02/18/2022
Several commentators have argued in recent days that the crisis between Russia and Ukraine has been a godsend for President Joe Biden ahead of the midterm elections in November. The argument is fairly straightforward. With tough talk and without endangering any U.S. forces, Biden is managing to block Russian President Vladimir Putin from carrying through on his plan to invade…
02/11/2022
Former Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif recently co-authored a book in Farsi about the 2015 nuclear deal that tells us a great deal about how we should be assessing the nuclear negotiations taking place in Vienna between Iran and the P5+1 (the U.S., Russia, China, France, Germany and France). Titled, The Nuclear Deal: The Untold Story of the JCPOA, Projecting…
02/10/2022
On Sunday morning, Israelis awoke to the headline in Calcalist, an business newspaper, reporting that the legal fraternity used counterterror spyware to remotely seize the contents of the cellphones of 26 Israelis, including then prime minister’s son, his closest advisors, journalists, businessmen, several mayors, senior government officials, and others. The story was an earthquake of epic proportions and the police,…
02/10/2022
On February 1, Amnesty International published a conspiracy theory about Jews. Amnesty’s 280-page diatribe entitled, “Israel’s Apartheid Against the Palestinians: Cruel System of Domination and Crime Against Humanity,” alleges that the only liberal democracy in the Middle East and the only Jewish state in the world is a criminal enterprise and has been since its formation in 1948. According to…
02/04/2022
In this week’s episode of the Mideast News Hour I was joined by Dr. Victoria Coates, the Distinguished Fellow for Strategic Studies at the American Foreign Policy Council. During the Trump administration, Victoria served as Deputy National Security Advisor and as the Senior Policy Advisor to the Secretary of Energy and the Secretary’s Representative to the Middle East and North…
02/04/2022
One of the curiouser responses to Amnesty International’s Israel Apartheid report this week came from the Anti-Defamation League. Monday, the heads of Amnesty held a press conference in Israel’s capital Jerusalem. In it they presented the main “findings” of the “investigation” they conducted regarding the status of Israel’s existence. It works out that after years of “careful study,” Amnesty’s entirely…
01/28/2022
With Germany killing the NATO alliance to all practical purposes this week by effectively siding with Russia against the U.S. and NATO in the Ukraine crisis, in this week’s show I spoke with veteran reporter Benjamin Weinthal, who served from 2002-2016 as the Jerusalem Post’s correspondent in Berlin and now covers the Middle Eastern affairs for the Post in Jerusalem.…
01/28/2022
From Washington to Berlin to Warsaw to Kyiv, everyone says that only Russian President Vladimir Putin knows what he plans to do with the 120,000 troops he has deployed to the Ukrainian border. But at this point, even if Putin decides not to invade, even if he withdraws all of his forces from the border zone he has already won…
01/21/2022
In Episode 35, against the rising talk that Benjamin Netanyahu will agree to a plea bargain that will banish him from political life, co-host Gadi Taub and I spoke with our friend and bestselling author of the Plot Against the President and The Permanent Coup, Lee Smith. We discussed what happens to a democracy after permanent bureaucracies oust elected leaders,…
01/21/2022
Last Saturday morning, an armed Islamic terrorist named Malik Faisal Akram entered Congregation Beth Israel in Colleyville, Texas and took the rabbi and three congregants hostage. Eleven hours later, after the hostages freed themselves and FBI officers entered the synagogue and either killed Akram or watched him kill himself, the episode ended. Matt De Sarno, the FBI agent in charge at the…