Israpundit

by Jerry Gordon

At last, the truth about Heshem Islam, Muslim outreach aide to Defense Secretary Islam comes out. As we predicted his embroidered resume did not stand up to the light of day and he was asked to vacate his post at the Pentagon.

Our friend Stephen Coughlin, the Pentagon’s lone Islamic Law and Jihad Military doctrine expert is vindicated and will begin a new assignment at the conclusion of his current Joint staff agreement with the Office of Secretary of Defense (OSD). Perhaps the coups de grace for Mr. Islam were the revelations of Steve Emerson’s Investigative Project report that Islam had met with Syrian radicals and members of a Muslim Brotherhood front group in violation of national security.

Bravo to Bill Gertz of the Washington Times, Claudia Rosset of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracy and Steve Emerson of The Investigative Project on Terrorism. Diane West of the Washington Times, Robert Spencer of Jihad Watch and Andy Bostom all played a part in this riveting saga. We trust that we did as well by keeping a focus on the ‘l’affaire Coughlin’.

On the Congressional scene, Rep. Sue Myrick (R-NC) head of the bi-partisan Anti-Terror Caucus we are sure played an important role in requesting DoD answers about Coughlin.

Now for the ultimate woodshed discussion between SECDEF Bob Gates and Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England resulting in the latter’s retirement for ‘good services’.

We hope that the National Defense Intelligence University proceeds with the publication of Coughlin’s important thesis and that the doctrine of the ‘long war’ will become part of required military training.

This proves that good sense and valued advocacy can win out in the war against cultural Jihad in America.

Now about those Wahhabi Muslim Military Chaplains? (more…)

By Arieh Eldad, Ma’ariv, January 25, 2008

Cabinet Minister Avigdor Lieberman did not resign because the Israeli government has just now put the “core issues” on the table in its negotiations with the Palestinians. The minister for strategic affairs obviously knows that Olmert and Abu Mazen have not spent the past few months chit-chatting about rising real estate prices in Jerusalem. And Lieberman could not have resigned because the division of Jerusalem is now being negotiated, since he himself supports such division and it even appears in his party’s platform. He joined the government in order to prevent Netanyahu becoming prime minister and he left because of recent public opinion polls.

Lieberman’s red lines had nothing to do with Olmert’s proclamations but rather with the poll results he’s reading. Lieberman’s voters were not quick to abandon him. It took a strong media campaign to prove to them that they were supporting a leader who doesn’t keep his word and who cannot be relied on. And even though a good number of Lieberman’s voters wanted him to continue in the cabinet, tens of thousands of others were leaving him, and they tilted the scales. There’s a limit to how much a person is willing to pay to stop Bibi.
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by Jerry Gordon, American Congress for Truth blog

Reading this London Times report on the secret Hamas operation that breached the border with Egypt, one has to seriously question the farce of Middle East policy by the White House. The news videos of the throngs of hundreds of thousands of Gazans breaking the border blockade with the apparent connivance of Egypt to denude shelves in the northern Sinai town of El Arish of food, and other consumer goods gave Ismail Haniyah, ‘President’ of Hamastan a major media victory.

Israel had blocked its border crossings after the provocation of continual rocket attacks on Israeli towns in the Western Negev and southern Israel, most especially, the beleaguered town of Sderot, under siege for over seven years by Hamas, Islamic Jihad and other terrorist groups in Gaza tossing rockets across the frontier. As doleful Israel PM Olmert said at the Herzliyah conference, yesterday, the rain of Kassem and Katyusha rockets on the beleaguered Israel town of Sderot “caused children to wet their beds at night’” Of course he could have done something to stop that, but hadn’t, until it became so overwhelming a threat that the closings of the Israeli Gaza crossings cut off of food, fuel and power were the only means of bringing Hamas to heel. Instead, before that became a palpable reality, Hamas had already implemented its secret plan to bring down the Egyptian Rafah border wall.
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comment by Jerry Gordon

Former US UN Ambassador, John Bolton, according to City Journal writer and former Time editor Stef Kanfer, is one of the last honest men around when he greeted him on the street in Manhattan last fall. Bolton replied that ‘there are others’. Bolton spoke at the annual Herzliyah Conference and may have been a precursor to the long-awaited Winograd Commission report due out the end of this month. Having been involved with the negotiations at the UN as US Ambassador during the Second Lebanon War, he knew the particulars of what was going on. As a result he virtually accused PM Olmert of ‘dissembling’ and Secretary of State Rice of ‘panicking’ after she watched the CNN news reports of alleged 28 deaths at Kana in Lebanon. Deaths of women and children that may have been ‘’staged” by Hezbolleh to capture the empathy of the world media. That caused her to accelerate the negotiations with the French UN Ambassador that resulted in UNSC Res. 1701. Here are Bolton’s main points:

“The Israeli military operation did not play a role in the talks on drafting UN Security Council Resolution 1701.”

“After the war, Olmert claimed that he launched the 11th-hour ground operation, in which 33 soldiers were killed, because the draft UN resolution that Israel received on August 11 was detrimental to its interests. The operation, he added, improved the resolution.

Bolton, however, rejected both assertions.”

“Rice exerted enormous pressure on me to reach an agreement already,” he said. “Until Kana, the U.S. wasn’t interested in another typical Middle Eastern cease-fire. We thought we would exploit the fighting to fundamentally change the situation, especially in Lebanon and Syria. But under the influence of her shock over Kana, the secretary of state changed her mind and only wanted an immediate end to the fire. That was the policy Rice dictated.”

So this was the ‘best deal’ that Livini and Olmert could get under the circumstances? Looks like Bolton may have inadvertently started the unraveling of the Olmert Kadima government by his storied honesty and truth telling.

Bolton: Final IDF op in Lebanon had no impact on UN truce talks
By Amos Harel and Avi Issacharoff, Haaretz Correspondents, January 21, 2008

John Bolton, who was U.S. ambassador to the United Nations during the Second Lebanon War, rejects Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s version of he launched a failed ground offensive during the war’s final days. (more…)

Ted Belman and Jerry Gordon believe this is a great story. Read it and let us know.

Greg Sheridan, The Australian, foreign editor | January 19, 2008

IN a land of stark, powerful and sometimes bizarre images, as Israel is, perhaps the most ghostly for an Australian are the countless gum trees that populate Israel, the north especially.

Israelis brought in the gum trees to drain the swamps. Now they are not so sure whether the fast-growing and thirsty trees are an ecological plus or not. But these exotic Australian settlers in the land of the Bible are now too numerous to eradicate, and too beautiful.
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