Why Obama Administration Peace Process Policy Will Be A Total Waste of Time in 2011
By Barry Rubin
Since predicting the future is hard, to say the least, it’s always interesting when one can clearly see a crisis looming months ahead of time. The usual pattern is for the impending problem to be ignored until the last minute, then it is suddenly discovered by journalists and policymakers with great astonishment.
Often, they then misdiagnose the causes of the problem precisely because they never understood why it happened in the first place.
In this case, the Palestinian Authority (PA) foreign minister–remember when the 1993 Israel-PLO agreement said that the PA wouldn’t conduct foreign policy? Ha-ha-ha–Riyad Malki says he will seek recognition of a Palestinian state in September at the UN. For many years, Malki ran the terrorist group, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) on the West Bank. But it’s ok! He quit.
So far, recognition has been obtained from Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia and Ecuador, with Uruguay, Paraguay,...
Who’s Afraid of the Palestinians?
Hussein Agha and Robert Malley (New York Review of Books)
* Palestinians have looked to unilaterally declaring statehood, obtaining UN recognition, dissolving the PA, or walking away from the idea of negotiated partition altogether and calling for a single binational state.
* Of these suggestions, arguably the most promising is to seek international acceptance of a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders. In the past few months, several countries have recognized such a state and others may follow. The trend is causing Palestinians to rejoice and Israelis to protest, which only makes Palestinians rejoice all the more. What it will not do for now is materially affect the situation on the ground.
* Invoking a one-state solution in which Jews someday no longer will form a majority has its own limitations. Yet Israel possesses a variety of potential responses. Already, by unilaterally withdrawing from Gaza, former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon transformed the numbers game,...
Judge OKs ‘flag of Islam on American soil’
Decision approves government funding for Shariah indoctrination
By Bob Unruh, WorldNetDaily
Attorneys for a Marine Corps veteran of the Iraqi War say they have filed a petition to the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals after a federal district judge ruled it is fine for the U.S. government to fund commercial enterprises that promote the indoctrination of Shariah religious law inside the United States.
The decision came from Judge Lawrence Zatkoff, who changed his perspective on the issue and said just last week that he would dismiss a constitutional challenge brought by Kevin Murray against the U.S. government’s bailout of AIG, the insurance giant.
That company used more than “$100 million in federal tax money to support Islamic religious indoctrination through the funding and promotion of Shariah-compliant financing. … SCF is financing that follows the dictates of Islamic law,” said officials at the Thomas More Law Center.
TMLC is representing Murray...
Israelis go green for Tu Bishvat
Well, Spring has sprung in Israel. The days are getting longer, the buds are appearing, new growth is everywhere and wild flowers are sprouting. Ain’t life grand. Ted Belman
HAARETZ
The Hiriya former waste dump is certainly an unlikely place for a Tu Bishvat (Israeli Arbor Day) planting ceremony, a holiday that symbolizes the rebirth of nature. Nevertheless, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will attend a festive planting event on the mountain of waste, as part of a widespread initiative towards environmental renewal.
During the visit, Environmental Protection Ministry officials will present the prime minister with an outline of plans to turn the site into a recycling park. Netanyahu’s visit comes just one day after the packaging recycling law was passed, aimed at reducing packaging waste and encouraging repeated use of packaging materials.
Tu Bishvat festivities will span over three days this year, metamorphosing from a tree-planting holiday into an occasion with wider...
Canada vigorously defends free speech
Iranium, a film about Iran as an enemy, was to be shown by Library Archives Canada in Ottawa. The Library cancelled the showing once due to demands by the Iranium Embassy and once due to threats of violence.
The Canadian Government ordered them to show the film and told the Iranian Ambassador in a diplomatic note where to get off.
With free speech under attack, our civilization’s survival is at stake.
Defending Lars Hedegaard’s right to free speech equals defending the right of Western civilization to survive. As editor, columnist, and Danish and International Free Press Society president, Hedegaard dares to exercise his right to criticize Islam as freely as one may Christianity or Judaism. [1]
Barring an effective international outcry — or a rare fever of Sudden Enlightenment Syndrome striking common sense into the head of Denmark’s public prosecutor — Hedegaard will face trial on Danish racism charges and conviction alike on January 24, 2011: a veritable auto da fé. [2]
In December 2009, Hedegaard remarked in a taped interview that a certain kind of domestic violence was peculiar to Muslim families (“they” rape their own children). He was charged as a common criminal. [3]
Denmark’s public prosecutor charged Hedegaard with racism for allegedly violating article 266 b of its penal code — a.k.a. the “racism...
King Abdicates
By Pamela Geller, American Thinker
Congressman Peter King (R-NY) told Politico Tuesday that in his upcoming hearings on radicalization among American Muslims, he was “not planning to call as witnesses such Muslim community critics as the Investigative Project on Terrorism’s Steve Emerson and Jihad Watch’s Robert Spencer, who have large followings among conservatives but are viewed as antagonists by many Muslims.”
Based on this, it appears that this will be a show trial. Between Emerson and Spencer, the whole of it is covered. Emerson knows who all the players are and what groups and cells they are affiliated with. He knows who everyone is and what he’s doing. For King to acquiesce in his marginalization is almost criminal. In Spencer’s case, it’s just as bad. Why wouldn’t King discuss the texts and teachings of Islam that jihadists use to justify violence and make recruits?
For King not to avail himself of Emerson’s...
5,000th IDF Soldier to Convert to Judaism
by Maayana Miskin
Since opening a program for conversion into Judaism, the IDF has become a center of Jewish learning, with thousands of soldiers who are not Jewish according to Jewish law taking part in courses on Judaism and roughly 800 per year choosing to undergo conversion.
In total, 17,000 non-Jewish soldiers have learned about Judaism in the army’s Nativ program, and almost 5,000 of them have converted to Judaism. Most Nativ participants have a Jewish parent or grandparent, but are not Jewish according to halacha (Jewish law), which states that Jewish status is passed through the mother.
Two-thirds of the soldiers who convert through Nativ are women, meaning that their children will be considered halachically Jewish.
The data on immigrant soldiers and conversions was revealed Wednesday in a meeting of the Immigration and Absorption Committee. MKs discussed the role immigrant soldiers play in the army, and ways in which the IDF can ease the immigrant absorption...
Ted Belman
Jerusalem, Israel
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