Yesterday Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim Jaafari, accompanied by a dozen Iraqi cabinet ministers, rounded off a three-day official visit to the Islamic Republic of Iran. While there, Jaafari met with Iranian arch-dictator Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, outgoing president Mohammad Khatami and president-elect Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Jaafari heads the Islamic Dawa faction in Iraq, which is closely allied with Teheran. He came…
Reacting to Neville Chamberlain's Munich Pact with Adolf Hitler in the British Parliament in October 1938, Winston Churchill warned, "You have to consider the character of the Nazi movement and the rule which it implies….There can never be friendship between the British democracy and the Nazi power, that power which spurns Christian ethics, which cheers its onward course by a…
A district attorney in a Middle Eastern country last week indicted a citizen for writing a letter to a public servant accusing him of being a quisling. The remarkable thing about the episode is that it did not take place in Syria or in Egypt. It took place in the only democracy in the Middle East. Last Thursday, the…
The barbaric terrorist attacks on Thursday morning in London make us all feel like Englishmen. Sitting in Jerusalem and watching the scenes on the television screen of emergency workers evacuating wounded from the burned out bus and of survivors, faces blackened from the underground blasts, describing the frightful events, bend one's heart toward Britain in its hour of pain. …
Since his election to the Iranian presidency two weeks ago, ultra Islamist Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has done everything to make a strong first impression on the rest of the world. On the nuclear issue, Ahmadinejad is planning to take a "new approach" towards Iran's ongoing negotiations with Britain, France and Germany on Iran's nuclear program. This new approach does not…
So on Wednesday it started. The fight for and against Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's plan to evacuate 8,000 law-abiding Israeli citizens from their homes has begun. There can be no doubt today in anyone's mind that in ignoring the mandate he received from Israeli voters in 2003 to oppose unilateral withdrawal from Gaza and in joining forces with the rejected…
Sunday night the Labor Party's new general secretary, MK Eitan Cabel, was forced to adjourn the party's central committee meeting when it descended into fistfights between the various groups of hooligans who comprise the "political" camps of the competing contenders for party leadership. Minister Dalia Itzik burst into tears when she received a blow on her leg and reportedly even…
During his meeting with US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Saturday, PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas told Rice that the PA had ceased all incitement activities against Israel. Yet on the same day that they met, the PA's official news service WAFA "reported" that Israelis were sending hordes of wild pigs to Palestinian villages around Hawarah village in the Nablus…
During her visit to Jerusalem on Sunday, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice applauded Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, saying, "He has displayed courage and vision in putting forth this disengagement plan." Unfortunately, nothing could be further from the truth. In a new book, Boomerang, published in Hebrew last week, left-wing commentators Raviv Drucker and Ofer Shelach provide an…
In an in-depth article entitled "How we would fight China" published in the June issue of The Atlantic Monthly, military correspondent Robert D. Kaplan analyzes the encroaching specter of a cold war between the US and China. He also sets out the strategies and tactics that the US military's Pacific Command is constructing to contend with the emerging reality. In…