Archive for June 26, 2016

3 Doctors and a Nurse Arrested for Hizmeh Terror Bombing

June 26, 2016

Their attack seriously wounded an IDF officer on the eve of Israel’s Memorial Day.

By: Jewish Press News Briefs Published: June 26th, 2016

Source: The Jewish Press » » 3 Doctors and a Nurse Arrested for Hizmeh Terror Bombing

 

This has got to be one of the strangest Arab terror cells captured to date in Israel.

On the eve of Israel’s Memorial Day a series of bombs exploded in the Hizme junction, seriously wounding an IDF officer.

The Shabak announced today that in a combined effort between the Shabak and the IDF’s Duvdevan unit, the terror cell which exploded the bombs has been captured. The cell had been planning additional attacks near Maale Adumim.

What is surprising is the makeup of the terror cell.

Three of the five Arab terrorists are dentists, one is a (male) nurse who works in a hospital (which wasn’t named). Two of the suspects had been arrested earlier which apparently led to the capture of the entire cell.

The terror suspects arrested in this raid were:

Dr. Samer Mahmoud Daoud al-Halabi, born in 1980, a resident of Abu Dis, a dentist – he placed and activated the bombs by cellphone.

Dr. Dagana Faiz Gamil Nabhan, born in 1980, a resident of the Kalandia, a dentist – he assisted al-Halabi.

Daoud Mahmoud Shehada al-Halabi, born in 1952, a resident of Abu Dis, a (male) nurse in a hospital – the father of the perpetrator.

Dr. Daoud Mahmud al-Halabi Shehadeh, born in 1974, a resident of Abu Dis, a dentist – the terrorist’s brother and his assistant in the bombing.

Shadi Mohamed Ahmed Muhsen, born in ’84, a resident of Abu Dis – the perpetrator’s cousin and an assistant in the bombing.

The surname al-Halabi indicates the family immigrated to Israel from Aleppo [Haleb], Syria.

The medical terrorists

The bombs were originally made and stored in one of the dental clinics in the village of Akav.

Security forces found 56 small pipe bombs, as well as one larger bomb, and two Molotov cocktails.

The professional assessment was that all the bombs were very lethal.

So much for the theory that well-educated, upper-middle class Muslims will not get involved in terror.

56 small but powerful pipe bombs.

Jewish Press News Briefs

Judge Jeanine: Brexit is just the beginning

June 26, 2016
Published on Jun 26, 2016

The world is changing and the elite establishment’s days are numbered

 

Saudis Kept Two Jihad Terror Groups Tied to Huma Abedin Off U.S. List

June 26, 2016

Saudis Kept Two Jihad Terror Groups Tied to Huma Abedin Off U.S. List

By  Pamela Geller on June 26, 2016

Source: Saudis Kept Two Jihad Terror Groups Tied to Huma Abedin Off U.S. List | Pamela Geller

Unconscionable. This is the malignant influence that another Clinton presidency would allow to continue to assert itself in the White House. It has to end. The Saudi/Muslim Brotherhood power over U.S. policymaking must be confronted, rejected and defeated.

“Saudis Kept Two Terror Groups Off U.S. List,” by Matthew Vadum, FrontPage, June 20, 2016:

The Saudi Arabian government apparently had so much clout with previous U.S. administrations that they refused to designate as terrorist organizations two terror-funding Islamofascist groups linked to Huma Abedin, now the vice-chairman of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

Abedin is joined at the hip to Hillary. She is to Mrs. Clinton what Valerie Jarrett is to President Obama.

That two deadly terrorist groups avoided proper scrutiny for years is a chilling reminder of how close Mrs. Clinton’s political network is to the brutal Muslim Brotherhood, possibly the Left’s favorite Islamist operation. It also underlines the extent to which Islamist enemies of the United States have infiltrated the American political establishment. And it takes on added importance now that polls show the pathologically dishonest Alinskyite radical who wrote the communitarian manifesto It Takes A Village has a significant lead over presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump.

Sifting through archived media reports, Breitbart’s Lee Stranahan discovered it was known in the weeks following the 9/11 attacks that the International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO) and its parent entity the Muslim World League (MWL), both of which are directly funded by Saudi authorities, were financial backers of al-Qaeda.

“The Saudis have probably done more to penetrate Al Qaeda than any other foreign intelligence service, but Al Qaeda in turn has penetrated the Saudi regime,” Newsweek reported the month after 9/11.

Although the IIRO, whose website calls the group the International Islamic Relief Organization of Saudi Arabia (IIROSA), and MWL “have been used by bin Laden to finance his operations,” they were “left off the list of groups sanctioned by the United States last week, U.S. officials hinted … in order to avoid embarrassing the Saudi government.”

The League acknowledges on its website that it is “engaged in propagating the religion of Islam” and “elucidating its principles and tenets.” It also engages in strategic lying, known in the Islamic world as taqiyya. The League “is well known for rejecting all acts of violence and promoting dialogue with the people of other cultures,” its website claims, adding that it does “not intend to undermine, dominate or practice hegemony over anyone else.”

It claims on the site that it has “external centers,” “external offices,” and “Islamic centers” in Argentina, Australia, Austria, Bangladesh, Belgium, Bosnia Herzegovina, Brazil, Burundi, Canada, Congo, Denmark, Egypt, France, Hungary, Indonesia, Italy, Jordan, Malaysia, Mozambique, Netherlands, Nigeria, Pakistan, Russia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sudan, Sweden, United Kingdom, and other countries.

IIRO describes itself as “a charity organization emanating from the Muslim World League.”

Its annual report from 2011/2012 indicates that “thousands of mosques have been built with an average of one mosque a day” and that it has “1,222 staff” worldwide. Under its “Holy Qur’an and Da’wa Program” it has “8,044 male and female students memorizing Qur’an and learning Islamic studies in 306 centres and Qur’an circles.” IIRO has “304 Qur’an teachers and supervisors” in “these centres in 29 countries around the world” and sponsors “338 Islamic preachers” in those 29 countries.

Clinton protégé and campaign vice-chairman Huma Abedin, her parents, and her siblings all have intimate ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim World League has reportedly taken in more than $1.3 billion since 1962 from the Saudi government to promote Wahhabism. The League, warns Andrew C. McCarthy, is the Brotherhood’s “principal vehicle for the international propagation of Islamic supremacist ideology.”

Abedin, who is married to disgraced former U.S. Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.), has never publicly explained her disturbing connections to the people who killed 3,000 Americans on 9/11 or why, despite those ties, she ought to be trusted with state secrets. And when courageous politicians like former Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.) have tried to sound the alarm about who Abedin really is, they have been relentlessly mocked by the media and politicians from both parties. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) famously suffered from an acute outbreak of faux chivalry on the Senate floor when congressional colleagues dared to ask legitimate questions about Abedin’s loyalty to this country.

Few recall that when Bill Clinton was president in 1996, the CIA believed the International Islamic Relief Organization helped to underwrite six terrorist training facilities in Afghanistan. Harper’s reported in 2004 that the former head of IIRO’s office in the Philippines, who happened to be Obama bin Laden’s brother-in-law, “had been linked to plots to ‘target the pope and U.S. airlines.’”

The year 1996 was also eventful for Abedin. That year the young Michigan-born woman returned to the U.S. after years of living with her jihadist parents and soaking up the militant Islamic culture of Saudi Arabia. She promptly began working for then-first lady Hillary as an intern in the White House. At the same time Abedin was a member of the executive board of the George Washington University chapter of the Muslims Students Association, which was created by the MWL in the 1960s. In 1996 Abedin also began working as assistant editor at the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, an Islamist publication of the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs (IMMA).

The Institute was founded in 1979 by the entrepreneurial Islamist Abdullah Omar Naseef who at the time was vice president of the prestigious King Abdulaziz University in Saudi Arabia. Naseef, who became MWL secretary-general in 1983, hired the late Dr. Zyed Abedin, Huma’s father, as managing editor of the Journal, and the Abedins relocated to the repressive Saudi kingdom. Huma’s mother is the publication’s editor-in-chief and her brother and sister also work there as editors.

The Harper’s article from 12 years ago added that the U.S. intelligence community believed MWL employees took part in the bombing of two U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998. Even though both MWL and IIRO funded al-Qaeda, Newsweek reported in October 2001, the Bush administration “left the two organizations off the list of designated terrorist groups in order to spare the Saudi government from embarrassment.” It’s not clear why the Clinton administration suppressed the truth about the two organizations.

Stranahan is optimistic that despite the frantic lies of the Left, the facts about Hillary and Huma will receive proper attention in the current election cycle.

“Defenders of Clinton and Abedin have attempted to spin concerns about Abedin’s disturbing connections as a crazed right-wing conspiracy theory, but the facts are coming out, and with America focused on the presidential race and terrorism, it is just a matter of time before the truth comes out.”

Meanwhile, even as the nation grieves for the 49 innocent Americans gunned down June 12 by Muslim terrorist Omar Mateen at a gay club in Orlando, Fla., members of the media seem blissfully unaware that for five years Hillary Clinton had a real live jihad-loving terrorist on the payroll at her family foundation.

Gehad el-Haddad, an Islamic terrorist leader who jumped straight from his job at the terrorist-friendly international cash-for-favors clearinghouse known as the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation to a post with Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, received a life sentence back home last year for seditious Islamist activities.

The professional propagandist may have learned about forcing Sharia law on Egyptians while he was “city director,” a senior communications post, at the Clintons’ charity from August 2007 to August 2012. (Note: Gehad is the Egyptian version of the Arabic word jihad.) Haddad was the lead English-language spokesman for the Muslim Brotherhood and a frequent apologist for the since-ousted President Mohamed Morsi’s violent crackdowns on civil liberties. He put his spin doctoring skills to use downplaying Brotherhood supporters’ attacks on women and children.

Hillary Clinton, of course, headed the U.S. Department of State during the Egyptian Revolution of 2011 that ousted longtime U.S. ally and anti-Islamist Hosni Mubarak and cleared the way for Morsi, an Obama ally.

It beggars belief that Clinton didn’t know about Haddad’s employment with the Brotherhood. A mere month after Haddad quit his Clinton Foundation job for full-time employment with the Brotherhood in 2012, Morsi received an invitation to deliver a major address at the Clinton Global Initiative, a high-profile project of the foundation.

These things are all just incredible coincidences, Clinton’s defenders will insist.

Jumbo super market in the Netherlands come with an Israel corner

June 26, 2016

A franchise holder of the supermarket chain Jumbo in the Netherlands was upset about the boycott of Israeli product and took 2 steps further than only selling Israeli products .

The VOICE of reason .

June 26, 2016

 

H/T  E.J.Bron

ttps://ejbron.wordpress.com

Why Brexit Is More Entrance Than Exit

June 26, 2016

Why Brexit Is More Entrance Than Exit, PJ MediaRoger Kimball, June 26, 2016

(The petition for a new referendum poll was apparently a scam.

The BBC, The Mirror, France 24, The Telegraph, Manchester Evening News, The Guardian… all reported on the bogus petition.

But they got punked. The poll was manufactured by 4Chan and Anonymous hackers who loaded up the signatures with fake names from The Vatican, Ghana, North Korea and elsewhere. [Emphasis in original — DM]

The petition fit the meme, so it deserved and got no fact-checking — DM)

Pop psychologists tell us that grief proceeds through five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Have been blindsided by the stunning victory of Brexit on Thursday,  members of the camp of  the Remainders are now vibrating somewhere between anger and bargaining. This followed hard on a brief period of stunned denial that often expressed itself as gulping incredulity. As the psychiatrist Theodore Dalrymple observed in City Journal,

For a long time, Britons who wanted their country to leave the European Union were regarded almost as mentally ill by those who wanted it to stay. The leavers didn’t have an opinion; they had a pathology. Since one doesn’t argue with pathology, it wasn’t necessary for the remainers to answer the leavers with more than sneers and derision.Even after the vote, the attitude persists. Those who voted to leave are described as,ipso facto, small-minded, xenophobic, and fearful of the future. Those who voted to stay are described as, ipso facto, open-minded, cosmopolitan, and forward-looking.

At this point it is not clear exactly when the Brits will formally invoke Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union and officially begin the withdrawal negotiations. But Thursday’s vote made Britain’s congé in the most stinging and public manner.

As of this writing, early Sunday morning, the Remainders have yet to take that rebuke on board. They have, however, moved firmly from denial to white hot anger, as the movement to invalidate the referendum by holding a second referendum attests. As of last night, a petition demanding that Parliament force a new referendum had attracted some 2 million signatures.

The fatuousness of that effort is as patent as it is contemptible. Back in 2009, Barack Obama smugly observed that “elections have consequences.” Thursday’s vote was a non-binding referendum, not an election, but it most assuredly has consequences, as (for example) the immediate announcement by David Cameron, the prime minister, that he would soon be resigning demonstrates.

I expect that the Remainders will soon abandon the petition and move on to more circuitous, backroom maneuvers to subvert or nullify the will of the people. It is at that point, when the delayers and dispensers of red tape arrive with their megaphones, that we’ll know that the bargaining stage has been definitively reached. (I am no psychologist, but my observation is that most people, even if they  do progress through the five stages described, do not entirely leave behind the earlier stages. There generally persists, I believe,  a bit of denial and more than a bit of anger.)

Fraser Nelson, editor of The Spectator, put his finger on one of the most extraordinary features of the Brexit phenomenon: that the vote turned out the way it did despite the Establishment’s mobilization of every resource at its command against it. “Never,” he wrote in an article for The Wall Street Journal,  “has there been a greater coalition of the establishment than that assembled by Prime Minister David Cameron for his referendum campaign to keep the U.K. in the European Union.”

There was almost every Westminster party leader, most of their troops and almost every trade union and employers’ federation. There were retired spy chiefs, historians, football clubs, national treasures like Stephen Hawking and divinities like Keira Knightley. And some global glamour too: President Barack Obama flew to London to do his bit, and Goldman Sachs opened its checkbook.And none of it worked. The opinion polls barely moved over the course of the campaign, and 52% of Britons voted to leave the EU. That slender majority was probably the biggest slap in the face ever delivered to the British establishment in the history of universal suffrage.

I’d say that 52%  is closer to “decisive” than “slender,” but Nelson’s point is well taken. The Remainders threw everything they had into this campaign, but it availed them nothing. The British people don’t like what the commissars in Brussels have been doing to their country. What is euphemistically called “immigration” — really, it is a sort of invasion – was part of the story, but only a part. Remainders seized on immigration as the motivating issue because it was easy to weaponize and use it to castigate those who favored Brexit as troglodytic nativists and reactionaries.

As I noted yesterday, the Brexit vote was less an “anti-Europe” vote than a positive assertion of freedom. Indeed, it was by accentuating the positive, by underscoring Brtain’s native strengths and potential, that Brexiteers like Boris Johnson were able to give affirmative voice to the people’s disenchantment. The unease that many Brits felt under the regulatory yoke of the EU is felt by many other people, including many Americans.

As has been often pointed out, that unease helps to explain the success of Donald Trump.  Would that Trump had a scintilla of the insight and affirmative spirit of Brexiteers like Boris Johnson, Dan Hannan,Michael Gove, and Nigel Farage.  Despite desperate howls to the contrary, the campaign these men waged triumphed not because of what they were repudiating but what they were saying Yes to. Sure, the campaign involved a No to officious interference by corrupt and unaccountable officials across the channel. But the main course was Yes: Yes to freedom, Yes to individual responsible, Yes to deciding for ourselves how we will govern ourselves.

There’s a moral here for politicians, and for political pundits.  It’s unclear, however, whether many people are bothering to read the script.

Joe Biden to China: Curb North Korea or Japan Can Go Nuclear ‘Virtually Overnight’

June 26, 2016

Joe Biden to China: Curb North Korea or Japan Can Go Nuclear ‘Virtually Overnight’, Breitbart, Frances Martel, June 24, 2016

Joe Biden

Vice President Joe Biden warned China that the Japanese government may acquire nuclear weapons “virtually overnight” if the threat from North Korea becomes too grave, urging Beijing to do more to curb Pyongyang’s belligerence.

The Vice President’s comments echo those of presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, who warned that Japan and South Korea acquiring nuclear weapons “is going to happen anyway” in controversial remarks issued in March. Japanese government officials and media responded to Trump’s comments much more severely than they have to Biden’s.

“What happens if Japan, who could tomorrow, could go nuclear tomorrow? They have the capacity to do it virtually overnight,” Biden told PBS host Charlie Rose in an interview broadcast Monday. He explained that he made this warning to Chinese President Xi Jinping personally while discussing the deployment of a Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system in South Korea to protect from a North Korean attack, a move that China has condemned vocally.

“When I tell President Xi, you have to understand we got a guy up there in North Korea who is talking about building weapons that can strike, nuclear weapons strike the United States and not only Hawaii and Alaska, but… the mainland of the United States,” he told Rose. “And I say, so we’re going to move up our defense system, and he says no, no, no, wait a minute, my military thinks you’re going to try to circle us.”

Biden suggested that China, a fellow communist country, “has the single greatest ability to influence North Korea.”

Japan has issued a tepid response to the remarks, with Japanese Deputy Chief Cabinet Secretary Hiroshige Seko telling reporters Friday that Japan simply “can never possess nuclear weapons.” Japan remains the only nation in the world to experience a nuclear weapon attack.

In March, Trump stated that both Japan and South Korea were likely to develop nuclear capabilities due to their access to advanced technology. “It’s going to happen, anyway. It’s only a question of time. They’re going to start having them, or we have to get rid of them entirely,” he said, suggesting that, should the move be inevitable, the United States should do more to curb its defense expenses in Asia protecting wealthy nations.

In response, Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida stated that Japan having nuclear capabilities was “impossible,” and national newspaper Asahi Shimbun described national leaders as responding with “bewilderment and unease.

The government of North Korea has behaved with extreme belligerence in 2016, beginning the year with the detonation of what they claimed was a hydrogen bomb and repeatedly launching missiles towards Japan (all have failed to reach their targets). Most recently, North Korea tested what are believed to be two Musudan ballistic missiles, with one reaching the greatest height the nation has yet to achieve on a test.

China responded to the new test by calling for North Korea to “act with caution and refrain from taking actions that may elevate tension on the Korean peninsula.” China recently backed expanded UN sanctions on North Korea, but has condemned U.S. and South Korean defense buildups in response to Pyongyang, claiming that the also put Beijing in the line of fire.

While China has kept its criticism of North Korea tepid and remained its largest trade partner, the volume of that trade has declined significantly. Imports from North Korea dropped 12.6 percent between May 2015 and May 2016, while exports to North Korea fell 5.9 percent in the same time period.

Op-Ed: The American Gulag

June 26, 2016

Op-Ed: The American Gulag, Israel National News, Phyllis Chester, June 26, 2016

For years, beginning in 2003, I have personally faced both censorship and demonization. When I began publishing pieces about anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism, and Islamic gender and religious apartheid at conservative sites, I was seen as having “gone over to the dark side,” as having joined the legion of enemies against all that was right and good.

My former easy and frequent access to left-liberal venues was over. I learned, early on, about the soft censorship of the Left, the American version of the Soviet Gulag. One could think, write, and even publish but it would be as if one had not spoken–although one would still be constantly attacked for where one published as much as for what one published.

Since then, Left censorship has only gotten worse. (There is also censorship on the Right–but not quite as much.)

A week ago, a colleague of mine was thrilled that a mainstream newspaper had reached out to him for a piece about the violent customs of many male Muslim immigrants to Europe. He discovered, to his shock, that his piece had been edited in a way that turned his argument upside down and ended up sounding like American Attorney General Loretta Lynch’s view, namely, that home-grown terrorists need “love and compassion,” not profiling or detention.

I told him: One more left-liberal newspaper has just bitten the Orwellian dust. He could expose this use of his reasoned view for propaganda purposes–or wear out his welcome at this distinguished venue.

“But,” I said, “on the other hand, what kind of welcome is it if they change your words and the main thrust of your argument?”

That same week, right after the Jihad massacre in Orlando, another colleague, long used to being published–and published frequently at gay websites–wrote about the male Muslim immigrant/refugee physical and sexual violence against girls and women (their own and infidel women); against homosexuals–and paradoxically, also against young boys. He counseled gays to understand that the issues of gun control and “hate,” while important, were also quite beside the point, that “homosexuality is a capital crime in Islam.”

His piece was rejected by every gay site he approached. One venue threatened him:  If he published his piece “anywhere,” that his work would no longer be welcome in their pages.

I welcomed him to the American Gulag.

He told me that he finally “had” to publish the piece at a conservative site.

Gently, I told him that what he wrote was the kind of piece that was long familiar only at conservative sites and that he should expect considerable flack for where he’s published as well as for what he’s published.

Another gay right activist told me that when he described Orlando as a Jihad attack, he was castigated as a “right-wing hater.” He, too, had to publish what he wanted to say at a conservative site.

I published two pieces about Orlando. I said similar kinds of things and I privately emailed both articles to about 30 gay activists whom I know.

The silence thereafter was, as they say, deafening. I was not attacked but I was given the Silent Treatment.

For a moment, I felt like gay activist Larry Kramer might have felt when, in the 1980s, he tried to persuade gay men to stop going to the baths and engaging in promiscuous sex, that their lust was literally killing them. Kramer was attacked as a spoilsport and as the homophobic enemy of the gay lifestyle. Alas, Kramer had been right and many gay male lives were lost to AIDS.

Thus, gay activists see their collective interests as best served by marching, lock-step, with politically correct politicians who view “mental illness,” “gun control,” and “American right-wing hatred of gays”–not Jihad–as the major problems. Such gay activists also prefer “Palestine” to Israel. It makes absolutely no difference that Israel does not murder its homosexual citizens and that in fact, Israel grants asylum to Muslim Arab men in flight from being torture-murdered by other Muslim Arab men.

A number of European activists have recently visited me.  They described what has been happening to women who undertake the journey from Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Turkey;  along the way, the girls and women are continually groped and sexually assaulted, even penetrated in every possible orifice, by gangs of male Muslim immigrants. If they want to live, their husbands and fathers can do nothing.

So much for Muslim immigrant women on the move.

And now, European women are being told to “dye their hair black,” stay home “after 8pm,” “always have a male escort at night;” a group of German nudists, whose tradition goes back 100 years, have just been told to “cover up” because refugees are being moved into the rural lake community.

Where will this all end? In Europe becoming a Muslim Caliphate dominated by Sharia law and by all its myriad misogynist interpretations? In Muslim immigrants assimilating to Western ways? In Europeans voluntarily converting to Arab and Muslim ways? In non-violent but parallel Muslim lives?

Bravo to England which has just taken its first, high risk steps to control its borders and its immigrant population.

A victory for patriotism

June 26, 2016

A victory for patriotism, Israel Hayom, Dror Eydar, June 26, 2016

(“Patriotism” — what a silly, old-fashioned concept. Thus spake the left. — DM)

1.
Nationalism won in Britain — not “fascism,” not “xenophobia” and not any of the other pejoratives pseudo-liberals love to apply to anything that counters their beliefs. Yes, pure and simple patriotism is what drove Brexit supporters, the kind of nationalism that leftist-liberal elites in the West in general, and Britain in particular, do not identify with.

British nationalism preceded Europe. The late historian Adrian Hastings placed the emergence of the buds of this nationalism in the eighth century and the formation of a true English national entity between the ninth and 11th centuries, at the end of the Anglo-Saxon period. So the claims that the pro-Brexit movement was fueled by of “populism” and “empty rhetoric” indicates the critics’ own worldview.

2.
Fear of foreign migrants was not the main motive behind Brexit, but the unchecked flow of such migrants did serve as a wake-up call. Many of the migrants flooding into Britain refuse to integrate into British society. They do not adopt the culture of their hosts and do not see themselves as committed to the long-standing British ethos. This cultural (and perhaps national) autonomy migrants have created for themselves within Britain has served as a catalyst for the reawakening of natural feelings of patriotism among native Britons — feelings that elites have been trying to kill in the name of universal ideas.

3.
Not surprisingly, and quite entertainingly in fact, much of the Israeli media showed sympathy for the “Remain” camp. Why, you ask, does this have anything to do with us? Let’s look at the similarities between the Brexit vote and the last Knesset elections in March 2015. One can see the same media denial of the will of the people, belittlement of patriotic and religious sentiments and adherence to leftist totalitarian thinking (even at the cost of detachment from reality and the people). For Israeli media figures, the aftermath of the Brexit vote was a mini-replay of the dejection they felt after the last Knesset elections.

4.
Just a few months ago, U.S. President Barack Obama called on Brits to vote to remain in the European Union. The results of Thursday’s referendum showed Obama’s complete lack of influence. Obama is a symbol of both the radicalization of Western elites, who since the end of World War II have been trying to dissolve the idea of the sovereign nation-state, and the attempt by these elites to impose ideology (euphemistically called “values”) on the reality they see, instead of engaging in a thorough examination of reality and the lessons of history. The drama in the U.K. will have implications on these subjects, too.

5.
When it comes to Israel, it is still not clear whether Britain’s departure from the EU will be good or bad. Anti-Israel activists on the European continent and inside Britain, who, seeking via a variety of methods (some sophisticated and some less so) to thwart the Jewish people’s return to Zion, will not disappear, and will perhaps even get stronger. However, seeing the hostile EU be weakened is not a bad thing. We will wait and see how things develop.

PM: Water poisoning claims prove Abbas no peace partner

June 26, 2016

PM: Water poisoning claims prove Abbas no peace partner Netanyahu brushes off PA president’s ‘halfhearted half-apology’ for repeating debunked hoax story in EU parliament address

By Tamar Pileggi

June 26, 2016, 2:32 pm

Source: PM: Water poisoning claims prove Abbas no peace partner | The Times of Israel

Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu leads the weekly cabinet meeting at the Prime Minister’s Office in Jerusalem on June 26, 2016. (Miriam Alster/FLASH90)

Ahead of his trip to Rome for talks with US Secretary of State John Kerry, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Sunday said Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’s recent address at the European Parliament again proved he was an unsuitable partner for pursuing peace.

Abbas last week told European lawmakers in Brussels that an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and East Jerusalem would end global terrorism, and repeated a debunked hoax story claiming that local rabbis had called for poisoning Palestinians’ water supply. Admitting the claim was “baseless,” Abbas on Saturday apologized and walked back the water poisoning allegation.

 “Abbas again last week proved to the entire world that he is not interested in direct negotiations with Israel,” the prime minister said at the start of his weekly cabinet meeting.

“Worse, he also spread abhorrent lies about the State of Israel and Judaism. True, he quickly apologized, a halfhearted half-apology, but the things he said there were in keeping with what he has said about us on other occasions, including at the UN General Assembly,” Netanyahu said. “Therefore, I think that people can conclude from this who wants to advance peace and a peace process – and who does not.”

A statement issued by the Prime Minister’s Office on Thursday accused Abbas of peddling lies, promoting incitement and spreading blood libels in his speech.

President of the Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas delivers a speech at the European Union Parliament in Brussels on June 23, 2016. (AFP / JOHN THYS)

President of the Palestinian Authority Mahmoud Abbas delivers a speech at the European Union Parliament in Brussels on June 23, 2016. (AFP / JOHN THYS)

“Israel waits for the day Abbas stops peddling lies and inciting [against Israel]. Until then, Israel will continue to defend itself against Palestinian incitement, which fuels terror,” the statement said.

Other senior Israeli politicians and US-based Jewish groups also issued sharp rebukes of the PA president over his remarks.

Following Sunday’s cabinet meeting, Netanyahu was set to leave for Rome to meet with Kerry, where, according to reports, the two men will discuss the possibility of reviving the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and the imminent publication of an international report expected to criticize Israeli settlement building.

Netanyahu will reportedly also make a last ditch effort to convince Kerry to soften an upcoming report that is expected to be critical of Israel.

The report by the Quartet diplomatic group — the United Nations, the European Union, the United States and Russia — is concerned that Palestinian violence and Israel’s construction in the West Bank and East Jerusalem is pushing the prospect of peace further away.

Washington, the traditional mediator in Middle East peace efforts, has not taken the lead in recent months, concerned that the situation is not promising and that another round of failed talks would only further embitter both parties.

But France has launched a diplomatic initiative to build international pressure on both sides.

The United States gave the French move a cool reception, but Kerry attended its inaugural meeting in Paris and has called on both sides to take “affirmative steps” to calm tempers and preserve the possibility of peace.