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By Lawrence Kadish
January 24, 2012
When a group of high-ranking Nazi bureaucrats sat down 70 years ago today (Jan. 20, 1942), they didn't plot the death of 6 million Jews; they aimed at 11 million.
Dubbed the Wannsee Conference, after its location, it was chaired by SS Obergruppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich, who brought together some of the most efficient managers of mass murder history has ever seen.
The 90-minute agenda was direct, having been transmitted by Hitler to his deputy, Reich Marshal Herman Goering, and then onto Heydrich: "Make all necessary preparations" for a "total solution of the Jewish question" in all territories under German influence, coordinate the role of all government organizations in accomplishing that goal — and then submit a "comprehensive draft" for the "final solution of the Jewish question."
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By Caroline B. Glick
The Jerusalem Post
January 23, 2012
A year ago this week, on January 25, 2011, the ground began to crumble under then-Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak’s feet. One year later, Mubarak and his sons are in prison, and standing trial. This week, the final vote tally from Egypt’s parliamentary elections was published. The Islamist parties have won 72 percent of the seats in the lower house.
The photogenic, Western-looking youth from Tahrir Square the Western media were thrilled to dub the Facebook revolutionaries were disgraced at the polls and exposed as an insignificant social and political force.
As for the military junta, it has made its peace with the Muslim Brotherhood. The generals and the jihadists are negotiating a power-sharing agreement. According to details of the agreement that have made their way to the media, the generals will remain the West’s go-to guys for foreign affairs. The Muslim Brotherhood (and its fellow jihadists in the Salafist al-Nour party) will control Egypt’s internal affairs.
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Demography and The Societal Timing of The Arab Spring
By Richard Cincotta
January 2012
Dr. Richard Cincotta is a political demographer whose research focuses on the demographic transition and human migration, and their relationships to political, economic, and environmental change. His publications on these topics have appeared in Foreign Policy, Nature, and Science magazines. He contributed to the National Intelligence Council's most recent global futuring exercise, Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World (2009) and The Geneva Declaration Secretariat's Global Burden of Armed Violence (2008).
Much has been written about the circumstances that led Middle East experts to be blindsided by the successful series of popular demonstrations that kicked off the Arab Spring in December 2010. Writing in Foreign Affairs, political scientist Gregory Gausse recounts how regional specialists, like himself, overestimated the strength and cohesiveness of North Africa’s autocracies, as well as the depth of personal allegiances available to these authoritarians among their military’s highest ranks. [1] Another article in the same journal, by Nassim Taleb and Mark Blyth, draws a strikingly dissimilar conclusion from political science’s most recent failure. [2] They describe North Africa’s dramatic political events as a “black swan”— the unpredictable terminus of a buildup of tensions brought to a head by complexly interacting forces.
Little, if any, mention has been made, however, of an article describing the relationship between demography and democracy (“How Democracies Grow Up”) that was printed on the pages of Foreign Policy in March of 2008[3]— more than two-and-a-half years before pro-democracy demonstrators took to the streets in Tunisia. In that essay, I describe a simple model driven by population age structure (the distribution of population by age) that can be used to statistically forecast democratization, with reasonable success. Based on that research, I reached the following conclusion:
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By Khaled Abu Toameh
January 20, 2012
Mahmoud Abu Rahma is perhaps one of the bravest Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Because of his courage, he has been stabbed several times in various parts of his body.
This is what happens under Hamas and the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority governments to anyone who dares to speak out against torture and assaults on innocent civilians and freedom of speech.
Abu Rahma's "crime" is that he dared to publish an article strongly criticizing Palestinian armed groups as well as the Hamas and Palestinian Authority governments for human rights violations and the use of civilians as human shields in the war against Israel.
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By Joel B. Pollak
January 19, 2012
 The Jewish Week reports that a speech last week by Stuart Appelbaum, president of the left-wing Jewish Labor Committee, prompted Israel’s deputy consul general to walk out of its gala dinner after Appelbaum criticized Israel in blunt, undiplomatic terms.
Though Appelbaum also noted “new expressions of contempt for Israel within the Arab world,” he launched a vitriolic attack on the government of Benjamin Netanyahu:
...[S]adly, Israel is cursed with a right-wing coalition government that’s regularly giving credence to it.
We all know Benjamin Netanyahu talks a good game about a two-state solution, but, at the very same time, his administration continues to shamelessly promote the construction of illegal settlements on the West Bank – a policy that no severely impedes negotiations…
Netanyahu’s right-wing supporters in this country have pulled out the stops to slander the president as some kind of enemy of Israel.
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By Jay Bushinsky
The Jerusalem Post
January 19, 2012
Should a successful career in the news media catapult ambitious journalists into the political arena as candidates for high public office?
The answer is no.
That is not the way it is in the U.S.A., UK, France or any of the world's other genuine democracies.
None one of the 44 men elected to the American presidency since 1789 were newspaper reporters, radio correspondents or television anchors. Nor have the British or French recruited national leaders from the ranks of their respective news media.
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By Sarah Honig
January 19, 2012
 Yair Lapid is certainly no less preposterous a choice than Ziva David.
When things get tough – or just seemingly tough – the not-so-tough invent an instant leader, another new, shining hope for the shallow masses yearning for magical interventions.
Existential dangers that can’t be eradicated in one simplistic swoop are a drag. Admitting that some problems are altogether intractable can be oppressive, especially to generations reared on the 45- minute TV plot where everything is fixable in a tight time frame. Life’s burdens would diminish if reality only conformed to Hollywood scripts.
Given that, there’s just no denying that the ultimate candidate for prime minister of Israel is none other than Ziva David – the boob tube’s outstanding Israeli patriot, a self-disciplined and self-reliant Zionist warrior, a virtual one-woman army and a sharpshooter guided by an unerring moral compass.
She’s quite possibly the only Jewish regular on American TV who’s unapologetic, complex-free and not comically dysfunctional. She’s surely the only full-time Israeli character on any mainstream network hit drama.
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IPT News
January 18, 2012
The Obama administration is considering releasing five top Taliban jihadists from custody at Guantanamo Bay in hopes of negotiating a peace agreement with the Afghan terrorist movement. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said last week that administration is in "the preliminary stages" of testing whether talks with the Taliban can succeed.
President Obama plans to withdraw virtually all U.S. troops from Afghanistan by 2014. Last month, Vice President Joe Biden told an interviewer that "the Taliban per se is not our enemy."
Republican presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney blasted Obama's approach to the Taliban, declaring that "The right course for America is not to negotiate with the Taliban while the Taliban are killing our soldiers." Yet one of Romney's top foreign policy aides has reportedly advocated a negotiating approach that is similar to Obama's.
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By Mitchell Bard
Jerusalem Post
January 17, 2012
Today, it has become popular to malign young Jews and to suggest that they are turning away from Israel. We hear that they have been turned off to Israel by policies of the Israeli government and have become increasingly supportive of the Palestinians. Those of us who work with students know this is rubbish and now a new poll provides evidence that young Jews feel close to Israel, have little sympathy for the Palestinians, are hawkish on peace issues, and don't believe public criticism of the government advocated by Jews on the far left is helpful.
The nationwide poll of 400 Jewish college students sponsored by the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise and The Israel Project found:
90% agree that Israel is the spiritual center of the Jewish people.
83% said caring about Israel is an important part of being Jewish.
73% said American and Israeli Jews share a common destiny.
89% have warm/favorable feelings toward Israel.
78% sympathize with Israel vis-a-vis the Palestinians.
84% think America should support Israel.
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By Khaled Abu Toameh
January 17, 2012
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas is now preparing for the day after the formal death of the peace process.
Abbas is conducting negotiations with three different parties simultaneously: Israel, Hamas and the international community.|
His policy now is to shoot in all directions in the hope of hitting as many birds as possible. This strategy, however, has so far failed to score significant gains.
The negotiations Abbas is conducting with Hamas are intended to create a joint Palestinian strategy in the aftermath of the failure of the peace process with Israel.
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Why 2011 should force a 2012 American Rethink of its Middle Eastern Military Relationships
By Gabriel M. Scheinmann
JINSA
January 17, 2012
It is an odd situation when your strongest ally finds itself surrounded by increasingly hostile forces whose militaries you arm and train. And yet, this is exactly the state of U.S.-Israel affairs. 2011 witnessed the decline or fall of many of America’s Middle Eastern allies. Islamist groups made major gains in Morocco, Tunisia, Jordan and Egypt. The “partner for peace” Palestinian Authority (PA) concluded a reconciliation agreement with the terrorist group Hamas, Iran extended its domination of Lebanon through its Hezbollah proxy, and the Iraqi government took a pro-Iranian authoritarian turn following the American withdrawal. The common thread to all these regimes: the U.S. has continued its military aid, assistance, or training to all of them despite these substantial negative political changes.
Take Egypt. The United States has been Egypt’s prime military benefactor since the signing of the Camp David Accords in 1978, providing $1.3 billion in military aid in 2011 and selling it many of its heavy arms systems including M1 Abrams tanks, which are assembled in Egypt, and over 200 F-16 fighter jets. Following the fall of the Mubarak regime last February, Egypt has permitted passage of Iranian warships through the Suez Canal, been unable to secure the Egyptian-Israeli border from increased terror attacks and arms smuggling into Gaza, and was unwilling to prevent a mob attack on the Israeli embassy in Cairo. Most recently, radical Islamist parties, with an anti-Israel if not anti-Semitic agenda, have won an overwhelming victory in lower house parliamentary elections, promising to put the Egyptian-Israeli peace accord to a popular referendum. Israel could soon face a situation where it is being threatened by radical, Islamist regime whose military is American trained and armed.
Comparable developments have occurred in the West Bank. Since 2007, the United States has overseen the training of a 5,000-man Palestinian Authority Security Force in Jordan. At a cost exceeding $500 million, the effort is intended to train Palestinian forces to fight terror in the West Bank. Although Israel has largely been supportive, Israelis reiterate that these forces cannot be counted on to operate independently following a potential full Israeli withdrawal.
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By Soeren Kern
January 16, 2012
Muslims in Europe are increasingly converting empty Christian churches into mosques.
The proliferation of mosques housed in former churches reflects the rise of Islam as the fastest growing religion in post-Christian Europe.
There are now more practicing Muslims than practicing Christians in many parts of Europe, not only in large urban centers, but also in smaller towns and cities across the continent.
As Islam replaces Christianity as the dominant religion in Europe, more and more churches are set to become mosques, which increasingly serve not only as religious institutions but also function as the foundational political building blocks for the establishment of separate, parallel Muslim communities in Europe that are based on Islamic Sharia law.
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Legal Remedies and Remaining Options
By Dr. Louis René Beres
BESA Center
January 16, 2012
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Israel should not expect stable coexistence with a nuclear Iran. Instead, it must enhance active defense, improve nuclear deterrence and target selected Iranian infrastructures. As Tehran edges closer to gaining nuclear capabilities, however, Israeli preemption tactics are becoming far more limited.
On January 16, 2003, the "Project Daniel" Group advised then Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on the threat of Iranian nuclear weapons.1 This report, which contained substantial legal and strategic recommendations, urged the prime minister to suitably enhance Israel’s deterrence and defense postures; to consider a prompt end to deliberate nuclear ambiguity (if Iran should be permitted to become nuclear); and to appropriately refine pertinent preemption options. It also concluded that Israel should not expect stable coexistence with a nuclear Iran and that active national defense should be increased and strengthened accordingly.
Israel’s active defense strategy involves mutually reinforcing the Arrow, Iron Dome, and, in the future, Magic Wand systems. To adequately protect against a potential WMD attack from Iran, however, these advanced elements of ballistic missile defense are not enough. They must be optimally complemented by improved Israeli nuclear deterrence and by a capacity for viable conventional first strikes against selected Iranian military and industrial targets. Under no circumstances, advised Project Daniel, should Israel assume that a safe and durable “balance of terror” could ever be created with Tehran.
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By Jay Bushinsky
The Jerusalem Post
January 13. 2012
Israel soon will have the world's biggest detention center for illegal migrant workers. The new facility will have room for 12,000 detainees.
It will enable the law enforcement authorities to lock them without trial up for up to three years instead of 60 days which has been the limit until now.
Meanwhile, the special law-enforcement unit that arbitrarily rounds up men, women and children whose presence here is deemed demographically dangerous by Interior Minister Eli Yishai and his narrow minded 'Shas' party will press on with its cold-hearted operations.
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By Sarah Honig
January 12, 2012
 How reassuring: Jerusalem Police commissioner Nisso Shaham has sanctimoniously added his two cents’ worth to the synthetic hullabaloo that gripped specified Jerusalem and Beit Shemesh neighborhoods – the sort to which I and my sort never go. Yet my non-Jerusalemite sort is the loudest in kicking up a righteous fuss about oddities that barely impact our daily lives.
Those of us who remember this country a little further back than the day before yesterday know that given anti-Zionist ultra-Orthodox elements habitually sought to stoke the fires of contention. Their counterparts on the leftist fringes of our political patchwork were equally eager to fan the flames. For the latter, it’s politically expedient to ignite culture wars and lump the entire complex gamut of Israel’s observant Jews under the single, all-inclusive epithet of haredim (God-fearing).
 The religious zealot who called a female soldier “pritzeh” (Yiddish for a woman of loose morals) was turned into a sectarian martyr when the prosecution – generally renowned for its languor and lenient plea bargains – charged him with no less than sexual harassment. The outsized photo of the secularist heroine in khaki, posing with self-important indignation, became the obligatory front-page feature for all tabloids.
And this brings us back to Shaham.
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