Saturday, 29 December 2012



IsraPundit


Israel Redefines Victory in the New Middle East  

Senior Israeli officials have indicated this month that any round of future fighting with Hezbollah will make last month’s Gaza conflict seem minor by comparison. Offense, not defense, is still preferred.
Israel is redefining its concept of military victory in a Middle East dominated by terrorist organizations turned quasi-state actors.
Once, decisive, unmistakable victories, accompanied by conquests of territory that had been used to stage attacks against Israel, provided all parties concerned with a “knockout” image. Victory was seen by the Israel Defense Forces as a clear-cut event, which ended when the enemy raised a white flag. Today, however, the IDF considers this thinking out of date in the 21st century battle arenas of the region, where a terror organization such as Hamas will continue firing rockets into Israel right up until the last day of a conflict, and claim victory despite absorbing the majority of damages and casualties.
(Read more…)

Blasphemy as a National Security Threat  

Spain has begun deportation proceedings against Imran Firasat, a Christian refugee from Pakistan, for making a documentary about Mohammed and thereby threatening the national security of Spain. If Firasat is deported back to Pakistan, he will face the death penalty proving that it’s a short step from the Spanish Inquisition to the Pakistani Inquisition.
The United States has a man sitting in prison for making another blasphemous movie, which the government spent weeks blaming for worldwide attacks on American embassies. And he isn’t the first man persecuted or prosecuted for offending Islam. Offending Islam has become a national security issue involving all levels of government.
(Read more…)

Bibi is odd man out on the right  

By Ted Belman
The Likud list moved decidedly to the right. There is very little to distinguish it from Bennett’s Bayit Hayahudi. They are all for annexation of Area C. Bibi is odd man out.
Bibi wants to head a center right government and would love to undermine his party by bringing in Labour of Yesh Atid. I don’t think he will be able to do so.
Let us say he gets 34 seats for Likud/Yisrael Beiteinu, Bennett gets 15 and Eldad gets 3. It is entirely possible that Likud could breakup with a third of its seats bolting the party and joinng Bennett. Thus Likud/YB ends up with 23 seats and Bayit HaYahudi plus Eldad and the 11 from Likud would total 29. Shas is turning against Bibi and would be happy to join with them.
Thus Bennett would be the next PM and not Bibi.
If Danny Danon and others played this card, Bibi would have no alternative but to make a right wing coalition


+972′s Person of the Year: The Settler  

This is a well researched article published by a far left Blog. I believe it is accurate and fair with one exception, it refers to settlements as illegal under international law. But the bottom line is the settler movement has won. The remaining power of the left elite in media, army, Knesset, judiciary, is waning and they know it. Ted Belman. H/T Curious American
The settlement movement registered major victories this year on various fronts. Its representatives are reaching new heights in politics, the judiciary and the media. One out of five residents east of the Green Line is a settler.The expansion of settlements continues unabated, and – most importantly – settlers are in full control of the Israeli national narrative. In 2012, as more and more observers declared the death of the two-state solution, the settler became the new normal.
For decades, the settler movement and Israel’s secular, largely Ashkenazi urban elite have been playing a game of “pretend.” The secular political elite claimed the settlers were religious ideologues, obstacles to peace and not representative of mainstream Israeli society. The settlers, meanwhile, charged that an effete minority ruling class ignored their contributions and commitment to the state.
(Read more…)

Into the Fray: Debating disobedience  

By MARTIN SHERMAN, JPOST
    Is the Likud once again planning to use the military to impose evacuations of Jewish communities? If not, why did it opt to make Bennett’s remark an issue of such centrality? Theirs not to make reply; Theirs not to reason why; Theirs but to do and die
    – Alfred Tennyson, The Charge of the Light Brigade, 1854
    Above all, the grand and only effectual security against the despotism of the government is… the sympathy of the army with the people…. Soldiers to whose feelings half or three-fourths of the subjects of the same government are foreigners will have no more scruple in mowing them down, and no more desire to ask the reason why, than they would have in doing the same thing against declared enemies…. Such armies have been the executioners of liberty through the whole duration of modern history.
    – John Stuart Mill, On Representative Government, 1861
The media feeding frenzy sparked by Naftali Bennett’s remark made during a blatantly antagonistic interview conducted by a blatantly adversarial interviewer, Nissim Mishal, was depressingly revealing as to the quality of the county’s public discourse.
(Read more…)

Israel’s opposition leaders on left are disgraceful  

By Ted Belman
Over the last few weeks, I have been dismayed over remarks made by opposition leaders, especially former Likudniks, demanding our capitulation. David Efune inAlgemeiner has neatly sumarized them:
    As the political climate heats up in Israel, the oft chimed argument of choice for the withered and depleted ‘concessions camp,’ charges that various actions taken by Prime Minister Netanyahu and the current sitting government are leading to ‘international isolation’ of the Jewish state.

    Last month, Tzipi Livni, leader of the newly formed ‘Hatnuah’ party opposed the announcement of new West Bank settlement building on the grounds that the move “isolates Israel encourages international pressure,” according to the Guardian.
    (Read more…)

Talking Turkey  

The menu for meals on my Turkish Airlines flight earlier this month assured passengers that food selections “do not contain pork.” The menu also offered a serious selection of alcoholic drinks, including champagne, whisky, gin, vodka, raki, wine, beer, liqueur, and cognac. This oddity of simultaneously adhering to and ignoring Islamic law, the sharia, symbolizes the uniquely complex public role of Islam in today’s Turkey, as well as the challenge of understanding the Justice and Development Party (known by its Turkish abbreviation, AKP), which has dominated the country’s national government since 2002.
Political discussions about Turkey tend to dwell on whether the AKP is Islamist or not: In 2007, for example, I asked: “What are the AKP leadership’s intentions? Did it . . . retain a secret Islamist program and simply learn to disguise its Islamist goals? Or did it actually give up on those goals and accept secularism?”
(Read more…)

How Iranian arms are smuggled into Gaza  

An explosion in southern Lebanon last week destroyed what is believed to have been a Hezbollah weapons depot. This latest in a series of mysterious “accidents” in Hezbollah-controlled precincts proved, as one Israeli official wryly remarked, that those who “sleep with rockets and amass large stockpiles of weapons are in a very unsafe place.” With the Party of God’s overland supply route through Syria choked off by the 22-month-long uprising against Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, and Israel virtually in total control of the maritime route, Hezbollah’s stockpile is being systematically degraded.
Yet the arsenal of Iran’s other regional proxy force, Hamas, is growing. The Israeli Defense Forces’ campaign against Hamas last month in Gaza targeted Iranian missiles, including the Fajr-5, capable of reaching Tel Aviv and other points north, and destroyed most of them within the first hours of the conflict. But Hamas is already rearming, and it’s not clear that Israel or even Muslim Brotherhood-governed Egypt, which is ostensibly capable of controlling the Sinai tunnel networks through which Hamas receives its arms, can do much about it.
(Read more…)


Ted Belman
Jerusalem, Israel

Posted by Britannia Radio at 08:02