Although the wave of mass protests spreading through the Arabic-speaking countries may have begun to recede, it has left a wide-ranging impact on the region. Three authoritarian regimes have collapsed, and the rest are experiencing varying degrees of duress.
This emerging political and strategic landscape has major implications for Israeli national security. Regional turmoil has effectively ruled out a major advance in Arab-Israeli diplomacy, enabled Ankara and Tehran to expand their influence, continued the decline of U.S. influence, and emboldened extremists.
So the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, both known genocide-promoting, Israel-hating, and Jew-killing bands of thugs have signed a “reconciliation deal.” So what? They hate each other as much or more than they hate Jews. They’ll never make with peace with Israel, no matter that morons like Defense Secretary Leon Panetta scream that Israel, a civilized democracy, is the party which needs to, “Get back to the damn [negotiating] table,” with two, not just one, group of homicidal maniacs. Palestinian blood-hatred against Israelis has been well-documented for years; they’ve been killing Israeli Jews, Arabs, Druze, Christians, etc., for years — yet the drum-beat persists that Israel needs to make concessions. Don’t believe me? Listen to the latest evil vitriol of Hamas in its own words (e.g., “We harvest the skulls of the Jews”) for yourself, courtesy of MEMRI:
It’s not every day that the leader of a brand-new country makes his maiden foreign voyage to Jerusalem, capital of the most besieged country in the world, but Salva Kiir, president of South Sudan, accompanied by his foreign and defense ministers, did just that in late December. Israel’s President Shimon Peres hailed his visit as a “moving and historic moment.” The visit spurred talk of South Sudan locating its embassy in Jerusalem, making it the only government anywhere in the world to do so.
The anti-Israel company LUSH Cosmetics has quietly closed its Beverly Hills location approximately 3 months after JtB organized a protest outside the store to expose the company’s support of PLO extremism.
Chanukah was celebrated in grand style in the Sunshine State, as a veritable panoply of community leaders, an array of top tier Jewish performers and 13,000 people gathered for the 32nd annual South Florida Chanukah Festival. Sponsored by Chabad-Lubavitch of South Broward County, the event which was held on the 7th night of Chanukah, featured the very best in Jewish music, food and cultural traditions.
Editors’ note: Yoaz Hendel now works in the Israeli prime minister’s office. This article was written before his government service; views expressed herein are his alone.
While the Obama administration has not reconciled itself to the futility of curbing Tehran’s nuclear buildup through diplomatic means, most Israelis have given up hope that the international sanctions can dissuade the Islamic Republic from acquiring the means to murder by the millions. Israel’s leadership faces a stark choice — either come to terms with a nuclear Iran or launch a preemptive military strike.
It is ironic that Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU), Israel’s only university bearing the name of the Jewish state’s founding father, and established in the ancient desert he dreamt of reviving, has become a hotbed of anti-Israel propaganda at the expense of proper scholarly endeavor.
So much so that an international committee of scholars, appointed by Israel’s Council for Higher Education to evaluate political science and international relations programs in Israeli universities, recently recommended that BGU “consider closing the Department of Politics and Government” unless it abandoned its “strong emphasis on political activism,” improved its research performance, and redressed the endemic weakness “in its core discipline of political science.” In other words, they asked that the Department return to accurate scholarship rather than indoctrinate the students with libel.
The same day the committee’s recommendation was revealed, Professor David Newman — who founded that department and bequeathed it such a problematic ethos, for which “achievement” he was presumably rewarded with a promotion to Deanship of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, from where he can shape other departments in a similar way — penned an op-ed in the Jerusalem Post in which he compared Israel’s present political culture to that of Nazi Germany. “I will no doubt be strongly criticized for compared making such a comparison,” he wrote,
“European countries are asleep and don’t perceive Iran as a danger. They have adopted a Chamberlain-like attitude and are much more sympathetic to Islamist causes that we’ll ever know,” said Likud MK Tzipi Hotovely at a recent speaking date before the south Florida Jewish community. Addressing an audience of over 100 at a Chabad sponsored “Lunch and Learn” in Miami Beach on December 14th, Ms. Hotovely, who sits on the Knesset’s Security and Defense Committee, referenced her recent trip to Belgium where she had attended a meeting of NATO members.
Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi, AKP) was reelected to a third term in June 2011. This remarkable achievement was mainly the result of the opposition’s weakness and the rapid economic growth that has made Turkey the world’s sixteenth largest economy. But Ankara’s growing international profile also played a role in the continued public support for the conservative, Islamist party. Indeed, in a highly unusual fashion, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan began his victory speech by saluting “friendly and brotherly nations from Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut, Amman, Cairo, Sarajevo, Baku, and Nicosia.”[1] “The Middle East, the Caucasus, and the Balkans have won as much as Turkey,” he claimed, pledging to take on an even greater role in regional and international affairs. By 2023, the republic’s centennial, the AKP has promised that Turkey will be among the world’s ten leading powers.
There is a constant effort — especially by the anti-Israel left–to portray those who express mainstream Israeli public opinion and the views of professional analysts as “right-wing” or “Likudnik.” This leads me to wonder what one would have to say to please these people. What would be the equivalent of a “liberal” position for Israel according to them? What kinds of positions would they see as legitimate?
What follows is not meant to exaggerate in any way but is, I believe, a genuine list of what they demand. To please them, I presume one would have to say the following:
The obsession of the EU, the USA, the UN, the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), Russia and even the Vatican to interfere in Israel’s domestic and foreign policy reminds me of the treatment of a Big Brother who has failed to do right in his past and thinks that he can make amends by forcing little brother to make all the sacrifices that Big Brother never has and never will make to satisfy a guilty conscience.
The Israel Academia Monitor (IAM) watchdog, which “monitors abuses of academic freedom and politicization of Israeli campuses by extremists and radicals,” has found, “Israeli academic institutions have been misused in recent years for radical anti-Israeli and even anti-Semitic propagandizing, often by tenured radicals with embarrassing academic records and dubious research credentials.”
For years, I have risked scorn, defamation, and even physical menace for telling the truth about the “Palestinian” Lie.
Although the “Palestinians” claim a sacred national identity with roots in the Holy Land, the truth is that no such people or group ever existed historically. (Yes, I know that now, given the enormous propaganda and funding for terrorism that there is, indeed, a group of people who call themselves “Palestinians” and who are viewed as such by the immediate world.)
On Sunday morning, December 11th, over 50 people gathered at the Israeli Consulate in New York to vocally express their revulsion at the recent decision by the Israeli government to demolish the community of Givat Aryeh. Organized by Americans For A Safe Israel (AFSI), its executive director Helen Freedman who just returned from Israel on the organization’s bi-annual Chizuk mission, told those gathered, “Just two weeks ago, we celebrated the dedication of a new Torah scroll that was presented to the residents of Itamar and Givat Aryeh in the Shomron by its sponsor, AFSI member Jack Ross. Now we are totally disheartened to learn that the destruction of this community was orchestrated by a decision of the Netanyahu/Barak government.”
In a rare glimpse behind the curtain, a Palestinian scandal sheds a lot of light on the Palestinian Authority, Arab politics, and Western illusions. Palestinian Authority (PA) Minister of Labor Ahmed Majdalani was being interviewed by a radio station when, not realizing that his microphone was on, he referred to Palestinian workers as “brothers of whores.” Hundreds of callers complained. Majdalani’s answer? He claimed he was talking about Israelis, not Palestinians!
Articles/Entries
