Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Tuesday, October 04, 2016

10/04 Links: Palestinian Murderers and their Western Enablers; Ten Places the Obama Administration Says Are Not In Israel

From Ian:

Palestinian Murderers and their Western Enablers

The Palestinian Authority not only celebrates murderers: it produces new ones every day -- and does so knowlingly and voluntarily. For this it uses textbooks, television and radio programs, and articles in newspapers, all paid for with money from Western governments.
The Palestinian Authority also financially rewards the murderers' families and the murderers themselves. These financial rewards are also paid for with money from Western governments.
How can Western politicians explain that they condemn the murders and still fund the incitement to kill? How come they keep giving money that rewards murdering Jews "by all available means"?
How can they define as "moderate" an organization such as the Palestinian Authority that admits sending terrorists to kill Israelis and that teaches children, on its Facebook page, how to stab Jews to death? And how can they consider it urgent to give such an organization its own State?
Israeli Jews know they can only rely on themselves. They know that others, such as France, are holding knives that are sharpened.

Which Nation is (Still) the Number One Sponsor of Terrorism?

Iran has evidently harbored senior Al Qaeda operatives since 9/11, including facilitating the flow of fighters and funds to al-Qaeda through Iran -- a kind of jihadi pipeline. In the mid-1990s, reported the Clarion Project, Iran negotiated an agreement with Osama Bin Laden to allow al-Qaeda terrorists to freely transit Iran.
And, of course, Tehran's senior leadership financed and facilitated, along with Hezbollah, the training of the 9/11 hijackers that killed nearly three thousand people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania. According to a December 2011 decision by Judge George B. Daniels "Iran and Hezbollah materially and directly supported Al Qaeda in the September 11, 2001 attacks."
But 9/11 was not Iran's first terror attack against the United States. The Iranian government also financed the attack on the Pan Am flight that blew up over Scotland in December 1988, and was also responsible for the 1996 terror attacks against Americans at Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, the 1998 bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania and the 1983 bombings of our Marine barracks and embassy in Lebanon.
A number of American courts, upon hearing the evidence of Iranian government support for terrorism, found Iran guilty of terrorist attacks against the United States and its citizens, culminating in at least $56 billion in damages, which included being found guilty complicity in the 9/11 attacks.
Even more chilling has been Iran's joint missile and technology cooperation with North Korea, making the potential use of weapons of mass destruction against the US a growing possibility.
If any UN action is taken to stop terrorism, it should start with shutting down the number one source of state-sponsored terrorism in the world -- the Islamic Republic of Iran.

J Street ad campaign to back pro-Iran deal Congressional candidates

The liberal Jewish political action group J Street is set to launch a $500,000 ad campaign aimed at supporting Congressional candidates who supported the Iranian nuclear deal signed last year.
The campaign will run in two swing states, according to a press release sent out on behalf of the organization, without specifying which two. Details on the new initiative will be made public on Wednesday.
J Street said it seeks to “ensure House and Senate candidates who have backed the Iran nuclear deal in Congress and on the campaign trail prevail at the polls, and in doing so prove that diplomacy-first policies also make for good politics.”
The campaign will include television and internet advertising, direct mail and polling and is part of a “multi-state effort focusing on competitive Senate races in which candidates have been attacked for their support of the Iran deal.”
The organization has maintained that the nuclear deal, signed between Tehran and six world powers last year and implemented in January, is good for the United States and for Israel — whose prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has been a vociferous opponent of the controversial agreement.

!Shana Tova u'Metuka שנה טובה ומתוקה!

I want to wish all of my readers a Shana Tova u'Metuka, a happy and sweet year 5777.

May this be a year of good health, prosperity, joy and peace.

Actress Mayim Bialik has a video explaining the customs of the day:

Aish.com came out with one of their annual music videos:

It is not too late to support EoZ and to start the new year with a mitzvah!

(h/t Mike Tan)

We have lots of ideas, but we need more resources to be even more effective. Please donate today to help get the message out and to help defend Israel.

10/02 Links: Prince Charles and Israeli Funerals; 7 Myths About Bibi Busted

From Ian:

Elliott Abrams: Prince Charles and Israeli Funerals

Prince Charles attended the funeral of Shimon Peres last week, in Jerusalem. This was not his first visit: he also attended the Yitzhak Rabin funeral in 1995.
In the 21 years since then he has visited Arab countries repeatedly, but Israel has remained on the blacklist. No official visit, no tourism, sum total of visits there = two visits to Mount Herzl Cemetery.
Why? Is it his own prejudice against the Jewish State, or is the Foreign Office telling him to stay away? (The Queen has never set foot in Israel.)
There is actually a very good reason for him to visit another cemetery in Jerusalem, at the Mount of Olives: his grandmother is buried in a convent there. That woman is Princess Alice of Battenberg, the mother of Prince Philip. Philip actually did visit there, in 1994, in a trip the Foreign Office insisted was entirely private.
Princess Alice was an extraordinary woman. She was the great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria and was born at Windsor Castle in 1885. Earl Mountbatten of Burma was her younger brother. Congenitally deaf, she nevertheless learned to speak English and German. She led a most difficult life, in and out of exile from Greece (she had married Prince Andrew of Greece in 1903).
During the Second World War she lived in Athens and sheltered Jewish refugees there, for which was recognized by Yad Vashem as one of the “Righteous Among the Nations.” That ceremony at Yad Vashem was in fact the occasion for Prince Philip’s visit. She lived the final years of her life in Buckingham Palace and died there in 1988, after which in accordance with her request her remains were interred on the Mount of Olives.
Her spirit is nicely suggested by this story: during the Second World War the Nazis occupied Athens. When a German general asked her “Is there anything I can do for you?” she replied “You can take your troops out of my country.”
I suppose it is far too much, diplomatically, to expect Israel to disinvite someone like the heir to the British throne from a funeral. But the Prince’s attendance was an act of hypocrisy. If he wants to honor Shimon Peres, a better way is simply to schedule a visit to the country to which Peres devoted his life. And he can see his grandmother’s grave while at it.

Elliott Abrams: In What Country is Shimon Peres Buried?

Last week President Obama spoke at Shimon Peres’ funeral and watched him buried–in some sort of No Man’s Land. Not in Israel, it seems.
The Obama White House actually issued a correction of its press release of Obama’s remarks, to strike the world “Israel.” You can see a screen shot of the corrected release here at the McClatchy news site.
The absurdity of this move is striking. The ceremony was at Mount Herzl, the Jerusalem cemetery where many of Israel’s greatest figures are buried: Herzl himself, Jabotinsky, Begin, Golda Meir, Rabin, and innumerable military heroes.
It lies in Western Jerusalem, near Yad Vashem and Jerusalem Forest–a place Palestinians do not even claim when they claim a share of Jerusalem; only those who seek to destroy Israel think this place will ever be anything but a part of the Jewish State. U.S. policy is that Jerusalem is a final status issue, so we have our embassy in Tel Aviv. But there is no dispute about west Jerusalem, where the Knesset, Prime Minister’s office, and Supreme Court, and the National Library, and Yad Vashem–and Mount Herzl–all lie.
One wonders if President Obama, speaking about the meaning of Peres’s life for Israel, actually thought as he spoke those words at the grave site that he was not standing in Israel, and that Shimon Peres was not being buried in Israel. I doubt it. Which suggests, again, how foolish the current and longstanding American policy really is.

Anti-Semitism at My University, Hidden in Plain Sight

Last semester, a group came to Providence to speak against admitting Syrian refugees to this country. As the president of the Brown Coalition for Syria, I jumped into action with my peers to stage a counterdemonstration. But I quickly found myself cut out of the planning for this event: Other student groups were not willing to work with me because of my leadership roles in campus Jewish organizations.
That was neither the first nor the last time that I would be ostracized this way. Also last semester, anti-Zionists at Brown circulated a petition against a lecture by the transgender rights advocate Janet Mock because one of the sponsors was the Jewish campus group Hillel, even though the event was entirely unrelated to Israel or Zionism. Ms. Mock, who planned to talk about racism and transphobia, ultimately canceled. Anti-Zionist students would rather have no one speak on these issues than allow a Jewish group to participate in that conversation.
Of course, I still believe in the importance of accepting refugees, combating discrimination, abolishing racist law enforcement practices and other causes. Nevertheless, it’s painful that Jewish issues are shut out of these movements. Jewish rights belong in any broad movement to fight oppression.
My fellow activists tend to dismiss the anti-Semitism that students like me experience regularly on campus. They don’t acknowledge the swastikas that I see carved into bathroom stalls, scrawled across walls or left on chalkboards. They don’t hear students accusing me of killing Jesus. They don’t notice professors glorifying anti-Semitic figures such as Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt or the leadership of Hezbollah, as mine have.

Maude Vallet

Well, perhaps not "joy" exactly, but before we plunge into things let's get something out of the way, immediately.

A "Jihadi," as I am using the term, is anyone who believes in the restoration of the Muslim Caliphate for the purpose of spreading al-Sharia throughout the known universe and who justifies violence in that "noble" pursuit.

In a piece for the Gatestone Institute entitled, France's New Sharia Police, Yves Mamou tells us that:

For years, "big brothers" have been obliging their mothers and sisters to wear a veil when they go out. Now that this job is done, they have begun to fight non-Muslim women who wear shorts and skirts -- no longer just in the sensitive Muslim "no-go zones" of the suburbs, where women no longer dare to wear skirts -- but now also in the heart of big cities.

The cultural enrichment is just stupefying.

Mamou's examples include the beating of a French girl by a Muslim man in Brittany for daring to wear "provocative" clothing; the attack by ten young Muslims in Toulon of two European families on a bike path as they yelled "whores!" and "strip naked!" before beating the holy crap out of one of the husbands; also in Toulon, 18-year-old Maude Vallet was spat upon by a gang of Muslim girls for the crime of wearing short pants; in a resort in Garde-Colombe, the Alps, a Moroccan guy stabbed a woman and her three daughters for being "scantily dressed" and then complained that he was, in fact, the "victim" by accusing one of the men of making an obscene gesture in front of his wife; and last April a 16 year-old-girl in a suburb of Paris was severely beaten by three young Muslim women for wearing a skirt.

The rise of Political Islam is not limited to Sharia-enforcing states like Iran or ISIS, nor to Jihadi organizations like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Hamas in Gaza, or Hezbollah in Lebanon. It also includes regular Muslim on the streets of western cities, when those Muslims approve of imposing Islamic law on non-Muslim societies. Your average work-a-day Muslim in the West, however, despite their disinclination to condemn their Jihadi brothers and sisters is not a problem. Like Muslims everywhere they are simply trying to put food on the table and take care of their families.

Nonetheless, what we are seeing today is the contemporary example of a thirteen-hundred year old imperial project designed by Muhammad in the early 7th century. It is good that most Muslims are not Jihadis, but this does not change the fact that the rise of Political Islam is, perhaps, the most significant geo-political phenomenon since the demise of the Soviet Union.

Just as the conflict against Nazi Germany in World War II was not "racist" towards Germans, so those of us concerned about the rise of Political Islam are not "racist" toward Muslims. Political Islam (or Islamism) is a highly significant and toxic political movement throughout the Middle East and Europe and, like any political movement, it can be friendly or unfriendly, but always open to criticism. Unfortunately, given the brutality and the goals of Political Islam as expressed in the various Jihadi organizations, like the Islamic State and the Muslim Brotherhood, finding necessary and harsh criticisms is like picking apples from a tree.

Beheadings. Stonings. Slavery.

Where do you start?

Mamou believes that "the Islamic dress code is the Trojan horse of Islamist jihad..." and quotes Professor of Philosophy, Berenice Levet, of the École Polytechnique, telling the French daily newspaper, Le Figaro that, "In the war that Islamism is leading with determination against civilization, women are becoming a real issue." And:

... I want it recognized once and for all that if today the roles of the genders are forced to regress in France, if domination and patriarchy are spreading in our country, this fact is related exclusively to our having imported Muslim values.

This is, of course, exceedingly touchy terrain and I can practically hear the ice cracking beneath my feet as I write.

However, the primary question is whether or not we are seeing the emergence of "Virtue Police" in the streets of Paris.

Mamou tells us:

In France, no organized Islamist brigades patrol the streets (as in Germany or Britain) to fight alcohol consumption or to beat women for the way they are dressed. Yet gangs of "youths", again, both men and women, are increasingly doing just that in practice.

And this is precisely why Political Islam is already having a profound influence on western culture.

As a movement, it is not merely a top-down phenomenon, but an organic, bottom-up phenomenon, as well. It is the organic nature of this fascist-like movement that makes it so slippery and difficult to pin down. It is for this reason that Jihadi apologists in Europe and the United States, including Barack Obama, always explain away Jihadi attacks as the psychotic doings of lone maniacs who suffer from schizophrenia or homophobia or work-place discontentment or who are driven to kill non-Muslims by the NRA or the Trump campaign or the evil behavior of ordinary, privilege-strutting, white guys.

It can never be about Islamic teachings, as we find them in the Qur'an or Hadiths, because that is far too inconvenient for international elites such as Angela Merkel or Hillary Clinton who want an enlightened progressive system of open borders with a significant degree of top-down control as we see in the non-democratic European Union.

The grassroots imposition of Islamic dress codes on the indigenous European population is merely one way of normalizing a system of jurisprudence that is completely at odds with the western political tradition as handed down from from Magna Carta via the Constitution of the United States and the western liberal political tradition, more generally.

If al-Sharia is encroaching onto western legal terrain, the implications should be sobering for anyone concerned about the maintenance of free speech or the fundamental rights of individual liberty.

Michael Lumish is a blogger at the Israel Thrives blog as well as a regular contributor/blogger at Times of Israel and Jews Down Under.

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The Jordanian Tourism Ministry said that the total number of Israeli tourists decreased by 14.3% for the first eight months of this year compared to last year.

91,333 tourists came this year from Israel compared to 106,538 tourists during the same period last year.

The number of Israeli tourists who stayed overnight also fell by 13.8% compared to the same period last year.

What a surprise!

Jews are not allowed to bring in religious objects to Jordan, so observant Jews cannot stay overnight because they cannot bring in what they need to pray in the mornings.

Recently, archaeologists discovered a menorah carved into a stone in a Byzantine church in Abila, Jordan, that is assumed to have been taken from a destroyed synagogue.

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Saudi scholar says Arabs need to follow the example of Jews

Dr. Ibrahim Matroudi, a Saudi scholar of Arabic and religion, told an Arab newspaper that the Arabs should follow the example of the Jews.

Matroudi says that the Jews revived their culture and language and that they have had many prominent scientists and scholars.

The culture of revenge is deeply rooted in Arab/Muslim society, he said, although this culture contradicts Islam. "All the people are fanatics. We inherited intolerance. Everyone sees his doctrine as right and others are wrong," he told Elaph.

He notes that the Jewish people went from being reviled throughout history to becoming leaders of the world, culturally and intellectually, today. Should not such a people be studied, rather than shunned?

(H/T Ibn Boutros)

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Jordanians protest gas deal with Israel, saying it is "occupation"

From Telesur:

Jordanians swarmed through the streets of Amman on Friday in a large demonstration titled "The Enemy's Gas is Occupation." Chanting "Raise your voice for dignity" and "No to the shameful deal," Jordanians of all backgrounds and occupations expressed their rage at a secretive US$10 billion gas deal that will supply 1.6 trillion feet of gas to Jordan from the offshore Israeli-controlled Leviathan natural gas field over the course of 15 years.

The peaceful demonstration was dispersed by security forces after only half an hour, yet the demonstrators' message demanding that officials in the Hashemite monarchy be held accountable was widely broadcast throughout global media.

The march reflects the widespread Jordanian antipathy toward the Israeli state, and the view that their future utility bills will benefit the continued occupation of Palestine. Half of Jordan's population is estimated to have Palestinian roots, while approximately 2.1 million refugees from Palestine are registered in the kingdom.

Jordan Times adds:

Activists also called for switching off the lights for an hour at 9pm on Sunday “to show the public’s rejection of the gas deal”, she added.

Demonstrations have also taken place in the southern governorate of Karak, some 130km from Amman, where residents headed to the city centre to denounce the agreement, locals said.

The engineers’ association and other organisations will “step up” protests over the coming weeks in Karak, a city that has boycotted Israeli products since 2015, said Wissam Majali, the director of “A city free of Zionist merchandise” campaign.

“This week’s protests, campaigns, and activities will mark the start of demonstrations and initiatives to demand the total reversal of the gas deal and to show the public’s outrage towards the agreement,” Majali told The Jordan Times.

Notice the antisemitic poster in this photo of a lightbulb turned into a religious Jew with blood coming out of his fangs:

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10/01 Links: Double Standards for Aleppo and Gaza; Dershowitz: Shimon Peres, a Leader for All Seasons

From Ian:

Security guard shot by gunman in attack on Moscow synagogue

A security guard at a Moscow synagogue was wounded Saturday evening when a man armed with a gun and a gasoline canister attempted to break into the Jewish institution and set it alight, Russian media reported.
Initial reports said the guard was in critical condition after being shot in the head and chest while trying to stop the assailant from entering the Choral Synagogue.
The attacker was arrested by police, according to media reports.
A rabbi at the synagogue said the assailant arrived during a Sabbath prayer service, when about 150 worshipers were inside, and asked to meet Moscow Chief Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, Ynet news reported. Several security guards then took him across the street, at which point he shot one of them.

Double Standards for Aleppo and Gaza

Israeli efforts to minimize civilian casualties go unreported or even ignored by the press, and Israel instead finds itself regularly judged in the court of public opinion, which is led by a lazy or hostile media.
So Israel is subjected not only to a different standard than the deplorable militaries of Syria and Russia, but even to a different standard than other Western militaries.
If and when the Syrian conflict comes to an end, will anyone be held to account for what certainly appear, at face value, to be genuine war crimes? Will there be a UN investigation and a Goldstone-style report? Will the International Criminal Court issue indictments? Given Russian involvement and the lack of American global power projection, it is unlikely that anyone will be held to account.
The next time open conflict between Israel and Hamas breaks out, will the parameters of judgment have changed as a result of the carnage in Aleppo and other parts of Syria? Or will Israel continue to be held to a standard of behavior unlike any other military in the world?
The likelihood is that nothing will have changed when it comes to how Israel is treated, and we will be left to conclude that, ultimately, the world will be outraged by Israel defending itself and its citizens irrespective of how ethically it behaves.

Bystanders to Genocide

The essay was titled “Bystanders to Genocide.” Ms. Power later expanded the article into a book, “A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide,” for which she was widely praised. Barack Obama read the book and promoted her rise in government.
Fast forward to the present, and Ms. Power can sound like those officials she once scolded for thinking they were doing everything they could given the complexities of the situation.
“Well, Syria is a very complex picture,” Ms. Power told CBS earlier this month. “There are thousands of armed groups. The question again of what military intervention would achieve, where you would do it, how you would do it in a way where the terrorists wouldn’t be the ones to take advantage of it—this has been extremely challenging. But the idea that we have not been doing quote anything in Syria seems absurd. We’ve done everything short of waging war against the Assad regime and we are, I should note, having significant success against ISIL on the ground.”
Ms. Power’s list of achievements in Syria might seem grimly funny to the more than 10 million Syrians driven from their homes in the civil war and the families of its 400,000 dead, most killed by the Assad regime. The starving residents of Aleppo and other besieged Syrian cities also know that until last week the Obama Administration was eager to team up with the Russians—going so far as to share critical battlefield intelligence—so they could jointly attack Islamic State targets, thereby further freeing the Assad regime to do its dirty work. Another stab at U.S.-Russian cooperation hasn’t been ruled out.
President Obama bears ultimate responsibility for doing so little to stop the five-year Guernica that is Syria, and we don’t know what Ms. Power’s private policy advice has been. But in public she has become an echo of the officials she once denounced for justifying American inaction in the face of mass slaughter. The honorable decision would be to resign.

09/30 Links Pt2: George Soros’ Israel-Hatred Spills Out Into the Open; 5 feel-good stories from Israel in 5776

From Ian:

George Soros’ Israel-Hatred Spills Out Into the Open

Billionaire George Soros generally does not hide the fact that he uses the considerable funds at his disposal to support his extremist, leftist ideals.
So when he does hide something, it should raise some serious questions. A series of leaked documents recently revealed that Soros’ philanthropy network, the Open Society Foundations, has been giving money to a number of anti-Israel organizations with the goal of smearing the Israeli government and undercutting its relationship with the United States.
The list of organizations is a veritable who’s who of hostile, anti-Israel actors. One of the leaked documents shows that between 2001 and 2015, Soros funneled over $9.5 million into a range of groups including Adalah, the Al-Tufula Center, the Arab Association for Human Rights, Baladna, The Galilee Society, Molad, the New Israel Fund and others.
Even worse, these documents showed that while the Soros network was systematically and methodically doling out its funds to these controversial groups, it was also working extremely hard to keep its donations and advocacy work quiet.
According to the private documents, which have now been published online, Soros and his network are engaging in these subversive tactics in an effort to “hold Israel accountable” for its supposed violations of international law. In truth, it seems more fitting that Soros be held accountable for his inscrutable policies. His so-called Open Society Foundations certainly don’t appear to be so open after all.
By secretly dispersing his money to influence politicians and the media, Soros hopes to drive a wedge between America and Israel without anyone noticing. This approach is wrongheaded and shameful. And it’s not new.

Michael Oren On Trump, Clinton, American Leadership And His Future Ambitions

Former Israeli Ambassador to the United States Michael Oren won’t take sides in the U.S. election — but that doesn’t mean he won’t express concerns about aspects of both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton’s policies.
During an appearance on “The Jamie Weinstein Show” podcast, Oren opened up about how Israelis view the U.S. election, his view of America’s role in the Middle East, whether he has ambitions to be foreign minister or even prime minster one day, and so much more.

The Mottle Wolfe Show: The Case For Trump

Mottle and Brian John Thomas discuss the loss of Shimon Peres. Brian John Thomas then goes on to layout the reasons why he supports Donald Trump for president.

White House strikes out "Israel" from transcript of Obama's speech at Peres memorial

The original White House page, from Google cache:

The current one:

The White House sent a "correction:"

Unbelievable.

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It's that time of year

People are Googling "Shana Tova U'Metuka" (wishes for a happy and sweet New Year) and my blog comes up as #1 and #2:

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09/30 Links Pt1: Phillips: Israel, not the West, stands for international law; Glick: The New Middle East

From Ian:

Melanie Phillips: Israel, not the West, stands for international law

In fact the US, Britain and Europe have long displayed this contempt by supporting the big lie that Israel behaves illegally or belligerently.
The West maintains that Israel occupies Palestinian territory in the “West Bank.” This is untrue. There has never been any “Palestinian territory.”
Israel’s presence in the disputed territories cannot be legally defined as an occupation. Under the Hague and Geneva conventions, an occupation can only take place on sovereign land. The territories were never anyone’s sovereign land.
Israel is furthermore entitled under international law to continue to hold onto them as a defensive measure as long as its Arab aggressors continue to use them for belligerent ends.
The West says Israel’s settlements are illegal. This is also untrue.
In the 20s, the Mandate for Palestine gave Britain the legally binding duty to settle the Jews throughout what is now not just Israel but the disputed territories too. That Jewish right has never been abrogated.
The Geneva conventions, cited as the reason the settlements are illegal, prohibit an occupying power from transferring people en masse into occupied territory. This was drafted after World War II to prevent any repetition of the Nazis’ forced displacement of peoples. Israelis resident in the disputed territories, however, have not been transferred but moved there through their own free choice.
Kontorovich has looked at every modern example where occupied territories have been settled. In none of them did the international community denounce such action as illegal or demand that settlers had to vacate the land as a condition for peace or independence. If world powers asked the occupying force to withdraw, they referred only to the army and not the settler population. The only exception has been Israel.
The West makes a fetish of international law. Yet it denounces Israel, the one Middle East state that upholds it. It’s time to call out the US, Britain and Europe for aiding the repudiation of law and justice and thus helping promote the Arab agenda of exterminating Israel.

Caroline Glick: The New Middle East

To accomplish these goals, Israel needs to operate in two completely separate arenas. To weaken Iran, Israel should take its cue from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, and from its own past successful military ties to the Kurds of Iraq in the 1960s and 1970s.
Israel needs to deploy military trainers beyond its borders to work with other anti-Iranian forces. The goal of that cooperation must be to destabilize the regime, with the goal of overthrowing it. This may take time. But it must be done. The only way to neutralize the threat emanating from the new Syria is to change the nature of the Iranian regime that controls it.
As for Russia, Israel needs to demonstrate that it is a power that Putin can respect in its own right, and not a downgraded Washington’s sock puppet.
To this end, Israel should embark on a rapid expansion of its civilian presence along its eastern border with Syria and with Jordan. As Russia’s air base in Syria undermines Israel’s air superiority and reliance on air power, Israel needs to show that it will not be dislodged or allow its own territory to be threatened in any way. By doubling the Israeli population on the Golan Heights within five years, and vastly expanding its population in the Jordan Valley, Israel will accomplish two goals at once. It will demonstrate its independence from the US without harming US strategic interests. And it will reinforce its eastern border against expanded strategic threats from both the Golan Heights and the new Jordan with its bursting population of Syrian and Iraqi refugees.
It is ironic that the new Middle East is coming into focus as Shimon Peres, the failed visionary of a fantasy- based new Middle East, is being laid to rest. But to survive in the real new Middle East, Israel must bury Peres’s belief that peace is built by appeasing enemies along with him. The world in which we live has a place for dreamers.
But dreams, unhinged from reality, lead to Aleppo, not to peace.

Why Iran is more dangerous than Islamic State

It is not too late to repair the impression that the West — led by the United States — views Iran as part of the solution to the problems of the Middle East, rather than the chief source of the region’s instability and radicalism. Of course, Iran fights Islamic State; the fact that the world’s leading radical Shiite government fights radical Sunnis should come as no surprise.
Those who believed that the nuclear agreement would lead to a more moderate, open, reformist Iran, at home and abroad, regrettably suffer from wishful thinking. So long as the ayatollah’s regime governs Iran, there is no chance we will see a McDonald’s in Tehran. Instead, we will see more executions, more repression, more tyranny.
This view of Iran is shared across the Middle East by countries that used to be antagonists. While the struggle between Israelis and Palestinians persists, any reference to the conflict between Israel and Sunni Arab states is, for now, obsolete. Today, Arabs and Israelis are in the same boat, facing Iranian-backed threats all around us; in terms of how to address these threats, we are also generally on the same page.
What we lack is leadership from our traditional allies in the West, especially our good friends in America. Should President Obama or his successor shift priorities and lead a campaign to pressure Iran to end its destabilizing policies — applying the same type of pressure that forced Iran to negotiate on its nuclear program — it will find willing partners among both Arabs and Israelis.