Pro-Israel Group’s Lawsuit Against IRS May be Tea Party Game Changer

by Daniel Greenfield

If the IRS had behaved itself, Z Street would rarely have ever made the headlines outside of the small world in which anti-Israel and pro-Israel groups argue with each other. But then the IRS, following the lead of the New York Times, decided to be overt about Obama’s policy of political intimidation. And now a crack has opened.

On Tuesday, a federal judge refused to dismiss a suit brought by a pro-Israel group against the IRS. In her ruling, Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson demanded that the agency stop “attempting to thwart this action’s advancement,” and ordered the IRS to respond to the complaint within thirty days.

The Philadelphia-based group, Z Street, applied for tax-exempt status in 2009 and the IRS responded slowly. In 2010, Z Street filed a lawsuit against the IRS. When asked why the application had not been processed, an attorney for the IRS responded that its application had been sent to a “special unit… to determine whether the organization’s activities contradict the Administration’s public policies.” The special unit was referred to as the “Touch and Go” division or TAG. Later an IRS manager acknowledged that pro-Israel groups were getting special scrutiny:

Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson, interestingly enough, was appointed by Obama. I don’t know whether to consider that significant or not.

Z Street subsequently sued the government and rightly argued that its constitutional rights had been violated because of the “viewpoint discrimination” that the IRS agent had openly displayed. Now after years of delays, Judge Jackson has ruled that by asserting that Z Street had no right to sue, the government had tried to “transform a lawsuit that clearly challenges the constitutionality of the process … into a dispute over tax liability.” She similarly dismissed the government’s claims of sovereign immunity.
As the Wall Street Journal editorial page noted yesterday:
“This ruling will force the IRS to open its books on the procedures it used and decisions it made reviewing Z Street’s tax-exempt application, procedures it has tried to keep shrouded. As the case proceeds, Z Street’s attorneys can seek depositions from many who have been part of the larger attempt to sit on similar applications by other conservative groups.”
In other words, this case may be the straw that breaks the camel’s back of the IRS’s politically prejudicial policies. If an IRS agent can reject or stall a pro-Israel group’s application on the grounds that “these cases are being sent to a special unit in the D.C. office to determine whether the organization’s activities contradict the Administration’s public policies,” then no group, no matter what its political orientation or cause is safe from being subjected to a political litmus test designed by any administration of either political party.

Lerner made a number of stupid mistakes, but Gentry made a much worse one. And it may prove to be the bigger crack in the IRS’ wall of silence.

Finally…

The judge rejected the third defense – one of sovereign immunity – raised by the IRS by pointing out that the government may not claim it is immune from claims that it is acting unconstitutionally.

Indeed, that is the basis for the Bill of Rights.

Daniel Greenfield

Source: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/pro-israel-groups-lawsuit-against-irs-may-be-tea-party-game-changer/

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

European Elections: "No to Europe, Yes to Europe"

by Soeren Kern

"I have a dreadful feeling in my bones that future historians may write of the May 2014 elections: 'This was the wake-up call from which Europe failed to wake up.'" — Timothy Garten Ash, The Guardian.

 
Anti-establishment parties from both the left and the right won big in the 28-nation European Parliament elections that ended on May 25.

Riding a wave of voter discontent over the existing political order in Europe, the electoral victories—especially those by euro-skeptic politicians in major EU countries such as Britain, France and Germany—mark a clear turning point in the debate over the future of the European Union.

The surge of anti-EU parties represents an important blow to the legitimacy of plans by the European establishment to transform the continent into a United States of Europe.

Europe-wide, nearly 150 representatives from anti-establishment parties won seats in the European Parliament. This is up from around 60 seats in the 2009 election. Established pro-EU parties will remain in control of roughly 70% of the 751-seat parliament, which manages the EU's €143 billion ($200 billion) annual budget and passes EU-wide laws that affect more than 500 million citizens.

Moreover, Europe's ruling elites are unlikely to allow these or any other election results to derail their quest to build a European superstate. Although European voters have sent an unmistakable message, efforts are already underway to discredit euro-skeptics by branding them as extremists.

Anti-establishment parties are also divided among themselves on many issues, a weakness that, if not overcome, will blunt their effectiveness in the European Parliament.

In summary, the euro-skeptics face a daunting set of long-term challenges to stop the seemingly relentless march toward European federalism. In the near term, however, the greatest impact of their electoral victories will be felt at the local and national levels.

Nowhere is this truer than in France, where the anti-EU and anti-immigration National Front (FN) party, led by Marine Le Pen, scored 25%, the largest share of the vote in the country. Her strong showing suggests that Le Pen now has a reasonable (although by no means certain) chance of winning the French presidency in national elections, set for 2017.

A Le Pen presidency could spell doom for the European Union: The FN party platform calls for taking France, the euro-zone's second-biggest economy after Germany, out of the European single currency. Monetary union without France would render the euro pointless.

Le Pen said at a press conference that the election results show that "the sovereign people have proclaimed that they want to take back the reins of their destiny into their hands." She also said that French voters had "shouted loud and clear" that they wanted France to be run "by the French, for the French and with the French" and not by "foreign commissioners" in Brussels.
 
For now, the FN will use its mandate "to defend France" and to fight "crazy measures" being implemented by French President François Hollande, a leading champion of the EU who also happens to be one of the most unpopular presidents in modern French history.
 
But Hollande—whose ruling Socialist Party was pushed into third place (13.9%), behind the FN and the opposition center-right UMP (21%)—insists that European integration will continue apace. In a televised address, Hollande acknowledged that the "European Project" had become "remote and incomprehensible" and this had to change. But he also said: "Europe cannot advance without France but France's future is in Europe," adding that his duty was to "reform France and re-orient Europe."

In Britain, the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), which campaigned aggressively for a complete exit from the EU, swept to the top of the national poll with 27.5% of the vote (almost twice the 16.5% it won in 2009). Drawing voters from both left and right, the UKIP victory marked the first time in more than a century that a party other than Labour or Conservative won a national election.

British Prime Minister David Cameron, whose Conservative party came in third behind UKIP and Labour, will now face calls from members of his party to move farther to the right on Europe and immigration.
 
During a news conference, Cameron blamed the election results on the EU and said that "Brussels has got too big, too bossy, too interfering." He added: "The European Union cannot just shrug off these results and carry on as before. We need change." But he offered no details on how this would happen.

Meanwhile, Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg—whose Liberal Democrats party suffered a near-total defeat by losing ten of its 11 MEPs and coming in fifth in the popular vote, behind the Green Party—was unrepentant and pledged to keep on pushing for greater British integration into the EU. "It's right we stuck to our values," Clegg said.

Nigel Farage (left), head of the UK Independence Party, and Marine Le Pen, head of France's National Front party. (Image source: Wikimedia Commons)

In Germany, the main winner was the euro-skeptic Alternative for Germany (AfD), which was founded only a year ago and won a respectable 7% of the vote. The AfD says it is anti-euro, but not anti-EU. Party leader Bernd Lucke, an economics professor, argues that the single currency is fundamentally flawed and that southern European countries should be evicted from the euro-zone. Also in Germany, neo-Nazi National Democratic Party (NPD) won its first EU seat.
 
Elsewhere in Europe, the Danish People's Party became the biggest in Denmark with about 25% of the vote. In Austria, the nationalist Freedom Party (FPÖ) finished third with 20%, compared with 12.7% in 2009. The party, which campaigned with slogans such as "Too much EU is dumb," picked up four seats, two more than in the last election.
 
In Greece, the left-wing, anti-establishment Syriza [Coalition of the Radical Left] party came in first with 27% of the vote. Syriza leader Alexis Tsipras said Europe had taken "an important step for the end of the disastrous policies of austerity and the return of democracy. The people of Europe condemned the policies of austerity." Also in Greece, the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn garnered 10% of the vote and will be sending two MEPs to Brussels for the first time.
 
In Hungary, the ruling conservative Fidesz [Hungarian Civic Union] party won a massive victory, with nearly 52% of the vote and 12 seats in the European Parliament. The far-right Jobbik came in second, garnering 15% of the vote. In the Netherlands, the Freedom Party (PVV) led by Geert Wilders came in second, winning four seats.
 
In Spain, opposition leader Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba said he was stepping down after his Socialist Party had its worst-ever election result. The Socialists lost nine of their 23 seats in the European Parliament while the ruling center-right People's Party lost eight of its 24 seats.
 
The big winner in Spain's elections was upstart leftist group called Podemos ("We Can"). The anti-establishment, anti-austerity party, founded in February, grabbed 8% of the vote and secured five seats. Podemos wants to prevent companies from firing employees, introduce a 35-hour workweek and redistribute wages. It also wants to abolish private hospitals to return to a fully state-controlled health care system.
 
The main task for euro-skeptic parties now will be to form an official European Parliament political group, which would unlock EU funding and open up seats on committees, and thus ensure a stronger position in parliamentary procedure. An official group requires at least 25 seats across seven countries. But given the wide range of interests and ideological persuasions, this may be a challenge.

Some euro-skeptic parties have pledged not to work with far-right parties, presumably in an effort not to alienate mainstream voters. The UKIP and the Danish People's Party have distanced themselves from Le Pen, who has cemented an alliance the Dutch Freedom Party. At the same time, Le Pen has said she will not enter into alliance with Greece's Golden Dawn or Hungary's Jobbik. In Germany, the leader of the AfD says he does not want to be in a coalition with euro-skeptics of any kind, and will instead begin talks with other conservative parties. But German Chancellor Angela Merkel has ruled out any cooperation with AfD.
 
Even if the anti-EU parties are upgraded to become an official political group within the European Parliament, they will still be outnumbered by the pro-EU parties by a wide margin. Moreover, the establishment parties may enter into a grand coalition of their own as a way to keep the anti-establishment parties at bay. But the opportunity to speak in parliamentary debates and chair certain committees will give the anti-EU parties an important new platform on which they can sell their message.
 
In the end, it remains to be seen how the anti-establishment victories will impact the European Union. So far Europe's ruling class appears content to ignore or ridicule them.
 
Jean-Claude Juncker, the former prime minister of Luxembourg and consummate European insider who is on a short list of candidates to become the next president of the European Commission (the administrative arm of the EU) had this to say about the election results: "The extreme right, contrary to what some of the media has said, did not win this election. We will have a clear pro-European majority in this house."
 
For his part, the outgoing head of the European Commission, José Manuel Barroso, shifted blame for the EU's unpopularity by accusing mainstream politicians of stirring up anti-European sentiments. "If you spend all week blaming Europe, you can't ask people to vote for Europe on Sunday," he said in an interview with the Financial Times.
 
German Chancellor Angela Merkel described the rise of the euro-skeptic parties as "regrettable" while German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble said Le Pen's FN party was "fascist" and "extremist."
 
FN Vice President Florian Philippot urged President Hollande to summon the German ambassador in Paris over Schaeuble's remarks. "It's not up to a minister of another country, a German minister, to tell the French how to vote," he told France 5 television. Referring to Schaeuble as someone who supports the EU unconditionally, Philippot added: "Those kind of people no longer respect the ballot box."
 
Speaking after a May 26 meeting of EU leaders in Brussels to assess the election results, UKIP leader Nigel Farage said that despite the election results, it felt like "business as usual."
 
"We've just had a quite dramatic European election, with new skeptical parties, some new extreme nationalist parties, a massive spectrum, from the left to the center to the right," he said. "You know, there is a big dissident voice now in this parliament. And yet, I've just sat in a meeting where you wouldn't have thought anything had happened at all."
 
In an essay published by the Guardian, the pro-European British historian Timothy Garton Ash says it should now be clear to everyone that "the old politics is no longer the answer" and that if the European Union hopes to survive, it should focus on one thing: implementing policies that promote job creation.
 
But Garton Ash is not hopeful: "I have a dreadful feeling in my bones that future historians may write of the May 2014 elections: 'This was the wake-up call from which Europe failed to wake up.'"
 
 
Soeren Kern is a Senior Fellow at the New York-based Gatestone Institute. He is also Senior Fellow for European Politics at the Madrid-based Grupo de Estudios Estratégicos / Strategic Studies Group. Follow him on Facebook and on Twitter.

Source: http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4333/european-elections

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

How to Lose a War

by Douglas Murray

Among the bizarre aspects of the New York Times story was that it relied for its sources on Muslims who had been questioned while in jail. Should people imprisoned for breaking the law be deemed entirely reliable witnesses?
Although the Times would presumably be content with the NYPD infiltration of drug cartels, its recruitment of American Muslims is called "racist" and deserving of full front-page treatment.
One way media could help is to correct the lies of groups such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations [CAIR].

 
For some years now the swiftest path to a Pulitzer Prize has been well-known. Notwithstanding at least one distinguished recent winner, it remains that there is only one sure-fire way to get to the attention of the Pulitzer judging committee – and that is to severely and irreparably damage American national security.

Best of all, of course, is to endanger the lives of U.S. combat personnel while they are in the field of battle. This is the arena in which the New York Times has appeared to aim for Pulitzer predominance during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. But in recent weeks, the Gray Lady has outdone even herself. After all, the American and global publics may have got used to the Times helping to lose wars abroad. But how to excuse her for apparently seeking to lose a war at home in America?

A recent front page of the Times led with an article "revealing" how the New York Police Department [NYPD] had done something truly terrible. What was the outrage that demanded front-page treatment? It was, in the words of the Times' own headline writers, that "New York Police Recruit Muslims as Informants on Terrorism". The paper reported that the NYPD sought informants from within American Muslim communities and that some of those questioned by police had found the exercise "coercive." The police were reported to have kept notes of which mosque a particular suspect had attended and whether or not he had performed the Haj pilgrimage to Mecca.

Among the bizarre aspects of the New York Times story was that it relied for its sources on Muslims who had been questioned while held in jail. There was also no querying over whether such sources could be relied upon, nor even a question if people arrested and imprisoned for breaking the law should be deemed entirely reliable witnesses.

As terrorism expert Steven Emerson put it:

"As part of the paranoid Times narrative, the reporter portrayed as unethical and racist the tried and proven law-enforcement technique of recruiting informants among different ethnic population pools. The same tactic is applied in the fight against illegal gangs, druggies, and criminal organizations: street gangs, Mexican drug cartels, Japanese yakuza gangs, Italian mafia, etc. Recruiting members of different ethnic and racial groups to infiltrate gangs and criminals has been a successful, legal and proven technique of collecting vital intelligence by law-enforcement officials across the country."

But although the Times would presumably be content with the NYPD infiltration of drug cartels, law enforcement's recruitment of members of the American Muslim community is called "racist" and such a breach of accepted protocol that it deserved full front-page treatment. And here we run headlong into the deeper denial.

It is true that only 3,000 people were killed by Islamic extremists on September 11^th 2001. And it is also true that only 3 people were killed and an estimated 260 or so others wounded a year ago at the Boston Marathon just over a year ago. It was only one Islamic extremist who planted a car-bomb in Times Square in 2010 and an Islamic extremist US Army Major who gunned down 13 U.S. service personnel at Fort Hood a year earlier. And it is true that successive U.S. governments have – by an admittedly curious variety of names – described the Islamist threat as the primary domestic security threat facing American. But why, in the eyes of the New York Times, would this mean that the NYPD would even think of speaking to people the Times describes as "Muslims"? How could the NYPD have gone so far off-piste that it required specific targeting of Muslims as informers? At the heart of that question, its ludicrousness and its obviousness, lies one of the great fallacies of our age.

It is the presumption, if not hope, of politically correct media that the American people can be kept safe by a law-enforcement system simultaneously attempting to protect the public and enforce the Times' strict codes of political correctness. In that worldview there is no more reason to suspect a Muslim to be likely to commit a terrorist act than there is to suspect the same of a Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist or Catholic nun. Or if there is, then there should not be: because that would be racist. They seek to be color-blind, and religion-blind. But in being so, they are also terror-blind. Terrorism can indeed come from a large number of directions. But in the U.S. today there is currently more reason to fear violent extremism emanating from certain American mosques than there is to suspect it to come from the average U.S. synagogue or church.

Of course the New York Times is entitled to this form of denial and evasion just as its readers are entitled to decide whether they wish to read a paper that seeks to cover-over the cracks in their society's security problems. What is unforgivable about the story is the damage it will do far beyond the Times' readership.

It takes a great deal of courage to speak out and warn the authorities if you think something untoward is happening in your community. We know from the small number of cases where plots have been thwarted by people from Muslim communities speaking to law-enforcement and seeking their help, that this does not always come easy. Anyone who spends time looking at this subject will also know the intense suspicion that radical U.S. Muslim groups such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations [CAIR] have whipped up around the question of going to the police. Even were that not so, it is worth conceding that it requires an unusual degree of guts and independence-of-thought for anyone, of any background, to say something which could in the short term lead to the community they have come from to be viewed with greater suspicion. People have loyalties and pulls – other emotions that are wholly understandable.

But we also know how few people have the courage take such steps. The vast majority of people who see something bad happening – even simply a radical preacher or a radical speech – keep it to themselves. They do not go out and speak to law enforcement. Sometimes it is because they do not want law enforcement to know what is going on. More often it is because they think it wrong or unhelpful to "air their community's dirty linen in public." Or because they have been taught to doubt the motives of the police and agencies.

For Americans to remain safe, it is vital that fewer American Muslims feel like that. One way media could help is to correct the lies of groups such as CAIR. The media could make it plain that the police are not waging war on Muslim communities, but trying to work with them to keep everyone – Muslims and non-Muslims – safe. But the New York Times has not done that. For the sake of an unenlightening, banal, predictable and badly-sourced piece, it has instead stoked a fire of suspicion that does not need stoking and presented to the wider public the notion that the bare minimum required to keep people safe is, according to the paper, an illicit activity.

Perhaps the New York Times' bid for another Pulitzer Prize will be successful. But if and when the next bomb goes off, I hope the American public remembers which paper chose to make law-enforcement's lawful and necessary work so very much harder.


Douglas Murray

Source: http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/4331/new-york-times-terrorism

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

Europe’s Lurch Right Is Bad for the Jews … and the United States

by Jonathan S. Tobin


The huge gains made by far-right nationalist parties in the European Union elections last week have a lot of people on the continent and elsewhere scared. The results threaten to undermine the hard-won European unity that has been achieved since the end of World War Two. The gains made by such parties across the board are the result of a variety of different local dynamics, but the common theme is hostility to immigrants and other religious minorities. Though center-right parties will still predominate in the EU parliament, the election threatens to further exacerbate an atmosphere in Europe in which anger against perceived outsiders morphs from localized violence to a general spirit of isolationism. The fact that many of these parties, such as France’s National Front, have flirted with anti-Semitism while others, such as Greece’s Golden Dawn, have openly embraced it seems to illustrate the rising tide of anti-Semitism in Europe. That last week ended with a murderous attack on Jews in Belgium also raised the fear level of embattled Jewish communities in Europe.

But there are some who are looking for a silver lining amid this dismal news. When some Jews look at Europe’s far right parties, they see a potential ally against Islamists since the nationalists there are often obsessed with what they see as a threat to their culture and national identity from the large populations of immigrants from Muslim countries. This leads some Americans who are on the right to believe that even though the EU nationalists are clearly hostile to Jews and Israel, they may nevertheless help secure Europe against Islamist influence and thus help preserve the West against those who are trying to overthrow it. While there is a superficial logic to this enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend sort of thinking, it is a grave mistake. European Jews wouldn’t be the only piece of collateral damage in the blowup of Western democracy. The far right’s victory would weaken American influence and create a far more dangerous world for all of us.

As much as the lurch right seems to represent a backlash among Europeans against outside influences, let’s put aside any illusion that these parties are really capable of routing Islamist influences. Nothing short of a turn to open fascism can evict Muslim immigrants from Europe. The rising influence of these communities and the anti-Semitism they help fuel stems not only from their numbers but also from the way the Jew-hatred they brought with them dovetails with traditional European anti-Semitism. Hostility to Israel and Jewish interests unites academics and other elites with those on the far right and Muslims. Euro nationalists of various stripes are not likely to be able to achieve their objectives with respect to Muslim immigrants because of the huge numbers involved and the resistance to that project from the traditional parties of the left and the center. But their fomenting of hate against religious minorities is likely to be more successful when it is directed against the far less numerous Jews. Though the far right and Muslims are locked in a never-ending fight, Jews are more vulnerable and easily caught in the crossfire of that conflict.

Just as important is the potential that these parties will splinter Europe in ways that are profoundly damaging to the defense of Western democracy. Small government conservatives in the United States may sympathize with those Europeans who bristle at being ruled by unaccountable EU bureaucrats in Brussels. But as much as the EU seems to be a perfect combination of the perils of big social democratic governments, a Europe that is worried about appeasing anger on the right is one that is likely to opt out of the collective security arrangements that have guaranteed the peace of the world since 1945. The EU is already a weak partner of the United States. But the increasing influence of rightist parties is liable to have a far greater impact on the ability of the U.S. to count on being able to use NATO to resist threats to collective security around the globe and in Europe as the Russian assault on Ukraine has proved.

The rise of the European right won’t do much to undermine the assault on the West from Islamists, but it could undermine any hope that the U.S. will be able to defend Western interests. European anti-Semites are, in fact, natural allies of their Muslim antagonists when it comes to making life difficult for European Jews and isolating Israel. This is an ominous development that should be viewed with horror by precisely those in the West who have rightly worried most about the way Islamists are gaining ground in Europe.


Jonathan S. Tobin

Source: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2014/05/27/europes-lurch-right-is-bad-for-the-jews-and-the-united-states-eu-elections/

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

Assad Destroys 400-Year-Old Synagogue

by Gil Ronen

 

Blast in central Damascus

AFP photo

Syrian Arab Army forces flattened the Eliyahu Hanavi Synagogue in the Jobar neighborhood of Damascus over the weekend. The Daily Beast, which brought exclusive photos of the destroyed synagogue, said that the attack “not only wrecked a site that’s at least 400 years old. It may have destroyed thousands of irreplaceable Jewish artifacts contained inside the synagogue, according to opposition leaders and photos obtained at the site.”

The area where the synagogue once stood has been under bombardment by the forces of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad for months. The Syrian regime is laying siege to the town, one of the few rebel strongholds in the area as part of what the opposition calls Assad’s “scorched earth” policy.

“I am deeply saddened to learn of the destruction of Jobar Synagogue, which was a treasure of Jewish and Syrian cultural heritage,” said Shlomo Bolts, an official at the Syrian American Council, an American charity connected to the Syrian opposition.

Bolts, a Jew of Syrian ancestry, said that the Syrian Jewish community is only the latest victim of Assad’s strategy to target religious and cultural institutions.

“Yet this is hardly the only place of worship to be destroyed by the Assad regime. The Umm al-Zinar Church [a house of worship in Homs that locals say dates back to the first centuries of Christianity], the [1,400 year-old] Khalid Ibn Walid Mosque, and countless other irreplaceable cultural sites are now lost to history due to a dictator’s manic desire to keep power at all costs,” he said.

An Israeli news report from April 2013 noted that the synagogue had been “looted and destroyed,” although later photos proved that the synagogue had taken only moderate damage from a mortar shell.

Last December, photos emerged in another Israeli news report showing that many of the synagogues most precious artifacts were intact. The report stated that the bulk of the synagogue’s artifact collection was being held safely in the hands of local leaders.

Before the conflict, the synagogue held thousands of religious and cultural treasures, including hundreds years old Torah scrolls, historical texts, precious dining ware, and ancient Judaica of all sorts. Some of the items were reportedly looted in the early days of the war. Some were reportedly placed in safekeeping. Many remained in the building until its destruction, said the Daily Beast.

Gil Ronen

Source: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/181135

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

Standing Up to Turkey - Like a Wimp

by Mordechai Kedar


From the first day on which the Islamic Party gained control of the government of Turkey, Israel has attempted to pacify and reassure Erdogan, despite that leader's proven antagonism to Jews - in line with his extreme Islamic approach - that was all too evident by the 1980's. During that period, he wrote a play called "Mas-kum-ya", an abbreviation of "The Free builders, Communists and Jews" and recently called an anti-Erdogan demonstrator "Jewish seed", considered a most denigrating and humiliating insult in Turkey.

Israel has tried to be optimistic since his election twelve years ago, in 2002, noting that the army remained basically secular and therefore continued its good relations with Israel.

However, Islamic clouds gradually darkened the relations between the two countries, so that as the trend towards Islamism grew stronger in Turkey, Israel's value to Ankara lessened appreciably, as did any mutual cooperation. Israel's official spokesmen tried to minimize the significance of these developments, but the bitter reality struck Israel in the face when Erdogan – under IHH camouflage – organized the Marmara flotilla in order to break the sea embargo that Israel maintains on Gaza. 
 
IHH is internationally known as a terror-sponsoring Islamist organization. That fact alone justified Israel's takeover of the Mavi Marmara, even if it entailed the use of force. Israel has the right to protect itself from weapons-smuggling to Gaza, and the armed terrorists who holed up on the Marmara disguised as "human rights activists" did not convince anyone that their mission was necessary. Even the UN investigative team – of which Turkey was a member – justified the takeover after the fact.
 
Except that Erdogan was not convinced, continued to claim that Israel had committed a crime and increased the pressure on her to admit it, accept responsibility for it and its results, remove the blockade of Gaza, and pay compensation to the families of terrorists who were aboard the ship. Israel tried to resolve the issue behind the scenes and reach a modus vivendi between the two nations, assuming that the Marmara episode aside, there is no other problem affecting relations between Israel and Turkey under Erdogan.

Israel's policy makers seemed to believe that as soon as a compensation agreement could be signed and the sums it demands paid, there would be no more problems and relations with Turkey would go back to what they were before 2002.

But then came this week's report of Turkey's complaint to Interpol against high-ranking IDF officers who were in active service at the time of the Marmara takeover. If Interpol accepts the Turkish complaint, these officers will be unable to fly to most points on the globe, because the minute they tread on the ground of a country that is a member of Interpol, they can be arrested and sent to Turkey, imprisoned, questioned, tried and sent to the infamous Turkish jails.

This is intended to bring Israel to its knees and have it beg the Turks to spare the lives of the IDF officers whose every move out of Israel might now be controlled by Turkey.

To my mind, there is no bigger mistake than the way in which Israel dealt with the Marmara affair. From day one, Israel should have said loudly: "The Marmara was a terror ship that wanted to break a legal siege on a terrorist entity, and everyone on the ship is a terrorist. The nation that sent the ship is terror-supporting and its prime minister encourages terror. Israel acted as would any normal nation when attacked by terrorists. Therefore, Israel's actions were justified. There is no obligation to compensate families of terrorists, no other nation in the world does that."

At the same time, Israel could have ceased – and still can cease - acting like a wimp and start giving as good as she gets. Israel has to raise world consciousness as to the many terrible events in which Turkey's present and past governments have been involved: illegal occupation of North Cyprus since 1974; ethnic cleansing of the Greek minority from northern Cyprus; persecution of the Kurds in Turkey and wholesale abrogation of that minority's human rights; an illegal and illegitimate war against the Kurdish population of northern Iraq; abrogation of rights of Christians in Turkey; legitimization of one-sided turning of churches into mosques; killing of Turkish citizens taking part in protests; aid to Jihadist organizations like al Qaeda who are fighting in Syria – and many more crimes in which the Turkish government is involved up to its neck.

And in case anyone has forgotten, in WWI the Turkish army committed genocide against the Christian Armenians who had lived in the Ottoman Empire for hundreds of years.

Several weeks ago, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmed Davutoglu announced that Turkey will not reimburse the Greek refugees that she expelled from northern Cyprus to the south of the island after her illegal occupation of the area, despite the decision of the EU Court of Human Rights that Turkey must grant them reparations. Israel can use that as a precedent and say clearly: "Turkey is not paying reparations to peaceful, decent citizens. And we should pay reparations to families of terrorists?" Israel can also turn to Interpol with a complaint against Erdogan and his forces for the murder of citizens in last year's demonstrations in Istanbul's Gezi Park.

Israel, however, does nothing to embarrass the Turks, because we behave like softies and try to pacify them, even though every thinking person knows that when one gives in to blackmail, that does not lower the blackmailer's demands. The opposite is true: the more the blackmailer succeeds in squeezing his victim, the larger his appetite becomes and with it, the level of his blackmail.

Israel's softie policy encourages Erdogan and his gang to raise the pressure level on Israel, because it doesn't cost him anything. Israel must begin a public relations campaign whose goal is public exposure of the truth about Erdogan and his cohorts, while at the same time working energetically in UN corridors and Western governments to achieve that goal. When Erdogan begins to feel that the pressure that he is applying to Israel creates an opposing pressure on him, he will begin to take Israel seriously, calm down his fellow-blackmailers and adapt expectations of Israel to match Israel's willingness to reach an agreement from a position of strength that might cause him damage.

The Biblical spies that Moses sent to scout the Holy Land told the people: "We ourselves felt like little grasshoppers and that's how they (the Canaanites, ed.) perceived us." Since then, the rules have stayed the same: he who sees himself as a grasshopper and behaves as if he is spineless, cannot expect others to take him seriously and relate to him as if he were a Samson.

Israel must change its method of dealing with Erdogan's Turkey drastically, especially now that the extensive damage caused by the kid-gloves method is evident. Israel's enemies must know that acting against her will entail a high price that up to now they have been excused from paying. Only this can stop their actions against us. Love between Israel and Turkey is not an option, but this kind of love does not exist anyway. The price the Turks will have to pay will serve as a deterrent and the ensuing hesitation before their next move against us will be Israel's reward for a change in policy from pacification to frontal attack.


Mordechai Kedar

Source: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/15073

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Al-Qaeda in Syria Reaches Israel's Border

by IPT News


Violence from the Syrian Civil War has periodically spilled over onto Israeli territory. Now, Syrian Islamist fighters hoist the al-Qaida flag and praise Osama bin Laden just a few miles from Israeli troops.

According to the Jerusalem Post, a video posted by al-Qaeda's Nusra Front shows the terrorists in sight of Israeli vehicles patrolling the border.

"This view reminds us of the lion of the Mujahideen, Osama bin Laden, on the mountains of Tora Bora", stated a leader of the Nusra Front in the video.

Last year, rebels briefly conquered the Quneitra border crossing with Israel.

The rebels currently control many rural villages in the surrounding area.

Western intelligence sources believe approximately 60 insurgent groups are fighting in southern Syria and are relatively better coordinated than the divided rebel groups in the north.

However, radical Islamist terrorist organizations including the Nusra Front and Ahrar al-Sham are strengthening and undermining the larger rebel brigades supported by Saudi Arabia.

Roughly 2,000 Nusra Front terrorists are operating in the area, demonstrating significant organizational skills in contrast to the infighting characterizing the more secular rebel groups.

Nusra terrorists control dozens of checkpoints from the Golan Heights to the Derraa on the Jordan border, supplying their fighters with basic necessities and garnering more popular support. Residents say that Nusra courts are now focused on various legal and humanitarian issues, including family disputes and transferring financial assistance to the poor.

As the more moderate rebel groups lose popular support, Islamist terrorist organizations will likely continue to strengthen. Al-Qaeda's expanding territorial control on the border with Israel is an extremely concerning development in the Syrian Civil War.


IPT News

Source: http://www.investigativeproject.org/4406/al-qaeda-in-syria-reach-israel-border

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

Obama's West Point Speech signals a presidency in deep trouble

by Thomas Lifson


Yesterday’s speech to the graduating class of West Point by President Obama may be remembered as the signal that his presidency has entered a crisis of confidence, much as Jimmy Carter’s infamous “malaise” speech has gone down in history as marking a failed presidency. Not only was the content of the speech delusional (calling Russia “isolated” in the wake of a massive and historic gas deal with China that marks a major rapprochement between two powers hostile to the United States; claiming Ukraine as an example of the success of his coalition strategy), the delivery was wooden, as if Obama were wishing he were on a golf course or basketball court, and felt a hostile vibe. And the visible reception was embarrassingly icy, with only a few people applauding at key lines, and a standing ovation in which the vast majority remained seated and unmoved, suggesting the commander in chief is held in contempt by the next generation of military leadership.

Writing at Powerline, Scott Johnson titled his quick reaction to the speech, “More mush from the wimp.” This is an allusion to an infamous Boston Globe op-ed critical of aJimmy Carter speech written by the late Globe op-ed page editor Kirk Scharfenberg. As a joke among the newsroom staff, Scharfenberg wrote “More mush form the wimp” on the piece, which was supposed to bear the headline “All must share the burden.” But his sarcastic barb was printed in 161,000 copies of the paper before being corrected.

The comparison is apt. Carter was a disaster who has been exceeded by Obama. As Carter fostered the rise of Iran’s mullahs and emboldened the Soviets, Obama has allowed Al Qaeda to spread and grow, all the while claiming it was “on the run.” As Carter’s economic policies gave rise to the neologism “stagflation,” Obama has managed to shrink the work force, hide inflation by keeping food and gasoline costs of the CPI, and make the title “recovery” a joke, as the nation remains mired in stagnation throughout his presidency.

The big difference is that Obama has enjoyed the enthusiastic support of most of the media, and their willing complicity in papering over his scandals and failures. But as of recent days, I think the limit has been reached, and his media supporters demoralized to the point of ineffectiveness.

There was something visually striking about his speech at West Point. For the first time I can remember, his teleprompter screens were visible in a good portion of the media coverage. And because of the lighting, they stood out very clearly as dark shapes. He looked absolutely pathetic, going back and forth between the two of them, in his trademark tennis match style of delivering a speech. When the prompters are invisible, it is an annoying tic, but justifiable on the presumption that he is addressing the entire audience. But when the screens are visible to viewers, the fakery leaps out, making him look like some sort of puppet whose master knows only a few moves.

Fox News showed the throughout his speech.

But as this brief clip below from Reuters, showing the cool reception he received, demonstrates, the awful truth was visible elsewhere. Needless to say, the Official White House version was a tight shot, keeping the prompters outside the field of vision.

While as an opponent of the president, I am glad that the truth of his incompetence is becoming more visible, as an American I am alarmed that we have two and half more years of him to survive. The villains of the world who run entire countries (and they are legion) see a man floundering and know how much time they have left to take advantage of our weakness. We are still paying the price for Carter’s incompetence. The ultimate toll of the Obama presidency could be far, far worse.


Thomas Lifson

Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2014/05/obamas_west_point_speech_signals_a_presidency_in_deep_trouble.html

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Waves of illegal minors overwhelms border facilities

by Rick Moran


More than 60,000 illegal minors have poured across the border this year and the government is having a difficult time caring for them.

As recently as 2011, just 6,000 kids crossed the border. The ten-fold increase is the result of a variety of factors, including violence and domestic abuse in their home countries, and President Obama's lax deportation policies.

Many of these kids end up as slave labor before falling into the hands of the government.

Reuters:

The flow is expected to grow. The number of unaccompanied, undocumented immigrants who are under 18 will likely double in 2015 to nearly 130,000 and cost U.S. taxpayers $2 billion, up from $868 million this year, according to administration estimates.
The shortage of housing for these children, some as young as 3, has already become so acute that an emergency shelter at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, has been opened and can accommodate 1,000 of them, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said in an interview with Reuters.
The issue is an added source of tension between Democrats and Republicans, who disagree on how to rewrite immigration laws. With comprehensive legislation stalled, President Barack Obama is looking at small, administrative steps he could take, which might be announced this summer. No details have been outlined but immigration groups are pressing him to take steps to keep families with children together.
The minors flooding over the border are often teenagers leaving behind poverty or violence in Mexico and other parts of Central America such as Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. They are sometimes seeking to reunite with a parent who is already in the United States, also without documentation.
"This is a humanitarian crisis and it requires a humanitarian response," Senate Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Barbara Mikulski said in an interview. The Maryland Democrat, a former social worker, has likened the flood of unaccompanied children to the "boat people" of past exodus movements.
Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama, the senior Republican on Mikulski's committee, said, "The need is there, you know the humanitarian aspect of it, but we're challenged on money."
Immigration groups lobbying for comprehensive reform argue that children are being hit hardest by the political deadlock.
With an even bigger funding challenge looming for 2015, Mikulski worries corners might be cut. She said children could end up being placed in federal holding cells meant only for adults and that funds might have to be shifted from other programs, such as refugee aid, to help cover the $252-per-day cost of detaining a child.

What to do? Deporting most of them would be irresponsible. We'd be sending them back into hell. Foster care? There aren't enough foster parents now for American kids.

Are they refugees or criminals? Or both?

No easy answers, that's for sure - except we're holding them so for the moment, we're responsible for them. That means ponying up the money to take care of them. But $2 billion next year? Perhaps we could send a bill to the countries where these kids originated. If they're going to encourage kids to come here, they should share in the cost of taking care of them.

It won't happen, of course. The whole point of illegal immigration to the US for these countries is that they export their problems so they don't have to deal with them. But sooner or later - and it better be sooner - some sort of reckoning will occur and it won't matter how violent these countries get or how abusive poor parents are to their kids. We can't bankroll the region's social problems. They're going to have to figure it out for themselves.


Rick Moran

Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2014/05/waves_of_illegal_minors_overwhelms_border_facilities.html

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

The Obama Undoctrine

by Daniel Greenfield


Afghanistan is lost, Iraq and Libya are in the middle of civil wars, Russia is carving off pieces of Ukraine and China is escalating its conflict with the rest of Asia. There isn’t a single element of Obama’s foreign policy that has proven successful. Instead it’s been one international disaster after another.

Obama just smiles into the camera and announces that “America has rarely been stronger relative to the rest of the world.” Anyone who disagrees is engaging in partisan politics. Or reading statistics.

Having signed off on Iran’s nuclear program while its Supreme Leader boasts that the holy war will only end with America’s destruction, he claims that the “odds of a direct threat against us by any nation are low.”

“From Europe to Asia, we are the hub of alliances unrivaled in the history of nations,” he proclaims. Meanwhile Russia and China humiliate our European and Asian allies for their worthless alliance hub.

“When a typhoon hits the Philippines, or schoolgirls are kidnapped in Nigeria, or masked men occupy a building in Ukraine, it is America that the world looks to for help,” he boasts.

And yet the masked men go on occupying buildings and Boko Haram goes on killing Nigerians. America has never been stronger than under Obama. And yet it’s incapable of actually doing anything, except maybe joining New Zealand, Sweden, Taiwan, Israel and Chile in providing disaster aid to the Philippines.

And if that doesn’t work, he can always sanction the typhoon. It should do as much to stop the wall of water it as it did to stop Russia and Iran.

Obama’s speeches come from a world that exists only inside his own teleprompter. Another leader might have been reeling from a string of international failures, but he boldly triumphs over reality. The worse things are, the bigger the party he throws to celebrate his victories.

Obama’s speech focuses on Afghanistan, but never mentions the Taliban. Imagine an FDR speech that pretended that Japan didn’t exist. That’s the depth of denial it takes for Obama to claim victory.

After using up the lives of 1,600 American soldiers fighting the Taliban without ever defeating them, he takes a victory lap for defeating Al Qaeda in Afghanistan when the CIA had told him back in 2009 that there were at most 100 Al Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan.

Thousands of Americans have been lost to an enemy whose existence Obama won’t even acknowledge as he takes another victory lap for losing another war.

With the VA scandal reminding everyone that he doesn’t just throw away the lives of soldiers abroad, but also at home, Obama is changing the subject with one Mission Accomplished speech after another. Like a politician caught with his mistress who begins taking his wife everywhere, he is suddenly in love with the military and can’t get enough photo ops with anyone wearing a uniform.

Even if they work for the post office.

In Obama’s teleprompter reality, a withdrawal is equivalent to success. Setting a withdrawal timeline with no regard for results deserves a victory parade. He wants credit for withdrawing from Afghanistan by the end of his term. Not only is he repeating the timeline mistake of his disastrous surge, but the timeline is once again pegged to a political, rather than a strategic, date.

Obama takes credit for troop removals, rather than outcomes. But if he doesn’t care that Al Qaeda in Iraq is more powerful than ever or that the Taliban control the future of Afghanistan, why didn’t he immediately withdraw the troops? Are we supposed to cheer his inability to either commit to winning a war or pull out? Is indecisiveness the virtue of a great leader?

Do we really need more applause lines about how long it took him to lose a war?

The West Point commencement address dresses up past failures as new successes and lays out a vision for the future by a lame duck leader who has failed at every foreign policy initiative. The address is an expanded version of his 2002 anti-war speech as a Chicago state senator that first brought him to the attention of his future backers. It straddles an awkward line between anti-war and interventionism.

Twelve years later, Obama hasn’t changed.

He’s still posturing as a fake centrist by setting up interventionist and isolationist straw men on both sides. Instead of defending his policies on their merits, he tries to make them seem reasonable by depicting his critics on the right and the left as extremists. After six years of foreign affairs failures, Obama is still talking as if he’s the “reasonable” centrist trying to steer a”‘sensible common sense” path.

At least those are the favorite buzzwords that his speechwriters throw in to influence the “folks.”

Obama wants to have his cake and eat it too. He wants applause for being an interventionist and for being a non-interventionist. In one sentence he sounds like JFK and in another like Eugene McCarthy.

He wants to send in the troops and then get credit for pulling them out. He wants to threaten other countries and then appease them at the negotiating table. He wants to set red lines he doesn’t stand behind and apply sanctions that mean nothing. And he wants to pass off this game in which the bad guys always win and America always loses as his smart power doctrine.

That’s not a doctrine. That’s an undoctrine.

The Obama Undoctrine is all things to all people. It respects international opinion, except when it doesn’t. It doesn’t believe in military solutions, but sometimes it does. It believes in taking military action to protect our interests, rather than foreign human rights, except when it believes the opposite.

In Libya, Obama sent in the jets when Libyans in Benghazi were threatened, but not when Americans in Benghazi were threatened.

The world may look to America for help, but Americans shouldn’t.

The shiny new Obama Undoctrine proposes such groundbreaking ideas as partnering with countries fighting terrorism. This is a bold new idea from the ’50s. Other bold new ideas include using international institutions like the League of Nations, ahem, the United Nations, to stop new wars from starting.

Anyone who wants an example of the “leadership” and “strength” of the Undoctrine should look at Iran. That’s not some nasty Republican sneering at the Undoctrine.

It’s Obama’s assertion in his address.

After admitting that any nuclear agreement with Iran is a long shot, he says of his appeasement, “This is American leadership. This is American strength.”

Obama’s idea of American leadership and strength is being repeatedly humiliated and led around by the nose by a bitter enemy determined to obtain nuclear weapons in order to destroy the United States.

If that’s Obama’s idea of leadership and strength, just imagine his idea of weakness.

Then there’s NATO. He describes it as “the strongest alliance the world has ever known.” That would have sounded more impressive before NATO staked out Ukraine for the bear and went home.

And if you want something more effective, try the UN. While Obama cuts the military to the bone, he will be “investing” more money in UN peacekeeping operations.

If we’re going to spend all that money on a military, it should be one that doesn’t run away at the first sign of trouble. That way we would at least be getting some bang for our buck. But maybe a small army of child molesters spreading cholera that runs away at the first sign of trouble embodies the Undoctrine.

“I believe in American exceptionalism with every fiber of my being,” Obama declared. “But what makes us exceptional is not our ability to flout international norms and the rule of law; it is our willingness to affirm them through our actions.”

Or as his nursery school teacher probably put it, “You’re special. Just like everyone else.”
This mess of contradictions is the Obama Undoctrine. It stands for everything and nothing. And it has accomplished nothing.


Daniel Greenfield

Source: http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/dgreenfield/the-obama-undoctrine/

Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.