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July 2016

Israel Hits ISIS in Sinai as Ties With Egypt Intensify By P. David Hornik

“A former senior Israeli official,” Bloomberg reports, “said his country has conducted numerous drone attacks on militants in Sinai in recent years with Egypt’s blessing. He spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss confidential military activity.”

“Militants in Sinai” refers primarily to ISIS, which has a branch there called Sinai Province. The Sinai Peninsula is a part of Egypt that Israel, after wresting it from Egypt in the 1967 Six Day War, handed back as part of the 1981 Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty.

In light of the fact that, since Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi took power in 2013, Israel and Egypt have maintained tight security cooperation, such Israeli drone strikes come as no surprise. ISIS in Sinai has mounted dozens of attacks on Egyptian security personnel there, and threatens Israel as well.

Sisi, who in 2013 overthrew Egypt’s short-lived Muslim Brotherhood government, has also moved aggressively against a Brotherhood offshoot, Hamas, in Gaza—again with Israeli cooperation.

But with a visit to Israel this week by Egyptian foreign minister Sameh Shoukry, the Israeli-Egyptian relationship appears to have taken an important step beyond the security sphere. It was the first visit to Israel by an Egyptian foreign minister in nine years. By all accounts, Shoukry’s talks with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu were held in a good atmosphere and went well.

Aside from discussing and further enhancing the security cooperation—which Israel’s deputy chief of staff told Bloomberg is at a “level…we’ve never experienced before”—what’s in it for the two sides?

For Netanyahu, it has to do with fending off initiatives, or possible initiatives, to tackle the Palestinian issue without Israel’s consent and with a likely pro-Palestinian bias.

One of those initiatives comes from France, which in June held an international conference on the Palestinian issue that Israel strongly opposed, and which neither Israeli nor Palestinian representatives attended.

Considering France’s longstanding pro-Palestinian bias, and President François Hollande’s Socialist government’s electoral dependence on France’s Muslim population, Israel sees France’s involvement as unwelcome and likely to lead to pro-Palestinian resolutions, potentially in the UN Security Council, and pressure on Israel. CONTINUE AT SITE

Reviving Relations Between Israel and Africa This special bond brings back many mutual benefits, both economic and diplomatic. By Danny Danon

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent visit to Africa signaled Israel’s renewed emphasis on its relationship with the continent. Beyond the mutual economic benefits, this renaissance in Israel-Africa relations is an opportunity, among other things, to bolster support for Israel on the international stage, particularly at the United Nations.

In the early years after independence in 1948, Israel enjoyed a unique relationship with many African nations. Recently freed from British rule and newly independent after thousands of years of exile and occupation of our homeland, Israel served as a role model for many African states caught in their own struggles with colonialism.

A special bond soon formed between the Jewish state and the young African nations. Israeli experts shared their knowledge with their African counterparts on everything from modern banking to drip irrigation. For Israel, the possibility of breaking out of the diplomatic isolation imposed by our immediate neighbors in the Middle East served as an additional strategic advantage.

Whatever progress was made in cultivating these relationships was thwarted following the 1967 Six Day War, and then almost completely wiped out after the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Fueled by Arab propaganda, many former African allies became convinced of the lie that Israel was now playing the role of colonizer by “occupying” Arab lands.

More than 40 years after its relationship with Africa soured, Israel is now turning back the tide. As Prime Minister Netanyahu recently stated, “Israel is coming back to Africa, and Africa is coming back to Israel.” The Israeli government has announced a multimillion-dollar plan to strengthen its economic ties with Africa. On his recent visit, the heads of 70 Israeli companies joined the prime minister to help strengthen African relationships.

In areas such as international development, investment and know-how, Israel is the perfect partner for Africa. Both have been forced to find creative solutions to the kinds of problems large, wealthy, powerful states have never encountered.

In water policy, for example, Israel is not only the world leader in recycling and reusing water for agriculture, we have now successfully mastered the desalination process so that all our water needs are fully met despite our arid climate. In energy innovation, our cutting-edge technologies in solar, wind and other clean- and renewable-energy sources is a major focus of many budding economic ties. CONTINUE AT SITE

Navy Images Show Iranian Boats in Incident Involving Top U.S. General Iranian boats approached Navy warships with Gen. Joe Votel, head of U.S. Central Command, aboard as they passed through the Strait of HormuzBy Gordon Lubold

The U.S. military has released photos of Iranian boats that approached two Navy warships Monday as they transited through the Strait of Hormuz with a special passenger aboard: Gen. Joe Votel, the head of U.S. Central Command, which oversees all U.S. forces in the Middle East.

The images, which aren’t typically released by the military, were captured by U.S. Navy personnel aboard the amphibious ship USS New Orleans and the destroyer USS Stout on Monday during a series of “interactions” between those two ships and smaller patrol boats operated by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, or IRGC.

The images show two small patrol boats akin to a civilian speed boat, and a larger boat known as a Houdong fast attack craft. Each are typical of the kind of craft the IRGC uses in the region, sometimes to harass American and other ships transiting through the strait.

Iranian officials in a report in state media confirmed that speedboats operated by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps navy “escorted” the U.S. warships through the strait, defending the incident as longstanding practice. The news account, on the website of the semiofficial FARS news agency, also warned that the small but heavily armed boats could destroy the American vessels.

“Monitoring foreign vessels in regions where the IRGC Navy conducts its missions is not a new thing and it is always done on a routine basis and round the clock,” Gen. Alireza Tangsiri, the lieutenant commander of the IRGC navy, said in the report. He emphasized that the IRGC Navy is assigned to monitor foreign vessels, especially those operated by “the enemies of the Islamic Revolution and the Great Satan, the U.S.”

Time to End the Demonizing of Police Two years of corrosive rhetoric about racist cops, based on falsehoods—with disastrous effects. Heather Mac Donald

For two years American police departments have endured relentless attacks from the Obama administration, its media allies and the Black Lives Matter movement alleging that U.S. law enforcement is a racist, deadly threat to African-Americans. A handful of disturbing videos depicting police shootings helped galvanize widespread hostility to law-enforcement officers, and cops began backing away from the proactive policing that stops crime but has been repeatedly denounced as racial oppression.

The result, especially in the first half of this year, has been an appalling increase in shootings and murders in many cities across America. Most of the victims, in this poisonous era spawned by Black Lives Matter, have been black. Now the consequences of this stream of falsehoods about police may be spinning out of control, with the assassination of five police officers in Dallas last week and the attacks on cops in other cities since then.

Make no mistake: Assertions about systemic, deadly police racism are false. That has been true throughout the period following the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014; recall that the cop involved was ultimately exonerated by the Justice Department. But no number of studies debunking this fiction has penetrated the conventional story line.

A “deadly force” lab study at Washington State University by researcher Lois James found that participants were biased in favor of black suspects, over white or Hispanic ones, in simulated threat scenarios. The research, published in 2014 in the Journal of Experimental Criminology, confirmed what Ms. James had found previously in studying active police officers, military personnel and the general public.

In 2015 a Justice Department analysis of the Philadelphia Police Department found that white police officers were less likely than black or Hispanic officers to shoot unarmed black suspects. And this month “An Empirical Analysis of Racial Differences in Police Use of Force” by Harvard economics professor Roland G. Fryer Jr., analyzing more than 1,000 officer-involved shootings across the country, reports that there is zero evidence of racial bias in police shootings.CONTINUE AT SITE

Travesty of a Justice -Ginsburg traduces judicial norms. James Taranto

Supreme Court justices have gotten involved in partisan politics before. Charles Evans Hughes even ran for president. But he resigned from the court before accepting the 1916 Republican presidential nomination. (He returned to the court in 1930, when President Hoover appointed him to succeed Chief Justice William Howard Taft, himself a former president.)

Ruth Bader Ginsburg should have resigned before giving her latest interview, to the New York Times’s Adam Liptak. “Unless they have a book to sell, Supreme Court justices rarely give interviews,” Liptak boasts. “Even then, they diligently avoid political topics.” Ginsburg, he gently observes, “takes a different approach”:

These days, she is making no secret of what she thinks of a certain presidential candidate.

“I can’t imagine what this place would be—I can’t imagine what the country would be—with Donald Trump as our president,” she said. “For the country, it could be four years. For the court, it could be—I don’t even want to contemplate that.”

It reminded her of something her husband, Martin D. Ginsburg, a prominent tax lawyer who died in 2010, would have said.

“‘Now it’s time for us to move to New Zealand,’ ” Justice Ginsburg said, smiling ruefully.

“She’d feel right at home there,” quips the New York Sun’s Seth Lipsky. “It turns out that New Zealand doesn’t even have a constitution.” Instead it has a series of statutes called the Constitution Act of 1986. Also New Zealanders drive on the left.

While we’re on the subject, Statistics New Zealand, a government agency, has “busted” the “myth” that the country has 20 sheep for every human inhabitant, a factoid that “adds weight to myriad sheep jokes,” as the Stats NZ website complains. In reality, “the sheep-to-person ratio has fallen and contrary to popular belief there are actually about six sheep per person, not 20.” The site is silent as to how Ginsburg’s immigration would affect the ratio.

Actually, her choice of country is the best thing about Ginsburg’s latest emanations. At least she departed from the tired trope of celebrities’ threatening emptily to move to Canada if a Republican is elected president. But a Supreme Court justice should not be expressing an opinion about an election, unless—as in the case of Bush v. Gore (2000), it becomes necessary for the court to resolve a legal dispute arising from it.

The Democratic Platform’s Sharp Left Turn This isn’t Bill Clinton’s party anymore. It isn’t even Barack Obama’s. By William A. Galston

In parliamentary systems, party platforms are blueprints for governance. In the U.S., they reflect the preferences of each party’s base—the activists and interest groups to which the party must pay attention. Changes in party platforms from one election to the next reveal shifts in thinking and—even more—the balance of power within the base as new groups surge and established forces give way.

That is why the 2016 Democratic platform is so significant. The platform committee hasn’t made public the text that will be taken to the Democratic convention in less than two weeks. But at this stage, based on the July 1 draft and 82 amendments to its text adopted by the end of the final platform committee meeting in Orlando, Fla., we know with near-certainty what the platform will say—and what it means.

The party that Hillary Clinton will lead into battle this fall is not Bill Clinton’s Democratic Party. In important respects it is not even Barack Obama’s Democratic Party. It is a party animated by the frustrations of the Obama years and reshaped by waves of economic and social activism.

Not surprisingly, the document endorses a range of Hillary Clinton’s campaign proposals, including a massive infrastructure-investment program, new incentives for small business, expanded profit-sharing to increase workers’ earnings, a tax on high-frequency financial transactions, paid family and medical leave, an enhanced earned-income tax credit for young workers without children, access to computer-science education for all K-12 students, and measures to make college education more affordable.

Neither is it surprising that the draft incorporates some of Bernie Sanders’s key proposals—most notably, a $15 per hour minimum wage—and that it doesn’t take sides on issues that divided the party, such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement and a broad tax on financial transactions, where neither side would give way.

In other respects, however, the draft is truly remarkable—for example, its near-silence on economic growth. The uninformed reader would not learn that the pace of recovery from the Great Recession has been anemic by postwar standards, or that productivity gains have slowed to a crawl over the past five years, or that firms have been reluctant to invest in new productive capacity. Rather, the platform draft’s core narrative is inequality, the injustice that inequality entails, and the need to rectify it through redistribution.

MARILYN PENN; A REVIEW OF CAPTAIN FANTASTIC

If your heroes are Noam Chomsky and Jesse Jackson, or if you’re a fan of parenting by dictatorial narcissists who retreat to the wilderness and isolate their children from society – you may enjoy Captain Fantastic, starring Viggo Mortenson. The normally swoon-worthy and photogenic actor is buried below a massive beard so you’ll have to wait till the end to see his adorable chin but in the meantime, you can count the many ways that this movie, which should have been titled Captain Fanatic, fails to deliver.

A safe bet is that 90% of the audience does not know who Noam Chomsky is and since his birthday is celebrated instead of Christmas, it’s just plain silly that he’ d be considered a superior reformer to Jesus – son of God, for God’s sake! You may also wonder throughout the course of the film where Viggo – here known as Ben Cash – actually got the cash to buy the various knives and other weapons intrinsic to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle he has imposed on his clan. Likewise for the clothing, food, camping and climbing paraphernalia that comprise a Hollywood minimal lifestyle. As the film progresses and you discover that the missing mother has been hospitalized for mental problems, you continue to wonder who decided it was a good idea to have a hallucinatory bi-polar woman undergo post-partum episodes SIX times. Never fear, for more than half the movie, the children are as upbeat as the von Trapp family and as skillful as the Flying Wallendas. As for precocity, I can only hint that one of them will get into ALL of the top colleges in your lexicon and, in a tasteless shaming of the poorly educated schoolchildren, these kids rival the Bronte and James families combined.

Eventually, the children are brought into the real world where they encounter their ‘civilized” relatives who hardly measure up to the lofty far-left standards of the screenwriter and his creations. Since every movie requires an arc, there comes a confrontation, some meltdowns, some accusations of “I hate you,” along with a generally unbelievable happy ending to rival Mama Mia. The moral of this movie is that even leftover hippies and their progeny look better with haircuts and no one with a chin like Viggo should ever consider a beard.

If you want to test yourself on the credibility factor in this film, try substituting L. Ron Hubbard for Noam Chomsky and ask yourself whether cult tactics of indoctrination are ever appealing coming from the right. How strange that the very same methods are made to look so cute with lefties as inspiration…………..

Full GOP Platform committee enthusiastically endorses ardently pro-Israel plank. By: Lori Lowenthal Marcus

Last night the JewishPress.com brought the news that a GOP subcommittee drafted and endorsed a pro-Israel plank that includes every single item on every (truly) pro-Israel wish list, thanks to the hard work of a few lawmakers such as South Caroline State Rep. Alan Clemmons and several pro-Israel organizations, including the Iron Dome Alliance.

But this morning brings more huge news: the full committee endorsed the pro-Israel plank with no changes. And the passage of that adamantly pro-Israel plank was met with a standing ovation by those in the room.

The Republican party ain’t what it used to be, or at least it doesn’t match the anti-Israel party portrait which so many people have tried to peddle.

And what of the Democrats? Jeff Ballabon, chairman of the Iron Dome Alliance, told the JewishPress.com that his coalition has made it very clear that they “would still love for Democrats to accept the same language and will attempt to persuade delegates in light of today’s success but ha[s] little optimism that it would be accepted.”

He said the coalition didn’t want this (strongly pro-Israel) policy to be tied only to one party, “this should be America’s policy,” but the enthusiasm with which the important language was met and embraced by the Republican platform committee speaks volumes.

While rumors have been swirling that the pro-Israel lobby AIPAC has been trying to stop the truly pro-Israel plank from getting out of the station, if they engaged in that effort, it failed.

And if AIPAC did not work to defeat this non-Two State language, it’s a whole new AIPAC world in which Israel is now in control of the best resolution of the various conflicts besieging the Jewish State, rather than bowing its head to dictates from the U.S. It also signals a change in the lobby’s stance regarding the disputed territories, which it has never strongly embraced.

Here is the language of the new Republican Party Platform on Israel:

9 Steps to Successfully Counter Jihad: Jamie Glazov

While the Obama administration continues to allow the Muslim Brotherhood to direct American foreign policy and, therefore, to implement “strategies” that render America defenseless in the face of Jihad and stealth Jihad, there are some alternative strategies that have the potential to turn this catastrophic situation around completely in America’s favor.

Below are 9 concrete steps that, if implemented by a future American administration, would make a big difference in preserving our civilization and in defending Americans from terrorism:

1. Label the Enemy and Make a Threat Assessment.

The Obama administration continues to refuse to label our enemy and, therefore, it continues to enable our defeat in the terror war. It is urgent that we name our enemy (i.e. Islamic Jihad) and definitively identify what ideology inspires our enemy (i.e. Islamic law).

2. Scrap “Countering Violent Extremism.”

“Countering Violent Extremism” is the pathetic and destructive focus of the Obama administration in allegedly fighting the terror war. On the one hand, this “focus” is vague to the point of being meaningless and completely incapacitates us. On the other hand, this focus allows the administration to perpetuate the destructive fantasy that there are other types of “extremists” — who just happen to be the Left’s political opponents — that pose a great threat to the country.

For example, as Stephen Coughlin has revealed, the “violent extremists” the administration is clearly worried about are the “right-wing Islamophobes” whom the administration obviously considers to be the real threat to American security.

The “Countering Violent Extremism” is trash and needs to be thrown in the garbage.

3. Stop “Partnering” With Muslim Brotherhood Front Groups.

The government needs to stop cooperating with, and listening to, Muslim Brotherhood front groups such as CAIR and ISNA immediately. The Muslim Brotherhood document, the Explanatory Memorandum, has made it clear that the Brotherhood’s objective is to destroy our civilization from within by our own hands with the influence of these groups. Moreover, as Robert Spencer advises, there needs to be legislation that will bar all such groups and affiliated individuals from advising the government or receiving any grants from it.

The Disappearance of the Two-State Solution It’s long past time that Americans acknowledge the facts on the ground. By Elliott Abrams

In the first draft of the 2016 Republican-party platform, references to the two-state solution do not appear. CNN reports the “delegates drafting the Republican National Convention platform approved removing language encouraging a two-state solution for Israelis and Palestinians.”

An earlier draft had included support for “two democratic states” — the policy of recent Republican and Democratic administrations — but had removed a reference to Palestine included in the GOP platform four years ago. On Monday, the national security subcommittee of the Platform Committee approved an amendment dropping support of a two-state solution, according to four people who were in the room for the discussion. . . . “The U.S. seeks to assist in the establishment of comprehensive and lasting peace in the Middle East, to be negotiated among those living in the region,” the approved amendment said. “We oppose any measures intended to impose an agreement or to dictate borders or other terms, and call for the immediate termination of all U.S. funding of any entity that attempts to do so.”

The Democratic party platform supports a two-state solution, as it has previously.

What are we to make of this?

Support for a two-state solution has not always been American policy since Israel won the West Bank and Gaza in 1967’s Six-Day War. The initial assumption was that the West Bank would go back to Jordan, and Gaza to Egypt, as part of a “land for peace” deal that would be negotiated between Israel and each of those countries. When I worked in the Reagan administration, Secretary of State George Shultz was explicit in saying we did not favor the creation of a Palestinian state.

And after all, why would we? The Palestine Liberation Organization was led by Yasser Arafat, a terrorist and a thief. Who would want to give him a state? Well, Bill Clinton did. At Camp David in 2000, Clinton tried to broker an agreement between Israel and the PLO chief that would have handed him the West Bank and Gaza. But Arafat said no to Clinton and Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak.