Will most Jews still vote for Biden?

An incredible achievement for peace. https://t.co/IVpJzfwp4E

— Ted Budd (@RepTedBudd) September 15, 2020

A cure for cancer and a vaccine for the coronavirus!

Israel, the country that announced last month that they may have a complete cure for cancer, now is saying that they will soon have a vaccine for the coronavirus. Ryan Saavedra has the stories here.

Trump breaks with his predecessors on Israel and Iran

In FrontPage Magazine, Carolyn Glick gives us some history of American policies toward Iran and Israel.

...As far as Iran is concerned, as journalist Lee Smith explained in Tablet online magazine this week, when Iranian “students” seized the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in November 1979 and held 52 Americans hostage for 444 days, they placed the Carter administration in a dilemma: If President Jimmy Carter acknowledged that the “students” weren’t students, but soldiers of Iran’s dictator Ayatollah Khomeini, the United States would be compelled to fight back. And Carter and his advisers didn’t want to do that.

So rather than admit the truth, Carter accepted the absurd fiction spun by the regime that Khomeini was an innocent bystander who, try as he might, couldn’t get a bunch of “students” in central Tehran to free the hostages.

At the base of their decision to prefer fantasy to reality with regard to Iran was the hope that Khomeini and his “students” would be satisfied with a pound or two of American flesh and wouldn’t cause Washington too many other problems.

...Khomeini and his “Death to America”-shouting followers got the message. They understood that Washington had given them a green light to attack Americans in moderate and, as Smith put it, “plausibly deniable” doses. it. For the next 40 years, Iran maintained its aggression against America. And from Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama, every president since Carter accepted and kept faith with Carter’s decision not to hold the Iranian regime responsible for the acts of aggression and war it carried out against America through proxies.

During the Iraq War from 2003-2011, Iran’s aggression reached new heights. Iran organized the Shi’ite militias that waged war against the U.S. forces in Iraq. It also supported Al-Qaeda in Iraq, which organized in Iran and used Iran as its logistical base for operations.

More than six hundred American forces were killed and thousands were wounded in attacks carried out with Iranian-made improvised explosive devices, (IEDs). Yet rather than confront Iran and take action against it, the Bush administration tried to make a deal with the mullahs.

Under Obama, reaching an accord with Iran was the singular goal of U.S. foreign policy. Every other goal was subordinated to Obama’s burning desire to appease Iran at the expense of Israel and the United States’ Sunni Arab allies.

This then brings us to President Trump. Trump’s decision to kill Qassem Soleimani—who as commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force was the head of all of Iran’s regional and global terror apparatuses—destroyed the Carter administration’s Iran narrative.

Soleimani was killed in Baghdad along with Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, the commander of one of the Soleimani-controlled Shi’ite militias in Iraq. Iraqi protesters, who have been demonstrating against Iran’s control over their government since last October, claim that Soleimani was the one who ordered al-Muhandis to kill the demonstrators. More than 500 demonstrators have been killed by those forces in Iraq over the past three months.

By killing the two together, the Americans exposed the big lie at the root of 40 years of deliberate American blindness to the reality of Iranian culpability and responsibility for the acts of terror and aggression its surrogates have carried out against America and its allies.

By killing Soleimani, Trump made clear that the blank check for aggression the previous six presidents gave Tehran is now canceled. From now on, the regime will be held responsible for its actions. From now on, U.S. policy towards Iran will be based on reality and not on escapism.

The second false narrative that has formed the basis of U.S. Middle East policy since Carter is that Israel and the so-called “occupation” are responsible for the absence of peace in the Middle East. Moved largely by Carter’s hostility towards the Jewish state, his administration was the first to call Israel’s control over Judea and Samaria an “occupation.” It determined, through a 1978 memo authored by Herbert Hansell, the State Department’s legal adviser, that the mere existence of Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria constituted a breach of international law.

Because the Hansell memo was based on a wholly specious interpretation of the Fourth Geneva Convention from 1949, and had no basis in actual international law, the Reagan administration refused to adopt it.

But that didn’t stop Ronald Reagan from adopting the anti-Israel substance of Carter’s policy narrative. Just as Reagan turned a blind eye to Iran’s responsibility for the terror attacks its proxies carried out against the United States—including the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut in April 1983 and the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut in November 1983—so he substantively accepted Carter’s anti-Israel narrative, which blamed Israel for the absence of Middle East peace.

Reagan appointed veteran diplomat Philip Habib to serve as his special envoy for Middle East peace. Habib put together a “peace plan” predicated on the notion of Israeli guilt.

The first Bush administration, the Clinton administration, the second Bush administration and of course the Obama administration all held to the Carter line that blamed Israel and its control over Judea and Samaria (and Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights, and—until 2005—Gaza), for the unrest and instability of the region. Obama, of course, went full circle. He adopted the Hansell memo as U.S. official policy and enabled the United Nations Security Council to pass a resolution criminalizing the existence of Jewish communities beyond the 1949 armistice lines.

The fact that the Carter narrative was self-evidently ridiculous and destabilizing made no impression on these successive administrations. PLO aggression and refusal to either disavow terrorism or accept Israel’s right to exist in any borders were brushed aside as irrelevant and unwelcome information.

Israel’s profound concessions for peace were pocketed, pooh-poohed and forgotten.

In November, the Trump administration put paid to the phony narrative of Israeli avarice with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s announcement that the administration was disavowing the Hansell memo and replacing it with the accurate, international law-based assessment that Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria are not inherently illegal.

Wednesday, while the world was awaiting Trump’s response to Iran’s failed missile attack against Iraqi bases housing U.S. forces, the Kohelet Policy Forum held a conference in Jerusalem on the legal and diplomatic significance of Pompeo’s announcement. In a pre-recorded message for the conference, Pompeo briefly explained why he decided to disavow the Hansell memo. His explanation could be equally applied to the Trump administration’s policy towards Iran.

In Pompeo’s words, “It is important that we speak the truth when the facts lead us to it. And that’s what we’ve done.”

For the American foreign policy establishment, Trump’s refusal to continue their 40-year marriage of policy to delusion is an unforgivable transgression, and a threat. Not only has he committed the crime of rejecting their collective “wisdom,” his reality-based policies might actually be working. The threat to them is obvious.

If Trump’s reality-based policies succeed, he will dismantle their foreign policy legacy. All their protestations of wisdom, all their fancy resumes and titles as former senior officials will lose their allure and market value.

Since Pompeo’s statement regarding the Israeli communities in Judea and Samaria related to an issue which, while critical, is less in the headlines today than it was under Obama, aside from a few peremptory condemnations the foreign-policy aristocrats ignored it. As they saw it, once they return to power and start working with an Israeli government led by someone other than Benjamin Netanyahu, the phony anti-Israel narrative will be restored to its rightful place as the foundation of U.S. policy.

The Iran story is different. Days before the drone strike that killed him, Soleimani tried to re-enact the 1979 “student” takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran with “protesters” in Baghdad. But this time it didn’t work. And Soleimani paid with his life for his failure. Iran’s half-hearted, failed missile attack against U.S. forces in Iraq showed that the Iranian regime is terrified of Trump and their reversal of fortune.

Trump’s policies expose the mendacity and rank insanity of his predecessors’ policies towards Iran and Israel. Since Obama’s policies were particularly radical, divorced from reality and devastating, Trump has reasonably singled them out for particular rebuke and condemnation. Among other things, reasonably, Trump said the missiles Iran shot at U.S. forces in Iraq were paid for by the $150 billion in sanctions relief and $1.8 billion in cash that flowed to the coffers of the IRGC through the 2015 nuclear agreement.

Rather than keep quiet as their signature policy was exposed as a strategic disaster, Obama administration officials and their supporters in Congress and the media went into very public paroxysms of rage. Ben Rhodes, Obama’s deputy national security adviser and chief propagandist, who sold the nuclear deal to a credulous and eager media, said Trump’s move would lead to war. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that the U.S. strike against Soleimani was “disproportionate,” hinting it was a war crime to kill the terrorist who had just ordered the seizure of a U.S. Embassy. She scheduled a congressional session to curb Trump’s power to confront Iranian aggression and nuclear proliferation.

On cue, a group of psychiatrists wrote an open letter to Congress insisting that Trump is crazy and must be restrained. (The same group has written several nearly identical letters since Trump took office.)

To protect and preserve their 40-year-old delusion-based policy, Trump’s domestic opponents are effectively supporting the Iranian regime against the United States. And as they see it, they have no choice. They are in a race against time. The more successful Trump’s reality-based policies towards Iran on the one hand and Israel on the other are, the harder it will be for the foreign policy establishment to restore their delusion-based policies when he leaves power. Given the stakes, we can assume that their attempts to clip Trump’s wings and debase him will increase in intensity, churlishness and irrationality as time goes by and as his successes mount.

Read more here.

Israel now an energy superpower

In the Legal Insurrection blog, William Jacobson reports in part,

while you were focused on Soleimani, Israel became an energy superpower.

Read about it here.

Israel's Defense Ministry unveils breakthrough laser technology

Artistic depiction of how innovative laser defense system would function on the battle field
(photo credit: Courtesy)

In the Jerusalem Post, Anna Ahronheim reports,

The Defense Ministry has made a technological breakthrough in the development of lasers that can intercept aerial threats, including rockets and anti-tank guided missiles, it announced Wednesday.

New laser technology “makes the security apparatus more lethal, more powerful and more advanced,” Defense Minister Naftali Bennett said Wednesday evening.

...The breakthrough recently made by the ministry is based on the precision of the laser beam, which can be focused on long-range targets and which can overcome atmospheric disturbances such as clouds and dust storms.

...They will also allow for a decrease in the number of missile interceptors used and the future potential to intercept a variety of threats, including unmanned aerial vehicles, drones and guided rockets.

...As a result of the breakthrough, the ministry has launched three programs for the development of high-energy laser demonstration systems in cooperation with the two companies: a ground-based laser system to complement the capabilities of the Iron Dome, development of a maneuverable platform-mounted laser system to defend troops in the field and the development of a laser demo system mounted on an air platform to intercept threats above cloud covers and for the defense of wide areas.

Read more here.

Did the US and Israel just collude to produce a massive breakdown in Iran's banking system?

Michael Ledeen writes in FrontPage Magazine,

The demonstrations against the failed Iranian regime have produced a massive breakdown in the country's banking security—the most devastating in the country’s history. According to the New York Times,

"As of Tuesday, details of 15 million bank debit cards in Iran had been published on social media in the aftermath of the protests, unnerving customers and forcing the government to acknowledge a problem. The exposure represented the most serious banking security breach in Iran, according to Iranian media and a law firm representing some of the victims."

This is a very big deal. After burning down hundreds of bank branches, the anti-regime demonstrators have now released the secrets of nearly twenty percent of the country’s population. Although expert analysts suspect a breach of such magnitude was likely the handiwork of a hostile nation state—the United States and Israel being the prime suspects—there is no hard evidence, and neither suspect has anything to say.

There is a possibility that Jerusalem and Washington worked together to maximize the pressure on Tehran. Both countries have penetrated Iran’s computerized systems in the past, and both are believed to have working relations with Iranians hostile to the regime. In a moment such as the present, with anti-regime demonstrations erupting all over the country, it would make sense to expose the accounts of the small fraction of the population with substantial bank balances.

If that is true, then the penetration of the Iranian banking system fits nicely with the objective of bringing maximum pressure to bear on the regime’s most loyal subjects. The prime targets are well known to the Israelis and the Americans, and have been sanctioned in the past.

The banks affected — Mellat, Tejarat and Sarmayeh — had all been sanctioned more than a year ago by the United States Treasury, which accused them of having transferred money on behalf of blacklisted entities of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, part of the armed forces. The entire Revolutionary Guards organization was designated as a terrorist group by the Trump administration last April.

Thus, the United States may have entered the fray against Iran, directly sabotaging the Persian banking system. The Trump Administration may have reasoned that a collapse of the economy will galvanize the Iranian people into action, and produce regime change.

...This is the vision I believe the president brings to the Iranian crisis. It is of a piece with his overall strategy of making things hot for our enemies, while offering them a chance to work things out at the negotiating table.

Now Trump undeniably has numerous foreign policy successes—and he deserves much credit for them. Most recently, his trade deal with China and the new U.S.A.-Canada-Mexico deal are praiseworthy achievements and decisive steps forward. The U.S. president has shown tenacity, patience and imagination. The triumph of Boris Johnson in the British elections also gives Trump a chance for a really big deal, starting with a bilateral agreement with Great Britain and proceeding to an embrace of an end to toleration of Hezbollah and other Iranian proxies throughout Europe.

Trump has opportunities galore, and tens of millions of Iranians await his next move.

The key here is that Trump is a dealmaker, not a revolutionary. He is not interested, for instance, in sending our soldiers to the Middle East. He doesn't seem to be completely invested in actually bringing down the Islamic Republic. He thinks, or acts as if he thinks, that misery will somehow eventually bring the mullahs to heel.

But this may not work. We live in a world in which evading sanctions is an art form, mastered by both the Iranians and our once-loyal European allies. Even the Saudis, as eager as anyone to see the end of the Islamic Republic, are baffled. The regime seems to dominate the situation, no matter how large the demonstrations. Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei doesn’t care about suffering Iranians, and he has murdered so many of them that he cannot expect leniency if the Islamic Republic comes down.

It is a revolutionary situation that lacks a revolutionary leader, and the one revolutionary country in the equation is the United States. And so we wait for the day that Donald Trump gets aggressive with the Iranian regime, speaks directly to the tens of millions of Iranians who await his words, and tells it like it is: we will do whatever we can to subvert the regime, and work with any and all Iranians who are ready for a makeover of that poor nation.

But that requires Trump to do what he has never done before, indeed what no American president has done: support a thoroughgoing Iranian revolution.

Read more here.

European Union engages in economic warfare against Israel

In the Federalist, Erielle Davidson writes in part, "As terrorists rain down hundreds of rockets on Israeli citizens in acts of jihadist warfare, the highest court of the European Union engages in its own economic warfare against the Jewish state."
Read more here.

Israel attacked by more than 600 rockets from Gaza

Israeli soldiers stand near a car that was direct hit by a rocket fired from the Gaza Strip on the Kibbutz Erez. Photo: Ilia Yefimovich/picture alliance via Getty Images

Zachary Basu reports in Axios,

More than 600 rockets were fired from the Gaza Strip within 24 hours on Sunday, killing at least 4 Israeli civilians for the first time since the 2014 war with Hamas, AP reports.

The big picture: The barrage of rocket attacks marks one of Israel and Gaza's "most intense flareups of violence in years," per AP. The Israeli military said it retaliated with 0ver 220 airstrikes against "high-quality" militant sites, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promising that Hamas will be held accountable for both its own actions and the actions of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad movement, which operates out of Gaza.

Arabs and Muslims are warming up to Israel, while the Left grows more hostile to Israel

Daniel Pipes writes in the Washington Times,

Barack Obama's policy of appeasing Tehran jolted the Arab states to get serious about the real threats facing them.

It is striking to note that full-scale Arab state warfare versus Israel lasted a mere 25 years (1948-73) and ended 45 long years ago; and that Turkey and Iran have since picked up the anti-Zionist torch.

That Arab and Muslim enmity has fractured, probably never to be reconstituted, amounts to one tectonic shift in the Arab-Israeli conflict. The second, no less important, involves the global Left's growing hostility to Israel.

...MbS versus Jeremy Corbyn symbolizes these two tectonic shifts, as does Israel now enjoying better relations with Egypt than with Sweden. The president of Chad turns up in Israel but a singer from New Zealand does not. Israel's athletes compete in the United Arab Emirates but get banned in Spain. Muslims show increasing indifference to the breakdown in Palestinian-Israeli diplomacy, but Leftists express growing anger over it.

...the rage against Israel is not about Ashkenazi-Sephardi relations, tensions on the Temple Mount, a possible attack on Iran's nuclear infrastructure, or Israel's own nuclear weapons. Rather, it almost exclusively concerns the status of some 3 million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Thanks to a mix of Palestinian public relations expertise and continued antisemitism, the welfare of this small and powerless but fanatical population has transmogrified into the premier global issue of human rights, getting endlessly more attention than, say, Ethiopia – and motivates nearly all denunciations of Israel.

Therefore, when the Left, now largely excluded from power, eventually returns to office in countries like Japan, India, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States, Israel will face a crisis due to the unresolved situations in the West Bank and Gaza.

Accordingly, a resolution of this issue should be an utmost priority for Israelis.

That does not mean touting yet another "peace plan" doomed to crash on the hard rock of Palestinian intransigence. It does mean, whatever one's favored plan might be, the need to end Palestinian aggression toward Israel: no more suicide attacks, kite bombings, and rockets. Only this will soothe Leftist rage.

Only an Israel victory and a Palestinian defeat will achieve this.

Read more here.

A tweet from Sean Davis

Question: given the discussion surrounding Russia, Montenegro, and Article 5 of NATO, if Israel were to strike Turkish vessels or assets providing material support to Hamas or other terrorist entities, would the U.S. be required to militarily defend Turkey? Why or why not?

— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) July 18, 2018

Nikki Haley is one of Trump's best appointments!

The UN Security Council was convened to discuss President Trump's announcement that America would move its embassy to Israel's capital, Jerusalem. Nikki Haley delivered a speech explaining how the US has worked to achieve peace and how the UN has unfairly attacked Israel!

Israel in the news today

In The Morning Rant at Ace of Spades, CBD writes,

Israel must be a really bad place. Worse than North Korea or Iran or Myanmar or Sudan or Venezuela. I mean, they let gays live, and let Arabs vote, and even allow churches and mosques. And worst of all, they have plenty of food, and free speech too! I can see why the world wants to fling poo at them.
Israeli Judo Champion Wins Gold In Abu Dhabi, Which Won't Acknowledge Israel. So He Sings Israeli National Anthem Himself.

When Tal Flicker, the Israeli judo champion, won the gold medal in Abu Dhabi, which refused to play the Israeli national anthem or display the flag of Israel, and played the theme of the International Judo Federation instead, he decided he would protest in the only way left to him: he quietly sang the Israeli national anthem himself.

Those of you who have been to Israel understand that the most fervent desire of most Israelis is to have a good life; peaceful and productive and interesting. The idea that Israel fixates on the "Palestinian problem" is laughable. What they want is security and peace. That the world not only does not recognize this, but actively pursues policies that marginalize a vibrant pluralistic democracy, simply because it is Jewish, makes a mockery of the platitudes often spoken about the Holocaust. They are just pissed that Hitler wasn't more successful.

In other news brought to us by Hank Berrien at The Daily Wire, On Monday afternoon, Israeli Defense Forces destroyed a network of terror tunnels near Khan Yunis in southern Gaza, according to AFP. The Times of Israel reported at least seven terrorists were killed, although other estimates ran as high as 12.

IDF spokesman Jonathan Conricus stated: "[The IDF] neutralized a terror tunnel leading into southern Israel from the vicinity of Khan Yunis. The tunnel was detonated from within Israel, close to the security fence. The (IDF's) actions are in light of this grave and unacceptable violation of Israeli sovereignty."

According to Brigadier General Ronen Manelis, the tunnel ran deep into Israeli territory.

On Sunday, Israel’s U.N. Ambassador Danny Danon announced that there was a tunnel underneath a Gaza school run by the U.N. agency for Palestinian refugees. He accused Hamas of using UNRWA facilities as “terror bases” and Gazan children as “human shields,” adding, “Yet another terror tunnel under an UNRWA schoolyard. This is what Hamas rule looks like and this is more proof of the double war crime committed as terror tunnels are built to attack Israelis, while using the children of Gaza as human shields.”

Israel is to blame for terrorism attacks committed by Palestinians?

Highly respected (by me) blogger Ace of Spades is going out on a limb. He advocates the firing of McMasters, Tillerson and Mattis, in that order,

with the possibility that the latter two will learn from the first firing and correct themselves.

What got Ace's ire? This report by Adam Kredo at the Washington Free Beacon.

The State Department is facing harsh criticism for claiming in an official report that Israel is to blame for terrorism attacks committed by Palestinians and accusing the Jewish state of being largely responsible for an impasse in peace negotiations, according to a leading member of Congress who is calling on the State Department to correct its "inaccurate and harmful" characterization of Israel.

...Rep. Peter Roskam (R. Ill.), co-chair of the House Republican Israel Caucus, criticized the latest report in a letter to Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and called on the administration to immediately amend it to portray Palestinian terror attacks as a primary reason for the impasse in peace talks.

The State Department's current characterization, Roskam claims, is harmful to Israel and likely to impede efforts by the Trump administration to renew peace talks.

"The State Department report includes multiple findings that are both inaccurate and harmful to combating Palestinian terrorism," Roskam wrote in a letter sent Thursday to the State Department, a copy of which was exclusively obtained by the Washington Free Beacon. "This report wrongly insinuates Israeli security measures on the Temple Mount and a stalled peace process as key forces behind terrorism."

"Most egregiously," Roskam adds, "it portrays the PA as innocent peacemakers far removed from being the source of terrorist activity."

Read more here.

At least Trump is trying

At Truth Revolt, Carolyn Glick writes,

...On Thursday, less than 48 hours after US President Donald Trump completed his successful visit to Israel, his chief negotiator Jason Greenblatt was back in town.

On Wednesday, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson set the tone for Greenblatt’s mission when he told reporters aboard Air Force One that during his visit, Trump “was putting a lot of pressure” on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas “to get back to the table” and negotiate a peace deal.

Tillerson went on to explain why Trump is so keen to make a deal.

“We solve the Israeli-Palestinian peace dilemma, we start solving a lot of the peace throughout the Middle East region,” he said.

Trump apparently agrees with his secretary of state.

At his joint appearance with Abbas in Bethlehem on Tuesday, Trump said, “I firmly believe that if Israel and the Palestinians can make peace, it will begin a process of peace all throughout the Middle East.”the people of Israel rationally fear the consequences of naturalizing 1.5 million to 2.5 million Palestinians who have been indoctrinated for more than 25 years to seek their annihilation.

...Trump said in Bethlehem that he is interested in spurring Palestinian economic growth. The fact is that the Palestinian economy grew the most when it was integrated in the Israeli economy. Integration with the Israeli economy, rather than handouts to PLO kleptocrats, is the key to Palestinian prosperity.

...In Riyadh, Trump said, “We will make decisions based on real-world outcomes – not inflexible ideology. We will be guided by the lessons of experience, not the confines of rigid thinking.”

It isn’t too late for Netanyahu to come forward. He can offer an alternative to the failed two-state fantasy. He can release himself, his country and Trump from the two-state/one-state cognitive straitjacket.

Trump doesn’t want to repeat the mistakes of his predecessors. But absent a clear strategic plan of action from Netanyahu, he will have no choice but to do so.

Read more here.

"There is no upside to Trump's move."

Caroline Glick reports,

...The US’s chief challenge in the Middle East today is to form a coalition of states and actors that can help it stem Iran’s rise as a nuclear-armed, terrorism-sponsoring regional power. The members of such a coalition are clear.

Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and the UAE stand united today in their opposition to Iran, its nuclear program, its support for Sunni and Shi’ite jihadists and terrorist groups, and its moves to establish an empire of vassals that spans westward through Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, southward to Yemen and eastward through Afghanistan.

The members of Iran’s coalition include its Lebanese foreign legion Hezbollah, the Assad regime, the Shi’ite militias in Iraq, Hamas, other Sunni terrorist groups aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood and Yemen’s Houthis.

By embracing the PLO, rather than build and strengthen the anti-Iranian alliance of Israel and the anti-Iranian, anti-Muslim-Brotherhood Arab states, Trump is tearing that alliance apart. In its place he is cobbling together an anti-Israel alliance comprised of Iran’s allies in Qatar and to a degree in Turkey, the PLO, and at least passively, Hamas. This anti-Israel alliance is supported, grudgingly, by the Saudis, Egyptians and others who cannot afford to be seen abandoning the Palestinians.

In other words, by embracing the PLO, Trump is strengthening Iran and its supporters at the expense of Israel, the US-aligned Sunni states and the US itself.

...by embracing Abbas and the PLO on Wednesday, Trump empowered Hamas. He signaled to Hamas – and to every other terrorist group in the Middle East – that to receive international support, including from his administration, all you need to do is say that you are willing to follow the PLO’s dual strategy of engaging simultaneously in terrorism and political warfare and subterfuge.

There is no upside to Trump’s move. It will not bring peace. It harms prospects for peace by empowering Abbas and his terrorist henchmen.

It will not strengthen Israel. It places Israel on a collision course with the Trump White House and undermines its regional posture.

It will not help the US to build a coalition to defeat Iran and its vassals. It subverts the coalition that already exists by embarrassing the Sunnis into siding with terrorists against Israel.

It does not advance the US war on terror. It empowers terrorists to kill Israelis and others by using US tax revenues to fund the PA, providing a blueprint for other terrorists to wage political war against the West and Israel.

And it harms Trump by alienating a key constituency and undermining his relations with Congress.

It is hard to see how Trump, now committed to this dangerous folly, can walk away from it. But to diminish the damage, a way must be found, quickly.

Read more here.

"The issue this time isn’t Israel, but Russia, yet the basic contours may very well be the same." ...“preserve” being a euphemism for “leak.”

Lee Smith writes at The Tablet,

But what if Donald Trump wasn’t the first or only target of an Obama White House campaign of spying and illegal leaks directed at domestic political opponents?

In a December 29, 2015 article, The Wall Street Journal described how the Obama administration had conducted surveillance on Israeli officials to understand how Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli officials, like Ambassador Ron Dermer, intended to fight the Iran Deal. The Journal reported that the targeting “also swept up the contents of some of their private conversations with U.S. lawmakers and American-Jewish groups.”

Despite this reporting, it seemed inconceivable at the time that—given myriad legal, ethical, political, and historical concerns, as well as strict National Security Agency protocols that protect the identity of American names caught in intercepts—the Obama White House would have actually spied on American citizens. In a December 31, 2016, Tablet article on the controversy, “Why the White House Wanted Congress to Think It Was Being Spied on By the NSA,” I argued that the Obama administration had merely used the appearance of spying on American lawmakers to corner opponents of the Iran Deal. Spying on U.S. citizens would be a clear abuse of the foreign-intelligence surveillance system. It would be a felony offense to leak the names of U.S. citizens to the press.

Increasingly, I believe that my conclusion in that piece was wrong. I believe the spying was real and that it was done not in an effort to keep the country safe from threats—but in order to help the White House fight their domestic political opponents.

“At some point, the administration weaponized the NSA’s legitimate monitoring of communications of foreign officials to stay one step ahead of domestic political opponents,” says a pro-Israel political operative who was deeply involved in the day-to-day fight over the Iran Deal. “The NSA’s collections of foreigners became a means of gathering real-time intelligence on Americans engaged in perfectly legitimate political activism—activism, due to the nature of the issue, that naturally involved conversations with foreigners. We began to notice the White House was responding immediately, sometimes within 24 hours, to specific conversations we were having. At first, we thought it was a coincidence being amplified by our own paranoia. After a while, it simply became our working assumption that we were being spied on.”

This is what systematic abuse of foreign-intelligence collection for domestic political purposes looks like: Intelligence collected on Americans, lawmakers, and figures in the pro-Israel community was fed back to the Obama White House as part of its political operations. The administration got the drop on its opponents by using classified information, which it then used to draw up its own game plan to block and freeze those on the other side. And—with the help of certain journalists whose stories (and thus careers) depend on high-level access—terrorize them.

Once you understand how this may have worked, it becomes easier to comprehend why and how we keep being fed daily treats of Trump’s nefarious Russia ties. The issue this time isn’t Israel, but Russia, yet the basic contours may very well be the same.

...What we know so far is that Obama administration officials unmasked the identity of one Trump team member, Michael Flynn, and leaked his name to the Washington Post’s David Ignatius.

...exposing Flynn’s name in the intercept for political purposes was an abuse of the national-security apparatus, and leaking it to the press is a crime.

This is familiar territory. In spying on the representatives of the American people and members of the pro-Israel community, the Obama administration learned how far it could go in manipulating the foreign-intelligence surveillance apparatus for its own domestic political advantage. In both instances, the ostensible targets—Israel and Russia—were simply instruments used to go after the real targets at home.

...The Obama administration would be less interested in what the Israelis were doing than in the actions of those who actually had the ability to block the deal—namely, Senate and House members. The administration then fed this information to members of the press, who were happy to relay thinly veiled anti-Semitic conceits by accusing deal opponents of dual loyalty and being in the pay of foreign interests.

...It didn’t take much imagination for members of Congress to imagine their names being inserted in the Iran deal echo chamber’s boilerplate—that they were beholden to “donors” and “foreign lobbies.” What would happen if the White House leaked your phone call with the Israeli ambassador to a friendly reporter, and you were then profiled as betraying the interests of your constituents and the security of your nation to a foreign power? What if the fact of your phone call appeared under the byline of a famous columnist friendly to the Obama administration, say, in a major national publication?

To make its case for the Iran Deal, the Obama administration redefined America’s pro-Israel community as agents of Israel. They did something similar with Trump and the Russians—whereby every Russian with money was defined as an agent of the state. Where the Israeli ambassador once was poison, now the Russian ambassador is the kiss of death—a phone call with him led to Flynn’s departure from the White House and a meeting with him landed Attorney General Jeff Sessions in hot water.

...The point of distributing the information so widely was to “preserve it,” the administration and its friends in the press explained—“preserve” being a euphemism for “leak.” The Obama team seems not to have understood that in proliferating that material they have exposed themselves to risk, by creating a potential criminal trail that may expose systematic abuse of foreign-intelligence collection.

Read more here.

Saudia Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, and Israel against Iran?

Bookworm reports,

There’s land if the Palestinians want it. Did you know that President al-Sisi in Egypt has offered the Palestinians a state that would include Gaza plus 618 adjacent square miles in the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula? This offer reflects the fact that the Egyptians, like the Jordanians, Saudis, and every other Sunni Arab state around can’t stand the Palestinians.

With Iran looming on the Iranian, the Sunni nations are becoming more aware that Israel is their bulwark against Iran. If they can get rid of the Palestinian issue — and get the troublesome Palestinians out of their countries — they can unite to face off against Iran. You can read more here.

"But, outside of the UN, there is some good news!"

Thanks to Bookworm, who provides this link to the delightful Nikki Haley in her first UN press conference.

Do go to Bookworm's site where she brilliantly exposes a Leftist hiding behind Anne Frank's skirts.

Nikki Haley stands up for Israel at UN

Adelle Nazarian reports at Breitbart,

United States Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley issued a scathing criticism of the UN Security Council over their “anti-Israel” bias on Thursday after emerging from her first regular monthly meeting at the international body.
“I have to admit; it was a bit strange,” Haley said of the council’s agenda.

The former South Carolina governor noted that while it is the UN Security Council’s mission to discuss ways to maintain international peace and security, their meeting on the Middle East failed to address some of the region’s most pressing issues — namely, Hezbollah’s illegal buildup of rockets in Lebanon, the money and weapons the Iran regime is supplying to its terrorist entities throughout Latin America and the Middle East, ways to defeat the Islamic State, and how to hold Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad accountable for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of his countrymen.

“Instead, the meeting focused on criticizing Israel, the one true democracy in the Middle East,” Haley said. She added that while she is “new” to the United Nations, she is well-seasoned in her understanding of the UN Security Council’s generations-long bias against Israel. “I’m here to say the United States will not turn a blind eye to this anymore,” she said. “I’m here to underscore the ironclad support of the United States for Israel.”

She called out the “breathtaking” double standards inherent in the Security Council.

“Incredibly, the UN Department of Political Affairs has an entire department devoted to Palestinian affairs,” she said. “Imagine that. There is not a division devoted to illegal missile launches from North Korea. There is no division devoted to the world’s number one state sponsor of terror, Iran.”

...“We will never repeat the terrible mistake of Resolution 2334 and allow one-sided security council resolutions to condemn Israel,” Haley said. “Instead, we will push for action on the real threats we face in the Middle East.”

...“Israel’s place in the world is changing,” Haley said. “Israel is building up new diplomatic relationships; more and more countries recognize how much Israel contributes to the world.” She said they realize that Israel is “a beacon of stability in a troubled region.” She concluded her speech by saying, “it is the UN’s anti-Israel bias that is long overdue for change… The United States will not hesitate to speak out against these biases in defense of our friend and ally Israel.”

Read more here.

Paris "peace" summit declaration contains five offensive anti-Israel components

Aaron Klein reports at Breitbart,

Instead of convening a summit on the ongoing civil war in Syria, or the migrant crisis threatening Europe, or the rampant anti-Semitism plaguing its own country, France on Sunday held a convention attended by over 70 nations to affirm the international community’s commitment to creating a Palestinian state.

Klein lists six items included in the final document that were offensive to Israel.

1 – The text draws a moral equivalency between “violence,” which would include Palestinian terrorism targeting civilians, and “settlement activity,” meaning Israelis building homes in the West Bank or eastern sections of Jerusalem.

2 – The declaration calls for Israel to “fully end the occupation that began in 1967,” language that seems to mean that Israel would need to withdraw from the entire West Bank and eastern Jerusalem and thus shrink the country to indefensible borders.

3 – The declaration patronizes Israel by calling on both parties to “restate” their commitments to the two-state solution.

4 – The declaration gives credibility to the so-called Arab Peace Initiative, which threatens Israel’s security.

5 – The Paris declaration “welcomed” UN Security Council Resolution 2334, which passed last month when the U.S. abstained and refers to the entire West Bank and eastern Jerusalem as so-called occupied Palestinian territories while demanding a complete halt to all Israeli construction in those areas.

Read more here, as Klein explains further each of the five points.