Australia’s Labor Party going anti-Israel in quest for Muslim votes By Thomas Lifson

Like Western Europe, Canada, and the United States, Australia has been on the receiving end of a growing stream of Muslim immigrants, to the great advantage of the domestic political leftist parties. The Australian Labor Party, which is currently the opposition to the centrist Liberal/National coalition that has formed the government, has long favored Muslim immigration.

Now that Muslims located in Sydney’s western suburbs form a significant voting bloc, the ALP is going hard against Israel. Andrew Bolt, syndicated columnist based at the Melbourne Herald-Sun is denouncing this in no uncertain terms:

Labor, desperate for Muslim votes in Western Sydney, is openly pandering to bigots and anti Semites:

NSW Labor delegates to this weekend’s state conference have proposed … 18 policy agenda items relating to Indigenous affairs and 24 about the environment. But there are a staggering 28 motions regarding Israel, most of them critical, out of the entire 45 foreign policy items up for discussion.

Shame on them. Shame. (snip)

If Labor passes such motions, any Jew who backs the party is a collaborator to Jew-hatred.

He documents the foreign policy obsession of the party:

Israel Looks Beyond America How many allies does President Obama think the U.S. can afford to squander? By Bret Stephens

Talk to Israelis about the United States these days and you will provoke a physical reaction. Barack Obama is an eye roll. John Kerry is a grimace. The administration’s conduct of regional policy is a slow, sad shake of the head. The current state of the presidential race makes for a full-blown shudder. The Israeli rundown of the candidates goes roughly as follows: “Hillary—she doesn’t like us.” “Cruz—I don’t like him.” “Rubio—is he done for?” “Sanders—oy vey.” “Trump—omigod.”

As for Israel’s own troubles—a continuing Palestinian campaign of stabbings; evidence that Hamas is rebuilding its network of terror tunnels under the Gaza border and wants to restart the 2014 war; more than 100,000 rockets and guided missiles in the hands of Hezbollah—that’s just the Middle East being itself. It’s the U.S. not being itself that is the real novelty, and is forcing Israel to adjust.
I’ve spent the better part of a week talking to senior officials, journalists, intellectuals and politicians from across Israel’s political spectrum. None of it was on the record, but the consistent theme is that, while the Jewish state still needs the U.S., especially in the form of military aid, it also needs to diversify its strategic partnerships. This may yet turn out to be the historic achievement of Benjamin Netanyahu’s long reign as prime minister.

On Sunday, Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon publicly shook hands with former Saudi intelligence chief Prince Turki al-Faisal at the Munich Security Conference. In January, Israeli cabinet member Yuval Steinitz made a trip to Abu Dhabi, where Israel is opening an office at a renewable-energy association. Turkey is patching up ties with Israel. In June, Jerusalem and Riyadh went public with the strategic talks between them. In March, Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi told the Washington Post that he speaks to Mr. Netanyahu “a lot.”

More Essential Than Ever: GOP Electability With the makeup of the Supreme Court at stake, viability in the general election is paramount—and only Marco Rubio seems to have it.By Allysia Finley

http://www.wsj.com/articles/more-essential-than-ever-gop-electability-1455572580

The death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has raised the stakes of the presidential election. If there is a silver lining, it’s that maybe conservatives will finally sober up and stop indulging their self-destructive impulse to choose the “most conservative” candidate or the one with no internal censor (or compass). They may finally realize how important electability is—and take a fresh look at Marco Rubio.

After an uninspiring performance in New Hampshire, the Florida senator used the South Carolina debate on Saturday as a mulligan to dispel criticisms that he is too callow and glib. While discussing immigration and foreign threats, Mr. Rubio came across as confident and capable without sounding robotic.

At the end of the night, Ted Cruz and Donald Trump were the ones looking juvenile after they engaged in a playground game of “liar, liar.” Mr. Trump sounded as uninformed as usual, though his supporters may not care. He had no solution for out-of-control entitlement spending other than promising, as so many politicians have before him, to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse. His harangue against trade deals and endorsement of an exit tax for companies that move abroad showed a shaky grasp of economics.

Unlike the front-runners, Mr. Rubio projected hope. Recalling the election of 1980, he noted that Americans “were scared about what kind of country their children were going to live in and inherit. And yet somehow Ronald Reagan was able to instill in our nation and in our people a sense of optimism. And he turned America around because of that vision and ultimately because of that leadership.”

Ronald Reagan aside, Mr. Rubio’s chiaroscuro contrasting the dark present with a bright future seems more to echo John F. Kennedy, who notably was also a youthful senator when he sought the Democratic nomination in 1960. In his acceptance speech at the convention, Kennedy said: “We are not here to curse the darkness, but to light the candle that can guide us through that darkness to a safe and sane future.” There are other similarities. As with JFK, some voters don’t take Mr. Rubio seriously because of his boyish good looks. A new Cruz ad mocks him as “just a pretty face.”

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Why Obama’s Middle East Policy Is Failing Focusing on Islamic State alone leaves the contagion of civil wars to drag the region deeper into disaster.by Kenneth M. Pollack and Barbara F. Walter

Imagine that it is Dec. 8, 1941, the day after the attack on Pearl Harbor. President Franklin Roosevelt goes before the Congress to request a declaration of war against . . . the Nazis’ SS.

Not the Japanese—they could never occupy the U.S. Not Hitler—we don’t much like him, but he’s not doing the killing. Not the regular Wehrmacht troops, they’re following orders. Not the Nazi Party—they aren’t a direct, physical threat to the U.S. Only the SS, because they are perpetrating the genocide that is the Third Reich’s worst crime.

Then FDR calls up Stalin and Churchill and urges them to quit worrying about German army divisions and the Luftwaffe and Hitler’s munitions factories—and focus only on the SS.

If America had taken that approach to World War II, it would have been utterly nonsensical, yet that is, in effect, how the Obama administration is dealing with the Middle East conflagration: by focusing exclusively on Islamic State.

The murderous jihadists of Islamic State, or ISIS, are only one symptom of a much larger problem in the Middle East. By fixating on this one symptom—rather than its sources—and then trying to convince everyone else in the region to do the same, we are setting ourselves up for failure.

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Russia’s Trap: Luring Sunnis into War by Burak Bekdil

Washington should think more than twice about allowing Turkey and Saudi Arabia, its Sunni allies, militarily to engage their Shiite enemies in Syria. Allowing Sunni supremacists into a deeper sectarian war is not a rational way to block Russian expansion in the eastern Mediterranean. And it certainly will not serve America’s interests.

Turkey and Saudi Arabia are too weak militarily to damage Russia’s interests. It is a Russian trap — and precisely what the Russians are hoping their enemies will fall into.

After Russia’s increasingly bold military engagement in war-torn Syria in favor of President Bashar al-Assad and the Shiite bloc, the regional Sunni powers — Turkey and its ally, Saudi Arabia — have felt nervous and incapable of influencing the civil war in favor of the many Islamist groups fighting Assad’s forces.

Most recently, the Turks and Saudis, after weeks of negotiations, decided to flex their muscles and join forces to engage a higher-intensity war in the Syrian theater. This is dangerous for the West. It risks provoking further Russian and Iranian involvement in Syria, and sparking a NATO-Russia confrontation.

After Turkey, citing violation of its airspace, shot down a Russian Su-24 military jet on Nov. 24, Russia has used the incident as a pretext to reinforce its military deployments in Syria and bomb the “moderate Islamists.” Those are the Islamists who fight Assad’s forces and are supported by Turkey, Saudi Arabia and Qatar. The Russian move included installing the advanced S-400 long-range air and anti-missile defense systems.

Owner of restaurant targeted by machete-wielding terrorist: ‘I am going to get a bigger [Israeli] flag’….By David Bernstein*****

Last week, Somali immigrant Mohamed Barry attacked with a machete patrons at the Nazareth restaurant in Columbus, Ohio. While authorities initially said they believed that Barry chose the restaurant randomly for a “lone wolf” attack, it now seems likely that the restaurant was targeted because the owner, Hany Baransi, is from Israel, and proudly displayed an Israeli flag in his window. According to Baransi, Barry asked a server a half-hour before the attack where the owner was from, and she confirmed that Baransi was from Israel.

The Tower has an exclusive interview with Baransi, a Christian from Haifa.

When asked whether he would consider removing the Israeli flag seen from his restaurant’s entryway as a precaution, Baransi swiftly rejected the idea.

“Actually I have another flag, and I am going to get a bigger flag, and I am going to get a Star of David necklace and put it on my chest, and I am going to get a tattoo,” he declared. “Honest to God, I am not kidding. They don’t scare me. We are Israelis. We are Israelis. We are resilient, we fight back.”

“We are used to these bastards,” he added. “We are used to these kinds of attacks, that they hate us just for what we are. They don’t know us, they don’t know anything about us, and they do that. You know, I don’t care if I was an Arab or not, because I am an Israeli, and if you don’t like Israelis you don’t like me.”

David Bernstein is the George Mason University Foundation Professor at the George Mason University School of Law in Arlington, VA. His latest book, Lawless: The Obama Administration’s Unprecedented Assault on the Constitution and the Rule of Law, was published in November.

Polish Democracy Is In Excellent Health: Matthew Tyrmand

The reports of the death of Polish democracy, to paraphrase the oft told line of the eminent American writer, satirist, and political critic Mark Twain, have been greatly exaggerated.

Contrary to the alarmist media reports emanating from the media mandarins of the mainstream Western press, most Poles on the ground, constituting a silent majority as clearly indicated by the recent Presidential and Parliamentary elections, want to reassure those in the West that in Poland today the threats to democracy being “spun” by the global media complex are grossly mischaracterized and even wholly manufactured.

Democracy in Poland is the healthiest it has ever been in the post-1989, modern era.

The mainstream Western press apparatus however, taking its cues from the Polish mainstream press and those connected to the last government – freshly ejected from office due to its brazen, systemic corruption and its agenda of deeper EU integration – continues to criticise the recently and democratically elected new government and to deliver egregiously incomplete accounts of the actions on the ground; well parsed to ensure no inconvenient truths make it to the Western reader.

This active “spin” is meant to obfuscate the truth about the last eight years as well as to “poison the well” for those elected with the largest democratic mandate in modern Polish history, the former opposition party, Law and Justice (Prawo i Sprawiedliwosc– PiS).

Undeniably, this is the first government elected in the post-Communist period with a unilateral imprimatur to govern without coalition partners, but that rarely gets disclosed in recent printed “analysis” as that would undermine the “fascist coup” narrative being vociferously peddled by media, foreign and domestic, and unelected EU apparatchiks who are seeing widespread European rejection of their policies and control.

David Singer: France Signals Surrender to PLO and Muslim Pressure

1. Abject surrender to PLO demands for unilateral recognition of a Palestinian State outside the parameters defined by Security Council resolutions 242 and 338, the Oslo Accords and the Bush Roadmap.

2. A desperate attempt to appease France’s 4.7 million Muslims as they protest against the continuing state of emergency declared after the series of co-ordinated attacks by Islamic State in Paris last November that saw 130 people murdered and 368 wounded.

France made its intentions clear in the following statement released on 30 January by Foreign Affairs Minister Laurent Fabius:

“France will engage in the coming weeks in the preparation of an international conference bringing together the parties and their main partners, American, European, Arab, notably to preserve and make happen the two-state solution”

Mr Fabius issued this veiled threat on France 24:

“If this attempt to achieve a negotiated solution reaches a dead end, we will take responsibility and recognize the Palestinian state”

Respected commentator Aaron David Miller has already delivered his verdict on the proposed International conference in a scathing tweet:

“Another bone headed French play.Convene a peace conference doomed to fail; then recognize a faux Palestinian state”

In its Spring 2015 Global Attitudes Survey the Pew Research Centre found that 76 per cent of France’s population had favourable views of France’s Muslim population whilst 24 per cent had unfavourable views.

France no doubt hopes that calling this pro-Arab international conference will stem any growth in the anti-Muslim view in the next Pew Survey. Given the violent ongoing Muslim demonstrations such hope is doomed.

The Framers Made the Appointment Process Explicitly Political Justice Scalia’s 2014 opinion explains the rancorous battle to replace him. By Josh Blackman

In October 2013, a reporter asked Justice Antonin Scalia what he thought about the government shutdown. The gregarious justice replied, “I have a deal with the Congress. I leave them alone. They leave me alone.” He was exactly right. The monastic Supreme Court is formally isolated from the political process in all respects, but one — the appointment process. Long before they enter the marble palace, judicial nominees must run a political gauntlet that the Constitution itself has erected. The president has the duty to appoint officials — he “shall nominate . . . judges of the Supreme Court.” But the executive has this power only “by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate.” Critically, the Senate is under no obligation to give the authority to the president.

This disjunction — the president shall nominate, but the Senate does not have to confirm — activates the very sort of structural bulwarks that the Framers hardwired into the Constitution. The Supreme Court’s unanimous 2014 decision in National Labor Relations Board v. Noel Canning reaffirmed this foundational lesson: When there is inter-branch disagreement that cannot be resolved through the political process, no nominee can be confirmed. Justice Scalia’s prescient concurring opinion in that case reminds us that senatorial refusal to confirm is not an unforeseen flaw but an intentionally designed feature of the Constitution. This is true even where it frustrates the orderly functioning of the federal government.

The case began in 2011 when Senate Republicans blocked a vote on President Obama’s nominees to the National Labor Relations Board. Without new appointees, the NLRB would lose its quorum and its ability to issue decisions. Faced with a political problem that called for a political solution, the president turned to an unconstitutional shortcut: Although the Senate had not gone on recess, Obama acted as if it had. During a 72-hour window between pro forma sessions on January 3 and January 6, 2012, the president deemed the Senate in recess and made three appointments to the NLRB.

The Supreme Court unanimously rejected the president’s legal defense of his action and found that the recess appointments were unconstitutional. But all nine justices went even further than that, specifically refuting the president’s argument that gridlock justified his breach of the separation of powers. During oral arguments, Solicitor General Donald H. Verrilli, the administration’s top lawyer, argued that the president’s decision to disregard the pro forma sessions was justified as a “safety valve” in response to “congressional intransigence.” If the president did not make the recess appointees, “the NLRB was going to go dark,” Verrilli said. “It was going to lose its quorum.”

Obama Invites Enemy Spies to U.S. Military Brainstorming Sessions One catastrophic intelligence flap after the next. Humberto Fontova

This very week General James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, testified that Castro’s spies remain a serious security threat to the U.S.:

“The threat from foreign intelligence entities…is persistent, complex, and evolving. Targeting and collection of US political, military, economic, and technical information by foreign intelligence services continues unabated. Russia and China pose the greatest threat, followed by Iran and Cuba…” (General James Clapper, Washington D.C. Feb 9, 2016.)

But two weeks ago (Jan. 26-29th) when the U.S. military’s Southern Command held its annual “Caribbean regional security conference,” senior members of Castro’s KGB-trained spy agency were kindly invited to participate.

“Aw come on, Humberto,” you say! “All nations embed spies in their diplomatic corps, for crying out loud. Let’s give Obama’s people a break on this one. How are they supposed to know which Cubans are the spies? It’s a jungle out there, amigo!”

Good point. Very true. In fact, U.S. intelligence services, regardless of the president they served, do not have an exactly stellar record with regards to Castro. To wit:

“We’ve infiltrated Castro’s guerrilla group in the Sierra Mountains. The Castro brothers and Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara have no affiliations with any Communists whatsoever.” (In Nov. 1958 Havana CIA station Chief Jim Noel, was reacting to warnings from “tacky right-wing Mc Carthyite!” Cubans.)