20,000 people heard MK's from several parties (not just the Likud - contrary to the JPost headline) urge Prime Minister Netanyahu to stand firm against "President Hussein Obama" at a rally in Hebron on Thursday. “The prime minister must say ‘no!’ to Barack Hussein Obama and ‘yes!’ to the nation of Israel,” Deputy Negev and Galilee Development Minister Ayoub Kara (Likud) told thousands of visitors who gathered in Hebron on Thursday.
A number of speakers addressed the holiday crowd, as part of a ceremony held by the Jewish community of Hebron to thank the government for adding the Cave of the Patriarchs to the national heritage list. At the ceremony, MKs who had pressured the ministers to vote for February’s cabinet decision were given certificates of thanks.
Palestinians and the international community protested the cabinet decision because they want the cave, which they call the Ibrahimi Mosque, and the entire West Bank city, as part of a Palestinian state.
Hebron’s Jewish community, settler leaders and MKs used the platform provided by the annual Pessah pilgrimage to the site to send a message to US President Obama and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu that the Jewish people did not intend to abandon Jerusalem or Judea and Samaria.
“The masses that came here today is the guarantee and the proof that no one will move us from this cave, not even Hussein Obama,” Kara said.
He and the other lawmakers who spoke urged Netanyahu not to cave in to American pressure to stop Jewish construction in the West Bank and east Jerusalem.
“We have to authorize renewed building everywhere in the land,” said Kara, who is Druse.
“We, the descendents of Jethro, preserved the land for the nation of Israel when it was in the Diaspora. We will continue to watch over it together with them, today as well,” he said.
Can you imagine what the World's reaction would be if an Israeli leader reacted like this to terrorism? “We’ve twisted off the heads of the most odious thugs, but clearly that’s not enough,” Medvedev said during a security meeting in the regional capital Makhachkala. “We’ll find them all in a timely manner and we’ll punish them all,” he said in comments broadcast on state television. “That’s the only way.”
...
Medvedev today issued a five-point plan for combating terrorism, starting with bolstering law enforcement agencies and delivering “sharp dagger blows” to terrorists. The government must help people who break ranks with the terrorists, develop the economy in the North Caucasus and promote morality and spiritual growth among its people, he said.
Medvedev said Russia must expand its arsenal of measures for fighting terrorism. “They must be not only more effective, but tougher, more brutal, if you like, with the goal of preventing terrorist attacks,” he said. “People must be punished for that.”
Great airport security. More here. 
... or a deliberate?
The Obama administration is spending its time on the 'Palestinian question' because they believe there's a 'fierce moral urgency' to settling it. There's just one catch. The Arabs themselves don't believe that. In fact, writes Michael Totten, other than Syria and Iran and Libya, which wish to stir up trouble for their own reasons, most of the Arba countries would just as soon see the Israeli - 'Palestinian' conflict put on ice. So what we have here, for the most part, is an Arab Middle East that wants to put the Israeli conflict on ice and resist the resistance instead — which is more or less what the Israelis want to see happen. It’s an unusual alignment of interests, but it is authentic. Iran’s Khomeinist regime has been gunning for Arabs in the Middle East since it came to power — and not just in Lebanon and Iraq but also in the Gulf and North Africa.
Egypt and Saudi Arabia are unreliable allies (and that’s being generous), but their interests really do overlap with our own and even with Israel’s once in a while. Assad, at the same time, can’t always be bothered even to pretend he shares interests with the U.S. and Israel. His government has been sanctioned and stigmatized for a reason, and it’s not because he’s misguided or misunderstood.
President Barack Obama clearly wants to tilt U.S. foreign policy more toward the Arabs, but he doesn’t have to do it at the expense of our alliance with Israel. Just start with what Washington, Jerusalem, and most of the Arab states have in common and build outward from there. The present alignment may only come round once in a century, so we best not blow it.
Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad has had an awesome week. On Sunday, at the Arab League summit, he called for the 'Palestinians' to ditch negotiations with Israel. On Wednesday, old enemy Walid Jumblatt of Lebanon coming to kiss and make up. And on Thursday, US Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John F.N. Kerry came for a shmooze and a disgusting display of hero worship with the terror supporter. Here's Jumblatt. Improved ties between Walid Jumblatt and Damascus could boost Syria's role in Lebanese politics five years after its troops were forced out of Lebanon. The Syrians withdrew in April 2005, ending nearly three decades of domination of their smaller neighbor.
In 2007, Jumblatt told a crowd of tens of thousands of supporters that Assad was a "snake" and a "tyrant" and called for revenge against him.
About three weeks ago, he called those remarks "improper."
The leader of Lebanon's terror Hizbullah group Hassan Nasrallah mediated between the Syrians and Jumblatt for several months.
Assad on Sunday called on Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to ditch negotiations with Israel in favor of “armed resistance.”
Kerry, nonetheless, said in Damascus following a three-hour meeting with Assad that Syria was committed to engaging in peace-making and was essential to the Mideast process.
Syria is an essential player in bringing peace and stability to the region,” said Kerry, who has long advocated US engagement with Damascus.
“He believes in engagement with Syria, and that through engagement the Syrians can be convinced to play a more helpful role in the Arab-Israeli process,” a Kerry aide noted. “This is part of his ongoing [efforts].”
In Israel last month, Kerry discussed Syria’s relationship with Iran, saying that “no one should be surprised, given the relationship of the last years, that discussions are continuing between Syria and Iran.”
The two countries are neighbors, he said, “and they have obviously been pushed somewhat together by the events of the last years. My hope is that we can offer a better alternative, a better set of choices.”
In a sign that President Obama may be about to throw Fatah and the 'Palestinian Authority' under the bus, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that 'ex-officials' of the United States who are close with the Obama administration are meeting with Hamas with Obama's approval. The Journal goes on to name names: In a meeting last summer in Zurich, Thomas Pickering, a former undersecretary of state and U.S. ambassador to Israel and Jordan, and Rob Malley, a top Mideast adviser to President Bill Clinton, met with Hamas's foreign minister, Mahmud Zahar, and Mr. Hamdan, the movement's top official in Lebanon. Recently retired European officials also were present. The meeting, detailed in minutes reviewed by The Wall Street Journal, was confirmed by Messrs. Pickering and Malley.
The meeting focused largely on practical issues, such as scenarios for how Hamas could meet the three Quartet conditions, according to the minutes—which participants said accurately reflected the meeting. Participants also focused on how to establish a mechanism to ease the Israeli siege of the Gaza Strip, an Obama priority.
"It was an effort to clarify what Washington's policy is and understand what Hamas's views are," Mr. Malley said.
Mr. Malley is currently director of the Mideast and North Africa program at the International Crisis Group, a Brussels-based think tank. Mr. Pickering is co-chairman of the group's board, a post previously held by George Mitchell, the Obama administration's envoy to the Mideast peace talks.
...
In a separate move that raised eyebrows in the region, U.S. diplomat Rachel Schneller met Hamas's Mr. Hamdan in Doha last month for a debate sponsored by the Doha-based al Jazeera television channel. Ms. Schneller is on sabbatical from the State Department at the Council on Foreign Relations, a New York-based think tank.
Ms. Schneller said she alerted the State Department to the invitation, and Washington approved it. "They gave me permission to go, which I found interesting," she said. After the debate, she met one-on-one with Mr. Hamdan over tea, Ms. Schneller said.
"He was really genuinely interested in how to make a breakthrough in negotiations and how to engage constructively with the United States," she said.
With another Kassam rocket falling on the south on Friday morning, and with Hamas insisting that its troops, and not Islamic Jihad's, were responsible for the deaths of two IDF soldiers last Friday, analysts believe that we may soon see a resumption of hostilities by Hamas for the first time since Operation Cast Lead ended in January 2009. The current situation is complex and shifting. Increased Israeli-Palestinian tensions in the West Bank have produced increased rocket firing from Gaza as Palestinian factions there show support for those in the West Bank. Palestinian political competition both inside and outside Gaza could push Hamas, however reluctantly, to a more adventurous policy regarding attacks on Israel -- if not directly via Hamas strikes, then by giving other organizations a freer hand. Hamas may or may not have already relaxed suppression on such groups due to various pressures. Whatever the case, when rockets are fired into Israel, the IDF often responds by hitting Hamas targets, and when Palestinian operatives approach the border fence, the IDF responds aggressively.
Israel is attempting to reinforce the level of deterrence it established with Cast Lead via airstrikes and warnings, but there is a sense that this is not enough -- that deterrence is eroding under current conditions. Israeli civilians in the south are also increasingly uneasy about the spike in rocket attacks and border incidents, adding to the pressure on the government and military to respond strongly. Senior Israeli officials have mostly been cautious about the situation, although Likud minister Yuval Steinitz stated on March 28 that Israel might have to reoccupy Gaza to destroy the Hamas regime. In addition, some Southern Command officers have taken a tougher public line than IDF chief of staff Gabi Ashkenazi, who has been very cautious.
Since Operation Cast Lead in the Gaza Strip last winter, Hamas has mostly refrained from attacks. It has altogether stopped its rocket attacks – although other terrorist factions have fired intermittently. It has, however, reserved for itself the right to attack along the Gaza border.
The pressure on Hamas is believed to be coming from three main sources: the Palestinian street, radical Palestinian terrorist groups that are affiliated with al-Qaida and which continue to attack Israel, and finally, mid-level Hamas military commanders who are frustrated with the organization’s decision to hold its fire.
While Hamas has yet to completely resume its attacks, it is continuing to rebuild its military infrastructure in the Gaza Strip and to smuggle in advanced weaponry.
An example was revealed on Thursday when Egyptian security forces announced that they had discovered a massive arms cache in the central Sinai Peninsula that was probably on its way to Hamas in Gaza. The cache, according to Egyptian media reports, included 100 anti-aircraft missiles, likely to be shoulder-launched, as well as 40 rocket-propelled grenades and 40 other explosive devices.
Hamas was believed to already have shoulder-to-air missiles before Cast Lead, but they were not used, leading Israeli intelligence analysts to conclude that while it had obtained the missiles, Hamas did not have a chance to train its fighters to use them before the IDF offensive. The same applied to anti-tank missiles.
Israel now believes that Hamas has trained its men to use the advanced weaponry, mostly by sending them to Iran and Lebanon.
News of the cache discovery comes after Egypt recently began a nationwide crackdown on Hamas’s smuggling industry and expanded its efforts to its southern border with Sudan, where trucks make their way from port cities along Africa’s Red Sea coast to the Philadelphi Corridor between Sinai and Gaza.
One of the main routes used by Iran to smuggle weapons to Hamas in the Strip starts at sea, with ships that dock in ports in Eritrea and Sudan. The cargo is transferred to trucks that travel through the Sudanese desert, up thorough Egypt and the Sinai Peninsula until they unload their cargo along the Philadelphi Corridor, a 14-kilometer strip along the Gaza border which is home to hundreds of smuggling tunnels used by Hamas to bring weaponry and explosives to the Strip.
The head of the Arab League urged the 22-nation bloc on Saturday to engage Iran directly over concerns about its growing influence in the region and its disputed nuclear program... The push to engage Tehran seems to be at least partly fueled by Arab frustration over Washington's failure to get Israel to back down on plans for more Jewish settlements on land the Palestinians want for a future state. It also suggests that Arab nations are increasingly less likely to align with the U.S. strategy on Iran if they feel they are getting nothing in return in Mideast peace efforts.
From Reuters:
OK, let's see how things are different:
So the existence of Jews in a city that they had lived in for centuries is a major problem for people who celebrate Easter? What else?
And who, exactly, is stopping them from making this trip? It certainly isn't Israel, which would welcome them. Yet the tone of the article, especially the previous paragraph non-sequitor, implies that it is Israel.
Reuters has not as of yet mentioned any restrictions. And, in fact, thousands of Christians do fly in from other countries - Christians who would have had much more difficulty in visiting Jerusalem before Israeli rule.
Ah, so Israeli restrictions are supposedly keeping the Palestinian Christians out. Of course, Israeli restrictions apply to Jews and Muslims as well as to where they could safely go in Jerusalem, and security is a real issue, as there were riots in Jerusalem a mere couple of weeks ago. But Reuters can't be bothered to believe that Israel is justified in what is clearly an injustice, even one that Reuters cannot quite define.
Israel has given out over 10,000 permits for Palestinian Christians to come to Jerusalem. The implication is that this is a huge reduction from the number that came in the 1940s. We'll see if that is true.
But how many?
If tens of thousands of Palestinian Christians descended on Jerusalem in the good old days, it should have been mentioned in the newspapers.  So in the good old days, some 5000 pilgrims from all nations managed to get to Jerusalem for the festivities - half of the number of permits that Israel gives to Palestinian Christians alone this year!Palestine Post archives from the 1930s and 1940s mirror the same facts - a few thousand pilgrims would come every year.  Some years the turnout would be worse than usual for various reasons - construction, or war, or riots.In 1938, for example, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was closed due to to public safety concerns over the danger of parts of ot collapsing. That year they had expected 4000 Copts and 700 Orthodox pilgrims. (Before the British took control of Palestine, the annual Easter services would often turn violent as the competing Christian sects would fight over who has ownership and precedence of various holy sites.) In other words, contrary to what Reuters writes, the number of pilgrims attending Holy Week services has increased significantly under Israeli rule. And even the number of Palestinian Christians allowed to participate is higher than the number that attended when Jerusalem was under British or Jordanian rule. All of this is happening at the same time that the number of Christians in the Palestinian Arab territories has been reduced significantly in recent years because of Islamic persecution. This little fact was also omitted by Reuters. Reuters has put together a hugely inflammatory and biased report that uncritically parrots the complaints of Palestinian Arabs without even bothering to check the most basic facts. |
PA prime minister Salam Fayyad was interviewed in Ha'aretz where he went into some detail about his plan to unilaterally declare a Palestinian Arab state next year.
He is ignoring Hamas completely, implying that a declared state will magically make Hamas disappear and melt into the PA. The only problem is that there is no basis to believe that in reality. His declared "state" would include a territory that is ruled by terrorists, and he would demand that the world recognize it as if it was under PA control.
Too bad he cannot give a single example. |
تنسيق-الكليات-لعام سكس نيك كس
Fox News and the Sun have reported that Female suicide bombers are being equipped with explosive breast implants.
It started with Richard Reid aka the Shoe bomber. Then we had Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab aka the crotch bomber. Now, Boob bombers!
This new al Qaeda tactic involves implanting the explosives in women's breasts during plastic surgery — making them "virtually impossible to detect by the usual airport scanning machines".
The explosive devices are made of pentaerythritol tetranitrate—also known as PETN—one of the most powerful explosives in existence. The surgeons performing the operations place the PETN devices inside bags, just like the ones used to hold the silicone gel inside breast implants. PETN has an explosive energy of 5.810 kilojoules per gram, which means that an explosive cup C—with just a few grams of PETN inside—would be able to open a large hole in an airplane's fuselage, effectively causing a crash.
It is believed the doctors have been trained at some of Britain's leading teaching hospitals before returning to their own countries to perform the surgical procedures.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah faction on Wednesday called for escalating the “popular struggle” against the security barrier and the settlements in the West Bank. … Veteran members of the Fatah Central Committee, including Nabil Shaath, Mahmoud al-Aloul, Muhammad Dahlan, Hussein al-Sheikh and Jibril Rajoub, said that the decision to escalate popular protests against the security fence and settlements was part of the faction’s political platform
They said the Sixth General Assembly of Fatah, which met last year in Bethlehem for the first time in over 20 years, had endorsed “popular resistance” as a means of confronting Israel’s measures in the West Bank and east Jerusalem.
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