Joseph Rabin writes

I just got a message from Rav Yeshayahu Hollander that MK’s Orlev and Cabel are reviving discussion on the “Heritage List”. Since we have a person who is in contact with Orlev we must press the petition now more than ever. It is both in Hebrew and English and I would very much like to see it reach the 10s of thousands by next week so that we can send it to Orlev and perhaps really kick start some discussion. The Mount must be included in the Heritage Lists now!

Please send this Petition asap to all your lists and stress that this is urgent.

Open Letter to US Jewry:

The battle for the future of Jerusalem has begun! While many people are beginning to cry out against the division of Jerusalem and against and a freeze on Jewish construction, it appears as if the heart and center has been forgotten. Like a human body if you kill the heart, the rest of the body will quickly wither away, and so it is with the Temple Mount and the Land of Israel.
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By Ted Belman
I find a lot of merit in Ron Paul’s views on American foreign policy at least the part where everyone looks to the US to protect them and yet doesn’t share the cost. This includes the West but also countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia. The US has to find a way to pull back or at least cut costs. It doesn’t want to find itself over extended and bankrupt. Thus all countries that benefit from its protection should contribute to the costs. For instance, they should pay the cost of the US maintaining troops on their soil. Similarly, the Gulf States should reimburse the US for the wars she has waged for their liberation and protection. Egypt has no need for the huge army the US is financing there. The big concern there is to stop the Muslim Brotherhood from taking over but Egypt doesn’t need a 2 million man army for that. Israel more than pays its fair share of the costs.

I sometimes think that the US should get out of Iraq unless Saudi Arabia wants to pay the costs of them being there. Instead they should use the troops to take down the Revolutionary Guard and the Mullah regime in Iran. This would solve problems with Syria, Lebanon, Hezbollah and Hamas. Iran will simply amend its constitution and hold new elections and the US can get out.

I am not happy with what the US is doing in Afghanistan but don’t know enough about the stability of Pakistan to offer a suggestion.

Ron Paul Challenges GOP Foreign Policy Agenda
By Doug Bandow

It has been nearly a decade since President George W. Bush chose arrogance over humility as the basis of American foreign policy. The intervening years have not been good for the United States or the Republican Party. As the GOP seeks to take back the White House it needs to conduct a serious foreign policy debate. Republicans should start by listening to Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas).

At the recent Southern Republican Leadership Conference big spending Mitt Romney bested Rep. Paul by just one vote in the popularity contest. Yet Paul eschewed reliance on easy applause lines and challenged the newfound Republican fondness for big militaries and constant wars.
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By Ted Belman

Conrad Black is a great writer and staunch friend of Israel. His latest article, Human Rights Watch and the Nazis is both informative and entertaining. After killing some of the Left’s sacred cows, he continues,

[..] But perhaps the most stentorian Te Deum has come from the human-rights organizations. Human Rights Watch was founded by distinguished rights champion and publisher Robert Bernstein, who is still active but long gone from HRW. As the leftist infantry was put to flight, HRW became a clinic for the shell-shocked, who, assisted by the balm of the inevitable George Soros funding, have transformed it into yet another Israel-bashing operation.
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How Evil Works

Posted By Jamie Glazov , FrontPage |

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is David Kupelian, award-winning journalist and managing editor of online news giant WorldNetDaily. com [1] as well as its popular monthly newsmagazine, Whistleblower. A widely read online columnist, he is also the author of the bestselling culture-war classic, The Marketing of Evil: How Radicals, Elitists, and Pseudo-Experts Sell Us Corruption Disguised As Freedom, now in its eleventh printing. His new book, released in February by Simon & Schuster, is How Evil Works: Understanding and Overcoming the Destructive Forces That Are Transforming America. [2]

FP: David Kupelian, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

Let’s start by talking about the Stockholm syndrome that, as you discuss in your book, is affecting the West right now in its confrontation with Islamic Jihad. Give us your perspective.

Kupelian: Jamie, thanks very much for giving me the opportunity to talk about “How Evil Works.” In Chapter 3, “How Terrorism Really Works,” I use the Stockholm syndrome to explain the inexplicable level of weakness and appeasement we continually see in the West toward Islam – for instance, in our disastrous failure to stop Nidal Malik Hasan before he shot dozens of people at Fort Hood, killing 13, even though we knew full well he was a jihadist time bomb waiting to explode.
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By Ted Belman

Shlomo Angel writes that Sunday’s rally in Silwan jeopardizes Jewish sovereignty in Jerusalem. The Needless Rightest March of dozens was led by Baruch Marzel and Itamar Ben Gvir.

He wrote

Anyone interested in the wellbeing of Jewish sovereignty in Jerusalem realized that the march would certainly create more objections and pressures against the settlement enterprise and construction in the east of the capital.
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On Israel, Obama Playing the Mideast Game Wrong
By Mortimer B. Zuckerman

The Middle East peace process is stalled thanks to a second deadlock engineered by the United States government. President Obama began the process with his call for a settlement freeze in 2009 and escalates it now with a major change of American policy on Jerusalem.

The president seeks to prohibit Israel from any construction in its capital—in an exclusively Jewish suburb of East Jerusalem. This, despite the fact that all former administrations had unequivocally understood that the area in question would remain part of Israel in any final peace agreement. Objecting to this early phase of the planning process for housing in East Jerusalem is tantamount to getting the Israelis to agree to the division of Jerusalem in any settlement—even before the start of final status talks with the Palestinians. In 1995, it was by a substantial bipartisan majority that Congress adopted the Jerusalem Embassy Act calling for the movement of the U.S. Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem—and equally importantly, stating that Jerusalem must remain united under Israeli sovereignty.
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By Sultan Knish

In preparation for his attempt to impose a final solution on Israel, Obama is spreading a variety of lies through the media and his spokesmen about Israel. And by exposing those lies, we can best get at the truth.

1. Netanyahu Must Choose Between Obama and his Right Wing

What Obama’s people would like you to believe here is that all it would take to restore good relations with the Obama Administration is for Netanyahu to reject the “extremists” and do what Obama tells him to do.

But in fact the vast majority of Israelis support Netanyahu’s position that Jews have the right to live anywhere in Jerusalem, and oppose Obama’s position that Jews have no right to live or build homes in parts of Jerusalem that were seized by Jordan in 1948 and ethnically cleansed of Jews.
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The Palestine Peace Distraction
Announcing a comprehensive plan now—one that is all but certain to fail—risks discrediting good ideas, breeding frustration in the Arab world, and diluting America’s reputation for getting things done.

By RICHARD N. HAASS, President of the Council on Foreign Relations, WSJ

President Obama recently said it was a “vital national security interest of the United States” to resolve the Middle East conflict. Last month, David Petraeus, the general who leads U.S. Central Command, testified before Congress that “enduring hostilities between Israel and some of its neighbors present distinct challenges to our ability to advance our interests.” He went on to say that “Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships with governments and peoples . . . and weakens the legitimacy of moderate regimes in the Arab world.”
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[This is a major article with a lousy title. It centers on money but I think there is another message and that is that Palin is a powerhouse.

Conservatives4Palin fisks the money meme in the New York Mag article. This is the best blog on Sarah Palin.]

The Revolution Will Be Commercialized
Sarah Palin is already president of right-wing America—and it’s a position with a very big salary.

By Gabriel Sherman, NEW YORK MAGAZINE

On the morning of July 3, 2009, a national holiday, Sarah Palin placed a call to her communications director and told her that she wanted to hold a press conference at her Wasilla, Alaska, home. She wouldn’t disclose the topic. For Palin, the months since Election Day had been a letdown even bigger than the loss to Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Being governor was drudgery. “Her life was terrible,” one adviser says. “She was never home, her [Juneau] office was four hours from her house. You gotta drive an hour from Wasilla to Anchorage. And she was going broke.” Her sky-high approval ratings in Alaska—which had topped 80 percent before John McCain picked her—had withered to the low fifties. She faced a hostile legislature, a barrage of ethics complaints, and frothing local bloggers who reveled in her misfortune. All this for a salary of only $125,000? The worst was that she had racked up $500,000 in legal bills to fend off the trooper scandal and other investigations. She needed money and worried about it constantly. “You have to keep in mind,” Bill McAllister, her then–press secretary, told me, “she and Todd were middle class. They’re rich now, but not then.”
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How high the moon?

Today is the anniversary of the birth of Ella Fitzgerald. She was a remarkable artist. Each period of her long career is rewarding, though she deepened her art as she got older. She excelled in a wide variety of material and in every musical setting. There is an emotional reserve or detachment in her singing, but there is also joy and an irrepressible sense of fun in her approach.

The songs that served as vehicles for her virtuosity invariably displayed her sense of fun. Listen, for example, to “How High the Moon,” “Air Mail Special,” “Flying Home,” “C Jam Blues,” or “You’ll Have to Swing It (Mr. Paganini).” The fun is vividly on display in her startling impersonation of Louis Armstrong on “Basin Street Blues.”

She could also bring out the beauty in a ballad, as she did, for example, in “Stormy Weather” with Joe Pass. Ann Hampton Callaway calls this

CONTINUE