RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270470/israel-moves-thwart-growing-hamas-maritime-threat-ari-lieberman

When it comes to military firsts, Israel can probably take credit for the lion’s share. Israel was the first nation to capture an intact Soviet MiG-21, the first to capture a complete intact Soviet P-12 radar station, the first to employ militarized drones in the context of a large-scale, Wild Weasel, anti-SAM operation, and the first to destroy not one but two atom bomb facilities.

On June 2, 2018 the Israel Defense Forces executed another operational first. The Israeli Air Force bombed and destroyed a Hamas underwater terror tunnel. The tunnel, which was located approximately three kilometers from the Israeli border, was constructed for the purpose of concealing Hamas movements and allowing Hamas frogmen to enter the sea from an adjacent Hamas naval base undetected.

Hamas has been trying to improve its militarized maritime program and has invested substantial resources into improving and expanding its sea assault capabilities. On July 8, 2014 a cell of five heavily armed Hamas frogmen infiltrated Israel from the sea at Zikim Beach, which is located just north of the Gaza Strip. They were quickly detected and Israeli ground and naval units were dispatched to confront them. After a running battle, all five were liquidated. An IDF soldier was lightly wounded in the exchange.

While the attack was thwarted, it highlighted another danger and underscored the need to address the growing Hamas maritime threat. The frogmen were well trained and demonstrated considerable bravery. Though the cell was wiped out, the confrontation could have just as easily ended in disaster.

www.geraldahonigman.com

Imagine for one moment tens of thousands of acres of French, Russian, American, Egyptian, or whoever’s farmland, forests, nature preserves, property, and lives deliberately being destroyed or targeted by neighbors sworn to their destruction by any-and-all means possible. Next, imagine that those neighbors, when not firing rockets, mortars, and missiles across the border, refuse to cease this new type of terror activity using often explosive, flaming terror kites as well. The only solution they will accept is your (and in Israel’s case, yet again) final solution.

Now, what might an acceptable response to such murderous intent be–especially when world bodies such as the United Nations basically ignore it (as happened again in the latest June13, 2018 UN condemnation of Israel for its defensive actions in Gaza) and wind up blaming the victim instead?

Predictably, taking cues from such hypocrisy, Hamas and its allies have next promised to launch thousands of additional incendiary kites into Israel as they attempt to storm the border to mark the end of Ramadan’s Eid al-Fitr’s celebration the following day–June 15th this year.

I wish it had not come to this, but the Hamas zebra does not change its stripes (and not that Fatah’s does).

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-fracturing-of-the-jewish-people-1528844625

“Israel is the home of all Jews,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared in his address to the American Jewish Committee Global Forum in Jerusalem last weekend. “Every Jew should feel at home in Israel.” There is a lot of history packed into these terse sentences, and just as much controversy.

The assertion that Israel is the home, not just a home, for all Jews is the core of classical Zionism. It implies that no other country can be a home, even if the Jews living there think it is. The Jews of Andalusia thought they were at home—until Christian rulers arrived and expelled them in the 15th century. The Jews of Germany thought they were fully German until a regime defined by murderous hatred of all Jews came to power.

But today, for the first time since the Talmudic era, there are two strong, self-confident centers of Jewish life. One of them embodies the Zionist proposition; the other rejects it outright. American Jews, the largest diaspora population, don’t believe they are living in exile, or even in danger. America is different, they insist. To the extent that America rests on civic principles rather than ethnic or religious identity, its liberal democratic institutions can accept Jews as equal citizens, as George Washington promised in his famous letter to the Touro Synagogue.

For most American Jews, the U.S. isn’t a temporary resting place interrupting ceaseless wandering; it is their permanent home. When they say “Next year in Jerusalem!” at the end of each Passover Seder, they don’t mean it literally.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/06/terrorist_time_bombs_in_the_making.html

One of the most despicable things that the Arab world does to its children is to turn them into human bombs. Propaganda in the form of songs is regularly broadcast on the Palestinian radio, The Voice of Palestine, as well as the Fatah-run TV station Awdah.

The song’s lyrics are as follows:

Our Martyrs are convoys and our bones are mountains
They don’t surrender to the lowly
We aren’t deterred by imprisonment
Palestine is etched on the heart of the fetus
A proud Martyr in his mother’s womb
And the Arab state will remain ours – Arab, Arab Palestine
We [hold] the rifles to our chests and our eyes are raised to you
Our homes are trenches and our souls are the sacrifice for you O Jerusalem, you will not remain stolen.

– “The First Direction of Prayer” by Syrian singer Assala Nasri
Official P.A. radio station The Voice of Palestine, Feb. 3, 2018

Innocent Arab children are being brought into this world for the explicit purpose of becoming killing machines. Are there any words to describe this despicable madness?

Since 1996, the Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) has been highlighting the heinous propaganda tools used in the Muslim world to “seek martyrdom-death.”

http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/sharpe

Scan the internet, along with the print and broadcast media, and you would be convinced by the sheer volume of fake news about Gaza that Israel occupies it and treats its Arab population with utmost cruelty. It is abase lie and another enormous Arab scam.

Of course, the fact that the so-called Disengagement Plan took place in 2005 is hidden or hardly mentioned at all. During that lamentable decision, Israel unilaterally demolished the 25 Jewish villages and farms – along with the schools and synagogues – that graced the territory, forced the Jewish villagers to abandon their homes and become refugees in Israel, and handed over control of Gaza to the Palestinian Authority.

That suicidal Israeli decision was taken by then Israel Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, in the naïve hope that Israel’s hand of peace would be reciprocated by the Arabs who call themselves Palestinians. It has, however, become an enormous self-inflicted Israeli tragedy as unremitting terror from Hamas occupied Gaza has reached unprecedented levels.

And it is conveniently ignored by the same fake news outlets that a bloody coup against the PA subsequently occurred when the Muslim Brotherhood’s Hamas terror branch brutally expelled the regime of Mahmoud Abbas and his own Fatah terror organization. Hamas is now the occupier of Gaza, employing a despotic reign of terror on both its population and against the Israeli villages and towns that border the Gaza Strip.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12496/palestinians-gays

Mahmoud Ishtiwi was executed in Gaza by three bullets to the chest, because he lived among people who consider homosexuality a sin punishable by death — and who act on it.

What can one learn from the controversy? Basically, that it is safer to be a member of Hamas than to be gay. Palestinian leaders would much rather see young Palestinians trying to kill Israelis than talk about gays in their own society. In the world of Hamas and the Palestinian Authority, there is no room for comedy or satire.

On June 8, an estimated 250,000 people attended the Gay Pride Parade in Tel Aviv. Tourists from all around the world came to Israel to watch and participate in the event. The theme of this year’s event is “The Community Makes History” — a reference to the LGBT community in Israel.

Meanwhile, as the Israelis were celebrating tolerance on the streets of Tel Aviv, their Palestinian neighbors were busy doing precisely the opposite: they were demanding that people should be fired for producing a television comedy about gay people in the Gaza Strip.

The controversial program, called “Out of Focus,” has drawn strong condemnations from Palestinians, who are now calling for punishing those responsible for “insulting Arab and Islamic values.”

In Palestinian and Arab society, homosexuality is denounced and stigmatized. Homosexuality is illegal under Hamas rule in the Gaza Strip, and dozens of gay Palestinians have fled to Israel out of fear of persecution and harassment. In the West Bank, the laws of the Palestinian Authority also do not protect the rights of gay Palestinians.

In the past decades, several gay Palestinians have been killed in both the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/270406/dont-repeat-peace-plan-futility-bruce-thornton

This month President Trump will unveil his plan for ending the seven decades of conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs. Like his predecessors, the author of the Art of the Deal seemingly can’t resist the chance to close the biggest foreign policy deal since the end of World War II. But he should resist chasing this diplomatic unicorn, and instead use the conflict as an opportunity for putting to rest the foreign-policy paradigm that has skewed and distorted our relations with allies and adversaries alike.

That paradigm holds that all conflicts between states and peoples can be resolved through the give-and-take of negotiations in which each side gives something up in a process founded on “mutual respect,” as the hoary cliché has it. Because peoples don’t understand their own best interests, the paradigm goes, they stumble into disorder and violence, a process exacerbated by poverty, lack of education, religious superstition, historical crimes like colonialism, and irrational traditions, all perpetuated by illiberal and autocratic regimes. Clear away those impediments, promote economic development, replace faith with science, create institutions that promote political freedom, and educate people in rational thought, and warring peoples will find that a negotiated settlement of differences can give them what they really want––peace, freedom, and prosperity.

The colossal delusion at the heart of this paradigm is the assumption that all people everywhere want what we in the West have created: peaceful coexistence and prosperity founded on technological development, and a greater understanding of human nature based on science rather than the superstitions of faith or tradition. But that assumption is reductive and contrary to the evidence of history, which teaches us over and over that peoples are moved by conflicting “passions and interests,” as James Madison put it. And the fiercest of these “passions and interests” are those about creed: the ultimate answers to humanity’s deepest yearning, which is to live in a way that obeys our Creator in this world and unites us with Him in the next.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/2018/06/to-jerusalem-and-back/

I land at Ben-Gurion Airport just before midnight and begin the long ascent to Jerusalem. The headiness hits me immediately and will remain until I depart 10 days later. A few hours later I sit bleary-eyed at breakfast ahead of a day spent trading ideas with some of Israel’s finest intellects from diplomacy, journalism and academia. I take lunch with the Director-General of the Foreign Ministry, Yuval Rotem, former Ambassador to Australia. A perfect specimen of energy meeting acumen, sneeringly called ‘cunning’ by Bob Carr in his diaries, Yuval at once sees the big picture while recalling the smallest detail. In the evening, I dine on Kurdish dumplings and hummus while discussing war and peace with a spokesman for the Israeli Prime Minister.

The following morning I depart for the Palestinian Territories to visit a Palestinian refugee camp, meet the Mayor of Bethlehem, and venture into darkest Hebron. I enter the camp, really just a common village of paved roads and stone houses, the entrance to which is adorned by an enormous key symbolising the Palestinian quest to return to what is now Israel. The enormity of the key aptly captures the degree to which the Palestinians are anchored in the past, unable to conceive of a future. Everywhere I turn I see the images of their ‘martyrs’. A corflute shows a young man with a Hamas headband and the smouldering wreck of an Israeli passenger bus he detonated. Where I come from such people are considered the lowest of cowards whose names should be blotted out. Here their names are exalted.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/06/exposing_bds.html

A lot can be said about the evil intentions of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement, and there is ample evidence showing BDS leaders’ hypocrisy and philosophical alignment with malicious actors with genocidal ambitions. One could readily find volumes of incriminating documentation about the group’s actions and alliances. And while it should be clear that a solid knowledge base is essential, we believe that it is just as important for the informed reader to take the next step and to educate others about the true nature of BDS. It is with this goal in mind that I provide an educational framework toward the end of this missive.

Firstly, we want to underline the importance of combating BDS because of the danger to Israelis and Jews worldwide allowing it to operate unchallenged presents, but also because its actions and goals should be unacceptable to all people of sound moral standing. While BDS tries to present itself as a human rights movement, it is precisely the opposite – an entity in pursuit of the destruction of the Jewish State by any means necessary, one that routinely violates personal liberties and treats individuals (including Arabs) as collateral damage. Boycotts of the Jews were practiced by some of the worst regimes in history, and BDS is a faux “grassroots” outgrowth of the Arab states’ seventy-year campaign to strangle Israel economically. As such, while BDS would like to be considered a “movement,” it may be more accurately perceived as an underhanded tactic.

Let us focus ever so briefly on the three BDS demands. The first BDS demand is for Israel to “end its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands and dismantling the Wall.” The phrasing is ambiguous, as many Israel-haters consider every inch of Israel, and not just the territories won by Israel in 1967, to be Arab land. Hence, the above can be interpreted as a call for the destruction of Israel. “The Wall” is actually a life-saving security barrier that was built in order to stem the waves of Palestinian suicide bombers that were marching into Israeli cities in the early 2000s.

The Gatestone Institute recently ran an essay by a Muslim Arab writer based in the Middle East, Bassam Tawilhttps://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/12467/palestinians-burn-the-jews

Here’s some excerpts from his article about fire kites being sent into Israel by those mainstream media’s “peaceful” Arabs across the Gaza border…

…The jubilant reactions of Palestinians and other Arabs and Muslims to the reports about the kite fires that have destroyed thousands of acres of fields and agricultural lands in Israel also leave no doubt that this tactic is a violent jihad waged with the goal of destroying Israel and killing Jews. Each time a report about another blaze surfaces, many Palestinians take to Facebook and Twitter to shout the Islamic battle cry “Allahu Akbar!” [“Allah is Greatest”], echoing calls from ISIS, Al-Qaeda and other jihadi terror groups when they launch terror attacks against non-Muslims. The Arabs and Muslims are now referring to the kite launchers as “mujahideen” (warriors) – a sign that these terrorists are soldiers of Islam engaged in a jihad against the infidels, including, of course, the Jews…

The flaming kites should be seen in the context of the ongoing Palestinian terror campaign that began decades ago and the goal of which is to kill Jews and eliminate Israel. There is no difference between the kites and rockets and mortars. There is no difference between the kites, suicide bombings, stabbing and car-ramming attacks. There is no difference between the kites and drive-by shootings. There is no difference between the kites and the slaughtering of a Jewish family during a meal. The techniques may vary, but the goal remains one: to see Israel wiped off the face of the earth…

On a somewhat related matter, not long ago, a young Israeli soldier was crushed to death by a large stone block dropped from a roof on his head. Other Jews have been killed and seriously wounded by rocks and stones as well, including very young children.