Munich 1938, all over again, with Israel being sold out for “peace for our time” so others could profit the same way by coercing Czechoslovakia to let itself become a sacrificial lamb to Hitler for Neville Chamberlain and Great Britain’s allies in WWII. Please check out the following…
No one can realistically be expected to know everything about the Palestinian Arab/Israeli conflict, yet there are recurring canards that one should be prepared to address with some level of knowledge.
In order to delegitimize the Jewish state, Arabs often deny the Jewish historical connection to the land, especially the city of Jerusalem.
Denying the Historical Connection of Jews to the Land of Israel
Over the centuries in Islam, there developed basic ideas which are critical to understanding the Middle East conflict today, but especially the Israel – Palestinian dispute. One is that all lands once conquered by the followers of Islam are to be subjected to Allah and that once a land is thus subjected, it must forever remain in Allah’s dominion. Thus Jihad (Holy War) becomes an urgent necessity in order to reclaim all lands which have been lost to Islam.
This, of course, is the dire situation facing modern reconstituted Israel today. But it is also the same condition for other sovereign territories freed from Islamic conquest in the past, including Spain, Portugal, Sicily, parts of France, Greece, the Balkans and southern Russia, which all fell at one time under the yoke of Islamic occupation and Sharia Law.
Peloni: Another very thoughtful and well informed commentary by Pandavar. Highly recommended.
Seizing land is the penalty which will chastise the barbarians, creating deterrence and any possible lasting peace. Failing to do this will leave the Pals with a strong insentive to do October 7 over and over again. The result of this will not be costly for Israel alone, but for the entire Western world.
To understand them, it is useless to start from us. To understand them, we need to start from them. A Palestinian state, something that only the Jews ever wanted, the Palestinians can no longer dangle as a carrot before them.
October 7, 7/7, 9/11. In context, the date in US format is enough to fix in the mind a particular act of Muslim holy mass murder, or, as one immigrant especially undeserving of US generosity famously said of the first of these religion-defining incidents of savagery, “some people did something,” a trivial incident not worth remembering, long-forgotten. “Forget about last week!” barked Mohamed Hijab a few days after his fellow Muslims “did something” on October 7. Why do we, that is, the West, “keep banging on” about workers dying in Qatar, demanded an exasperated Qatari spokesperson, “Death is part of life”. “Life is not precious,” said a triumphant Gazan mother whose baby’s life Jewish doctors in an Israeli hospital had just saved, to a Jewish journalist who had gone out of his way to arrange funding to save her baby. Her dream for her baby was that he should become a suicide bomber in Jerusalem.
Zamir has a long, decorated career in the IDF and is trusted by PM Netanyahu
/ IDF Spokesperson’s Unit Wikipedia Commons
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz announced the selection of Maj.-Gen. Eyal Zamir to replace Lt.-Gen Herzi Halevi when the latter steps down in March.
The Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) announced the decision pm Saturday evening, following the end of the Sabbath.
Peloni: I am so grateful to Sen. Cotton and his allies for bringing this subject to the fore and acting with a sense of historical prudence in striking the pejorative term of “West Bank” from American documents. This term lies pregnant with the falsity that Judea and Samaria are not Jewish Lands, that Jews have no right to live there, and that they will one day be divested from Israel for yet another attempt to placate the Pals. None of these implications are true, fair or defensible. The reconstituted state of Israel has the only right to these lands which were stolen from the Jews in both ancient and modern times, while the indigenous rights to these lands continue to belong to the Jewish people alone. Hence, it is a welcome sight to see the rise of the Republican legislative majority come to be coincident with the bi-partisan recognition of the truth that there is no West Bank, and never will be again.
In 135 A.D., following the suppression of the revolt by the Maccabees, the Roman overlords of what was then called Judaea decided to change its name to “Syria Palaestina” — “Syria of the Philistines” — which was then shortened to “Palestine.” The Romans wanted to efface, through a change of toponym, the connection of the Jews to the land that was made obvious in the place name “Judaea.” They also attempted to change the name “Jerusalem” to “Aelia Capitolina” but, unlike “Palestine,” that place name never caught on.
For thousands of years, going back to the Bible, women have wept and grieved and pleaded to God over their miscarriages. Indeed, it took all these millennia for modern-day pharmaceutical companies to develop solutions to this ongoing nightmare.
In the 1940s, they were happy to offer doctors the ability to prescribe diethylstilbestrol (DES) to prevent miscarriage. “You can tell them you would give it to your wife,” the marketing mavens from Big Pharma suggested to physicians.
And with good reason. This “miracle drug” worked! Women who had experienced no trouble conceiving but were plagued by constant miscarriages were now able to carry their babies to term and deliver quite “perfect” bundles of joy!
Peloni: This is not meant to distract from, nor to disagree with, Kelleigh Nelson’s important recent report which we published on the topic of Tulsi Gabbard’s possible nomination as DNI. It has occurred to me, however, that the issue and application of a well informed judgement should be a key indicator in awarding someone the position of being named to such a sensitive and influential position as the DNI, thru which Gabbard will have an awesome responsibility of making the right judgements as indicated by the sensitive intelligence which she will have to assess. So her ability to use Good Judgement in matters related to intelligence would appear to be quite relevant to the most basic qualification of being considered for the role of which Gabbard is being considered at this time.
Peloni
U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
If confirmed to the position of the DNI, Tulsi Gabbard will have control of upgrading or downgrading the intelligence briefs which are handed to the president, and on which all policy decisions are gauged. She will also have the ability to shape the intelligence gathered by focusing or quashing investigations into foreign influence peddling as might be judged by her to be relevant.
So let us look at a few things related to this fact.
THE JORDANIAN NATIONALITY LAW SUPPORTS PRESIDENT TRUMP’S CLAIM THAT JORDAN SHOULD OPEN ITS DOORS TO PALESTINIANS….@POTUS@realDonaldTrump
EVERY PALESTINIAN IS AN NATIVE JORDANIAN WITH THE RIGHT TO RETURN TO THEIR HOMELAND, EAST OF THE JORDAN RIVER, ACCORDING TO JORDANIAN NATIONALITY LAW NO. (6) OF 1954, WHICH STATES: “ANYONE WHO HELD PALESTINIAN NATIONALITY BEFORE MAY 15, 1948, AND HABITUALLY RESIDED IN THE HASHEMITE KINGDOM OF JORDAN BETWEEN DECEMBER 20, 1949, AND FEBRUARY 16, 1954, IS CONSIDERED A JORDANIAN CITIZEN.”
The Hashemite regime declared itself a kingdom over all Palestinian territories designated for Arabs under the UN Partition Plan and legitimized this through the Jericho Conference. As a result, every resident of Gaza today was considered a resident of Jordanian-controlled territory between 1949 and 1954.
This is from the message of the family of Yarden Bibas, 35, who returned home from Hamas captivity on Saturday morning.
“Yarden has returned to an unbearable reality.” When he was taken hostage on October 7, he was separated from his wife, Shiri and their two young sons, Ariel and Kfir, now 5 and 2 years old respectively, who were all taken captive. At one point a video was released by Hamas in which they showed a weeping Yarden who had been told by the terrorists that his family was dead. But this cruel propaganda video was proof of nothing.
Archives New Zealand from New Zealand, CC BY-SA 2.0
Most of us feel that we understand the spy-game intimately. We have been invited into its glamour, drama, twists and turns through the creative minds of Ken Follet, Tom Clancey, John le Carre and the Grand-daddy of them all…. Ian Fleming. There are hundreds of authors who entice us into the world of intrigue. Hollywood has made billions of dollars quenching our thirst for the excitement and the glamour. But it is not quite like that. Certainly not here in the Middle East.
Peloni: It should be recalled, as explained by Mike Benz, USAID is nothing more than local and regional capacity building across the whole world of assets that can be used by either the Pentagon, the State Dept or the CIA for their own activities. Hence, while it is good to see that the USAID program is placed under the watchful auspices of the US State Dept, it should be recalled that the ranks of the US State Dept oversaw partial funding of some of the alarming anti-Bibi protests on the streets of Jerusalem during the attempt to pursue Judicial Reform in Israel in early 2023. So, as Greenfield describes it, rolling the USAID under the control of the State Dept is only a good first step, and the second and third steps will require significant reform from within the US State Dept, something which is not entirely likely under Marco Rubio – recall the section relating to Rubio in Part II of Nelson’s important review of Trump’s nominees:
United States Agency for International Development, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
USAID has been a major problem for a long time, but, under the Biden administration, it turned into a rogue agency that actively resisted the efforts of the Afghan watchdog to get information about its activities and that has directed billions of aid to terror states in ways that are completely unaccountable by moving the money through the UN and third party NGOs while making it impossible to track what they were doing with it.
Peloni: As Project Stargate is in line to be the follow up to Project Warp Speed, closer attention should be paid to the unbridled assault on public health to bring Warp Speed online, and the reality is that all this assault began while manipulating scientific research to satisfy corporate profits rather than scientific inquiry. And while Warp Speed was catastrophic, it will be dwarfed by the much grander, more ambitious, better funded, and more far reaching followup program, Stargate. Bring scientific research back to support the principles of scientific inquiry and out of the pockets of corporate profiteers and stop this madness.
In light of RFK, Jr.’s confirmation hearings to be Secretary of Health and Human Services, it is good to remember that much of what is presented to us as science stems from vested interests and an outdated mechanistic worldview.
Science is one of humanity’s greatest achievements. But it is not infallible — that’s why it is science and not dogma — and is sadly not immune to the virus of corruption. For many decades, the mirror of science has become increasingly blurred by a storm of vested interests, particularly when research and the communication of results are linked to large corporations.
Maj. Kristin Wolfe, F-35A Lightning II Demonstration Team pilot and commander, flies an F-35 assigned to the 421st Fighter Generation Squadron at the Wings Over Houston Airshow, Texas, Oct. 15, 2023. The airshow showcases vintage World War II aircraft alongside modern aviation and has supported a variety of local and national charities during its 39-year history. (U.S. Air Force photo by Staff Sgt. Kaitlyn Ergish)
The Israel Ministry of Defense is acquiring $80 million in “advanced self-protection suites” for Israel’s F-16I aircraft, the latest in a procurement blitz in the wake of the conflicts in Gaza and Lebanon.
Peloni: Should this result in simply supporting the termination of those involved in the ‘Review Process’, it will be a terrible miscarriage of justice. Political and legal malfeasance masked as legal prosecution needs to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. It is not enough for the US to return to legitimate application of the law going into the future, rather it must be used to prosecute those who used the misapplication of the law over the past four years, not based on political affiliation, but upon the proper use of legal standards. It will be the latter and not the former which will result from the Trump administration not prosecuting every individual involved in the legal tragedy which has come to be known as January 6. Transparency and Accountability are equally required to serve the needs of justice. Anything less is political collusion, no matter who is pulling the strings.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) fired prosecutors investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the Capitol and demanded the names of the FBI agents involved in the case ahead of a possible similar purge, The Associated Press (AP) reported Friday.
The firing — ordered by Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove — affected about 12 employees at the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, the outlet reported.
If US President Donald Trump is really serious about making a positive impact on the Middle East, a good place for him to start would be to designate the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood movement as a terrorist organisation and scale down Washington’s ties with the Gulf state of Qatar. Pictured: President Donald Trump and Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani meet in the White House July 9, 2019. (Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images)
For Trump to make genuine progress in bringing peace and stability to the region in his second term, though, his administration must first focus on the root cause of much of the unrest blighting the region.
