Showing posts sorted by relevance for query egypt explosives. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query egypt explosives. Sort by date Show all posts

Thursday, September 24, 2015

From Ian:

IDF Blog: The Palestinian Attacks that Terrorized Israel this Year
In the past 12 months the lives of thousands of Israelis have been threatened by Palestinian terror. Driving your car, taking the bus, or simply walking around- daily routine has become dangerous to Israelis. Here is a recap of all the main terrorist attacks against Israelis in the last year.
October 2014
October 22- A 20 year old Palestinian terrorist, Abed a-Rahman a-Shalud, drove his car into a Jerusalem light rail station, killing a three-month-old infant, Haya Zissel Braun, and a 22 year-old Ecuatorian, Karen Mosquera, and injuring seven others.
November 2014
November 10- A Palestinian stabbed an IDF soldier near the Haganah train station in Tel Aviv. The soldier, Almog Shilony, was evacuated to the hospital in critical condition. He succumbed to his wounds later that evening.
PMW: Fatah: Israel is decapitating the Dome of the Rock
In a cartoon published on the website of Fatah's Information and Culture Commission, Israel is portrayed as an Islamic State executioner dressed in black with a Star of David on his hood and the text “Judaization” across his robe. The executioner is swinging an axe, about to decapitate a Palestinian whose head is the Dome of the Rock. The Palestinian is resting his head on a sleeping chopping block labelled “the international disregard.” [Website of Fatah's Information and Culture Commission, Sept. 19, 2015]
This cartoon is yet another example of how the Palestinian Authority and Fatah - both headed by Mahmoud Abbas - keep fanning the flames of recent months’ riots and unrest in Jerusalem. Palestinian Media Watch has documented that the PA and Fatah support and promote the riots in Jerusalem.
PA Chairman Abbas himself promised that Allah will reward those who "will not allow" Jews' "filthy feet" to "defile" the Al-Aqsa Mosque and Jerusalem.
The official PA daily has published cartoons promoting rock throwing and both PA and Fatah officials have endorsed continued conflict at the Temple Mount, encouraging Ribat - religious conflict/war to protect land claimed to be Islamic.
Earlier this month, Fatah spokesman in Jerusalem, Raafat Alayan, repeated the libel that Israel is acting “to destroy the Al-Aqsa Mosque and build the alleged Temple”:
Is the Iran Deal a Dud?
Two new studies have confirmed that this fear is justified. Iran will be able quickly to produce nuclear weapons fuel even under the terms of the JCPOA.
Iran can emerge in 15-20 years, or less, as a nuclear power with the potential, at a time of its choosing, "to make enough weapon-grade uranium for several nuclear weapons within a few weeks." – David Albright, founder and president of the Institute for Science and International Security.
If sanctions failed to do the job, and if Iran engaged in future illegal nuclear activity -- no matter how serious -- would the U.S. use military force? When the U.S. and its allies discovered that North Korea had illegally built a nuclear weapon and massively cheated on the agreed framework, did anyone use military force to stop its effort? No.
The likelihood is far greater that the U.S. will look the other way in order not to admit that the deal it agreed to is a dud.
Iran has already repeatedly attacked the United States, from the murder of 241 Marines in Lebanon in 1983, to the attack on Khobar Towers; the murder of Americans over Lockerbie; the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya; the attack on the USS Cole; has been complicit in the attacks of September 11, 2001; is still holding four Americans hostages and, openly, is daily threatening America again.

Tuesday, September 01, 2015

From Ian:

UK Labor Front-Runner Campaigned to Free Israel Embassy Bombers
The man likely to be elected head of the UK's major opposition party, Labor MP Jeremy Corbyn, campaigned in support of two terrorists convicted for bombing Jewish and Israeli targets in London, it has been revealed.
It is just the latest disturbing revelation of the Labor front runner's connection to extremists, including terrorists and virulent anti-Semites.
Corbyn led the campaign to release Palestinian terrorists Jawad Botmeh and Samar Alami, who were convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison for bombing the Israeli Embassy and a Jewish charity headquarters in 1994.
14 people were injured in the embassy attack, while six were wounded in the attack on the offices of the United Jewish Israel Appeal (UJIA) just one day later. Both attacks involved car bombs packed with high explosives.
Botmeh and Alami were found in possession of five pounds of explosives, which investigators say were were used to make the bombs, and a sizable cache of guns. But while they admitted possession of the arms the convicted terrorists protested their innocence, saying they weren't intended for use in the UK. Botmeh even claimed Israel had bombed the sites themselves to gain sympathy.
But a 2001 appeal against their conviction was rejected, with the prosecution noting the "overwhelming" evidence of their involvement in the plot - though their suspected accomplices have never been caught.
Undeterred, Corbyn took up their cause in 2002, signing five early day motions in Parliament between 2002-2006 and calling for their parole, according to the Jewish Chronicle. He called for the pair's release repeatedly, and in 2003 questioned then-Home Secretary David Blunkett over the investigation, suggesting the men had been framed.
His support for the bombers continued after their release from prison as well.
Douglas Murray: Jeremy Corbyn isn’t alone in thinking that Osama bin Laden’s death was ‘a tragedy’
The news that Jeremy Corbyn thought the death of Osama bin Laden ‘a tragedy‘ because he was never put on trial is not very surprising. Nor is it as far-out-there as most of his comments.
I did a BBC Question Time immediately after bin Laden’s death where I got the impression I was the only person in Britain not to feel sad about the terrorist’s death. Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Paddy Ashdown and most of the audience seemed horrified by the terrorist’s early demise and were most exercised of all over whether or not he had been given an appropriately ‘Islamic’ burial.
Fortunately there was a woman in the audience (in Hammersmith, London) who had been on the Tube on 7 July and had seen people ripped from their lives far more brutally and with far less reason than Osama bin Laden was. But most people in the room were far too high on ‘liberal’ fury to care about that or about commuters murdered on the transport most of them would use each morning.
All of which is to say that people should beware of thinking Corbyn is in a minority on this one. It is possible – I have certainly thought for some time – that a liberal death-wish, as exemplified by weeping over your enemies, is fairly mainstream in our country these days.
Emails Show Blumenthal Pushed Son’s Anti-Israel Activism On Hillary
In response to a tweet from The Daily Caller’s Jamie Weinstein asking the younger Blumenthal if he was an “informal adviser” to Clinton, Blumenthal responded, “I warned her about the danger of #JSIL. She didn’t listen.”
The JSIL (The Jewish State of Israel in the Levant) hashtag on Twitter is the creation of Max and fellow anti-Israel writer, Rania Khalek. The hashtag is meant to compare Israel to the terrorist organization ISIL.
In June 2010, Sid sent Clinton a piece Max wrote about the Gaza-bound flotilla carrying pro-Palestinian activists, which ended in a deadly raid by Israeli commandos after the flotilla refused to turn around when it attempted to break through Israel’s coastal territory.
The incident remains in dispute to this day. In his piece, Max claims that Israel provided no proof the flotilla passengers had terrorist connections and Israeli media was playing along with whatever the Israel Defense Forces told them.
Sid sent Clinton another Max article that attacked Israel over the flotilla incident in June 2010. The piece is titled, “The Flotilla Raid Was Not ‘Bungled.’ The IDF Detailed Its Violent Strategy In Advance.”
A few months later in August, Sid sent Clinton an email with Max’s piece that described Israeli teenagers who spent their summer demolishing Palestinian structures in the Bedouin village of Al-Arakib. Max calls it the “Summer Camp Of Destruction.” (h/t Effect)
Israeli-Palestinian Faceoff - on a Welsh Mountain?
Now that's commitment: When a group of British pro-Israel activist got wind of a fund-raising event for a terrorist-linked charity they decided they had to act.
Dozens had already signed up for the fundraiser for Interpal, a charity which is banned in the US for funding Hamas, but which is still legal in the UK, despite Hamas also being a proscribed terrorist group there.
Hamas is responsible for the murder of thousands of Israelis and the maiming of many more, mostly civilians. Its charter details its commitment to the destruction of the State of Israel and the ultimate genocide of the Jewish people.
Joseph Cohen, founder and leader of the Israel Advocacy Movement, decided to arrange a counter-protest in response. A simple enough task - except the fund-raiser was a hike up the highest mountain in England and Wales, Mount Snowdon.
But that didn't deter the half-dozen Israel activists who, together with Cohen, schlepped all the way from London to Wales for a mountaintop showdown.
They decided the most appropriate response would be to dedicate their own hike to the One Family organization, which helps survivors of terrorist attacks and bereaved families deal with their physical, psychological and emotional wounds.
However, not wanting to tip-off the pro-Palestinian group, they only announced their own fundraiser after the event.

Monday, August 17, 2015

From Ian:

IDF plans for possible Syria operation as jihadist, Hezbollah threats mount
The Israeli military is preparing for a possible ground operation on the Syrian side of the Golan Heights in the event of sustained rocket strikes or coordinated terror attacks against Israel either by Sunni jihadists or Hezbollah operatives.
The number of Islamists flooding into the area close to the border with Israel has the IDF on high alert, Channel 2 reported Sunday, adding that the military held a large-scale drill last week simulating a possible advance into Syria and the evacuation of Israeli civilians from border communities.
According to a Channel 10 report Sunday, the drill included preparation for a scenario in which Islamist forces launch a sophisticated, multi-pronged attack on Israeli troops, similar to attacks against Egyptian security forces in Sinai in recent months.
The IDF is also planning for a possible Hezbollah offensive directed by Iran, with an IDF source saying that hundreds of Hezbollah members are present in the Golan, and that Tehran has been behind several recent attacks against Israel. Israeli officials have routinely raised concerns over the presence of Iranian and Hezbollah fighters using positions in the Syrian Golan, partially held by rebel forces, to attack Israel.
“It’s clear that Iran is behind all of the terror attacks here [in the Golan] in the past two years,” the IDF officer said Sunday during a briefing with reporters. “The Iranians are using the border – they establish units – whether it’s [Jihad] Mughniyeh, [Samir] Kuntar, and more – to carry out [the attacks].”


Iran׳s Al Quds Force builds forward command near Israeli border, but war isn't on the horizon
On Sunday the IDF gave Israeli military reporters a tour in the area of Mount Hermon in the Golan Heights and later there was a briefing with senior commanders in the Northern Command. As is usually the case with such briefings, facts and assessments were presented. They were rather routine. There certainly was not anything dramatic in the IDF's comments that suggested a change, an increased state of preparedness or higher level of alert.
But to drive 200 km. from Tel Aviv in each direction and to go a whole day without filing news? No way. So after the tour and the briefings, journalists were filmed in a fighting stance with the northern Golan Heights border fence in the background, delivering reports on an IDF plan for a ground attack in Syria.
Indeed, this possibility was also brought up, but it was a marginal piece in a presentation of a number of hypothetical scenarios.
Imagine the response from media, politicians or the public if the chief of staff or another senior army official would say that the IDF has no plan and is not prepared for the worst case scenario. Of course the IDF prepares for every possibility, even the most difficult. This is the role of the commanders: to prepare the IDF for every situation, scenario or eventuality.
However, the few sentences uttered by the officers giving the briefing about the possibility of the IDF taking control of territory in Syria, and even conquering a village or two on the border, were on the margins of what was said. These sentences were intended to explain that this is only one scenario that was practiced in a wide-ranging exercise that was carried out recently by the IDF's 210th Regional Bashan Division to prepare for a situation in which one of the terror groups, like the Nusra Front or Islamic State would try to break through the Golan border to attack IDF soldiers in the way that the Sinai Province of the Islamic State (formerly known as Ansar Bayit al-Maqdes) are doing against the Egyptian army.
Video: IDF Kills Iran-Sponsored Golan Terrorists
The IDF published video Sunday of an incident from last month in which it eliminated terrorists who infiltrated the northern Israeli Golan Heights from Syria. The terrorists, who set off on their mission from the village of Hadr in Syria, intended to plant powerful bombs and set them off against the IDF.
A senior military source in the Northern Command said that Iran was involved in all the recent terror attacks in the Golan. “The Iranians are behind all of the attacks and attempted attacks,” he said. “In the internecine fighting between them, [the battling forces in Syria] are also using chemical weapons, and we take this into account.”
“When one gazes deep into Syria from the peak of the Hermon,” the officer added, “one does not see a Syrian state anymore. Assad's grip on the ground is gradually weakening, and yet, there are still many forces loyal to the regime, including 180,000 in the regular army, and another 60,000 defending communities, 15,000 militiamen and about 5,000 Hezbollah men.”
"All these have turned Syria into a terror arena and the IDF treats it as such. The IDF understands that any small terror attack can cause the relatively quiet situation to deteriorate into war, and that is why scenarios are constantly being drilled.”

From Ian:

Douglas Murray: The New Racists: Jew Hate
If you had thought that the only qualification needed is to excel at your chosen art form and then see if you can gather audiences, you were wrong. That is not enough anymore -- certainly not if you are Jewish.
The treatment of the reggae star Matisyahu is something new. For Matisyahu is not an Israeli -- he is an American. For a while, only Israeli Jews were made pariahs among the nations because of an unresolved border dispute involving their country. Now it is Jews born anywhere else in the world who can be targeted in the same way. They are singling out Jews -- Jews and only Jews.
Habima performers were insulted and vilified while on stage at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, trying to perform "The Merchant of Venice." None of the protesters seemed to see the irony of vilifying Jews on stage during that of all plays.
Spain has its own border issues. Perhaps Spanish performers should henceforth be quizzed about their political attitudes before they are allowed to perform abroad? Maybe the rest of the world should demand that all artists from Spain sign a statement or make a video supporting Catalan independence if they are to be allowed to perform in public?
Only one country and one geopolitical question is addressed in this way. Turkish artists are nowhere in the world asked to condemn their country's illegal occupation of Northern Cyprus -- an occupation, lasting more than four decades, of half an EU member state.
Their singling out of Jews, wherever they are from, makes their racist motivation abundantly clear. If the Rototom Sunsplash festival wants to take part in this racist BDS fever then it is them -- and not Jews -- whom the world must make into pariahs.
Foreign Ministry: Spanish festival's boycott of US Jew Matisyahu proves BDS is anti-Semitic
If you plan on going to the Sunsplash Rototom Reggae Festival in Spain this week, you better not speak the language of the Hebrewman. If you do, they might kick you out.
The festival’s cancellation of a scheduled August 22 appearance by Jewish-American reggae artist Matisyahu – under pressure from Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) activists – unmasks the anti-Semitic nature of that movement, a Foreign Ministry representative said Sunday.
“We always said that BDS was not connected to the Palestinian issue or the settlements but was nothing more than Jew hatred,” spokesman Emmanuel Nahshon said.
“And this demonstrates that.”
Matisyahu, Nahshon stressed, is not Israeli.
WJC President Condemns Cancellation of Matisyahu Concert
World Jewish Congress (WJC) President Ronald S. Lauder on Sunday expressed “outrage” and “utter bewilderment” at news that a music festival in Spain had disinvited American Jewish musician Matisyahu for failing to sign a pro-Palestinian declaration.
“This is a clear instance of anti-Semitism, and nothing else,” Lauder said in a statement, urging Spanish authorities “to condemn this sad incident and to take appropriate action those responsible for it.”
“Matisyahu is an American Jew. More importantly, like everybody else in a free and democratic society, he not only has a right to express his views – whether you agree with them or not — but he also has every right not to have the repugnant views of the festival organizers imposed on him. He is a musician who has been denied the opportunity to play his planned gig at a European reggae festival purely because he is Jewish and because he refuses to side with the vicious and bigoted BDS movement,” Lauder said.
“And to the people of Spain, I say this: Being a ‘Zionist’ and supporting Israel has nothing to do with supporting apartheid. Rather, it is about supporting democracy, the rule of law, freedom, openness and diversity,” he continued.
“The Rototom Sunsplash festival benefits from financial support from public authorities. I very much hope that they will convey a clear message to the organizers that either they re-invite Matisyahu and apologize for their outrageous behavior, or they pay back that financial aid, because anti-Semitism and racism must not be rewarded by public support – not in Spain, and not anywhere else,” added Lauder.

Tuesday, August 11, 2015

From Ian:

Wistrich takes aim at ‘anti-Zionist mythology’ of left in posthumous essay
In his final essay, Wistrich went on the attack against what he saw as one of the most pernicious dogmas of Israel’s critics, firmly rejecting any comparisons between the Jewish state and European colonialist regimes.
“Jews who arrived in British Mandated Palestine manifestly did not come in order to destroy or displace the Palestinian Arab ‘nation’—contrary to the myth propagated by the pro-Palestine radical left, until today,” he wrote, asserting that economic modernization spurred by Jewish national revival turned Palestine into a land “attracting substantial Arab immigration.”
According to Wistrich, there were around six hundred thousand Arabs in the entire British Mandated Territory in the early 1920s, rising to well over a million by 1940, “hardly an example of colonial dispossession of the ‘indigenous’ population.”
Most Palestinian Arabs during the Mandatory period were “either immigrants from neighboring Arab lands or descendants of immigrants who had arrived since the late nineteenth century,” he added.
“Not only were they not Palestinian ‘natives,’ but at the time of the Balfour Declaration there was no clear or distinct concept of a Palestinian Arab nation. The left-wing narrative, especially since 1967, has consistently sidelined such inconvenient realities, replacing them with ideological fictions,” he asserted.
Wistrich wrote that he believed Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War to be a turning point for much of the liberal and democratic left in their approach to Israel, with the state’s image turning into that of an occupier which “began to erode an unwritten taboo against open antisemitism since the Shoah.”
“A much harsher anti-Israel rhetoric” emerged both on the right and the left, including “an increasingly aggressive and vituperative anti-Zionism” on the part of radical “progressives.”
WSJ Book Review Takes on "Holocaust Syndrome"
Author and former AP reporter and editor Matti Friedman has previously, like CAMERA, drawn attention to the inaccuracies in media coverage of Israel. Now, in a sharp and funny book review in The Wall Street Journal, Friedman turns his gaze to “non-fiction” inaccuracies. In a review of Padraig O’Malley’s “The Two-State Delusion,” Friedman points out:
More work should have gone into ensuring accuracy. The author asserts, for example, that Israel’s military victory in 1967 resulted from “massive U.S. assistance,” when there wasn’t massive U.S. military assistance before 1967. (France was then the main arms supplier; the planes that won the war were Mirages and Mystères.) We learn that Ariel Sharon was an agriculture minister in 1971 and that this has something to do with the genesis of the settlements; he wasn’t, and it doesn’t. The author describes Israeli soldiers carrying their Uzis “nonchalantly,” which is a nice touch. But no Israeli soldiers carry the Uzi, which was deemed obsolete after the 1973 war and removed from frontline service after that. The word “homeland” is quoted pointedly from the Balfour Declaration of 1917, where that word doesn’t appear. Would it have been too much trouble to check the text? It’s a single sentence.
The sub-headline of the review is “The idea that a collective memory of the Holocaust renders Jewish judgment defective is somehow acceptable these days,” a point Friedman illuminates with this passage:
The “bonding, primal element” of the Jewish psyche, we learn, is the Holocaust. Israelis are in thrall to weapons because of the Holocaust; they are obtuse to the suffering of others because of the Holocaust; and in general they are sort of crazy because of the Holocaust. Actually, half of the Jewish population in Israel has roots in the Islamic world. Their families were displaced by Muslims, not Nazis. Israelis think many of their neighbors are out to destroy Israel not because of the Holocaust, but because many of their neighbors say they are out to destroy Israel. Israel’s actions in the Middle East, in other words, have to do with its experience in the Middle East. The country’s objective success against long odds would have to indicate that at least some of its decisions have been reality-based, if not quite reasonable.
The idea that a collective memory renders Jewish judgment defective seems to be something acceptable to say aloud these days in connection with Israel, which is why I’ve dwelled on it. It’s important to point out not only that this observation is wrong, but that it is a patronizing ethnic smear. I don’t like the careless generalizations in Mr. O’Malley’s book or his shaky grasp of the facts. But I don’t think they have anything to do with the potato famine.

The entire review, unlike the book apparently, is worth reading.
PROOF: EU is funding anti-Israel organizations, violating international law
Israel and the EU established diplomatic relations in 1959. TheRebel.media recently sat down with the Ambassador of the EU to Israel, Lars Faaborg-Andersen, to discuss this complicated relationship.
Because Israel is a democracy, the EU is far more critical of them than of other Middle Eastern countries.
This double standard extends to EU NGOs pushing anti-Israel "Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions" campaigns, even though the Ambassador insists that the EU is against BDS.
According to Israeli officials, the EU is acting illegally (and violating its own signed agreements) by funding unauthorized Palestinian buildings in areas placed under Israel control by international law, including the West Bank.
Investigative journalist Ben-Dror Yemini says "Israel should tell the EU, 'enough.'"
He says that the EU's official statements about Israel often contradict their real world actions.
Igal Hecht presents a number of examples of this.
EU violating international law in relations with Israel


Saturday, August 01, 2015

From Ian:

PodCast: Focusing on Israel, the U.S.-Iranian detente, and the conflicted Middle East: with Caroline Glick and Richard Baehr
We make no secret of our respect, admiration and, yes, love of Israel. And though turmoil in the region is nothing new, we thought that we should continue to examine the percolating situation in the Middle East after we’ve been able to analyze the Iranian nuclear deal.
Two of our favorite people with whom to discuss the topic are Richard Baehr, the Chief Political Correspondent for American Thinker (simply one of the best), and Caroline Glick, Deputy Managing Editor for the Jerusalem Post, and former assistant Foreign Policy Advisor to Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.
A distorted evening with Max Blumenthal
And it was at this point I realised that shock is a major part of Blumenthal’s selling process. He deliberately seems to go out of his way to anger the part of the audience he knows is both present and critical of him. The BDS boys are already sold; they don’t need feed such as this, Blumenthal desires to be disliked. He wants to agitate because it gets him noticed. Once the Q&A highlighted the presence of pro-Israelis, Blumenthal visibly became more outrageous; it was as if the two sides feed off each other. His message of hate towards Israel sells his books and the more we shout his name in anger from the rooftops, the more books he will sell. So he turns the level of venom up another notch.
Israelis don’t shoot Hebrew speakers. It’s a fantasy world created by a conspiracy nut who suggested that ‘my government’ ‘his government’ and ‘Israel’ are all engaged in some deep dark scheme that keeps the innocent Palestinians locked away in their refugee camps because it pleases some cabal of capitalists. All we need is for all those capitalists to be Jewish and we have a new edition of Protocols.
Blumenthal works on the premise that you cannot attack his position without appearing to attack victims, cynically using dead Gazan children as human shields. As Blumenthal mentions the amount of explosives the Israelis used as being more than ‘Hiroshima’, describes military strategies where Hebrew speakers are targeted for killing and uses comparisons with Darfur to infer genocide, the clear message is one of total force by a brutal army against an innocent population. Massive force being used without care against one of the highest populated areas on earth. And yet more innocent people died in Syria last week than in Gaza in a 50 day conflict ( Didn’t you see the massive protests in London?) Given Israel’s supremacy, the numbers simply do not tell the same tale. Israel clearly is not behaving the way that is being attributed to it.
And it was over. Having seen a slight altercation outside the building caused by two seemingly harmless women, I approached them at the station on the way home. They did not know who I was, and my possession of a bag with Blumenthal’s book suggested I was ‘a friend’. I am not going to recount the exchange here, but as usual a simple conversation about the conflict highlights a thorough lack of knowledge or information and a deep hostility to ‘Zionists’. They have formed solid opinions without even a grasp of the basics. When eventually they realised I was a Jew who wouldn’t spit on the Israeli flag, they walked away.
I haven’t read the whole book yet, but having seen Blumenthal talk, the over-riding sensation I am left with is one of sadness. The only challenging questions that came out in the Q&A were from pro-Israelis, the remainder of the audience had nothing to say and gushed over every word. It was an empty room with a few empty people looking for their bias to be fed. And fed they were.
Sarah Honig: The humanistic ardor of interwar Poland
Poland made history on Monday morning, April 19, 1937. It taught the world how to implement a boycott without actually admitting that it’s doing anything of the sort.
Headliners of today’s European Union have learned the lesson well, even if few of the EU’s sanctimonious sermonizers can likely cite the source and inspiration for their very unoriginal charade.
The Polish non-boycott was no mean feat on the eve of WWII, when dark clouds of impending doom already gathered over the heads of European Jewry.
Given the bestial goings-on and the brutish anti-Jewish boycotts next-door in the Third Reich, Poland appeared positively refined by comparison – the soul of sophistication.
The Poles never sank as low as the crude and vulgar Germans. They didn’t adopt the practice of daubing storefronts with giant Jude inscriptions, smashing windows or sending out storm troopers to form scary picket lines, carry offensive signs in the formidable Teutonic tradition and warn off the super-race away from subhuman Jewish shopkeepers.
Instead, Poland’s Minister of Industry and Commence Antoni Roman issued an edict that looked impeccably non-discriminatory.
It ordered that all business signs boldly display the proprietor’s name, directly above any other incidental scrap information such as what was sold at the premises. Precise rules were stipulated regarding the size of the letters required.
What could possibly be wrong with that? The measure applied to everyone throughout the republic. Surely nothing could be more equitable. No single community or grouping was targeted.
JPost Editorial: Don’t parole Pollard
Last week, screaming headlines were generated worldwide by breaking news in The Wall Street Journal that the US was preparing to release Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard after 30 years in prison. This announcement, predictably, unleashed a tidal wave of media coverage.
A subsequent announcement a few days later officially confirming imminent parole for Pollard added to the deluge of reports, which continue unabated.
There is something suspect in the timing of these news stories.
Jerusalem’s rejection of Pollard’s release as intended to mitigate Israel’s displeasure with the disastrous Iranian nuclear pact was predictable.
However, denials by US officials, claiming that Pollard’s release is unrelated to the Iranian deal were less predictable.
There were simply too many denials, at too high a level and employing too strident a tone to be credible.
Clearly, the media frenzy about Pollard occurs precisely when the Obama administration needs headlines diverted away from the Iranian deal. The public’s attention instead has become focused on a subject that many love to hate: Israel.

Thursday, July 30, 2015

From Ian:

Israel’s Foreign Ministry chief: Sunni Arab nations are our ‘allies’
The director general of Israel’s Foreign Ministry, Dore Gold, called the Middle East’s Sunni Arab nations “Israel’s allies.”
Gold used the term twice in a presentation Wednesday in New York focused on the shortcomings of the Iran nuclear deal.
“What we have is a regime on a roll that is trying to conquer the Middle East,” Gold said of Iran, “and it’s not Israel talking, that is our Sunni Arab neighbors — and you know what? I’ll use another expression – that is our Sunni Arab allies talking.”
Gold, a former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations and a longtime adviser to Israeli prime ministers from the right-wing Likud Party, is also the author of a 2003 book on Saudi Arabia called “Hatred’s Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia Supports the New Global Terrorism.” Saudi Arabia has been one of the most vocal Arab opponents of US-Iran rapprochement and the Iran nuclear agreement.
The presentation, which was organized by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, also featured Amos Yadlin, a former chief of Israeli military intelligence who now heads Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies. Yadlin ran unsuccessfully for the Knesset in March on the center-left Zionist Union list.
Infamous Terrorist Samir Kuntar Not Killed in Syria Airstrikes Attributed to Israel, Brother Claims
The brother of infamous Lebanese terrorist Samir Kuntar was quick to deny Samir’s death on Wednesday after air strikes attributed to Israel were reported in Lebanon and Syria, Israeli news site NRG reported.
According to the reports, two Hezbollah operatives and three loyalists to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad were killed in the strikes.
On Twitter, Bassem Kuntar claimed, “Samir is fine” and added his condolences to the “martyrs of the Syrian Arab resistance to the Israeli occupation in the Golan who were killed during the Israeli strike in the afternoon.”
Syrian State TV Reports Second Israeli Airstrike on Terror Targets in a Day
An Israeli warplane on Wednesday attacked a terrorist base belonging to a pro-Syrian government Palestinian terror group, Syrian state television claimed.
The Israeli plane purportedly attacked a military base along the Lebanon-Syria border belonging to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a group that supports Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, Reuters reported, citing the television report.
An Israeli military spokesman declined to comment on the reported strike.
Earlier on Wednesday, Arab media outlets reported that the Israeli Air Force struck a vehicle in the Quneitra region of southern Syria, killing at least two people and as many as five, who were possibly members of the Hezbollah terror group and the People’s Committees, a pro-Assad militia led by the Lebanese terrorist Samir Kuntar.
Netanyahu: Under nuke deal, Iran has months to hide illicit activity
If Iran honors the agreement, it will be able to build numerous nuclear weapons with the blessing of the international community, he lamented during a briefing for Israeli diplomatic correspondents in his Jerusalem office.
“The inspections regime is full of holes,” Netanyahu said. “This deal is terrible. It’s preferable to have no deal than this deal.”
Under the Comprehensive Joint Plan of Action that the world powers signed with Iran earlier this month, Iran has 24 days before it needs to grant international inspectors access to hitherto undeclared sites they suspect host nuclear activity.
But, Netanyahu said, if no agreement has been reached after that time elapses, the deal says that the complaint is to go to another committee trying to bridge the dispute, which will deal with the issue for another 30 days. If Iran still refuses to let inspectors into the site and the United Nations Security Council is involved, it will take another 30 days before any action is taken, the prime minister said.
“It could take a total of three months,” Netanyahu said.

Wednesday, July 29, 2015

From Ian:

Honest Reporting: Dr. Jonathan Spyer Makes Sense of the Middle East
With the rise of the so-called Islamic State, multiple groups fighting each other in the disintegrating states of Syria and Iraq, the bitter Sunni-Shia conflict and the competing interests of state actors and their proxies, the Middle East has never been more confusing for the casual observer. Not to mention the recent Iranian nuclear deal that has the potential to alter the balance of power within the region.
To make sense of it all, over 90 people joined HonestReporting to hear Dr. Jonathan Spyer, the Director of the Rubin Center, IDC Herzliya and a fellow at the Middle East Forum on July 23 in Jerusalem.
Using his experiences traveling to some of the Mideast hot spots, including most recently Iraq, Dr. Spyer expertly wove together the various threads that link the multiple conflicts affecting the region as well as addressing the impact of the Iran’s nefarious influence and the effects on Israeli security and diplomacy. He addressed how those Arab states that lacked a unified national identity or national institutions have imploded over the course of the past five years, for example Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, while others that did have strong national identities and institutions such as Egypt or Tunisia, have avoided this scenario.
Dr. Spyer explained how with the collapse of states, older sub-state, primordial identities have resurfaced forming the basis of the various political and military groups battling over the remains of those collapsed states. He traced the beginning of the process to Syria in the summer of 2012 when the Assad regime took a strategic decision to pull back from a very large swathe of territory in the country’s north and east in the belief at that time that he could reconquer the area in the future. Instead, what is clear is that this ushered in the creation of separate entities – a Sunni rebel entity, a Kurdish entity. The Sunni rebel entity has further splintered into other entities including Islamic State and Al-Nusra. Dr. Spyer also outlined how Iraq had also split into separate entities.
Dr. Jonathan Spyer: HonestReporting Speaker Series


Elliott Abrams: Bensouda Saves the ICC
In a recent blog post, I noted the 2-to-1 decision by a “pre-trial chamber” to overturn the decision of International Criminal Court Prosecutor Fatou Bensouda not to proceed against Israel in the Mavi Marmara case. This was the first time such a decision of the ICC Prosecutor had been overturned.
As several people who wrote in comments added, the chamber didn’t force Bensouda to prosecute–just to look at the case again. So she did. Last week she said she was “carefully studying the decision and will decide on the next steps in due course. The decision on whether to open an investigation depends on the facts and circumstances of each situation.”
Having looked again at the facts and circumstances, she has stuck with her decision. In a very quick reply to the judges, she told them that their decision failed to consider “the unique context of violent resistance aboard the Mavi Marmara.” She’s absolutely right.
And she has done the ICC a great favor. As my original blog post noted, there has always been political pressure on the ICC to become–like the U.N. Human Rights Council–an Israel-bashing enterprise. That would destroy whatever chance the tribunal has of gaining legitimacy. The first ICC Prosecutor, Luis Moreno Ocampo of Argentina, avoided that trap, and now Bensouda is doing the same. She has saved the ICC from driving into a dead end where only politics and bias could be found.
Israel rejects ‘flawed’ war crime claim by rights group
Israel accused Amnesty of “a false narrative – claiming that four days of military operations by the IDF were in direct response to the killing and kidnapping of one IDF soldier,” the foreign ministry said, referring to the Israel Defense Forces.
“It seems that Amnesty forgot that there was an ongoing conflict – during which the IDF was operating to stop rocket fire and neutralize cross-border assault tunnels, and Palestinian terrorist organizations were actively engaging in intensive conflict against the IDF from within the civilian environment.”
Last summer’s 50-day war took a heavy toll on Gaza, killing 2,251 Palestinians, including more than 500 children according to Palestinian tallies. Israel claimed as many as 1,000 of the casualties were fighters.
Seventy-three people were killed on the Israeli side, including 67 soldiers.
Israel officially blames Hamas for Palestinian civilian casualties, noting that the group, which rules Gaza, often launched attacks from within residential areas.

Tuesday, July 28, 2015

From Ian:

Overwhelming Israeli Opposition Strongest Sign Iran Deal Is A Bad One
No country has more to lose from a military confrontation with Iran than Israel — and no country has more to gain than Israel from a peaceful resolution of the Iranian nuclear issue.
And yet, an overwhelming majority in the Jewish State views the Iran deal as a catastrophic mistake, one that potentially threatens the country’s very existence. This reality alone should make you think twice about the Obama administration’s claim that it negotiated a strong deal to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.
Critics of Israel’s position on the Iran deal are often quick to paint Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as a warmonger. But why would Netanyahu be anxious for a military confrontation? Israel would likely be the main target of any Iranian response to a strike on its nuclear program, even if the attack was conducted by the United States. With Iran’s terror proxy Hezbollah armed with an estimated 100,000 rockets in southern Lebanon, the consequences of an Iranian retaliation could be very grave for the Jewish State.
Conversely, Israel would benefit most from a deal with Iran that actually prevented the Islamic Republic from being able to obtain nuclear weapons capability. A good deal would eliminate the threat of an apocalyptically anti-Semitic regime being able to gain the means to make its genocidal dreams a reality. At the same time, a good deal would remove the need for a possible military attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities that could precipitate a bloody confrontation between Israel and Iran’s terror proxy Hezbollah.
 Jennifer Rubin: Blaming failure of a rotten deal on Israel?!
Kerry does not “fear” Israel would be blamed; he is threatening to blame Israel if U.S. lawmakers decide that the deal is not in the interests of the United States. Not only is he inciting anti-Israel fervor, but he also is repeating another canard, namely that Israel controls Congress. In doing all this, the administration echoes ancient tropes against the Jews and not-so-ancient ones against an Israeli government that won’t meekly assent to its death.
The administration sounds more unhinged with each passing day, no doubt because it is not convincing Democrats to stand with the White House in defense of a rotten deal. In particular, many lawmakers who insisted on disclosure of the possible military dimensions (PMDs) of Iran’s nuclear program are learning it won’t be in the dealIn other words, the administration caved on PMDs and the deal would go into effect without ever forcing Iran to disclose information necessary to conduct adequate inspections. (“Outside nuclear experts said understanding Iran’s past nuclear work was critical to verifying the new agreement because it establishes a baseline for what Tehran has done in the past.”) Democrats who insisted on a credible inspection process and know that it depends on our understanding of Iran’s past nuclear weapons program have a choice: Cave (as the president did, thereby sacrificing their own credibility) or insist the president go back (with additional leverage in the form of new sanctions) to obtain what Kerry once promised he would get.
No wonder the administration is throwing a fit, louder and more overtly anti-Israel with each passing day. The president and his advisers desperately want to divert attention from their own grossly defective deal — and blame Israel if it fails. Nothing could be more revealing of the deal’s weakness and the Obama administration’s hostility to Israel than the manner in which it is defending the deal.
Can @TheTimes cite examples of Bibi saying he ‘opposed’ Iran negotiations? #IranDeal
In a July 28th article (Huckabee likens Iran deal to Holocaust), Times of London Middle East reporter Hugh Tomlinson claimed that Israel’s prime minister not only opposes the current Iran nuclear deal, but actually has opposed negotiations with Iran altogether.
Here’s the relevant passage, in the penultimate paragraph of the article.
Congress has two months in which to review the Vienna accord before voting to accept or reject it. Israel, which bitterly opposed negotiations with Iran from the outset, has been lobbying Congress for months in an attempt to block the deal.
Given that serious negotiations with Iran date back to 2009, Tomlinson is in effect saying that Binyamin Netanyahu has “bitterly opposed negotiations with Iran from the outset”. Indeed, Tomlinson has made this same claim on at least one other occasion.
However, as CAMERA has demonstrated, despite some media claims echoing Tomlinson’s take on Netanyahu’s position, the fact is that the prime minister has consistently supported negotiations with Iran, albeit one which achieved ‘a better deal’ than the one the six world powers have been prepared to accept.
A Washington Official, and the Washington Post, Fabricate Israeli Praise for the Iran Deal
The Post's headline promises a discussion of Israelis who feel the deal is "good" for their country. And the article goes on to name four prominent Israeli security experts. The message for readers, then, is that even if Israel's government and the largest opposition party are united against the deal — an inconvenient reality for the deal's advocates in the American government and the media, who normally can find allies among Israeli politicians who are so often at each other's throats — at least those in the know understand how truly good the agreement is.
Except it isn't true. Let's look at the security experts named in the piece:
Tharoor first mentions Ami Ayalon, a former head of the Shin Bet, Israel's internal security service, and links to a Daily Beast piece entitled "Ex-Intel Chief: Iran Deal Good for Israel."
Unfortunately for Tharoor (and for Daily Beast commentator Jonathan Alter), Ayalon, who begrudgingly supports the deal because it is "the best plan currently on the table" and because he believes there are no available alternatives, nonetheless has said in no uncertain terms, "I think the deal is bad. It's not good."
Tharoor then cites former intelligence chief Efraim Halevy, but strangely links to an Op-Ed Halevy wrote after a framework agreement was finalized in Lausanne last April but before the details of this final deal were agreed upon in Vienna this month. In a more recent (and thus relevant) Op-Ed, Halevy described what he sees as several strong points in the agreement and concludes that it is "important to hold a profound debate in Israel on whether no agreement is preferable to an agreement which includes components that are crucial for Israel's security."
He didn't explicitly state which side of the debate he favors, although there is a sense that leans toward the idea that Israel must get behind the deal. But like Ayalon, his tepid defense of the deal, if it is even that, seems to hinge on the idea that this agreement makes the emergence of any other, better deals unrealistic. "There will be no other agreement and no other negotiations," Halevy says in his recent Op-Ed.

Monday, July 27, 2015

From Ian:

Natan Sharansky: Jews stood up to the U.S. government 40 years ago, and should again on Iran
As difficult as this situation is, however, it is not unprecedented. Jews have been here before, 40 years ago, at a historic juncture no less frightening or fateful than today’s.
In the early 1970s, Republican President Richard Nixon inaugurated his policy of detente with the Soviet Union with an extremely ambitious aim: to end the Cold War by normalizing relations between the two superpowers.
Among the obstacles Nixon faced was the USSR’s refusal to allow on-site inspections of its weapons facilities. Moscow did not want to give up its main advantage, a closed political system that prevented information and people from escaping and prevented prying eyes from looking in.
Yet the Soviet Union, with its very rigid and atrophied economy, badly needed cooperation with the free world, which Nixon was prepared to offer. The problem was that he was not prepared to demand nearly enough from Moscow in return. And so as Nixon moved to grant the Soviet Union most-favored-nation status, and with it the same trade benefits as U.S. allies, Democratic Sen. Henry Jackson of Washington proposed what became a historic amendment, conditioning the removal of sanctions on the Soviet Union’s allowing free emigration for its citizens.
By that time, tens of thousands of Soviet Jews had asked permission to leave for Israel. Jackson’s amendment sought not only to help these people but also and more fundamentally to change the character of detente, linking improved economic relations to behavioral change by the USSR. Without the free movement of people, the senator insisted, there should be no free movement of goods.
Watchdog Says Obama Administration ‘Inventing’ Iran Concessions Under Nuclear Deal
According to TIP, four points in the infographic leave out information from the deal. The first claims that Iran has agreed to use only light-water nuclear reactors indefinitely, aside from the existing heavy-water reactor in Arak. TIP said that this “brand new claim” actually “contradicts past statements by President Obama.”
In the President’s post-Vienna speech he noted, “For at least the next 15 years, Iran will not build any new heavy-water reactors,” and not indefinitely, the group said.
The second concession claimed by the State Department is that Iran agreed not to cooperate with other countries on developing uranium enrichment technologies for 15 years. TIP alleges that this is also a “brand new claim,” and “can’t be true because the JCPOA obligates the Russians to cooperate with Iran on nuclear technology at Iran’s underground enrichment bunker at Fordow.”
The third concession listed in the infographic is that Iran has agreed to let the IAEA monitor the production and stockpiling of all heavy water in Iran. TIP points out that this is not a new concession, and was included under the Lausanne framework agreement, which said, “Iran will not accumulate heavy water in excess of the needs of the modified Arak reactor, and will sell any remaining heavy water on the international market for 15 years.” The JCPOA merely repeats this obligation, according to TIP.
The fourth claim was that Iran had agreed not to develop proficiency in uranium or plutonium metallurgy for at least 15 years, which would prevent it from producing the necessary components for a nuclear weapon. TIP claims that “the Iranians have had that proficiency since at least… 2009.”
One of the State Department-listed concessions was that Iran committed not to “engage in certain activities that could be used to design and develop a nuclear weapon.” The Israel Project acknowledged that this clause was included in the JCPOA, but, the group said, it is “100% unenforceable.” TIP quoted former IAEA official Olli Heinonen as saying that there’s “not really even an inspection procedure for that, I think it’s zero. It’s not even one.”
The State Department fact sheet also included two Iranian concessions that TIP said were “widely expected, and were aimed at fixing glaring and well-known loopholes left in the Lausanne text.”
Then and Now, Leftists Bowed Before Iranian Anti-Semites
Andrew Young, the ambassador to the United Nations under the Carter Administration, said that Khomeini was "a saint, a Social Democrat saint" and compared his revolution in the name of Allah to the American movement for civil rights. The Ambassador to Tehran, William Sullivan, compared the imam to Gandhi. The consultant of Jimmy Carter, Bill James, wrote that Ayatollah had to be admired "as a man of integrity."
Richard Falk, jurist from Princeton and future UN envoy in the Middle East, led the American mission in the suburb of Paris and hailed Khomeini as "a new model of popular revolution based, in large part, on nonviolent tactics". The Iranian expert Richard Cottam in the Washington Post called Khomeini "moderate, centrist", a hermit who was not interested in power. who would, once he defeated the Shah, retire in the holy city of Qom.
The exact opposite is, of course, what happened.
As Houchang Nahavan, former minister of the Shah and author of "Iran, the Clash of Ambitions" said: "Many leftist movements of Europe sent their delegations to the international conference held in Tehran in favor of the operation of the hostages of 4 November 1979." From France, the gay poet Jean Genet, unaware of what the mullahs did to homosexuals, expressed great sympathy for Khomeini because he had dared to oppose the West.
The journalist André Fontaine, director of the Monde, compared Khomeini to John Paul II in an article entitled "The Return of the divine" while the philosopher Jacques Madaule, re-defining the role of Khomeini, said that "his movement will open the doors to the future of humanity", defining Khomeinism as a "clamor from the depths of the times" who refuted "slavery."
Michel Foucault, in the famous articles in the Corriere della Sera and the Nouvel Observateur, was able to commend the impressive achievement of Khomeini as "the first of the Grand insurrection against global systems, the most modern form of revolt". The same Jean-Paul Sartre, guru of the Left, decided to go in person to Tehran to sustain publicly, with a great reinforcement of publicity, the wild-eyed imam.

Sunday, July 19, 2015

From Ian:

Netanyahu: Khamenei's words prove nuclear deal will not stop Iranian terror machine
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday that those who thought signing a nuclear deal with Iran would cause the Islamic Republic to temper its extremism were proven wrong over the weekend when Supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei vowed to continue opposition to the United States and its Middle East policies.
Speaking at the weekly cabinet meeting, Netanyahu said, "If anyone thought that excessive concessions to Iran would lead it to change its policies, they received a decisive answer this weekend with the aggressive and adversarial speech by Iran's leader Khamenei."
The prime minister said that "the Iranians are not even trying to hide the fact that they will use the hundreds of millions that they will get from this deal in order to arm their terror machine, and they say outright that they will continue their fight against the United States and its allies, Israel being chief among them."
In a speech at a Tehran mosque Saturday, punctuated by chants of "Death to America" and "Death to Israel," Khamenei said he wanted politicians to examine the agreement to ensure national interests were preserved, as Iran would not allow the disruption of its revolutionary principles or defensive abilities.
An arch conservative with the last word on high matters of state, Khamenei repeatedly used the phrase "whether this text is approved or not," implying the accord has yet to win definitive backing from Iran's fictionalized political establishment.
Nine things Khamenei hates about you
The following are key points from the speech delivered on July 18, 2015, by Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, at Eid al-Fitr prayers in Tehran. The full translated text of the speech is available here.
1. Praise for Iranian calls of “Death to Israel” and “Death to America”:
2. Conditional backing for last week’s nuclear deal with the P5+1 powers, and for President Rouhani and the team that negotiated it:
3. A pledge of ongoing support to regional allies, including the Palestinians, against their enemies:
4. No warming of relations with America, and no change in opposition to what America emblemizes:
5. Denial of Hezbollah terrorism, and accusation of Israeli terrorism:
6. Derision of the US government’s account of the nuclear deal:
7. A vow that Obama will never prevail against Iran:
8. Boasting that Iran has forced the West to accept its nuclear industry:
9. America will lose should war break out:
  Steinitz slams Kerry claim that better Iran deal was ‘fantasy’
National Infrastructure Minister Yuval Steinitz on Sunday slammed remarks by US Secretary of State John Kerry, who over the weekend dismissed as “fantasy” the claim — raised by Israel and domestic US critics — that it was possible to have penned a better nuclear deal than the one signed by world powers and Iran last week.
“To the best of our professional assessment, these remarks are baseless,” Steinitz, who is Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s point man on the Iranian nuclear threat, told Army Radio on Sunday.
“One can easily think of a better agreement in which, as is the international practice in such cases, Iran must reveal everything it has done in the past and not simply answer questions of procedure, which really ignores the issue,” he said.
Speaking on US television Friday, Kerry insisted that Israel that “will be safer” under the terms of the nuclear deal, and that the concept of a more stringent nuclear deal was unrealistic.
I’ve Read the Nuclear Deal, Mr. President, and It’s Awful
First off it’s worth noting that Energy Secretary and MIT nuclear physicist Ernest Moniz said back in April that to be effective the deal would have to include “anytime, anywhere,” inspections, so Obama’s explanation about why 24 days notice is now good enough fails to convince me.
I want Moniz to explain why he changed his position on this AND why 24 days is now acceptable. I would like Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes to explain why he walked back his comments on requiring “anytime, anywhere” inspections.
And I want a more convincing explanation than negotiator Wendy Sherman’s excuse that the term was just a “rhetorical flourish.” (If that was a rhetorical flourish, I’m curious how many other administration comments about the nuclear deal were rhetorical flourishes.)
But in that paragraph, Obama limits the grounds of questioning the deal to whether the language of the deal is insufficient to prevent Iran from achieving a nuclear breakout over the course of the deal.
Here’s where I have problem. Even if the agreement was airtight, and I doubt that it is, there’s a matter of the administration’s behavior during the Joint Plan of Action, which was agreed to in November 2013. The problem is that the Obama administration has acted as “Iran’s attorney” covering for Iran’s violations of the previous agreement.

Saturday, July 11, 2015

From Ian:

Guy Bechor: Israel must use UN as an offensive tool
On the fifth year of the Middle Eastern destruction, which is going to last for decades, it's time to determine that the United Nations has become irrelevant here, except in regards to one country, which is the last remnant of the old regional order – Israel.
Can the UN do anything in Syria? In Iraq? In Yemen? In Saudi Arabia? In Egypt? In Libya? That's why it focuses on Israel.
It gives this organization's institutions a feeling that they have some advantage, that they are useful. The larger the failure in the region, the more the obsession towards Israel will grow, to the point of a farce. The more the Arab regimes fall apart, their attempt to divert the attention towards us becomes more desperate.
Israel is defending itself – at the grotesque "Human Rights" Council, which is controlled by dictators, at the delusional UNESCO and at the Security Council, where some members don't even recognize Israel. So it might be time to change direction, to turn the regional void into something which could assist us. It's time to use the UN as an offensive tool, not just as a defensive tool. It's time to move the warfare into enemy territory.
From now on, the UN institutions should be flooded with complaints, reports and information about the destruction taking place around us. Every day, a complaint, a report to the media, a resolution in the different institutions. The quality will create the quantity. Even if it isn't accepted, the conscious effect will eventually become fixated. We should embarrass them, just like they seek to embarrass us.
Every day, we should file a report about the Mahmoud Abbas gang which is carrying out mass arrests, including torture, which is persecuting minorities, where UN funds have been disappearing for years, which is responsible for racist incitement against Israel on a daily basis.
Fear and defiance in Paris, 6 months after kosher market attack
On her way home from food shopping, Mirelle Bensason pauses to rearrange wilted wreaths and posters hanging on the perimeter fence that police set up around the kosher supermarket where an Islamist gunned down four Jewish shoppers six months ago.
Bensason, who does not keep strictly kosher, is not a Hyper Cacher regular, but sees the continued flow of customers into the shop as proof of the Jewish community’s resilience.
Hyper Cacher reopened in March, about two months after Amedy Coulibaly entered the chain’s Port de Vincennes location and took its patrons hostage. Since it reopened, the store is guarded during its hours of operation by police officers toting machine guns.
“I take care of the commemorations on this fence to remember the victims and my pain, our pain,” said Bensason, a blue-eyed grandmother of four who was born in Morocco and now lives on the eastern edge of Paris, not far from Hyper Cacher. “But we’re not afraid to come shopping here. We refuse to be cowed by our enemies. Life has not changed much, except for the pain that comes with loss.”
14 French Islamists sentenced for targeting kosher shops
A Paris court on Friday jailed 14 Islamists for planning jihadist attacks on French Jews and other targets.
The Correctional Tribunal of Paris sentenced 39-year-old Mohamed Amchalane, the leader of the banned terrorist group Forsane Alizza, to nine years in prison, Le Figaro reported.
He and 13 of his accomplices, all members of the group, were convicted of “participating in a group formed with a view to preparing terrorist acts.”
The accomplices received lighter punishments of varying severity, ranging from a suspended sentence of one year to six years in prison, Le Figaro reported.
Among the group’s alleged targets were five Jewish supermarkets of the Hyper Cacher chain, the news website ouest-france.fr reported, and several other Jewish businesses. A Hyper Cacher market in the Paris area was the scene of January’s deadly terrorist siege, in which four French Jews were murdered.

Tuesday, July 07, 2015

From Ian:

Michael Totten: The Iran Delusion: A Primer for the Perplexed
The chattering class has spent months bickering about whether or not the United States should sign on to a nuclear deal with Iran, and everyone from the French and the Israelis to the Saudis has weighed in with “no” votes. Hardly anyone aside from the Saudis, however, seems to recognize that the Iranian government’s ultimate goal is regional hegemony and that its nuclear weapons program is simply a means to that end.
The Middle East has five hot spots—or “shatter zones,” as Robert D. Kaplan called them in his landmark book, The Revenge of Geography—which are more prone to conflict than others, where borders are either unstable or porous, where central governments have a hard time keeping everything wired together, and where instability is endemic or chronic.
Gaza, where Hamas wages relentless rocket wars against Israel, is one such shatter zone. The Lebanese-Israeli border, where Hezbollah does the same on a much more terrifying scale, is another. Yemen, which is finally falling apart on an epic scale, has been one for decades. Syria and Iraq have merged into a single multinational shatter zone with more armed factions than anyone but the CIA can keep track of.
What do these shatter zones have in common? The Iranian government backs militias and terrorist armies in all of them. As Kaplan writes, “The instability Iran will cause will not come from its implosion, but from a strong, internally coherent nation that explodes outward from a natural geographic platform to shatter the region around it.”
That’s why Iran is a problem for American foreign policy makers in the first place; and that’s why trading sanctions relief for an international weapons inspection regime will have no effect on any of it whatsoever.
Has the Obama Administration Become Iran’s Lawyer?
The smart money here in Vienna is on the likelihood of a nuclear deal between the U.S. and Iran being finalized at any moment. Maybe it will happen today with the White House showing the good manners to wait until after Americans have returned from their July 4 vacations to announce that they’ve cleared the way for Iran to get a bomb. Or maybe the Iranians will get the bomb in a little more than a decade, as the president of the United States has explained, but it will probably happen much sooner. And when the clerical regime does finally break out, the chances are they’re the Iranians will be the ones who are going to let the American public know because our elected officials seem to be keeping information from us and our allies when it comes to all things Iran.
Indeed, it looks like the Obama administration has become Iran’s lawyer. In both making Tehran’s case to U.S. allies (from the White House’s P5+1 negotiating partners, to Middle East friends like Israel and Saudi Arabia), and shaping public perception of Iranian actions, the White House has made itself an indispensable friend to the clerical regime. Iran doesn’t have to worry about justifying its behavior—like its failure to meet obligations under the interim nuclear agreement and its outright lies—because it knows the administration will do all the heavy lifting.
Consider how the White House has managed to explain away Iran’s illicit nuclear activities. In the first place, the Joint Plan of Action is a somewhat weak document. It fails to prohibit the sorts of things you might expect to be banned if Iran’s program was really “frozen,” like the White House says. For instance, even though there are UN security council resolutions regarding Iran’s procurement of parts and equipment for illicit nuclear work, the JPOA has sidestepped the issue. The resulting framework is that when the Iranians get caught violating those resolutions, the State Department can declare that Iran is not in technical violation of the JPOA.
There’s also the issue of Iran coming clean about its past nuclear activities in order to disclose the possible military dimensions of the program. Despite the fact that the Obama administration has repeatedly assured skeptics that Iran would address the question of PMDs, the IAEA has reported that Iran fails to address outstanding questions or allow inspections of certain sites. But since PMDs are not in the JPOA, the State Department can brush away such concerns.
Dennis Ross: On Iran, Worry About the Deal, Not the Deadline
Just as June 30 turned out not to be a true deadline for the Iranian nuclear talks, it would be wise to treat July 7 — the extended deadline — much the same way. The Obama administration should make clear that it is prepared to conclude a deal at any time, provided it is fully consistent with the framework understanding from April; anything less, and there will be no deal. If the Iranians insist on trying to walk back or redefine the framework understanding, they will not only stretch out the negotiations but will lead us to harden our own position and impose new conditions.
Taking such a stance is all the more critical now, with Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, seemingly laying down conditions that are inconsistent with the framework understanding — no access to military sites or scientists, immediate sanctions relief upon signing of the agreement, no limits on research and development, and rejection of any restrictions on its program lasting 10-12 years. Was the supreme leader signaling that he does not want a deal? Was he posturing so his negotiators could seek more concessions? Was he playing domestic politics and trying to assuage hard-line opponents of a deal?
My bet is on posturing. Of course, his revolutionary ideology and hostility toward the United States, as well as the reality that there are hard-line opponents of an agreement, mean that he might not only be posturing to influence the negotiations. It may, in fact, be difficult for him to conclude a deal. Still, Khamenei has allowed these negotiations to continue and permitted his negotiators — whom he continues to defend — to conclude the framework understanding. Clearly, he decided Iran has much to gain from an agreement. And the fact is that an agreement consistent with the framework understanding offers Iran a lot.

Monday, July 06, 2015

From Ian:

Shmuley Boteach: Will Samantha Power Be the First American UN Ambassador to Abandon Israel?
Last week, mega-philanthropist Michael Steinhardt, co-founder of Birthright Israel, which has brought 500,000 young Jews to Israel, joined with our organization The World Values Network, in a full-page New York Times ad about Ambassador Samantha Power. In the ad Mr. Steinhardt reminded the Ambassador of her commitment at her Senate confirmation hearings, “I will stand up for Israel and work tirelessly to defend it” at the United Nations.
At the AIPAC Annual Policy Conference in Washington, DC, in March, Samantha avowed, “It is a false choice to tell Israel that it has to choose between peace on the one hand, and security on the other. The United Nations would not ask any other country to make that choice, and it should not ask it of Israel.”
Ambassador Power, of course, was correct – security is the foundation of any sustainable peace framework in the Middle East. To its credit, the United States has long stood for justice and served as an essential check against overreach, anti-Semitism, and double standards by Arab and European nations at the UN.
Yet statements in April by Ambassador Power refusing to rule out supporting UN resolutions that target Israel, added to recent claims by Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah, have raised serious questions about the specter of betrayal by the United States and Ambassador Power during the UN General Assembly in September. Reports have emerged that France plans to put forth a resolution before the UN Security Council that will call for an immediate resumption of peace talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority with a hard-cap of 18 months for a final deal. Under the French proposal, if no deal is reached in 18 months, the UN would recognize the Palestinian state, effectively granting legitimacy to an organization that has consistently proven incompetent, corrupt, hostile to democratic values, and openly supportive of terrorism. While the global Jewish community has come to expect little from France, Hamdallah said that France and the U.S. are “coordinating” together on the diplomatic catastrophe. There also exists the possibility that should Israel refuse to accept a UN Security Council Resolution authorizing a timetable for the unilateral creation of a Palestinian State, economic sanctions could be levied against the Jewish State.
Khaled Abu Toameh: When Palestinians Die in Jail
Three Palestinian men were found dead in their jail cells in the West Bank and Gaza Strip this past week.
But their stories did not attract the attention of the international media or human rights organizations in the U.S. and Europe. Nor was their case brought to the attention of the United Nations or the International Criminal Court (ICC).
By contrast, the case of 17-year-old Mohamed Kasba, who was shot dead north of Jerusalem by an Israeli army officer as he attacked the officer's car with stones, received widespread coverage in the Western media.
The UN even rushed to condemn the killing of Kasba, and called for an "immediate end" to violence and for everyone to keep calm. "This reaffirms the need for a political process aiming to establish two states living beside each other safely and peacefully," said UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, Nickolay Maldenov.
The UN official, needless to say, made no reference to the deaths that occurred in the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Hamas jails. He did not even see a need to express concern over the deaths or call for an investigation. Like the mainstream media in the West, the UN chooses to look the other way when Palestinians torture or kill fellow Palestinians.
The reason the case of the three detainees will not interest anyone in the international community is because the men did not die in an Israeli jail. Instead, the three men died while being held in Palestinian-controlled jails.
Had the three men died in Israeli detention, their names would have most likely appeared on the front pages of most leading Western newspapers. The families of the three men would have also been busy talking to Western journalists about Israeli "atrocities" and "human rights violations."
IsraellyCool: Proof 17-Year-Old Killed By IDF Was A Terrorist
Last week, I posted about the death of 17-year-old palestinian Muhammad al-Casba, killed while attempting to murder Col. Israel Shomer. Brian later posted about the Irish Times skewed coverage of his death, which referred to him as merely a “17-year-old Palestinian protester.”
A number of Israeli sites have since posted some photos purporting to be of the young “protester”, which if correct, show what type of “protesting” he was involved in. Not to mention what kind of future he had lined up for himself.
My initial reaction when seeing such photos is “Is this really proof? After all, this is an Israeli site. Seeing these photos on a palestinian, Arab, Muslim site – now that would constitute proof.”
Now compare to the photos of the young man with the gun and the intense look of hatred in his eyes.
I think we can all agree this 17-year-old was a terrorist whose aim was to murder, and not merely a young protester trying to ruin someone’s car.

Thank you to the big-mouth Israel haters for confirming what we already suspected.

Wednesday, July 01, 2015

From Ian:

Eugene Kontorovich: New federal law fights European boycotts of Israel
In plain English, this means U.S. courts cannot enforce judgements that doing business in or being based in the West Bank or Golan Heights violates international law, or particular European rules. There are not as of yet any such foreign judgements to speak of; indeed, legal challenges to business activities across the Green Line have consistently been rejected by European national courts. The real importance of the foreign judgements provision is establishing and strengthening U.S. state practice on this international legal issue.
That is, one underlying purpose behind the series of relatively minor EU restrictions on business across the Green Line is to establish an entirely novel principle of international law (applicable only to Israel): that these areas are for completely off limits for Israelis. The Europeans claim the mere presence (forget habitation) of Israelis in these areas can be a crime under international law. The new law rejects this contention, event to point that it will not recognize foreign judgements arising from it. This would include, for example, the purchase of property in the West Bank by Americans.
Finally, another under-appreciated provision states that boycotts and divestment of Israel by governments violates the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs, the cornerstone of international trade law. Such a finding by a major third-parrty state should make the EU quite worried about the possibility of Israel challenging their impending restrictions in the World Trade Organization’s dispute resolution mechanism.
More broadly, the law – and the state laws it will spawn – represents a major refutation of the conventional wisdom that boycott pressure on Israel is growing irreversibly and ineluctably. In this account, it is Israel’s policies, rather than the single-minded animosity of its opponents, that fuels boycott efforts, and nothing short and changing those policies will help. In short, in this view, the boycott pressure is at least in part legitimate. This view was championed by the left-wing J-Street group, which opposed the Roskam Amendment. They did not manage to convince a single congressman. Despite the efforts of such ostensibly pro-Israel groups, Americans understand that the movement to single out Israel for economic punishment is unreasonable, discriminatory, dangerous to Israel’s security, and contrary to long-standing U.S. policy.
State Department backs away from anti-BDS law’s language
The US State Department backed away Tuesday from controversial language included in the anti-BDS (boycott, divestment and sanctions) legislation signed into law by President Barack Obama a day earlier, indicating official discomfort with a clause that critics say intentionally blurs the lines between Israel and the West Bank.
“By conflating Israel and “Israeli-controlled territories,” a provision of the Trade Promotion Authority legislation runs counter to longstanding US policy towards the occupied territories, including with regard to settlement activity,” State Department Spokesman Jack Kirby wrote in a statement issued Tuesday afternoon. “Every US administration since 1967 – Democrat and Republican alike – has opposed Israeli settlement activity beyond the 1967 lines. This administration is no different. The US government has never defended or supported Israeli settlements and activity associated with them and, by extension, does not pursue policies or activities that would legitimize them.”
Kirby’s comments referred to the part of the Trade Promotion Authority law which sponsors said were designed to discourage European governments from participating in BDS activities by leveraging the incentive of free trade with the US.
The provisions require US trade negotiators to make rejection of BDS a principal trade objective in Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership negotiations with the European Union, instructing them to discourage “politically motivated actions to boycott, divest from or sanction Israel and to seek the elimination of politically motivated non-tariff barriers on Israeli goods, services, or other commerce imposed on the State of Israel.”
Lawless Administration Won’t Enforce Law Against Israel Boycotts
Kirby is right that the U.S. government has never formally recognized the right of Jews to live in Jerusalem or the West Bank. But he’s wrong to assert that President Obama’s policies are entirely consistent with that of his predecessors. This administration has made an issue of the existence of 40-year-old neighborhoods in Jerusalem in a way that is unprecedented since it treats the presence of Jews in parts of Israel’s capital as being just as illegitimate as the most remote West Bank settlement. Moreover, no previous administration has ever considered boycotts of Israel, whether of the entire country or of the half million Jews who live on the other side of the 1967 lines as legitimate. Kirby’s statement is an implicit endorsement of some Israel boycotts while opposing others.
Nor does the focus on settlements aid the cause of peace as the administration claims. Israel has already made far-reaching offers of withdrawal from the West Bank including statehood that has been repeatedly rejected by the Palestinians. The refusal to recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state no matter where its borders are drawn is the obstacle to peace, not the presence of Jews in Jerusalem or the West Bank.
As I have written previously, the notion that it is okay to boycott some Jews but not others is one that sends a dangerous signal to Israel’s enemies. Once it is deemed lawful to anathematize parts of the Israeli economy, it is a slippery slope to treating all such boycotts as legitimate. Since the original Arab boycott that sought to strangle the Israeli economy was only broken by U.S. efforts to ban trade with those who enforced the boycott, a Congressional effort to move against BDS now was entirely in keeping with longstanding U.S. policy. But since this administration is obsessed with the idea of banning settlements, it is prepared to let a Europe in which a rising tide of anti-Semitism has fueled support for BDS activity get away with such boycotts.
This is a disgrace, but any thought of a legal challenge to the decision is a waste of time. Since the U.S. Supreme Court gave President Obama the right to invalidate laws about Israeli rights to Jerusalem in a decision handed down earlier this month, he can be confident that he will be granted similar latitude to ignore anti-BDS law.
But it isn’t just friends of Israel who should be outraged about this decision. This is an administration that views law enforcement as an option, not an imperative. Just as he did on immigration, where he ignored the will of Congress and used executive orders to effectively annul legislation by not enforcing those concerning illegal immigrants, President Obama regards his personal opinion as being above the law. That is a dangerous tendency to substitute his preferences for the rule of law ought to scare all Americans, regardless of their views about trade or Israel.

Friday, June 26, 2015

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: Time to call out those aiding the Israel pogrom
We know that the NGOs are the instruments of the Soviet-inspired psychological warfare campaign to bend the collective Western mind with systematic falsehoods and blood libels about Israel.
What we haven’t done is hold to account those who have enabled these institutions and groups to do these wicked things, and who have given them traction.
Israel and its defenders should be publicly calling out those Western governments which fund these NGOs, and demanding that they stop funding such demonization and incitement to Israel’s destruction.
Most of these Israeli NGOs are part of the New Israel Fund’s network. The NIF should be ostracized. If an organism has ingested poison it must expel it or else it may die.
UN Watch points out that since its establishment the UNHRC has condemned Israel more than the rest of the world combined. Why are the UK and US still members of this travesty of a human rights arbiter? As long as they participate in it, they validate and legitimize it. As long as Israel’s allies keep silent in the face of the libels against Israel pouring out of the NGOs, UN and other international bodies and their own media and universities, those governmental allies are themselves implicitly conniving at this delegitimization campaign. As long as they continue to fund these NGOs, they too have blood on their hands.
The Davis report is just the latest manifestation of the surreal nightmare through which we are living, in which much of the world has been turned into one giant pogrom, both physical and intellectual, against the Jewish state. To fight it, we must not only delegitimize the delegitimizers but hold their enablers’ feet to the fire, too.
Caroline Glick: The Iranian-American nuclear project
If the US fails to reverse Obama’s policies toward Iran in the next two years, it is hard to see how it will be able to rebuild its strategic posture in the future.
The pace of change in the region and the world is too rapid today to rely on past achievements as a basis for future power.
As for Israel, it is now clear that there is no “crisis” in Israel-US relations. The Obama administration is betraying Israel. The centerpiece of Obama’s foreign policy is his desire to transform Iran’s illicit nuclear program, which endangers Israel’s existence, into a legal Iranian-American nuclear program that endangers Israel’s existence.
Consequently, the last thing Israel should worry about is upsetting Obama. To convince fence-sitting Democratic senators to vote against Obama’s Iran deal, Israel should expose all the ruinous details of the nuclear agreement. Israel should let the American people know how the deal endangers not just Israel, but their soldiers, and indeed, the US homeland itself.
By doing so, Israel stands a chance of separating the issue of Democratic support for Obama from Democratic opposition to the nuclear deal. Obama wants this deal to be about himself. Israel needs to explain how it is about America.
At the end of the day, what we now know about US collaboration with Iran brings home – yet again – the sad fact that the only chance Israel has ever had of preventing Iran from getting the bomb is to destroy the mullahs’ nuclear installations itself. If Israel can still conduct such an operation, it makes sense for it to be carried out before Iran’s nuclear program officially becomes the Iranian-American nuclear project.
Martin Sherman: The logical lacunae of the Left - Ari Shavit at AJC
One of the annual program’s highlights is the Forum’s Great Debate, which this year featured The Jerusalem Post’s Caroline B. Glick and Haaretz’s Ari Shavit, on whether the two-state formula offers a constructive solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, or is merely a dangerous delusion.
Unsurprisingly, Glick gave a feisty repudiation of the conceptual rationale and practical feasibility of any resolution based on the two-state principle. My strong misgivings regarding the alternative one-state paradigm she proposes are well known, but while I differ on what should be done, I always find her arguments as to what shouldn’t be done powerful and persuasive.
But it is on her opponent, Ari Shavit, that I should like to focus in the ensuing paragraphs.
At the start of the debate, Glick showered lavish praise on him, describing him as “a shining example, of what is best on the Left.” She continued that although “from a policy prescription he remains entirely true to his tribe... he represents the best of his tribe,” adding, with a wry reference to his fellow ideologues’ tendency to disregard recalcitrant realities, “because from time to time, he can make room for facts that are uncomfortable to his tribe.”
Sadly, in his address Shavit displayed scant signs of such virtues.

Thursday, June 25, 2015

From Ian:

Bernard-Henri Levy: A yellow star for the Jewish state?
Is this just a detail that can be safely ignored on the grounds that BDS targets “only” the territories, the Jewish settlements being built there, and the goods that the settlers produce? This is another sucker trap.
Here, too, it is enough to read the movement’s founding declaration of July 9, 2005, which specifies that one of its “three objectives” is to “protect” the “rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN resolution 194.” In fact and in law, that would amount to establishing on those lands a new Arab country that could be counted on, in short order, to undergo an ethnic cleansing that would make it judenfrei.
And, finally, how can I refrain from reminding those whose memory is as full of holes as their thinking that the idea of boycotting Israel is not as new as it appears? In fact, it is older than the Jewish state, having emerged on December 2, 1945, from a decision by the Arab League, which then wasted no time in relying on that decision to reject the United Nations’ dual resolution to establish two states. Among the promoters of this brilliant idea were Nazi war criminals who had settled in Syria and Egypt, where they gave their new masters lessons in marking Jewish shops and businesses.
A comparison is not an argument. And the meaning of a slogan does not reside entirely in its genealogy. But words do have a history. As do debates. And it is better to know that history, if we wish to avoid repeating its ugliest scenes.
The truth is that the BDS movement is nothing more than a sinister caricature of the anti-totalitarian and anti-apartheid struggles. It is a campaign whose instigators have no aim other than to discriminate against, delegitimize, and vilify an Israel that in their mind never stopped wearing its yellow star.
To activists of good faith who may have been taken in by duplicitous representations of the movement, I would say only that there are too many noble causes in need of assistance to allow oneself to be enlisted in a dubious one. Those worthy causes include fighting the jihadist decapitators, saving the women and girls enslaved by Boko Haram, defending the Middle East’s imperiled Christians and Arab democrats, and, of course, striving for a just peace between Israelis and Palestinians.
Labour’s Hamas connection
Among the Labour mainstream, complacency about Corbyn has been replaced by a rising sense of anger. “He claims he is a socialist, yet the first principle of socialism is supposed to be equality,” says James Bloodworth, editor of the influential Labour website Left Foot Forward. “Is he deluded enough to think that anti-Semitic terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah care a jot for the human rights of women, of gay people and of Jews?”
Bloodworth continues: “He needs to clarify his past statements as a matter of urgency. If he still stands by the things he has said, anyone genuinely interested in human rights cannot support him.”
But he is not alone in his affection for hardline Islamists. A seam of similar feeling runs through the British political establishment, particularly on the left.
The Palestinian Return Centre (PRC) is a British campaign group that — according to the Tel Aviv-based Meir Amit Terrorism and Intelligence Center — is affiliated to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood. In 2009, it welcomed the Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh as its guest speaker at its annual conference; and it has long enjoyed the patronage of MPs.
At a PRC event held at Parliament in 2013, Corbyn took the stage alongside Baroness Jenny Tonge, who was forced to resign from her position in the Liberal party after saying that if she were Palestinian, she “might just consider” becoming a suicide bomber; and Lord Nazir Ahmed, who after causing a deadly road accident by texting behind the wheel, blamed his prison sentence on a Jewish conspiracy.
A surprising number of other British politicians, including Andy Slaughter, Sir Gerald Kaufman and Crispin Blunt, have visited Hamas leaders in Gaza, and some — George Galloway included — have made sizable donations to the terror group. Now that Corbyn’s star is rising, this loose collective of pro-Islamist MPs may have a new representative at the top table. (h/t Yenta Press)
 Landmark anti-BDS law passes final Senate legislative hurdle
After weeks of legislative drama, a trade bill containing provisions opposing the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel cleared its final legislative hurdle Wednesday afternoon. The anti-BDS language, passed as part of the controversial Trade Promotion Authority legislation, is expected to be signed into law by President Barack Obama, who had pushed Congress to pass the trade bill as soon as possible.
Two amendments opposing BDS in Europe – one sponsored by Democratic Sen. Ben Cardin and Republican Sen. Rob Portman and the other by Republican Representative Peter Roskam and Democratic Representative Juan Vargas – were included in a trade authorization package that was considered must-pass legislation for the administration.
The president needed Congress’s vote to authorize him to negotiate trade deals with so-called “fast-track authority,” but ten days ago House Democrats turned on the president and defeated a key portion of the trade deal package.
After quick legislative maneuvering last week, House Republicans passed the authorization part of the bill – the part that the president needed most urgently and that Republicans tend to support – and then passed the revised House version back to the Senate for approval. On Wednesday afternoon, the Senate gave the controversial legislation its final approval, sending trade authorization to the president’s desk to be signed into law.
Roskam: If you want free trade with the U.S., you can't boycott Israel


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