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January 2017

A Look Back at the First Disastrous ‘Two-State Solution’ By Victor Sharpe

In the 11th hour and the 59th minute of his miserable term in the White House, Barack Hussein Obama struck his knife deep into the heart of the embattled Jewish state.

With the appalling anti-Israel passage of U.N. Security Council Resolution 2334, engineered by President Obama and Secretary of State Kerry, the blame for the Israel-Palestinian conflict was falsely imparted upon the easy target: Israel and the so-called “settlements.”

There were no “settlements” before the 1967 Six-Day War, when the Jewish state survived yet another Arab war of genocide and freed the embattled nation from the existing 1947 nine- to 15-mile-wide armistice lines, which Israel’s then minister of foreign affairs, Abba Eban, called the Auschwitz lines.

It is not from 1967 that the conflict with the Arab and Muslim world or the so-called Palestinians began. To fully understand its origins, we must go back to the early years of the 20th century.

In 1920, Great Britain was given the responsibility by the League of Nations to oversee the Palestine Mandate with the express intention of reconstituting within its territory a Jewish national home.

The League of Nations created a number of articles in line with the original intent of the Balfour Declaration of November 29, 1917. At the last minute, however, a new article was introduced by the British Colonial Office: article 25.

It became apparent that its inclusion directly enabled Great Britain in 1921-22 to tear away all the vast territory east of the River Jordan and give it to the Arab Hashemites. The territory to become Trans-Jordan, led by the emir Abdullah.

British officials claimed that the gift of Mandatory Palestine east of the Jordan River was in gratitude to the Hashemites for their contribution in helping defeat the Turks. However, T.S. Lawrence described in derisory terms the Hashemite role as “a side show of a side show.”

Ironically, Britain was aided far more by the Jewish Nili underground movement in defeating the Ottoman Turkish Empire, which had ruled geographical Palestine for 400 years.

This was the first partition of Palestine, the first two-state solution, and created the new Arab entity nearly 97 years ago called Trans-Jordan, covering some 35,000 square miles, or nearly four fifths of the erstwhile Palestine Mandate. Immediately, Jewish residence in this new Arab territory was forbidden, and it is thus historically correct to state that Jordan is Palestine.

In 1923, the British and French colonial powers also divided up the northern part of the Palestine Mandate. Britain stripped away the Golan Heights (with its ancient biblical Jewish roots) and gave it to French-occupied Syria.

‘Leaderless Jihad’ — Hardening Targets to Thwart Lone Wolf Attacks By Stephen Bryen

After the January 8th truck attack by a terrorist in Jerusalem that killed four young soldiers (three of them women) and injured more than 15 others, the Israeli government has started putting in cement barriers to try and head off similar attacks in future.

Israel is trying to deal with a relatively new, harder to track kind of terrorism called “leaderless jihad.” In 2005 jihadist military theorist Abu Musab al-Suri (AKA Mustafa Setmariam Nasar) published an online book titled The Call to Global Islamic Resistance focusing on the importance of “solo jihadi terror work.” According to al-Suri, solo jihadi attacks will exhaust the enemy and cause him to collapse and retreat.

In the West, these are commonly called “lone wolf” attacks, but this is misleading and the terminology makes it sound as if the lone wolves are not part of a terror network. The truth is that such terrorism is organized and takes advantage of the Internet and social media as a key way to pass messages sending their adherents on terrorist missions. Many of the wannabe terrorists who take up these calls for action already have been proselytized, often in local mosques​ and schools​ or by terrorist operatives in their communities. Some of them even publish personal manifestos on social media though often under nom de plumes but with photos and other information giving important clues to near-term threats. The Ft. Lauderdale shooter, Esteban Santiago, used the​ pen​ name Aashik Hammad. The shooters in San Bernardino, Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, almost certainly were trained in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan and Tashfeen Malik had a social media account under a pseudonym. The FBI insists these terrorists were “self-radicalized,”​ a claim that does not in any way align with the overwhelming evidence they were not only Jihadi but also Wahhabi trained.​

Leaderless jihad is a means to try and avoid tracking by intelligence agencies and law enforcement. It presents a particular problem in anticipating and thwarting attacks. Like “lone wolf” therefore, “leaderless” jihad is not really leaderless at all. Rather the leadership function is hidden​ to a degree​.

When faced with a threat that is hard to anticipate through intelligence and law enforcement tracking, it is important to try and make it as difficult as possible for terrorists to be successful. The most immediate steps that can be taken is to harden places that are vulnerable to attack.

Trump: The Outsider Moves Inside by Christopher Caldwell

The entire publicity apparatus of the media and government was enlisted to make a vote for him appear futile. Now poised to take power, many previously silent supporters will come out of the woodwork. His prospects of political success may be correspondingly larger.
In early December, when President-elect Donald Trump’s post-election “Thank You Tour” arrived at the US Bank Arena in Cleveland, someone hollered out of the audience, “We love you, Donald.” Trump yelled, “I love you, too”—one of the oratorical innovations of Barack Obama’s successful campaign for president in 2008 that few politicians have been able to resist imitating. But then, Trump pointed to the working-class fellow in the audience who had hollered in the first place. Trump said, in his unsyntactical way, “Guy. Some guy. Look at this guy. And I do love him. He’s a rough-looking cookie, though, I tell you. Love. We love. And there’s going to be a lot of love in this country.”

In a strange sense, spreading the love may be the biggest policy challenge Donald Trump faces as he approaches the presidency. His opponents are predicting catastrophe. Some of them are actively wishing for it. Hillary Clinton’s campaign backed an attempt to undo his election through legal challenges in three states. Not since Ronald Reagan has an American president arrived in the White House amid such widespread anxiety over his basic competence. Although Reagan was re-elected easily after four years, it took a long time to disabuse his detractors of the notion that he was too stupid to be president. And Donald Trump has a particular challenge. He was elected on an explicitly nostalgic campaign slogan—“Make America Great Again”. No politician can keep a promise to turn back the clock. Failure of one kind or another seems inevitable.

Yet Trump scored a triumph just days after his election. Carrier, an air-conditioning manufacturer that had been a special target of Trump’s bile on the campaign trail, agreed to cut in half a plan to move production facilities to Mexico. The initiative will keep 1100 jobs in Indiana. Newspapers have mocked Trump’s plans to bring industrial jobs back to the United States. “The reality is more complicated,” says the Los Angeles Times. Maybe so, but the Carrier deal is a sign that Trump is stronger than he looks. Voters who have had their credulity abused by politicians extolling capitalism’s theoretical benefits are likely to be patient with him. “They forgot that it was the American worker who truly built the country,” Trump said of the experts during his Cincinnati speech. Even if Trump cannot re-establish the high-paying manufacturing jobs of half a century ago, they are a symbol that he will not forget working people.

India’s Best Friend: Protector of the Free World by Jagdish N. Singh

Israel has always been appreciative of New Delhi’s security imperatives. New Delhi, however has yet to be fully appreciative of Israel’s security imperatives.

New Delhi has yet to be morally conscientious enough openly to back Israel in multilateral fora such as the United Nations. One hopes Prime Minister Modi would show the statesmanlike leadership at which he is so expert and which makes him so admired.

Israel stands and fights for openness, diversity, truth and its existence, just as India does. India must back Israel. New Delhi also needs Jerusalem in combating Islamist terrorism, one of the greatest threats to its unity and territorial integrity.

The operational code of anti-India Islamist forces’ behaviour is similar to that of Israel’s Palestinian counterparts: spread the culture of hatred and violence against the free world. Israel knows better than anyone it how best to protect it against such elements.

Ever since former Indian Prime Minister P. V. Narsimha Rao decided in January 1992 to establish full diplomatic ties with Israel, relations between the two democracies have flourished in all fields. Socially, there have been unprecedented people-to-people exchanges. Today over 40,000 Israelis travel to India annually. Since the Israeli poet Amir Or translated the famous Indian epic he Mahabharata into Hebrew in 1998, more books of Indian poetry have been translated into Hebrew.

Economically, technologically and militarily, relations between India and Israel also have moved from strength to strength. In 1992 trade between the two nations stood at a meagre $100 million. Today this stands at $5 billion with the possibility of its being tripled if a free trade agreement is concluded between the two nations.

Israel has always been appreciative of New Delhi’s security imperatives. Jerusalem stood by India in its wars in 1965, 1971 and 1999, and The was helpful to India in winning the Kargil war of 1999.

During India’s “Kargil War” of 1999 Israel came to India’s assistance. Since then, India has increasingly turned to Israel for advanced weapons systems.

India has emerged as Israel’s second largest Asian trading partner, after China. Today Israel is India’s second largest arms supplier, after Russia. The Indo-Israeli relationship in this sector has developed into the formation of joint military ventures for the development of specific weapons systems and technologies.

The UN Holocaust: More Lies and Treachery on the Way? by Yves Mamou

The launch of this diplomatic attempt to gut Israel will start on January 15, in Paris, at a “peace conference” — which should immediately be postponed a week.

“Led astray from their primary mission, these organizations [such as the United Nations] have become tools of corruption or terrorism, reinforcing global Islamic power… Their latest resolutions do not only confirm the victory of jihadism and illiteracy: they also express the success of the years of effort made by this post-war Europe that continues to destroy, defame and delegitimize the Jewish State in the name of Islamic justice.” — Bat Ye’or, prizewinning historian.

With a UN now run as if it is the universal caliphate, assisted mostly by dictators and despots, it is hard to see much good ever coming from it. No one has yet been made accountable for the $100 billion “oil for food” scandal, and peacekeepers still dole out food to children in exchange for sex.

“The beginning of this long journey dates back to 1967, in France… Europe rushed to adopt the French position in 1973 and, along with the OIC, planned political measures designed to destroy the Jewish State by denying its sovereign rights and its cantonment on an indefensible territory. Resolution 2334 is now the icing on the cake of this policy, which forms the basis for a Euro-Islamic policy…” — Bat Ye’or.

All freedom loving nations would be wise to abandon the UN, or, second-best, defund it. Sadly, that is the only language the UN seems to understand. Countries imagining that in Donald Trump they have another pushover, watch out. You will be in for quite a shock.

Israel, this tiny country in the heart of Middle East, has become the new target of diplomacy-abuse at the United Nations, headed by the Americans, the Europeans (mainly France) and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) — 57 Islamic states plus “Palestine”, which at the moment forms the largest bloc at the UN.

On December 23, 2016, the UN Security Council passed Resolution 2334, which effectively sets the boundaries for the Palestinian state at the 1949 armistice lines. The Arabs had previously refused to accept the armistice line as a border, presumably because agreeing to it might preclude the Palestinians from trying to get the rest of “Palestine”, defined by them as “from the river [Jordan] to the sea [Mediterranean]” — meaning all of Israel. Just look at any Palestinian map — It is identical to the shape of the entirety of Israel.

According to Res. 2334, not only are Jewish settlements are illegal, overnight, effectively making their Jewish residents criminals, but the Jewish Quarter, the Western Wall and the Temple Mount in Jerusalem’s Old City — the heart of Judaism for nearly 4,000 years and the seat of Christianity for more than 2,000 years — are now grotesquely considered “occupied territory”.

As Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer noted:

“It’s as if the U.N. passed a resolution declaring Mecca and Medina to be sovereign Jewish or Christian territory. It’s absurd. It’s an insult to the intelligence of the world and is supremely damaging to the Israeli claim to its own holy places.”

Germany Sees Sharp Fall in Asylum Seekers While the number of asylum seekers declined in 2016, a slow pace for deporting rejected applicants may harm security By Andrea Thomas

BERLIN—The number of asylum seekers entering Germany fell by about two thirds last year but the proportion of rejected applicants who left remained low, the government said Wednesday, raising fears that criminals or extremists may remain in the country.

The influx of migrants from war-torn or poor economic regions has raised security concerns, particularly after last year’s terror attacks in Germany. In December, rejected asylum seeker Anis Amri killed 12 and left scores wounded.

Government data showed that roughly 280,000 people entered Germany last year in search of asylum, down from a record of about 890,000 in 2015. But only 80,000 left Germany either voluntarily or were deported.

“The development of the asylum figures show that the German government’s measures have an effect. We have succeeded in regulating, steering the number of people coming to us,” said Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière. However, the number who left was too low, given the number of rejected asylum claims, he said. “We are in talks with the states to further increase the number of these returnees.”

The number of filed asylum claims, which lags behind the number of newly arrived migrants, rose to 745,545 in 2016 from 476,649 in 2015. The biggest group of applicants came from Syria, followed by Afghanistan, Iraq and Iran, and more than half received asylum or refugee status.

Mr. de Maizière called on European Union countries to continue with their efforts to establish a harmonized asylum policy as the rate of granting asylum or refugee status differs greatly among member states.

“It’s not too much to ask that countries should agree on how to assess the political situation in Somalia, Nigeria and Pakistan,” he said. “Entry criteria and the length of asylum procedures should be more streamlined in Europe. The level of welfare benefits should also be awarded within a certain range.” CONTINUE AT SITE

The Woman Who Scooped Everyone on World War II Clare Hollingworth was a journalist of the old school—daring, dogged and open-minded. By Melanie Kirkpatrick

The celebrated British war correspondent Clare Hollingworth died Tuesday in Hong Kong at 105. The news reached me via her obituary in the Daily Telegraph, which a friend emailed. It was fitting that the Telegraph published one of the first reports of her death, as the newspaper also published Hollingworth’s most famous article and arguably the biggest scoop of the 20th century: the outbreak of World War II.

In late August 1939, Hollingworth was a 27-years-old cub reporter for the Telegraph in Poland. After talking a British diplomat into allowing her to borrow his car, she drove across the border into Germany, where she observed large numbers of troops, tanks and field artillery lined up along a road.

As she wrote in her autobiography, when the wind blew open burlap screens “constructed to hide the military vehicles . . . I saw the battle deployment.” Her story appeared in the London newspaper on Aug. 29 under the headline “1,000 Tanks Massed on Polish Frontier.” Germany invaded Poland three days later.

The young reporter’s scoop heralded the rest of her journalism career, which took her to the four corners of the Earth. She was a journalist of the old school—daring, dogged and open-minded. She was interested, above all, in “getting the story.” In pursuit of that goal, she would talk to anyone, travel anywhere, endure any discomfort.

Hollingworth spent six years covering World War II in dangerous assignments that took her to Central Europe, the Balkans and northern Africa. Next she covered the war in Algeria, two wars between India and Pakistan, conflicts in Aden, Burma, Borneo and Ceylon, the Vietnam War, two Arab-Israeli wars, the bloody birth of Bangladesh, and the Cultural Revolution in China.

In 1946 she was staying at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem when a bomb went off, killing 91 people. “I was not being brave,” she once wrote about her adventures. “My over-riding feeling was enthusiasm for a good story.”

Her sources included high government officials and military officers as well as soldiers and ordinary people. When I knew her in the British Crown Colony of Hong Kong in the 1980s and ’90s, she was as welcome at the governor’s sedate dinner parties as she was at the raucous bar of the Foreign Correspondents Club or with the local patrons of sidewalk noodle stands.

In what was perhaps her sole concession to being a female reporter in what was then mostly a man’s world, she often made a point of befriending sources’ families, secretaries and household help. Such sources came in handy, such as when she broke the news, in 1963, that British double agent Kim Philby had defected to the Soviet Union. The wife he left behind in Beirut was one of her sources.

Since the early 1980s, Hollingworth made her home in Hong Kong. She would hold court at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club, where she often could be found in a corner of the bar sipping a G&T and attired in her regular working uniform of a custom-made safari suit and rubber-soled Chinese slippers. She was a marvelous raconteur, and I heard some of her best tales over dinner in the club’s upstairs dining room. CONTINUE AT SITE

Tillerson for State Trump and his nominee show more realism on Russia.

Over several hours before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday, Rex Tillerson presented a largely clear-eyed view of Russia and American interests. Though the Secretary of State nominee had tense exchanges—with Marco Rubio over whether Vladimir Putin is a “war criminal,” with Tim Kaine on climate change, with others about his claim that Exxon had never “directly lobbied” against Russian sanctions—on the whole it was a sober, informed performance.

This sobriety was in marked contrast to the circus provoked by the publication of allegations—completely unsubstantiated—that the Russians hold compromising information about Donald Trump and worked with his surrogates to influence the 2016 election.

Among the allegations is that Mr. Trump hired prostitutes to perform degrading acts on a bed at the Ritz-Carlton in Moscow that had been slept in by President and Mrs. Obama. Another is that Mr. Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, held a “clandestine meeting” with “Kremlin representatives” in Prague last August. These are two items drawn from 35 pages of memos prepared by a former British MI6 officer who was formerly stationed in Russia and who was paid first by Republican opponents of Mr. Trump and then by Democrats.

The memos had been circulating in press and political circles for some time. Yet even many publications that were vociferously anti-Trump declined to publish the material because they couldn’t substantiate the claims.

This changed Tuesday. First CNN published a dispatch noting that a summary of the memos had been attached to a report by the U.S. intelligence community on Russian hacking—though CNN did not include the uncorroborated details. The BuzzFeed website then published the 35 pages of memos even as its editor admitted “there is serious reason to doubt the allegations.”

The response was predictable. Mr. Trump took to Twitter to deny everything and ask with his familiar restraint if the U.S. is now “Nazi Germany.” Mr. Cohen said he’d never been to Prague. Amid Wednesday’s press conference brawl, it was easy to miss that Mr. Trump conceded for the first time that Russia was behind the hacks on the Democrats last year. Mr. Trump’s vehement denials also mean that if we learn in the future that Russia does have compromising details about him, his Presidency could be over.

All of this is a reminder—as if we need it—that the Trump Administration will be unlike any we’ve experienced. But when you look past the salacious, there’s been some healthy movement even on Russia. Mr. Tillerson showed that he’s nobody’s fool, that he has a good sense of the challenges America faces, and that the U.S. has paid a price for the Obama Administration’s retreat from leadership.

Notably he said that Russia “poses a danger,” that “there should have been a show of force” when the Russians invaded Crimea, and that the U.S. ought to give Ukrainians the arms they need to defend themselves against Russia. He had similar messages about how we have to “send China a clear signal” about its military buildup on contested islands in the South China Sea.

We wish Mr. Trump would handle these media frenzies with more presidential composure, but that’s all the more reason for the Senate to confirm Mr. Tillerson to advise him.

The Trump Russia Files The president-elect’s interregnum turns into a media circus damaging everyone.By Daniel Henninger

A standard journalistic defense for publishing, or reporting on, the sort of thing BuzzFeed put on the web Tuesday night about Donald Trump’s alleged compromise by the Russians is that “the people” ultimately will sort it all out. You could say the same thing about tornadoes.

Conventional wisdom after the election held that the media had been chastened by its coverage of the campaign, that it had learned to be more careful about separating facts from the media bubble.

The past week’s news, if one still can call it that, was bookended by two Trump files. The first was the intelligence community report that Russia’s hack of the presidential election favored Mr. Trump. The second was a salacious opposition-research file on Mr. Trump published by BuzzFeed, which says it is about “trending buzz.” Below the site’s Trump-in-Russia stories Wednesday sat, “Lauren Conrad Just Posted The Most Adorable Photo Of Her Baby Bump.”
No one has learned anything.

When people played on real pinball machines, everyone knew that if you banged on the machine too hard, it would lock up. It would “tilt.” Because so many once-respected institutions are behaving so badly, the American system is getting close to tilt.

The interregnum between the election result and next week’s inauguration has become a wild, destructive circus, damaging the reputation and public standing of everyone performing in it, including Donald Trump.

Trumpians will resist that thought, but they should be concerned at their diminishing numbers. Quinnipiac’s poll this week puts Mr. Trump’s approval rating at 37%. Building in even an expansive margin for error, this is an astonishing low for a president-elect.

Mr. Trump routinely mocks the “dishonest media.” He has a point, but dishonesty isn’t the problem. The internet, media’s addictive drug, is the problem. Whatever publication standards existed before the web are eroding.

Any person getting a significant federal job undergoes an FBI background check. These “raw” FBI files—a mix of falsity, half-truths and facts—are never published.

The BuzzFeed story about Donald Trump in Russia is a raw FBI file, or worse. Once it went online, every major U.S. news outlet prominently published long accounts of the story, filled with grave analysis and pro forma caveats about “unverifiable,” as if this is an exemption for recycling sludge.

This isn’t news as normally understood. It’s something else. CONTINUE AT SITE

Kerry Exits as Congenital Liar and Traitor to America & Israel By Joan Swirsky

Nothing could have surprised—indeed shocked—the national and international public more than learning through a Boston Globe article by Jennifer Anne Perez on February 2, 2003, that U.S. Senator John Kerry—who presented himself as a born-to-the-purple “Boston Brahmin” of Irish-Catholic ancestry—was in fact the grandson of Czech Jews.

Like another Democrat, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, Kerry pretended to be shocked! shocked! to learn of his Jewish heritage.

Only when he was outed did this poseur—more known for marrying heiresses then for any legislative accomplishments in his over 30 years as a U.S. senator—admit that, yes, his Eastern European ancestors, surnamed Kohn (a variation of Cohen) were Jews.

But why, after he knew the truth, would he be one of the major architects of a policy to destroy the Jewish state of Israel, as he did with his genocidal speech in the State Department at the end of December?

Of course, the same can be asked of Jews like George Soros, Peter Beinart, and dozens of other Jewish Jew haters who lie awake nights roiling and ruminating over Israel’s success—indeed, its very existence—and feel so distressed by their own Jewishness that they spend their entire lives plotting and planning and spending millions of words and dollars to obliterate Israel, which they no doubt fantasize will kill the Jew inside themselves.

Here’s an ironic twist: Carrie’s younger brother Cameron, an attorney, converted to Judaism in 1983 and is racist children as juice.

Getting back to John Kerry, however, we now know that from the very beginning of his public life, he knew he had Jewish roots but lied about them. I think this is called being a liar.
ONCE A LIAR…

No one has said it better than the founder an editor of the New York Sun, Seth Lipsky: “It looks like Secretary of State Kerry is determined to go out the way he came in—wrapping himself in the flag while betraying the causes of both America and its allies. He came in by doing that to Vietnam and is going out by turning on Israel. “

To be sure, if there’s one thing most Americans are certain about it’s that Kerry lied through his teeth when he defamed the heroic soldiers he fought with in Vietnam, accusing them—falsely—of hideous war crimes.

Lipsky explains that, “Kerry’s tirade against Jewish settlements and liberated Judea and Samaria was breathtaking and it’s mendacity.” And what is the definition of mendacity? Lying!