Yamina leader Naftali Bennett unprepared.

“Whoever receives the most recommendations from the factions will receive the mandate,” said a source close to the president.

Read more…

by Daniel Edelstein, JUSTSECURITY.ORG       March 10, 2021

The primary victor and loser in last fall’s short but brutal battle between Azerbaijan and Armenia was fairly obvious to observers. Seeking control over the Nagorno-Karabakh region and seven surrounding districts, Azerbaijan emerged from the conflict reclaiming the majority of territory that it had lost to Armenian separatists in the early ‘90s, leaving only a small percentage of the broader region’s territory under Armenian control, roughly corresponding to its historical Armenian-majority areas.

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By James Reynolds, BBC News,  Published 12 August 2012

First of all, you need to ask for an appointment well in advance. Security agents call your head office to make sure you are who you say you are.

If your credentials check out, an appointment is made, and a guard escorts you to the top floor of the building. Another guard calls you in, tests your equipment and ask you to leave behind your mobile phone. You are taken through further checks and invited to sit in a corridor and admire works of art on the wall as you wait.

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T. Belman.  Azerbaijan is a predominantly Muslim country; more than three-fifths of the population is Shi?i, and about one-third is Sunni. But its government is intensely secular. Population wise it is slightly larger than Israel.

You will recall that it gave Israel landing rights in its fight with Iran. Israel sided with it in its fight against Armenia. Ironically, so did Turkey.

In an exclusive interview, Azerbaijan’s Economy Minister Mikayil Jabbarov says he hopes to open Azeri trade and tourism bureaus in the Jewish state.

By Dean Shmuel Elmas, ISRAEL HAYOM

Like other oil-producing states, Azerbaijan is looking to diversify its economy.

While economic ties between Baku and Jerusalem are strong, the coronavirus has led to a decrease in bilateral trade following a $1.4 billion high in 2019. Israeli Foreign Minister Gabi Ashkenazi and Azerbaijan’s Economy Minister Mikayil Jabbarov are set to discuss kick-starting bilateral trade in a meeting of the Israel-Azerbaijan intergovernmental committee to be held next week.

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“This is not a conflict-free situation,” said Wolf. “[Fauci] is not giving us fact-based, science-based guidance.”

By Lauren Marcus, World Israel News

A prominent feminist author spoke out against Dr. Anthony Fauci on Tuesday, saying she believed he does not have the U.S.’s best interests at heart and that he is compromised by Israeli funding.

Dr. Naomi Wolf, a former Democratic party consultant who once advised former president Bill Clinton and former vice president Al Gore, told Fox News that Fauci “does not work for us.”

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By  Harold C. Hutchison, UNCOVER DC       April 22, 2021

In light of the sharp swing to the Left that corporate America is taking – one that has resulted in the transplanting of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions approach from targeting Israel to being aimed at conservative policy preferences like election integrity and the protection of women’s sports. The fact is, at one time, the Republican Party did make its alliance with big business, often because agendas meshed around lower taxes.

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An Updated Response to Advocates and Skeptics

By Amb. Dore Gold, JCPA

The Strategic West Bank Mountain Ridge and the Jordan Valley

By Patricia McCarthy, AM THINKER

If there is one thing that characterizes the left today, it is the fervent need to pretend men like George Floyd, Daunte Wright, Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Rayshard Brooks, Eric Garner, and others are pillars of society, hapless victims of police brutality and racism.  Those mentioned above all died resisting arrest.  All had criminal records, some of them extensive and for violent crimes.

Not one of them complied with the police when pulled over for a traffic stop or when they were in the process of being apprehended after committing a crime.  All of them attempted to resist, flee, or harm the police who were present.  In nearly all these cases, their own behavior brought about their demise, however tragic they may have been.
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Yamina leader Naftali Bennett would be wise to remember that he cannot accomplish his political goals by joining the Center-Left bloc.

By  Caroline B. Glick, ISRAEL HAYOM

Dear Naftali,

Maybe you remember the conversation we had back in November 2018 when we were waiting for our flight home from New York. I was coming back from a lecture tour. You were coming back from a trip to Pittsburgh. In the aftermath of the massacre of American Jews as the Tree of Life Synagogue, as Minister of Education and Diaspora Affairs you rushed to the scene as the representative of the State of Israel to console and support the community.

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April cop-killing of Daunte Wright strengthens resolve to pursue broader public safety reforms, after previous efforts focused on responding to Floyd’s death

By LONNY GOLDSMITH, TOI

People react after the verdict was read in the Derek Chauvin trial on April 20, 2021 In Minneapolis, Minnesota. Former police officer Derek Chauvin was on trial on second-degree murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter charges in the death of George Floyd May 25, 2020. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)

TC Jewfolk, via JTA — Enzi Tanner didn’t watch the trial of Derek Chauvin.

Even as the jury returned guilty verdicts Tuesday afternoon on all three counts against the former Minneapolis police officer — second-degree murder, third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter — the community safety organizer at Jewish Community Action, a Minnesota social justice organization, had been thinking of issues bigger than the result.

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T. Belman. I find this very disturbing. But why should I expect otherwise.

Comments by mostly liberal organizations say ruling a first step in addressing police brutality, reforms still needed to tackle systemic racism

By JACOB MAGID, TOI 21 April 2021,

Illustrative: Jews for Racial and Economic Justice (JFREJ), the sister organization of The Jewish Vote, march in support of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2016. (Courtesy Gili Getz)<
>

A host of mainly liberal US Jewish groups welcomed Tuesday’s guilty verdict in the trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin over George Floyd’s death.

Chauvin was convicted of murder and manslaughter for pinning Floyd to the pavement with his knee on the Black man’s neck in a case that touched off worldwide protests, violence and a furious reexamination of racism and policing in the US.
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by Victor Rosenthal       April 22, 2021

Earlier this week I wrote about what Yoram Hazony calls “The Virtue of Nationalism,” the idea that independent nation-states with ethnically homogeneous populations and limited borders provide a better opportunity to maximize individual freedom and satisfaction than large imperial conglomerations that try to meld diverse groups into an ethnically neutral state of all its citizens.

I noted that nationalism is a natural extension of the inherent human tendency to like and trust others that resemble them, beginning with family members and expanding outward to include clans, tribes, and nations. I argued that this tendency was probably developed as a result of evolutionary forces over hundreds of thousands of years, and is now essentially hardwired into humans.  Zionism, Jewish nationalism, is naturally based on these human feelings.  But it’s not simple.

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T. Belman. If you want to understand Jordan, this discussion is indispensable.
The participants argue that Jordan’s stability is very important to all its neighbors particularly Israel
At the same time it points our the threats to that stability.

They argue that Jordan is a supporter of the two state solution and thus a friend of the Palestinians in Israel. They ignore that advocates of the two state solution are perpetuating the conflict. Jordan takes this position in order to prevent Jordan becoming the Palestinian state. i.e, they want Palestine to be created west of the river, not east of it.

Thus these experts are at odds with the Jordan Option.
– Palestinians represent about 75% of the population of 9 million and they are marginalized by the current regime.
– The Palestinians argue that the King is robbing the country of its wealth making it a debtor nation.
– That the people are very poor and have no future.
– That the Palestinians will do a better job at running the country for the people and that they will make a more stable Jordan

Jerusalem Studio 599

Blinken is relying on inflated, erroneous Palestinian Authority numbers and overlooking the Jewish demographic tailwind in Israel. Op-ed.

By Amb. (ret.) Yoram Ettinger, INN , Apr 21 , 2021

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken

Secretary of State Antony Blinken keeps advising Israel to retreat from the mountain ridges of Judea and Samaria (aka the ‘West Bank’), lest it loses its Jewish majority.

Secretary Blinken is wrong, relying on highly-inflated, erroneous Palestinian Authority numbers, ignoring the dramatic Westernization of Arab demography, and overlooking the unprecedented Jewish demographic tailwind in Israel, as documented by the following data.
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Israel’s Mossad is increasingly active on the Iran-Azerbaijan border – a fact which is causing growing concern in Tehran.

By Dean Elmas Shmuel, INN

The landscape surrounding the Iran-Azerbaijan border is incredibly beautiful. These pristine, green hills, however, conceal widespread intelligence-gathering activity by the Mossad, according to foreign reports.

On Tuesday, I toured the border at two points: the first at Fuzuli and the second at Zangilan. Both these areas were liberated in the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh War, in which Azerbaijan expanded its border with Iran from 500 kilometers (310 miles) to 600 kilometers (373 miles). And if up until that war the ayatollah regime in Tehran struggled to monitor the gigantic, fenceless border with its neighbor, now this border is even longer.

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T. Belman. If you love America, you want to protect it.  That’s called patriotism,   If you hate America, you want to destroy it.  All the policies of the left are intended to destroy America rather than improve it.

by Tabitha Korol

Our schools choose their teaching staff by the color of their skin, not the content of their character or the extent of their knowledge, and the advantages that may be gained for the socialist-democrat party.

In a small, but vibrant, Middle-America community, there exists a public high school with a wall that proudly displays the achievements of past graduates, so that I welcomed reading the community’s magazine that boasted the school’s latest successes, cited as “diversity.”   But it soon became clear that the diversity refers to the staff’s complexions and sexual dispositions.  We search in vain for references to interests served, classes offered, careers sought, talents developed, and ingenuity encouraged, and we realize that another order of business is afoot.

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