Monthly Archives : November 2017

The State Department drops the ball


Over the weekend, The New York Times published its latest broadside against US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson for what the newspaper referred to as his “culling” of senior State Department officials and his failure to date to either nominate or appoint senior personnel to open positions. But if the State Department’s extraordinary about face on the PLO’s mission in…

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Portents of a quagmire in Syria


Is the war in Syria won? The images broadcast this week from Sochi, the Russian vacation town on the Black Sea coast, were pictures of victory – for the bad guys. On Tuesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin stood beside his Syrian client, President Bashar Assad, who licked Putin’s boots, as well he should have. Assad owes his regime and his…

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Holding the PLO (and the State Department) accountable


Is the PLO’s long vacation from accountability coming to an end? How about the State Department’s? In 1987 the US State Department placed the PLO on its list of foreign terrorist organizations. The PLO was removed from the list in 1994, following the initiation of its peace process with Israel in 1993. As part of the Clinton administration’s efforts to…

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Bannon and the anti-Israel establishment


Speaking at the Zionist Organization of America’s annual dinner, Steven Bannon, US President Donald Trump’s former chief strategist and current CEO of the Breitbart news website, said the US political establishment has “lowered the bar on what [pro-Israel] is supposed to be.” Bannon invited the pro-Israel activists to join what he referred to as the “insurgency movement against the Republican…

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Pining for fig leafs


Friday, long-time US diplomats and Middle East experts Aaron David Miller and Richard Sokolsky published an article in Foreign Policy expressing “buyers’ remorse” over Saudi Arabia’s newfound willingness to take the lead in regional affairs. Titled, “Donald Trump has unleashed the Saudi Arabia we always wanted – and feared,” Miller and Sokolsky note that for generations, US policymakers wanted the…

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Tzippy and the Iceberg


Princeton University Hillel’s last minute decision on Monday to cancel Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipy Hotovely’s scheduled address was the tip of a very dangerous iceberg. The iceberg itself was revealed the next day on Capitol Hill. On Tuesday the House Judiciary Committee held a hearing on the Antisemitism Awareness Act of 2016. The bill is intended to facilitate the fight…

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The American Jewish BDS movement, and its victims


Here is the transcript of the above video interview on this topic: Priceton University is terrible. They should be ashamed of themselves. Hillel should be ashamed of itself. They have this policy of not supporting BDS, but Hillel supports silencing Caroline Glick, Tzipi Hotovely, and I would assume Ayelet Shaked and Naftali Bennet, and Gilad Erdan and maybe Bibi Netanyahu;…

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The potential of the Saudi purges


The purges in Saudi Arabia are a shocking development with strategic implications. But to understand their potential promise, it is important to understand the context in which they are taking place. For 70 years, Saudi Arabia served as the largest and most significant incubator of Sunni jihad. Its Wahhabist Islamic establishment funded radical mosques throughout the world. Saudi princes have…

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America, the laughingstock


The United States has a credibility problem. Put plainly, aside from Israel, no one in the Middle East appears to take the Americans seriously. Let’s start with the Palestinians. In the wake of last month’s unity deal concluded between US-backed Fatah and Iran-backed Hamas, US President Donald Trump’s special Middle East envoy Jason Greenblatt announced, “Any Palestinian government must unambiguously…

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