Europe’ Last Stand “World Premiere Sept 24”

By: Shalom BearPublished: August 22nd, 2014

via The Jewish Press » » UPDATE: Hamas Executes 21 Arabs in Gaza.

Please see important update at the end of the article regarding the photos originally published here.

The Islamic terror organization, Hamas, publicly executed 11 Gazans in Gaza City on Friday morning at 10am.

UPDATE 2:15pm: 7 more Gazans were executed on Friday afternoon. We just learned that 3 Gazans were executed yesterday. for a total of 21 Gazans executed by Hamas in the past 24 hours.

The 11 executed Arabs were accused of treason by Hamas. A Hamas security official claims the 11 had been tried in a Hamas court.

Hamas accused them of trying to overthrow Hamas by collaborating with Israel.

Hamas has warned Gazans to not publicize the names of the executed, as presumably they want to include them in the list of people killed in Operation Protective Edge. Their bodies were moved to Shifa hospital after the executions.

Hamas is currently running an internal operation to seek out and execute every Gazan they suspect is trying to overthrow Hamas or collaborate with Israel, which of course is a good cover for killing off any political opponents.

On Friday afternoon, Hamas executed an additional 7 Gazans outside the Omari Mosque after prayers.

It’s important to note, that unlike ISIS, Hamas did not behead their victims when killing them. They shot some.

Apparently to some, this is a very important distinction.

CORRECTION AND UPDATE
The photos originally posted here originated from various Hamas supporter and affiliate site and pages.

We have removed them for the following reasons:

1) Photo was from an earlier execution, apparently by Hamas in Gaza, but a few years ago.

2) Photo was from a 2006 execution by Islamic Jihad in Jenin (Shomron).

3) Photo was an execution from a different Islamic conflict.

We thank our readers for helping us clarify the source of the photos, and to ensure the accuracy of our reports.

Relations are strained over Gaza but US support for Israel remains strong
By Chris McGreal in Washington The Guardian
Relations are strained over Gaza but US support for Israel remains strong, Sunday 10 August 2014 14.28 EDT

(Somehow I suspect America will be around long after Obama is just a smudge on the pages of American history.-LS)

Even before the smoke clears in Gaza, the damage assessment has begun.

On the face of it, relations between the Obama administration and Binyamin Netanyahu’s government, already marked by antipathy and distrust, have been driven to a new low by very public sniping over Israel’s bloody assault on the Palestinian enclave.

The administration’s public declaration that it was “appalled” by Israel’s “disgraceful” shelling of a UN school, which killed 10 people, and US secretary of state John Kerry’s unguarded mocking of Netanyahu’s claims to be carrying out pinpoint operations to avoid civilian casualties, was a marked break from the largely unquestioning support for military operations the Jewish state has come to expect from Washington. So was Barack Obama’s observation that the deaths of innocent civilians in Gaza “have to weigh on our conscience”.

In contrast, the US Senate gave unanimous backing to a resolution giving unequivocal support to Israel without even mentioning the loss of Palestinian lives.

In Jerusalem, Netanyahu railed against American pressure for a ceasefire, at one point calling the US ambassador to pass on a message to the White House “not to ever second-guess me again”. Israeli press quoted anonymous officials pouring contempt on Kerry.

All of this came after months of tension as the US secretary of state pressed a reluctant Israeli prime minister to take peace negotiations with the Palestinians seriously, and then watched his efforts collapse. The Israeli leadership’s true feelings were laid bare when the defence minister, Moshe Ya’alon, branded Kerry “obsessive and messianic”.

Kerry angered the Israelis further by warning, albeit in a private meeting, that the Jewish state risked becoming “an apartheid state” if it maintained the occupation.

Yet, even as what is now regularly described as a dysfunctional relationship between Obama and Netanyahu is increasingly played out in public, those who have viewed US-Israeli dealings from the inside say the airing of frustration and contempt will not, for now at least, change any of the fundamentals about how Washington deals with the Jewish state.

Daniel Levy, a former adviser to Ehud Barak, then Israeli prime minister, and an ex-delegate to peace negotiations with the Palestinians, said the US’s decision to resupply Israel with tank shells, mortars and other weapons to continue the very killings the president and Kerry were questioning said more than the criticisms thrown back and forth.

“The American support in munitions, even in the middle of the Gaza operation, when UN shelters and schools were being hit, and just as European countries were beginning to question their arms exports to Israel, speaks to the fact that we’re more in the arena of continuity than change,” he said.

Still, Levy added that the friction might not be entirely without cost to Israel. “I think there’s going to be far less American willingness to go out of their way to say: ‘How do we help the Israelis in this situation?’. When the cameras are on, America will still do what it feels it needs to do. But I think there are all kinds of areas where they could go the extra mile and they will be less enthusiastic to do that,” he said. “I feel it has weakened Israel’s position when it comes to Iran.”

Aaron David Miller, who served six US secretaries of state as an adviser on Arab-Israeli negotiations, said he has watched relations ebb and flow between several US administrations and Israel. The principal issue for Obama, he said, had been the scale of the killing seen on US TV screens.

“Civilian casualties is in essence the major problem the president has. Make the bad pictures of innocent Palestinians dying go away – that’s the pressure,” said Miller. “Unlike John Kerry, the president’s not interested in transforming this into some major peace deal. He’s preoccupied with so many other issues. He has less than a thousand days left in his presidency. He cares more about the middle class than he does about the Middle East.”

Obama told the New York Times last week that he was not optimistic about the chances of a peace deal because Netanyahu is popular with Israeli voters. The Israeli prime minister doesn’t feel the pressure to reach an agreement, while the Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, is “too weak”. The president said that worried him because while he has no doubt Israel will survive, its “democratic and civic traditions” are threatened by continuing the occupation.

Kerry has not given up trying to revive long-term peace talks and may see the latest war in Gaza as the beginnings of a path to fresh negotiations. But Miller said there’s little enthusiasm in the White House for the peace process.

“It’s closed for the season right now,” he said. “The president’s seen this movie with Netanyahu before. It’s presented a losing hand to him every single time.”

Yousef Munayyer, director of the Palestine Centre in Washington, said he would be surprised if the US expended more effort on trying to engineer a peace agreement because Obama and Kerry have “learned the hard way that Netanyahu is not going to cooperate in any meaningful way” when much of his cabinet is either opposed to a Palestinian state or to the concessions necessary to bring it about.

“It’s hard to see it really happening again because current political trends in Israel are really on course for right wing governments for the foreseeable future. So there’s really no reason to expect that you’re going to have an Israeli government that’s more conducive to a peace agreement than the Netanyahu government that you have now – and he’s certainly not,” said Munayyer. “At the same time, the United States is not in a position yet where it’s ready to bear the political cost of putting the kind of pressure on the Israelis that’s necessary to get them to change their behaviour. The calculation that they’re probably making is that it’s not worth it to engage right now and that if the Israelis want to drive themselves into international isolation they’re not going to hold them back.”

But the assault on Gaza did highlight a trend that may come to change the political equation about Israel in the US.

Polls show a gradual shift in American public opinion, mostly generational. While a clear majority of Americans overall support Israel’s assault on Gaza as self-defence, a Pew poll last month showed diminishing support for Israel among younger Americans. Over-65s backed Israel over the Palestinians by nearly seven to one. Among young adults, aged 18-29, that support fell to just two to one in favour of Israel.

That appears in part to be because younger Americans are getting their news from sources other than mainstream television and newspapers. Israel’s 2009 assault on Gaza helped boost support for the Palestinian cause on US college campuses because the internet offered access to a much greater variety of reports, analysis and opinion, much of it from outside the US.

Technology widened the field further during the latest conflict in Gaza with many more pictures and eyewitness accounts from Palestinians living under the bombs.

“You have these forums where a girl in the Gaza strip who’s 16 years old can tweet images of bombs falling outside of her house to 160,000 people,” said Munayyer. “That kind of access to disseminating information has never existed before and it’s a game changer. That changes public opinion and ultimately that will change the way policymakers act on this issue but that’s a way down the road.”

Defender of The Faith, Power Line,  Scott Johnson, August 21, 2014

Like Hezbollah, Hamas, al Qaeda, Islamic Jihad and all the rest, the Islamic State promotes the imposition of Sharia law in the name of Islam. They all understand themselves to be Muslims acting on behalf of the faith. Yet Obama makes a special point of standing up for the good name of Islam, such as it is.

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In his statement on the beheading of James Foley by devotees of the Islamic State (referred to in his statement as ISIL) yesterday, Obama spoke up on behalf of Islam:

Let’s be clear about ISIL. They have rampaged across cities and villages — killing innocent, unarmed civilians in cowardly acts of violence. They abduct women and children, and subject them to torture and rape and slavery. They have murdered Muslims — both Sunni and Shia — by the thousands. They target Christians and religious minorities, driving them from their homes, murdering them when they can for no other reason than they practice a different religion. They declared their ambition to commit genocide against an ancient people.

So ISIL speaks for no religion.

Obama continued in a theological vein:

Their victims are overwhelmingly Muslim, and no faith teaches people to massacre innocents. No just God would stand for what they did yesterday, and for what they do every single day. ISIL has no ideology of any value to human beings. Their ideology is bankrupt. They may claim out of expediency that they are at war with the United States or the West, but the fact is they terrorize their neighbors and offer them nothing but an endless slavery to their empty vision, and the collapse of any definition of civilized behavior.

ISIL is of course an acronym for the Islamic State in the Levant. It purports to have created or restored an Islamic caliphate in the territory under its control. How do you edit Islam out of the Islamic State?

Like Hezbollah, Hamas, al Qaeda, Islamic Jihad and all the rest, the Islamic State promotes the imposition of Sharia law in the name of Islam. They all understand themselves to be Muslims acting on behalf of the faith. Yet Obama makes a special point of standing up for the good name of Islam, such as it is.

We can compare and contrast Obama’s words regarding “ISIL” and Islam with his recent remarks declaring that “we tortured some folks.” He asserted: “When we engaged in some of these enhanced interrogation techniques, techniques that I believe and I think any fair-minded person would believe were torture, we crossed a line. And that needs to be understood and accepted.”

While he declared us guilty of “torture,” Obama instructed that the torture we committed was “contrary to our values.” So we have that going for us. Like true Islam, according to Obama, “our values” are worthy. The Bush administration officials who countenanced the “torture” and the CIA officers who undertook it on our behalf stand outside the American creed like the bloodthirsty maniacs of the Islamic State.

All is not lost. Obama has come to redeem the time. Like a merciful God who understands all, Obama allowed: “I understand why it happened. It’s important when we look back to recall how afraid people were.” Obama does not purport to understand the devotees of the Islamic State, but his reticence in this case serves the reputation of Islam.

COLUMN ONE: Understanding the Israeli-Egyptian-Saudi alliance, Jerusalem Post, Caroline B. Glick, August 21, 2014

Photo by: REUTERS

The partnership that has emerged in this war between Israel, Egypt and Saudi Arabia is a direct consequence of Obama’s abandonment of the US’s traditional allies. Recognizing the threat that Hamas, as a component part of the Sunni jihadist alliance, constitutes for their own regimes, and in the absence of American support for Israel, Egypt and Saudi Arabia have worked with Israel to defeat Hamas and keep Gaza’s borders sealed.

If the US and the EU are able to coerce Egypt and Israel to open their borders with Gaza, then the Western powers will hand the jihadist axis a strategic victory.

The Israeli-Egyptian-Saudi alliance can ensure that all members survive the Obama era. And if [it] lasts into the next administration, it will place all of its members on more secure footing with the US, whether or not a new administration decides to rebuild the US alliance structure in the Middle East.

***********

The partnership that has emerged in this war between Israel, Egypt and Saudi Arabia is a direct consequence of Obama’s abandonment of the US’s traditional allies.

Hamas’s war with Israel is not a stand-alone event. It is happening in the context of the vast changes that are casting asunder old patterns of behavior and strategic understandings as actors in the region begin to reassess the threats they face.

Hamas was once funded by Saudi Arabia and enabled by Egypt. Now the regimes of these countries view it as part of a larger axis of Sunni jihad that threatens not only Israel, but them.

The Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and its state sponsors Qatar and Turkey, are the key members of this alliance structure. Without their support Hamas would have gone down with the Muslim Brotherhood regime in Egypt last summer. As it stands, all view Hamas’s war with Israel as a means of reinstating the Brotherhood to power in that country.

To achieve a Hamas victory, Turkey, Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood are using Western support for Hamas against Israel. If the US and the EU are able to coerce Egypt and Israel to open their borders with Gaza, then the Western powers will hand the jihadist axis a strategic victory.

The implications of such a victory would be dire.

Hamas is ideologically indistinguishable from Islamic State. Like Islamic State, Hamas has developed mass slaughter and psychological terrorization as the primary tools in its military doctrine. If the US and the EU force Israel and Egypt to open Gaza’s borders, they will enable Hamas to achieve strategic and political stability in Gaza. As a consequence, a post-war Gaza will quickly become a local version of Islamic State-controlled Mosul.

In the first instance, such a development will render life in southern Israel too imperiled to sustain. The Western Negev, and perhaps Beersheba, Ashkelon and Ashdod, will become uninhabitable.

Then there is Judea and Samaria. If, as the US demands, Israel allows Gaza to reconnect with Judea and Samaria, in short order Hamas will dominate the areas. Militarily, the transfer of even a few of the thousands of rocket-propelled grenades Hamas has in Gaza will imperil military forces and civilians alike.

IDF armored vehicles and armored civilian buses will be blown to smithereens.

Whereas operating from Gaza, Hamas needed the assistance of the Obama administration and the Federal Aviation Administration to shut down Ben-Gurion Airport, from Judea and Samaria, all Hamas would require are a couple of hand-held mortars.

Jordan will also be directly threatened.

From Egypt’s perspective, a Hamas victory in the war with Israel that connects Gaza to Sinai will strengthen the Muslim Brotherhood and its Islamic State and other allies. Such a development represents a critical threat to the regime.

And this brings us to Islamic State itself. It couldn’t have grown to its current monstrous proportions without the support of Qatar and Turkey.

Islamic State is obviously interested in expanding its conquests. Since it views itself as a state, its next move must be one that enables it to take over a national economy. The raid on Mosul’s central bank will not suffice to finance its operations for very long.

At this point, Islamic State wishes to avoid an all-out confrontation with Iran, so moving into southern Iraq is probably not in the cards. US forces in Kuwait, and the strength and unity of purpose of the Jordanian military, probably take both kingdoms off Islamic State’s chopping block for now.

This leaves Saudi Arabia, or parts of it, as a likely next target for Islamic State expansion.

Islamic State’s current operations in Lebanon, which threaten the Saudi-supported regime there, indicate that Lebanon, at a minimum, is also at grave risk.

Then there is Iran. Iran is not a member of the Sunni jihadist axis. But when it comes to Israel and the non-jihadist regimes, it has cooperated with it.

Iran has funded, trained and armed Hamas for the past decade. It views Hamas’s war with Israel in the same light as it viewed its Lebanese proxy Hezbollah’s war with Israel eight years ago.

Both in Iraq and Syria, Iran and Islamic State have shown little interest in making one another their primary target. Turkey and Qatar have often served as Iran’s supporters in the Sunni world.

This is the context in which Israel is fighting its war with Hamas. And due to this context, two interrelated strategically significant events have occurred since the war began.

The first relates to the US.

The Obama administration’s decision to side with the members of the jihadist axis against Israel by adopting their demand to open Gaza’s borders with Israel and Egypt has served as the final nail in the coffin of America’s strategic credibility among its traditional regional allies.

As the US has stood with Hamas, it has also maintained its pursuit of a nuclear deal with Iran. The US’s position in these talks is to enable the mullocracy to follow North Korea’s path to a nuclear arsenal. The non-jihadist Sunni states share Israel’s conviction that they cannot survive a nuclear armed Iran.

Finally, President Barack Obama’s refusal to date to take offensive action to destroy Islamic State in Iraq and Syria demonstrates to Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states that under Obama, the US would rather allow Islamic State to expand into their territory and destroy them than return US military forces to Iraq.

In other words, Obama’s pro-Hamas-, pro-Iran- and pro-Muslim Brotherhood-axis policies, along with his refusal to date to take effective action in Iraq and Syria to obliterate Islamic State, have convinced the US’s traditional allies that for the next two-and-a-half years, not only can they not rely on the US, they cannot discount the possibility of the US taking actions that harm them.

It is in the face of the US’s shift of allegiances under Obama that the non-jihadist Sunni regimes have begun to reevaluate their ties to Israel. Until the Obama presidency, the Saudis and Egyptians felt secure in their alliance with the US. Consequently, they never felt it necessary or even desirable to consider Israel as a strategic partner.

Under the US’s strategic protection, the traditional Sunni regimes had the luxury of maintaining their support for Palestinian terrorists and rejecting the notion of strategic cooperation with Israel, whether against Iran, al-Qaida or any other common foe.

So sequestered by the US, Israel became convinced that the only way it could enjoy any benefit from its shared strategic interests with its neighbors was by first bowing to the US’s long-held obsession with strengthening the PLO. This has involved surrendering land, political legitimacy and money to the terror group still committed to Israel’s destruction.

The war with Hamas has changed all of this.

The partnership that has emerged in this war between Israel, Egypt and Saudi Arabia is a direct consequence of Obama’s abandonment of the US’s traditional allies. Recognizing the threat that Hamas, as a component part of the Sunni jihadist alliance, constitutes for their own regimes, and in the absence of American support for Israel, Egypt and Saudi Arabia have worked with Israel to defeat Hamas and keep Gaza’s borders sealed.

Most Israelis have yet to grasp the strategic significance of this emerging alliance. This owes in large part to the Left’s domination of the public discourse.

The Israeli Left sees this new partnership. But it fails to understand its basis or significance. For the Left, all developments lead to the same conclusion: Whatever happens, Israel must strengthen the PLO by strengthening Palestinian Authority Chairman and PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas.

Failing to recognize the basis for Israel’s emerging strategic partnership, led by Finance Minister Yair Lapid and Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, the Left is advocating using our new ties with Saudi Arabia and Egypt as a means of strengthening Abbas by organizing a regional peace conference.

What they fail to understand is that such a move would destroy the partnership.

Israel’s strategic cooperation with Egypt and Saudi Arabia owes to their shared interests. It cannot extend beyond them. And they have no shared interests in regard to the PLO.

Threatened by the axis of jihad, no Muslim government can be seen publicly with Israelis. Asking Egyptian and Saudi leaders to have their pictures taken with Israelis is like asking them to sign their own death warrants.

Moreover, Israel’s required end-state in negotiations with the PLO – defensible borders and recognition of its sovereign rights to Jerusalem – is something that no Muslim regime can publicly accept – especially now.

So far from building on our new cooperative relationship, if the government heeds the Left’s advice and uses our incipient ties with the Saudis and Egyptians to strengthen the PLO, it will highlight and exacerbate conflicting interests and so destroy the partnership.

Moreover, the fact is that the PLO can play no constructive role for any of the sides in weakening our common foes. As he has for the past decade, during the current war Abbas has demonstrated that he is utterly worthless in the fight against the forces of jihad – both of the Sunni and Shi’ite variety.

At least for the duration of Obama’s presidency the interests that Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Israel share in preventing Iran from developing nuclear weapons and defeating the Muslim Brotherhood/Islamic State as military and political threats can only be advanced through joint action.

The Obama administration would have forced Israel to bow to Hamas’s demands weeks ago if the Egyptians and Saudis hadn’t opposed a Hamas victory.

Without Israeli military action, Iran will become a nuclear power. In light of the US’s backing of Iran’s nuclear program, such an Israeli operation is effectively impossible without regional support.

As to Islamic State, right now the US is interested in cooperating with Iran in fighting the barbaric force.

In exchange for Iranian cooperation, the US is liable to cede Basra and the Shatt al-Arab to Iran.

Effective cooperation between Israel, the Kurds and the Sunnis could contain, and perhaps defeat, Islamic State while reducing Iran’s chances of securing the strategically vital waterway.

Since the emerging partnership between Israel, Egypt and Saudi Arabia is a direct result of the Obama administration’s destruction of US strategic credibility, it is fairly clear that if properly managed, it can last until January 2017. Until then, in all likelihood, the US will be unwilling and unable to rebuild its reputation.

And until then, the parties are unlikely to find alternative means of securing their interests that are more effective than joint action.

Given the stakes, and the complementary capabilities of the various parties, Israel’s primary task today must be to work quietly and diligently with the Saudis and Egyptians to expand on their joint achievements in Gaza.

The Israeli-Egyptian-Saudi alliance can ensure that all members survive the Obama era. And if [it] lasts into the next administration, it will place all of its members on more secure footing with the US, whether or not a new administration decides to rebuild the US alliance structure in the Middle East.