By Stanley Renshon, CIS.org

Democrats and many Republicans view the current immigration legislation now being considered in Congress primarily through a political prism. For Democrats, the new legislation presents the opportunity to add many millions of new immigrants — sympathetic to their party’s perspective of larger and more “helpful” government — to the country’s voting rolls and thus help bring about their dream of a permanent Democratic majority.

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We’ve gathered some poll numbers that anti-Second Amendment politicians should take into account before national elections in 2014, so tell your reps. Of Americans surveyed: 1) “58 percent of people worry that stricter gun legislation would make it more difficult for people to protect their families;” 2) only 4% consider gun control the “most important problem facing this country today;” and, 3) only 47% “say they are ‘angry’ or ‘disappointed’ that gun legislation failed to pass.” Regarding a very important subset of U.S. citizenry, “15,000 verified law enforcement professionals” taking part in a recent gun control survey “oppose the theories brought forth by gun-control advocates” and “feel that those [gun] controls will negatively affect their ability to fight violent criminals.”

First, from Pew via ABC:

… 48 percent of gun owners purchased firearms for protection — an increase of 22 percent from the survey conducted in August of 1999. 65 percent of women listed protection as their top priority, compared to 43 percent in 1999, while 42 percent of men said protection was their main concern, up 21 points from 1999. …

58 percent of people worry that stricter gun legislation would make it more difficult for people to protect their families and homes …

Second, from Gallup via CNS:

Only 4 percent of Americans think guns and gun control are an important problem facing the country, according to Gallup, and far more Americans are concerned about the economy, unemployment and the federal debt. …

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Here, you can thank those senators who voted yesterday against the destruction of the Second Amendment via phone, email, Twitter, and Facebook. These senators deserve our continual support. They acted as they should because “Upon taking office, senators-elect must swear or affirm that they will ‘support and defend the Constitution.’” Even though the Second Amendment is quite clear to many Americans, as it succinctly states that “the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed,” there are extremists who care nothing about our great nation’s founding principles. But these pro-Second Amendment senators stepped up to the plate for gun rights full-well knowing that they will be targeted by special interest groups for being “soft” on gun control.

After the defeat of anti-gun rights legislation, President Obama “flashed anger as he said that the gun rights lobby had ‘willfully lied’ about the legislation, and that Republicans and Democrats had ‘caved to the pressure’” of the supposedly nefarious gun lobby. But was Obama really doing the lying?”

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By Barry Rubin

On the issues about which the world is obsessed, Israel’s new government is basically a continuation of the old one. That is the key point to keep in mind regarding the new coalition which has a comfortable 68-seat majority, well over the 61 minimum parliamentarians required.

Basically, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is in a strong position as these things go. It is notable that there is not a single other person seriously considered to be a serious candidate for prime minister. Of course, he will have the usual headaches of managing a disparate coalition in which parties will quarrel, threaten to walk out, and make special demands.

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by Richard Butrick,* THINK-ISRAEL

Forget the Five Pillars[1] of Islam. It is the Five Stages of Islam that threaten the fundamental freedoms of Western Democracy. Freedoms which include freedom of thought, expression, and association and the crucial derived right of freedom of the press. We should never forget that “Islam” means submission — the opposite of self-determination and Enlightenment values.

Six years ago Dr. Peter Hammond published[2] a remarkable book which included a statistical study of the correlation between Muslim to non-Muslim population ratios and the transition from conciliatory Islam to fascist Islam. The stages are the same in 2011 but the demographics have changed to show an alarming progression. Many European nations and the U.S. are on the cusp of moving to a higher bracket. The demographics change but the story is the same. First comes the taqiyya and[3] the kitman; then comes the Sword of Islam. Imam[4] Rauf, the Ground Zero Mosque promoter, is the current master of taqiyya. He has gulled everyone from Bloomberg[5] to Maureen Dowd[6] of the NYT — who fanaticizes over male Muslims. Expect doppelgangers of Khomeini for stage 5 and Islamic PEACE at last.

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by Nidra Poller*

What is Europe going to do about Islam? Submit? Resist? Or just wait it out, dimwittedly? The recent French presidential election offers insight into the way Islam, or more exactly the Islamist factor, may eventually play out in European politics.

Despite attempts by the Left to focus the debate on the economic crisis, Islam played a decisive role in the contest. The Socialist candidate, whose platform was tilted to favor the party’s Muslim clientele, could not have won without total support in the second round of voting from far Left parties marked by zealous anti-Zionism and a full range of anti-Western ideologies. The question of Islam-in-France was raised with unprecedented candor by incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy of the Movement for a Popular Majority (UMP). For the first time in France, a major party clearly advocated a push back against Islam (qualified of course with the adjective “radical”). This strategy fired up the enthusiasm of the base, mobilized voters, brought tens of thousands to party rallies, and led to a daily increase in Sarkozy’s polling figures. It would be fair to estimate that if he had had one more week to campaign he might have defeated Hollande during the second-round vote on May 6, 2012.

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by David J. Rusin*

Zead Ramadan, board president of the New York chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), is eyeing a bigger platform from which to promote his Islamist agenda: a seat on the New York City Council. If he prevails, the city that endured 9/11 will count among its lawmakers a senior official in an organization linked to the financing of terrorists and intent on frustrating law enforcement efforts to foil the next jihad plot.

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By Barry Rubin

OH! pleasant exercise of hope and joy!
For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood
Upon our side, we who were strong in love!
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven!–Oh! times,
In which the meager, stale, forbidding ways
Of custom, law, and statute, took at once
The attraction of a country in romance!

–William Wordsworth, Poem on the French Revolution, 1789

A decent but very leftist British Middle East expert once described for me his experience in Iran in 1979. As a leftist, he had discounted any idea that Islamists might take over the country before the revolution, dismissing them as insignificant. But then he supported the revolution against the “reactionary, pro-Western” shah.

He had many friends among Iranian leftists. Quickly, he went to Tehran and scheduled meetings at the leftist newspaper established after the revolution. The newspaper was named with the Persian word for dawn, recalling–intentionally or not I have no idea–the words of another revolutionary romantic quoted above.

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by Daniel Pipes*

Were Barack Obama re-elected, I predicted two months before the Nov. 2012 presidential vote, “the coldest treatment of Israel ever by a U.S. president will follow.” Well, election’s over and that cold treatment is firmly in place. Obama has signaled in the past two months what lies ahead by:

• Choosing three senior figures – John Kerry for State, John Brennan for the CIA, and Chuck Hagel for Defense – who range from clueless to hostile about Israel.
• Approving a huge gift of advanced weapons – 20 F-16 fighter jets and 200 M1A1 Abrams tanks – to the Islamist government in Egypt despite the fact that its president, Mohamed Morsi, has becoming increasingly despotic and calls Jews “blood-suckers, … warmongers, the descendants of apes and pigs.”
• Reiterating the patronizing 35-year old tactic relied upon by anti-Israel types to condemn Israeli policies while pretending to be concerned for the country’s welfare: “Israel doesn’t know what its own best interests are.”
• Ignoring evidence of Cairo importing Scud missile parts from North Korea.
• Rebuffing the 239 House members who called for closing the PLO office in Washington in response to the PLO’s drive for state-observer status at the United Nations.

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By Barry Rubin

As expected, Israel has once again made Benjamin Netanyahu its prime minister. The results were not as positive for him as they might have been but are good enough to reelect him.

While some might find this paradoxical, the results show that Israelis have a basic consensus and yet have very different ways of expressing their political positions. This isn’t surprising given the fact that 32 parties were on the ballot.

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by Şenay Yıldız*

Translation of the original text: Ortadoğu liderliğine en yakın ülke Türkiye
Translated by Elif S. Gürbey

Founder and president of the Middle East Forum, Daniel Pipes is well known for his work on the Middle East and political Islam. Pipes, an award-winning columnist for the National Review and Jerusalem Post, writes commentaries and articles about the Middle East in leading media organizations such as the BBC, Al Jazeera, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post. After visiting Turkey last month, Pipes, who has 12 books and numerous articles on Islam, Syria, and the Middle East, published an article in National Review Online titled “Talking Turkey.” We talked with him [in mid-December] about his impressions of Turkey and his expectations from the Middle East.

- When were you in Turkey the last time?
I was in Turkey two weeks ago. I visited in 2007 as well. My first visit to Turkey was in 1972. I spent the summer of 1973 trying to learn Turkish while living in Istanbul’s Üsküdar quarter … but I was not very successful at it.

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by Ambassador (ret.) Yoram Ettinger, “Second Thought: a US-Israel Initiative,” “Israel Hayom”

President Obama’s criticism of Prime Minister Netanyahu — on the eve of the January 22, 2013 Israeli election — underlines the secondary role played by the Palestinian issue in shaping US-Israel strategic cooperation.

Since March, 2009, Obama has systematically scorned Netanyahu’s policies on the Arab-Israeli conflict in general and the Palestinian issue, Jerusalem and the construction of Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria, in particular. However, since March, 2009, irrespective of harsh disagreements over the Palestinian issue, the mutually-beneficial US-Israel strategic cooperation has expanded, especially in areas which feature the distinctive Israeli added-value: intelligence-sharing, counter-terrorism, homeland security, missile defense, training, battle tactics, joint exercises, pre-positioning of military hardware, medical treatment of soldiers and civilians, research and development, space, commercial and defense industries and high tech in general. Neither Israel nor the US intends to subordinate primary interests to secondary issues by cutting off their noses to spite their faces.

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by Alexander H. Joffe*

In January, Israeli voters will go to the polls for an election that promises to hand Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu a renewed mandate. Few prospects are more loathsome to the Israeli left, US President Barack Obama’s administration, most European leaders, or many American Jews.

But no one regards the prospect of another Netanyahu government with more anguish than the Palestinians. In the Arab-Israeli conflict’s long, tortured history, they have reviled no Israeli prime minister – with the possible exception of Ariel Sharon – more than Netanyahu. The reason is simple: he is one of them.

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by Daniel Pipes*

Like so many other conservatives, I had come to assume that the Tea Party, the 2010 election results, Solyndra, 8 percent unemployment, Benghazi, and an aroused opposition (said one Romney adviser: on election day, “you just don’t want to get in the way of a Republican heading into the polls”) assured defeat for Barack Obama’s bid for a second term. His victory was therefore particularly bitter. Was I alone in sleeping badly and avoiding the news for days?

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By Yoram Ettinger, “Second Thought: a US-Israel Initiative”

On the eve of the January 22, 2013 Israeli election, the Israeli constituent demonstrates more realism than Israeli politicians. Israelis highlight security imperatives when responding to reality-driven polls, which pose questions based on the stormy Arab Winter and not on the mirage of the Arab Spring.

Increasingly, Israelis recognize that — in the Middle East — bolstered security constitutes a solid base for survival and for the pursuit of peace. They realize that the pursuit of peace, by lowering the threshold of security, could jeopardize survival, as well as the slim chance for peace.

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