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	<title>FrontPage Magazine &#187; Caroline Glick</title>
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		<title>Lapid’s Political Crack-Up</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/lapids-political-crack-up/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=lapids-political-crack-up</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/lapids-political-crack-up/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 05 Dec 2014 05:30:57 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Caroline Glick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[coalition government]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Elections]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Left]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Netanyahu]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Yair Lapid]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=246744</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why the Israeli Left is incapable of moving to the center. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/1863275564.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-246745" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/1863275564-448x350.jpg" alt="1863275564" width="337" height="263" /></a>Originally published by the <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Column-One-Lapids-political-crack-up-383704">Jerusalem Post</a>. </em></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">Three days after Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and leader of the Yesh Atid party and now former finance minister Yair Lapid failed to resolve their differences and so thrust Israel into an electoral season less than two years after the last election, the Left’s narrative is already clear. Netanyahu has forced unnecessary, costly elections on the country.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">He did so because his reactionary nature, overweening ego and thin skin made it impossible for him to handle a true reformer like Lapid, who was trying to push the country forward.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The actual situation is quite different. These elections are necessary. The up to NIS 1.2 billion that taxpayers will have to pay to finance the vote scheduled for March 17 is money well spent. And if the current polls are even close to what the election results will be three months from now, then the public understands that they are necessary and intends to elect a government that will serve it better than the one that just dissolved.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">To be sure, Netanyahu is the one who decided to call elections. But the person responsible for making it impossible for the existing government to function is Lapid. Over the past few months Lapid has had the political equivalent of a nervous breakdown.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In 2013, Lapid ran as a centrist. The television celebrity’s new party, Yesh Atid, presented itself as the voice of the hard-working middle class whose members love this country and are tired of electing governments that trample their economic interests and take them for granted in favor of special interests, especially the haredim.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In other words, Lapid ran as his father’s son.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The late Yosef “Tommy” Lapid’s Shinui party also claimed to be the voice of the middle class and the ideological Center, fighting the special interests, especially the haredim.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">But as economic commentator Rotem Sella explained Thursday on the NRG website, aside from boycotting the haredim, Lapid Jr. did not follow in his father’s footsteps after taking office.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Whereas Shinui was a liberal free market party that supported then-finance minister Netanyahu’s reforms that transformed Israel’s sclerotic, socialist economy into a rapidly growing free market, Lapid and his ministers from Yesh Atid exchanged their capitalist platform for socialist policies immediately upon taking office. In so doing they put Israel on a path to recession and social upheaval.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">As Sella noted, among other things, shortly after taking office Lapid capitulated to the thuggish Histadrut labor federation and agreed not to touch the inflated salaries of state employees – paid for by the middle class taxpayers who voted for him.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">His health minister, Yael German, took steps to wipe out private medical services through draconian taxation and paralyzing regulation of private medical services. Her actions didn’t rescue the bankrupt public health system. They merely served to deny citizens the right to pay for better healthcare and to deny doctors the opportunity to make a living even remotely commensurate with the value of their skills.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In recent months, Lapid’s signature policies were his decision to expand the deficit in order to increase welfare spending and his draft bill to cancel VAT for select first-time home purchasers.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The former policy has already damaged Israel’s international credit rating. The latter policy has been criticized across the board by economists as a populist move that will raise housing prices and waste NIS 3b. in taxpayer money – that is, well more than the cost of the elections.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Lapid’s refusal to reconsider his policies despite their self-evident foolishness was a key cause of the government’s fall. And his insistence that only mean-spirited reactionaries oppose his plans is evidence that he lacks the capacity to understand how people perceive his behavior.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">That brings us to his ideological transformation in office from a self-proclaimed centrist security hawk to a member in good standing of the radical Left.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The votes for at least half of the 19 mandates Lapid won in the last election were given to him by the center-right. Yesh Atid contended for these votes against the rightist Bayit Yehudi party led by Economy Minister Naftali Bennett.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Netanyahu threw many of the ballots Lapid’s way when he opened a vicious attack against Bennett in the final weeks of the campaign.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Out of respect for his voters, Lapid gave his first policy address at Ariel University in Samaria. During the coalition talks he and Bennett formed an alliance to force Netanyahu to take both of their parties into the government.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Without Bennett it is entirely possible that Lapid would have spent the last two years as head of the opposition.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Yet, within a few months of taking office, Lapid began a gradual slide to the Left. In recent months the slide became a steep and rapid descent as his broadsides against Netanyahu and the Right became ever more frequent and extreme.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Lapid’s most radical position has been his unhinged opposition in recent weeks to the draft basic law defining Israel as the Jewish nation-state.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">For those with short memories, the draft law began as an initiative of the Livni-led Kadima party, co-sponsored by nearly 80% of its Knesset faction. Yet, much to the consternation of his Zionist voters, Lapid caused untold damage to Israel by proclaiming that the anodyne draft legislation, most of the provisions of which are already anchored in standing law, and which he supported until just recently, is “anti-democratic.”</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">If that wasn’t enough, during his press conference on Wednesday night, Lapid unleashed a wild attack on Netanyahu. Lapid proclaimed that during Operation Protective Edge last summer, Netanyahu’s cabinet “lost its faith in his ability to manage” the war. This allegation says more about Lapid than it does about Netanyahu.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">After all, if he believed that Netanyahu was incompetent to lead the nation in war, how did he dare to stay silent? Why did he repeatedly vote in favor of Netanyahu’s decisions? Lapid accused Netanyahu of destroying Israel’s relations with the US. He claimed that he receives frequent calls from US senators demanding explanations for Netanyahu’s “patronizing, and contemptuous” behavior toward the US.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The problem with Lapid’s allegations is that the public doesn’t believe them. During and in the immediate aftermath of the war, Netanyahu’s popularity was sky high.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">As for relations with the US, this week Bar- Ilan University’s BESA Center released the results of its biennial survey of Israeli opinion of relations with the US. According to the survey, Israelis blame US President Barack Obama, not Netanyahu, for the crisis in relations with the White House.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Whereas 73 percent of Israelis believe the US is a loyal ally of Israel, only 37% believe that Obama’s position toward the country is positive. Sixty-one percent believe he is either negatively inclined toward Israel or neutral.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">According to Haaretz, the White House recognizes that the Israeli public blames it for the crisis in relations. On Thursday, the paper reported that the administration was planning to escalate its anti-Israel policies, but now will put them on hold. Administration officials reportedly fear that US pressure on Israel during the elections campaign will increase public support for Netanyahu.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">During his press conference, Lapid insisted that Netanyahu will not serve again as premier.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">But according to polls, Netanyahu has no rivals for the job. It is not merely that nearly three times as many people think that Netanyahu is the best person to serve as prime minister when compared to his closest contender, Labor Party leader Isaac Herzog. It’s also that the polls show right-wing parties picking up seats, while Lapid’s party is likely to lose more than half it seats in the Knesset.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Far from Lapid’s insistent claim that Netanyahu is “cut off” from the public, it is Lapid who sees nothing but his own reflection.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">According to a report Wednesday published by the NRG website, members of Yesh Atid’s Knesset faction are furious with Lapid. They believe that his move to the Left is destroying the party.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">And they are correct.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The 10 mandates from free market supporters on the center-right that Lapid won two years ago will go to actual center-right and rightist parties. Likud, the centrist party just formed by former Likud minister Moshe Kahlon, Bayit Yehudi and Yisrael Beytenu will all pick up votes from disaffected Yesh Atid voters.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">All that remains of Yesh Atid’s great promise are nine Knesset seats which Lapid took two years ago from Labor, Kadima and Meretz.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Today the leftist parties are polling 33 Knesset seat total, and it is hard to see how that number can rise.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">This brings us to the reason these elections are so necessary. Lapid’s con job on the voters two years ago meant that the public didn’t receive the center-right government it wanted. Lapid taught the public that there are no center-left parties, only leftist parties that pretend to be centrist for electoral purposes.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">These elections are necessary because the public hasn’t changed in two years. It still wants a center-right government that supports free market economics. And now, according to the polls, the public understands what it needs to do to get the government it wants. It needs to boot out the Left.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">And so we arrive at the polling data. Whereas the undisguised Left is where it has been for the past 10 years, at roughly 20% of the electorate, the center-right is polling 50%.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">With the haredi parties, Netanyahu can form a coalition government with no leftist parties that rests on the support of nearly two-thirds of the seats in the Knesset.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Until now such a coalition was deemed politically unattractive by the political consultant class, because the public believed that only the Left could call itself the Center. Now, thanks to Lapid, the public sees the truth. The Left in power means lies, bad policies, and political chaos. The Left out of power means truth, good policies and political stability.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Back in the halcyon days of 2013, when Yesh Atid was the toast of the town, Lapid told us that the “old politics” are dead, and that “new politics,” had won the day. These “new politics” would propel the country to new heights of good government and economic growth.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Lapid of course was lying. But his slogan might work for the Likud in the coming election cycle.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">By finally exposing the Left as incapable of ever moving toward the Center, Lapid has taught us what we need to do to get the government we want. And the polls indicate that the public has learned the lesson. The price tag for a truly center-right government with liberal economic policies is up to NIS 1.2b. That’s a liquidation sale price.</span></p>
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		<title>Sisi Is Not Mubarak</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/sisi-is-not-mubarak/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=sisi-is-not-mubarak</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/sisi-is-not-mubarak/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 04 Dec 2014 05:40:24 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Caroline Glick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Abdel Fattah Sisi]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Mubarak]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Sinai]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Tunnels]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=246635</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[As far as Israel is concerned, the current Egyptian President is the much better man.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/al-sisi.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-246677" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/al-sisi-450x280.jpg" alt="al sisi" width="256" height="159" /></a><em>Originally published by the <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Column-one-Sisi-is-not-Mubarak-383483">Jerusalem Post</a>. </em></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">The Egyptian court’s decision last Saturday to acquit former president Hosni Mubarak, his sons and associates of all remaining charges against them caused most commentators to proclaim that current Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Sisi has turned back the clock. Under his leadership, they say, Egypt has restored Mubarak’s authoritarian regime under a new dictator.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">While this may be how things appear on the surface, the fact of the matter is that at least as far as Israel is concerned, nothing could be further from the truth.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">During his 30-year rule, Mubarak always assessed that threats against Israel were unrelated to threats against Egypt. Due to this view, despite continuous complaints from Jerusalem, Mubarak enabled jihadists to take root in Sinai. He allowed Egypt to be used as the major path for terrorist personnel and armaments to enter Gaza. He took only minor, sporadic action against the smuggling tunnels connecting Gaza to Sinai.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">By 2005, it became apparent that forces from Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran and al-Qaida were operating in the Sinai and cooperating with one another.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Despite warnings from Israel, Mubarak took no effective action to break up the emerging alliance and convergence of forces.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">It was due to Mubarak’s refusal to act that the Palestinians in Gaza were able to begin and massively expand their projectile war of mortars, rockets and missiles against Israel. From the first such attacks, carried out 14 years ago, the Palestinian projectile campaigns could never have happened without Egypt’s effective collaboration.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">On countless occasions, Palestinian terrorist commanders were able to escape to Sinai and avoid arrest by Israeli forces, only to return to Gaza from Sinai and continue their operations.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Mubarak believed that Israel was his safety valve.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">By facilitating jihadist operations against Israel from Egyptian territory, he assumed that he was securing Egypt from them. As he saw things, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran would be so satisfied with his cooperation in their jihad against the Jews that they would leave him alone.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">It was only in 2009, when Egypt announced the unraveling of a terrorist ring in Sinai comprised of Iranian Revolutionary Guards, Hamas and Hezbollah operatives planning attacks against Israel and Egypt, and seeking the overthrow of the regime, that Mubarak began signaling he may have misjudged the situation. But even then, his actions against those forces were sporadic and half-hearted.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Hamas’s continued assaults against Israel in the years that followed, and the build-up of Muslim Brotherhood and al-Qaida forces in Sinai, were a clear sign that Mubarak was unwilling to contend with the unpleasant reality that the very forces attacking Israel were also seeking to overthrow his regime and destroy the Egyptian state.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In stark contrast, Sisi rose to power as those selfsame forces were poised to destroy the Egyptian state. The Muslim Brotherhood’s rise to power owed in part to the support it received from Hamas.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">During the January 2011 rebellions against Mubarak, Hamas operatives played a key role in storming Egyptian prisons in Sinai and freeing Muslim Brotherhood leaders – including Muslim Brotherhood president Mohammed Morsi – from prison. In 2012 and 2013, Hamas forces reportedly served as shock troops to quell protests against the Muslim Brotherhood regime. Those protests arose in opposition to Morsi’s moves to seize dictatorial powers Mubarak never dreamed of exercising, and his constitutional machinations aimed at transforming Egypt into an Islamic state and hub of a future global caliphate.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Sisi and his generals overthrew the Muslim Brotherhood with Saudi and UAE support in order to prevent Egypt from dissolving into a Sunni jihadist axis in which Hamas, al-Qaida and other jihadist movements were key players, and Iran and Hezbollah were allied forces.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Due to the events that propelled him to power, Sisi has adopted a strategic posture far different from Mubarak’s. As Sisi sees things, Sunni jihadist forces and their Iranian-led Shi’ite allies are existential threats to the Egyptian state even when their primary target is Israel. Sisi accepts that Israel’s fight against them directly impacts Egypt.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">He recognized that when Israel is successful in defeating them, Egypt is more secure. When Israel is weak, the threat to Egypt rises.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Like Israel, Sisi acknowledges that the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is shared by Hamas, al-Qaida and all other significant Sunni jihadist groups renders all of these groups threats to Egypt. And because of this acknowledgment, Sisi has abandoned Mubarak’s policy of enabling their war against Israel.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Not only has he abandoned Mubarak’s policy of enabling them, Sisi has acted in alliance with Israel in combating them. This is nowhere more evident than in his actions against Hamas in Gaza.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">After seizing power in July 2013, Sisi immediately ordered the Egyptian military to take action to secure the border between Gaza and Sinai. To this end, for the first time, Egypt took effective, continuous steps to block the smuggling of arms and people between the two areas. These steps had a profound impact on Hamas’s regime. Hamas went to war against Israel this past summer in a bid to force Egypt and Israel to open their borders with Gaza in support of the Hamas regime and its jihadist allies.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Hamas was certain that footage of suffering in Gaza would force Egypt to oppose Israel, and so open its border with Gaza. It would also lead to US-led pressure on Israel that would make Israel succumb to Hamas’s demands.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Against all expectations, and previous precedents of Egyptian behavior under both Mubarak and Morsi, Sisi supported Israel against Hamas. Moreover, he brought both Saudi Arabia and the UAE into the unofficial alliance with Israel. The bloc he formed was powerful enough to surmount US pressure to end the war by bowing to Hamas’s demands and opening Gaza’s borders with Egypt and Israel.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Since the cease-fire came into force three months ago, Sisi has continued to seal the border. As a consequence, he has denied Hamas the ability to rebuild Gaza’s terror infrastructure. In its reduced state, Hamas is less able to facilitate the operations of its jihadist brethren in Sinai that are primarily involved in waging an insurgency against the Egyptian state.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">To be sure, the most significant strategic development in recent years is the US’s strategic realignment under President Barack Obama. Under Obama the US has switched sides, supporting Iran and its allies, satellites and assets, including the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, against America’s Sunni allies and Israel.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">But the alliance that emerged this summer between Israel and Egypt, with the participation of Saudi Arabia and the UAE , is also a highly significant strategic development. For the first time, a major regional power is basing its strategic posture on its understanding that the threats against itself and against Israel stem from the same sources and as a consequence, that the war against Israel is a war against it.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Israelis have argued this case for years to their Arab neighbors as well as to the Americans and other Western states. But for multiple reasons, no one has ever been willing to accept this basic, obvious reality.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">As a consequence, everyone from the Americans to the Europeans to the Saudis long supported policies that empower jihadist forces against Israel.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Sisi became the first major leader to break with this consensus, as a result of actions Hamas took before and since his rise to power. He has brought Saudi Arabia and the UAE along on his intellectual journey.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">And this reassessment has had a profound impact on regional realities generally and on Israel’s strategic posture specifically.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">From Israel’s perspective, this is a watershed event.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The government must take every possible action, in economic and military spheres, to ensure that Sisi benefits from his actions.</span></p>
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		<title>Iran&#8217;s No China</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/irans-no-china/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=irans-no-china</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 25 Nov 2014 05:50:01 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Caroline Glick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Appeasement]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=245972</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The Obama administration will never abandon its courtship of Iran. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/iranian-protestors-burn-us-flag-during-protest-tehran.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-245973" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/iranian-protestors-burn-us-flag-during-protest-tehran-450x337.jpg" alt="iranian-protestors-burn-us-flag-during-protest-tehran" width="322" height="241" /></a>Originally published by the <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Our-World-Irans-no-China-382727">Jerusalem Post</a>. </em></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">The Obama administration will never abandon its courtship of Iran. On the eve of the extended deadline in the US-led six-party talks with Iran regarding Teheran’s illicit nuclear weapons program, the one thing that is absolutely clear is that courting Iran is the centerpiece of US President Barack Obama’s Middle East policy. Come what may in Geneva, this will not change.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">To be clear, Obama does not seek to check Iran’s rise to regional hegemony by appeasing it. None of the actions he has taken to date with regard to Iran can be construed as efforts to check or contain Iran.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Their goal is to cultivate a US alliance with Iran. As Obama sees things, Iran for him is what China was for then US president Richard Nixon. Nixon didn’t normalize US relations with the People’s Republic of China in order to harm the Chinese Communists. And Obama isn’t wooing Iran’s Islamic revolutionaries in order to harm them.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Unfortunately for the world, China is not a relevant analogy for Iran. Nixon sought to develop ties with Beijing because he wanted to pry the Chinese out of the Soviet orbit. Courting China meant harming Moscow, and Moscow as the US’s greatest foe.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">There is no Moscow that will be weakened by the US’s empowerment of Tehran. The only parties directly and immediately harmed by Obama’s policy of courting Iran are America’s allies in the Middle East. The Allies’ appeasement deal with the Nazis in 1938 had three victims: Czechoslovakia, the rest of Europe, and the rest of the world.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Obama’s policy of courting Iran also has three victims: Israel, the Sunni Arab states, and the rest of the world.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Obama’s initiation of the six-power nuclear talks with Iran harms Israel because the talks facilitate Iran’s nuclear program. That is, Obama is enabling Iran to develop the means to attack Israel with nuclear weapons.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">According to press reports of the content of the negotiations, the US has already abandoned its major red lines. It has abandoned its demand that Iran dismantle its centrifuges. Late last week the US was reportedly about to abandon its demand for Iranian transparency to the International Atomic Energy Agency regarding its past work on atomic bomb development.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In other words, the deal the US was hoping to conclude this week with Iran, and will now continue negotiating next month, involves taking no serious action to curtail Iran’s progress in developing nuclear weapons.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">And in exchange for taking no action to curtail its nuclear progress, Iran demands and will likely receive a complete abrogation of binding UN Security Council economic sanctions against it. Those sanctions were passed in response to Iran’s illicit nuclear progress. The deal the US is now willing to sign renders Iran’s nuclear program legitimate.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Then there are the rest of the states in the region. The Saudis and their Sunni brethren are not the Czechs. They are Poland, Belgium France and Holland. Like the Nazis and the European states in late 1938, Iran threatens all Sunni states in the region.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">As the Americans have engaged in obsessive-compulsive nuclear negotiations with Iran, the Iranians have divided their attention between nuclear development and regional expansion. In September they took over Yemen.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Houthi militia from northern Yemen took over Yemen’s capital city Sana’a that month. The Houthi are Shi’ite, and are to Yemen what Iran’s Lebanese Shi’ite proxy Hezbollah is to Lebanon. The Houthis, who are already a major force in the US-trained Yemeni armed forces, are demanding control over them.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In addition to its proxy’s takeover of Yemen, as Middle East analyst Tony Badran reported earlier this month, the Iranian leadership is orchestrating a major information campaign to present itself as the regional hegemon to regional actors.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps Commander Qassem Soleimani has had his picture taken with Kurdish peshmerga in Iraq as well as with Iraqi regular military forces. Iranian security chief Ali Shamkhani went to Lebanon in late September and offered to arm the Lebanese Armed Forces.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Iran, these photo-ops and visits signal – is the new boss of the region. Yemen shares a 1,700 km border with Saudi Arabia.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The Houthis already fought a border war with Saudi Arabia in 2009. The Iranian proxy’s control over much of the border today is a clear threat to Saudi sovereignty. In light of the close ties the Houthis have spent the past decade cultivating with Saudi Arabia’s Shi’ite minority, it is also a threat to the internal political stability of the kingdom.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">As the Obama administration has erased red line after red line in the nuclear talks, and sided with Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood and other Iranian Sunni allies against US allies, Iran’s leaders have gloated that their hegemony over Yemen raises to four the number of Arab states under their dominion, that list including Iraq, Syria and Lebanon.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Iran’s control over Yemen is a direct threat to the world economy. Before the Houthis marched on Sana’a, Iran was able to threaten global oil markets with its sovereignty over the Straits of Hormuz that controls naval traffic between the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. With the Port of Aden, Iran will also control maritime traffic between the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">It is true that massive increases in US oil sales due to its shale oil development will reduce some of the Middle East’s power to dictate oil prices. But Middle Eastern oil sales still constitute 40 percent of the world market and will continue to be a massive force in the global economy in the coming years. As the force controlling the flow of that oil, Iran will exert massive influence over the global economy.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Add to that the fact that Iran’s Hezbollah has sleeper cells in every major city in Europe and in several hubs in North America, and that Iran has strategic alliances with Venezuela and Nicaragua, a nuclear- armed Iran exerting hegemonic control over the Middle East and its oil exports will become a strategic danger to the global economy and global security.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">One of the many eyebrow raising aspects of Obama’s courtship of Iran is that it isn’t tied to a US retreat from the region. The US isn’t retreating.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Obama has ordered hundreds of air strikes on Islamic State targets to date, and more will undoubtedly follow. The US participated in the NATO overthrow of Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi. US power remains a major factor in regional affairs, and Obama has not shied away from using it during his tenure in office.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The problem is that in all cases, his use of US power has helped Iran more than it has helped US allies. And in the case of Libya, US power has directly threatened US allies and empowered al-Qaida and it associates.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">With the rise of China today, some US analysts question the wisdom of Nixon’s opening to Beijing.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">But there is little argument that his China gambit caused strategic damage to the Soviet Union and contributed to the US victory in the Cold War.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Not only will Obama’s Iran opening not redound to the US’s benefit in the short term. Its inevitable result will be a decade or more of major and minor regional wars and chronic instability, with the nuclear-armed Iran threatening the survival of all of America’s regional allies. It will also lead to shocks in the global economy and massively expand Iran’s direct coercive power over the word as a whole.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Not only is Obama no Nixon, compared to him, Neville Chamberlain looks like a minor, almost insignificant failure.</span></p>
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		<title>Responding to the Slaughter</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/responding-to-the-slaughter/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=responding-to-the-slaughter</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 21 Nov 2014 05:26:03 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Caroline Glick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=245745</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Immediate measures Israel should take to stop the Islamic jihad against the Jewish people. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/635518979796654817-GTY-459169342.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-245746" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/635518979796654817-GTY-459169342-450x337.jpg" alt="635518979796654817-GTY-459169342" width="395" height="296" /></a>Originally published by the <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Column-One-Responding-to-the-slaughter-382423">Jerusalem Post</a>. </em></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">What we are seeing in Jerusalem today is not simply Palestinian terrorism. It is Islamic jihad. No one likes to admit it. The television reporters insist that this is the worst possible scenario because there is no way to placate it.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">There is no way to reason with it.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">So what else is new? The horrible truth is that all of the anti-Jewish slaughters perpetrated by our Arab neighbors have been motivated to greater or lesser degrees by Islamic Jew-hatred. The only difference between the past hundred years and now is that today our appeasement-oriented elite is finding it harder to pretend away the obvious fact that we cannot placate our enemies.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">No “provocation” by Jews drove two Jerusalem Arabs to pick up meat cleavers and a rifle and slaughter rabbis in worship like sheep and then mutilate their bodies.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">No “frustration” with a “lack of progress” in the “peace process,” can motivate people to run over Jewish babies or attempt to assassinate a Jewish civil rights activist.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The reason that these terrorists have decided to kill Jews is that they take offense at the fact that in Israel, Jews are free. They take offense because all their lives they have been taught that Jews should live at their mercy, or die by their sword.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">They do so because they believe, as former Jordanian MP Ya’qub Qarash said on Palestinian television last week, that Christians and Muslims should work together to forbid the presence of Jews in “Palestine” and guarantee that “not a single Jew will remain in Jerusalem.”</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Our neighbors are taught that Muhammad, the founder of Islam, signed the treaty of Hudaybiyah in 628 as a ploy to buy time during which he would change the balance of power between his army and the Jews of Kuraish. And 10 years later, once his army gained the upper hand, he annihilated the Jews.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Throughout the 130-year history of modern Zionism, Islamic Jew-hatred has been restrained by two forces: the desire of many Arabs to live at peace with their Jewish neighbors; and the ability of Israeli authorities and before them, British authorities, to deter the local Arab Muslims from attacking.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The monopoly on Arab Muslim leadership has always belonged to the intolerant bigots. Support for coexistence has always been the choice of individuals.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Haj Amin el-Husseini’s first act as the founder of the Palestinian Arab identity was to translate The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and serialize them in the local press.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">During the Arab jihad of 1936-1939, Husseini’s gangs of murderers killed more Arabs than the British did. He targeted those who sought peaceful coexistence with the Jews.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">His successor Yasser Arafat followed his example.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">During the 1988-1991 Palestinian uprising, the PLO killed more Palestinians than the IDF did. Like Husseini, Arafat targeted Palestinians who worked with Israel.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Since Israel imprudently embraced Arafat and the PLO in 1993 and permitted them to govern the Palestinians in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, and exert direct influence and coercive power over the Arabs of Jerusalem, the Palestinian Authority’s governing institutions have used all the tools at their disposal to silence those who support peaceful coexistence with Israel, and indoctrinate the general public in Islamic and racial Jew-hatred.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Much has been made of the recent spike in incitement of violence by Palestinian leaders led by Arafat’s successor Mahmoud Abbas. But the flames Abbas and his comrades are throwing would not cause such conflagrations if they hadn’t already indoctrinated their audience to desire the destruction of the Jews.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">You cannot solicit murder among those who haven’t been taught that committing murder is an act of heroism.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Today Israel must take swift, effective action to stop the slaughter. The damage that has been done to the psyches of the Arabs of Jerusalem and their brethren in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, cannot be repaired in a timeline relevant to the task of preventing the next massacre.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">This means that for the time being, on the tactical level, Israel’s only play is strengthening its deterrence.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Israel faces two major constraints in meeting this challenge.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">First, the European Union and the Obama administration, as well as the US foreign policy elite, are obsessively committed to a policy of empowering the Palestinians against Israel.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The Spanish parliament’s decision to go ahead with its planned vote to recognize the “State of Palestine,” just hours after the massacre at the Bnei Torah Kehillat Yaakov synagogue in Jerusalem’s Har Nof neighborhood shows that the EU’s dedication to strengthening the Palestinians against Israel is entirely unrelated to events on the ground.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">They don’t care who the Palestinians are or what they do. For their own reasons they have made supporting the Palestinians at Israel’s expense their top foreign policy priority.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Similarly, US President Barack Obama couldn’t contain his compulsion to pressure Israel even in his statement condemning the massacre. Even there, Obama called on Israelis and Palestinians equally to restrain themselves.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Obama’s unabated hostility toward Israel was brought to bear on Tuesday afternoon when the State Department restated its rejection of Jewish property rights in Jerusalem and its desire to see the homes of terrorist murderers left intact for the welfare of their terror-supporting families.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">On Tuesday, Israel’s social media outlets were filled with angry rebukes of Western media outlets from CNN to MSNBC to CBS, to the BBC. All these networks, and many others, did everything in their power to explain away the synagogue slaughter as just another instance of a cycle of violence. That is, they all sought to frame the discussion in a way that would lead their viewers to the conclusion that the slaughter of praying rabbis was justified.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">While appalling, the coverage was not the least surprising. The Western elite media’s devotion to their false narrative of Israeli culpability for all the problems in the region is absolute. Networks would rather wreck their professional reputations than tell the truth.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Together with the EU, the American policy elite and the Obama administration, the media place Israel’s leaders in a bind. Every step they take to defend the country and protect the rights of Jews meets with automatic and libelous condemnation.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The other impediment Israel faces in deterring anti-Jewish violence against its citizenry is its own weakness. Since the inception of the phony peace process, Israel has continuously rewarded the Palestinians for their murderous violence against its citizenry.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">From Israel’s transfer of control over all the Palestinian population centers in Judea and Samaria, to its forcible expulsion of its own people from Gaza, to its repeated releases of terrorists from prison, to its continued transfer of hundreds of millions of shekels in tax revenues to the PA, Israel has showed the Palestinians at every turn that far from being punished for murdering Jews, they will be rewarded for doing so.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Given the US and European support for the Palestinians, Israeli declarations that there will be no future releases of terrorists have no credibility. If terrorists aren’t killed on the spot, they can assume that they will eventually be released; if not in exchange for an Israeli hostage, Israel will release them in an attempt to placate the White House.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">But even with these constraints on its actions, Israel can take steps to deter its hate-filled enemies from attacking.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Since the current campaign of murder is being carried out by terrorists largely acting on their own accord, the measures Israel adopts to stop the attacks should be directed primarily against individual terrorists. As for action against the PA, it needs to be credible, consistent and directed to where it will hurt Palestinian leaders the most: their wallets.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">With regard to the individual terrorists, the government has made much of its intention to destroy the homes of terrorists. While it sounds good, there is limited evidence of the effectiveness of this punitive measure, which is a relic of the British Mandate.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Rather than destroy their homes, Israel should adopt the US anti-narcotics policy of asset seizure.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">All assets directly or indirectly tied to terrorists, including their homes and any other structure where they planned their crimes, and all remittances to them, should be seized and transferred to their victims, to do with what they will.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">If Israel hands over the homes of the synagogue butchers to the 24 orphans of Rabbi Moshe Twersky, Rabbi Kalman Levine, Rabbi Aryeh Kupinsky and Rabbi Avraham Goldberg, not only will justice be served. The children’s inheritance of the homes of their fathers’ killers will send a clear and demoralizing message to other would-be killers.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Not only will their atrocities fail to remove the Jews from Israel. Every terrorist will contribute to the Zionist project by donating his home to the Jewish settlement enterprise.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Just as Israel has repeatedly buckled under US pressure to release terrorists from jail, so it has bowed to US pressure to continue to fund the PA by transferring the tax revenues it collects on goods imported to the PA.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Assuming that the government is too weak to stand up to the Americans, at a minimum it can see that the money is properly used.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">To that end, the Knesset should pass a law permitting Israeli terror victims to sue the PA for actual and punitive damages in Israel courts. The sums awarded to the victims should be taken from the tax revenues Israel collects for the PA. The law should apply retroactively to all victims of Palestinian terror carried out since the establishment of the PA in May 1994.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Not only should the law permit Israeli terror victims to sue the PA. It should dictate actions the Justice Ministry must take to assist them in bringing suit.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Israel should also revoke citizenship and residency rights not only from terrorists themselves, but from those who enjoy citizenship and residency rights by dint of their relationship with the terrorists.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Wives who received Israeli residency or citizenship rights though marriage to terrorists should have their rights revoked, as should the children of the terrorists.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Since Tuesday’s massacre, aside from Abbas’s phony condemnation, the Palestinian leadership and public from Fatah to Hamas have been unanimous in their praise for the atrocity.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Today Israel is powerless to influence the hearts of our Arab neighbors. But we can influence their minds. We can deter them from attacking us.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The actions set forth above: asset seizure, revenue seizure and citizenship/residency abrogation for terrorists and their dependents are steps that Israel can take today, despite the hostile international climate.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">If the government and Knesset adopt these measures, they will rectify some of the damage Israel has inflicted on itself by showing the Palestinians over two decades that they will be rewarded for their aggression.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">If our leaders fail to take these or similar actions, and suffice with complaining about incitement, their condemnations of the murder of Jews will ring as hollow as those sounded by the BBC, Obama and Abbas.</span></p>
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		<title>Terror Decentral</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/terror-decentral/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=terror-decentral</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 07 Nov 2014 05:24:20 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Caroline Glick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[car]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[incitement]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Palestinian]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Terrorism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[trigger]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=244807</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Time for Israel to destroy the indoctrination and incitement that trigger Palestinians to kill. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/F141105YS01-e1415190015595-635x357.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-244812" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/F141105YS01-e1415190015595-635x357-406x350.jpg" alt="F141105YS01-e1415190015595-635x357" width="328" height="283" /></a>Originally published by the <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Column-One-Terror-decentral-381065">Jerusalem Post</a>. </em></p>
<p>In the postmortems of the terrorist car attacks in Jerusalem, it is easy to see the writing on the wall. Ibrahim al-Akary, the terrorist who on Wednesday ran over crowds of people waiting to cross the street and catch the Jerusalem Light Rail, was the brother of one of the terrorist murderers freed in exchange for IDF hostage Gilad Schalit.</p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">He had placed the photograph on his Facebook page of Moataz Hejazi, the terrorist killed by police after shooting Yehuda Glick outside the Begin Heritage Center last Wednesday.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">A few days before Abdur Rahman Slodi got into his car and mowed down three-month-old Chaya Zissel Braun and a dozen other pedestrians two weeks ago, PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas exhorted the Palestinians to prevent Jews from visiting the Temple Mount, Judaism’s holiest site, by all means possible.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Slodi had served time in prison for terrorist offenses and was active on social media where he expressed murderous hatred for Jews and a desire to kill them.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">So yes, the writing was on the wall. But unfortunately, the writing is on all the walls, or Facebook walls. It is not at all clear how Israeli security services could have known to distinguish these men from the thousands of other Palestinians and Jerusalem Arabs who hate Israel, support the murder of Jews and identify with various terrorist organizations.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">On Thursday security forces arrested several people in villages around Hebron with suspected ties to Akary. So he may not have been acting on his own. But all the same, neither he nor Slodi seem to have been directed to carry out their attacks by a cell commander who himself was directed by a higher level terrorist operative.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Rather, in all likelihood, something triggered both men to carry out attacks in a wholly independent or semi-independent manner.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The question is, what was the trigger and how was it pulled? The Israeli media are obsessed with the question of whether or not we are experiencing an third Palestinian terrorist onslaught, or intifada. Public Security Minister Yitzhak Aharonovitch insists that we are not. Others insist that we are. Whatever we want to call it, we are seeing a new form of Palestinian terrorist warfare against Israel, which in many key aspects mimics the larger jihad carried out by al-Qaida and its affiliates and spin-offs.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In a recent article in the online Small Wars Journal, Maj. Nicholas Pace from NATO’s Joint Forces Command discussed how al-Qaida and Islamic State have decentralized their terrorist networks.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Due to the superior signals intelligence fielded by the US, Pace explained, al-Qaida and Islamic State have diffused and decentralized their networks into smaller hubs that operate independently.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The role of terrorist chiefs like al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri is to inspire and incite, and to a degree direct, operations, rather than plan and order them.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Today the main factor unifying al-Qaida and Islamic State and their sister groups and followers in the region and worldwide is ideology.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">They all share the same hatred of the West, of all religions other than Islam and of all competing forms of Islam. They all seek the establishment of a global caliphate that will rule the world under the banner of Islam.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">As Pace notes, this shared ideology was all that US Army Maj. Nidal Malik Hassan needed to feel that he was a member of al-Qaida when in 2009, after have a few Internet communications with al-Qaida ideologue Awar al-Awlaki, he walked onto the Fort Hood military base in Texas and massacred his fellow soldiers.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Pace argues that Islamic State forces in Iraq and Syria also operate along a decentralized model of operations, and the more they are directly targeted by the US and its allies, the more they will decentralize and compartmentalize their force structure.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The operational advantage of this model is that it gives enormous flexibility and independence to operatives in the field to maximize their resources. The drawback is that those resources tend to be less sophisticated than those that can be brought to bear by a centrally organized and resourced military organization.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">But this isn’t really a problem for jihadists.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">As Pace notes, they see themselves as soldiers in a long-term struggle. Their goal is not necessarily to conquer their target populations. Rather they seek to make life impossible for target societies.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Mass chaos sowed by constant, low intensity, near-scatter-shot attacks can over time be sufficient to break the will of a targeted society or military organization to fight them.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Certainly this has been the case for the Iraqi military that has melted away in the face of Islamic State’s fanatical troops.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">For such a decentralized military system to work, the leadership needs two things: a shared ideology, and communications capabilities that enable them to incite and loosely directly violence.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Ideology is not something that people pick up or discard quickly or easily. For a person to be attracted to the jihadist cause he has to undergo indoctrination over a significant period of time.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">You cannot incite a person to strike if he hasn’t already been indoctrinated in a manner that makes him amenable to your incendiary call to action.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">And this brings us back to the Palestinians and the trigger for the attacks conducted by independent or semi-independent terrorist operatives.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">With the exception of Pakistani students in madrassas, few societies have undergone the mass indoctrination that the Palestinians have undergone over the past 20 years of Palestinian Authority rule. From the cradle to the grave, and most significantly in the school system, Palestinians are indoctrinated to hate Jews and seek the violent destruction of Israel. They are told that it is an Islamic duty to fight Jews and destroy Israel.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">This is as true in regular PA schools as it is in schools run by the United Nations Relief Works Agency (UNRWA).</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">We are experiencing today in Jerusalem a decentralized terrorist campaign rooted in the 20-year indoctrination of the Palestinians.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Yes, Hamas and Fatah still operate terrorist cells and units that are members of terrorist hierarchies.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">But at the same time, they have used a model similar to al-Qaida’s in developing semi-independent and wholly independent networks of operatives and operational cells. These independent cells are highly motivated and are willing to wait until they receive generalized signals from their leadership to strike.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">So it was for instance in June with the kidnapping and murder of the three teenagers in Gush Etzion. A few weeks before the kidnapping took place, from his home in Qatar, Hamas chief Khaled Mashaal remarked that Hamas needed more hostages to trade for jailed terrorists.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The terrorists in Hebron were motivated to strike. With the financial assistance of Saleh al-Arouri, the Hamas ideologue and operational commander in Turkey, they were able to purchase what they needed for the kidnapping. And when Mashaal said the time had come to kidnap Israelis, the countdown to the kidnap and murder of Naftali Fraenkel, Gil-Ad Shaer and Eyal Yifrah began.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The cell was isolated and tiny. Mashaal’s order was indirect.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In the case of the violence in Jerusalem, indoctrination in UNRWA schools in places like Shuafat refugee camp where Akary lived, not to mention throughout Judea, Samaria and Gaza, has raised generations of Arabs who hate Israel and Jews.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Owing to this indoctrination, when presented with mass incitement by preachers in the mosques, and most importantly by the official Palestinian Authority media, these calls for violence are immediately embraced on a massive scale. Indeed, the comfort level that the Arabs of Jerusalem feel today in supporting terrorism may well be unprecedented.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">For instance, until this Wednesday night, every time terrorists in Jerusalem used motor vehicles to murder Israelis, their families and neighbors insisted that they were not terrorists but hapless drivers. There had been no attack, merely a traffic accident.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">On Wednesday night when reporters went to interview Akary’s family and neighbors, they were met by shouts of praise for his murderous act. He was embraced as a martyr. And just as important, his act inspired mob violence in Shuafat and other Arab neighborhoods against police forces. For the first time, support for terrorism outweighed concern about alienating their Jewish neighbors or forcing police retaliation.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">On Thursday Fatah’s Facebook page was full of images calling for Palestinians to run over Jews.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">As Palestinian Media Watch reported, one used a play on words between the Arabic acronym for Islamic State and the Arabic word for running something over, thus positively associating the terrorists who run over Jews with members of Islamic State.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Hamas – Fatah’s partner in the PA’s coalition government – was similarly quick to praise Akary and call for more such attacks.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In dealing with this burgeoning, decentralized terrorist campaign, aside from taking action to protect bus stops with various barricades, Israel needs to go after the triggers.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">It needs to break up the indoctrination system.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">And it needs to destroy the Palestinian leadership’s ability to communicate their incendiary messages.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Since UNRWA schools operating in Jerusalem engage in anti-Semitic indoctrination, Jerusalem municipal authorities must give them the choice of using Israeli textbooks or shutting down. If Israel wishes to assert its sovereignty, UNRWA schools would be a good place to start. Beyond that, preachers in mosques who incite murder and call for the destruction of Israel should be arrested.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">As for the PA’s communications networks, all of the radio and television signals operating in the PA come from the Israeli electromagnetic spectrum. It is time to shut them down. As Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reiterated on Wednesday, Abbas is directly inciting the murderous attacks on Jerusalem through the PA media organs. The way to protect Jerusalem is to remove him and his Hamas partners from the airwaves.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">There has been a lot of talk over the years about providing positive and negative incentives to convince the Palestinians not to engage in terrorism.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">But now is not the time for incentives. The population mobilized through incitement has become too fanatical to engage with reason.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The terrorists who take the wheel and run over pedestrians know that they will more than likely never come home. And they don’t care.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">They certainly don’t care that Israel will destroy their homes. And they also certainly won’t be impressed by discounted mortgages if they integrate into Israeli society.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In the long term, it is imperative that Israel provide incentives to both the Jerusalem Arabs and the Palestinians to integrate peacefully with Israeli society. But before the government can seriously engage in this task, it needs to destroy the triggers of this terrorist onslaught. It is not enough to complain about Palestinian indoctrination and incitement. It is time for Israel to end them.</span></p>
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		<title>Obama and the Definition of &#8216;Islamic&#8217;</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/obama-and-the-definition-of-islamic/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obama-and-the-definition-of-islamic</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 04 Nov 2014 05:50:14 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Caroline Glick]]></dc:creator>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=244447</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The fatal flaw in the administration's strategy of mainstreaming radical political Islam. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/obama.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-244454" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/obama-384x350.jpg" alt="obama" width="298" height="272" /></a>Originally published by the <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Our-World-Obama-and-the-definition-of-Islamic-380696">Jerusalem Post</a>. </em></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">In his speech on September 11 announcing that the US would commence limited operations against Islamic State, US President Barack Obama insisted, “ISIL, [i.e. Islamic State] is not Islamic. No religion condones the killing of innocents, and the vast majority of ISIL’s victims have been Muslim.”</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">To be sure, it is hard to see how any human faith can countenance IS’s actions. For the past several months, on a daily basis, new videos appear of IS fighters proudly, openly and wantonly committing crimes against humanity. This week for instance, a video emerged of an IS slave market in Raqqah, Syria, where women and girls are sold as sex slaves to IS fighters.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Despite the glaring contradiction between divinity and monstrosity, the fact is that IS justifies every single one of its atrocities with verses from the Koran.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">IS referred to its sex slave market in Raqqah for instance as the “Booty Market&#8230; for what your right hands possess.”</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The phrase “what your right hands possess” is a Koranic verse (4:3) that permits the sexual enslavement of women and girls by Muslim men.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Whether it is mainstream Islamic jurisprudence or not to embrace the enslavement of women and girls as concubines is not a question that Obama – or any US leader for that matter – is equipped to answer. And yet, Obama spoke with absolute certainty when he claimed that IS is not Islamic.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Obama speaks with similar conviction whenever he refers to Iran as “The Islamic Republic of Iran.”</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Obama’s consistent deference to the Iranian regime, exposed by his studious use of the regime’s name for itself whenever he discusses Iran indicates that at a minimum, he is willing to accept the regime’s claim that it is an Islamic regime. In other words, he is willing to accept that everything about the Iranian regime is authentic Islam.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">And that the Islamic Republic then, in keeping with his assertion that “no religion condones the killing of innocents,” similarly does not condone the killing of innocents.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Of course, there is a problem here. In fact, there are two problems here.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">First, in its treatment of its own people, the Iranian regime condones and actively engages in the killing of innocents, the vast majority of whom are Muslims. The Islamic regime of the Islamic Republic of Iran invokes the Koran to justify its killing.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Likewise, the political imprisonment, torture and general repression of Iranians from all faiths are justified in the name of Islam.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Consider two recent examples.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">On October 25, 27-year-old Reyhaneh Jabbari was hanged for allegedly killing a man who was trying to rape her. Jabbari was imprisoned for seven years prior to her execution.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Although her suffering was a cause celebre for advocates of human rights in Iran, the regime didn’t care. In contempt of the international community, it murdered her a week ago.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">As her attorney Mohammed Mostataei explained at a conference held by UN Watch in Geneva last week, Jabbari was tried under Islamic law – the law of the land in the Islamic Republic of Iran. And under Islamic sharia law, intent in adjudication of criminal offenses is irrelevant. As a consequence, once regime inquisitors force a person to confess, he or she is doomed.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Forced confessions are the stock in trade for Iranian investigators.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Last month, 25 women in Isfahan, Iran’s tourist capital, were reportedly victims of acid attacks.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The women had acid thrown in their faces while they were driving in their cars.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The public immediately suspected that they were targeted because their faces were not covered sufficiently to satisfy Islamic goon squads that drive around the city seeking – with the tacit if not open support of the regime – to terrorize the public into obeying their repressive, inhumane interpretation of Islam.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">On October 22, human rights activists in Iran held demonstrations against the acid attacks outside the judiciary building in Isfahan and outside the Iranian parliament in Tehran. In both instances, protesters insisted that there is no difference between the repression inherent in the radical Islam propagated by IS and that practiced by the Iranian regime.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In both cities, demonstrators were attacked by regime forces with tear gas. Many were arrested.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">After the acid attacks were first reported, the Iranian parliament passed measures to strengthen the authority of the regime’s Basij shock troop squads to enforce repressive, misogynist Islamic dress codes on women and enforce other socially repressive aspects of the regime’s Islam.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">As Baron Alexander Carile of Barriew, a member of the British House of Lords and expert on terrorism explained last Friday in The Washington Times, “In essence, the regime responded to the acid attacks that have seriously injured 25 people so far by legitimizing the motives of their attackers.”</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">According to the UN, Iran executed 852 Iranians for various offenses from July 2013 through June 2014.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">This of course is just the tip of the iceberg. The vast majority of the regime’s killing is carried out by its proxies.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">IS’s persecution of those who have had the misfortune to fall under its control is a blight on the human race. And so is the persecution committed by Iran’s puppets – the Assad regime in Syria, and its Lebanese terror army Hezbollah.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Since the Syrian civil war began three years ago, the Iranian-controlled regime has killed somewhere between 120,000 and 200,000 people.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, nearly 10,000 of the dead are children, another 6,000 are women. Other groups place the number much higher.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">More than 2.14 million Syrians are now refugees in neighboring countries. Half of the refugees are children. Another 4.25 million Syrians are internally displaced.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">If it hadn’t been for Iran’s support for the regime, the vast majority of the victims of Syria’s civil war would still be alive and living in their homes.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Thanks to Iran and its Hezbollah army, Lebanon is on the brink of sharing Syria’s fate.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Hezbollah has played a major role in the war in Syria, and over the years, with Iran’s total backing, it has murdered thousands of people in Lebanon, Israel and throughout the world.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Hezbollah has trained sister Iranian supported or commanded terrorist groups like Islamic Jihad and Hamas. With the blessing, and often acting on direct orders from the Islamic Republic, these groups have killed hundreds of innocents. Like Hezbollah, Assad and the mullahs in Tehran, they have also repressed their own people in the name of their Islamic devotion.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">And this brings us back to Obama and his insistence that IS is not Islamic, but the Iranian regime is Islamic. How are we to understand this seeming anomaly? Throughout his tenure in office, Obama has gone out of his way to mainstream Muslim extremists.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">This has taken the form of granting senior appointments to people aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood. For instance, amid a Congressional investigation into suspected leaks, Mohamed Elibiary, a senior fellow at the US Department of Homeland Security Advisory Council, resigned his position.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Just before his resignation, Elibiary tweeted that the rise of the caliphate is “inevitable.” In 2004 he spoke at a conference in Dallas celebrating the legacy of Iranian dictator Ayatollah Khomeini. As Robert Spencer has reported, the conference was titled, “A Tribute to a Great Islamic Visionary.”</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Moreover, Obama had befriended radical Islamic leaders who openly support terrorism, including Turkish dictator Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the emir of Qatar, Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">And of course, as we see more and more clearly each day, the centerpiece of Obama’s foreign policy has been appeasing the Islamic Republic of Iran in the hope of achieving détente with the nuclear weapons pursuing state sponsor of terrorism.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The likes of IS, with its love of the video camera, discredit Obama’s narrative that radical, terror- supporting Muslims are peaceful. Since IS is openly evil, it is un-Islamic.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">On the other hand, despite the fact that it is nearly as barbaric as IS, the Iranian regime is Islamic, because as far as Obama is concerned, it is good. And it is good because he wants to make a deal with the mullahs.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In other words, Obama is neither an expert on Islam, nor a man moved by moral indignation.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">He opposes IS because IS makes it hard for him to defend Islam from bad public relations. And he coos about the “Islamic Republic of Iran” because he is dedicated to his mission of whitewashing and mainstreaming the regime born of an Islamic revolution.</span></p>
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		<title>Being Safe While Isolated</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/being-safe-while-isolated/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=being-safe-while-isolated</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/being-safe-while-isolated/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 31 Oct 2014 04:50:56 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Caroline Glick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[assassination]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[attempt]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[coma]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jews]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[pray]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[temple mount]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Yehudah Glick]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=244175</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[An attempted murder in Jerusalem underscores the danger of Obama's subversion against Israel. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/BN-FH124_1029GL_P_20141029214811.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-244176" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/BN-FH124_1029GL_P_20141029214811-450x299.jpg" alt="BN-FH124_1029GL_P_20141029214811" width="327" height="217" /></a>Originally published by the <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Column-One-Being-safe-while-isolated-380359">Jerusalem Post</a>. </em></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">Yehudah Glick has spent the better part of the last 20 years championing the right of Jews to pray on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem – Judaism’s holiest site. On Wednesday night, the Palestinians sent a hit man to Jerusalem to kill him.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">And today Glick lays in a coma at Shaare Zedek Medical Center.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Two people bear direct responsibility for this terrorist attack: the gunman, and Palestinian Authority President and PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas. The gunman shot Glick, and Abbas told him to shoot Glick.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Abbas routinely glorifies terrorist murder of Jews, and funds terrorism with the PA’s US- and European-funded budget.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">But it isn’t often that he directly incites the murder of Jews.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Two weeks ago, Abbas did just that. Speaking to Fatah members, he referred to Jews who wish to pray at Judaism’s holiest site as “settlers.” He then told his audience that they must remain on the Temple Mount at all times to block Jews from entering.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">“We must prevent them from entering [the Temple Mount] in any way&#8230;. They have no right to enter and desecrate [it]. We must confront them and defend our holy sites,” he said.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">As Palestinian Media Watch reported Thursday, in the three days leading up to the assassination attempt on Glick, the PA’s television station broadcast Abbas’s call for attacks on Jews who seek to enter the Temple Mount 19 times.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">While Abbas himself is responsible for the hit on Glick, he has had one major enabler – the Obama administration. Since Abbas first issued the order for Palestinians to attack Jews, there have been two terrorist attacks in Jerusalem. Both have claimed American citizens among their victims. Yet the Obama administration has refused to condemn Abbas’s call to murder Jews either before it led to the first terrorist attack or since Glick was shot Wednesday night.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Not only have the White House and the State Department refused to condemn Abbas for soliciting the murder of Jews. They have praised him and attacked Israel and its elected leader. In other words, they are not merely doing nothing, they are actively rewarding Abbas’s aggression, and so abetting it.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Since Abbas called for Palestinians to kill Jews, the White House and State Department have accused Israel of diminishing the prospect of peace by refusing to make massive concessions to Abbas. The concessions the Americans are demanding include accepting the ethnic cleansing of all Jews from land they foresee becoming part of a future Palestinian state; denying Jews the rights to their lawfully held properties in predominantly Arab neighborhoods; and abrogating urban planning procedures in Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem built within the areas of the city that Israel took control over from Jordan in 1967.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The US claims that it has great influence over the Palestinians. If this is true, then as Fatah’s official celebrations of Glick’s attempted murder make clear, that influence is being intentionally exercised in a negative way. The Americans are encouraging the Palestinians to be more violent, more radical and more extreme in their demands of Israel and propagation of Jew-hatred.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The Obama administration is abetting Palestinian terrorism today. And it is doing so after it spent last summer siding with Hamas and its state sponsors Qatar and Turkey in its illegal war against Israel.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Moreover, it is important to note that the most outrageous statements the administration has made to date against Israel came after the first terrorist attack in Jerusalem directly inspired by Abbas’s call to murder Jews.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The most outrageous statements the administration has made about Israel came of course this week with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg’s report that senior unnamed Obama administration officials called Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “a chickensh*t” and a “coward.” They also described an administration in a state of “red hot anger” against Netanyahu and his government. Those statements were made after three-month old Chaya Zissel Braun, an American baby, was murdered by a Palestinian terrorist in Jerusalem in an Abbas-incited attack.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The most distressing aspect of Goldberg’s quotes is that in and of themselves, these profane, schoolyard bully personal attacks against Israel’s elected leader were the mildest part of the story.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The most disturbing thing about the gutter talk is what they tell us about Israel’s role in Obama’s assessments of his political cards as they relate to his nuclear negotiations with Iran.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The senior administration officials called Netanyahu a coward because, among other reasons, he has not bombed Iran’s nuclear installations.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">And now, they crowed, it’s too late for Israel to do anything to stop Iran.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">They are happy about this claimed state of affairs, because now Obama is free to make a deal with the Iranians that will allow them to develop nuclear weapons at will.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The obscene rhetoric they adopted in their characterization of Netanyahu didn’t come from “red hot anger.” It was a calculated move. Obama knows that he has caved in on every significant redline that he claimed he would defend in the nuclear talks with Iran.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Obama has chosen to demonize Netanyahu and castigate Israel now as a means to transform the debate about Iran into a debate about Israel. The fact that the trash talk about Netanyahu was a premeditated bid to capture the discourse on Iran is further exposed by the fact that Obama has refused to take any action against the officials who made the statements.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">He isn’t going to punish them for carrying out his policies.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Obama knows that after next week’s midterm elections, he will likely be facing a Republican-controlled House and Senate. He has no substantive defense against attacks on his policy of enabling the world’s most active state sponsor of terrorism to acquire nuclear weapons. The threat a nuclear- armed Iran poses to the US is self-evident to most people who pay attention to foreign affairs.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Since he can’t win the substantive debate, he wants to change the subject by pretending that the only country that opposes Iran’s nuclear weapons program is Israel, which, his senior advisers insinuated to Goldberg, was apparently bluffing about its danger. After all, if it was a reason for concern, Netanyahu would have bombed Iran three years ago rather than try to accommodate Obama.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">As a consequence, any congressional opposition to his deal makes no sense and therefore must be the result of the nefarious Israel’s lobby’s control of Congress. Loyal Americans, like Obama, must stand up to the cowardly, power grabbing, warmongering Jews, led by the coward in chief Netanyahu.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In other words, in castigating Netanyahu and Israel, the Obama administration has decided to use Jew-hatred as a political weapon to defend its policies of abetting Palestinian terrorism and enabling Iran’s nuclear weapons program.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">There are critical messages to the Israeli people and our leaders embedded in the Goldberg article.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">First, the unbridled attacks against Israel’s democratically elected – and popular – prime minister show us that when we are faced with an inherently hostile administration, the wages of appeasement are contempt.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">No Israel leader has done more to appease a US administration than Netanyahu has done to appease Obama. Against the opposition of his party and the general public, Netanyahu in 2009 bowed to Obama’s demand to embrace the goal of establishing a Palestinian state.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Against the opposition of his party and the general public, in 2010 Netanyahu bowed to Obama’s demand and enacted an official 10-month moratorium on Jewish property rights in lands beyond the 1949 armistice lines, and later enacted an unofficial moratorium on those rights.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">And Netanyahu bowed to Obama’s pressure, released murderers from prison and conducted negotiations with Abbas that only empowered Abbas and his political war to delegitimize and isolate Israel.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">And for all his efforts to appease Obama, today the administration abets Palestinian terrorism and political warfare.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">As to Iran, Netanyahu agreed to play along with Obama’s phony sanctions policy, and bowed to Obama’s demand not to attack Iran’s nuclear installations. All of this caused suffering to the Iranian people while giving the regime four-and-ahalf years of more or less unfettered work on its nuclear program.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Netanyahu only cut bait after Obama signed the interim nuclear deal with Iran last November where he effectively gave up the store.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">And for Netanyahu’s Herculean efforts to appease Obama, Netanyahu found himself mocked publicly as a coward by senior administration officials who snorted that now it is too late for him to stop Obama from paving Iran’s open road to nuclear power.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">One of the assets that Netanyahu’s continuous attempts to please Obama was geared toward securing was US support for Israel at the UN Security Council. And now, according to the senior administration officials, Obama has decided to spend his last two years in office refusing to veto anti-Israel Security Council resolutions.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Before formulating a strategy for dealing with Obama over the next two years, Israelis need to first take a deep breath and recognize that as bad as things are going to get, nothing that Obama will do to us over the next two years is as dangerous as what he has already done. No anti-Israel Security Council resolution, no Obama map of Israel’s borders will endanger Israel as much as his facilitation of Iran’s nuclear program.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">As unpleasant as anti-Israel Security Council resolutions will be, and as unpleasant as an Obama framework for Israel’s final borders will be, given the brevity of his remaining time in power, it is highly unlikely that any of the measures will have lasting impact.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">At any rate, no matter how upsetting such resolutions may be, Goldberg’s article made clear that Israel should make no concessions to Obama in exchange for a reversal of his plans. Concessions to Obama merely escalate his contempt for us.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Bearing this in mind, Israel’s required actions in the wake of Goldberg’s sources’ warnings are fairly straightforward.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">First, to the extent that Israel does have the capacity to damage Iran’s nuclear installations, Israel should act right away. Its capacity should not be saved for a more propitious political moment.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The only clock Israel should care about is Iran’s nuclear clock.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">As for the Palestinians, whether Netanyahu’s willingness to stand up to Obama stems from the growing prospect of national elections or from his own determination that there is no point in trying to appease Obama anymore, the fact is that this is the only pragmatic policy for him to follow.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The proper response to the assassination attempt on Yehudah Glick is to allow Jews freedom of worship on the Temple Mount. The proper response to Obama’s nuclear negotiations is a bomb in Natanz. Obama will be angry with Israel for taking such steps. But he is angry with Israel for standing down. At least if we defend ourselves, we will be safe while isolated, rather than unsafe while isolated.</span></p>
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		<title>Kerry, Qatar and the Poisonous Tree</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/kerry-qatar-and-the-poisonous-tree/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=kerry-qatar-and-the-poisonous-tree</link>
		<comments>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/kerry-qatar-and-the-poisonous-tree/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 28 Oct 2014 04:55:17 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Caroline Glick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[IS]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ISIS]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[islamic state]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Jihad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Palestinian]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Qatar]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Terror]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=243916</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Washington's alarming alliance with jihad supporters -- and how it undermines the cause against the Islamic State. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/132156075_21n2.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-243919" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/132156075_21n2-450x335.jpg" alt="132156075_21n" width="305" height="227" /></a>Originally published by the <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Kerry-Qatar-and-the-poisonous-tree-379979">Jerusalem Post</a>. </em></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">It would be interesting to know which Arab leaders are telling US Secretary of State John Kerry that the absence of peace between Israel and the Palestinians is “a cause of recruitment” to Islamic State.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Is that something he is hearing from Qatari Emir Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani? The Qatari leader, whose kingdom has been cited by the US Treasury Department as a major funder of Islamic State (IS), is certainly one of Kerry’s favorite regional leaders.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">If Thani did blame Israel for the rise of IS, then his statement would constitute yet another instance of the double game Qatar has been playing with the Americans. On the one hand, the regime is financing jihad, and other the other hand, it pretends to side with the West against the jihad that it is funding.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">This is certainly the case in Jerusalem.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">According to an investigative report published Friday in Yisrael Hayom, Qatar is financing the violence in the capital. Veteran Jerusalem affairs reporter Nadav Shragai wrote that the Islamic rioters who daily attack Jewish visitors and police forces on the Temple Mount are paid by Qatar through the Northern Branch of the Islamic Movement.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The Qatari government and other Islamic funds are transferring vast sums of money to the Islamic Movement’s radical northern branch headed by Sheikh Ra’ed Salah. The Islamic Movement in turn is paying thousands of shekels every month to hundreds of women and men, mainly Muslim Israeli citizens, who call themselves the Murbitat.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The Murbitat presents itself as an Islamic prayer group, but according to Shragai, the group’s job is to harass Jews and police on the Temple Mount. They scream and curse at Jewish visitors and in recent months have escalated their violence against them, and their police escorts. These violent attacks include assaults with rocks, firebombs and firecrackers.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">To prevent the police from blocking their entry to the Mount, members of the Murbitat enter the mosques in times of relative calm and then remain there for weeks at a time. The women are used as well to smuggle firecrackers and other weaponry onto the Temple Mount by hiding them in their burkas.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In a report published Sunday by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Palestinian affairs researcher Pinchas Inbari explained the goals of the violence.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The riots and assaults on the Temple Mount have two goals. First, they aim to incite the Islamic world against Israel and return attention to the Palestinians. And second, they seek to destabilize the regimes in Egypt and Jordan.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Regarding the goal of galvanizing support for jihad by attacking Israel, Inbari recalled how immediately after longtime Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak was overthrown in February 2011, the Muslim Brotherhood’s most influential cleric, Qatar-based Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, gave a speech at a mass rally in Cairo and called for the Muslims to march on Jerusalem.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The rally was organized by the Muslim Brotherhood and attended by two million people. It marked the first time that Qaradawi had returned to Egypt since he was forced to flee in the 1960s for his support for jihad.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">From Doha, Qaradawi has become the most influential cleric on the regime-controlled Al Jazeera satellite network. As such, he has become the most important Islamic cleric in the Sunni Islamic world.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">As Inbari noted, following his speech in Cairo Qaradawi authored a book titled </span><em style="color: #000000;">Jerusalem: The Problem of Every Muslim</em><span style="color: #000000;">, in which he restated his call for an Islamic conquest of the city.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Saleh, who is extremely close to Qaradawi, stated that “Jerusalem is the capital of the imminently approaching Islamic Caliphate.”</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In other words, the Palestinians and their Qatari financiers are seeking to galvanize the forces of global jihad, including IS, to view the Palestinian war against Israel and the Jews as the centerpiece of the jihad.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">These efforts are backed by both Fatah and Hamas, who are competing for Qatari money. Fatah chief and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas resonated the claims of the most radical jihadists when earlier this month he referred to Jews on the Temple Mount as “herds of cattle,” and called on Muslims to attack them for they “desecrate” the holy site simply by being there.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Doha-based Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal called on the Palestinians “to defend Jerusalem and al-Aksa, and on the Muslim nation to send a painful message of rage to the world.”</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">As to the goal of using the violence on the Temple Mount to destabilize Egypt and Jordan, Inbari noted that efforts to intensify violence in Jerusalem have grown since the Egyptian military overthrew Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood regime in July 2013. “Presumably,” Inbari argues, “Qatar tried indirectly to help the Brotherhood in Egypt by inspiring support for them on the Jerusalem issue.”</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The Jordanian regime even more acutely is threatened by the violence on the Temple Mount. Israel recognized Jordan as the custodian of the Temple Mount in its peace treaty with the Hashemite Kingdom. The Muslim Brotherhood in Jordan has capitalized on the violence on the Temple Mount to condemn the regime for what it claims is its failure to protect al-Aksa from the Jews.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In contending with the violence in Judaism’s holiest site, and throughout its capital city, the Israeli government is caught in a trap.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">While telling their fellow Muslims that they must wage a jihad for Jerusalem, Fatah and Hamas as well as the Israeli Islamic Movement tell Western leaders that their violence against Jews in the city owes to actions that Israel has taken to safeguard the lives and civil rights of Jews.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">To appease these specific purported grievances, the Palestinians demand that Israel deny protection and civil rights to Jews by among other things, denying Jews the freedom to visit the Temple Mount and denying Jews property rights in Jerusalem.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Rather than recognize that they are being played by double-speaking Palestinians and their jihadist supporters, Washington and Brussels are going along with their deceit. Both the Obama administration and the EU firmly side with the Palestinian demand that Jews be denied civil rights in Jerusalem. Both have condemned and threatened Israel for not preventing Jews from lawfully purchasing homes in Silwan and for allowing contractors to build homes for Jews in Jewish neighborhoods of Jerusalem.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">This places the Israeli government in an impossible position. It is being attacked by jihadist forces who seek its destruction. It is told by Washington and Europe that if it doesn’t appease those who cannot be appeased by denying protection and civil rights to Jews, then it will lose whatever is left of its good relations with the US and Europe.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">And this brings us back to Kerry’s claim that Arab leaders are blaming Israel for the rise of Islamic State.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">As IS forces draw closer to Baghdad and expand their control over Anbar Province in Iraq, it is becoming more and more apparent that the US-led campaign against the terrorist army is failing.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">To a significant degree, Washington’s inability to forge a coherent and feasible strategy for containing and defeating IS owes to its refusal to understand the nature of the enemy and its goals.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">What we see in Qatar’s financing of the violence on the Temple Mount is that the same forces that are financing IS are financing the violence against Israel.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The goal of IS is the establishment of a global Islamic empire. The first targets on its target list are Sunni Mus &#8211; lim states that oppose the Muslim Brotherhood.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The goal of the Islamic violence on the Temple Mount and throughout Jerusalem is to overthrow regional regimes that oppose the Muslim Brotherhood while igniting a pan-Islamic war against the Jewish state.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">By insinuating that Israel is to blame for IS’s rise to power, Kerry was not simply blaming the victim. He was empowering the aggressor.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">For the West to defeat IS, it first needs to recognize that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was right when he said at the UN last month that IS and Hamas – and increasingly Qatari-financed Fatah – are “branches of the same poisonous tree.”</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">With his announcement Monday that the government had approved the construction of 1,250 new housing units in Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem, Netanyahu showed that Israel prefers freedom and security to good relations with Washington and Brussels.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Washington and Brussels need understand that by forcing Israel to make that choice, they are hurting themselves and the cause of their own freedom and security far more than they are harming Israel.</span></p>
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		<title>It’s Time to Beat the Jew-Haters</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/its-time-to-beat-the-jew-haters/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=its-time-to-beat-the-jew-haters</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 24 Oct 2014 04:55:38 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Caroline Glick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Anti-Semitism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Death of Klinghoffer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[elite]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Met]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[opera]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=243761</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The rise of elite anti-Semitism -- and how the Jewish community should respond. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Klinghoffer-1.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-243764" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Klinghoffer-1-450x337.jpg" alt="Klinghoffer-1" width="324" height="243" /></a>Originally published by the <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Column-One-Its-time-to-beat-the-Jew-haters-379700">Jerusalem Post</a>. </em></p>
<p>The decision by the most prestigious opera house in America to produce an opera that mainstreams Jew-hatred and anti-Jewish terrorism is a great victory for elitist anti-Semitism. In the world of elite anti-Semitism, Jews are told that truth is but a narrative. Jewish history and rights have no more merit – indeed less merit – than the lies of Jew-haters. And if Jews dare to object to the propagation of lies against them, they open themselves to the easy accusation that they seek to stifle free speech.</p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">The goal of elitist anti-Semitism is to erode the right of Jews to have and promote Jewish rights and interests. This is done by demonizing those who defend Jewish rights and advance Jewish interests, while elevating and romanticizing the lives and largely false narratives of those who seek to destroy Israel.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The Met’s singular contribution to the cause of elitist anti-Semitism is the prestige its production of The Death of Klinghoffer confers on the cause.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Another dam has been breached. Another safe zone has become a no-go zone.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">On the other hand, at the end of the day, as bad as elitist anti-Semitism is, over the past decade or so, American Jews have developed tools to deal with it.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In the weeks that preceded the opera’s opening last Monday night, much – although not all – of the Jewish community in New York was able to unify in opposing it. Politicians and luminaries joined with more than a thousand protesters on opening night to express their revulsion at the opera.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">And the Met has already paid a price for its elevation of anti-Semitism to high art.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Far from living up to its reputation as a leader in the arts, on Monday, due to the massive protest against the production, the Met lost its artistic credibility. The crowd that gave the opera a standing ovation didn’t do so because they had just experienced a musical masterpiece. They stood and cheered because they were happy the Met elevated murderous, Jew-hating terrorists, whom they support.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">One of the novel aspects of the opposition to the production was an action taken Monday by the Zionist Organization of America. Hours before the opera began, the ZOA issued a press release demanding that major Jewish donors to the Met, including the Michael Bloomberg LP company, the Annenberg Foundation, the Neubauer Family Foundation and the Toll Brothers Foundation, account for their decision not to revoke their multimillion dollar support for the opera house.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The ZOA’s move is important because as Jews see more and more public support for the denial of Jewish rights and interests, it will become increasingly important to call to account those backing institutions that advance this growing trend toward Jewish disenfranchisement.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The ZOA’s move was important as well because it points us in a useful direction for dealing with a second and increasingly prominent form of anti-Semitism in the US and Canada. That form is violent anti-Semitism.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Increasingly, anti-Semites in the US are adopting brownshirt tactics to violently advance their goal of removing Jews from the public square and intimidating others into boycotting Israel and those who support it.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Take just a few examples in recent weeks. In late September, several hundred anti-Semitic rioters at the Port of Oakland prevented longshoremen from unloading cargo from the Israeli cargo ship Zim Shanghai. According to media reports, there were 50 policemen from the Oakland police force on the scene, but their presence did not stop the rioters or enable the longshoremen to offload the cargo.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">None of the anti-Semites were arrested. Zim Shanghai was forced to leave the port with its cargo and sail on to Los Angeles.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The group that organized the assault on the Zim ship calls itself Block the Boat for Gaza. It operates through its Facebook page where it openly organizes violent assaults on Israeli shipping. Another assault is planned, according to its Facebook page, for October 25.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">A previous assault in August, during Operation Protective Edge, also took place with police presence and nonintervention. The Zim Piraeus was forced as well to pull anchor with its cargo and sail on to Los Angeles.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Block the Boat for Gaza is supported by another group called Arab Resource and Organizing Center.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">On October 8, the Brooklyn Nets played an exhibition game against Maccabi Tel Aviv at the Barclay Center in downtown Brooklyn. The event was a benefit for Friends of the IDF. Twelve IDF soldiers wounded during Operation Protective Edge were guests at the event.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">About a hundred anti-Semitic rioters organized outside the event. They were members of variety of organizations reportedly including Jewish Voices for Peace, Adalah – New York, and the Direct Action for Palestine.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">After the event, a number of the rioters accosted Leonard Petlakh, the director of a local Jewish community center, as he was leaving the arena with his two young sons. According to The Forward, they shouted, “Free Palestine,” and, “Your people are murderers.” And then one of them punched him in the face, breaking his nose.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The assailant was arrested. But strangely, he was not charged with committing a hate crime despite the clear anti-Semitic character of his crime.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">On October 5, hours after the end of Yom Kippur, swastikas were painted on the walls of AEPi Jewish fraternity at Emory University near Atlanta.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Swastikas were also painted at the Yale University campus. In July, mailboxes of AEPi members at University of Oregon were defaced with swastikas.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In August, a Jewish student at Temple University was assaulted by a member of Students for Justice for Palestine.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In a video filmed at the national convention of AEPi and posted on YouTube two weeks ago, members of AEPi from campuses around the US and Canada shared the stories of anti-Semitic assaults they and their friends suffer regularly on their campuses. The attacks described included, among other things, violent assaults.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Gideon Rafal, the president of AEPi at University of Arizona, described how he was assaulted while trying to prevent a group of 20 Jew-hating thugs from forcing their way into his fraternity house.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Rafal said he was struck from behind and lost consciousness.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The injuries he sustained during the assault included a skull fracture, bleeding in the brain, a concussion and a lower back fracture. He says that he was hospitalized for three weeks, spending 10 days in the intensive care unit.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Rafal did not say who the assailants were or what legal measures were taken against them or what organization if any, they were associated with.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Other students described threats against Jewish students manning a table for Birthright Israel programs at Loyola University in Chicago, and the assault of a Jewish female student at University of California at Santa Cruz.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Shane, a student at University of Calgary, described how he, his mother and sister were violently assaulted for counter-protesting at an anti-Israel protest. The group that sponsored the anti-Israel protest and whose members attacked him and his family is an official campus organization.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Shane said he fears for his life as he walks through campus.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In recent years it has become apparent that university campuses have become breeding grounds for anti-Semitism. The incidents described by the Jewish students who attended the AEPi convention indicate that the anti-Israel propaganda taught in the classrooms is increasingly being translated into anti-Jewish violence outside of them.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The major American Jewish organizations were incompetent to contend with anti-Israel incitement as it became a major force in university classrooms some 15 years ago. Jewish students found themselves with few communal resources to rely on when they suddenly and unexpectedly found themselves at the front lines of the anti-Semitic battle against Jewish rights.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">New groups like Stand with Us and Hasbara Fellowships were formed to fill the vacuum. CAMERA, ZOA and other major groups have in recent years invested massive efforts into empowering students to stand up to this incitement.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">But today, as anti-Semites on and off campus increasingly resort to brownshirt tactics, the American Jewish community again finds itself without the means to contend with a new challenge.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">And this brings us back to the ZOA’s naming the names of Jewish philanthropists still supporting the Met.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The organizations involved in intimidating Jews and assaulting Jews on and off campus who support Israel are not interested in dialogue. Groups that organize to prevent the conduct of normal commercial relations between Israel and the US are not concerned with whether or not they are considered mainstream. The goal of these groups is to intimidate and terrorize the American and Canadian publics into silence as they make it impossible for Israel and its supporters to have a place in the public square.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Educational efforts are of little value in contending with thugs. But this doesn’t mean that there is nothing to be done. Groups like Block the Boat for Gaza, Students for Justice in Palestine, Jewish Voices for Peace, Adalah, the Arab Resource and Organizing Center and Direct Action for Palestine need to be investigated.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Where does their money come from? Who are their leaders? What are their ties to terrorist groups? What are their ties to organized labor? What are their ties to politicians? What is their tax status and what do their tax returns say? If members of various groups are intimidating Jewish students then there should be restraining orders against them. Criminal complaints should be filed against them. Their tax-exempt status should be challenged.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Jewish students should be demanding that Students for Justice in Palestine be expelled from their campuses along with other hate groups, like Jewish Voices for Peace. Jewish alumni should be organizing to withhold all donations from universities that permit anti-Semitic groups to operate on campus. And Jewish lawyers should be filing lawsuits against universities and other institutions that enable the operation of anti-Semitic groups on their premises.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">If Jewish students complain that they feel threatened on campus, then lawsuits should filed against the universities for engendering a threatening atmosphere against them.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Politicians who support or, when asked, fail to condemn these groups, individuals and their actions as racist and bigoted should be called out for their behavior. Police departments like the Oakland police department that do nothing to stop rioters from preventing the lawful, unfettered operation of a major US port should be subjected to public and legal scrutiny.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The challenge of anti-Semitism in North America is growing and mutating by the day. Jews in America and Canada need to adapt quickly to changing circumstances. Reasonably, American Jews have no interest in aping the hateful tactics of anti-Semites to fight them. But an aggressive campaign of legal, political, social and financial opposition to those who seek to demonize Jews and deny Jews civil rights as Jews as well as those who enable them can go a long way toward making members of these hate groups and their supporters rue the day they decided to go after the Jews.</span></p>
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		<title>Obama, the Virtuoso Manager</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/obama-the-virtuoso-manager/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obama-the-virtuoso-manager</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 21 Oct 2014 04:52:06 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Caroline Glick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[incompetent]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Iran]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[nuclear program]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=243445</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why criticism of the president's "incompetence" is wrong. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/obama_evil.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-243446" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/obama_evil.jpg" alt="obama_evil" width="307" height="265" /></a>Originally published by the <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Our-World-Obama-the-virtuoso-manager-379343">Jerusalem Post</a>. </em></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">Since he assumed office nearly six years ago, US President Barack Obama has been dogged by allegations of managerial incompetence. Obama, his critics allege, had no managerial experience before he was elected. His lack of such experience, they claim, is reflected in what they see as his incompetent handling of the challenges of the presidency.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In everything from dealing with the Congress, to reining in radical ideologues at the IRS, to handling the chaos at the Mexican border, to putting together coordinated strategies for dealing with everything from Ebola to Islamic State (IS), Obama’s critics claim that he is out of his league. That he is incompetent.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">But if Israel’s experience with him is any guide, then his critics are the ones who are out to sea. Because at least in his handling of US relations with the Jewish state, Obama has exhibited a mastery of the tools of the executive branch unmatched by most of his predecessors.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Consider two stories reported in last Friday’s papers.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">First, in an article published in </span><em style="color: #000000;">The Jerusalem Post</em><span style="color: #000000;">, terrorism analyst and investigative reporter Steven Emerson revealed how the highest echelons of the administration blocked the FBI and the US Attorney’s Office from assisting Israel in finding the remains of IDF soldier Oron Shaul.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Shaul was one of seven soldiers from the Golani Infantry Brigade killed July 20 when Hamas terrorists fired a rocket at their armored personnel carrier in Gaza’s Shejeia neighborhood.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">As Emerson related, after stealing his remains, Hamas terrorists hacked into Shaul’s Facebook page and posted announcements that he was being held by Hamas.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Among other things it did to locate Shaul and ascertain whether or not he was still alive, the IDF formally requested that the FBI intervene with Facebook to get the IP address of the persons who posted on Oron’s page. If such information was acquired quickly, the IDF might be able to locate Oron, or at least find people with knowledge of his whereabouts.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Acting in accordance with standing practice, recognizing that time was of the essence, the FBI and the US Attorney’s Office began working on Israel’s request immediately. But just before the US Attorney secured a court order to Facebook requiring it to hand over the records, the FBI was told to end its efforts.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In an order that senior law enforcement officials told Emerson came from Attorney General Eric Holder’s office, the FBI was told that it needed to first sign an “MLAT,” a Mutual Legal Assistance Treaty with Israel, a procedure that would take weeks to complete, and is generally used in cases involving criminal prosecutions and other non-life threatening issues.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In other words, facing a bureaucracy acting independently, Holder – reportedly Obama’s most trusted cabinet secretary – acted quickly, decisively and effectively. And thanks to his intervention at the key moment, although Israel was able – after an exhaustive forensic investigation – to determine Oron’s death, today it is poised to begin negotiations with Hamas for the return of his body parts.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Then there was the unofficial arms embargo.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In August, </span><em style="color: #000000;">The Wall Street Journal</em><span style="color: #000000;"> reported that the White House and State Department had stopped the Pentagon at the last minute from responding favorably to an Israeli request for resupply of Hellfire precision air-to-surface missiles. The precision guided missiles were a key component of Israel’s air operations against missile launchers in Gaza. The missiles’ guidance systems allowed the air force to destroy the launchers while minimizing collateral damage.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In keeping with the standard decades-long practice, Israel requested the resupply through European Command, its military-to-military channel with the US.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">And in keeping with standard practice, the request was granted.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">But then the White House and State Department heard about the approved shipment and spun into action. As in the case of Oron’s Facebook page, they didn’t reject Israel’s request. They just added a level of bureaucracy to the handling of the request that made it impossible for Israel to receive assistance from the US government in real time.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">As State Department spokeswoman Marie Harf put it at the time, “We’re not holding anything. A hold indicates, technically, that you are not moving forward on making a decision about a transfer&#8230;. These requests are still moving forward; there’s just additional steps in the process now, and there’s been no policy decision made to not move forward with them&#8230;. They’re just going to take a little while longer.”</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The Hellfire missiles, along with other ammunition Israel requested during the war, arrived in September – a month after the cease-fire went into effect.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">On Friday veteran military affairs reporter Amir Rappaport reported in Makor Rishon that the hold on the Hellfire missiles was only one aspect of the White House’s decision to stop arms shipments to Israel during the war. Shortly after Operation Protective Edge began, the administration stopped all contact with the Defense Ministry’s permanent procurement delegation in the US.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">According to Rappaport, for the first time since the 1982 war in Lebanon, “The expected airlift of US ammunition [to the IDF] never arrived at its point of departure.”</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The difference between Obama’s actions during Operation Protective Edge and Ronald Reagan’s partial arms embargo against Israel 32 years ago is that Reagan made his action publicly. He argued his case before the public, and Congress.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Obama has done no such thing. As was the case with the FAA’s scandalous ban on flights to Ben-Gurion Airport during the war, Holder’s prevention of the FBI from helping Israel find Oron, and Obama’s arms embargo were justified as mere bureaucratic measures.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">As Harf claimed in relation to the embargo, there was no hostile policy behind any of the hostile policy moves. Obama and his senior advisors are simply sticklers for procedure. And since during the war Obama insisted that he supported Israel, policymakers and the public had a hard time opposing his actions.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">How can you oppose a hostile policy toward Israel that the administration insists doesn’t exist? Indeed, anyone who suggests otherwise runs the risk of being attacked as a conspiracy theorist or a firebrand.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The same goes for Obama’s policy toward Iran. This week we learned that the administration has now offered Iran a nuclear deal in which the mullahs can keep half of their 10,000 active centrifuges spinning.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Together with Iran’s 10,000 currently inactive centrifuges which the US offer ignores, the actual US position is to allow Iran to have enough centrifuges to enable it to build nuclear bombs within a year, at most.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In other words, the US policy toward Iran exposed by Obama’s nuclear offer is one that enables the most active state sponsor of terrorism to acquire nuclear weapons almost immediately.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">But Obama denies this is his policy. For six years he has very deftly managed Congressional opposition to his wooing of the Iranian regime by insisting that his policy is to reduce the Iranian nuclear threat and to prevent war.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Opposing his policy means opposing these goals.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Consistent polling data show that Obama’s policies of harming Israel and facilitating Iran’s acquisition of a nuclear arsenal are deeply unpopular. His successful advancement of both policies despite this deep-seated public opposition is a testament to his extraordinary skill.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">On the other hand, Obama’s virtuoso handling of the federal bureaucracy and Congress also reveal the Achilles heel of his policies. He conceals them because he cannot defend them.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Obama’s inability to defend these policies means that politicians from both parties can forthrightly set out opposing policies without risking criticism or opposition from the administration.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">How can Obama criticize a serious policy to support Israel when he claims that this is his goal? And how can he oppose a serious policy to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons when he says that he shares that goal? At least as far as Israel is concerned, Obama’s mastery of the federal bureaucracy is complete. It is not incompetence that guides his policy. It is malicious intent toward the US’s closest ally in the Middle East. And to defeat this policy, it is not necessary to prove incompetence that doesn’t exist. It is necessary to show that there are far better ways to achieve his declared aims of supporting Israel and blocking Iran’s nuclear weapons program.</span></p>
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		<title>Benny Gantz’s Troubling Assessments</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/benny-gantzs-troubling-assessments/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=benny-gantzs-troubling-assessments</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 14 Oct 2014 04:46:41 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Caroline Glick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Benny Gantz]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Borders]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=242998</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How Israel's IDF chief of staff is facilitating the opening of Gaza's borders. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/3277243153.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-242999" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/3277243153-444x350.jpg" alt="3277243153" width="320" height="252" /></a>Originally published by the <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Our-World-Benny-Gantzs-troubling-assessments-378793">Jerusalem Post</a>. </em></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">The outcome of the donor conference for Gaza reconstruction that was held in Cairo on Sunday was not surprising.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Representatives of 50 countries convened to pledge funds to Hamas and the PLO. The Palestinians had hoped to receive $4 billion in pledges. They raised $5.4b.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Most of the money will be transferred to the PLO-controlled Palestinian Authority led by President Mahmoud Abbas. But at least $1b. will go directly to Hamas, from its primary financier, Qatar.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">With its $1b. Hamas will be able to pay its terrorist operatives and rebuild its terrorist forces.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The air force revealed last week that Hamas is rebuilding its rocket arsenal already.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">As for the money that will be transferred to Abbas, the billions in funding will give the PLO the money it needs to finance Abbas’s rapidly escalating political war against Israel in the international arena.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">At least some of the money will also go to Hamas, Abbas’s partner in the unity government.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The entire nature of the conference was surreal, but again predictable.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Surreal because it was based on a total disregard for reality.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In last summer’s war, Hamas wantonly and deliberately waged an unprovoked, illegal missile campaign against Israel for the third time in five years. It fired 4,500 projectiles at Israeli territory. It also used tunnels it dug into Israeli territory to attack Israel.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Had Hamas not attacked, Israel would not have counterattacked. There would have been no damage to repair in Gaza.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">If the US, Europe and the Arab world were interested in actually helping Gaza, rather than organize a conference to fund Hamas and the PLO, they would have enjoined Israel to finish the job two months ago and end Hamas’s criminal, terrorist state in Gaza once and for all.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Yet, they did no such thing. Throughout the war, the US and the EU joined Qatar and Turkey in blaming Israel for Hamas’s illegal war.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">And on Sunday, they put their money where their mouths are. They pledged billions to the PLO and its political war against Israel. And they funded Hamas – both directly and indirectly. Moreover, they gave Hamas a political victory by agreeing to fund Abbas, even though he is the head of a PLO-Hamas government.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">All of this was predictable because it happens every time Israel is attacked, whether by terrorist armies in Judea, Samaria and Gaza, or in Lebanon.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Every time the Palestinians and Lebanese Hezbollah attack Israel, the US and Europe eventually side with the Arabs and demand that Israel stop defending itself.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The only difference between the most recent war with Hamas and its predecessors is that this time, the US was even more adamantly opposed to Israel’s attempts to defeat Hamas than the Europeans and many Arab governments.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In other words, the only difference between the most recent war and its predecessors is that the level of hostility towards Israel – and conversely support for Hamas – among leading members of the international community was unprecedented.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Israel’s job in contending with this hostile environment should have been similarly unprecedented.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Israel should have been offering to lead an international force in Gaza to overthrow Hamas and arrest its leaders pending war crimes trials. It should have been sticking the international community’s nose in the stench of its hypocrisy and anti-Israel bias.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Operationally, it should have recognized that Israel’s chief achievement in the war was its ability to withstand US pressure and maintain Gaza’s physical isolation by maintaining the borders shut, and so preventing the terrorist regime from resupplying and rearming.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">At least on the last count, keeping Gaza sealed was Israel’s unflinching position throughout the war. To prevent the opening of Gaza’s borders, and through it, the rebuilding of Hamas’s terrorist infrastructure and political power, at great diplomatic cost, Israel repeatedly rejected US demands for an open border.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">But today, this position is collapsing. True, Israel is insisting officially that stringent controls be placed on all dual use goods brought into Gaza. But officials openly acknowledge that there is no way to enforce the controls once the goods are imported.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Far worse than accepting that its position is difficult to enforce, Israel is actually facilitating the opening of Gaza’s borders. In so doing, Israel is giving Hamas the victory it failed to achieve on the battlefield.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">And worst of all, the chief proponent of this policy is not Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, or even Justice Minister Tzipi Livni. Its chief advocate is IDF chief of staff Lt.-Gen. Benny Gantz.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Throughout the war, tremors of criticism were heard in governing circles and the media against the IDF leadership in general, and against Gantz, in particular.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In a series of media interviews on the eve of Yom Kippur, Gantz showed that not only was the criticism warranted – it was far too mild.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">For years, it has been rightly said that Israel suffers from a chronic shortage of strong leaders. But what Gantz showed in his interviews is that even if Israel was blessed with the strongest leaders in Jewish history, it is far from clear that they would have the capacity to act on their convictions.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In Israel, as in all countries, for a government to get things done political leaders require the assistance of professional echelons who develop tactical options for achieving strategic goals and implement government policies.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The chief criticism of Gantz during the war was that he failed to present the government with options for defeating Hamas or that when he did present them, he did so in ways that made it impossible for the government to adopt options he opposed.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">It was also said that he failed to respect the government’s sovereign authority to determine policy, and interjected his position on issues that were well beyond the professional authority of the IDF.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In his interview with Maariv, Gantz said that the only way to guarantee that the cease-fire will hold is by paying off Hamas. That is, he made clear that he sides with the US and the rest of the international community against the government.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In his words, “At the end of the day, 1.8 million Palestinians live there, and the quiet is also dependent on the trend of creating economic hope there.”</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Gantz placed the blame for their supposed hopelessness on Israel, and its measures to contain Hamas’s threat to Gaza. In his words, “The people there need to live, and they are caught between Egypt on one side, us on another side and the sea with a six mile fishing zone on the other side.”</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Later in the interview, Gantz insisted that Israel’s interest is in enabling the international community to fund Hamas, arguing that terrorism is simply the result of economic privation.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">As he put it, “The Palestinians also do not want to see terrorism operating from within them.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Hamas absorbed a mighty blow and sustained great damage. It needs to see economic recovery, and this need, for economic growth is an opportunity for us.”</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The question of whether or not Gaza should be enriched is not a military one. But that doesn’t bother Gantz. After dictating what the government’s position must be, he then coyly winked, “I leave this for the elected leadership.”</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Throughout the war, Israel’s elected leadership insisted that Gaza remain sealed.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The Left has followed Gantz’s lead and attacked the government for not opening Gaza’s borders and even participating in the Cairo conference.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">But again, reality tells a different tale.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Israel has nothing to gain from participating in a Hamas funding drive.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">It does however have an interest in influencing the international agenda. To do so, the most basic requirement for the government is to reject the lie that Israel is to blame for Hamas’s aggression. Israel’s leaders – elected and appointed – need to internalize the fact that the war this summer, like all previous acts of Hamas aggression against Israel stemmed not from privation and hopelessness, but from empowerment and hopefulness.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Hamas doesn’t attack Israel because it needs money. It attacks Israel because doing so empowers it and weakens Israel – as we saw in Cairo on Sunday.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Unfortunately, for as long as our unelected professional class is led by men who have internalized our enemies’ narratives, there is no way that Israel can act on these basic strategic truths regardless of whom voters elect. And as a result, we shall continue to witness our soldiers’ hard won victories being squandered by our leaders – in and out of uniform.</span></p>
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		<title>Bringing Happiness to Iran</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/bringing-happiness-to-iran/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=bringing-happiness-to-iran</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 10 Oct 2014 04:27:12 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Caroline Glick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[attack]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[explosion]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=242817</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Should Israel openly support internal opponents of the Islamic Republic? ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/1371416420044127700-e1373642361951.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-242818" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/1371416420044127700-e1373642361951-418x350.jpg" alt="1371416420044127700-e1373642361951" width="320" height="268" /></a>Originally published by the <a href="http://www.jpost.com/landedpages/printarticle.aspx?id=378494">Jerusalem Post</a>. </em></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">It is still unclear what happened on Sunday night at Iran’s illicit nuclear installation at Parchin. According to Iranian sources, there was a large explosion that rocked the area within a 15-km. radius of the facility. Two people were reportedly injured.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">According to the UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency and Israel, the Parchin facility is a key component of Iran’s suspected military nuclear program. It is at Parchin that Iran is allegedly building a nuclear explosive device – that is, a nuclear warhead.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The timing of the blast is notable. On Monday night, a delegation from the IAEA landed in Tehran for a new round of talks scheduled for that Tuesday. The UN’s demand to inspect Parchin was set to be one of the top agenda items at the talks.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Given the timing, it is certainly possible that the Iranians carried out the explosion themselves as a means of preventing the IAEA from demanding access.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">But let us assume that the widely held automatic assumption – that Israel was behind the blast at Parchin – is accurate. The fact is that in order to destroy Iran’s nuclear weapons program, or seriously setback its completion, dozens, if not hundreds of additional targets need to be hit and destroyed.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Iran has secured its illicit nuclear program by dispersing and replicating its nuclear installations throughout the country. If the Parchin bombing was carried out by Israel, it must be seen as but another strike in Israel’s purported – and if it exists, meandering – campaign to destroy Iran’s capacity to develop nuclear weapons.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">At the desultory rate Israel’s assumed campaign is progressing, we can have little confidence that through bombing alone, Israel will be able to prevent Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons in the near future.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">One of the main reasons that Israel’s purported strikes in Iran have been so lethargic is because the US opposes them. As we have seen in recent years, the Obama administration has been a sieve of information to the media about Israel’s alleged covert strikes in Iran. To successfully neutralize Iran’s nuclear facilities through acts of sabotage, Israel needs to hide its effort from the US as well as Iran.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In light of these constraints, Israel should consider expanding the goal of its policy towards Iran from merely debilitating Iran’s nuclear project to ending it entirely by overthrowing the regime.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">There are many reasons to believe that overthrowing the regime is a realistic option.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">First and foremost, to the shock and amazement of the entire world, following the stolen 2009 Iranian presidential elections, the Green Movement arose spontaneously and nearly overthrew the regime. Millions of Iranians from across ethnic lines and throughout the country rose up against the regime. They rallied around presidential candidates Seyyed Mir-Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi and demanded that the mullocracy be replaced with a democracy.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Had the Obama administration backed the Iranian people rather than the regime, it is likely that the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) and supreme dictator Ali Khamenei would have been finished six years ago along with their nuclear program and worldwide terrorist network.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Dr. Michael Ledeen, Freedom Scholar at the Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies has been closely following the Iranian regime since he served in the Reagan administration in the 1980s. In 2009, he argued that even without US assistance, if Israel had been willing to help the Green Movement, with little effort, it could have empowered the opposition sufficiently to overthrow the regime.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In a conversation this week, Ledeen said Israel still has the capacity to provide opposition forces the tools they require to overthrow the regime.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Today, with Khamenei reportedly seriously ill, the widespread assessment is that Iran is already in the throes of a succession crisis. As Ledeen sees it, radical ayatollahs are vying with the IRGC and Khamenei’s family to succeed him. President Hassan Rouhani is also seeking to ascend to Khamenei’s all powerful throne.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">At the same, time, as Iran enters into this period of political uncertainty, the regime itself is less popular than ever.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Rouhani was elected last year on the strength of his promise to expand freedoms in Iran. Since he took office, repression, not freedom has expanded.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Over the past year, the number of regime executions and mass arrests has skyrocketed. So too, the number of Iranian political prisoners subjected to torture has risen. Despite Rouhani’s promise to free them, Mousavi and Karroubi, who were placed under house arrest in 2011, have not been freed.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Last week, the family of Ayatollah Hossein Kazemeyni Boroujerdi announced that the religious leader has been informed that he is about to be executed by the regime. Boroujerdi is serving his eighth year of an 11-year prison sentence for rejecting the religious legitimacy of the regime and demanding, in keeping with Shi’ite jurisprudence, its overthrow and replacement with a democracy in which mosque is separated from state.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Boroujerdi enjoys massive support in Iran. His bravery in the face of regime repression is breathtaking.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Since his arrest, Boroujerdi has been subjected to barbaric torture. And yet, rather than repent his ways, as the regime demands, he has smuggled letters to the world outside his prison exposing the dismal state of human rights in the Iran, and the heresy at the heart of the regime.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Ledeen claims that an Israeli campaign to highlight the suffering of Iranian political prisoners and dissidents that would include constant public condemnations of the regime, calls for the release of political prisoners, and support for greater freedom, particularly for women would have a major impact both globally and in Iran.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">If such a campaign is coupled with the provision of communication equipment for the opposition to let its leaders and followers bypass the regime’s firewalls and communicate freely with one another, its chances of success would grow. So too, the provision of financial and other support for Iranian workers’ unions, including building international support for their rejection of the regime, and broadcast of accurate news, by among other things expanding the broadcast time allotted to Voice of Israel Persian service, could empower the regime’s opponents.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Ledeen scoffs at the concern that Israeli support for regime opponents will boomerang against them and strengthen public support for the regime. As he put it, “Opponents of the regime are always accused of being in cahoots with Israel and the US, so getting support doesn’t change their risk, and in fact will strengthen them&#8230; The opposition is probably amazed they are not getting help from Israel.”</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Ledeen’s policy involves a program of nonviolent, open Israeli political and financial support for regime opponents.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">A different policy of regime overthrow was put forward by Nicholas Saidel in an article published last month by Mida online magazine. Saidel recommended that Israel adopt a more involved policy of directly supporting minority liberation movements operating inside Iran. Saidel noted that oppressed, irredentist minorities – including the Azeris, Kurds, Ahwazi Arabs and Baluchis together comprise more than a third of Iran’s population. He suggests that the regime should be overthrown and Iran should be carved up into a number of smaller states that will be too weak to threaten Israel.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Saidel notes that all four minorities have in the past cooperated with Israel. Some have spoken openly in favor of Israel. Israel, he argues, has the wherewithal to help them today in significant ways that will, at a minimum, significantly weaken the regime and so limit its ability to harm Israel.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Of the two options, the potential downside of Saidel’s is far higher. The specter of small, powerful jihadist forces along the lines of Islamic State and the Taliban being installed in power in Iran is distressing. But even in this case, the payoff of destroying the regime, and so ending Iran’s nuclear program and its sponsorship with Hezbollah, Hamas and other jihadist terror groups would be enormous.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Regardless of how one assesses the risk of either policy of supporting regime opponents, given the risk a nuclear armed Iran will constitute for Israel; the Obama administration’s obvious preference for a nuclear armed Iran over an Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear installations; and the ever growing threat posed by Iran’s terrorist proxies, it would appear that the risks attached to adopting either Ledeen’s approach, or Saidel’s approach, or both, are far smaller than the risk of letting Iran take out membership in the nuclear club.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Distressingly, Israel’s security brass seems utterly bereft of creative or even three dimensional thought in regards to Iran. In an interview with Ma’ariv published last Friday, IDF Chief of General Staff Lt.-Gen. Benny Gantz claimed that international sanctions convinced Iran that its nuclear project was harming its regime.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">What the sanctions actually convinced them was that it was worth their while to pretend to be interested in a nuclear deal in order to loosen or end the sanctions. Acting this way would not prevent them from acquiring nuclear weapons but would restore Iran’s economic viability.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Over the past decade, attempts to get Israeli military leaders to even consider a program of assisting the regime’s opponents have come up empty.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The time has come to reconsider this refusal. In his recent public remarks on Iran, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu argued repeatedly and rightly that the Iranian regime is more dangerous to global security than Islamic State. But he has abstained from mentioning that the Iranian regime is as dangerous to those living under its jackboot as Islamic State is to those who come under its power.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Had Netanyahu raised Boroujerdi’s plight in his speech at the UN, it would have weakened Rouhani.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">And for his part, Boroujerdi would not have been any more imperiled than he already is.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">So too, the seven young Iranians who were sentenced last month to suspended jail sentences and 91 lashes for daring to post an Internet video of themselves singing Pharrell Williams’s song “Happy” will not be any more unhappy and oppressed if Israeli leaders stood up for their right to be happy.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Ledeen remarked, “I’ve rarely seen a policy that was both strategically and morally imperative, but [supporting the Iranian regime’s domestic opponents] is certainly one of them.”</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">We may never know what exactly happened Sunday night at Parchin. But we certainly know that it will take hundreds more mysterious explosions to prevent Iran from getting the bomb. And even if such explosions take place, so long as the regime remains in power, there is every reason to believe that such achievements will lack significance in the long term.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Iran is Israel’s greatest foe. Between its support for Hezbollah and Hamas and its nuclear program, it threatens Israel more gravely than any other state today. The best way to end these threats is not to fight another round against its proxies. It is to go to the source of the problem.</span></p>
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		<title>Israel Bashers’ Phony Contrition</title>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 07 Oct 2014 04:45:04 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Caroline Glick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Anti-Semitism]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Dr. Richard Horton]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Hamas]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[European high society launches a vicious anti-Semitic attack against the Jewish State. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<div id="attachment_242550" style="width: 319px" class="wp-caption alignleft"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Screen-Shot-2014-10-07-at-1.13.04-AM.png"><img class="wp-image-242550" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/Screen-Shot-2014-10-07-at-1.13.04-AM-450x345.png" alt="Screen Shot 2014-10-07 at 1.13.04 AM" width="309" height="237" /></a><p class="wp-caption-text">Dr. Richard Horton</p></div>
<p style="color: #000000;"><em>Originally published by the <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Our-World-Israel-bashers-phony-contrition-378206">Jerusalem Post</a>. </em></p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Dr. Richard Horton, the editor of the English medical journal The Lancet, was not transformed by his visit to Israel last week.</p>
<p>Horton came to Israel last week the guest of Rambam Medical Center in a bid to dig himself out of the hole he dug himself into. On August 19 Horton published a 1,600-word letter criminalizing Israel. In it, Israel was accused of committing war crimes and crimes against humanity. The authors called for a boycott of Israel, including Israeli academia. Since its publication on Lancet’s website, the letter has garnered 20,000 signatures.</p>
<p>The letter made no mention of the fact that the war this summer was initiated by Hamas through its illegal missile, mortar and rocket offensive against Israeli population centers. The esteemed medical professionals who wrote the letter failed to mention that Hamas’s operational headquarters was located in Shifa hospital in Gaza. And of course, they ignored the underlying fact that Hamas’s entire campaign against Israel was a crime against humanity.</p>
<p>Immediately following its publication, Prof. Gerald Steinberg, the head of NGO Monitor, exposed that the letter’s principal authors are frothing-at-the-mouth anti-Semites. Dr. Paola Manduca and Dr. Swee Ang disseminated a video entitled, CNN, Goldman Sachs &amp; the Zio Matrix. It was produced by the former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan David Duke.</p>
<p>As Britain’s Telegraph reported, in disseminating the video, Ang exhorted her audience to understand that the Jewish threat outlined in the video is a threat to humanity. In her words, it “is not about Palestine – it is about all of us!” For her part, as the Telegraph reported, Manduca has accused Israel of responsibility for the Boston Marathon bombing. And she disseminated an article comparing Israel to a “strangler fig,” which as the Telegraph explained, “grows around other trees and takes their sunlight, often resulting in the deaths of the original trees.”</p>
<p>Steinberg cataloged Horton’s long record of publishing anti-Israel slanders under the guise of a scientific research. Horton responded with indignation to the initial criticisms of his decision to publish the defamatory letter. He told the Telegraph that the anti-Semitic views of letter authors were “utterly irrelevant.” He called criticism of his decision to publish the letter, “a smear campaign.”</p>
<p>Horton then pledged not to retract the letter – which is still posted on Lancet’s website – “even if [criticism of the authors] was found to be substantiated.”</p>
<p>Yet as the outrage mounted against him, and the stench of the Jew hatred of his colleagues grew stronger, Horton began to feel the heat. So after refusing to publish a letter from Israeli doctors from Rambam rejecting the libelous attacks against Israel, Horton accepted Rambam’s invitation to come to Israel last week and learn firsthand how none of his allegations were true.</p>
<p>At the end of his three-day visit, Horton gave a lecture at Rambam where he condemned the Cossack-style Jew hatred of his colleagues Ang and Manduca. But despite his seeming contrition, Horton did not disavow their letter. He did not agree to remove the slander from The Lancet’s website.</p>
<p>Horton’s selective contrition was an expression of contempt for Israel, for his Israeli hosts and for their Herculean efforts over three days to demonstrate to him that Israel is good, not evil. Yet, instead of calling him on his obnoxious behavior, the heads of Rambam and other critics embraced him and praised his transformation.</p>
<p>As Dr. Anthony Luder, the director of pediatrics at Ziv Medical Center in Safed, wrote in a letter to The Jerusalem Post published Monday, “In what looks like an academic version of the Stockholm Syndrome, my esteemed colleagues at Rambam Medical Center have only succeeded in throwing sand in the face of the medical community by providing legitimization for a hateful hypocrite and terrible scientist.”</p>
<p>Horton’s behavior is very much in keeping with what has become standard operating procedure throughout much of Europe today. First, attack Israel. If you get called on it, issue a clarification or a clearing-of-the-throat apology that does not contain any retraction of your falsehoods. For your willingness to rhetorically temper your mendacious allegations, you can expect to be forgiven by Israel and those who care about truth in your country.</p>
<p>CONSIDER THE new Swedish government’s behavior.</p>
<p>During his inaugural speech last Friday, the new Social Democrat Swedish prime minister, Stefen Lofven, announced that his government will recognize the non-existent State of Palestine.</p>
<p>Israel rightly responded angrily to his statement, noting that the reason no peace accord has been signed between Israel and the Palestinians is because the Palestinians have scuttled and prevented negotiations for the past five years.</p>
<p>In the face of Israel’s angry rebuke of Lofven’s statement, the Swedish Embassy in Tel Aviv issued a clarification saying that Sweden supports a negotiated settlement and values its ties with Israel. Ambassador Carl Magnus Nesser told Army Radio that the remark was simply made to jump-start peace talks.</p>
<p>Lofven’s statement was not notable because he revealed himself as a fan of Palestinian terrorists who refuse to recognize Israel’s right to exist. That’s been Sweden’s policy for decades.</p>
<p>What was notable about Lofven’s statement is that he made it in his inaugural address to the Swedish Parliament.</p>
<p>What this means is that in Sweden, supporting the Palestinians against Israel is not a foreign policy issue. It is a domestic policy issue.</p>
<p>As Benjamin Weinthal documented in Monday’s Post, Swedish Social Democrat politicians with no connection to foreign policy have long records of vilifying Israel and condemning Jews that insist on supporting the Jewish state. Lofven’s government reflects this anti-Israel, and frankly anti-Semitic trend.</p>
<p>Lofven appointed Turkish-born Green Party politician Mehmet Kaplan to serve as urban planning and environment minister in his government. Three years ago Kaplan participated in the illegal, pro-Hamas Turkish flotilla to Gaza as a passenger aboard the Mavi Marmara terrorist ship. In a rally over the summer, he used jihadist language and called for the “liberation of Jerusalem,” and the “liberation of Palestine.” Kaplan has likened Swedish jihadists who travel to Iraq and Syria to fight for Islamic State to Swedish freedom fighters who fought against the Soviets in Finland during World War II.</p>
<p>Other leading politicians in the Social Democratic Party have traveled to Israel and participated in riots against IDF forces.</p>
<p>In other words, Swedish politicians have identified anti-Israel activism as a potent tool for garnering domestic support. This is why Lofven spent so much more time discussing it in his inaugural address than he spent discussing the killing fields in Syria and Iraq, for instance.</p>
<p>But just as Horton wasn’t willing to be lumped together with his Ku Klux Klan-supporting comrades, so the Swedes aren’t willing to admit that their hostility towards Israel owes to domestic considerations that have nothing to do with what Israel does.</p>
<p>Horton’s phony contrition and the Swedish embassy’s “clarification” flow from the same source. And they tell us something about what is happening in Europe and how we need to deal with Europe as it transforms itself before our eyes.</p>
<p>Europe is abandoning the ideals of the Enlightenment, and embracing authoritarianism and irrationality.</p>
<p>But it isn’t willing to admit what it is doing. As a consequence, it is possible to harken to those ideals to shame Europeans for their irrational bigotry and so slow the process down.</p>
<p>Horton will no doubt revert to open defamation of Israel in due time. The Swedish government will similarly attack us in due course.</p>
<p>But forcing them to slow down is important.</p>
<p>Whether or not Europe’s downward spiral is unstoppable is irrelevant for Israel because what is clear enough is that if Europe decides to abandon its current path, it won’t be because of anything Israel does.</p>
<p>Facing this situation, Israel must be guided by two goals as it confronts Europe. It needs to stop caring about what Europeans think of it, and it needs to reduce as much as possible its exposure to the European market.</p>
<p>On the latter issue, unless something fundamental changes, it is undeniable that at some point in the next 10 to 15 years, Europe will join the Arab League’s boycott of Israel. Israel needs time to develop alternative markets for its exports.</p>
<p>On the former issue, Europe’s main non-economic weapon against Israel today is the fact that the Israeli public and particularly Israel’s elites still care what Europe thinks of us. Israelis need time to understand that European hatred for Israel has nothing whatsoever to do with anything Israel does.</p>
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		<title>Netanyahu’s Statements and Policies</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/netanyahus-statements-and-policies/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=netanyahus-statements-and-policies</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 03 Oct 2014 04:50:38 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Caroline Glick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Iran]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[meeting]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Netanyahu]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Nuclear Weapons]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[Decoding the Israeli prime minister's message to the Obama administration. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/5618435092089408259no.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-242294" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/10/5618435092089408259no.jpg" alt="5618435092089408259no" width="315" height="200" /></a>Originally published by the <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Netanyahus-statements-and-policies-377946">Jerusalem Post</a>. </em></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">Although commentators overlooked it, the Obama administration did it again. They blindsided Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu on the eve of his trip to Washington.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The last time it happened was in May 2011 when US President Barack Obama set out his policy toward Israel and the Palestinians as Netanyahu was in flight, en route to Washington to meet with him.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In that speech Obama announced his support for an essentially full Israeli withdrawal to the entirely indefensible 1949 armistice lines in Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria. Obama adopted this position despite the fact that Netanyahu and the Israeli public rejected it and viewed it as a threat to Israel’s survival.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">This time the Obama administration didn’t blindside Israel on the eve of Netanyahu’s visit with another hostile pronouncement in relation to the Palestinians. This time they did so in relation to Iran.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In an address on Saturday night before the National Iranian-American Council, Phillip Gordon, the White House’s coordinator for the Middle East, said that if US-Iranian talks on Iran’s nuclear weapons program lead to an agreement, they can pave the way for the reestablishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries. In his words, “A nuclear agreement could begin a multi-generational process that could lead to a new relationship between our countries.”</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Gordon’s statement was a blunt departure from the White House’s previous position that the only gain Iran would make by obeying binding UN Security Council resolutions that prohibit the Islamic theocracy from enriching uranium would be the abrogation of economic sanctions that were adopted to force Iran to end its illicit nuclear activities.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In accordance with US law, diplomatic relations with Iran are contingent on Iran’s cessation of support for terrorist organizations and other unlawful activities.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In his remarks to NIAC – a group that the vast majority of Iranian-Americans view as the unofficial lobby of the Iranian regime – Gordon said that due to the importance of the nuclear issue, to make progress in nuclear talks, the US is willing to ignore Iran’s support for terrorism and other crimes.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In his words, “The nuclear issue is too important to subordinate to a complete transformation of Iran internally.”</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">FACED WITH this boldfaced US declaration that it will not only do nothing to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power, but is also endorsing continued Iranian sponsorship of Hezbollah, Netanyahu opted to avoid yet another direct confrontation with the White House. Rather than directly call the administration out for its role in enabling Iran to become a nuclear state, Netanyahu sufficed with his usual rhetoric. He gently chided Obama for his pro-Iranian policy during his public remarks at the White House. And in all of his public statements, Netanyahu underlined how and why Iran and its nuclear weapons program are a greater threat to the free world than Islamic State.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">There are probably two reasons for Netanyahu’s reticence. First, a confrontation would be futile.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Even before Gordon’s speech, it was obvious to Netanyahu that Obama’s goal is not to prevent Iran from getting nuclear bombs. The goal of Obama’s Iran policy is to reinstate US-Iranian relations.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Obama sees himself as a reincarnation of Richard Nixon. He will be for US-Iranian relations what Nixon was for US relations with Communist China.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Obama doesn’t mind if Iran has a bomb in the basement so long as he can drink tea with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani in the drawing room.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Given Obama’s absolute commitment to his goal, there was no point in having a confrontation with him. Netanyahu’s rejection of Obama’s position, made through his repeated warnings, was directed toward other ears. Netanyahu’s statements and warning were directed toward the American media, the American public and the American political class. His goal is to develop and strengthen support for an Israeli policy that would run counter to Obama’s policy of embracing Iran even at the cost of enabling Iran to become a nuclear power.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The only problem with Netanyahu’s rhetoric is that it isn’t credible. At this point, it is hard to believe Netanyahu has a policy to prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapons.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">During his five-and-a-half years in office, Netanyahu has taken only sporadic action against Iran.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The cumulative impact of those actions has been limited, in part due to the Obama administration’s policy of leaking Israeli operations to the media.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Moreover, in light of the episodic nature of these actions, it is hard to view them as integrated components of an overall strategy whose aim is to destroy or significantly degrade Iran’s nuclear installations. In other words, it doesn’t appear that Israel has a policy of any kind for dealing with Iran’s nuclear weapons program.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">All we have is Netanyahu’s Churchillian rhetoric, which in itself will do nothing to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">As the media analysts were quick to point out, whereas Netanyahu sought to focus his discussions with Obama on Iran, Obama was keen to focus his discussions with Netanyahu on the Palestinians.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Netanyahu’s unwillingness to focus specifically on the Palestinian issue was notable mainly because in his limited remarks on the issue, he signaled that he has a new strategic vision and policy for contending with the Palestinian conflict with Israel.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The first aspect of Netanyahu’s apparently emerging policy came out on Monday during his speech at the UN General Assembly. There Netanyahu criticized PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas more honestly and assertively than he ever has before.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Slamming Abbas for his libelous charge that Israel enacted a genocide against the Palestinians in Gaza, Netanyahu said that the deranged moral universe in which Israel can be accused of genocide is “the same moral universe where a man [Abbas] who wrote a dissertation of lies about the Holocaust, and who insists on a Palestine free of Jews, judenrein, can stand at the podium and shamelessly accuse Israel of genocide and ethnic cleansing.”</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Netanyahu then further distanced himself from the PLO-centric framework for building peaceful relations between Israel and its neighbors. He noted that the rise of Sunni jihadist forces and the Iranian nuclear threat have brought major Sunni Arab states to the conclusion that their best bet is to work with Israel to meet and surmount the growing dangers. This new regional landscape in turn can provide a means of resolving the Palestinian conflict with Israel in a manner that will not endanger Israel.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Netanyahu’s suggestion, repeated at the White House Wednesday, that neighboring Arab states may develop new means of resolving the Palestinian issue, rings true in light of the diplomatic support Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates gave Israel in its war against Hamas this summer. And even though the Egyptian government later denied the reports, talk persists that Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi did in fact offer the Palestinians sovereignty over a large swathe of Sinai adjacent to Gaza as a means of establishing a viable Palestinian state without sovereignty over Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The assessment that a policy is slowly being developed along these lines was reinforced on Tuesday by Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Repeating Netanyahu’s reference to a regional alliance structure that can be used to resolve the Palestinian conflict with Israel, Ya’alon said that it is irrational to even consider an Israeli withdrawal from Judea and Samaria in the aftermath of the war in Gaza.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The emerging policy apparently involves the application of Israeli sovereignty over all or parts of Judea and Samaria, along the lines I set out in my book The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East, in combination with an Egyptian offer of Sinai territory to the Palestinians in conjunction with the demilitarization of Gaza.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">From the administration’s behavior following Obama’s meeting with Netanyahu on Wednesday, we learned that the administration is adamantly opposed to any revision of the current PLO-centric framework, which is predicated on Israeli concessions to an intransigent PLO.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Shortly after Netanyahu left the White House, the administration bitterly attacked and threatened Israel, because the Jewish state refuses to obey the administration and deny Jews the right to buy and own property in eastern, southern and northern Jerusalem. The administration was enraged because in line with Israel’s refusal to adopt anti-Semitic housing policies, the Jerusalem Planning Board approved the construction of housing for Jews and Arabs in the city.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Also on Wednesday, Channel 10 reported that Secretary of State John Kerry is seeking to scuttle the developing Israeli alliance with Egypt and other anti-jihadist Sunni states by bringing Qatar, Hamas’s principal Sunni state-sponsor, into the mix. Kerry is reportedly trying to organize a regional peace conference that would coerce Israel into accepting the so-called Saudi Peace Initiative from 2002. That initiative would require Israel to surrender to all the PLO’s territorial demands and accept millions of foreign, hostile Arabs into its shrunken, indefensible territory.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In light of Obama’s absolute commitment to the anti-Israel, PLO-centric policy model for dealing with the Palestinian rejection of Israel, for the next two years there will be no change in US policy on the issue.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Under these circumstances, Netanyahu’s task is to lay the foundation in Washington for support for an Israeli policy that abandons the PLO as a partner and moves beyond the failed two-state model. Here, Netanyahu’s statements at the UN and the White House indicate that this is the path he has embarked upon.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Unfortunately, while Netanyahu may prefer to lay the groundwork for a new policy indirectly and cautiously, Abbas’s bid to convince the US to support the passage of a Security Council resolution that would require Israel to withdraw from Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem a week after the 2016 presidential elections will likely force Netanyahu present an alternative to the PLO-centric two-state plan sooner rather than later.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">After the 2016 elections, Obama will be unconstrained by concerns for Democratic candidates.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Most of the Security Council resolutions against Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria were passed after the 1980 presidential elections when the then lame duck Jimmy Carter felt free to attack Israel at will.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">To avoid a repetition of that experience in late 2016, Netanyahu will have to offer an alternative to the failed two-state plan ahead of the 2016 presidential nominating conventions.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Netanyahu’s statements in the US this week present us with a mixed picture of his leadership.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Netanyahu appears more resolute on the Palestinian threat than he has in the past. This is a good thing. But on the most pressing threat Israel faces today, his strong words rang hollow. The only way to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power is for Israel to attack Iran’s nuclear installations. Until Israel adopts a policy for doing so, words will not suffice.</span></p>
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		<title>Kicking the PLO Habit</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/kicking-the-plo-habit/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=kicking-the-plo-habit</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 30 Sep 2014 04:53:08 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Caroline Glick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=242006</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why the lives of Israelis and Palestinians will only get worse with the successors of Arafat in power.]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #000000;"><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/abbas-unga-speech-palestine.si_.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-242007" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/abbas-unga-speech-palestine.si_-432x350.jpg" alt="abbas-unga-speech-palestine.si" width="285" height="231" /></a>Originally published by the <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Our-world-Kicking-the-PLO-habit-376614">Jerusalem Post</a>. </em></p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The signs are everywhere that the time has come for Israel to abandon the PLO.</p>
<p>So long as the PLO remains in power, the lives of Israelis and Palestinians will only get worse.</p>
<p>PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas’s speech last Friday at the UN General Assembly where he repeatedly accused Israel of committing genocide was not merely an abandonment of direct peace negotiations with Israel. Abbas abandoned the very concept of peaceful coexistence between Israel and the Palestinians.</p>
<p>Abbas called for the UN to pass a resolution that will require Israel to cede Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria in their entirety to the PLO within a set period of time. No Israeli consideration can be taken into account. No Israel concern can be attended to.</p>
<p>As he put it, “Palestine refuses to have the right to freedom of her people, who are subjected to the terrorism by the racist occupying Power and its settlers, remain hostage to Israel’s security conditions.”</p>
<p>As is always the case, the immediate victims of Abbas’s blood libels are the Israeli Left. The politicians and media elite that have hitched their horse to the PLO were again left stuttering by the wayside.</p>
<p>For some, like Meretz chair Zehava Gal-On, stuttering is a fine option. So she pushed out an endorsement of Abbas’s genocide speech.</p>
<p>Gal-On said, “Meretz supports Abbas’s international efforts to bring the end of the occupation and to get international recognition as a [Palestinian] state and member of the UN before and as a corridor to reaching peace in bilateral negotiations between equals,” And she joined Abbas in blaming Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu for Abbas’s rejection of peace.</p>
<p>As the center-left commentator Dan Margalit noted in Yisrael Hayom, Gal-On and Meretz are basically alone in their embrace of Abbas today.</p>
<p>But they are far from alone in maintaining their slavish devotion to the idea that the only way to improve the situation is by giving Abbas whatever he wants.</p>
<p>And here the circle of victims of Abbas’s hostility expands from the Left to the entire country.</p>
<p>In a Facebook post on Saturday, Opposition leader and Labor Party leader Yitzhak Herzog latched all of Israel to the Left’s position by seeming to condemn Abbas while insisting that he is Israel’s only hope.</p>
<p>Herzog wrote that Abbas’s remarks, “were disappointing but not surprising.</p>
<p>“I have met with [Abbas, aka] Abu Mazen dozens of times: He is not a friend or a sympathetic ally. He is someone we have to make a deal with,” Herzog insisted.</p>
<p>Herzog then repeated the same points he and his fellow leftists have made for decades: that Abbas is better than Hamas, that Israel’s security cooperation with the PLO is really great, and that he only way to get the world to be nice to us is by maintaining our allegiance to Abbas and the PLO.</p>
<p>Herzog concluded by joining Gal-On and Abbas in attacking Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and blaming him for Abbas’s open transformation into Israel’s enemy.</p>
<p>The first problem with Herzog’s statement is that if it is true that he has always known that Abbas is our enemy, then he just told us that he is a liar.</p>
<p>Like all his friends on the Left, Herzog has continuously embraced Abbas and insisted that he is a man of peace and a moderate and interested in making a deal with Israel.</p>
<p>Yet far worse than his apparent serial dishonesty is Herzog’s insistence that Israel remain in the same policy straitjacket of embracing the PLO.</p>
<p>It is true that Israel gets some security cooperation from the Palestinian security forces. But it is also true that the only guarantor of Israel’s security is the IDF. Were the Palestinian security forces to disband tomorrow, Israel would be better off, not worse off.</p>
<p>This is the case because as Abbas showed, the PA views Israel as its enemy. For tactical reasons PLO militias do work with the IDF from time to time. But their strategic goal – Israel’s destruction – is unchanging. Any doubts that this is the case were dispelled by Abbas’s remarks in New York.</p>
<p>As for the PLO being preferable to Hamas, the PLO is Hamas’s coalition partner. Abbas staunchly expressed his commitment to the unity government he forged with Hamas in his UN speech.</p>
<p>Supporting the PLO in Gaza is the same as supporting Hamas.</p>
<p>Finally, Israel’s international position is continuously degraded, and has been since 1993 as a direct result of its embrace of the PLO. As Abbas showed yet again on Friday, the PLO is leading an international campaign to delegitimize Israel’s right to exist. By embracing the PLO, Israel is legitimizing the campaign against it.</p>
<p>Due to our adoption of the Left’s catechism, that Israel has no choice but to continue its embrace of the PLO, we find ourselves at this juncture &#8212; where the PLO no longer even tries to hide its rejection of peaceful coexistence with the Jewish state &#8212; unable to mount a concerted defense of our rights and legitimate concerns.</p>
<p>If we have no choice but to cut a deal with a group that openly seeks our annihilation in collaboration with Hamas, a terrorist group supported by Iran, then how can we defend ourselves and ensure our rights are respected and our interests are secured? The short answer is that we cannot. Since the PLO seeks our destruction, everything we do to strengthen it weakens us. Abbas made clear in his UN speech that he is playing a zero-sum game with Israel. Everything he gains comes at our expense.</p>
<p>Herzog and his comrades are right about one thing. Chances for peaceful coexistence between Israel and the Palestinians will increase in an environment where the Palestinians enjoy civil rights and economic opportunities. The problem is that the PLO has harmed, and will continue to harm both for as long as it remains in power.</p>
<p>In large part because the PLO recognizes that freedom and economic opportunity engender social happiness and peace, for the past 21 years they have taken active steps to repress freedom and strangle economic opportunities. Only a Palestinian society that is poor, immiserated and indoctrinated to hate Jews will agree to serve as foot soldiers in a perpetual war.</p>
<p>To this end, the PLO has stolen billions in international aid funds, imprisoned and tortured its critics, built an economy based on graft and protection, and brainwashed the Palestinians with a narrative of hating Jews and blaming Israel for the misery to which the PLO has reduced them.</p>
<p>Israel has two options going forward to secure its rights and protect its interests. Both options are preferable to remaining where we are. But to adopt either of these policies, we first need to abandon the pretense that the PLO is a credible, legitimate actor.</p>
<p>The first option is to adopt Economy Minister Naftali Bennett’s plan to apply Israeli law over Area C of Judea and Samaria – that is, the land lacking a significant Palestinian population, and agreeing to Palestinian self-rule in the Palestinian population centers.</p>
<p>For this option to work, Israel will have to cultivate a security and social environment among the Palestinians that is conducive to the emergence of a genuinely moderate leadership. This new leadership could replace the PLO and lead the Palestinians to a better, freer life based on peaceful coexistence with Israel and freedom in a self-governing territory.</p>
<p>The second option is to adopt the policy I set out in my recent book, The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East. That policy involves implementing Israeli law over all of Judea and Samaria and providing the Palestinians with equal rights under Israeli law.</p>
<p>Palestinians will receive permanent residency status as the Arab residents of Jerusalem and the Druse of the Golan Heights received in 1967 and 1981. Like them, Palestinians will have the right to apply for Israeli citizenship. Those who abide by the criteria of Israel’s citizenship laws will receive citizenship.</p>
<p>Both of these options will improve chances for peace. Both policies with secure the lives of Israelis and Palestinians and foster their rights and prosperity.</p>
<p>Friday Abbas told clearly that he is our enemy, and indeed the enemy of the Palestinians whose lives he insists on imperiling and embittering by locking them into a perpetual war for the destruction of Israel.</p>
<p>He told us to move on.</p>
<p>And move on we must, first and foremost by kicking our PLO habit.</p>
<p><b>Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: </b><a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref%3dnb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital-text&amp;field-keywords=david+horowitz&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;ajr=0#/ref=sr_st?keywords=david+horowitz&amp;qid=1316459840&amp;rh=n:133140011%2ck:david+horowitz&amp;sort=daterank" target="_blank"><b>Click here</b></a><b>. </b></p>
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		<title>A Prayer for 5775</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/a-prayer-for-5775/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=a-prayer-for-5775</link>
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		<pubDate>Wed, 24 Sep 2014 04:50:21 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Caroline Glick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<description><![CDATA[My hope for the American Jewish community this Rosh Hashana. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/rosh-hashanah338.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-241644" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/rosh-hashanah338-440x350.jpg" alt="rosh-hashanah338" width="299" height="238" /></a>Originally published by the <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/A-prayer-for-5775-376221">Jerusalem Post</a>. </em></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">Despite the dangers mounting all around us, as we approach Rosh Hashana 5775, for Jews in Israel, in many ways things have never been better.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">On Sunday night, President Reuven Rivlin and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu spoke at the 10th-anniversary celebration marking the founding of the Menachem Begin Heritage Center in Jerusalem.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In his remarks, Rivlin described the impact of what he referred to as the “revolution” Menachem Begin led in Israeli society.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Through his victory in the 1977 Knesset elections, which marked the end of the Labor Party’s monopoly on power, Rivlin explained, Begin began the process of expanding the definition of what it means to be an Israeli. Until Begin rose to the premiership, entire sectors of society, Mizrahim from Arab countries, new olim, religious Zionists and haredim had been shunned by the establishment.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Begin changed that.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Begin opened the doors to everyone, facilitating their entry into society on their own terms, transforming Israel from a melting pot, where everyone was supposed to aspire to become a member of the in-group, into a multicultural society, where all expressions of Israeli-ism were welcome.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The goal of Begin’s revolution was to develop Israel into an open, dynamic and inclusive society. Begin ushered in its first phase – inclusion. He didn’t live to see the next phase, that of integration. In the first phase, the spurned sectors Begin embraced defined themselves more by what distinguished them from other Israelis than by what united them with their fellow Israelis.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Today, Rivlin explained, we are in the next phase of Begin’s revolution as we see the integration of more and more Israelis into a new, dynamic, inclusive model of Israeli-ism. This is a model based on what unites us, rather than what drives us apart.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In his remarks, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu also highlighted the sense of national unity that increasingly defines the Israeli experience. Netanyahu dwelled on its foundations – the shared Jewish heritage and values that form the basis of Israeli society.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Both men marveled at how far Israel has come in this direction over the past decade and a half by recalling the uncertain beginning of the Begin Heritage Center when, during Netanyahu’s first tenure as prime minister, the Knesset passed a law mandating its formation.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">At the time, Israeli society was suffering from an unprecedented level of polarization.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Many Labor members responded to Begin’s rise to power by turning to the radical Left. In 1993, with the inauguration of the so-called peace process with the PLO, the Labor Party transformed itself from the party that encompassed the national ethos into one that undermined it.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The ethos that Labor had developed in its years in power was one of collective security and shared fate. The peace process, predicated as it was on Israeli culpability for the Arab world’s rejection of the Jewish state, subverted the national ethos. After all, if Israel itself was responsible for the absence of peace, and until 1993, Israel’s strategic posture was based on activist defense, then Israel’s strategic posture, and the social understandings it was rooted in, were responsible for Arab hatred and aggression, and therefore they had to be rejected.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">After Netanyahu defeated Labor leader Shimon Peres in the 1996 elections, Labor and its partners rooted their strategy for returning to power on exploiting the sectoral identities cultivated by Begin in order to turn Israelis against one another.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The results of the 1999 elections demonstrated the strategy’s success. Likud and Labor – the big tent parties – were vastly weakened as sectoral parties rose in power and influence, reflecting the unraveling of society’s sense of shared destiny.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">This disintegration, together with the so-called peace process’s subversion of the national ethos of collective security, brought about a situation where when the PLO rejected statehood and peace at Camp David in 2000 and Yasser Arafat turned to jihad, Israeli society was weaker than it had been since the early 1950s.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">It took the efforts of Israelis from all walks of life, and from all sectors of society, who read the writing on the wall, to forge a new national ethos. The new Israeli ethos is built not only on security and shared fate, but on the far firmer foundation of a shared Jewish heritage.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Unlike what Israel’s many detractors claim, there is nothing fanatical about Jewish heritage.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">To the contrary, being loyal to that heritage means not only that Jews of all walks of life can feel at home in Israel, but that Israel’s non-Jewish citizens can integrate into Israeli society without having to surrender their unique cultural and religious identities.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">It is this new sense of national identity and purpose that enabled Israeli society to stand as one through the disasters we absorbed this summer. And as Netanyahu emphasized on Sunday evening, it is this inclusive unity, that Menachem Begin did so much to facilitate, that forms the basis of Israel’s ability to survive in a regional and international environment that grow more dangerous and hostile by the day.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">As Israelis work to maintain our unity while embracing our diversity, American Jews find themselves divided and increasingly polarized across ideological and social lines. While what unites American Jews is more significant than what divides them, many key groups appear to have lost sight of this basic truth.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Radical groups that reflect the views of almost no significant American Jewish constituency, have jumped in to fill the void. And owing to the absence of a clear, strong message from key components of the community, they are making headway in their goal of unraveling and disempowering the Jewish community of America.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Consider the organized opposition to the Metropolitan Opera of New York’s decision to produce the harshly anti-Semitic opera The Death of Klinghoffer.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">On Monday some 3,000 people attended the mass rally to protest the prestigious opera house’s decision to produce the opera that demonizes Jews and glorifies Palestinian terrorists. It was an impressive turnout. This is particularly true because very few of the major Jewish organizations agreed to participate in the protest. The American Jewish Committee, the Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish Federation of New York and the Jewish Council on Public Affairs were particularly conspicuous in their absence.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">It’s not that all these groups think that the Met’s decision to mainstream hatred of Jews, dehumanization of Jews and delegitimization of the Jewish state is acceptable.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In a press release published on September 19, the AJC for instance excoriated the Met’s decision to produce the opera and highlighted the anti-Semitic positions of the opera’s composer and librettist.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">AJC Executive Director David Harris said, “Today, with increasingly virulent anti-Western, anti-American, anti-Semitic, and anti-Israel terrorism, all reminiscent of the cruelty perpetrated against Leon Klinghoffer, we should not rationalize or humanize acts of terrorism or terrorists.”</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">But then, at the end of the press release, Harris turned his guns on the Jews who organized the protest against the opera, which he refused to join.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Harris said, “We call upon all who are planning to protest the Klinghoffer opera to do so with civility, so that the focus of public criticism may remain, as it should, on the opera’s totally inappropriate and insensitive messages.”</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Harris’s position regarding the opera is substantively indistinguishable from the positions of the 52 organizations that sponsored and participated in the protest. Those included StandWithUs, the Zionist Organization of America, CAMERA, Americans for a Safe Israel, JCCWatch, Endowment for Middle East Truth, several major synagogues and Jewish day schools, and the Catholic League, among many others. None of these organizations gave anyone the slightest reason to believe that they would do anything but focus on the anti-Semitic, pro-terror message underlying the opera.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">So why did Harris treat them like irresponsible children who cannot be trusted? And why, given the commonality of views, and his own concerns, did he not ensure that the message would be effectively delivered, by delivering himself, as a participant in the rally?</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">By standing on the sidelines and drawing distinctions between the supposedly responsible AJC and the supposedly irresponsible organizations that participated, Harris weakened the campaign to fight anti-Semitism. Not only was this an irresponsible thing to do, it was deeply destructive, not least because it expanded the polarization of the Jewish community.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Peter Gelb, the Met’s director, is Jewish. And many defenders of the decision to produce The Death of Klinghoffer have argued that Gelb’s Judaism makes it unacceptable to point out that by producing an anti-Semitic opera, the Met is mainstreaming anti-Jewish bigotry.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">But the sad fact is that a growing number of radical Jews, who reject the very notion that Jews have rights, including the right to support Israel and defend the Jewish state, are filling the void left by the Jewish leadership establishment that would rather attack activists whose agenda they share than cooperate with them.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">For instance, next month, Harvard will host the first national meeting of “Open Hillel.” Jewish anti-Zionist luminaries including Haaretz columnist Peter Beinart, BDS champion Judith Butler and Rebecca Vilkomerson, the executive director of the Jewish anti-Zionist group Jewish Voices for Peace, will lead the discussions.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Open Hillel’s goal is to deny Jewish students on US campuses the right to defend Jewish rights.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Open Hillel emerged in recent years in protest against Hillel’s insistence that anti-Israel groups not operate under the umbrella of the national Jewish student organization.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Open Hillel claims that Jews, as distinct from every other group, have no right to insist that their rights be defended by a Jewish organization formed to do just that.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">An apt analogy would be an African-American group that supported the restoration of Jim Crow laws demanding to be embraced by the Black Student Organization, and insisting that any claim that they should be denied the legitimacy of the black community is an act of academic and social ostracism.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Many Jewish organizations, first and foremost those who participated in the protest against the Met on Monday afternoon, are devoting massive efforts to counter the anti-Israel and anti-Jewish propaganda being disseminated on university campuses by groups like these.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">But the overriding sense, cultivated by the Jewish leadership that treats unapologetic defenders of Jewish rights as suspect and undesirable, is that the Jewish community as a whole is uninterested in confronting and combating the haters.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In Israel, as traditional elites failed in the 1990s, new forces emerged to take up the charge of rebuilding Israeli society. Their success paved the way for the unity of Israeli society that today enables Israel to stand fast against a rising tide of military and diplomatic threats.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">It is my fervent prayer for 5775 that the American Jewish community will take a lesson from Israeli society, and unify against the growing forces of anti-Jewish bigotry. May they embrace our shared Jewish heritage and stand with one another to secure the rights and freedom of the Jewish people in the coming year and into the future.</span></p>
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		<title>Why Rouhani Loves NY</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/why-rouhani-loves-ny/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=why-rouhani-loves-ny</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 19 Sep 2014 04:49:01 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Caroline Glick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
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		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=241339</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[The embattled regime looks to the West to save it. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><span style="color: #000000;"><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/2013-09-28T114417Z_1_CBRE98R0WLW00_RTROPTP_4_UN-ASSEMBLY-IRAN-ROUHANI.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-241340" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/2013-09-28T114417Z_1_CBRE98R0WLW00_RTROPTP_4_UN-ASSEMBLY-IRAN-ROUHANI-434x350.jpg" alt="Iran's President Hassan Rouhani takes questions from journalists during a news conference in New York" width="319" height="257" /></a></span></p>
<p><em>Originally published by the <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Column-One-Why-Rouhani-loves-NY-375776">Jerusalem Post</a>. </em></p>
<p><span style="color: #000000;">Iranian President Hassan Rouhani’s trip to New York next week will be a welcome relief for the Iranian leader. Finally, he’ll be somewhere where he’s appreciated, even loved.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Ahead of his trip to America, the US media continued its practice of presenting Rouhani as a moderate, and a natural ally for the US.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">NBC News’ Anne Curry interviewed Rouhani in Tehran, focusing her attention on his dim view of Islamic State.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Rouhani told Curry, “From the viewpoint of the Islamic tenets and culture, killing an innocent people equals the killing of the whole humanity. And therefore, the killing and beheading of innocent people in fact is a matter of shame for them and it’s the matter of concern and sorrow for all the human and all the mankind.”</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The US media and political establishment’s willingness to take Rouhani at his word when he says that he’s a moderate is one of the reasons that Strategic Affairs Minister Yuval Steinitz was in such a desolate mood on Wednesday.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">During a briefing with the foreign media, Steinitz described the state of negotiations between the US and its negotiating partners – Russia, China, Britain, France and Germany – and Iran regarding its illicit nuclear weapons program.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The briefing followed the latest round of the biennial Israeli-US strategic dialogue. Steinitz led the Israeli delegation to the talks, which focused on Iran, the week before nuclear talks were scheduled to be renewed.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">One of Steinitz’s chief concerns was the US’s insistence that Rouhani is a moderate.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In his words, “The only thing that has changed [since Rouhani replaced president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad] is the tone. The only difference is that the world was unwilling to hear from Ahmadinejad and [his nuclear negotiator Saeed] Jalili, what it is willing to listen to from Rouhani and [Iranian Foreign Minister Javad] Zarif.”</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Unlike the Americans, the Iranian people are through with the fiction that Rouhani is a moderate, which is why he no doubt will be happier in New York than in Tehran.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Rouhani’s trip to New York coincides with his one-year anniversary in office. Since he took power, a thousand Iranians have been executed by the regime.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Forty-five people were executed in just the past two weeks.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">According to Iranian scholar Majid Rafizadeh, the public’s tolerance for regime violence has reached a breaking point.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In an article in the Frontpage Magazine online journal, Rafizadeh described how 3,000 people descended on regime executioners as they were poised to kill a youth in Mahmoudabad in northern Iran. The protest forced them to call off the show.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">They murdered the young man the next day, when no one was looking.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">As Iran scholar Dr. Michael Ledeen has explained, the rise in regime brutality is directly proportional to the threat it perceives from the public.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">And the regime has good reason to be worried.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Anti-regime protests and strikes occur countrywide, every day.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">For instance, from September 9-14, MEK, an Iranian opposition group, documented public protests against security forces and attacks on regime agents in Tehran, Zanzan, Bane, Qom, Karaj and Bandar Abbas.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">These actions ran the gamut from a strike by a thousand gas workers in the Aslaviyah gas fields who protested searches of their dormitory rooms by regime agents, to two separate assaults on military vehicles in Zanzan, to youth responding violently in cities throughout the country when regime agents tried to enforce Islamic dress codes on women and girls.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Under the same Rouhani who waxed so poetically against beheadings when speaking to an overeager NBC reporter, not only have state executions have massively intensified. Public floggings, public hand amputations and other public demonstrations of regime brutality have also expanded to levels unseen in recent years.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Rouhani promised to protect women’s rights. Yet since he took office, women’s rights have been severely curtailed.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Last month, the Revolutionary Guards barred women from working as waitresses. In July, Tehran’s mayor barred women from sharing workspace with men. These moves and others like them, aimed at enforcing gender apartheid in all public places in the country, force millions of women into poverty. The official unemployment level for women is already hovering around 20 percent.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Then there are Iran’s other social ills, for instance drug addiction.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Iran has the highest level of drug addiction in the world. According to Babak Dinparast, a senior Iranian drug enforcement official, some 3.5 million Iranians, or 4.4% of the population, are drug users.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In April, Dinparast made the stunning claim that 53% of drug users are government employees.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">According to the Iranian parliament’s research institute, the average productive hours of Iranian workers is 22 minutes a day.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In Transparency International’s ranking of administrative and economic corruption, Iran ranks 144th out of 177 countries.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In other words, Iran is coming apart at the seams. The people cannot stand the regime. The regime, incompetent and unwilling to tackle any of Iran’s problems, responds to the public’s outrage with massive, brutal repression.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">If left to its own devices, in all likelihood, the Iranian regime would have been toppled five years ago when it falsified the results of the 2009 presidential elections, and so fomented the Green Revolution But the people of Iran didn’t bet on the regime’s ace in the hole: the Obama administration.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The same Obama administration that supported the overthrow of US allies in the war on Islamic jihad – Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi – stood by the Iranian regime as it massacred its people in the streets of Iranian cities for daring to demand their freedom.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">If the 2009 Green Revolution was the gravest threat the regime had faced since the 1979 revolution brought it to power, today the regime is also imperiled.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">On Monday, Iran’s dictator Ayatollah Ali Khamenei was released from the hospital after undergoing prostate surgery. Several strategic analyses published since then claim that his days are numbered and that as a consequence, the regime faces a period of profound uncertainty and instability.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The Iranian people are watching all of this, and waiting.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">As was the case in 2009, the disaffected Iranians, who hate their regime and want good relations with the US and the West, remain the greatest threat to the regime.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Beyond its borders, Iran is also under stress. With its Revolutionary Guard and Hezbollah forces committed to Syria in defense of Bashar Assad, Iran finds its position in Iraq threatened by the rising power of Islamic State.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Yet, as happened in 2009, in the midst of this gathering storm, the Obama administration is rushing to the mullahs’ rescue, begging Iran to support US efforts to fight Islamic State, indeed claiming that securing Iran’s support and cooperation is a necessary precondition for the mission’s success.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">To say that this US policy is madness is an understatement.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">As Michael Weiss documented in Foreign Policy in June, Iran and its puppet, the Syrian regime, played central roles in facilitating the development and empowerment of Islamic State both in Syria and Iraq. A defector from the Syrian Military Intelligence Directorate reported in January that the regime helped form Islamic State.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">First, it sprang Sunni jihadist leaders from Sednaya prison in 2011. Then, it facilitated in the creation of the armed brigades that became Islamic State.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">The idea was that through Islamic State, it could tarnish the reputation of all of its opponents by claiming they were all jihadists.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">US military officers with deep knowledge of Iran’s role in Iraq told Weiss that Islamic State’s leadership entered Iraq from Iran.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">A key al-Qaida financier, Olimzhon Adkhamovich Sadikov, was charged in February by the US Treasury Department with “provid[ing] logistical support and funding to al-Qaida’s Iran-based network.”</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">US Army Col. Rick Welch, who served as the military liaison to both the Sunni tribes and the Shi’ite militia in Iraq during the 2007-2008 US military surge, told Weiss that the assessment of Iraqi Sunnis and Shi’ites alike was that “Iran was funding any group that would keep Iraq in chaos.”</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Iran sought chaos in order to prevent the establishment of a stable Iraqi government allied with the US while incrementally establishing Iranian control over the country.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Iran’s actions in Iraq and Syria, in other words, have for the past decade been focused on expanding Iranian power at the expense of the US and the Iraqi and Syrian people.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">This behavior of course is in line with Iran’s global strategy. From its support for Hamas to its control over Hezbollah and Islamic Jihad, from developing a strategic alliance with Venezuela to expanding its presence throughout South and Central America, through its closely cultivated relationship with Russia, Iran’s every move involves expanding its power and influence at America’s expense.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">And yet, despite this, the Obama administration has made strengthening the Iranian regime and appeasing it the centerpiece of its Middle East policy.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">President Barack Obama told Jeffrey Goldberg in March that Iran is a rational actor that the US can do business with.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">He said, “If you look at Iranian behavior, they are strategic, and they’re not impulsive. They have a worldview, and they see their interests, and they respond to costs and benefits.”</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">As Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry now perceive things, Iran opposes Islamic State, and therefore it will play a supportive role in the US campaign against Islamic State. Moreover, by participating in the campaign, Iran will demonstrate its good faith and so make it possible for the US to cut a deal with the mullahs that will legitimize their illicit uranium enrichment – because really, how big a threat can a country that opposes Islamic State be? As for Iran, it sees its interest as having the US destroy Islamic State, and if possible, having the US pay Iran for the privilege of fighting Iran’s war – against the foe Iran did so much to create.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">And this brings us back to Steinitz’s gloomy assessment of the talks with Iran. Steinitz warned against the growing prospect of the US caving in to Iran’s nuclear demands as a payoff for Iranian support against Islamic State.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">In his words, “Some people might think, ‘Let’s clean the table, let’s close the [nuclear] file,” in order to get Iran on board against Islamic State.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Unfortunately for Steinitz, and for the rest of the world, including the US, the Obama administration seems bent on proving him right.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">Today the Iranian regime is weaker than it has been since it violently repressed the Green Revolution.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">And that is why Rouhani is happy to be coming to New York.</span><br style="color: #000000;" /><br style="color: #000000;" /><span style="color: #000000;">He knows that now, as then, the Obama administration will save the regime. This, even as the mullahs advance their goal of becoming the hegemons of the Middle East at the US’s expense, and completing their nuclear weapons program, which will secure the regime for decades to come, and threaten America directly.</span></p>
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		<title>Obama&#8217;s Self-Defeating Fight</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/obamas-self-defeating-fight/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=obamas-self-defeating-fight</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 16 Sep 2014 04:40:17 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Caroline Glick]]></dc:creator>
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		<category><![CDATA[Islam]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Jihad]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Qatar]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Saudi Arabia]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[War]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=241097</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Why the world thinks America is fighting to lose against Islamic State. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #000000;"><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/WireAP_0bae6af261174ccc93186590385b497b_16x9_992.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-241098" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/WireAP_0bae6af261174ccc93186590385b497b_16x9_992-432x350.jpg" alt="WireAP_0bae6af261174ccc93186590385b497b_16x9_992" width="315" height="255" /></a>Originally published by the <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Obamas-self-defeating-fight-375428">Jerusalem Post</a>. </em></p>
<p style="color: #000000;">The United States has a problem with Islamic State. Its problem is that it refuses to acknowledge why Islamic State is a problem.</p>
<p>The problem with Islamic State is not that it is brutal. Plenty of regimes are brutal.</p>
<p>Islamic State poses two challenges for the US. First, unlike the Saudis and even the Iranians, IS actively recruits Americans and other Westerners to join its lines.</p>
<p>This is a problem because these Americans and other Westerners have embraced an ideology that is viciously hostile to every aspect of Western civilization.</p>
<p>Last Friday, Buzz Feed published a compilation of social media posts published by Western women who have left their homes in Chicago and London and other hometowns to join IS in Syria.</p>
<p>As these women’s social media posts demonstrate, the act of leaving the West and joining IS involves rejecting everything the West is and everything it represents and embracing a culture of violence, murder and degradation.</p>
<p>In the first instance, the women who leave the West to join IS have no qualms about entering a society in which they have no rights. They are happy covering themselves in black from head to toe. They have no problem casting their lot with a society that prohibits females from leaving their homes without male escorts.</p>
<p>They have no problem sharing their husband with other wives. They don’t mind because they believe that in doing so, they are advancing the cause of Islam and Allah.</p>
<p>As the women described it, the hardest part about joining the jihad is breaking the news to your parents back home. But, as one recruiter soothed, “As long as you are firm and you know that this is all for the sake of Allah then nothing can shake you inshalah.”</p>
<p>Firm in their belief that they are part of something holy, the British, American and European jihadistas are completely at ease with IS violence. In one post, a woman nonchalantly described seeing a Yazidi slave girl.</p>
<p>“Walked into a room, gave salam to everyone in the room to find out there was a yazidi slave girl there as well.. she replied to my salam.”</p>
<p>Other posts discussed walking past people getting their hands chopped off and seeing dead bodies on the street. Islamic State’s beheadings of American and British hostages are a cause for celebration.</p>
<p>Their pride at the beheadings of James Foley and others is part and parcel of their hatred for the US and the West. As they see it, destroying the US and the West is a central goal of IS.</p>
<p>As one of the women put it, “Know this Cameron/ Obama, you and your countries will be beneath our feet and your kufr will be destroyed, this is a promise from Allah that we have no doubt over&#8230;. This Islamic empire shall be known and feared world wide and we will follow none other than the law of the one and the only ilah!” These women do not feel at all isolated. And they have no reason to. They are surrounded by other Westerners who joined IS for the same reasons they did.</p>
<p>In one recruitment post, Western women were told that not knowing Arabic is no reason to stay home.</p>
<p>“You can still survive if you don’t speak Arabic. You can find almost every race and nationality here.”</p>
<p>The presence of Westerners in IS, indeed, IS’s aggressive efforts to recruit Westerners wouldn’t pose much of a problem for the US if it were willing to secure its borders and recognize the root of the problem.</p>
<p>But as US President Barack Obama made clear over the summer, and indeed since he first took office six years ago, he opposes any effort to secure the US border with Mexico. If these jihadists can get to Mexico, they will, in all likelihood, have no problem coming to America.</p>
<p>But even if the US were to secure its southern border, it would still be unable to prevent these jihadists from returning to attack. The policy of the US government is to deny the existence of a jihadist threat by, among other thing, denying the existence of the ideology of Islamic jihad.</p>
<p>When President Barack Obama insisted last Wednesday that Islamic State is not Islamic, he told all the Westerners who are now proud mujihadin that they shouldn’t worry about coming home. They won’t be screened. As far as the US is concerned their Islamic jihad ideology doesn’t exist.</p>
<p>So whereas every passenger arriving in the US from Liberia can be screened for Ebola, no one will be screened for exposure to jihadist thought.</p>
<p>And this brings us to the second problem IS poses to the US.</p>
<p>As a rising force in the Middle East, IS threatens US allies and it threatens global trade. To prevent its allies from being overthrown and to prevent shocks to the international economy, at a minimum, the US needs to contain IS. And given the threat the Westerners joining the terror army constitute, and Washington’s unwillingness to stop them at the border, in all likelihood, the US needs to destroy IS where it stands.</p>
<p>Unfortunately, there is no reason to believe that the US is willing or able to either contain or defeat IS.</p>
<p>As US Maj. Gen. (ret.) Robert Scales wrote over the weekend in The Wall Street Journal, from a military perspective, IS is little different from all the guerrilla forces the US has faced in battle since the Korean War. Scales argues that in all previous such engagements, the outcomes have been discouraging because the US lacks the will to take the battle to the societies that feed them or use its firepower to its full potential out of fear of killing civilians.</p>
<p>Clearly this remains the case today.</p>
<p>Moreover, as Angelo Codevilla explained last month in The Federalist, to truly dry up the swamp feeding IS, it is necessary to take the war to its state sponsors – first and foremost Turkey and Qatar.</p>
<p>In his words, “The first strike against the IS must be aimed at its sources of material support. Turkey and Qatar are very much part of the global economy&#8230; If&#8230;</p>
<p>the United States decides to kill the IS, it can simply inform Turkey, Qatar, and the world it will have zero economic dealings with these countries and with any country that has any economic dealing with them, unless these countries cease any and all relations with the IS.”</p>
<p>Yet, as we saw on the ground this weekend with US Secretary of State John Kerry’s failed mission to secure Turkish support for the US campaign against IS, the administration has no intention of taking the war to IS’s state sponsors, without which it would be just another jihadi militia jockeying for power in Syria.</p>
<p>And this leaves us with the administration’s plan to assemble a coalition of the willing that will provide the foot soldiers for the US air war against Islamic State.</p>
<p>After a week of talks and shuttle diplomacy, aside from Australia, no one has committed forces. Germany, Britain and France have either refused to participate or have yet to make clear what they are willing to do.</p>
<p>The Kurds will not fight for anything but Kurdistan. The Iraqi Army is a fiction. The Iraqi Sunnis support IS far more than they trust the Americans.</p>
<p>Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan will either cheer the US on from a distance, or in the best-case scenario, provide logistical support for its operations.</p>
<p>It isn’t just that these states have already been burned by Obama whether through his support for the Muslim Brotherhood and the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak and Muammar Gaddafi. And it isn’t simply that they saw that the US left them hanging in Syria.</p>
<p>They see Obama’s “strategy” for fighting IS – ignoring the Islamic belief system that underpins every aspect of its existence, and expecting other armies to fight and die to accomplish the goal while the US turns a blind eye to Turkey’s and Qatar’s continued sponsorship of Islamic State. They see this strategy and they are convinced America is fighting to lose. Why should they go down with it? Islamic State is a challenging foe. To defeat it, the US must be willing to confront Islamism. And it must be willing to fight to win. In the absence of such determination, it will fight and lose, in the region and at home, with no allies at its side.<br />
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		<title>Of Politicians and Moral Courage</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/of-politicians-and-moral-courage/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=of-politicians-and-moral-courage</link>
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		<pubDate>Fri, 12 Sep 2014 04:54:48 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Caroline Glick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[courage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Iran]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[ISIS]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Moral]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Obama]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[politicians]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[speech]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Syria]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=240833</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[How Obama's lack of moral clarity will make it impossible for him to address threats to America. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/09102014_Obama_ISIS_Speech.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-240836" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/09102014_Obama_ISIS_Speech.jpg" alt="09102014_Obama_ISIS_Speech" width="282" height="250" /></a>Originally published by the <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Column-One-Of-politicians-and-moral-courage-375120">Jerusalem Post</a>. </em></p>
<p>Leaders are not elected. Politicians are elected. Their election in turn provides politicians with the opportunity to become leaders.</p>
<p>You don’t become a leader by telling people what they want to hear, although doing so certainly helps to you get elected. A politician becomes a leader by telling people what they don’t want to hear.</p>
<p>If they are lucky, politicians will never have to become leaders. They will serve in times of peace and plenty, when it’s possible to pretend away the hard facts of the human condition. And they can leave office beloved for letting people believe that the world is the Elysian Fields.</p>
<p>Certainly this has been the case for many American politicians since the end of World War II.</p>
<p>This is not the case today. In our times, evil rears its ugly head with greater power and frequency than it has in at least a generation. As Americans learned 13 years ago this week, evil ignored is evil empowered.</p>
<p>Yet fighting evil and protecting the good is not a simple matter. Evil has many handmaidens.</p>
<p>Those who hide it away enable it. Those who justify it enable it. Those who ignore it enable it.</p>
<p>To fight evil effectively, a leader must possess the moral wisdom to recognize that evil can only be rooted out when the environment that cultivates it is discredited and so transformed. To discredit and transform that environment, a leader must have the moral courage to stand not only against evildoers, but against their far less controversial facilitators.</p>
<p>In other words, the foundations of true leadership are moral clarity and courage.</p>
<p>On Wednesday two American elected leaders gave speeches. In one, a leader emerged. In the other, a politician gave a speech.</p>
<p>The first speech was given by Texas Senator Ted Cruz.</p>
<p>On Wednesday evening, Cruz gave the keynote address at the inaugural dinner of an organization that calls itself In Defense of Christians.</p>
<p>The purpose of the new organization is supposed to be advocacy on behalf of oppressed Christian communities in the Middle East.</p>
<p>Ahead of the dinner, The Washington Free Beacon website questioned Cruz’s decision to address the group. Several Christian leaders from Lebanon and Syria also scheduled to address the forum had records of public support for Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, and Hezbollah, and had made egregiously anti-Semitic statements.</p>
<p>For instance, Church of Antioch Patriarch Gregory III Laham blamed jihadist attacks on Iraqi Christians on a “Zionist conspiracy against Islam” aimed at making Muslims look bad.</p>
<p>Probably the organization’s leaders assumed that Cruz would give their group bipartisan credibility and never considered he might challenge their anti-Jewish prejudices. No American politician in recent memory has made an issue of the rampant Jew-hatred among Middle Eastern Christians. Probably they figured that he’d make an impassioned speech about the plight of Christians under the jackboot of Islamic State, enjoy warm applause, leave the hall and clear the path for other speakers to blame the Jews.</p>
<p>Cruz did not follow the script. Instead he used the opportunity to tell his audience hard truths.</p>
<p>In a statement released by his office, Cruz summarized the events of the evening.</p>
<blockquote><p>“I told the attendees that those who hate Israel also hate America&#8230; that those who hate Jews also hate Christians. And that anyone who hates Israel and the Jewish people is not following the teachings of Christ.</p>
<p>“I went on to tell the crowd that Christians in the Middle East have no better friend than Israel. That Christians can practice their faith free of persecution in Israel. And that ISIS [Islamic State], al-Qaida, Hamas and Hezbollah, along with their state sponsors in Syria and Iran, are all part of the same cancer, murdering Christians and Jews alike. Hate is hate, and murder is murder.”</p></blockquote>
<p>For his decision not to take the low road, Cruz was subjected to angry boos and heckling from the audience, whose members angrily rejected his remarks.</p>
<p>“After just a few minutes, I had no choice,” Cruz said. “I told them that if you will not stand with Israel, if you will not stand with the Jews, then I will not stand with you. And then I walked off the stage.”</p>
<p>Cruz’s action was an act of moral leadership.</p>
<p>He stood before his audience of fellow Christians and told his co-religionists that their hatred of Jews and Israel is un-Christian. He told them as well that their bigotry blinds them to their own plight and makes them reject their greatest ally in securing their future in the Middle East.</p>
<p>Cruz’s strategy for fighting Islamic oppression of Christians involves uniting all those oppressed and attacked by jihadists. In all honesty, it is the only policy that has a chance in the long term of securing the future of the Christians of the Middle East.</p>
<p>For Cruz to reach this conclusion, he first had to possess the moral clarity to recognize that Christian Jew-hatred is a major obstacle to securing the future of the Middle East’s Christians.</p>
<p>In other words his strategic vision is anchored in moral courage.</p>
<p>The same evening that Cruz was booed off the stage by an audience of anti-Semitic Christians, US President Obama gave a speech to the general audience where he set out his rationale for fighting Islamic State in Iraq and Syria and his strategy for doing so.</p>
<p>In some ways, it is unfair to compare Obama’s speech to Cruz’s. Cruz addressed a narrow constituency and Obama gave his speech to all Americans, and indeed to the entire world.</p>
<p>A more apt comparison would be between Cruz’s speech to the pro-terror Christians and Obama’s speech to an audience that included Muslim Brotherhood leaders in Cairo in 2009.</p>
<p>Indeed, the chief reason that Cruz’s speech was an act of leadership, and Obama’s was the address of a politician, is that Obama’s speech reflected his remarks in Cairo and his subsequent speeches to Muslim audiences and about Islam throughout the intervening years.</p>
<p>Neither during his speech in Cairo nor in subsequent remarks has Obama ever called out the world’s Muslims for their bigotry against Jews, Christians and others. Neither during his speech in Cairo nor in subsequent addresses has Obama spoken out against Islamic terrorism or the jihadist world view that stands at the foundation of Islamic terrorism.</p>
<p>Rather, throughout his presidency Obama has denied the existence of the jihad, its ideology and the fact that it is a force shaping events throughout the world.</p>
<p>Wednesday’s speech was no exception.</p>
<p>At the outset of his remarks, Obama insisted that Islamic State, or (ISIL has he calls it), “is not ‘Islamic.’” Obama may be right, and he may be wrong.</p>
<p>That’s for Muslims to determine. But whatever the truth is about Islam and jihad, the fact is that hundreds of millions of Muslims believe that Islamic State and other jihadist groups and regimes, of both the Shi’ite and Sunni variety, are accurate expressions of Islam. This is why thousands of Muslims from Europe and the US are flocking to Iraq and Syria to join Islamic State.</p>
<p>Obama’s policies for contending with Islamic jihadists are a natural extension of his refusal to speak hard truths to Muslims or speak truthfully about Islamic terrorism and jihadism. His whitewashing of jihadist Islam on Wednesday night similarly was reflected in the strategy he set out for fighting Islamic State.</p>
<p>As Fred and Kim Kagan noted in The Weekly Standard, Obama’s decision to use counterterror strategies for fighting Islamic State is a recipe for failure. What Obama referred to as “a terrorist organization,” is actually an insurgency that fights battles against standing armies and wins.</p>
<p>Counterterror operations cannot work against such a force.</p>
<p>So, too, Obama&#8217;s asserted that his strategy for fighting Islamic State has been tried and succeeded in Somalia and Yemen. Yet by all accounts, jihadist forces in both countries are not only undefeated, they are becoming stronger.</p>
<p>Obama’s strategy involves joining US air power with anti-Islamic State forces on the ground in Iraq and Syria. Yet aside from the Kurds, all the forces on the ground in both countries are deeply problematic.</p>
<p>Just hours before Obama’s speech, the leadership of Syria’s “moderate” rebel forces was decapitated in an explosion. And for all their moderation, the leaders were part of an anti-Assad coalition that included Islamic State.</p>
<p>Although he is an Alawite, Bashar Assad and his forces are members of the Shi’ite jihadist coalition led by Iran that includes Hezbollah.</p>
<p>These forces are more dangerous than Islamic State. Yet US air strikes against Islamic State will redound to their direct benefit.</p>
<p>Obama’s refusal to acknowledge the existence of jihad – of both the Sunni and Shi’ite variety – makes it impossible for him to devise a realistic strategy for defeating jihadists. He rightly defines Islamic State as an enemy of the US, but because he denies the existence of jihad, he is incapable of putting Islamic State in its proper strategic context. Among the many forces fighting on the ground in Iraq and Syria today, you have two jihadist forces – one Shi’ite and one Sunni – that are fighting each other. Both are enemies of America and its allies.</p>
<p>To be sure, Islamic State must be confronted and defeated – just as Iran, Hezbollah, al-Qaida, Hamas and Boko Haram need to be defeated.</p>
<p>Defeating only one group empowers others, and so you keep ending up where you started.</p>
<p>Yet rather than understand that while jihadist forces may oppose one another, the threat they pose to the free world is indivisible, as Obama focuses on Islamic State, he is enabling Iran to expand its power in Iraq and Syria, and to complete its nuclear weapons program.</p>
<p>Last week the International Atomic Energy Agency reported that Iran continues to hide key information about its nuclear program from the UN nuclear watchdog, despite its agreement to provide the IAEA with full transparency last November.</p>
<p>The Iranians continue to bar IAEA inspectors from the suspected military nuclear installation at Parchin. Negotiations on a nuclear accord between the US and its partners and Iran are going nowhere. According to Western diplomatic sources, the failure to reach an accord owes entirely to Iran’s refusal to compromise on any substantive nuclear issues.</p>
<p>While Iran refuses to provide transparency to the IAEA, its guiding strategy is clear to the naked eye. It is prolonging negotiations to buy time to complete its nuclear program.</p>
<p>However, Obama, who insists that Islamic State “terrorists are unique in their brutality,” refuses to see the true picture.</p>
<p>The truth revealed on Wednesday night is that Obama cannot lead a successful war against the forces of Islamic jihad that threaten humanity. He cannot do so because he rejects the moral clarity required to confront the danger.</p>
<p>He cannot successfully lead the war because, as we saw once again on Wednesday night, he is not a leader. He is a politician.</p>
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		<title>President Sisi’s Gift</title>
		<link>http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/caroline-glick/president-sisis-gift/?utm_source=rss&#038;utm_medium=rss&#038;utm_campaign=president-sisis-gift</link>
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		<pubDate>Tue, 09 Sep 2014 04:22:40 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator><![CDATA[Caroline Glick]]></dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[Daily Mailer]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[FrontPage]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Abdel Fattah el-Sisi]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Gaza Strip]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[Israel]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[land]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[offer]]></category>
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		<category><![CDATA[Sinai]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://www.frontpagemag.com/?p=240581</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Egypt's offer to create a Palestinian state in Sinai -- and why the Palestinians rejected it. ]]></description>
				<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p style="color: #000000;"><em><a href="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Egyptian-Minister-of-Defe-007.jpg"><img class="alignleft  wp-image-240582" src="http://cdn.frontpagemag.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Egyptian-Minister-of-Defe-007.jpg" alt="Egyptian Minister of Defense Abdel-Fattah al-Sissi" width="312" height="256" /></a>Originally published by the <a href="http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/President-Sisis-gift-374792">Jerusalem Post</a>. </em></p>
<p style="color: #000000;">Something extraordinary has happened.</p>
<p>On August 31, PLO chief and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas told an audience of Fatah members that Egypt had offered to give the PA some 1,600 kilometers of land in Sinai adjacent to Gaza, thus quintupling the size of the Gaza Strip. Egypt even offered to allow all the so-called “Palestinian refugees” to settle in the expanded Gaza Strip.</p>
<p>Then Abbas told his Fatah followers that he rejected the Egyptian offer.</p>
<p>On Monday Army Radio substantiated Abbas’s claim.</p>
<p>According to Army Radio, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi proposed that the Palestinians establish their state in the expanded Gaza Strip and accept limited autonomy over parts of Judea and Samaria.</p>
<p>In exchange for this state, the Palestinians would give up their demand that Israel shrink into the indefensible 1949 armistice lines, surrendering Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria. Sisi argued that the land Egypt is offering in Sinai would more than compensate for the territory that Abbas would concede.</p>
<p>In his speech to Fatah members, Abbas said, “They [the Egyptians] are prepared to receive all the refugees, [and are saying] ‘Let’s end the refugee story.’” “But,” he insisted, “It’s illogical for the problem to be solved at Egypt’s expense. We won’t have it.”</p>
<p>In other words, Sisi offered Abbas a way to end the Palestinians’ suffering and grant them political independence. And Abbas said, “No, forget statehood. Let them suffer.”</p>
<p>Generations of Israeli leaders and strategists have insisted that Israel does not have the ability to satisfy the Palestinian demands by itself without signing its own death warrant. To satisfy the Palestinian demand for statehood, Israel’s neighbors in Egypt and Jordan would have to get involved.</p>
<p>Until Sisi made his proposal, no Arab leader ever seriously considered actually doing what must be done. Indeed, the rejection of this self-evident Israeli claim has been so overwhelming that in recent years, every Israeli suggestion to this effect was met with raised eyebrows and dismissal by Israelis and foreigners alike.</p>
<p>So what is driving Sisi? How do we account for this dramatic shift? In offering the Palestinians a large swathe of the Sinai, Sisi is not acting out of altruism. He is acting out of necessity. From his perspective, and from the perspective of his non-jihadist Sunni allies in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, the Palestinian campaign against Israel is dangerous.</p>
<p>Facing the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran, and the rise of jihadist forces from al-Qaida to the Islamic State to the Muslim Brotherhood, the non-jihadist Sunnis no longer believe that the prolongation of the Palestinian jihad against Israel is in their interest.</p>
<p>Egypt and Jordan have already experienced the spillover of the Palestinian jihad. Hamas has carried out attacks in Egypt. The Palestinian jihad nearly destroyed Lebanon and Jordan. Egypt and Saudi Arabia now view Israel as a vital ally in their war against the Sunni jihadists and their struggle against Iran and its hegemonic ambitions. They recognize that Israeli action against Sunni and Shi’ite jihadists in Hamas, Hezbollah and Iran serves the interests of non-jihadi Sunnis. And, especially after the recent conflict in Gaza, they realize that the incessant Palestinian campaign against Israel ultimately strengthens the jihadist enemies of Egypt and Saudi Arabia like Hamas.</p>
<p>Apparently, Sisi’s offer to Abbas is an attempt to help the Palestinian people and take the Palestinian issue out of the hands of Palestinian jihadists.</p>
<p>Unfortunately for Sisi and his fellow non-jihadist Sunnis, Abbas is having none of this.</p>
<p>In rejecting Sisi’s offer Abbas stood true to his own record, to the legacies of every Palestinian leader since Nazi agent Haj Amin el-Husseini, and to the declared strategic goal of his own Fatah party and his coalition partners in Hamas. Since Husseini invented the Palestinians in the late 1920s, their leaders’ primary goals have never been the establishment of a Palestinian state or improving the lives of Palestinians. Their singular goal has always been the destruction of the Jewish state, (or state-in-themaking before 1948).</p>
<p>Sisi offered to end Palestinian suffering and provide the Palestinians with the land they require to establish a demilitarized state. Abbas rejected it because he is only interested hurting Israel. If Israel is not weakened by their good fortune, then the Palestinians should continue to suffer.</p>
<p>For Israel, Sisi’s proposal is a windfall.</p>
<p>First of all, it indicates that the Egyptian-Saudi- UAE decision to back Israel against Hamas in Operation Protective Edge was not a fluke. It was part of an epic shift in their strategic assessments.</p>
<p>And if their regimes survive, their assessments are unlikely to change so long as Iran and the Sunni jihadists continue to threaten them.</p>
<p>This means that for the first time since Israel allied with Britain and France against Egypt in 1956, Israel can make strategic plans as part of a coalition.</p>
<p>Second, Sisi’s plan is good for Israel on its merits.</p>
<p>The only way to stabilize the situation in Gaza and comprehensively defeat Hamas and the rest of the terrorist armies there is by expanding Gaza.</p>
<p>If, as Sisi offered, the Palestinians of Judea and Samaria accept limited autonomy, Israel will no longer be demographically challenged. As a consequence Israel could apply its laws to Area C, ensuring its long-term security requirements and safeguarding the civil rights of all of its citizens.</p>
<p>Sisi’s plan is a boon for Israel as well because it calls Abbas’s bluff.</p>
<p>Abbas is genuflected to by the US and the EU who insist that he is a moderate. The Israeli Left insists that he is the only thing that stands between Israel and destruction.</p>
<p>Yet here we see him openly acknowledging that from a strategic perspective, he is no different from the last of the jihadists. He prefers to see his people wallow in misery and poverty, without a state to call their own, than to see Israel benefit in any way.</p>
<p>Abbas’s rejection of Sisi’s offer demonstrates yet again that he and his Fatah comrades are the problem, not the solution. Continued faith in the PLO as a partner in peace and moderation is foolish and dangerous. He would rather see Hamas and Iran flourish than share a peaceful future with Israel.</p>
<p>The only reason that Abbas is able to continuously reject all offers of statehood and an end to Palestinian suffering, while expanding his diplomatic war against Israel and supporting his coalition partner’s terror war, is because the US and Europe continue to blindly support him.</p>
<p>The final way that Sisi’s offer helps Israel is by showing the futility of the West’s strategy of supporting Abbas.</p>
<p>According to Army Radio’s report, both Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and the Obama administration have been briefed on the Egyptian plan. The Americans reportedly support it.</p>
<p>Netanyahu’s position on the Egyptian proposal was not reported. But his recent statements indicate that he views the Egyptian proposal as a sea change that may facilitate a diplomatic breakthrough.</p>
<p>During his press conference following the conclusion of the cease-fire in Gaza a week and a half ago, Netanyahu was asked about the prospect of renewing the peace process with Abbas.</p>
<p>Netanyahu responded vaguely that prospects of the peace process are better now, in light of regional shifts. With the Egyptian proposal now out in the open, and assuming that this is what Netanyahu was referring to, his remarks were accurate.</p>
<p>Sisi’s offer, even with Abbas’s rejection of it is a gift to Israel. And Israel’s challenge in the weeks and months ahead is to make the most of it.</p>
<p>If the Americans force Abbas to accept Sisi’s offer, Israel and the Palestinian people will benefit.</p>
<p>And if Abbas successfully scuttles it, Sisi’s offer will show that Israel is correct that it cannot satisfy Palestinian demands on its own, and indeed, it demonstrates how unreasonable those demands are.</p>
<p>Sisi’s offer demonstrates that for non-jihadist Sunnis, not only is Israel not the problem in the Middle East, a strong Israel is a prerequisite for solving the region’s troubles. Here is a major Arab leader willing to stand with Israel even if it means discrediting the PLO .</p>
<p>As a consequence, Sisi’s offer is a challenge to the US and Europe.</p>
<p>Sisi’s offer shows Washington and Brussels that to solve the Palestinian conflict with Israel, they need to stand with Israel, even if this means abandoning Abbas.</p>
<p>If they do so, they can take credit for achieving their beloved two-state solution. If they fail to do so, they will signal that their primary goal is not peace, but something far less constructive.</p>
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