Wednesday, 12 September 2012






U.S. History and Civics Quiz for the Day  

by Bill Levinson
We hate to speculate how many people will get this wrong, noting that 1/3 of people who were surveyed did not know that Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were the enemy in World War II.
 

The Jewish Exodus from Arab Lands:  

Aharon Mor and Orly R. Rahimiyan, JCPA
For over 2,500 years, Jewish communities have existed in the lands now known as the Middle East and North Africa, as well as in Iran. Around one million Jews lived there at the start of the twentieth century; today less than 3 percent of that one million still remain (including Iran).
Upon the establishment of the State of Israel, the status of Jews in Arab countries changed dramatically. The Arab world’s rejection of the Jewish state triggered a deliberate surge in state-legislated discrimination and abuse by Arab regimes and their citizenry, making Jewish residence in Arab countries simply untenable. As a result, the Jews were expelled.
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Posted by Ted Belman @ 6:32 pm ET | Plink | Trackback | 6 Comments » | 202 views

Regavim is worthy of your financial support  Edit Link

By Ted Belman
Regavim is the most important NGO we have, fighting the theft of our land by the Arabs and Beduoin aided and abetted by the EU. Please make them one of the charities you support. It is a serious charity doing serious work in need of serious donations. It could certainly use donations in excess of $1000. $10,000 would be nice if you can afford it. I have posted many articles about its work. Search “Regavim” on Israpundit.
Ari Briggs who heads it just wrote to tell me:
You won’t believe this. I was putting the final touches on an article on the situation in the Negev, specifically about the illegal building in and around Bir Hadaj, when this news came in!!
I thought it was just too hot not to share. Now I have to work out how to add it to my op-ed.
These issues and more will be discussed at the upcoming Public Forum held by Regavim during Sukkot. Details to follow.
Police raid Bedouin village of Bir Hadaj find stolen military jeeps and more 
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Israel and Russia make an alliance  

Just as I have been telling you, Israel is a big winner with this deal and Russian will help defend against attacks on their oil rigs. Not mentioned here is the fact that Russia has bailed out Cypress and Greece financially when the EU refused. Also Russia being an enemy of Turkey will defend Cyprus from attacks by Turkey. I am hoping that Russia has also agreed to veto UNSC resolutions if the US doesn’t.
See also Israel’s Leviathan gas group gets offers for share of field. What is unclear to me is what does Russia have an interest in. Ted Belman
Islamist terrorists will think twice before drawing Russia’s ire
For over 30 years, Israel tried swapping land for peace with its Arab neighbours. Those wishful political plays didn’t work out so well, but Israel’s latest foray — a hard-headed deal with Russia for cash and future considerations — holds more promise. In this unfolding new deal, Israel parts with a share of its lucrative offshore gas field in the Mediterranean, while Russia parts company with Israel’s enemies in Syria and Iran. Russia secures quite separate gains. Win-win for Israel and Russia. Lose-lose for Israel’s and Russia’s various rivals.
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Netanyahu: World powers have no moral right to block us  

Prime minister issues harsh response to Washington’s refusal to put red lines before Iran, says ‘The world tells Israel to wait. And I say, wait for what? Wait until when?’
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ramped up on Tuesday threats to attack Iran, saying if world powers refused to set a red line for Tehran’s nuclear program, they could not demand that Israel hold its fire.
“The world tells Israel ‘wait, there’s still time’. And I say, ‘Wait for what? Wait until when?’ Those in the international community who refuse to put red lines before Iran don’t have a moral right to place a red light before Israel,” Netanyahu, speaking in English, told reporters in a press conference with Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borisov.
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Poll Shows Obama Getting Lowest Jewish Support Since Carter  

President Obama may be enjoying a slight, if likely temporary, bounce in the polls this week. But one of the surveys showing him with a lead in a tight race over Mitt Romney also provides a breakdown of the data that confirms predictions that he is losing up to a quarter of the Jewish votes he got in 2008. The Investors Business Daily/Christian Science Monitor/TIPP Poll gives a breakdown of religion along with other demographic groups and shows Obama leading among Jews by a margin of 59 to 35 percent with six percent undecided. While that is still a majority it is a dramatic decline from the 78 percent of the Jewish vote he got four years ago.
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The Still Unnamed Enemy  

As the sun sets over Manhattan, the cladding on the crown of the Chrysler building bursts into a reddish flame that quickly dies out. Lights wink on across the panorama of office buildings and condominiums to the north of the island. In the south there is an island within the island, a space of darkness hardly filled by the naked structure of the new Freedom Tower. Out of that darkness two beams of blue light rise into the sky.
September 11 is a broken moment in American history. Unlike December 7, 1941, there can be no closure for it. It is a loose end dangling in the sky. Time has passed and the tides of the river that flows both ways have washed against the banks of the lower western end of the island built out of earth lifted from the foundations of the World Trade Center. And still the day hangs in the air like moths within the blue light. A question waiting for an answer.
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Israel’s Rightward Drift  

Which way America will turn in November—Democrat or Republican, left or right—is still very up in the air. Israel, for its part, is in a clear rightward drift that only appears to be accelerating.
It turns out this week that the Israeli daily Maariv is getting bought out by Makor Rishon, a small right-wing paper. Maariv, something of an Israeli institution, first published back in February 1948 a few months before the modern state of Israel was declared, had been falling off badly in sales. Seventeen months ago the Israeli tycoon Nochi Dankner bought Maariv in an attempt to revive it—which failed.
Makor Rishon, which has a small, dedicated, opinionated readership, is owned by Shlomo Ben-Zvi, a British immigrant who lives in the Judea community of Efrat and is identified with the hawkish wing of Likud. It’s thought that Ben-Zvi, after completing the purchase of the centrist Maariv from Dankner, will merge the two papers, keep the Maariv brand name, but move the new, revised paper considerably to the right.
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Brotherhood turning Middle East into Islamist bloc’  

The Middle East is on the path to becoming a single Islamist bloc run by the Muslim Brotherhood, Home Front Defense Minister and former Shin Bet chief Avi Dichter said Monday.
Speaking at the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism’s World Summit, Dichter said “the Arab world in general and in particular the countries neighboring us have begun a long journey that will end with the Middle East being a bloc run by the Muslim Brotherhood, and possibly a single Islamist bloc.”
He also spoke about the civil war raging in Syria, saying that it is a question of when and not if the Assad regime will fall, adding that a massacre of the Alawite sect should be expected in such a case.
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US seeks to head off new Palestinian UN status bid  

I am not certain how recognition as a non-member status by the UN helps the PA legally. The international community already takes the position that the Fourth Geneva Convention applies. But what can possibly be the reason that the Obama administration wants to prevent it from happening.
Apparently, “Washington was working to try to bring the Israelis and Palestinians back to the negotiations.” They tried that for four years. What are they now offering the PA to encourage them to refrain. What does it intend to do to force Israel to make more concessions. Why do they believe negotiations will succeed?
Or does Obama prefer a world where the endless peace process is intact to one where the UNGA has granted the PA non-member status and there is no peace process. Ted Belman
State Department spokeswoman says Washington still believes only ‘realistic path’ for Palestinian statehood is through direct negotiations
The United States is trying to dissuade Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas from seeking non-member status at the United Nations at top UN meetings later this month, an official said Monday.
“We continue to make clear that we believe that the only realistic path for the Palestinians to achieve statehood is through direct negotiations,” State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said.
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Relying on U.S. Intelligence  

by Shoshana Bryen, American Thinker
September 9, 2012
Jerusalem and the resettlement of Palestinian refugees disappeared from the Democratic Party platform; language that characterized Hamas as unacceptable to the United States — not only to Israel — disappeared. Jerusalem is back. But the crucial part of the Democratic Party Platform for Israel is related only tangentially to Israel. It is about Iran:
(The) window for diplomacy will not remain open indefinitely and that all options — including military force — remain on the table. But we have an obligation to use the time and space that exists now to put increasing pressure on the Iranian regime…
 

Tribalism beats universalism  

FRESNO ZIONISM
    Ms. Butler fights the regressive “my side, right or wrong” with the liberating “your side, right or wrong.” It’s the post-structuralist version of the Sermon on the Mount: “Love thy enemy more than thyself.” But what if that enemy embraces a savage form of loving themselves and hating us? What if it takes an extreme interpretation of Muslims’ edict to “love and hate for Allah’s sake”? This enemy makes all our utopian and multiculturalist projects impossible. — Benjamin Weinthal and Richard Landes, “The Post-Self-Destructivism of Judith Butler”
Judith Butler is an American academic (philosophy) known for her quick mind,impenetrable prose and anti-Israel activism. The quotation is from an article about the controversy surrounding her selection by the city of Frankfurt to receive its important Adorno Prize for excellence in philosophy, music, theater and film.
I’ll leave it to Weinthal and Landes to describe the particular trouble with Ms Butler and the Germans, and to others to evaluate her academic work, which (despite my philosophy degrees) is far beyond my understanding.
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Can Hezbollah survive the fall of Assad  

The Syrian government has tried many times to transfer its crisis to Lebanon, but it has failed to cause a real explosion that would lead to another Lebanese civil war. It has, however, succeeded in inciting small outbreaks of violence that have pushed the country to the verge of a breakdown for the past 17 months. Clashes in the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli between Sunnis and Alawites have intensified in recent days — but this time the Lebanese Army intervened to stop the fighting.
Something fundamental has changed: the Shiite militant group Hezbollah, long Syria’s powerful proxy in Lebanon, has become a wounded beast. And it is walking a very thin line between protecting its assets and aiding a crumbling regime next door.
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Gaza Prepares to Declare Independence (From Palestine)  

It’s no secret that Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist faction that controls Gaza, has long considered exchanging its underground smuggling tunnels to Egypt for a policy of above-board trade. What has only recently begun to register is that Hamas may be contemplating a bolder political gambit still: Cutting its financial ties to both Israel and the Palestinian Authority government in the West Bank, in preparations for declaring full independence on behalf of Gaza.
Al-Hayat first reported the story on July 22. The London-based Arabic daily noted that Hamas was poised to sever its limited economic ties with Israel, open a free trade zone with Egypt at the Rafah border crossing, and declare itself liberated. Before the story could gain traction, however, senior Hamas leaders Mahmoud al-Zahhar and Salah al-Bardawil quickly disavowed the reports.
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Ted Belman
Jerusalem, Israel

Posted by Britannia Radio at 17:02