In a recent interview on the popular radio show The Breakfast Club, Temple University professor and former CNN contributor Marc Lamont Hill affectionately referred to Nation Of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan as “my brother.” Moreover, Hill pushed back against whites who suggested that he and other black pundits should, in Hill’s words, “throw [Farrakhan] away wholesale” because of the latter’s long history of incendiary racial rhetoric. Noting that no one had ever urged him to similarly distance himself from what he describes as “extreme” conservatives like Bill O’Reilly and Ann Coulter when he was a Fox News contributor years ago, Hill now asks: “Why is only one set of people untouchable? And why does every black leader have to ritually denounce Farrakhan in order to sustain a position?”

Hill’s professed bewilderment vis-à-vis this alleged double standard is wholly unsurprising, in light of the very obvious fact that he, like Farrakhan, has shown himself to be quite fluent in the vernacular of racism and anti-Semitism. During a January 2017 appearance on a CNN panel, for instance, Hill took issue with black celebrities like Ray Lewis, Jim Brown, and Steve Harvey for accepting President-elect Donald Trump’s invitation to meet with him at Trump Tower. After Bruce LeVell — an African American member of Trump’s diversity coalition — objected to Hill’s complaints, Hill characterized LeVell and all other nonwhites who were working on behalf of Trump’s agenda as “a bunch of mediocre Negroes.”

On Columbus Day 2012, Hill published an op-ed in which he listed the “15 Most Overrated White People” – a list that included such names as Elvis Presley, Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump, William Shakespeare, and Babe Ruth. Hill’s motivation for writing this column, he explained, was his angst over the celebration of a national holiday honoring “an immoral treasure hunter” and “vicious conquistador.”

In stark contrast to his sneering derision of “overrated” whites, Hill has heaped mountains of glowing praise upon convicted black cop-killers like Mumia Abu Jamal (“one of the world’s most celebrated journalists, freedom fighters, and political prisoners”) and Assata Shakur (“an American hero and freedom fighter”).

In October 2015, Hill lauded Rasmea Odeh — the mastermind of a deadly 1969 terrorist bombing in Jerusalem — as a “Palestinian freedom fighter.” Viewing Israel as “an apartheid state” that deserves to be crushed economically by organized worldwide boycotts, Hill contends that violence is a wholly legitimate means of advancing the creation of “a free Palestine from the River to the Sea.” In other words, all the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea — precisely the territory that constitutes Israel — should henceforth be known as “Palestine.”

Among the most revealing aspects of Hill’s worldview is the genuine love and admiration he has voiced for the late Khalid Abdul Muhammad, describing him as a “mentor, teacher, and revolutionary hero.” Best remembered as a vulgar mouthpiece of the Nation Of Islam and the New Black Panther Party, Muhammad famously accused Jews of having provoked Adolf Hitler when they “went in there, in Germany, the way they do everywhere they go, and they supplanted, they usurped.” Further, Muhammad advised blacks that “[t]here are no good crackers, and if you find one, [you should] kill him before he changes.” He told a television audience that “[t]here is a little bit of Hitler in all white people.” He told a San Francisco State University audience that the “white man” is “not a devil,” but is “the Devil.” He declared that blacks, in retribution against South African whites of the apartheid era, should “kill the women,…kill the children,…kill the babies,…kill the blind,…kill the crippled,…kill the faggot,…kill the lesbian,…kill them all.” And he praised Colin Ferguson, a black man who had shot some twenty white and Asian commuters (killing six of them) in a racially motivated 1993 shooting spree aboard a New York commuter train, as a hero who possessed the courage to “just kill every goddamn cracker that he saw.”

So much for Hill’s “mentor,” “teacher,” and “hero.” Oh sure, Muhammad’s language may have been a bit salty at times, but at least he wasn’t an “overrated white person.”

Muhammad’s mentor, Louis Farrakhan, likewise has a long, well-documented history of venom-laced references to “white devils” and Jewish “bloodsuckers.” He has characterized Jews as “wicked deceivers” from “the synagogue of Satan”; has referred to Judaism as a “gutter religion”; has described Adolf Hitler as “a very great man”; and has portrayed white people variously as “vicious beasts,” “the skunks of the planet,” and “potential humans [who] haven’t evolved yet.”

In March 2015, Farrakhan said that “Israelis and Zionist Jews” — and “not … Arabs or Muslims at all” — were behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In a sermon he delivered four months later in Miami, Farrakhan issued what was, in essence, a call for black people to murder whites: “I’m looking for 10,000 in the midst of a million. Ten thousand fearless men who say death is sweeter than continued life under tyranny…. [S]talk them and kill them and let them feel the pain of death that we are feeling!”

A protégé of both Farrakhan and Khalid Abdul Muhammad is the former Chairman of the New Black Panther Party, Malik Zulu Shabazz, who once told a Howard University audience: “I say to all Jewish people and all white people … stop pushing your Holocaust down my throat.” At a “Redeem the Dream” rally at the Lincoln Memorial, Shabazz called on black young people to unite against their “common enemy” — the white man — and he articulated his “black dream” of seeing “caskets and funerals in the community of our enemy.”

Even while denouncing what he depicts as the scourge of white supremacy, Shabazz passionately embraces his own philosophy of racial superiority: “Black Power! Black Power!… Our genes are dominant, white genes are recessive…. Black Power!”

In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Shabazz defended Osama bin Laden and blamed President George W. Bush for the horrors of that day. Calling America and Israel the “number one and two terrorists right now on the planet,” Shabazz declared: “Zionism is racism, Zionism is terrorism, Zionism is colonialism, Zionism is Imperialism, and support for Zionism is the root of why so many were killed on September 11.” During a New Black Panther Party meeting in March 2002, Shabazz held up a picture of bin Laden and praised him as a Muslim “brother” and “a bold man” who was “not bowing down” to the West, but rather was “standing up” for his beliefs and “bringing reform to this world.” Urging his listeners to “give [bin Laden] his respect,” Shabazz said: “Let’s give him a hand, man.”

At a protest outside B’nai B’rith headquarters in Washington soon thereafter, Shabazz said: “Kill every goddamn Zionist in Israel! Goddamn little babies, goddamn old ladies! Blow up Zionist supermarkets!”

Shabazz’s successor as Chairman of the New Black Panther Party is Hashim Nzinga, who routinely refers to white people as “crackers” and has accused Jews of using “their monies” to “infiltrat[e]” historically black colleges with the poison of “white supremacy.”

Another longtime New Black Panther Party leader, Quanell X — who recently severed his ties to that organization — once told a CNN interviewer that black Americans were fully prepared to resort to violence as a means of addressing racial injustices. Declaring that “all you Jews can go straight to hell,” he warned: “I say to Jewish America: Get ready … knuckle up, put your boots on, because we’re ready and the war is going down.”
A particularly prominent black racist/anti-Semite who has made a long career out of smearing whites and Jews is Jesse Jackson. In a private conversation with a black reporter during his 1984 presidential campaign, Jackson infamously referred to Jews as “Hymies,” and to New York City as “Hymietown.” In a speech at Michigan State University many years later, he disparaged the American founders as nothing more than “a bunch of white men” who were oblivious to the needs and perceptions of nonwhites.

A slightly younger and distinctly more vulgar version of Jackson is the equally renowned “civil rights activist” Al Sharpton, who first gained notoriety thirty years ago when he helped perpetuate the obscene Tawana Brawley hoax, where a black teenage girl falsely claimed to have been the victim of a racially motivated gang-rape that in fact had never even occurred.

A few years after that, Sharpton fanned the flames of a series of deadly race riots that overran the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn after a Hasidic driver had accidentally struck and killed a young black boy. Among other things, Sharpton characterized local Jews as “the diamond merchants right here in Crown Heights.”

In a 1994 speech at New Jersey’s Kean College, Sharpton referred to white people as “crackers” who “was in the cave while we [blacks] was building empires.” “We taught philosophy and astrology and mathematics before Socrates and them Greek homos ever got around to it,” he added for good measure.

In 1995, Sharpton led his National Action Network in a racially charged boycott against Freddy’s Fashion Mart, a Jewish-owned business in Harlem. The street leader of the boycott, former mental patient Morris Powell, and his fellow protesters repeatedly warned passersby not to patronize the “crackers” and “the greedy Jew bastards [who are] killing our [black] people.” This all took place under the watchful, approving eye of Sharpton, who referred to the proprietors of Freddy’s as “white interlopers.” The subsequent picketing became ever-more menacing in its tone, until one of the participants eventually shot four whites inside the store and then set the building on fire –– killing seven people in all.

In June 2016, Sharpton led a rally in support of black Assemblyman Keith Wright, who at that time was running in a Democratic primary election as part of his quest for a U.S. House seat. Belittling Wright’s primary opponents, who also were black, as race traitors, Sharpton said: “You’re supposed to be attracted to these Negroes you ain’t never seen before. I mean, they must have a laboratory to just create these Negroes.”

There is no white person anywhere in the media or in politics who could have said this –– or any of the other ugly remarks made by Sharpton –– without being permanently blacklisted from polite company. But Sharpton faced no consequences whatsoever. Indeed, former President Barack Obama publicly lauded him as “a voice for the voiceless and … dispossessed”; praised him for his “commitment to fight injustice and inequality”; and thanked him for his “dedication to the righteous cause of perfecting our union.” Moreover, Sharpton visited the White House on official business at least 85 times during Obama’s two terms in office.

Keith Ellison, the longtime U.S. congressman who was recently elected Attorney General of Minnesota, once published an article advocating slavery reparations as well as the creation of a geographically self-contained “homeland” for black people. For more than a decade, Ellison worked actively on behalf of the Nation Of Islam and argued that Louis Farrakhan “is a role model for black youth”; “is not an anti-Semite”; “is a sincere, tireless, and uncompromising advocate of the black community and other oppressed people around the world”; and is regarded by “most black people” as “a central voice for our collective aspirations.”

Filmmaker Spike Lee has been highly outspoken on racial matters in many different contexts and venues. After visiting apartheid-era South Africa in the early 1990s, for instance, he said: “I seriously wanted to pick up a gun and shoot whites. The only way to resolve matters is by bloodshed.” On other occasions, Lee has bluntly articulated his contempt for black-white couples. “I give interracial couples a look,” he once said. “Daggers. They get uncomfortable when they see me on the street.”

In February 2014, during a Black History Month event at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, Lee angrily denounced the recent influx of new, wealthy, and disproportionately white residents to certain historically black New York City neighborhoods. He also voiced resentment over what he viewed as the white newcomers’ efforts to quash local black traditions and pastimes. Said Lee:

“Then comes the motherfu**in’ Christopher Columbus Syndrome. You can’t discover this! We [blacks] been here. You just can’t come and bogart. There were brothers playing motherfu**in’ African drums in Mount Morris Park for 40 years and now they can’t do it anymore because the new inhabitants said the drums are loud…. Get the fu** outta here!”

Lee then likened the wave of gentrification to efforts to wipe out Native Americans who already had been living on the continent during the nation’s formative years. And in yet another allusion to attempted genocide, Lee stated in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine that “AIDS is a government-engineered disease” designed to eradicate nonwhites and homosexuals.

Jeremiah Wright, the longtime former pastor of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ, likewise believes that “we started the AIDS virus … as a means of genocide against people of color.” A Jew-hater extraordinaire, Wright has referred to Israel as a “dirty word”; has stated that Zionism contains an element of “white racism”; has likened Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to South Africa’s treatment of blacks during the apartheid era; and has advocated divestment campaigns targeting companies that conduct business in, or with, Israel. When a number of prominent African Americans counseled fellow blacks to boycott Louis Farrakhan’s Million Man March in 1995, Wright derided them variously as “Negro leaders,” “colored leaders,” “Oreos,” “darkies,” and “house niggras.”

Leonard Jeffries, a former Professor of Black Studies at the City College of New York, contends that blacks are “sun people,” the culturally and racially superior counterparts of whites, the “ice people.” Speaking at a taxpayer-funded Black Arts and Cultural Festival in Albany, New York, he once claimed that his Jewish disputants in academia were “slick and devilish and dirty and dastardly.” Sneering at the “white boy” and “the culture of white racism,” Jeffries has exhorted historians to point out that President George Washington was nothing more than a “slave master bastard Founding Father.”

Amir-Abdel Malik-Ali is a California-based black Imam who lectures frequently at Muslim Student Union and Muslim Students Association events. A passionate supporter of the genocidal terrorist organizations Hamas and Hezbollah, he endorses suicide bombings as a legitimate “resistance” tactic: “Palestinian mothers are supporting their children who are suicide bombers, saying, ‘Go honey, go!’ That ain’t suicide; that’s martyrdom.”

In a May 2006 appearance at UC Irvine, Malik-Ali accused the “apartheid State of Israel” of carrying out a “holocaust” and a “genocide” against the Palestinian people. Speaking from a podium whose facade was adorned with a banner that said “Israel, the 4th Reich,” he referred to Jews as “new Nazis” and “a bunch of straight-up punks.” “The truth of the matter is your days are numbered,” Malik-Ali added. “… We will fight you until we are either martyred or until we are victorious.”

Another noteworthy black racist is Women’s March, Inc. co-president Tamika Mallory, who previously served as executive director of Al Sharpton’s National Action Network and has characterized Nation Of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan as the “Greatest Of All Time.” “We’re not really interested in hearing white women talk about how much they want to work with us [in Women’s March], and how much they want to be allies, and how much they appreciate us, and all those great things,” says Mallory, because they “have been voting the wrong way” and thus “are largely to blame” for America’s racial inequities. Moreover, Mallory accuses white women of being “unable to step aside and allow women of color to … lead.”

At an event in 2011, Congressman James Clyburn shared a stage with Louis Farrakhan, who discussed the Nation Of Islam book The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, which purports to provide “irrefutable evidence that the most prominent of the Jewish pilgrim fathers [sic] used kidnapped Black Africans disproportionately more than any other ethnic or religious group in New World history.” After Farrakhan spoke about the need for blacks to pool their resources and work together, Clyburn said: “I want to thank Minister Farrakhan for offering up a number of precepts that we ought to adhere to.”

Farrakhan and Clyburn have plenty of company among black public figures who are not only unashamed of engaging in racial tribalism, but who actually go so far as to put it on display and shout it from the rooftops. In 2012, for instance, actor Samuel L. Jackson proudly and defiantly acknowledged that in 2008 “I voted for Barack [Obama] because he was black…. [His] message didn’t mean [bleep] to me.”

In a “Millions for Reparations” rally demanding that the federal government pay slavery reparations to black Americans, New York City Councilman Charles Barron angrily declared: “I want to go up to the closest white person and say, ‘You can’t understand this, it’s a black thing,’ and then slap him just for my mental health.” When delivering a commencement address to black students at Medgar Evers College in 2009, Barron encouraged the graduates to always identify themselves first-and-foremost as black: “Never forget who you are, and don’t be afraid to be black…. I don’t want you to be a lawyer who happens to be black. Be a black lawyer. I don’t want you to be an elected official who happens to be black. Be a black elected official. We got a black President. We got a black governor. Say black, black, black, black, black.”

Another hallmark of contemporary black racism is a spirit of self-righteous combativeness that jumps at any opportunity to disparage white people in openly racialist terms. In December 2018, for example, NBA star LeBron James ripped NFL team owners as “a bunch of old, white men” who “got that slave mentality. And it’s like: ‘This is my team. You do what the fu** I tell y’all to do, or we get rid of y’all’.”

In a similarly mean and accusatory tone, Democrat Congressman Andre Carson told a gathering of supporters at a 2011 Congressional Black Caucus event that the conservative Tea Party movement was infested with white racism: “This is the effort that we are seeing of Jim Crow. Some of these folks in Congress right now would love to see us [blacks] as second-class citizens. Some of them in Congress right now with this Tea Party movement would love to see you and me [blacks] … hanging on a tree.”

In October 2018, CNN host Don Lemon scolded President Trump for “demonizing” Muslims and illegal aliens as potential terror threats. Then, in the next breath, he asserted that “the biggest terror threat in this country is white men, most of them radicalized to the right, and we have to start doing something about them. There is no travel ban on them. There is no ban on — you know, they had the Muslim ban. There is no white guy ban. So what do we do about that?”

Like most black racists, Lemon routinely engages in psychological projection by accusing white people of harboring racist beliefs and malevolent intent. For instance, he claims that President Trump was engaging in racism when he mocked both Lemon and Congresswoman Maxine Waters as people of low intelligence. And yet, as the Media Research Center has documented, there have at least 36 known occasions where Trump has publicly characterized specific white individuals as “dummies,” “not bright,” “dopey,” “clueless,” and “low IQ.”

The late Professor Derrick Bell, widely regarded as the principal founder of Critical Race Theory, described Nation Of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan as a “smart and superarticulate” man and “a great hero” for black people. Claiming that “few whites are ready to actively promote civil rights for blacks,” Bell stated that “slavery is, as an example of what white America has done, a constant reminder of what white America might do.”

In a 2016 op-ed piece in The New York Times, Georgetown University professor Michael Eric Dyson described whites as people of boundless “privilege,” known for their “selfish insistence that the world, all of it — all its resources, all its riches, all its bounty, all its grace — should be [theirs] first, and foremost, and if there’s anything left, why then we [blacks] can have some, but only if we ask politely and behave gratefully.” Dyson also laments that blacks commonly react to white racism by “sicken[ing] our souls with depression”; presumably he is unaware that white suicide rates are fully three times higher than those of blacks.

Salon political writer Chauncey DeVega laments that “Negrophobia” — a form of “mental, physical and emotional violence against black people” which “presumes the inherently benign nature of whiteness and the dangerousness of black and brown people” — is ubiquitous in America, “where many whites dehumanize black people by subconsciously linking them to apes.”

Fellow Slate writer Jamelle Bouie contends that “the Americans who backed Trump and his threat of state-sanctioned violence against Hispanic immigrants and Muslim Americans … voted for a racist.” “If you voted for Trump, you voted for this, regardless of what you believe about the groups in question,” says Bouie. “That you have black friends or Latino colleagues, that you think yourself to be tolerant and decent, doesn’t change the fact that you voted for racist policy that may affect, change, or harm their lives. And on that score, your frustration at being labeled a racist doesn’t justify or mitigate the moral weight of your political choice…. To insist [that] Trump’s backers are good people is to treat their inner lives with more weight than the actual lives on the line under a Trump administration. At best, it’s myopic and solipsistic. At worst, it’s morally grotesque.”

In September 2018, then-ESPN host Jemele Hill posted a tweet stating that “Donald Trump is a white supremacist who has largely surrounded himself w/ other white supremacists.” In a subsequent discussion about that particular charge, Hill doubled down: “I thought I was saying water is wet. I didn’t even think it was controversial.”

The overt and unapologetic promotion of racial tribalism has become the defining hallmark of the black Left in contemporary America. Rooted in the absurd notion that black people, by definition, cannot be racists because they lack political “power,” black racism today parades righteously and ostentatiously under the protective, all-encompassing banner of “social justice.” And because the leftists who thoroughly dominate America’s educational establishment and mass media have largely embraced and advanced this very same narrative of perpetual black victimhood and white transgression, black racists have become emboldened as never before to trumpet endless litanies of manufactured racial grievances. As evidenced in the many examples cited above, they feel free to thunder with absolute impunity things that would permanently destroy the career and reputation of any white person who dared to even whisper similar words. This is how people come to hate each other. This is how nations get torn apart. This is how civilizations die.

4. ΑΞΙΖΕΙ ΝΑ ΤΟ ΔΙΑΒΑΣΟΥΝ ΑΠΑΝΤΕΣ!

“Jihadist Psychopath” is a harrowing journey into the growing terror death toll — and into the accompanying sympathy for the terrorists.

January 4, 2019

Daniel Greenfield

 

[Frontpage editor Jamie Glazov will be speaking at Beverly Hills Hotel on Feb. 6 about his new book: Jihadist Psychopath: How He Is Charming, Seducing, and Devouring Us. Register HERE. Order the book HERE.]

There are basic interrelated questions that any student of human history must ask. Why is human history filled with so much evil, and why do good people so often do nothing in the face of evil?

Jamie Glazov’s new book, Jihadist Psychopath: How He Is Charming, Seducing, and Devouring Us,addresses that troubling question.

The answer that he comes up with in Jihadist Psychopath is a collusion that is not born only of simple radicalism, but of the ways in which Islamic political movements play on our own emotional weaknesses.

Jihadist Psychopath is a journey into the dark heart of the Western world using the metaphor of the interplay between the psychopath and his victims. That metaphor pervades Glazov’s text, structuring his understanding of the growing terror death toll and the accompanying sympathy for the terrorists.

Glazov, who has a BA in Political Science and a PhD in History, had already made a study of Islamic terrorists. To prepare for the writing of Jihadist Psychopath, he also made a study of the most fascinating and deadliest element in the criminal life of societies: the psychopath. Human societies are bound together by empathy. Multiculturalism and diversity stretch and expand our sense of empathy to its limits. The psychopath plays on our sense of empathy despite lacking any empathy of his or her own.

That paradox makes the psychopath extremely curious and deadly. Like a cuckoo bird, the psychopath has evolved to exploit a biological loophole, empathy, meant to bind a species together around shared interests, without the biological commitment to those interests, creating a predator that is facile and adept, as Glazov’s title puts it, at “charming, seducing and devouring us”.

The uses and abuses of empathy by the psychopath and the Islamic terrorist are a major focus of Jihadist Psychopath. Islamic terrorists take advantage of the empathy bonds that multicultural societies use to bind diverse populations together into a single functional entity whose members cooperate and even sacrifice for the benefit of the group, without ever sharing in that sense of mutual responsibility.

Like psychopaths, Glazov argues, Islamic terrorists create the illusion of a mutual relationship while viciously exploiting and eventually destroying their victims by degrees. These victims can be the individuals, the women who marry Islamic terrorists only to be used by them to obtain legal status or to birth new Jihadists, but they are the microcosm of our larger society which is also being charmed, seduced, and destroyed by an ideology that turns our own values and our sense of self against us.

“Once he succeeds in lodging his hooks into his target’s body, he inflicts the key wound, convincing him that he (the victim) is the actual offender and guilty party, and that the psychopath is the actual victim,” Glazov writes.

The exchange of roles between perpetrator and victim is crucial to the predation of weaker societies on stronger societies. As predatory plants mimic the appearance of the prey of their victims, the Jihadist appears to resemble a victim of Western civilization, of colonialism, capitalism, and imperialism, turning guilt and grief into the aphrodisiac of his monstrous appetite, before entrapping his civilizational victim.

Victimhood is the protective coloration of the psychopathic predator, both in his familiar role as the demon haunting a thousand crime stories, thrillers, and action movies, and the less familiar guise of CAIR, ISNA, and countless other Muslim Brotherhood front groups who defend the predation of terrorists by reinventing them as the victims of the very people whom they are killing and destroying.

And yes, the victims are neither truly helpless nor innocent. As the con artist exploits greed, the psychopath’s swollen sense of self-regard feeds upon the narcissism of his victims.

As Glazov notes in Jihadist Psychopath, “It is crucial to emphasize that many victims in the con game possess a tremendous narcissism, since in needing to believe that they are part of the script and can actually change it, they incubate a pathological and self-destructive ego.”

The boundless narcissism of the Left, which convinces its true believers that their beverage choices and their menu options can save or destroy the planet, that even their pettiest actions and emotional states are deeply meaningful signifiers of great and terrible changes in the world, makes it absurdly easy for the Islamist psychopath, who offers the illusion of saving them and himself, to hook them on his line.

The Left hungers for victims to justify its inflated sense of self-importance and its greed for power. Islamists exploit their messianic delusions by playing the victims in need of rescuing. The Islamist psychopath validates the twisted psychology of his radical victims only to destroy his rescuers.

This same psychodrama has played out in Iran, in Egypt, in the United Kingdom, and the United States. When the alliances unravel, as they finally must, the socialist utopia instead becomes the caliphate.

Jihadist Psychopath is an invaluable resource for understanding and coming to grips with the human drama behind the headlines and the radical emotions behind the radical march of political events. It gets at the unacknowledged truth behind the political psychodramas of the Left, the narcissistic notion that even the most destructive behaviors can feel good because they make us feel good about who we are.

“Who we are” was the theme of  a number of Obama speeches. It is no coincidence that the politician who most definitively straddled the cultural divide between Islam and the Left, while uniting them politically in their mutual hatred of the United States of America, could never get enough of telling us who we are.

The core of Jihadist Psychopath lies in the conflict of identities, the slow sonorous clash of civilizations between a West that is losing its sense of self and an East that is regaining it, and between former conquerors losing their religion and renewed conquerors regaining it, between monsters and victims.

“Islamic supremacism crushes all individuality within itself. Its members cannot have their own identity or beliefs, nor can they explore or nurture their own happiness or talents,” Jamie Glazov writes.

And those same Islamic supremacists use their conviction in the inferiority of the individual to destroy the identities of their victims, temporarily adopting their borrowed identities as camouflage, mirroring their victims, gaining their confidence, abusing them, destroying their sense of self, and killing them.

Jihadist Psychopath is a compelling look at the process by which the West is losing its life and its soul.

Reprinted from American Thinker.

5. Να το ερώτημα! Για πείτε μας και εσείς την άποψή σας!

ISRAEL

Can anyone beat Benjamin Netanyahu?

BY BEN SALES 

JANUARY 3, 2019 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seen at a menorah lighting at the start of Hanukkah in Ramat Gan, Dec. 2, 2018. (Lior Mizrahi/Getty Images)

(JTA) — Israeli police want him to be indicted in three separate corruption cases.

He’s embattled from left and right for his attacks on Gaza and his policy in the West Bank. He’s made a point of cozying up to controversial right-wing nationalist leaders, from Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro to Hungary’s Viktor Orban — and especially to President Donald Trump. Many American Jewish leaders say his policies are driving away Diaspora Jews.

And if the upcoming Israeli election were to be held today, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would almost definitely win for the fourth time in a row. Probably in a landslide.

Why? In a sentence, it’s because enough Israelis trust him with their security. To his voters, everything else is commentary.

“They think that if he may have received bribes or played with Israel’s telecom market to have personal gain, this has nothing to do with the way he confronts Iran or the way he handles things in Syria,” said Israeli political journalist Tal Schneider, referring to some of the corruption allegations against Netanyahu.

“I think in Israel, you win elections on security issues only,” she said. “It’s very easy to speak to people’s fears because in Israel, fears are real. It’s in people’s lives on a daily basis.”

Polls ahead of the April 9 election have Netanyahu’s Likud party holding a wide lead over a growing group of competitors in the opposition. Likud is slated to win around 30 seats in Israel’s 120-seat parliament, the Knesset, putting Netanyahu in the best position to form a ruling coalition. His closest opponents would get half that number.

It’s the security, stupid

Netanyahu’s international critics — the United Nations, the European Union, the former Obama administration, liberal American Jewish groups, leading liberal newspapers — have portrayed him as too aggressive in Gaza, too cavalier with the lives of Palestinian civilians and unwilling to make peace with the Palestinian Authority. That’s not to mention the protests over his policies on African asylum seekers, religious pluralism in Israel or the status of Arab Israelis.

But in Israel, polls show that most Jews think Netanyahu is not aggressive enough in Gaza. In November, his defense minister resigned, complaining that Netanyahu was too risk-averse in deploying the military. When it comes to the army, his centrist rivals have only tried to talk tougher than the prime minister.

In 2014, following a war in Gaza that saw Israel pilloried in international forums, a left-leaning group of former generals praised Netanyahu for his “level-headed leadership.” Jewish Israelis tend to see their fighting in Gaza as a necessary response, not a war of choice.

On the diplomatic front, both Israelis and Palestinians have despaired of any hope for a peace accord anytime soon. The other topics — from minority rights to religious policy — generally don’t even register as election issues in Israel.

“Security is pretty much always the number-one issue for Israeli voters, and it comes before the diplomatic front when Israelis rank their priorities in polls,” Lahav Harkov, a senior contributing editor for The Jerusalem Post, wrote to JTA. “He keeps the focus on security and his credentials as an expert on that front, as much as possible.”

It’s true that two former Israeli generals, both chiefs of staff, have founded new parties this year specifically aiming to oppose Netanyahu. But so far, neither is attacking Netanyahu directly on security issues. Moshe Yaalon, one of Netanyahu’s former defense ministers, said his partywould represent “the good, values-based, clean-handed land of Israel.” Benny Gantz, a former general, has only begun to open up about his platform. In a television interview Thursday, he said he would leave several West Bank settlement blocs in place but that an agreement with the Palestinians would bolster Israel’s security.

“We need established, ongoing efforts, in light of any challenge, to reach a diplomatic accord, with the understanding that this is part of our resilience, this is part of our security,” Gantz told Israel’s Channel 16. “There needs to be a real diplomatic effort, without being suckers and without being irresponsible.”

A fragmented opposition

A chorus of other candidates has also failed to match him at the polls. Yair Lapid, a one-time news anchor and finance minister who leads the centrist Yesh Atid party, has a strong base but hasn’t been able to broaden his appeal. The once-robust Labor Party, headed by former telecom executive Avi Gabbay, is mired in the single digits.

If anything, the multiplicity of new parties may only help Netanyahu by fragmenting his opponents. The past few elections have seen several new parties spring up, all competing for the same bloc of voters. Meanwhile, the right has remained relatively united around Netanyahu’s leadership.

Netanyahu’s opponents say the only way to beat him is by joining together. Ehud Barak, Israel’s most recent left-wing prime minister, said Netanyahu would be defeated only “if, in the center-left camp, a bloc comes together.” He called for Yaalon, Gantz and several other opposition parties to unite. But only the opposite has happened: A center-left alliance, the Zionist Union, split in dramatic fashion this week.

“The center-right is competing to lead the state, while the center-left is competing in an internal primary to see who has the most power within its camp,” Ovad Yehezkel, a former centrist Israeli government official, wrote on the Israeli news site Ynet. “In that sense, the fragmentation of parties helps the center-right win elections. And paradoxically, the center-left rolls out the red carpet to the Prime Minister’s office for its rivals.”

Corruption fatigue

Netanyahu’s main problems of late have been the potential indictments against him and a growing aura of corruption. Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert (he ended up going to prison) resigned even before police recommended that he be indicted. But that has already happenedfor Netanyahu and he shows no signs of backing down. He has vowed to remain prime minister even if he is formally charged with a crime.

Will that cost him the election? Probably not, Harkov said. Netanyahu frequently demonizes the Israeli press (and, like Trump, often claims that negative articles are “fake news”). At this point, Harkov said, Israelis are just tired of the back-and-forth. Netanyahu’s opponents, as well as government watchdogs, have called his decisions dangerous to Israel’s democracy. But if Israelis are feeling squeamish, it isn’t showing in the polls.

“There’s so much news about Netanyahu’s investigations that they don’t take it seriously anymore,” Harkov wrote. “Yes, there are corrupt politicians who go to prison, but enough people seem to be willing to shrug the latest things off as just champagne and cigars or point to the incessant leaks to the media as a sign of bias by both the press and the police.”

Netanyahu’s last election campaign, in 2015, also was plagued with scandal — though he was not indicted. Leading up to Election Day, it appeared he could lose. But he pulled off a comeback victory, emerging in a stronger position than before. And the longer he stays in power, Schneider said, the more inevitable his victories seem. In Israel, there are no term limits.

“The people of Israel don’t see anyone else in Israel who can do it,” she said. “With the time passing, he’s getting stronger and stronger because when you sit in that chair, you’re the incumbent. You can use all the facilities to keep promoting yourself.”

6.

ΔΕΝ ΘΑ ΞΕΧΑΣΟΥΜΕ ΠΟΤΕ!

One quarter of all Jewish Holocaust victims murdered in 100 days in 1942

 January 4, 2019

Jews arrive at the Nazi death camp in Auschwitz, Poland. (Screenshot)

The estimated average of 15,000 deaths daily during the “extreme phase of hyper-intense killing” is nearly three times greater than previous estimates.

By: JNS.org

Almost a quarter of the Jews killed in the Holocaust were murdered during 100 days in 1942, making it the time frame with the highest killing pace in the 20th century, according to a new Israeli study published on Wednesday.

The mass murder between August and October 1942 included Jews exterminated in Auschwitz, in Ukraine and as part of “Operation Reinhard,” an intense mass-slaughter campaign carried out by the Nazis between March 1942 and November 1943 in death camps Belzec, Treblinka and Sobibor. The operation itself killed some 1.7 million Polish Jews.

That rate during that operation has been “poorly quantified in the past,” said Lewi Stone, a professor at Tel Aviv University, who published his study in the Science Advances academic journal. He mentioned that most records of the killings were destroyed by the Nazis.

The estimated average of 15,000 deaths daily during the “extreme phase of hyper-intense killing” is nearly three times greater than previous approximations.

Stone said that the murder pace declined in November 1942 due to “relatively few Jews left” in Nazi-controlled places in and around Poland, “so the rate of the killing likely subsided because of the difficulty of rounding up victims.”

This study implies that those three months consisted of a higher killing rate than the 1994 Rwandan genocide, which had been widely seen as the quickest murderous campaign in the 20th century, with some 800,000 people massacred over 100 days.

“Historians, social scientists, policy-makers and journalists have consistently relied on inaccurate assessments that greatly underestimated the Holocaust kill rate during ‘Operation Reinhard,’” wrote Stone.

7.

 2018 

People shocked after the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting. (AP/Gene J. Puskar)

The ‘Top 10’ Global Anti-Semitic and Anti-Israel Incidents of 2018

This is the shocking list of the worst anti-Semitic, anti-Israel incidents the Jewish world has encountered in 2018, with figures showing a concerning trend. 

By: JNS and United with Israel Staff

The Simon Wiesenthal Center (SWC), which dedicates itself to combating post-Holocaust anti-Semitism, has presented its list of the 10 worst anti-Semitic and anti-Israel incidents that occurred over the course of 2018.

It was “a year where anti-Semitism showed disturbing signs of growth worldwide,” the anti-Semitism watchdog noted.

1. The Pittsburgh Synagogue Massacre

The deadliest attack in American Jewish history: Eleven worshippers were shot and killed during Shabbat-morning services on Oct. 27 at the Tree of Life*Or L’Simcha Synagogue.

“How could this have possibly happened in the United States? Why now? With hate crimes on the rise in the US, including a 57 percent rise in anti-Semitic incidents, the shooting in Pittsburgh illustrates the dangers of a society in which openly espousing hatred and intolerance on social media – and in the real world – are no longer taboo,” SWC wrote.

2. Louis Farrakhan’s Use of Nazi Propaganda to Dehumanize of Jews

During a speech in October in Detroit, Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan slammed those who call him a Jew-hater: “I’m not mad at you because you’re so stupid. … So when they talk about Farrakhan, and call me a hater, you do what they do: call me an anti-Semite. … Stop it, I’m an anti-termite.”

“The vile Farrakhan continues to draw accolades from the founders of the Women’s March on Washington, many elected officials and members of the entertainment community. The mainstream media has largely turned a blind eye to Farrakhan’s longstanding hatred of Jews,” SWC charged.

3. Swastikas on Multiple US Campuses after the Pittsburgh Tragedy

Swastikas were found at Duke University, University of Illinois, Cornell University, Stanford University and other higher education institutions in the aftermath of the deadliest shooting in US Jewish history.

“Members of extremist groups, like Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), created hostile environments for Jewish students by posting quotes on social media like, “Let’s stuff some Jews in the ovens” and “every time I read about Hitler, I fall in love again,” SWC noted.

4. The Jeremy Corbyn-led British Labour Party Mainstreams Anti-Semitism in the United Kingdom

“Multiple photos of Corbyn embracing members of Middle East terrorist groups added to the fears of many Brits well beyond the Jewish community,” SWC stated.

5. UNRWA’s School Curriculum that Wipes Israel Out of Existence and Venerates the Mass Murderer of Jews

According to SWC, “Hamas effectively controls the UNRWA teachers’ union and teachers resort to social media to promote terrorism against Israelis and to ‘stab Zionist dogs.’”

6. Airbnb’s Discrimination Against Israelis in Judea and Samaria

There is no indication that Airbnb, who claim to oppose BDS, is extending its interventionist diplomacy to Cyprus or the scores of other disputed territories around the world.

The Wiesenthal Center is urging its 400,000 members to book their travel elsewhere.

7. German Bank’s Association with Leading BDS Group

In 2018, the Bank for Social Economy insists on doing business with the radical “Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East,” which strongly endorses boycotting the Jewish state.

8. Episcopal Bishop’s Wholesale Fabrication of Non-Existent Israeli Atrocities against Arab Children

During a speech in Massachusetts last July, Bishop Gayle Harris reported that she witnessed an Israeli soldier arrest a three-year-old Arab child on the Jerusalem Temple Mount and gun down a 15-year-old Palestinian teen in the back. After SWC exposed the claims as fabrications, Harris, the #2 Episcopal clergy in the state, backtracked, saying that she had only heard the stories from a third party – a Palestinian.

9. Prestigious Swedish Hospital’s Refusal to Act against Overt Jew-Hatred in its Top Ranks

The head of neurosurgery at the Karolinska Institute has systematically discriminated against three Jewish doctors, blocking them from helping their patients and even hindering continued research at the Institute.

“We are shocked by the lethargic response of Karolinska to the cancer of anti-Semitism,” SWC’s Rabbi Abraham Cooper said. “So far, powerful bigots have been protected and life-saving Jewish physicians are left twisting in the winds of hate.”

10. Roger Waters Using Concert Venues to Spread Vitriol against the Jewish People

There are few performers whose anti-Israel vitriol can match that of Roger Waters. Despite his protests to the contrary, for years the co-founder of the iconic band Pink Floyd has crossed the line between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism.

2018 has been a busy year for Waters. While in Germany, he heard Munich’s Mayor, Dieter Reiter, explain why the city would not rent any venues for his performances. “Waters has made increasingly unacceptable and anti-Semitic comments,” Mayor Reiter said. “I want to make it unequivocally clear that Waters’ anti-Semitic rabble-rousing is not welcome in Munich and will not go unchallenged.”

8.

THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO TZIPI LIVNI

Born to Eitan and Sarah Livni, respectively the Irgun’s operations officer and one of the warriors he commanded, Tzipi was raised in the milieu of the “warring family.”

BY AMOTZ ASA-EL

 

JANUARY 4, 2019

Η ΠΟΛΙΤΙΚΟΣ ΑΥΤΗ ΕΙΝΑΙ ΜΕΓΑΛΟ “ΚΕΦΑΛΑΙΟ” ΓΙΑ ΤΟ ΙΣΡΑΗΛ ΚΑΙ ΔΕΝ ΘΑ ΠΡΕΠΕΙ ΝΑ ΧΑΘΕΙ !!!

MK Tzipi Livni participates in a debate in Knesset June 25, 2018. (photo credit: MARC ISRAEL SELLEM/THE JERUSALEM POST)

In the annals of grandiose dismissals, it will go down as one of the grandest.

Not that Avi Gabbay’s political defenestration of Tzipi Livni is as meaningful as, say, Harry Truman’s firing of Douglas MacArthur in 1951, which shocked the US; or governor-general Sir John Robert Kerr’s disposal of prime minister Gough Whitlam in 1975, which shook Australia; or Yitzhak Shamir’s shedding in 1990 of Avraham Sharir, which made a laughingstock of the man who tried to defect from Right to Left.

Gabbay, unlike those national leaders, commands a sinking dinghy, and his victim, unlike theirs, is the mother of all has-beens. Still, the way the 60-year-old Livni was dumped is exceptional, like her 20-year political career which now approaches its unceremonious end.

Truman and Kerr fired with dignity, and Shamir, who did humiliate, fired passively, by omitting Sharir’s name while reading out the names of his new cabinet’s ministers in front of thousands, including his victim.

Gabbay, by contrast, like Al Capone in The Untouchables, swung a baseball bat at his victim’s skull in front of an unsuspecting audience that suddenly included a bleeding head.

Partnership demands friendship, loyalty and keeping agreements, the Zionist Union chairman told a visibly astonished Livni, before axing the Labor Party’s alliance with her.

Despite this cruelty toward her, there was little public sympathy for Livni, not even when she claimed to have received supporting emails “especially from women.”

The cumbersome attempt to change the subject failed. Livni didn’t previously distinguish herself as a feminist crusader, and what she faced was not about gender. It was about the substance of Israeli politics, with which she lost touch already last decade.

BORN TO Eitan and Sarah Livni, respectively the Irgun’s operations officer and one of the warriors he commanded, Tzipi was raised in the milieu of the “warring family,” as the veterans of the anti-Labor, pre-state underground organizations called themselves.

It was natural to proceed from that background to the Betar youth movement, where counselor Tzipi peached Vladimir Jabotinsky’s nationalism and applauded Menachem Begin’s Greater Israel crusades.

The ideological identity into which she was born was further bolstered in her mid-20s, when her father launched an 11-year tenure as a Likud lawmaker. Her brief service those years in the Mossad coincided smoothly with her patriotic upbringing.
Livni’s marriage to businessman Naftali Shpitzer might have cut this thread, since he was raised by Labor supporters. Instead, the husband veered from Left to Right following Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination, which he felt unleashed sinister attacks on the Right.

Several weeks earlier, while fasting during Yom Kippur, the couple discussed the Oslo Accords, which Livni, like most others in her original milieu, loathed. Reportedly, that’s when she decided to join politics.

Benefiting from her lineage, she found her way to first-time Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s circle and became his privatization czar.

Having previously failed to reach a high place on the Likud’s Knesset list, in 1999 she did, thus starting the parliamentary career that this week may have reached its end.

Where did she go wrong?

TZIPI LIVNI failed in three spheres: chemistry, physics and sociology.

Chemically, she was cold and unfeeling. This is how she lost Gabbay’s trust, and this is how she alienated a good man like Amram Mitzna, the retired general, mayor and Labor Party chairman, whom she recruited for Hatnua only to betray him when it was time to appoint him a minister.

This may also explain her fateful failure in 2008 to seal a coalition agreement with the ultra-Orthodox parties. With better people skills, she might have reached the 2009 election as prime minister.

Physically, Livni helped assemble and disassemble too many political formations while sailing from the Likud to Kadima, from Kadima to Hatnua, and from there to the Zionist Union, all within one decade.

Yet all this might have been overlooked had she been with it socially.

Curiously, but admirably, a decade after her husband’s journey from Left to Right, Livni journeyed from Right to Left. Having backed Ariel Sharon’s retreat from Gaza, she then helped him split the Likud and form Kadima. Then, as Ehud Olmert’s foreign minister, she went further left, backing his promise to leave the West Bank.

Just when and why exactly she made her ideological U-turn she never fully explained. Still, such ideological transformations have been common in Israeli politics, in both directions, from Moshe Dayan to Yuval Steinitz. Livni’s collapse was therefore not about that, but about her ultimate failure to listen to the public and offer a broad national vision.

As a prime-ministerial contender, Livni was required to display the kind of sensors with which true leaders detect the people’s pain and history’s demands. She couldn’t.

In love with foreign affairs, she kept preaching her land-for-peace conviction with a convert’s zeal, while failing to produce a domestic agenda.

In summer 2011, the well-born Livni was caught completely off guard by the social protest movement that demanded cheaper housing, tuition and food. Though she was the leader of the opposition, the protesters treated her as part of the problem.

Even then, Livni drew no conclusions and continued clinging to her single-issue agenda.

Similarly, after having recruited in 2013 die-hard socialist and former Histadrut leader Amir Peretz, Livni did not explain what ever happened to the Thatcherist capitalism she served as Netanyahu’s privatization czar.

Then, after Labor elected the humbly born Gabbay as its leader, Livni ignored and indeed obstructed his quest to move away from Labor’s Oslo legacy and to refocus it on social issues.

It was this narrow agenda and social aloofness that steadily pushed Livni to the political margins.

There is a lesson in this to the many candidates and parties now splitting, merging and sprouting as the approaching election’s jockeying intensifies: Preach less, listen more, and be humble – or someone humbly born will emerge from the woodwork and humble you.

www.MiddleIsrael.net

9.

THE IDF’S ANTI-TUNNEL OPERATION IS NOT ABOUT TUNNELS

IDF intelligence chief said deterrence, legitimacy were the keys to Operation Northern Shield.

BY YONAH JEREMY BOB

 

JANUARY 4, 2019

IDF SOLDIERS LIFT the cover off a hole into a cross-border tunnel dug from Lebanon into Israel, near Metulla, last month. (photo credit: RONEN ZVULUN/REUTERS)

Of course, the soldiers in Operation Northern Shield are investing nearly all of their time eliminating Hezbollah’s cross-border attack tunnels.

But this week we learned loud and clear from IDF intelligence chief Maj.-Gen. Tamir Heyman that the real primary goal of the month-old IDF operation is deterrence. Not only that, but we learned that the next main goal of the operation is setting the stage for any future conflict with Hezbollah.

Israel hopes to grab the moral high ground and, by unearthing Hezbollah’s duplicity in building cross-border attack tunnels, establish legitimacy for the massive destruction that the IDF may need to bring down on Lebanon in a potential future war.
Eliminating Hezbollah tunnels themselves does end aspects of the threat the powerful force could pose in a future conflict, but as Heyman said, Israel may not be capable of eliminating all of the attack tunnels at this time.

“I want to emphasize that we are not talking about an operation whose goal is to destroy the attack tunnel capability of Hezbollah, but rather… to thwart Hezbollah’s primary attack plan,” he said in Tel Aviv.

Heyman said that Hezbollah’s plan had been to invade villages on the northern border to take the fighting into Israel.
His message was that by severely blunting Hezbollah’s attack-tunnel abilities, even if some abilities remained, it would be heavily discouraged from even a limited invasion.

How many more cross-border attack tunnels does Hezbollah have, and what is the point of eliminating only some of the tunnels?

While defense sources have told The Jerusalem Post that Hezbollah’s attack tunnels were always single digits, which would mean at most only a few have not yet been uncovered, there is reason to be skeptical.

First of all, during the 2014 Gaza war, initial IDF estimates regarding how many attack tunnels Hamas had and how long it would take to clear them were gross underestimates.

A small number of tunnels, which the IDF initially said could be cleared in a matter of days, eventually ballooned to 31 attack tunnels, which took around 50 days to eliminate.

Daphné Richemond-Barak, author of the book Underground Warfare and a professor at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, told the Post: “There could definitely be more tunnels. It is very likely. The fact that we found five – five is a lot and very few.

“It’s a lot because it’s a significant security threat, but its very few because, given what we know about the threat and given Hezbollah’s, Hamas’s and Israel’s history underground,” the number seems low.

She also said that “going out on a major operation and making lots of media noise” – maybe “five tunnels justifies it, but the noise created expectations of an even graver threat… and even more tunnels.”

Richemond-Barak said she would feel safer with the tunnel situation if the IDF was crossing into Lebanon in a targeted fashion to get rid of tunnels also near the border, which possibly connect to cross-border tunnels or may be hooked up to them in the future.

Further, she suggested that “if we only have five, this suggests these tunnels may be… recent” and that the IDF may be missing locating older tunnels.

“If the IDF technology can only detect vibrations, anything that was already dug” before the IDF deployed the technology in the last six to 12 months “is sitting idle and would be much harder to detect.”

FORMER NATIONAL security adviser Maj.-Gen. (res.) Yaakov Amidror told the Post that in deciphering how many tunnels Hezbollah might have and what tactic it might try next, “we need to be very careful comparing Gaza to the North.”

Just because there were 31 attack tunnels in Gaza, and Hezbollah is more sophisticated than Hamas, that does not mean it has as many attack tunnels.

Amidror, who is now a fellow both of the Jerusalem Institute for Strategic Studies and of the Jewish Institute for National Security of America in Washington, said, “In Gaza, it is very easy to dig tunnels because the ground is made of sand.”

In contrast, he said, “in the North, because the ground” is solid rock, “it is very hard to dig. You need machines, you need to work hard and very slow. All of this impacts a lot what method you use to locate… and deal with them,” he added.

Moreover, he said that “the entire conceptual approach” for dealing with tunnels in the North is different than in the South. For example, unlike the South, in the North “there is no underground fence… it is impossible because of the ground, and all the methodology is different.”

What would be the point of eliminating just some of Hezbollah’s tunnels?

Amidror said, “The operation is very important because it proved to Hezbollah that, “first, we know a lot about what is happening in Lebanon. Second, we took away their card to play, which was a winning card because it gave them strategic surprise.”

Continuing, he said, “We have neutralized Hamas’s and Hezbollah’s ability to surprise us in battle with a system of tunnels, from which they wanted to bring their forces against our fighters all along the border.” Without the operation to eliminate Hezbollah tunnels, in any future conflict with Hezbollah, “We would have sent IDF troops into Lebanon, but we would then learn that Hezbollah had sent its soldiers to infiltrate Metulla.”

He said taking away even five tunnels from Hezbollah makes a big difference psychologically and operationally.
“Now, even if they achieve some surprise, it will not be a strategic surprise. No doubt Hezbollah will be more cautious because they lost a big advantage. This also contributes to making the area more stable, so its importance is strategic and not just tactical,” he said.

Besides deterring Hezbollah from even a limited risky invasion of villages in northern Israel, the operation was clearly also designed to boost Israeli legitimacy.

Tick Tock: World Has Twelve Years To Clean Itself Up–Or Else

A broad debate leading into any future conflict with Hezbollah would likely be who is acting in self-defense and who has been violating the other country’s sovereignty.

Already UNIFIL has been forced to acknowledge Hezbollah violated Israeli sovereignty with the tunnels, and the US and various European countries have also taken Israel’s side in the narrative.

All of this may be a boon in the battle for legitimacy, against a backdrop where Israel has been trying to make its case since 2006 that Hezbollah and Lebanon are violating UN resolutions.

Recently, the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center issued a detailed report about Hezbollah’s violations of UN Security Council 1701, both with regard to digging tunnels into Israeli territory and on other fronts.

The center said, “The construction of the tunnels is another example of the systematic… violations of UNSC 1701.” It added that the tunnels were a key “aspect of the Iran and Hezbollah strategy to move the fighting into Israeli territory in the next war.”

The same report said that UNSC 1701 has also failed because “the Lebanese government and army… were supposed to enforce the security arrangements and prevent (Iranian-backed) Hezbollah violations…. The Lebanese government pays lip service to Resolution 1701, but in reality does not enforce it, because it does not want to come into conflict with Hezbollah.”

Likewise, the center said, “The upgraded UNIFIL, which is supposed to support the Lebanese Army, avoids enforcing Resolution 1701. It shows more intensive activity than before the war and supports the Lebanese Army’s routine activities. However, UNIFIL employs a narrow interpretation of Resolution 1701 because” UNIFIL also fears Hezbollah.

For similar reasons, “The international community pays lip service to the need to implement Resolution 1701,” but “has come to terms with the ongoing violations,” said the center.

So uncovering the tunnels might help shift the broader debate over the full range of Israel-Lebanon self-defense and sovereignty issues.

But there is a more concrete, though future, legitimacy consideration.

Amidror stated, “The tunnels were important, but there was also another thing. War between us and Hezbollah basically means destroying Lebanon” in many areas, noting that if Israel needs to bomb tunnels on the Lebanese side that go under civilian houses – “all of those houses will be gone.

“How many Lebanese houses will be gone? There are tens of thousands of rockets in houses, and if we bomb them and we destroy those houses – full neighborhoods will disappear into thin air because of the explosive material inside the rockets,” he said.

With this possible scenario, Amidror said, it is important to build a legitimacy case against Hezbollah “as a criminal terror organization hiding behind and under [literally] civilians, exploiting its citizens as human shields.

“So when we get to the decisive day when” parts of “Lebanon are erased,” including possible unavoidable civilian casualties, “we hope then that the world will understand better.”

Richemond-Barak cautioned that beyond general legitimacy, on the legal plane, any Israeli advantage would be limited to this period when it is unearthing the tunnels.

In other words, if there is a conflict in six to 12 months, the prior finding of the attack tunnels “does not help… because of the immediacy element to self-defense.”

She said that “establishing facts about the tunnels might make the US or the UN more likely to believe Israel, but raising awareness at the legitimacy level does not change the law” limiting what actions Israel can take.

HOW IS Hezbollah likely to adapt to the IDF’s success in eliminating many of its tunnels? How might it try to avoid detection or adapt other tactics to try to gain an upper hand over Israel?

Amidror has told the Post before that Hamas cannot dig deeper tunnels in an effort to avoid Israeli detection, because of Gaza’s proximity to the sea.

However, he said that Hezbollah can go deeper, but that going through additional rock comes at a price. Amid reports that Hezbollah tunnels are around 25 meters deep, he said, “Let’s say they want to dig down to 100 meters. But they also need to go up again through the rock. There is no free lunch…. I cannot say it’s impossible, but it would be an extremely long operation and much more complex in terms of engineering.”

Richemond-Barak said that since Israeli detection technology might be looking for vibrations, Hezbollah might try to use a machine to make Israel” detect false positives and throw if off the scent of real tunnels.

She said that various parties to World War I employed such tactics against each other in underground warfare.

The future of underground warfare between the IDF and Hezbollah is uncharted and likely far from over. But Operation Northern Shield has fundamentally altered the balance in Israel’s favor.

10.

Shanahan Stresses National Defense Strategy in First Meetings as Acting Secretary

Jan. 3, 2019

By Jim Garamone

Defense.gov

WASHINGTON — Acting Defense Secretary Patrick M. Shanahan will use the National Defense Strategy as his blueprint moving forward, Pentagon officials said.

Shanahan took over for James N. Mattis on Jan. 1.

The acting secretary had served as the deputy defense secretary since July 2017. Before that, he was a senior executive at the Boeing Co. As deputy secretary, Shanahan was intimately involved with the development of the National Defense Strategy and the administration’s South Asia strategy.

Shanahan stressed the National Defense Strategy’s importance during his first meeting with department officials. The department’s transition from a counterinsurgency strategy to one based on near-peer competition will continue, he said. Shanahan told defense officials to emphasize “China, China, China.”

Russia and China are near-peer competitors to the United States not only militarily, but politically, diplomatically and economically. The Chinese, particularly, see themselves as taking America’s place and instituting their own rules-based architecture that would only benefit China.

Rebuilding U.S. Capabilities

The National Defense Strategy announced last year is aimed at rebuilding U.S. military capabilities that were decimated by years of sequestration spending cuts, constant deployments and equipment overuse. It also is designed to foster the capabilities needed to maintain American pre-eminence into the future.

Shanahan has said many times that he is laser-focused on operationalizing the defense strategy. Doing that, he has noted, requires the resources in place. He has called the fiscal year 2020 defense budget “the most significant” for the department. “It is about the resources you put in place and the taskings and activities that those resources direct,” he said during a presentation to the Military Reporters and Editors organization in October.

With that in mind, Shanahan said, the department’s chief financial officer, David Norquist, will perform the duties of deputy defense secretary. The 2020 budget request is being finalized and will be presented to Congress at the beginning of February.

“As department of defense chief financial officer and comptroller for the past 19 months, David Norquist has had insight into virtually every tenet of this department,” Shanahan said in a statement announcing the decision. “I have the greatest confidence in his abilities to lead a phenomenally talented team while performing the duties as deputy secretary of defense.”

The three lines of effort in the National Defense Strategy will remain unchanged, Shanahan said: improving lethality, maintaining and building strong alliances, and reforming DOD business practices.

The acting secretary has been involved in the three lines. He worked on the Nuclear Posture Review. He is the point man for the department’s Space Working Group, and the legislative proposal to establish a separate Space Force will be unveiled with the 2020 defense budget submission.

“The strategy in its most distilled form is about doing more,” Shanahan said last year just after the strategy was unveiled. “It’s about being more lethal, it’s about having more relationships, and it’s about being more affordable. When I’m sitting in the room with the staffs … thinking about strategy, I’m really thinking about the person most downrange. It’s all about how do we make them more lethal? How do we make their efforts easier? How do we make them smarter, faster, stronger, better?”

11. ΡΕ ΤΣΙΠΡΑ ΔΕΝ ΑΦΗΝΕΙΣ ΤΗΝ “NOVARTİS”… ΗΣΥΧΗ, ΔΕΝ ΑΦΗΝΕΙΣ ΤΟΝ “ΠΟΛΕΜΟ ΚΑΤΑ ΤΗΣ ΔΙΑΦΘΟΡΑΣ”, Αχαχαχαχαχαχαχαχαχα,  ΓΙΑ ΤΟ ΜΕΛΛΟΝ ΚΑΙ ΑΝΤ’ ΑΥΤΟΥ ΝΑ ΣΤΕΙΛΕΙΣ ΤΙΠΟΤΑ ΓΙΑΤΡΟΥΣ ΣΤΟ ΙΣΡΑΗΛ, (ΣΤΟ ΠΛΑΙΣΙΟ ΕΝΟΣ “ΕΘΝΙΚΟΥ μας ΠΡΟΓΡΑΜΜΑΤΟΣ”, λέω τώρα εγώ, και στο πλαίσιο μιας Ιατρικής Ε-Ι συνεργασίας), ΜΠΑΣ ΚΑΙ ΣΩΘΕΙ ΚΑΙ ΣΤΗΝ ΧΩΡΑ ΜΑΣ ΚΑΝΕΝΑΣ ΚΑΡΚΙΝΟΠΑΘΗΣ; 

Alpha Tau is working toward commercializing its alpha radiation therapy technology to treat malignant tumors. (Courtesy)

Israeli Medical Breakthrough Eliminates 70% of Cancerous Tumors

Jan 3, 2019

Now going into clinical trials, an Israeli breakthrough technology has the potential to destroy solid cancerous tumors.

By Brian Blum, ISRAEL21c

A breakthrough Israeli technology that eliminates cancerous tumors in 70 percent of patients was nearly lost in bureaucracy and university politics.

Fifteen years ago, Professors Yona Keisari and Itzhak Kelson of Tel Aviv University discovered a way to use alpha radiation to zap tumors. Their approach was revolutionary – alpha radiation is so powerful it can snap both strands of a cancer cell’s DNA, but it won’t harm surrounding healthy tissue as other types of radiation do.

However, alpha radiation can’t travel more than about 50 microns (1/20 of a millimeter) inside human tissue. Treating a tumor of, say, 5cm would require hundreds of thousands of alpha particles – a seeming impossibility.

Keisari and Kelson discovered that, when delivered via a particular isotope of the element radium, alpha radiation can travel as far as 3mm. The isotope, Radium 224, releases atoms that diffuse inside a tumor and then emit their own alpha particles. This approach requires far fewer alpha particles to kill a tumor.

The professors and Tel Aviv University patented the technology in 2003. More research was conducted and 12 peer-reviewed papers were published. But squabbling between the various stakeholders over the intellectual property kept their breakthrough in limbo until 2015 when Uzi Sofer was recruited to sort things out.

Sofer had an impressive track record in medical technology. He previously cofounded and served as CEO of Brainsway, which develops treatments using transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) for depression, PTSD, OCD and other brain disorders and addictions. The company grew under his leadership from two to 70 employees.

Realizing what the professors had, Sofer formed a new company – Alpha Tau (the “Tau” stands for Tel Aviv University) – to further develop the technology. Earlier this year Alpha Tau raised $29 million from Shavit Capital, Medison Ventures and OurCrowd.

Stimulates Immune System

Alpha Tau is the only company to use alpha radiation to zap tumors. All other types of brachytherapy (where a sealed radiation source is placed inside or next to the area requiring treatment) use beta or gamma radiation.

“But that only causes a single-strand break in the DNA, from which the cell can recover,” Sofer explains. “And it’s not as focused. As a result, it causes a lot of side effects and destroys healthy tissue.”

When the healthy tissue around the tumor is not destroyed along with the cancer, the immune system is stimulated to recognize and attack the same type of tumors elsewhere in the body. These kinds of metastases are the cause of death for 85% of cancer patients.

“We believe that DaRT technology has tremendous clinical value not only in destroying the tumor but preventing cancer from spreading to other organs,” Sofer says.

Clinical Trials

Thousands of animal studies have been done on the company’s Alpha DaRT (“Diffusing Alpha-Emitters Radiation Therapy”) technology.

The first human trials of Alpha DaRT have been taking place in Israel and Italy for squamous cell carcinoma (SCC) tumors, a form of skin and oral cancer; and in Israel, Italy, New York and Montreal for congenital melanocytic nevus (CMN).

Clinical trials of DaRT planned for 2019 will take place in France (CMN), Montreal and New York (pancreatic and prostate cancer), Russia (breast cancer) and Israel (prostate cancer). Additional trials will later be initiated for more than 20 other indications – such as vulvar, cervical, renal and colon cancer – at medical centers in more than 25 countries.

“We can treat any kind of solid tumor,” Sofer tells ISRAEL21c, “including cancers where there is no other chance and this is a patient’s last chance to live.”

Pancreatic cancer, for example, today has no cure; patients usually die within five years of diagnosis. Alpha Tau’s DaRT “seeds” may be able to flip that prognosis.

“In our SCC studies, we were able to eliminate more than 70 percent of the tumors entirely and to cause shrinkage of 100 percent of the tumors,” Sofer says. “Encouraged by these promising results, we hope to eliminate pancreatic tumors as well or to shrink them so that it will be possible to remove them surgically.”

Personalized Treatment Kits

Despite the power of alpha radiation, it’s actually safer than conventional beta or gamma treatments.

“You don’t need so much radioactivity to get the same effect,” Sofer explains. “We can ship our treatment kit to hospitals almost in regular boxes. Patients can be treated in an outpatient setting with no radioactive shielding.”

After less than a week, 50% of the alpha radiation will already be gone from the body. In two weeks, there will be no radioactivity left at all.

However, once a DaRT kit is assembled (for example, a patient with breast cancer might need 12 needle applicators with 6 DaRT seeds in each) it must be sent to the treatment facility fast.

“If for some reason a patient doesn’t come on time, the next day you’ll need to put the whole kit in the trash,” Sofer says.

Because of DaRT’s fast decay, Alpha Tau will need to build production facilities close to the main treatment centers. The first one is already working in Israel. The company has received approval to build a facility in Massachusetts. The third will be in Japan with a fourth in Europe, Sofer says.

Under Sofer’s leadership, Alpha Tau now has 26 on staff in Israel, including the professors who invented the core technology. Following clinical testing, Sofer hopes Alpha DaRT will receive its European Union approval in 2020 with the US and Japan coming in 2022.

“We are already saving lives in the trials,” he says. “It’s amazing to see patients who have been told their life expectancy is in weeks get treatment under local anesthesia and, 60 days out, they’re clear, they have no evidence of any tumors. I’ve been in this business for a while, but this is the best.”

12.

“ΚΑΤΩ ΒΡΕ ΤΑ ΧΕΡΙΑ” ΑΠΟ ΤΟ ΝΕΟ ΚΑΙ ΔΥΝΑΤΟ “ΑΙΜΑ” ΤΗΣ Ι/ΠΟΛΙΤΙΚΗΣ!

01-03-19

Supreme Court chief slams Shaked for ‘politicizing’ court

INN -Supreme Court chief justice Esther Hayut launched an attack on Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked for her efforts to pack the nation’s highest court with conservative-leaning judges.

Speaking at a conference in Haifa, Hayut said that attempts to install judges on the bench due to their political orientation are “diverting the ‘ship’ of the court”.

“Attempts to drag the court system and its judges into politics, as well as attempts by various parties to ‘appropriate’ judges for themselves and others, undermine these basic principles of independence that are the lifeblood of the judiciary,” ?said Hayut, adding that such efforts to sway the court had existed before.

“I believe that just as they did not succeed then they were doomed to failure today as well,” said the judge.

In what many see as a reference to Shaked, Hayut said that “just as [newly] appointed judges have the power to sever the umbilical cord between them and those who supported their candidacy, the same supporters should be expected to sever the same rope at their end and allow the judicial system and Israel’s judges to do their job professionally”.

According to Hayut, the stability of the judicial system comes from its legal opinions and hit back at charges that accuse the High Court of judicial overreach. “In contrast to what they are trying to embed in the public’s consciousness, the variety of opinions in the court system in general and in the Supreme Court, in particular, were not born today,” contended Hayut.

“It is characteristic of our system from time immemorial, and tens of thousands of judgments handed down over the years attest to this.”

Since becoming Justice Minister in 2015, Shaked has put a priority on packing Israel’s High Court with justices who believe in judicial restraint. As of July 2018, 147 new judges have been appointed during Shaked’s term while another 115 judges have been promoted and six of the 15 Supreme Court justices have been replaced, a third of all judges in Israel.

Shaked’s efforts to turn back what right-wing Israelis say is the High Court’s judicial overreach has led to criticism from Hayut, who has accused her in the past of seeking to destroy the judiciary. In December 2017, Hayut decried the way “in which some of the elected officials, ministers and members of the Knesset, express their contempt for the judiciary,” which she said “are far from respectful and very embarrassing.”

13.

NETANYAHU: U.S. ACTING AGAINST IRAN ECONOMICALLY, ISRAEL MILITARILY

“This is happening in Syria against Iran’s efforts to militarily entrench itself here” he said. “This is also happening on the border with Lebanon.”

BY HERB KEINON

JANUARY 3, 2019 

 

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attends a news conference in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil December 30, 2018. (photo credit: TANIA REGO/COURTESY OF AGENCIA BRASIL/HANDOUT VIA REUTERS)

A day after US President Donald Trump said that “Iran can do what they want” in Syria, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made clear that this is not exactly the case, and that Israel continues to take action against Iran’s effort to entrench themselves there.

During an address to cadets of the IDF’s officers course at a Bar-Ilan University symposium in honor of  IDF commando Emmanuel Moreno who was killed during the Second Lebanon War, Netanyahu said that Israel acts with determination against all those trying to endanger it.

“This is happening in Syria against Iran’s efforts to militarily entrench itself here,” he said. “This is also happening on the border with Lebanon.”

Trump, at the end of a cabinet meeting on Wednesday, had said that Iran is “pulling people out of Syria, but they can do what they want there, frankly.” He said that Iran has suffered under the renewed sanctions imposed since he pulled out of the Iranian nuclear deal in May.

 

“The biggest threat from Iran is the threat of nuclear weapons in the hands of a power that declares that we have to be wiped off the map,” Netanyahu said. “I insisted on a renewal of sanctions against Iran, and President Trump took the courageous decision to renew them.”

Trump, Netanyahu said, is acting against on Iran on the economic front, “and we, here in Israel, are acting against Iran on the military level.”

14.

Britain Warns Russia Against ‘Chess Games’ Over Alleged Spy

January 04, 2019

Britain has warned Russia against playing “diplomatic chess games” following the arrest on spying charges by Moscow of Paul Whelan, a former U.S. Marine who also holds British and Irish citizenship.

“We don’t agree with individuals being used in diplomatic chess games…. We are all extremely worried about him and his family,” British Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt told the BBC on January 4.

Russia’s Federal Security Service said on December 31 that it had detained Whelan while he was allegedly carrying out an act of espionage in Moscow.

At the time, he was identified only as an American.

His arrest comes with relations between Moscow and the West strained over a range of issues, including Russia’s role in wars in Syria and eastern Ukraine, its alleged meddling in elections in the United States and elsewhere, and the poisoning of a double agent in Britain.

“We are extremely worried about Paul Whelan. We have offered consular assistance,” Hunt said. “The U.S. are leading on this because he is a British and American citizen.”

Maria Zakharova, a spokeswoman at the Russian Foreign Ministry, confirmed that British officials have applied for consular access to Whelan.

Ireland’s Department of Foreign Affairs on January 4 confirmed that Whelan also holds Irish citizenship and said it was also requesting consular access to him in Moscow.

Interfax said Russian authorities had brought formal charges against Whelan on January 3.

Whelan’s lawyer, Vladimir Zherebenkov, did not comment on the charges but said that under the terms of his arrest, Whelan was expected to remain in pretrial custody in Moscow until at least February 28.

Zherebenkov said on January 3 that he had appealed the two-month pretrial custody order, asking for Whelan to be released on bail instead.

The U.S. State Department said U.S. Ambassador to Russia Jon Huntsman visited Whelan at a detention facility in Moscow on January 2 and spoke by phone with his family.

Whelan’s family has denied he is a spy and said he was in Moscow to attend a wedding.

The family said Whelan was last heard from on December 28.

Whelan is a former U.S. Marine who lives in the state of Michigan and is director of global security at BorgWarner, a U.S.-based supplier of automotive parts and components.

The detention of Whelan comes weeks after Russian Maria Butina pleaded guilty in a U.S. court to acting as an agent for the Kremlin.

The Kremlin has denied that Butina is a Russian agent and has organized a social-media campaign to secure her release.

In the past, Russia has sometimes arrested foreigners with the aim of trading prisoners with other countries.

With reporting by AFP, Reuters, TASS, and AP

Source: https://www.rferl.org/a/u-k-warns- russia-over-playing-diplomatic-chess-games-over- whelan-arrest/29691438.html

Copyright (c) 2019. RFE/RL, Inc. Reprinted with the permission of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 1201 Connecticut Ave., N.W. Washington DC 20036.
15.

Berlin Asks Top US Spy Agency to Help Investigate Mass Governmental Hack

Sputnik News

 04.01.2019

While Germany seeks assistance from the other side of the Atlantic, the hack is being investigated by a number of domestic agencies, including the Federal Office for Information Security, the Federal Criminal Police Office and the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution.

German security agencies have turned to the US National Security Agency (NSA) for help following a massive hack attack which resulted in the personal data of over 100 politicians being stolen and leaked online, the Bild newspaper reported on Friday.

According to the newspaper, the data theft is currently being investigated by the Federal Office for Information Security, the Federal Criminal Police Office and the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution.

Also, the German Interior Ministry is looking into whether any foreign special services played a role in the cyberattack.

Earlier in the day, German media reported that the personal data of over 100 politicians, including their home addresses, phone numbers, banking details and other information, were stolen and published online.

The hack compromised the personal data of politicians on various levels, including regional parliaments, the federal parliament, and the European Parliament, with hackers leaking banking details, ID scans and private messages of some of the victims.

© Sputnik

16.

China showcases own version of ‘Mother of All Bombs’

Global Times

By Liu Xuanzun Source:Global Times Published: 2019/1/3 

China’s arms industry giant NORINCO for the first time showcased a new type of massive aerial bomb, which it dubbed the Chinese version of the “Mother of All Bombs” due to its huge destruction potential that is claimed to be only second to nuclear weapons.

The bomb was airdropped by an H-6K bomber and caused a gigantic explosion, a promotional video China North Industries Group Corporation Limited (NORINCO) released on its website in December shows.

This is the first time the new bomb’s destructive powers have been shown in public, the Xinhua News Agency reported on Wednesday on its mobile application.

Calling the several-ton-weapon a Chinese version of the “Mother of All Bombs,” the report said that it is China’s most powerful non-nuclear bomb, and that the H-6K bomber could only carry one at a time due to its size.

Judging from the video and the size of the H-6K’s bomb bay, this bomb is approximately five to six meters long, Wei Dongxu, a Beijing-based military analyst, told the Global Times on Thursday.

“The massive blast can easily and completely wipe out fortified ground targets such as reinforced buildings, bastions and defense shelters,” Wei said.

It can also be used to clear a landing zone for troops on helicopters to rappel down, in case the area is covered by obstacles such as forests, Wei noted.

The weapon will also spread fear among enemies if a weapon of this caliber is deployed, military observers noted.

The US wields a similar weapon, the Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB,) which was first to dubbed the “Mother of All Bombs” because of its acronym and power.

A MOAB was dropped on an Islamic State cave complex in Afghanistan in 2017, the New York Times reported.

The bombing was very successful, but no casualty totals were given.

Wei said that the Chinese bomb is smaller and lighter than the US one, enabling it to be deployed on the H-6K bomber.

The US bomb is so large that it has to be carried by a larger transport aircraft rather than a bomber, Wei said, noting that a bomber can fly faster and is better at targeting than a transport aircraft, and the Chinese bomb’s designer must have had this in mind when it produced the bomb to fit the H-6K.

To match the US weapon, Russia developed the “Father of All Bombs” which is both bigger and thermobaric, meaning it uses gas to create a huge fireball rather than a shockwave, Wired reported.

Some military observers speculated that the Chinese bomb is also thermobaric.

However, a NORINCO representative told the Global Times that the bomb shown in the video is not a thermobaric weapon, but did not provide additional details.

17.

Free eBook: “Risk-Centric Cybersecurity Management“

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