'Palestinian' chief "Mitchell told Abbas that contrary to what has been said in the mass media there is no agreement with the Israeli side on anything," Erekat told reporters.
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The revenants have just about completed constructing 11 new 'outposts' in Judea and Samaria - just in time for Prime Minister Netanyahu's meeting with US Special Middle East envoy George Mitchell. Israel Matzav: Revenants construct 11 new outpostsActivists on Sunday announced that they wished to "put an end to the White Papers," and called for assistance in constructing the 11 outposts, an allusion to the 11 settlements established in the Negev during the British Mandate.
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The 'Palestinian Authority,' which perpetually has no money except what it receives from 'international aid' (i.e. your tax dollars and my tax shekels) has decided to spend $2 million on a museum to memorialize terrorist leader Yasser Arafat in Ramallah (the picture is of Arafat's mausoleum, which was constructed in 2007 at a cost of $1.5 million). 
Eight US members of Congress were in Gaza Monday for a 'low profile' visit. It's 'low profile' enough that I have not been able to find their identities online. They crossed into Gaza through the Erez crossing point in Israel. Israel Matzav: 8 US Representatives in Gaza Monday for 'low profile' visitAfter crossing from Israel into Gaza, the eight legislators headed for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA)'s headquarters in the city and started a meeting with John Ging, the UNRWA operations director, the sources said.
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After months of anticipation that President Obumbler would Israel Matzav: Obama won't present 'peace plan'?Ever since Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu met with Obama in Washington in May, there have been persistent reports that Obama would give a speech in which he would outline his vision of a peace agreement, much in the way that president Bill Clinton did in 2001, just before leaving office.
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Seven men - who just happen to be Muslims - have been arrested in North Carolina and charged with planning terror attacks, including in Israel. Israel Matzav: 7 Muslims arrested in North Carolina planned terror attacks in IsraelThe indictment said Boyd, a US citizen, trained in Afghanistan and fought there between 1989 and 1992 before returning to the United States. Court documents charged that Boyd, also known as 'Saifullah,' encouraged others to engage in jihad.
Boyd's faith was so brash that, this year, he stopped attending worship services in the Raleigh area and instead began meeting for Friday prayers in his homeRead All at :
| Date: | Friday, July 31, 2009 |
| Time: | 12:00am - 1:00pm |
| Location: | Consulate General of the United States of America |
| Street: | 360 University Avenue |
| City/Town: | Toronto, ON |
taken from B'NAI ELIM (Sons of the Mighty)
I spoke to two senior administration officials who seemed to feel fairly
strongly that Benn doesn't understand what the President is trying to do.
The sight was not that unusual, at least not for Mosul, Iraq, on a summer morning: a car parked on the sidewalk, facing opposite traffic, its windows rolled up tight. Two young boys stared out the back window, kindergarten age maybe, their faces leaning together as if to share a whisper.
The soldier patrolling closest to the car stopped. It had to be hot in there; it was 120 degrees outside. “Permission to approach, sir, to give them some water,” the soldier said to Sgt. First Class Edward Tierney, who led the nine-man patrol that morning.
“I said no — no,” Sergeant Tierney said in a telephone interview from Afghanistan. He said he had an urge to move back before he knew why: “My body suddenly got cooler; you know, that danger feeling.”
That morning in Mosul, Sergeant Tierney gave the command to fall back. The soldier who had asked to approach the car had just time enough to turn before the bomb exploded. Shrapnel clawed the side of his face; the shock wave threw the others to the ground. The two young boys were gone: killed in the blast, almost certainly, he said.
Third, Mr. Obama seems to have confused American Jews with Israelis. We are close emotionally and politically, but we are different. We speak Hebrew and not English, we live in the Middle East and have separate historical narratives. Mr. Obama’s stop at Buchenwald and his strong rejection of Holocaust denial, immediately after his Cairo speech, appealed to American Jews but fell flat in Israel. Here we are taught that Zionist determination and struggle — not guilt over the Holocaust — brought Jews a homeland. Mr. Obama’s speech, which linked Israel’s existence to the Jewish tragedy, infuriated many Israelis who sensed its closeness to the narrative of enemies like Mahmoud Ahmedinejad.
taken from :Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations
Coming Soon: First Feature Documentary About The Doors
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When You're Strange: A Film About The Doors: "Coming Soon: First Feature Documentary About The Doors"
At the Weekly Standard blog, John Noonan links this article from the Washington Post about the length to which the Obama administration went to try to kill funding for the F-22 raptor fighter jet (pictured). Noonan then asks why the administration fought so furiously against the jet. Israel Matzav: Why Obama killed the F-22Raising an objection to F-22 acquisition is one thing, launching a Napoleonic campaign -- over the objections of both Congress and the military -- is excessive. There were some serious, deeply intelligent strategic thinkers who had some equally serious, intelligent justifications for building a larger fleet of Raptors. Considering the fighter's admittedly steep price is but a drop in the health care/stimulus bucket, it's a little hard to believe the administration's only motivation was to eliminate waste in the defense budget.
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'Our friends the Saudis' have told President Obumbler that they won't make any 'gestures' toward Israel to get a 'peace process' going. But this time, they have gone even further. They have warned their allies not to make any gestures either. And they have insisted that their allies coordinate with them any statement they make about Israel. 
Continuing to bring Bashar al-Assad closer, President Obumbler has lifted American sanctions on sending airplane parts and computer hardware and software to the chinless ophthalmologist of Damascus. Syria has apparently done nothing in return. 
In The Corner, Michael Rubin quotes from an editorial in the conservative Iranian paper Kayhan (Supreme Leader Khamenei appoints the editor of Kayhan, and so its editorials are seen as mirroring the views of the Supreme Leader): Israel Matzav: Iran's interpretation of Obama's policyWhat punishments they threaten are to persuade Iran to come to the negotiation table, not in order to punish Iran after eventual failure of negotiations which they themselves know is neither realistic nor effective. For now the situation is this: that the Americans in a very impolite way and like uncivilized cowboys beg Iran to negotiate. Their imperialist nature has not yet taught them that begging someone to negotiate with has its own ways and shouting and screaming in a state of emergency can't be interpreted as a sign of strength. The final and returning point is...that they have no strategy, but only beg to negotiate. After the elections they for a couple of days wanted to speculate that something had changed in Iran and that they should use a different method, but not much time had passed after which they found out that the governments in Iran only execute the decisions of the Leader...
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There's a demonstration in Jerusalem this evening against President Obama's policies toward Israel. “Not since the days of [U.S. Secretary of State Henry] Kissinger has there been such a protest against American policies,” said MK Yaakov Katz (Ketzaleh), chairman of the National Union party. “The pressure that Barack Hussein Obama is exerting against us to simply stop growing and stop living will not work.”
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The Washington Times reports that Bolivians are resisting Iran's push for their country to sell Iran uranium for use in its nuclear program. Israel Matzav: Bolivians resisting Iran's push for uraniumIndian inhabitants around Manomo, a mountain that means "sleeping man" in native Guarani, have said that its bald, rounded top glows at night. Underground mine shafts and open pits are visible at various points along the mountain's side and barren peak.
Mincruz, a Santa Cruz mining company, reported that an analysis of 280 rock samples extracted last year shows a 2.4 percent uranium content, which is considered of "high value."Read All at :
On Sunday, I asked how the Obama administration plans to stop Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons, something Secretary of State Clinton insists it is going to do. In Monday's New York Daily News, Michael Goodwin asks whether the Obama administration has a policy on Iran at all. Israel Matzav: Does the US have a policy on Iran? If so, what is it?More to the unfortunate point, her choice of words in Thailand caused doubts about whether the United States even has a policy toward Iran. If we don't, we better get one.
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In a joint news conference with Defense Minister Ehud Barak, US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates (pictured) referred to a 'defense umbrella' against Iran for US allies, the same phrase that got Secretary of State Clinton into trouble in Thailand last week because it implies American acceptance of a nuclear-armed Iran. Acknowledging Israel's concerns, Gates said the US administration's attempt to engage Iran diplomatically was "not an open-ended offer" and that the US was aware Iran might try to "run out the clock."
A Kuwaiti newspaper reports that Hezbullah is training officers of the Lebanese Armed Forces to fight alongside it in the event of a war with Israel. Additionally, an entire battalion of the Lebanese Armed Forces is to operate within Hezbullah. Israel Matzav: Awesome: Hezbullah training Lebanese Armed ForcesLebanese defense officials believe there is a secret pact between Hizbullah and top officers in the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF), the Kuwaiti paper Asiyassa reported on Monday.
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The IDF has set up a new training ground for war with Hezbullah. It includes a rubber city in which to practice urban warfare, with tunnels leading to a forest simulating the 'nature preserves' Hezbullah has set up in southern Lebanon. Israel Matzav: IDF training for war with HezbullahShortly after the Second Lebanon War in 2006, the IDF built a replica of a Hizbullah "nature reserve" - a forested area where the group had dug bunkers and deployed rocket launchers - to train IDF troops. Now, the IDF is building an urban warfare center - consisting of a mock Lebanese village - which it plans to connect to the replica of the nature reserve.
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Barry Rubin reports that next week's Fatah convention in Bethlehem, the first in 20 years, will highlight the leadership problems in Fatah. All of the 17 members of Fatah's Central Committee are over the age of 65, and the younger generation is even more radical (no great surprise given what they have been spoon-fed by the 'Palestinian' media) than the current one. But even the current Fatah Central Committee is not one that is going to make peace.
On Sunday, it was reported that a judge in Gaza forced a lawyer to don a head scarf in order to appear in court. Now it is reported that the decree goes beyond the courts. Gaza is becoming more and more like Iran and Saudi Arabia. All women are now required to wear head scarves. The London-based newspaper Al-Quds al-Arabi reported that the Gaza government approved a series of laws meant to guard Muslim morals.
This joins an increasing number of reports by Gaza residents, who say modesty patrols have been forcing women to wear head coverings, especially at Gaza's beaches, and that they are inspecting isolated cars in order to prevent unmarried couples from being alone together.Read All at :
Israel Matzav: Women of Hamastan forced to wear head scarves
The Jewish growth rate in Judea and Samaria was 2.3% during the first six months of this year, and may reach 5% by the end of the year as families tend to move during the summer. The number of Jews in Judea and Samaria has now crossed the 300,000 mark, and together with parts of Jerusalem that were liberated during the 1967 Six Day War, there are now more than 600,000 Jews in those territories that the United States and other governments classify as 'settlers.' 
In his weekly column in the Washington Examiner, Power Line's Paul Mirengoff discusses the Godfather's sage advice: 'Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.' Paul focuses on three allies that the United States has abandoned in the age of Obama - Britain, Israel and India. At Commentary Magazine's Contentions blog, Abe Greenwald focuses on another abandoned American ally, Georgia (Hat Tip: Power Line). And in the Boston Globe, Kapil Komireddi focuses on Obama's treatment of India. Mirengoff and Greenwald both take a stab at the most puzzling question: Why? Here's Mirengoff: Why has Obama violated the intuitively obvious portion of the Godfather's adage? 
Israeli defense officials warned on Sunday that Hamas is digging tunnels near UN facilities, including schools, assuming that Israel won't target them in a future war. In one instance, in a school in Beit Hanoun, the school sustained damage because of the tunnel digging underneath it. As it happens, this is the same school from which an IAF drone taped Hamas launching Kassam rockets in 2007.
Recently, I posted about the Jerusalem Municipality's efforts to get 'Palestinian' kids living in the city into normal day camps where they would have normal kids' activities and not the types of activities run by Islamist camps. Here's why the Municipality felt such a need to do that.
Haaretz reports that British anti-Semitism has doubled this year. Haaretz does so with a headline that says that British anti-Semitism has doubled 'since the Gaza war,' reflecting the leftist newspaper's misgivings about that war. But there is no question that all is not well in Londonistan. Israel Matzav: British anti-Semitism has doubled this yearThe Community Security Trust (CST), which monitors anti-Semitism and provides security for the Jewish community in Britain, said that it had recorded 609 anti-Semitic incidents across the U.K. from January to June this year - over double the 276 for the same period last year, mostly connected to Israel's operation in Gaza.
Huhne added that "it is absurd that home-grown bigots should hold British Jews responsible for the actions of a foreign government. We cannot have overseas conflicts echoed on Britain's streets."Read All at :
In the Washington Post, Jim Hoagland discusses Hillary Clinton's 'nuclear umbrella' speech from this past week. Reading the end of Hoagland's column, I have to wonder what he's smoking. Israel Matzav: Then how are we going to stop them, Jim?Israeli politicians immediately portrayed Clinton's remarks in Thailand as a weakening of the U.S. stance on Iran by suggesting that the Obama administration is looking at scenarios for living with a nuclear-armed Iran.
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Two weeks ago, I reported that Israel had placed an initial order for 25 of the new F-35 Joint Strike Fighter jets, with a contract to be signed in early 2010 and the first plane to be delivered in 2014. Two days later, I reported that the resolution of a dispute with the United States over the F-35 would result in Israel forfeiting the technological advantage of using some of its own technologies in the place. JPost now has more bad news: The F-35 is two years behind production schedule. 
Holland is reconsidering its funding of Breaking the Silence, the organization that two weeks ago released 'confessions' to 'war crimes' by anonymous IDF soldiers who were involved in Operation Cast Lead. It was the second time Breaking the Silence had released 'confessions' from IDF soldiers, and in each case the 'confessions' were based on rumor and hearsay.
This summary of the 'Obama doctrine' is excellent with the one small caveat that I believe that he ascribes too great a role to the United States in creating the State of Israel. Israel Matzav: The Obama doctrineIn fact, its very objective is to undercut America's pre-eminent global role, reducing its great-power status to that of a multilateral partner equal to Russia, China or the European Union. At its core, the Obama Doctrine maintains that all societies and cultures are morally equal. More important, promoting democracy and human rights has been abandoned in favor of "improving America's standing in the world."
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Mackubin Thomas Owens does as good a job as anyone in characterizing President Obama's policy on Israel. Israel Matzav: Obama adopts the 'Palestinian' grievance narrativeThe Obama approach in the Middle East is predicated on what might be called the Arab “grievance narrative,” which holds that Israel was created as a result of Western guilt about the Holocaust. It is also based on the idea that, as the president suggested in his Cairo speech, there is moral equivalence between the Holocaust and Palestinian “dislocation.”
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Victor Davis Hanson imagines what would have happened during the last six months if President Obama had decided to govern like a Clintonesque moderate rather than like a Jimmy Carter drunk on socialism. I'm only going to highlight the parts that relate to Israel - you may want to read the whole thing (Hat Tip: Instapundit). 
Canadian poet and essayist David Solway looks at some of the walls that countries around the world have built to protect themselves and questions why only Israel's 'security fence' is controversial. Israel Matzav: Good fences make good neighbors[UN 'Human Rights Commissioner Navi] Pillay, like most of her duplicitous ilk, also has nothing to say about the palisade being built by the government of Thailand, which is higher and longer than the Israeli barrier, to cordon off two million Muslims living in the south of the country. She has nothing to say about the “wall of shame” dividing Morocco from Western Sahara (1,500 miles), the electrified fence between Botswana and Zimbabwe (300 miles), and the soon-to-be-completed, ten-foot-high barrier along the entire border between Saudi Arabia and Yemen, built by the Saudis to discourage terrorist infiltration!
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This is from an article about the security situation in Judea and Samaria. Avital, the Ofra spokesman, remembers the days in the 1980s before the outbreak of the first intifada when she and her neighbors would go to Ramallah on a daily basis -- something no one has done in years.
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David Pryce-Jones reviews George Gilder's The Israel Test (Gilder was apparently a passenger on National Review Online's cruise). I particularly liked this: Israel Matzav: Your attitude toward Jews decides whether you love or hate freedom... and mankindNobody but Gilder could have written this book. Israel of course has its defenders, but they use arguments based on nationalism, territory, ethnicity, defence of minorities, rights, historicism, and so on. Gilder sees Jews since their emancipation as the vanguard of human achievement. They may be few in numbers, but their creativity has brought prosperity to themselves and those around them, and that prosperity in turn has brought freedom. Thus Jews spearhead capitalism and the democracy indispensable to its proper functioning. Marxists, Nazis, and now Muslims and their apologists envy Jews because they cannot emulate them, and so set out to destroy the success that shows up their failure. The attitude you take towards Israel and Jews decides whether you love or hate freedom, and beyond that, mankind — that’s the test he is proposing in the book’s title. And just in case the reader risks failing this test by jumping to a false conclusion, Gilder has a portrait of his very non-Jewish ancestry, saying, “We were classic WASPS all.”
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5 of the Fifth Month 5769
This 12Tribe Films presentation about the expulsion of Jews from Netzer-Hazani was compiled mostly from video footage shot by the town's youth. It focuses on the basketball game played in Azza (Gaza) before the expulsion of Jews from their homes, and the handing over of their lands to the Yishma'eli (Arab) enemies.
Esser Agaroth: "Home Game" (Film Recommendation)(12TribeFilms.org) “Home Game” is a captivating new film that encapsulates the surreal story of normal teenagers trying to continue an annual basketball tournament during a very abnormal summer in Israel -- the summer of 2005 during the disengagement from Gaza. This powerful film emphasizes the journey of these teenagers and their determination to win against all odds, both on and off the court. "Home Game" tells part of the untold human story to a piece of Jewish history that was overshadowed by politics.
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I've posted several times about how the 'Palestinians' have their kids spend the summer. Here's one example. This year, the Jerusalem Municipality is spending NIS 500,000 (about $128,000) trying to get 'Palestinian' kids to spend their summer in a camp run by the Municipality instead of in Islamist camps. Is it working? Well, they have 8,000 kids in Municipal-run summer camps this year. Israel Matzav: Trying to make 'Palestinian' kids spend their summers like other kidsThat Israel sees [Islamist] camps as a threat is not in his imagination. In recent years there has been alarm in the Israeli media over Palestinian summer camps run by Fatah and Hamas, some offering paramilitary training for teenagers. Now, even camps for younger children have come into question, and officials in the Jerusalem municipality say they're in a strugle to make municipal-run (read: Israeli) camps more affordable for the children of Arab East Jerusalemites.
"The Islamic movement is running summer camps with a very clear agenda: to indoctrinate young kids to a very strict religious viewpoint and what we know are very extreme messages, which of course we think is not the right thing," says Yakir Segev, a Jerusalem city council member who is in charge of the East Jerusalem portfolio.Read All at :
Even the American Left is beginning to doubt President Obama's emphasis on a 'settlement freeze' according to Foreign Policy Magazine's The Cable blog. Israel Matzav: 'Obama uses an axe when a scalpel is needed'Obama's stance on Israel is facing predictable criticism from more right-leaning pro-Israel groups in the United States. Mort Klein of the Zionist Organization of America, for instance, this week described the U.S. pressure over plans to build Jewish housing on the site of a Jerusalem hotel as "racist." But more troubling perhaps for Obama are doubts from some who strongly support his push to resolve the conflict.
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A report in Asharq Al-Awsat quotes a 'senior US source' as saying that a strike on Iran means the end of President Obama's presidency and a 20-year war on Islam. Israel Matzav: 'Strike on Iran means end of Obama, 20-year war'“An American war on Iran would mean entering a twenty-year battle with the Islamic world starting from Afghanistan and Iraq to Iran,” according to the major pan-Arabic newspaper’s reporter Huda Al Husseini.
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Shavua tov and a good week to everyone.Israel Matzav: Israel finances its own demonizationIt began with a eulogy to the late PLO representative Faisal Husseini - who happened to be cited by Likud Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor this week as being the one Palestinian leader to have acknowledged that there could be no "right of return" - and headed mainly downhill from there.
We got to meet a Shuafat refugee camp rap pack, one of whose members made a casual lyrical reference to Israel's unexplained purported killing of a mother and father. We saw footage of the complexities of travel into and across Jerusalem, with a soundtrack that included the voice of a pregnant Palestinian woman discussing how Israeli security forces allegedly threatened to kill her if she would not get undressed for a security check at a roadblock, and the voice of a man discussing how he had been unable to save a dying Palestinian woman blocked en route to the hospital by hard-hearted Israeli security personnel at another roadblock.Read All at :
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