Melanie Phillips

Is a bunch of young Israeli lawyers working round the clock sustained only by Diet Coke, falafel and cigarettes about to pull off the legal equivalent of the Six-Day War?

Israel famously won that war before it even started by destroying the Egyptian air force on the ground. Now it’s beginning to look as if the Gaza flotilla of fools and fanatics may be holed below the waterline before it even sets off on its cynical and potentially murderous stunt.

It was supposed to have sailed by now. Today, however, it was reported that it now may not set sail before next week. The main reason is a series of unprecedented and ingenious manoeuvres by Israeli lawyers which have tied up the boats in legal actions mainly concerning insurance and registration issues.
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AFP
By Katia Dolmadjian

With a concentration of start-ups just behind that of Silicon Valley and an impressive pool of engineers, Israel is becoming the new standard for high-tech, with a unique business model.

Internet-related activities contributed 9 billion euros (12.6 billion dollars) to the Israeli economy in 2009, representing 6.5 percent of GDP, according to a report from management consultancy McKinsey.

The sector is worth more than the construction industry (5.4 percent of GDP) and almost as much as health (6.8 percent).
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I hate it when Bibi puts all the focus on our security rather than on our right to the land. I want to keep the land for its sake. It will also make us more secure. What is crucial to peace is that the Arabs compromise on the land. Ted Belman

By HERB KEINON, JPOST

Netanyahu says anti-missile system must be deployed along border of future Palestinian state, is keen on obtaining US help for buying more.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is starting to prepare for US help in purchasing additional Iron Dome anti-missile batteries, bringing the issue up on Wednesday during a meeting with three key Democratic congressmen.
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I am speechless. This is so disgusting, its beyond words. Its a betrayal. To suggest its a matter of “favoring internal politics at expense of its int’l standing.” is to write off all Israel legitimate concerns and goals. F..k Israel’s international standing. Keep Judea and Samaria. Ted Belman

Friends of Israel to PM: Accept Obama terms, restart talks
By GIL SHEFLER, JPOST

In apparent criticism of Netanyahu, Ronald Lauder reportedly warns Israel against favoring internal politics at expense of its int’l standing.

Members of the International Council of Jewish Parliamentarians gathered at the King David Hotel on Tuesday for a candid conversation closed to journalists dealing with the considerable challenges facing Israel in the international arena.
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Barry Rubin commented. “First of all, the headline is basically a lie. The US has never had “formal” contacts with the Muslim Brotherhood but only informal ones. This represents a major policy shift.”

REUTERS

By Arshad Mohammed

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The United States has decided to resume formal contacts with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, a senior U.S. official said on Wednesday, in a step that reflects the Islamist group’s growing political weight but that is almost certain to upset Israel and its U.S. backers.

“The political landscape in Egypt has changed, and is changing,” said the senior official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “It is in our interests to engage with all of the parties that are competing for parliament or the presidency.”
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With its oil treasure, Israel gets a shield from tyranny

By Neil Reynolds, The Globe and Mail

OTTAWA— The London-based World Energy Council says Israel’s Shfela Basin, a half-hour drive south of Jerusalem, holds 250 billion barrels of recoverable shale oil, possibly making the energy-vulnerable country (as expressed by The Wall Street Journal) “the world’s newest energy giant.” With reserves of 260 billion barrels, Saudi Arabia would remain the world’s No. 1 oil country – though not, perhaps, for long. Howard Jonas, CEO of U.S.-based IDT Corp., the company that owns the Shfela Basin concession, says there is much more oil under Israel than under Saudi Arabia: Perhaps, he says, twice as much.
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You liked it before, you’ll like it again

By Ted Belman

Yesterday Tim Pawlenty, Republican presidential nominee hopeful, gave a very important speech to the Council on Foreign Relations.

He disagreed stongly with Obama’s approach to Israel and the peace process.

And in the middle of all this, is Israel.

Israel is unique in the region because of what it stands for and what it has accomplished. And it is unique in the threat it faces—the threat of annihilation. It has long been a bastion of democracy in a region of tyranny and violence. And it is by far our closest ally in that part of the world.
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James G. Wiles, AMERICAN THINKER

By Spengler, ASIA TIMES

A version of the essay below appeared in the Dutch-language daily newspaper De Volkskrant on June 16. For months, the Dutch parliament has debated a bill that would ban kosher slaughter on supposed humanitarian grounds. On June 23, parliament offered a compromise according to which the Jewish community will have a chance to demonstrate that this 3,000-year-old practice does not cause animals to suffer. Given that kosher slaughter is mandated in order to prevent animal suffering, the entire proceeding is grotesque. This might seem like an esoteric issue affecting a small religious minority; on the contrary, I argue, it is on just such questions that the moral survival of the West depends – Spengler.

For the first time in Western history, the physical as well as emotional pain felt by animals became a human concern three
millennia ago in the Jewish Scriptures. Not only does the Hebrew Bible prohibit meat obtained by hunting – the least humane way of killing animals – but it forbids the owner of an ox from muzzling the beast while it threshes grain, or killing a calf in the presence of the mother cow.
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The dangers in premature recognition of a “Palestinian state”!

By Abdallah al-Hadlaq, Al Watan, Kuwait

(Translated from Arabic)

International agreements dealing with peace in the Middle East must be respected

The Palestinian side is flaunting UNSC Resolutions 242, 338 and 1850 and the Road Map to Peace, all of which call for agreed solutions for disputes to be reached by direct talks, rejecting unilateral acts that undermine internationally accepted parameters for reaching peace, and defining basic principles for bilateral peace-making.
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by Eitam Abadi, Indy News Israel April 27/11

Parliamentary initiatives to annex territories won from Jordan during the 1967 Six Day War have been gaining traction in recent weeks as the Western-backed Palestinian Authority continues its threats to unilaterally declare a state in these territories this September at the United Nations General Assembly.

National Infrastructures Minister Uzi Landau (Yisrael Beiteinu) raised the idea of annexation at a party convention in Jerusalem two weeks ago and has since been granting interviews on the subject to the local and foreign press, including CNN, which approached Landau to discuss the matter on Tuesday.
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By David Solway, FrontPage

When one surveys the world situation, one cannot react with anything but intense disquiet and apprehension. The premonition of imminent catastrophe cannot be shunted aside as unthinkable or as the capricious imaginings of the congenitally unstable. War is in the air, as it was in 1914 and 1939, before the actual outbreak of hostilities. And the flashpoints are instantly discernible, namely, the Middle East and the South Asian theater. The sequel appears to be pretty much inevitable.
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In Obama’s progressive calculus, disdain for the United States is a mark of authenticity.

By Victor Davis Hanson, NRO

The incoming hope-and-change Obama administration advanced the narrative that at home and abroad it cared far more for people than profits. Its “reset” diplomacy (all in the past “bad,” all in the future “good”) was supposed to be about multilateral consensus instead of Bush-era unilateral hubris. But after almost 30 months, it is now clear that in our dealings abroad values like human rights, constitutional government, free-market liberal economics, and transparency do not matter much to the Obama administration.
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By Abdul Rahman Al-Rashid, alsharq alawsat

Hezbollah’s mission, since the group’s establishment in 1982, has been extremely easy in that it has been limited to confronting Israel. This mission allowed Hezbollah to obtain Arab respect, Iranian funding, and local influence. However today Hezbollah finds itself in an extremely difficult situation; its enemies have multiplied and increased to the extent that Israel is now the least of their worries. More then half of the Lebanese people are against Hezbollah, whilst most Arabs are against them as well, and Syria seems to have abandoned them or at least distanced themselves from the Lebanese group.
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According to Haaretz, “Lior was wanted for questioning after he endorsed the controversial book “Torat Hamelech,” which justifies the killing of non-Jews. ” There was no mention about the circumstances that would justify it. Does anyone have more info on what the book espouses? We must be able to distinguish the difference between this and expressions in the Koran or Christian Bible which many criticise. Rubin makes the case for the killing below and I entirely agree with him. This is a push back against the left who are trying to rewrite the rules of war. To advocate such killing is not incitement but common sense.
Two years ago this article, Rabbi Lior Says It’s OK to Kill Civilians …and other rabbis are silent, was published in an anti war blog. Lior alledgedly said,

“The law of our Torah is to have mercy on our soldiers and to save them. This is the real moral behind Israel’s Torah and we must not feel guilty due to foreign morals.”

“When our forces come across civilians during a war or in hot pursuit or in a raid, so long as there is no certaintly that those civilians are incapable of harming our forces according to Halkah they may and even should be killed.”

I have no ojection to these principals. In fact I have argued that it is criminal negligence to put your own soldiers at risk to save the lives of your enemies. Our duty is to our own and not to mankind.

The article ends with this surprising statement,

”I should also note that Lior’s resoning is very similar to the logic that Madeleine Albright used when asked to respond to the charge [in 1995] that a half million Iraqi children has been killed by U.S. sanctions. It was “worth it” because it was her responsibility to make sure US soldiers would not have to“refight the Gulf War”

Totally aside from the validity of the charge that 500,000 children died, to my mind we should not allow the left to tie our hands in seeking victory. That is not to say that we should drop the Bomb at the drop of a hat. It is to say that there are times when you drop the bomb. Ted Belman

Rabbi Lior’s Arrest
by David Rubin, INN

Rabbi Lior’s arrest was much more than a travesty of free speech. The reason for the arrest made no sense at all.

There has been much commotion over the arrest of Rabbi Dov Lior by the police, with many rightly referring to it as an infringement of free speech.

His crime? He endorsed a book entitled Torat Hamelech, authored by Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira and Rabbi Yosef Elitzur, which says that it is permissible to kill civilian non-Jews in certain situations during wartime.
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IDF fears flotilla activists will try to kill soldiers

Army info suggests radical elements equipping some vessels talking part in sail with bags containing chemicals, most likely sulfur, to use against soldiers taking over vessels. Activists in Greece claim some ships have been tampered with

By David Isaac, Shmuel Katz Blog

Shimon Peres has achieved sainthood. It’s not clear how it happened. Maybe it’s just that Israelis have a soft spot for the “pioneering” generation and Peres, a protégée of David Ben-Gurion, is the only one left standing.

It’s ironic as Israel’s current president was, until now, never popular with Israel’s voters. He may have been popular at one time with the Socialist International, of which he was voted vice president in 1978. He may have been popular with the Nobel Foundation, which gave him the prize for peace in 1994. And he may have been popular within his own Labor Party, of which he was chairman from 1977-1992.
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Laura: Delta airlines should be boycotted for going along with the racist, anti-Semitic Saudi practice of barring Jews. Why is it that whenever Americans do business with islamic countries, American values and laws give way to sharia? We should not be engaged in commerce with any country which practices racial, religious and gender apartheid. We don’t even need oil from Saudi Arabia since we have adequate resources to fulfill our energy needs for a very long time to come. Not only drilling for oil offshore and in Alaska but shale oil as well. It is only the democrats and environmentalists that stand in the way of us becoming energy independent.

FAA investigation demanded of Delta-Saudi ‘no-Jew’ deal
Enraged customers scorch airline for doing ‘business with the devil’

By Bob Unruh, © 2011 WND

The Federal Aviation Administration has been asked to investigate, the Saudi Arabian government is denying it discriminates against Jews, and Delta Air Lines is getting incinerated by critics on its own website as the dispute over the airline’s plans for a cooperative program that would ban Jews from certain flights heated white-hot today. (Read more…)

By John Hinderaker, PowerLineBlog

May 1, 2011

I do not understand why Israel has not already annexed Judea and Samaria. These regions, the heart of ancient Israel, are generally known today as the “West Bank” of the Jordan River. Three times, Arab states have attacked Israel in an effort to carry out a second Holocaust. Three times, Israel has defeated them. No principle of justice required Israel, having escaped annihilation by force of arms, to retreat back to the inadequate borders of 1948.

When the United States defeated Mexico in the Mexican War, what did we do? We annexed the Southwest. When France defeated Germany in World War I (more or less), what did it do? It annexed Alsace and Lorraine. After World War II, how did the Dutch obtain compensation from Germany? They annexed certain lands that were later sold back to West Germany for a large sum. Many such examples could be offered.
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