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According to Secretary John Kerry, “if we do not resolve the issues between Palestinians and Israelis; if we do not find a way to find peace; there will be an increasing isolation of Israel.”

However, a thorough examination of Israel’s international standing reveals an increasingly splendid global integration of the Jewish state – economically, technologically and scientifically – irrespective of the Palestinian issue.

Contrary to the Kerry school of thought – and based on a reality check – the Palestinian issue has never been a core cause shaping the Middle East, a crown-jewel of Arab policymakers or the crux of Israel’s relations with Arab countries and the international community. While diplomatic talk highlights the Palestinian issue, the diplomatic, commercial and industrial walk reveals that policy-makers and the international business community do not embrace Kerry’s “Palestine First” assessment and his “Isolation Warning/Threat.”

Thus, the Turkish Statistics Institute documented an expansion of the Turkey-Israel trade balance, despite the brutal anti-Israel ideology of President Erdogan. The Institute reports a 56% export increase, to Israel, during the first five months of 2013, compared with January-May, 2012, while the imports from Israel were increased by 22% during the same period. The Israel-Turkey trade balance was $3.4BN in 2008 and exceeded $4BN in 2012. Turkey’s requirements in the areas of industry, medicine, health, agriculture, irrigation, education, science, technology and defense – and Israel’s unique innovations in these areas – have prevailed over Erdogan’s anti-Western, anti-Israel and pro-Hamas Islamist orientation.

The London Financial Times reported: “in six hours of [Prime Minister Netanyahu’s] talks with the Chinese leadership, they spent roughly ten seconds on the Palestinian issue, while revealing an unquenchable thirst for Israeli technology.” Highlighting Israel’s intensified and diversified global integration, the China-Israel 2013 trade balance exceeded $10BN, providing a tailwind to the currently negotiated free trade agreement, and enhanced by Chinese investments in some fifty Israeli high tech companies. The Japan Times reported the growing Japanese interest in Israeli business opportunities, tripling the number of reviews of Israeli companies.

From Maosim and the Black Panthers to Conservatism — on The Glazov Gang
Film producer John Duffy shares his personal journey from communism to the belief in American freedom and liberty.
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/frontpagemag-com/from-maosim-and-the-black-panthers-to-conservatism-on-the-glazov-gang/

http://www.dianawest.net/Home/tabid/36/EntryId/2798/Who-Really-Won-the-Cold-War.aspx
Whether the Cold War is back, it’s an apt moment to strike up a wider conversation about a couple of central questions from my book American Betrayal. Why did the West fail to claim an ideological or moral victory at the apparent end of the Cold War? Did the West really even win the Cold War?

If we go back in time and listen, we hear no consensus click over signs that an unalloyed U.S.-led triumph over communist ideology had taken place; nor do we find a sense of national thanksgiving for the forces of good – or, at least, for the forces of better – in their triumph over the forces of a non-abstract evil as manifested in Gulag or KGB or famine or purge history. “Mustn’t gloat” was about as joyous as the White House of Bush 41 ever got.

Was the official non-reaction due to that “crisis of confidence” we always hear about – specifically, that “politically correct” failure to believe in the worth of the West? I used to think exactly that and no more. The self-loathing West, failing to see anything of value in itself, was simply unable to take satisfaction, let alone pride, in the demise of its mass-murdering nemesis. “After all,” the PC catechism goes, “Who’s to say the Western system is ‘better’ than any other?”

But there is far more to it. At a certain point, it becomes clear that what we are looking at isn’t a West that fails to appreciate itself anymore, but rather a West that isn’t itself anymore. Decades of subversion by communist infiltrators and American traitors, collaborators and “useful idiots” have helped make sure of that. So, even if the military enemy went away after the dissolution of the USSR on Christmas Day 1991, our ideological enemy never even had to break step. Cold Warriors might have prevailed abroad, but America lost the ideological Cold War at home.

This helps explain why our college campuses are outposts of Marx, our centralizing government is increasingly invasive and dictatorial, and our culture is one of metastasizing decadence – the amoral conditions of “The Communist Manifesto” made manifest.

Indeed, to be “anti-Western” today, as some have noted, is to stand in opposition to the West’s rampant immorality, as Russian President Vladimir Putin pointedly claims to do. This is why, as Masha Gessen recently wrote in the Washington Post, Russians look at events in Ukraine and think “the West is literally taking over, and only Russian troops can stand between the Slavic country’s unsuspecting citizens and the homosexuals marching in from Brussels.”