RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.jns.org/with-bennett-at-the-helm-how-will-he-steer-the-bedouin-negev

Israelis think of the desert area as its “Wild West,” a place where sovereignty is more honored in the breach, and where concerns center on crime and national security. For the government, the biggest challenge is bringing to heel unregulated Bedouin building on state land.

 Israel’s newly sworn-in Prime Minister Naftali Bennett has many landmines to avoid. One concerns land issues in Israel’s Negev Desert, specifically whether he will rein in unregulated Bedouin settlements that some say threaten to overwhelm Israel’s land reserves in the south.

“Bennett is selling the Negev!” was one of the first broadsides hurled against the new premier by Benjamin Netanyahu, who attempted to use the issue as a last-ditch effort to peel away right-wing members from the Knesset’s vote of confidence in the government on Sunday. He claimed that Bennett would hand control over parts of the south to the Ra’am Party—the first Arab party to agree to join an Israeli government. The Bedouin make up an important part of Ra’am’s base, and one of their key voting issues centers on illegal housing.

The Negev—and the Bedouin who make up 25 percent of its population—has long been a political football in Israeli politics, although it’s often pushed to the backburner. Israelis think of the desert area as its “Wild West,” a place where Israeli sovereignty is more honored in the breach, and where there are concerns over crime and national security. For the government, the biggest challenge is bringing to heel unregulated Bedouin building on state lands. The Bedouin are spreading rapidly because they are growing rapidly; they have one of the highest birthrates in the world, in part due to polygamy. Designated a crime in Israel, it is largely unheeded by the Bedouin. A 2012 Tel Aviv University study found that one-in-three Bedouin men have at least two wives.

“They have families with sometimes 30, 40, even 50 children. … When they’re grown, they have to build somewhere, and this is the recipe for the illegal houses that we have in the thousands in the Negev,” said Kobi Michael, senior researcher at Tel Aviv’s Institute for National Security Studies and editor of the institute’s periodical “Strategic Assessment.”

https://www.nysun.com/foreign/message-to-iran-the-era-of-lies-is-over/91542/

As Israel’s new government settles in, President Biden and Prime Minister Bennett agree to disagree on Iran — which means we could be at the start of a geopolitical game of good-cop-bad-cop.

Addressing the Knesset before the Sunday vote that made him premier, Mr. Bennett said that “as the greatest threat to Israel, the Iranian nuclear project is reaching a critical point.” The Mideast, he added, “is yet to recover from the effects of the first nuclear deal, which emboldened Iran to the tune of billions of dollars, and with international legitimacy.”

Renewing it “is a mistake that will once again lend legitimacy to one of the most discriminatory and violent regimes in the world,” Mr. Bennett said. Then he made clear that “Israel will not allow Iran to be equipped with nuclear weapons. Israel is not a party to the agreement, and will maintain full freedom to act.”

Freedom to act is key to the new government’s Iran policy, as it was for Benjamin Netanyahu when he was prime minister.

Yes, Yair Lapid — the new foreign minister and alternate prime minister — said one of his top goals is to repair relations with America’s Democrats. Addressing the foreign ministry staff, he said that Israel must prepare for renewal of the JCPOA. Yet he insisted that “this is a bad deal” and that “Israel will use every option at its disposal to prevent Iran from having a nuclear weapon.”

In an interview last week, outgoing chief of the Mossad, Yossi Cohen, detailed some secrets behind the Israeli methods — sabotage of Iran’s nuclear facilities, assassinations of top nuclear scientists, and, most glaringly, taking an entire nuclear archive from a warehouse at the heart of Tehran and safely smuggling it to Israel.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/06/mark_levin_provides_insight_about_what_happened_in_israel.html

Those who long for a parliamentary system in America, instead of our “winner take all” system, would do well to look at what’s been happening in Israel. Benjamin Netanyahu, after 12 years as Prime Minister is now out and, in his place, there’s an unstable coalition made of people whose only common bond is that they, like the Israeli equivalent of America’s Deep State, wanted Bibi out. Mark Levin does a good job explaining how what happened.

In parliamentary systems, the people do not vote directly for the Prime Minister. Instead, parliament itself chooses its leader. If there’s a clear majority and a single minority, it’s simple. If there’s a clear majority and several minorities, all of which are too small to combine against the majority, it’s still simple.

It starts being a problem when there isn’t a majority but is, instead, only a plurality. A plurality means that one party received more votes than each of the other parties received. However, the first party nevertheless failed to receive more than half of the total votes. Dictionary.com offers a good example:

For example, Gabriel won the plurality for school vice president with 40 percent of votes while Kiara came in with 35 percent and Carl with 25 percent. If Gabriel had received 54%, he would have received both the majority and plurality. 

In that situation, all the various parties start making deals – building coalitions – in the hope that their coalition will have a majority of members in the parliament. When the coalitions fall apart (as they often do), elections begin all over again. It’s an unstable system, especially in times of war – and Israel is always in a time of war.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2021/06/oppressed_palestinians_or_potentially_oppressive_terrorists_.html

Why do Palestinians, who present themselves as victims of land-grabbing Israeli oppressors, extol and find inspiration in the land-grabbing oppressors of history? 

On April 16, 2021, Al Jazeera published an article by ‘Adnan Abu ‘Amar, “head of the Political Science Department at the University of the Ummah in Gaza,” on the topic of jihad during the month of Ramadan. In it, he explains how Palestinians find “inspiration” in various jihads throughout Islamic history, “prominent among them the raid of Badr, the opening of Mecca, the opening of al-Andalus, and the battle of the pavement of martyrs [the Battle of Tours].”

Interestingly, in all these battles, the Muslims were the aggressors.  They invaded non-Muslim territory, butchered and enslaved its inhabitants and appropriated their lands — and for no other reason than that they were “infidels,” non-Muslims. 

The battle of Badr was occasioned by Muhammad’s raids on non-Muslim caravans; the “opening” of Mecca — in Muslim historiography, the euphemistic word “opening [to the light of Islam]” is always used in place of “conquest” — was simply that, the conquest of a non-Muslim city; the opening/conquest of al-Andalus is a reference to the years 711-716, when Muslims invaded and slaughtered countless thousands of Christians in Spain and torched their churches; and the battle of Tours is, of course, where the Muslim invasions into the heart of Europe were finally halted in 732.

In fact, Palestinian elements are constantly praising the unjustified conquests of others.  On May 29, Hizb al-Tahrir — the “Liberation Party” — often holds large outdoor events near al-Aqsa mosque to commemorate the anniversary of the Islamic conquest of Constantinople (May 29, 1453).   During one of these, after all the takbirs (chants of “Allahu Akbar”) had subsided, Palestinian cleric Nidhal Siam spoke:

Oh Muslims, the anniversary of the opening [that is, conquest] of Constantinople brings tidings of things to come. It brings tidings that Rome will be conquered in the near future, Allah willing….   [Moreover,] Islam will throw its neighbors to the ground, and its reach will span across the east and the west of this Earth. This is Allah’s promise, and Allah does not renege on his promises.