By Ted Belman

J Street must be fought on all fronts. It supports the Goldstone Report and a Judenfrei Judea and Samaria. It also opposes sanctions on Iran. Its position is clearly set out in my post, J-Street and Obama are in full agreement.

* Consistent and concerted diplomatic engagement by the United States to achieve Israeli-Arab peace. A negotiated end to the Israeli-Arab and Israeli-Palestinian conflicts serves both U.S. and Israeli strategic and security interests. Achieving it must be a priority for any future U.S. administration; (They insist that Israel be forced to capitulate.)

* An enduring relationship between the US and Israel that promotes their common interests. We recognize and support Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people, a democratic country that promises equal rights for all its citizens and that has the right to defend itself against external threats; (But not a a Jewish state.There is a difference.

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By Mat Hausman

J Street’s first annual conference attracted much media hype and congressional participation, but also exposed the organization’s true character for those who chose to wade through the platitudes. It featured speakers with anti-Israel and even antisemitic pedigrees. Its participants reportedly criticized Israel for defending herself militarily, belittled the need for sanctions against Iran, condemned Jewish habitation in Jerusalem, proposed that Israel be stripped of her Jewish character, and trumpeted the so-called Saudi “peace plan,” which is actually a subtle strategy for the deconstruction of Israel. They also called for the Obama White House to impose upon Israel a coercive and destructive “peace.” Most telling were reports that J Street would cease describing itself as “pro-Israel” on college campuses (although its student board now disputes this).
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By D.L. Adams, The American Thinker

The negative spiritual and intellectual consequence of believing two mutually exclusive concepts is “cognitive dissonance.” Our interaction as a society with Islam is a direct cause of “cognitive dissonance” for us as individuals and as a culture.

Resolution of the contradiction requires the rejection of one of the concepts as false. If we continue to ignore our cognitive dissonance about Islam the consequences are dire: we will lose our civilization.

Islam is much more than a religion; it is a complete civilization that includes politics (caliphate), jurisprudence (Sharia law), war (jihad), and a deliberately misleading “religion of peace.” The doctrine of Islam is found in three books: Koran (the literal word of Allah as “revealed” to Mohammed), Sira (Mohammad’s biography), and Hadith (stories about and sayings of Mohammed by contemporaries). The definitive text of Sharia law is “Reliance of the Traveller.” Allah and Mohammed are to be obeyed, not questioned. “Islam” means “submission;” a Muslim is “one who submits.” “Islam” does not mean “peace.”

Say: Obey Allah and the Apostle; but if they turn back, then surely Allah does not love the unbelievers. (Koran,3:32)

O you who believe! Obey Allah and His Apostle and do not turn back from Him while you hear. (Koran, 8:20)

O you who believe! fight those of the unbelievers who are near to you and let them find in you hardness; and know that Allah is with those who guard (against evil). (Koran, 9:123)

The purpose of the Islamic doctrine is the destruction of all cultures that are not Islamic and expansion of Islam until the entire world is under Islamic rule and Sharia law.

CONTINUE

The author of this article comes from the left and in 2000 he was tasked, with others, to analyze the moral dilemmas facing the IDF and to attempt to set limits to IDF behavior without jeopardizing victory. No easy task.

The Goldstone Illusion

By Moshe Harbital, New Republic

In 2000, I was asked by the Israel Defense Forces to join a group of philosophers, lawyers, and generals for the purpose of drafting the army’s ethics code. Since then, I have been deeply involved in the analysis of the moral issues that Israel faces in its war on terrorism. I have spent many hours in discussions with soldiers and officers in order to better grasp the dilemmas that they tackle in the field, and in an attempt to help facilitate the internalization of the code of ethics in war. It was no wonder that, when the Goldstone Report on the Gaza war was published, I was keen to read it, with some hope of getting a perspective on Israeli successes or failures in this effort to comprehend war, and to fight it, morally. Unlike many who responded to the report, in praise or in blame, I gave this immensely long document a careful reading.
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By Ted Belman

Bibi is basking in a warm embrace. But is that a good thing for Israel?

Since taking office on the strength of a right wing victory and his right wing rhetoric, he has governed from the centre. First he wooed Kadima and then Labour to join him. He also recruited Soli Meridor from the left to join Likud. Bibi was concerned to counter the influence and pressure from the right.

He has managed to win praise for the new national consensus he has built, for stabilizing his government through passing the two year budget legislation, for withstanding Obama’s pressure for a freeze and for maintaining good US/Israeli relations.

He has also kept his right wing ministers in line including Begin , Yaalon, Edelstein,Landau, Hershkowitz etc.
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Compliments of Anglo Raanana Real Estate

· Ilan Ben-Dov is assembling a dream team of executives for Partner Communications, the mobile services company he bought last week, and so he should, it cost him all of NIS 5.29 billion and that’s a lot of money by anybody’s reckoning but it looks as if he got himself a bargain if the latest figures, just published, are anything to go by.

· And while we’re where the big money is, you might remember that when the world economy was not looking good at all, Mr Nochi Dankner of Koor Industries bought a large bloc of Credit Suisse shares. Well he’s been buying…and selling ever since and Koor has reported NIS 3.2 billion in capital gains from the Swiss Company’s stock, including NIS 251 million that will be recorded in the fourth quarter.
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Senator Kirsten Gillibrand says the purpose of cap and trade is to enrich investment banks
by Bill Levinson

The enemy doesn’t expect us, reckons us 100 versts away, and if a long way off to begin with, 200, 300 or more– suddenly we’re on him, like snow on the head; his head spins. Attack with what comes up, with what God sends; the cavalry to begin, smash, strike, cut off, don’t let slip, hurra!
Aleksandr V. Suvorov (1729-1800)

“Attack with what comes up, with what God sends,” underscores the need to exploit opportunities to destroy an enemy, and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) has provided such an opportunity to demolish Barack Obama’s cap and trade agenda. It allows our side to totally reverse the focus of cap and trade from protection of the environment, polar ice caps, polar bears, and so on to enrichment of investment banks and similar entities at the expense of the working American. Gillibrand’s letter to the Wall Street Journal says openly that the real purpose of cap and trade is to enrich Goldman Sachs, J.P. Morgan Chase, the New York Stock Exchange, and the Green Exchange, and supporters of so-called greenhouse gas regulations agree with us that she has endangered Obama’s agenda. (Read more…)

by Bill Levinson

A terrorist killed eleven American soldiers at Ford Hood and wounded dozens of others. The alleged shooter, Nidal Malik Hasan, was a convert to militant “Islam.” “He was making outlandish comments condemning our foreign policy and claimed Muslims had the right to rise up and attack Americans,” Col Lee told Fox News.

By Ted Belman

Goldstone’s delivery was smooth and compelling. He went to great lengths to defend his report and blame Israel for not cooperating. I kept looking for his halo as it would have been in keeping with his saintliness.

Gold on the other hand gave a choppy defense of Israel that to my mind was not near articulate enough or competent enough. It was left to a tape of Richard Kemp’s to put Israel’s case as Gold should have put it..

When it came to the questions and answers, Gold still did not measure up. Goldstone was smooth and believable.

He kissed up to the Palestinians and to Hamas in particular, praising them for their humanity. He showed them great respect which to my mind gave voice to his bias.

Gold’s strongest point was that responsibility should have been placed on Hamas for the whole war and its destruction. Instead the report ignored this.

Gold pointed out that Israel’s choice was to destroy Gaza as Russia destroyed Chechnya or to avoid war entirely or to do the best she could do in separating the civilians from combatants. She choose the later.

The best questions was to Goldstone asking him what Israel should have done to stop the rocket attacks. He avoided the issue. Nevertheless he kept repeating that Israels response was disproportionate which means that the civilians deaths were excessive given the military target. This is a judgement call. How does one decide this without a bias.

Gold ended strong saying that the UN is so biased that Israel should never submit itself to its judgement.

Goldstone said that the the mandate was even handed and Israel should have welcomed it.

By Aluf Benn

Israel’s critics in the United States portray it as a strategic burden. They argue that during the Cold War there was value in cooperating with the Israel Defense Forces, which gave the Americans useful information on Soviet weapons systems used by Arab armies. But the Soviet Union collapsed and all the value Israel offered to U.S. national security evaporated with it.

These critics are wrong in a big way: The U.S. military effort against Al-Qaida and the Taliban is based on a doctrine developed by Israel. The IDF was a global leader in targeting terrorists from the air. When Israel embarked on its assassinations policy in the summer of 2001, the United States condemned it. Several weeks later the Twin Towers were brought down in a terrorist attack and Washington’s approach changed. Instead of condemning Israel, the Americans simply copied its methods, foreign sources say. Unmanned combat air vehicles (UCAVs), armed with missiles, started being used to kill terrorists, first in Yemen and later in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
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The Challenge of the UN Gaza Report

Amb. Dore Gold and Judge Richard Goldstone

will discuss the UN Report on war crimes in Gaza

Brandeis University, Thurs., Nov. 5 at 5 p.m., EST

To watch the webcast live, click here

In what is sure to be a heated debate, South African Judge Richard Goldstone will discuss his report for the first time with a senior Israeli figure. Dore Gold, former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations and president of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, will respond to Goldstone in the forum and then both will take questions from the audience.

Professor Ilan Troen, who heads the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies at Brandeis University, said in an interview: “What we’re in for is learned, direct, and honest drama.” (Boston Globe, Oct. 22, 2009)

The debate is a program of the International Center for Ethics, Justice, and Public Life and the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies at Brandeis University.

Background Information from the Jerusalem Center
on the Goldstone Report and the Gaza War

• Blocking the Truth of the Gaza War: How the Goldstone Commission Understated the Hamas Threat to Palestinian Civilians - Col. (res.) Jonathan D. Halevi

• Palestinian “Policemen” Killed in Gaza Operation Were Trained Terrorists - Col. (res.) Jonathan D. Halevi

• International Law and Military Operations in Practice - Col. Richard Kemp CBE

• Did Israel Use “Disproportionate Force” in Gaza? - Dore Gold

• International Law and the Fighting in Gaza - Justus Reid Weiner and Avi Bell

• Accountability of Hamas Under International Humanitarian Law - Sigall Horovitz

• Video: Dore Gold Discusses the Flaws and Fallacies of the Goldstone Report

“It’s NOT Healthcare, Stupid!”

By David Thornton, Conservative Examiner

During the 1991 presidential campaign, Bill Clinton famously displayed a sign in his campaign headquarters that read, “It’s the economy, stupid.” This sign served to remind Clinton and his staff of what was important to their campaign and keep them on message. Ultimately, Clinton convinced voters that he could bring the country out of the recession caused by President George H. W. Bush’s tax increases.

Now that he is in office, President Barack Obama could use a similar sign to remind him of what is important, not to his campaign, but to the country. Obama’s sign could easily read, “It’s not healthcare, stupid!”

Currently, the United States faces two major crises. The first and most obvious is the economy. The second is the threat that the US faces from radical Muslims, both in the form of terrorist groups and rogue nations. Obama’s response to these twin crises has been to focus his administration’s efforts over the entire summer of 2009 into an overhaul of the US healthcare system. Healthcare reform is necessary, but should have a much lower priority given the current world and national situation.
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Canada has a similar bill which I discuss below this article

By Dan Izenberg, JPOST

Justice Minister Yaakov Neeman will soon submit a bill that would allow the Knesset to ignore High Court decisions nullifying legislation that it deems unconstitutional, he said earlier this week.
Justice Minister Yaakov Neeman.

A similar, but more draconian measure that had been submitted by former justice minister Daniel Friedmann was approved in the cabinet by a vote of 13 to 12, but was not brought to the Knesset because of the strong opposition to it.

Neeman’s announcement to introduce the controversial bill comes at a time when he is already under fire for pushing to split the functions currently held by the attorney-general into two separate positions.

During a symposium held at Tel Aviv University on Tuesday, Neeman said it had proven impossible to win Knesset approval for an all-encompassing constitution. Instead, the Knesset should advance a written constitution incrementally, gradually legislating one chapter after another.
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THE HOUSE CHAMBER, WASH., D.C. NOVEMBER 3, 2009

CHANCELLOR MERKEL: Thank you. Thank you very much. It’s — it’s very moving, I must say.

Madame Speaker, Mr. Vice President, distinguished members of Congress — (through interpreter) — thank you for the great honor and privilege to address you today, shortly before the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall,

I am the second German chancellor on whom this great honor is bestowed. Konrad Adenauer was the first when in 1957 he addressed both houses of Congress, albeit one after the other.
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By Ted Belman

In a major article, Der Speigel covers the story How Israel Destroyed Syria’s Al Kibar Nuclear Reactor

[..] At that time, the nuclear plant on Euphrates had likely entered its first key phase. In the spring of 2004, the American National Security Agency (NSA) detected a suspiciously high number of telephone calls between Syria and North Korea, with a noticeably busy line of communication between the North Korean capital Pyongyang and a place in the northern Syrian desert called Al Kibar. The NSA dossier was sent to the Israeli military’s “8200″ unit, which is responsible for radio reconnaissance and has its antennas set up in the hills near Tel Aviv. Al-Kibar was “flagged,” as they say in intelligence jargon.
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By Robert S. Wistrich, HAARETZ

On November 9, 1938, a massive nation-wide anti-Jewish pogrom took place during peacetime across the entire territory of the Third Reich.

The pretext for this orgy of violence against German Jews was the shooting in Paris two days earlier of German diplomat Ernst vom Rath by Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old Polish-Jewish refugee.

The state-organized pogrom, instigated by Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, resulted in the burning or damaging of more than a thousand synagogues; the ransacking of about 7,500 businesses, the murder of at least 91 Jews, and the deportation of another 30,000 Jewish males to concentration camps in Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen.
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How Israel Was Disarmed

By BRET STEPHENS, WSJ, looks into the future

Jan. 20, 2010

NEW YORK—When American diplomats sat down for the first in a series of face-to-face talks with their Iranian counterparts last October in Geneva, few would have predicted that what began as a negotiation over Tehran’s nuclear programs would wind up in a stunning demand by the Security Council that Israel give up its atomic weapons.

Yet that’s just what the U.N. body did this morning, in a resolution that was as striking for the way member states voted as it was for its substance. All 10 non permanent members voted for the resolution, along with permanent members Russia, China and the United Kingdom. France and the United States abstained. By U.N. rules, that means the resolution passes.
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By Ted Belman

Hillary Clinton recently said,

“And the Obama Administration’s position on settlements is clear, unequivocal. It has not changed. And as the President has said on many occasions, the United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements.”

That may well be his position but it has not always been the position of the US and its presidents.

In 1995, The Center for Policy Analysis on Palestine and Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies co-hosted a June 2 symposium on “Settlements and Peace: The Problem of Jewish Colonization in Palestine.”

Geoffrey Aronson of the Foundation for Middle East Peace traced the history of changing U.S. policy toward the settlements. Until 1980, American policy was based on four principles, not all of which were mutually compatible, Aronson noted. First, Washington declared that the Israeli settlements were illegal and violated international law. Second, settlement construction prejudiced the eventual outcome of future negotiations on the status of the occupied territories, according to the U.S.

At the same time, Washington agreed that once the settlements were built, they were not easily removed. Finally, American policymakers declared that the final disposition of existing settlements should be decided by the parties to the conflict, and was therefore a subject for negotiations.

Under Ronald Reagan, however, American statements ceased to refer to settlements as “illegal,” calling them merely “obstacles to peace.” Aronson said that despite his strained relations with then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, George Bush also refrained from declaring the settlements illegal under international law.

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By Moshe Arens, THE JERUSALEM POST

Ninety-two years ago today the British foreign secretary, Arthur James Balfour, sent the now famous letter, known as the Balfour Declaration, to Baron Rothschild to be transmitted to the Zionist Federation of Great Britain and Ireland.

Looking at the State of Israel today one might say it all started with the Balfour Declaration. Some would say, it all started with Theodore Herzl and the first Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, 20 years earlier. And students of Zionist history would say it all started even earlier with the Lovers of Zion, the Hovevei Zion, and the first wave of modern Jewish immigration to Palestine from Eastern Europe, Ha’aliya Harishona. But as far as international recognition of Zionist aspirations, and the political movement that set in motion the Zionist enterprise that became the Jewish state in Palestine, the State of Israel, it all started with the Balfour Declaration.

In World War I efforts had been made to have Jews, as Jews, participate in the fighting against the Turks. The Zion Mule Corps, commanded by John Patterson and his deputy Yosef Trumpeldor, had participated in the fighting at Gallipoli; the NILI spy network in Palestine, led by Aharon Aaronson, had been providing intelligence information to the British; and the Jewish Legion organized by Vladimir Jabotinsky, that was to participate in the fighting in Palestine, was formed in August 1917. All that, and the political spadework done by Chaim Weizmann and Nahum Sokolow in London had laid the groundwork for the declaration. And there was the sympathy for the return of the Jewish people to their ancient homeland in some circles in Britain.
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by Bill Levinson

The charges involved were upgraded to homicide when the girl died of her injuries.

Ariz. Dad Ran Over “Westernized” Daughter
Iraqi Immigrant Arrested After Fleeing Country; Allegedly Hit Girl with Car for Failing to Live as Traditional Muslim

(AP) An Iraqi immigrant accused of running down his daughter in Arizona with his car because she was becoming “too Westernized” has been arrested in Georgia, authorities said Friday.