February 22, 2012

By Ted Belman

Things are turning ugly in Jordan. Just two days ago, a beautiful young co-ed, Enass Musallam, was brutally stabbed in the abdomen five times by a masked man who was “professionally covered like he was on a SWAT team”. She narrowly survived the vicious attack.

What was her “crime”?

She is a Palestinian student at the University of Jordan. She is active in opposing King Abdullah’s discriminatory policies towards the Palestinians. Recently, King Abdullah’s uncle made threats to the Palestinians –out of the blue– on Jordanian national TV. She responded immediately with a posting on her blog. Shortly after her article was published, when she was heading to college, a masked man who reportedly spoke in a Bedouin accent, attacked her.
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Laura: Pro-jihad, Jew-hating, communist vermin hugo chavez is using his state run media to go after his opponent with antisemitic attacks. A tactic used by all vile dictators who want to deflect their suffering people’s attention away from their own oppressive, corrupt, failed authoritarian rule, he engages in incitement against Jews and the Jewish state.

 Honest Reporting

“Pro-Zionist Rats”: Venezuelan Media Attack Chavez Opposition
February 20, 2012 12:38
by Simon Plosker
[Translate]
This article has been adapted from an original communique courtesy of ReporteHonesto, HR’s Latin American affiliate.

With elections approaching in Venezuela, opposition leader Henrique Capriles Radonski – and especially his Jewish background – has become a lightening rod for criticism from state run media and supporters of Hugo Chavez. (Read more…)

By Ted Belman

Remember Robert Bernstein? He founded Human Rights Watch and remained at the helm for 20 years until 2009 when he wrote an Op-Ed for the NYT titled Rights Watchdog, Lost in the Mideast in which he accused it of “issuing reports on the Israeli-Arab conflict that are helping those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state.”

He has now started a new organization called Advancing Human Rights. Irwin Cotler and David Keyes are on the Board of Directors.

Its mission statement reads in part:

[..]
We therefore believe that our time is best spent focusing on authoritarian countries without free speech or corrective mechanisms.

To achieve our goals, AHR will utilize the Internet to support freedom advocates and give them a platform to exchange ideas. This arm of AHR is called CyberDissidents.org and it is already at work engaging democratic dissidents in autocratic countries.
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Trailing in Polls, Sarkozy Counts on Jewish Support

By Robert Zaretsky, THE FORWARD

Like the United States, France will choose a president this year. Little more than two months away from the elections, the conservative president, Nicolas Sarkozy, is running behind the Socialist candidate, François Hollande. Several other candidates are polling well: Marine Le Pen of the extreme right-wing Front National hovers at about 20%, followed by the centrist candidate, François Bayrou, and by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who represents a coalition of parties to the left of the Socialists.

If this were the United States, the Jewish vote would fall heavily on the left side of the spectrum. After all, American Jews have historically voted in overwhelming numbers for Democratic presidential candidates; in 2008, Barack Obama won nearly 80% of the Jewish vote. American Jewry’s attachment to liberalism seems to be one of the constants of politics in our country— even when it seems against that population’s economic interests. In a way, the corollary to the question “What’s wrong with Kansas?” is “What’s wrong with the Upper West Side?”
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Bolton is interviewed at the CPAC Conference in Feb

Commentator

Question: Syria is in a state of civil war. Now the so-called international community, the US government with it, seems unable to find a solution. Do you think US policy on the Assad regime and on Syria in general is adequate?

Answer: I think US policy on Syria is in disarray. I think they were surprised by the Russian and Chinese vetoes in the Security Council, even though the draft resolution had been watered down into something completely anodyne.

They nonetheless expected that Russia and China would support it so they could say: “That’s what our policy is”. [On 16th February, China and Russia again refused to condemn Syria, this time voting against a non-binding resolution of the UN General Assembly.] Now, with that resolution vetoed, they are completely at sea. And I think it has left everybody at sea, in the West and in the Arab world too.
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By David Keyes, ISRAEL HAYOM

One hundred Jewish leaders met with Jordanian King Abdullah II on Tuesday to “commend him for Jordan’s role – and his in particular – in supporting negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, and seeking to be a source of stability in a region in turmoil.”

King Abdullah has a lot to answer for these days and one hopes that the Jewish leaders were not too timid to raise difficult issues. Weeks ago, the king ended a 13-year policy of isolating Hamas and welcomed arch-terrorist Khaled Mashaal to Amman. Jordanian Prime Minister Awn Khasawneh called for a return of Hamas leaders to the Hashemite Kingdom.
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According to the High Court’s directive the new law must be ? believe it or not ? proportionate, egalitarian and constitutional, three words that send shivers down the spines of Haredi politicians.

By Yossi Verter, HAARETZ

Tuesday’s ruling by the High Court of Justice gave final authority for what was already common knowledge: Within five months at most the Tal Law ? which was the basis for the increasing shirking of military service by young ultra-Orthodox men ? will be relegated to the trash can of history. The Knesset and the cabinet will be hard-pressed to come up with a replacement ? not as a stopgap measure, a temporary order or a political maneuver, but rather as a real, new law.
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By Efraim Inbar, bloomberg.com..

The upheaval in the Arab world has damaged Israel’s strategic environment. Its peace treaty with Egypt, a pillar of national security for more than three decades, is in question. More important, the events in the Arab world have deflected attention from Israel’s most feared scenario, a nuclear Iran, playing into the Iranian strategy to buy time in order to present the world with a nuclear fait accompli. Israel’s leaders fear that the international response is now unlikely to impact Iranian policy, at a point when its nuclear program is so advanced.
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I disagreee with the author. The Arab countries have no interest helping Palestinians have a better life, neither for that matter, is the Palestinian leadership. They both want to keep the Palestinians in limbo to be used as pawns against Israel. Ted Belman

Khaled Abu Toameh.Stonegate Institute..21 February ’12..

The Palestinian Center for Human Rights announced that Palestinians — not Israel — were to blame for the electricity crisis.

Who is stopping the Palestinians from turning the Gaza Strip into the Middle East’s Hong Kong? Is it Israel, the Palestinians themselves or the Arab countries?

In the past few weeks, Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh has visited a number of Arab and Islamic countries in a bid to secure financial aid for “rebuilding” the Gaza Strip. Haniyeh returned to the Gaza Strip this week with a suitcase full of promises from Iran, Qatar, Sudan, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates to help the Palestinian residents of the Gaza Strip.
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[This story is part of a larger profile appearing in the March 12th, 2012 issue of FORBES magazine. The complete cover story will appear online beginning Wednesday, February 22nd.]

Sheldon Adelson plays as stubbornly in politics as he does in business. So the criticisms that he’s trying to personally buy the presidential election for Newt Gingrich are met with a roll of the eyes. “Those people are either jealous or professional critics,” Adelson tells me during his first interview since he and his wife began funneling $11 million, with another $10 million injection widely expected, into the former speaker’s super PAC, Winning Our Future. “They like to trash other people. It’s unfair that I’ve been treated unfair—but it doesn’t stop me. I might give $10 million or $100 million to Gingrich.”

Adelson, the 78-year-old CEO of casino giant Las Vegas Sands, certainly can afford to: With a net worth of roughly $25 billion, that $11 million, which jolted Gingrich’s flatlining presidential bid back to life, equates to 0.044% of his fortune. For someone with a $1 million net worth, the equivalent would be $440, or a two-night stay at Adelson’s Venetian casino. Adelson could personally fund an entire presidential campaign—say, $1 billion or so—and not even notice.
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