Debbie Wasserman Schultz be let go?

By: Malkah Fleisher

Published: September 5th, 2012

The Weekly Standard is already advancing the speculation that Debbie Wasserman Schultz be let go from her post as DNC chair following her blatant lie regarding Republicans, Israel, and Israel's ambassador Michael Oren.

In a TV appearance Tuesday night, Debbie Wasserman Schultz was asked about the Michael Oren email. But instead of acknowledging her misstatement, the DNC chair attacked the reporter, Philip Klein, who quoted her.

 
See the video

http://www.jewishpress.com/news/wasserman-schultz-caught-red-handed-lying-about-michael-oren-to-smear-republicans/2012/09/05/0/?print 

Israel’s Ambassador: DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz Lied

By: Tibbi Singer

Published: September 5th, 2012

DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz on the convention floor with ABC News.
Photo Credit: Screen shot

Israel’s U.S. ambassador Michael Oren denied the claim made by Debbie Wasserman Schultz, chairwoman of the Democratic National Committee, that he had told her that what the Republican party was doing was “dangerous for Israel.”

Back in August, Hadassah Magazine interviewed Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and one of their question was: "Why did you call on both parties to refrain from challenging each other over support for Israel?"

"What the Republicans are doing is dangerous," answered the DNC chair. "They are using Israel as a political football.… Israel’s ambassador [to the United States], Michael Oren, has said this. If there is any perception of daylight between the parties on support for Israel, that strengthens Israel’s enemies. The president rejects what some Republican candidates have been saying, that America should review all its foreign aid commitments from zero, making each country justify the support it receives."

Then, in a speech at the Democratic Convention yesterday, Debbie Wasserman Schultz declared, “We know, and I’ve heard no less than Ambassador Michael Oren say this, that what the Republicans are doing is dangerous for Israel.”
Read More:

http://www.jewishpress.com/news/breaking-news/israels-ambassador-dnc-chair-debbie-wasserman-schultz-lied/2012/09/05/0/?print

Housing Quiz.....

Confronting the Unpleasant Truth about Two States

By: Vic Rosenthal

Published: August 29th, 2012

German President Joachim Gauck (L) and President of the Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas give a press conference in Ramallah, 31 May 2012. That Abbas draws on the legacy of Yassir Arafat is but one reason why many feel a Palestinian state would threaten Israel.
Photo Credit: Rimawi/Flash90

Sometimes the truth is more than just ‘inconvenient’. Sometimes it is downright unpleasant, even ugly. But nevertheless, it is what is and we need to deal with what is, not what we would like it to be.

Martin Sherman sees the unpleasant truth and, unlike so many others, draws the logical conclusions. He has written a series of articles in the Jerusalem Post in which he has exposed the sheer insanity of the Left’s two-state solution (TSS), as well as the failure of the Right to propose real alternatives.

Now Sherman has taken up the challenge to provide a practical alternative. In his most recent article — which I urge you to read in its entirety, since I can’t do justice to it with a few snippets — he writes,

To survive as the permanent nation-state of the Jewish people Israel must address two fundamental imperatives:

• The geographic imperative • The demographic imperative

It is self-evident that if either of these is inadequately addressed, Israel’s status as the nation-state of the Jewish people will be gravely jeopardized, eventually becoming unsustainable.

The mainstream discourse invariably – and deceptively – presents Israel’s only choice as being between accepting the TSS – which would make Israel untenable geographically, or the OSS (one-state solution) – which would make it untenable demographically.

Neither comprises an acceptable policy-paradigm for anyone whose point of departure is the continued existence of Israel as the permanent nation-state of the Jews.

This, as we will see, compels us to the inexorable conclusion that between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea there can – and eventually will – prevail either exclusive Jewish or exclusive Arab sovereignty…
Read More:

http://www.jewishpress.com/blogs/confronting-the-unpleasant-truth-about-two-states/2012/08/29/0/?print

Why Is Romney So Feverish on Israel When Most Jews Will Vote Obama?

By: Yori Yanover

Published: August 31st, 2012
Latest update: September 1st, 2012

Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with U.S. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney in Netanyahu's office in Jerusalem in late July.
Photo Credit: Marc Israel Sellem/GPO/FLASH90

Is Netanyahu betting the house on Romney?

Leftist political scientist Yaron Ezrahi told GPB News that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has made his preference clear this election year.

"Netanyahu has not acted wisely enough in order to maintain Israel's neutrality, traditional neutrality in relation to the American election," Ezrahi says.

The professor of Political Science at the Hebrew University argues that it's clear to anyone who follows the news that Netanyahu would prefer a Romney presidency. But while that might be good for Netanyahu and the Likud government for the moment, it would be bad for Israel in the long run.

"He has brought about consequences that actually damage the vital interests of the state of Israel," Ezrahi says.

If ever there was a demonstration of Netanyahu's clear preference this election, it was when he met with Romney in Jerusalemin late July.

The NY Times reminded its readers in April that, back in 1976, the lives of Mitt Romney and Benjamin Netanyahu intersected, on the 16th-floor offices of the Boston Consulting Group, where both served as corporate advisers. They absorbed and shared the same world view. Since then, they had kept a warm friendship, little known to outsiders, that is now rich with political intrigue.

I believe Mitt Romney is using Netanyahu to win the November election. But it's not U.S. Jews he's after.
Read More:

http://www.jewishpress.com/news/yoris-daily-news-clips/why-is-romney-so-feverish-on-israel-when-most-jews-will-vote-obama/2012/08/31/0/?print

Will Romney or Obama Save Israel from Iran?

By: Yishai Fleisher

Published: September 3rd, 2012

U.S. President Barack Obama (L) sitting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu (R) in the oval office, May 18, 2009.
Photo Credit: Pete Souza

Who will save Israel from Iran? President Romney or President Obama?

On August 26th The New York Times had this to say:

Weapons sales by the United States tripled in 2011 to a record high, driven by major arms sales to Persian Gulf allies concerned about Iran’s regional ambitions, according to a new study for Congress. Overseas weapons sales by the United States totaled $66.3 billion last year, or more than three-quarters of the global arms market, valued at $85.3 billion in 2011. Russia was a distant second, with $4.8 billion in deals.

Sixty-six billion dollars. That is a lot of money for a cash-strapped country. (Compare that to $48 billion - the budget of the Department of Homeland Security in 2012). Now, let’s say you were working in the Pentagon, or at Northrop Grumman, or you were a Senator or Congressman for an arms manufacturing state - would you go to sleep at night praying for world peace? No, you would not. Instead, you would thank God for the success of your business, and especially for the guys you owe it all to, Ayatollah Khomeini and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. They are responsible for all that business - 66 billion Dollars.

As Israel waits for a green light from the US to attack Iran so as to deal with the Iranian threat, some in America prosper from the arms escalation in the Middle East. And while we hear palliatives to the effect that this or that president will help Israel with Iran, it is all just a game, and a delay tactic. Iran is too lucrative to US arms manufacturers to allow Israel to have total victory over the Mullah regime. For the powerful arms industry, nothing could be better than a bunch of far-away Middle East folks who have disposable cash and who love to buy American made arms. The USA may talk peace but it sells war.

The Iran problem is not the making of Barack Obama. Fifteen years ago I was an intern in AIPAC’s Washington DC office. Back then,  Middle East analyst Keith Weissman was constantly warning that Iran had the will and the capacity to pursue a weapon of mass destruction. Netanyahu himself has been making this issue public for over a dozen years. This problem has been festering and no American leader, Republican or Democrat, has really tried to deal with it - maybe because for them there is no problem, but rather, a financial opportunity.
Read More:

http://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/columns/yishai-fleisher/the-romneyobama-iran-illusion/2012/09/03/0/?print

Elliot Abrams: Americans Support Israeli Strike on Iran; Iranians Don’t Fear Obama

By: Daniel Tauber

Former Bush Administration official Elliot Abrams
Photo Credit: Ariel Jerozolimski / CFR.org

Former advisor to George W. Bush Elliot Abrams stated in an interview that the American people would support an Israeli strike on Iran and criticized the Obama Administration for its handling of Iran’s nuclear threat, calling Obama’s approach “weak.”

“The President has made one big mistake . . . We have not made the Iranians afraid of a strike and I think they ought to be afraid of a strike – of an American strike in reality,” Abrams said in an interview with the Jerusalem Post.

Abrams said that this may be the reason why Iran has no desire to conclude an agreement with the Permanent Members of the Security Council and Germany (the so-called “P5+1”).

“They do not think it’s possible. They do not think it’s in the cards. I think that is one of the reasons diplomacy has failed – and it has failed,” he said.

As for an Israeli strike, Abrams said it would be “justifiable” given the danger Iran poses to Israel.

Abrams credited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for "helping along" the sanctions regime against Iran with his public statements.

"I think the Europeans, for example, would not have supported sanctions as much as they have, nor, I think, the Russians [or] the Chinese, had it not been for Israel’s drawing attention to the threat from Iran and drawing attention to the possibility that Israel would feel [it] must act against that threat," Abrams said.

Abrams predicted that Obama would not be able to take punitive measures against Israel for such a strike, saying that “in an election year it’s particularly hard for a president …to take a position against Israel as the American people are taking a position in favor of Israel.”

Abrams also revealed that one of the reasons President Bush pursued the Annapolis Peace Conference and the renewal of negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority with such vigor towards the end of his term was that then Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told the administration such efforts had a good chance of success.

Dershowitz: Obama Must Show Iran He Means Business on Military Option

By: Alan M. Dershowitz

Published: August 29th, 2012

Alan Dershowitz with his copy of the Jewish Press.
Photo Credit: Andrew Courtney

It is now become clear that neither diplomacy nor sanctions will halt the Iranian march toward nuclear weapons. Iran is today stronger diplomatically than it has been in years, as evidenced by the meeting of the nonaligned nations in Tehran. Iran is neither isolated nor alone in a world in which nonaligned nations form a majority at the United Nations.

The sanctions, while hurting the Iranian economy and making life more difficult for the average Iranian, are having zero impact on the Iranian nuclear program, which according to objective intelligence reports, is gathering steam and moving even more quickly toward its ultimate goal of a nuclear weapon that will be a game changer. An Iranian nuclear weapon will end any dream of nonproliferation. It will protect Iran's surrogate terrorists, such as Hezbollah, under a formidable nuclear umbrella. And it will make an eventual nuclear war more likely. That is why President Obama rightfully took the containment option off the table and put the preventive military option squarely on it.

Read More:

http://www.jewishpress.com/indepth/opinions/dershowitz-obama-must-show-iran-he-means-business-on-military-option/2012/08/29/0/?print

When is restraint ridiculous.....

In Broad Daylight

By: Yori Yanover

Published: August 30th, 2012

Photo Credit: Issam Rimawi / Flash90

This is a picture of a Palestinian youth throwing rocks at an Israeli military vehicle as it entered the Arab city of Ramallah on Wednesday, August 29, 2012.

This youth and hundreds, even thousands like him, have been greeting Israeli cars and individuals this way every day of every month of every year since the mid 1980s. There is absolutely nothing new about it.

It's a dog bites man story.

The Israeli and the Palestinian law enforcement agencies alike also don't see anything new or special about this habitually and violently inhospitable act.

Likewise, they see nothing special about hundreds and thousands of Arab youths who have lobed flaming objects, most commonly Molotov cocktails, at Israeli moving vehicles, with the expressed purpose of burning alive the people inside.

It's the dog bite man thing. Whatcha' gonna' do.

Then a couple of Jewish 13-year-olds have been accused of doing the same thing.

Without direct proof, to the best of my knowledge, and at the exact spot where several Israeli cars had been pelted with Molotov cocktails on recent nights.

That's HUGE news. That's man bites dog. That's the stuff the GSS can sink its teeth into.

In Israel, 2012, Arab crime is mundane, routine, unimportant. Victims of Arab crime are negligible.

But Jews who beat up Arabs—which they shouldn't, and Jews accused of firebombing Arabs—which they shouldn't, are amazing news.

Obviously, a police force without the minimal inclination of catching the real perpetrators is just not going to bring law and order anywhere, much less to an area as sizzling with hatred as Ramallah and its environs.

They'll tell you it's a political issue. You'll have rock throwing and firebombing until Israel pulls back to the 1949 armistice line. But, you know, by the time any political resolution is achieved—probably by the time all of us writing and reading this will have great grandchildren—there's going to be a Palestinian population out there that just throws rocks and Molotov cocktails, nothing special.

Good luck doing your law and order thing at that point.

As America Throws Israel Under the Bus…

By: Jameel@Muqata

Published: September 4th, 2012

The multi-purpose amphibious assault ship USS Iwo Jima (LHD 7) transits the Persian Gulf, Oct. 25, 2008. The ship is as one of many US naval units which secure the world's water ways.
Photo Credit: U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class MichÊl Starkey/Released.

Generally reliable Shimon Shiffer reports in YNET:

The United States has indirectly informed Iran, via two European nations, that it would not back an Israeli strike against the country's nuclear facilities, as long as Tehran refrains from attacking American interests in the Persian Gulf, Yedioth Ahronoth reported Monday.

According to the report, Washington used covert back-channels in Europe to clarify that the US does not intend to back Israel in a strike that may spark a regional conflict.

In return, Washington reportedly expects Iran to steer clear of strategic American assets in the Persian Gulf, such as military bases and aircraft carriers.

In "liberal-speak", pundits say that countries don't have allies, they have interests.  That's incorrect; political leaders have interests...countries still have allies.

I hope that other representatives of the USA will stand with Israel, since it appears the current President would rather throw Israel under the bus..."Hey Iran, stay clear of us, and you can bomb Israel as much as you want."

Thanks.