The star of the evening was Barbra Streisand who sang Avinu Malkeinu and People.

Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and Bibi Netanyahu also played supporting roles in the party with their very popular speeches.

A number of other singers and dancers also performed.

In the audience was Robert De Niro, The IDF Chief of Staff, Natan Sharansky, and many other famous people.

Two separate soldiers reported seeing an IDF soldier being driven off in the back of a Palestinian car in the early evening. The IDF took the reports seriously and began searching for the car and the possibly kidnapped soldier. Simultaneously they did a head count of all soldiers that might have been in the area.

After a few hours the search was called off.

“Thieves break into IDF base, steal soldier’s rifle,” read a recent headline about the Naftali camp in the north. Last December, two Arabs breached the security fence at the Rama base north of Jerusalem, pepper sprayed the soldier at the guard station, then stole his weapon.

The same month, F-16 engines disappeared from a base in central Israel, preceded by crates of ammunition and military jeeps stolen from bases in the south.

In March, an Eritrean infiltrated and vandalized a base that contains classified units. This month, a prisoner in a high-security military prison escaped for the second time. Given that at least one base has been plagued with rats, maybe friendly rodents chewed out an escape route for him?

Another base last year was reported to have open sewage, worms in the kitchen, and other charming features. But at least soldiers there might be adequately fed, which doesn’t seem to be the case all around.

To top it off, soldiers describe feeling humiliated over orders that endanger their lives and incriminate them for defending themselves—in addition to the demoralizing effects of such policies.

This disgraceful reality didn’t happen overnight. Consider Aaron Klein’s description of the October 2000 surrender of Joseph’s Tomb in The Late Great State of Israel:

“…soldiers clandestinely removed holy materials and a Torah scroll from the site. Palestinian gunmen led by Arafat’s Brigades squad fired on an Israeli convoy as it departed the tomb, wounding one border policeman. The Israelis retreated completely while under fire. Within less than an hour, Palestinian rioters overtook Joseph’s Tomb and began to ransack the site…”

Yet look how robustly the military demolishes Jewish communities, as part of what a wife and mother expelled from Mitzpe Avichai has called “a well-oiled system of robots.”

If a military is a microcosm of society, then all of these events should be expected given the derelict and abusive national conditions I discussed a few columns ago. As long as mourners at the Mount of Olives suffer rock attacks and police ignore similar aggression elsewhere, don’t be surprised when the IDF mirrors this hideousness.

But as one commenter noted, there was a country that, despite its importance, was not mentioned even once: the US. And the reason was that although the trends for Europe seemed clear, my ability to imagine the future here in the US was far weaker, producing only cloudy visions.

Or maybe I just wasn’t comfortable with what I envisioned. But let me flip the switch on the time machine anyway.

It’s 2018. President Clinton is halfway through her first term, having been helped to a landslide victory by a lackluster Republican candidate nominated by a fractured party split between representatives of extractive industries, social conservatives and Tea Party libertarians. Although the media that had so single-mindedly shilled for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 had begun to tire of him when the heavy hand of the Justice Department fell on them in 2013, Ms Clinton convinced the press that she was on their side. After all, wasn’t her own daughter a TV journalist?

Demographic changes also helped. Hispanics and Asians represented a greater share of the population than in 2012, and these groups voted heavily Democratic, especially as Clinton and her husband had campaigned hard for the American Immigration and Diversity Act of 2014, which provided a relatively unobstructed path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants (and future Democratic voters). Many people voted for Ms Clinton simply because they thought it was time to give a woman a chance (it was hard to argue that male politicians hadn’t screwed up big time).

Although the Republican Party had traditionally been considered the party of ‘big business’, 2018′s biggest businesses — Google, Facebook, Amazon, etc. — gave large contributions to Democratic candidates, and only smaller ‘insurance’ donations to Republicans.

Finally, there were some less savory aspects to the election. Small businesspeople thought twice about publicly supporting Republican candidates out of fear of regulatory agencies and the IRS, which were even more politically active than in 2013, despite the furor that had arisen then. Lists were compiled of voters that had moved or died, and since there was no requirement for ID to vote in most states, others voted in their places. Information from the massive NSA databases about ordinary Americans found its way to political operatives.

It was no contest for the presidency, and only slightly less unbalanced in the House and Senate.

Not that the Congress mattered that much anymore. Despite its constitutionally mandated role, its continued paralysis through the Obama years made it inevitable that the Executive Branch would find ways around it. By 2018, many of its debates were only political posturing, while the real decisions were taken by the administration by executive orders. Some politicians made quaint speeches about the Constitution, to little effect. “What can we do?” said administration spokespeople. “The Congress is dysfunctional.”

Although the Democrats had campaigned against income inequality, it turned out that the rich — especially the super-rich — were continuing to get richer, and the poor and middle-class poorer. Despite the commitments of the ‘progressive’ administration, health-care and other services for the poor, disabled, mentally ill, homeless, etc., suffered more and more for lack of funds. Many roamed the streets, begging and stealing to survive.

Shortly after Clinton’s election at the tail end of the Israeli-Hezbollah war of 2016, Hezbollah activated several terrorist cells who had infiltrated the US from South America via the Mexican border. They succeeded in detonating bombs at LA International Airport and several Jewish institutions in Los Angeles. They also invaded the Israeli consulate there, killing several security personnel and taking numerous hostages. Although Israel sent a security team, the terrorists began executing hostages before they arrived, and the LAPD stormed the building, resulting in a bloodbath of terrorists, hostages and police.

After the LAX bomb was determined to contain radioactive materials — a ‘dirty bomb’ — the centrally-located airport was abandoned at huge cost. Property values tumbled within a 30-mile radius (although the contamination was in fact limited to the airport area). The city of Los Angeles was forced to declare bankruptcy when it could not come close to balancing its budget.

Many Americans asked how this could have been allowed to happen, given the degree of surveillance that they had become used to, including tracking of cellphone usage, emails, monitoring of the content of voice communications, and a massive expansion of facial recognition software which received inputs from hundreds of thousands of cameras in public areas and matched it to databases of passport and driver’s license photos. Since these programs were revealed in 2013, they had become even more pervasive — and the security agencies developed incredibly powerful search tools than can spit out complete dossiers on the lives of individual people or groups, by analyzing literally trillions of database entries in moments.

President Clinton promised to “bring the terrorists to justice,” but Israel had already destroyed the Hezbollah infrastructure in Lebanon, so all she could do was send the few surviving terrorists to Guantanamo (which she promised to close). US Muslim organizations such as CAIR, ISNA, etc., swung into action to forestall an expected ‘wave of Islamophobia’. Liberal churches and Reform Temples throughout the country held special meetings in which representatives of those organizations ‘explained’ the difference between ‘bad’ (Shiite) Muslims like Hezbollah, and ‘good’ Muslim-Brotherhood types like themselves. They also hinted that the patience of even ‘good’ Muslims could run out if the US continued to support the existence of a Jewish state.

It was argued that ‘hate speech’ against Islam was partly responsible for the anger against the West, and that — while everybody had a right to free expression — certain videos and blogs should be removed from the Internet, because they exacerbated a bad situation. Many people agreed. The Clinton Administration hinted that “it knew how to deal with hate-mongers” and would take steps to do so.

The Administration issued a classified executive order called the “Homeland Protection Act” [HPA] which was explained as a response to the “West Coast 9/11.” Since it was classified, the contents were not revealed, but it was understood that it was necessary to deal with the emergency, just like the broad surveillance measures. It was thought that it temporarily suspended certain parts of the Bill of Rights. Again, many Americans agreed, and those who didn’t understood that they needed to be very careful about how they expressed their disagreement.

Some Americans were taken into custody under the HPA. Interestingly, they were mostly right-wingers, not Islamic terrorists. But the HPA apparently didn’t require that they be publicly charged, so in essence they disappeared.

The Canadian Prime Minister expressed his concern about the erosion of civil rights in the US, especially since many Americans were crossing the border into Canada daily. The US government responded by beefing up its control of the Canadian border, subjecting suspected emigrants to impromptu examinations to ensure that they were not trying to avoid their US tax obligations. The Administration issued an executive order than anyone leaving the US had to prove that they had paid all due taxes or post a bond. In some places, they built a wall.

Impossible? I wonder.

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Her words are very dense and quite cryptic but I think this what she is trying to say.

In her opinion, we have two immovable objects. We have Divine Revelation and the requisite belief that God gave the Torah to us in its complete form and we have Biblical Criticism which in her opinion asserts that the Torah has evolved from multiple authors and multiple eras. Something has to give. For most people, ignorance about one or the other is the turning point. People who know more about Biblical Criticism than TMS are more likely to think that the Torah is not Divine. Those who know more about (the Orthodox Jewish) approach to Torah than Biblical Criticism are more likely to think that Biblical Criticism is just a theory or soft science with more biases than religious approaches to Torah.

I am not here to take sides and apparently neither is Professor Ross.

Ross’s basic idea is that “revelation” was not a one time thing. The revelation continues as the world progressed and however the Torah was emended or edited after Sinai was part of revelation. In order to make this sound religious, Professor Ross uses all kinds of fancy kabbalistic “logic” to make this approach kosher. In short, God is not bound by time so everything is really happening at once. Revelation can’t be just a moment in time and God is continually revealed through the evolution of Torah. Apparently there are allusions to this kind of theology in classical sources. Also, the thing that make our tradition unique is only that it is our tradition. I’m not sure how and why this fits in, but she does say it.

Read the entire interview because the bulk of it is really about what this approach is not as opposed to what this approach actually is. But what is it?

Well, it’s not Orthodox. That’s for sure. But as has been pointed out, it’s not that far off. In terms of how the charedi world sees Mesorah and Daas Torah, the assumption is that God is “signing off” on the developments of Orthodox Judaism is part and parcel of how charedi Judaism works. So is it so hard to hear that God functioned the same way with regard to how the text of the Written Law evolved? Granted, the Written Law and Oral Law have different parameters and roles and I am not saying that these two ideas are the same. I am merely pointing out that the two ideas are similar.

Is this idea viable or useful?

I don’t think so. First of all, simple ideas are popular. There is a reason that more nuanced positions are less popular than bombastic theories of everything. People like when things are simple. The fundamentalist version of Torah M’Sinai is simple and not nuanced at all. It’s also pretty popular. If you want a theory to be popular it needs to be simple. Professor Ross has proposed a very complicated theory that is very difficult to articulate. It’s not going to gain much traction because of this fatal flaw.

More importantly, I think that an idea like this is not likely to help actual people. People who believe in the fundamentalist version of Torah M’Sinai don’t need this. People who reject Torah M’Sinai are not usually looking for creative way to believe in Torah M’Sinai. Further, I am not sure that this path will lead people who reject fundamentalist Torah M’Sinai to mitzvah observance. I think they want to do what God says to do, not what men say to do as a part of God’s slow revelation.

However, there are a few people in the middle who I am confident that this approach can help. Some people just want some theological basis to be orthodox and this can potentially serve that small group. If we believe in the primacy of keeping Torah and Mitzvos then we should welcome creative ways that are somewhat theologically sound to help more people accomplish this goal.

Melt your brain and read the interview here: Kavvanah

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Every city is by necessity a tyranny. Density determines how people live and how they do not. Freedom is in part inefficiency and city living is fed by the need to achieve social efficiency. Bloomberg’s much denounced nanny state tactics are only an extension of the same drive to maximize social efficiency.

Bloomberg may have become the poster billionaire for such behavior, but the majority of cities have their own solutions to the problems of people that come at the expense of individual freedom. The same efficiency that compresses the maximum number of people into an existing space is also applied to every other area of their lives. In cities of strangers, there is no area of life too intimate to be examined and made more efficient.

Unlike the country, the city is its own frontier. Its great adventure is not exploration, but existence. The city is always changing, mutating, falling apart and coming together under assault from waves of new immigrants and social challenges. Its spaces are inner spaces; whether those of the mind of the individual on a crowded bus, the meaning of the squiggles in a piece of abstract art or that club hidden at the end of an old alley.

Cities are never stable. That is what makes them exciting. Truly old cities become fossilized, but they still always seem on the verge of being tipped over. The city is a social breakdown in motion and the authorities are always scrambling to apply emergency measures to salvage it. There are always poor people somewhere and other people on the verge of rioting. A criminal underclass haunts its towers and slums. And most of all there are too many people.

Freedom is measured in terms of space, both physical and conceptual, but in the city freedom is largely conceptual, rather than physical. The city man and woman are less likely to go camping than to explore their inner psyches. With little physical space available that is unoccupied, the urbanite retreats to the one sanctuary where no one can trouble him. His own mind. Despairing of physical space in his cramped conditions, he takes refuge in the space of his own psychic attic.

Culture flourishes in the city, but it is a culture that is a signpost of status. Urban culture has to work harder to be noticed among jaded appetites in cities where the noise and bustle make attentions harder to seize and where sensibilities are harder to shock. Status symbols in culture take that one step further by disrupting communications, producing art that is illegible and requires inside knowledge to interpretation. The escape into deeper levels of metaphor continues the urbanite exploration of the psyche while closing the door to the underclass to preserve the status of the artistic cultural space.

The city is seen as the pinnacle of culture and therefore there is nowhere else to go but deeper inside. If the city is the endpoint of human civilization, then its refining becomes the prime task of that civilization.

The modern liberal would hardly exist but for the various social improvement schemes of the city from the early muckraking photographers taking photos of dirty slum children playing in alleys to the massive implementation of the modern welfare state. The agrarian and industrial obsessions of the left have collapsed. Only the urban obsession with the eternal slums, now likely to be the product of government intervention, rather than slum overcrowding, continues.

It is no coincidence that Obama’s big victories came in the city. And it is even quite probable that population density might be a predictor of big government and small government voters. It isn’t that urbanites especially love government, but they have come to accept it as a necessary evil and to look longingly for the vaunted reformers to come and save them from the political machines.

The lack of space, physical, economic and structural, in a city makes the lack of freedom into a part of the design. It is second nature to assume that someone must administer those friction zones because there is no alternative.

The social codes that might resolve such conflicts elsewhere are difficult to sustain in an environment that is always changing. Anonymity brings with it a freedom from peer pressure and community mores, but also eliminates the power of those things to maintain social norms.

Urban social norms are evolved to avoid conflict. Urbanites studiously ignore each other or maintain a distant politeness in their interactions. Not noticing other people is the height of good manners. The truly civilized man is expected not to notice uncivilized behavior. Relativism is the expected response to any violation of human norms, but not to violations of any element of the petty codes of urbania. It is very well for a man to strip naked on a train and run from car to car shouting that the aliens are coming, but not to throw his recycling into the trash.

The only free people in cities are eccentrics and criminals. Eccentricity is a necessary performance art in the face of anonymity. And criminality is often the only way to get things done. Everyone breaks some laws because there are too many laws and many of them are unreasonable or unlivable. In their own way, every urbanite is an eccentric and a criminal. It is only a matter of scale. The best eccentrics have features written about them in newspapers. Less successful eccentrics occasion only shrugs. The best criminals become legends. The rest just spend their senior years bemoaning the new thugs who don’t seem to care about honor and are only out for themselves.

Information is the great obsession of the city. The urbanization of America has kept up with an information management revolution. Telecommuting did not touch off a second wave of suburban escapes. Instead cities became bigger than ever.

The new mobile technologies can be used for telecommuting, but what they do best is overcome the sense of confining space. Compacting social interactions into a 4 inch device has transformed the city into a landscape of invisible connections. Social media has achieved another descent for the city into inner space, maintaining imaginary broad social spaces amid the density of urban life.

The internet has become the ultimate city, a virtual urban environment flooded with content, shocks, amazes and confuses, while destroying sensibilities and boundaries. It is a multicultural city encompassing the world. And the individual cities are also coming to seem like the internet, networks and hubs, short-lived and purposeless, but somehow hanging on long enough to grab some attention.

Information is the city’s only reason for existence. The industries have fled to dirtier cities in the far east. Detroit still grinds on as carmakers subsidized by the government subsidize a city abandoned by its people. On the verge of bankruptcy, Detroit looms large in the imagination as a failure, a relic of industry whose great failure was the inability to attract enough bright young people with money to subsidize its army of government employees.

New York City on the other hand is a success story. The city makes very little of any use, but it does cater to tourists and acts as a hub of the financial industry. It offers impressions and information as its currency. And supplements that with culture and education. It is no different in this than many other cities, including London.

The new city is park brokerage and part hipster hangout, with the two often overlapping. Outside this charmed circle of hedge funders attending art exhibitions is a growing permanent underclass flowing through the gates of the city. The relationship of that underclass to the two charmed circles of finance and culture is that of the barbarians at the gates of a decadent empire.

Cities are arguably ghettos. The old mechanisms for moving workers up the ladder collapsed when industries did. The workers who moved to the north from the south to take advantage of those industries became dwellers in the ghettos and they were joined by armies of immigrants looking for opportunities, but finding few of those outside the civil service.

The city exists to administer the city, to cater to it and to serve it. Cities are getting bigger, but it’s not a natural increase. The very efficiency of the city has made it a convenient place to gather large numbers of people who need caring for. That is explicitly the case in Detroit where plans include making the city far smaller by demolishing parts of it in order to be better able to care for the people.

The modern city is a failure, but it is also the space out of which conceptions of the ideal state come from. Urbanites are still suckers for the progressive dream of a global state that packs everyone into a city as big as the world. No one asks to what purpose. To an urbanite, the purpose of the city is self-apparent. It is home.

Khamene’i has again proven what a great master strategist he is. He has succeeded in pacifying the West and his own people, thus buying the time his scientists need to complete his nuclear project.

The Iranians are the best strategists in the Middle East, better than those in the West, and the reason the Iranians constantly succeed in out-maneuvering the West.

In the West, we constantly look for ways not to engage in military conflict; the Iranians are more than willing to offer us those ways. We will almost assuredly give the new president Hasan Rouhani time to “consolidate” his position, thereby granting Iran even more time to develop its nuclear weapons capability. That is the meaning of this Iranian presidential “election.”

Of the 686 men who wanted to run for president, the Guardian Council, totally under Khamene’i's control, chose eight candidates. All of them clearly supported Khamane’i's continued rule, which so many of the Iranian people, including senior clerics, loathe. So the choice for Iranian voters was not between candidates with widely differing views. Nevertheless, within that narrow framework, there were differences. Whoever the people actually voted for (we have no way of knowing how free and fair the election was), this result was one of the best of all possible outcomes — for the Iranian regime.

Since Rouhani spoke “moderately” during the campaign and had a previous reputation for being “moderate,” having him win almost guaranteed that the Iranian people — who came out into the streets after the previous elections were stolen from them — would not this time protest the election results. Rouhani’s “election,” therefore, pacifies the reformers who clearly will not demonstrate against him, thereby sparing the Iranian regime having to suppress, arrest, and murder people, actions which had horrified the international community.

Moreover, the West could lull itself into believing that since Rouhani is a “moderate,” maybe he is someone we can “deal with.” The election result, therefore is a huge win for Khamene’i and his clique, and a defeat for the West, Israel, and the Iranian people.

* * *

What can we learn from past experience about dealing with the results of this “election”?

During the early stages of the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979, we negotiated with the then Iranian President Abolhassan Bani Sadr, even though anyone who understood the Iranian revolution would have realized that Bani Sadr, despite his title as President, had no power. The real and only power was Ayatollah Khomeini, called the rahbar (guide or leader). Probably the best translation of that word into any Western language is the German word Führer, the term the Germans used to describe Adolf Hitler.

Khomeini, Iran’s Führer, hated us. But we in the U.S. ignored him and concentrated our negotiating efforts on Iran’s President Bani Sadr. After all, having had a president by then for almost 200 years, we knew what powers a president had. We consequently ascribed those same powers to Iran’s president. We negotiated with him — but he was powerless to make decisions. Only Khomeini could decide. So while we wasted time, we handed Iran a huge victory. During that period, the U.S constantly made concessions to the Iranian regime. In Middle Eastern terms, these enabled Iran to shame the U.S., and consequently gain huge numbers of supporters — both Shi’ites and Sunnis — throughout the Muslim world.

That situation is almost exactly the one we face today. Just as with Khomeini, Khamene’i is today the only decision-maker in Iran. The Iranian president is nothing more than a figurehead who carries out of the will of the rahbar, or suffers the consequences of not carrying it out.[1]

By pinning our hopes on President Rouhani, and parsing his every word, we will find ways countless to give him time to “consolidate his power,” as if he really has power, while we will be less demanding of Iran as it races to cross the nuclear threshold.

Most likely, we will obtain the same results we did when we negotiated with Bani Sadr. We will therefore almost assuredly give Iran the time it needs to cross the nuclear threshold. Just as with Bani Sadr, we will ignore the fact that he is basically powerless and that it is only Khamene’i who rules the country.

Making Rouhani the president was a brilliant strategic move for Khamene’i — not just to pacify the West, by also to pacify the Iranian people, who want nothing more than Iran to be accepted as a normal country and regain the international standing it had before the Islamic revolution.

Rouhani’s more religiously “moderate” rhetoric led the Iranian people to believe he would be able to negotiate Iran out of the catastrophic economic reality they face. So the “reformers” pin their hopes on him, instead of going out into the streets and demonstrating against him and the regime, as they did after Iran’s previous presidential “election.”

Khamene’i has again proven what a great master strategist he is. He has succeeded in pacifying the West and his own people, thus buying the time his scientists need to complete his nuclear project. This is, in short, a “win” for Khamene’i and a “lose” for the West, Israel, and the Iranian people who have shown many times how much they want to be rid of the regime’s tyranny.

[1] Bani Sadr eventually escaped Iran partially because he realized he was powerless. Subsequent Iranian presidents have realized that they either bow to the will of the rahbar or suffer the consequences. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Iran’s outgoing President, tried to do things his own way, but was humiliated by Iran’s governmental system, controlled by Khamene’i. Ahmadinejad was hauled before the Iranian parliament, then publicly questioned and humiliated. It remains to be seen how the newly “elected” Iranian President Rouhani will handle similar situations.

Last August, President Obama declared that the Syrian regime’s use of chemical weapons was a “red line.” About four months later, Al Jazeera released unconfirmed reports that a gas attack killed seven civilians in a rebel-held neighborhood of Homs. Last April, the UK, France, and Israel each claimed that there was evidence that the Syrian government had used chemical weapons in Aleppo, Homs, and/or Damascus. By April 25th, the U.S intelligence assessment was that the Assad regime had likely used sarin gas, but President Obama dodged his red line by announcing that a thorough investigation was still needed (as if the Syrian government would ever allow one). Meanwhile, reports from foreign intelligence agencies and journalists continued to corroborate the use of chemical weapons by the Assad regime. So why did Obama’s requirement of a thorough investigation to confirm the crossing of his red line suddenly vanish last Friday?

Viewed through the lens of domestic politics, Obama’s Syria epiphany looks conveniently timed to deflect attention from an ever-swelling wave of scandals: Benghazi-gate, IRS-gate, AP/Fox-gate, and now NSA-gate and State Department prostitution-gate. As the film Wag The Dog highlights, international crises are great at diverting attention from domestic scandals.

But from the perspective of the Syrian rebels, the timing and nature of U.S. military assistance may be viewed as either too little, too late, or a cynical attempt to ensure a perpetual stalemate. After all, the outgunned rebels have needed lethal weapons from the U.S. for over two years. Chemical weapons use by the Assad regime is old news. So what has changed? The Syrian regime recently defeated rebel forces at the crucial battle in Qusayr, a town providing a strategic supply conduit for rebel forces in Homs. After the military gains enabled by the robust battlefield support of Iran-backed Hezb’allah, the Syrian regime is now preparing for a major offensive to retake Aleppo. With another crushing blow to a key rebel stronghold, the regime could ultimately prevail in the conflict, unless the U.S. provides just enough rebel support to restore the pre-Qusayr stalemate.

Obama has already made it clear that any lethal weapons or no-fly zone provided by the U.S. would be limited. Such tentative U.S. involvement is unlikely to end the carnage, given the vigorous support that the Assad regime enjoys from Iran, Hezb’allah, and Russia (which could undermine a U.S.-imposed no-fly zone by supplying Syria with its potent S-300 missile defense system). Indeed, the New York Times reported on June 14th that “the president’s caution has frayed relations with important American allies in the Middle East that have privately described the White House strategy as feckless. Saudi Arabia and Jordan recently cut the United States out of a new rebel training program, a decision that American officials said came from the belief in Riyadh and Amman that the United States has only a tepid commitment to supporting rebel groups.”

What a difference two years makes. In 2011, the relatively non-sectarian Free Syrian Army (FSA) was the main force fighting for freedom from Assad’s tyranny. Sunni Islamists had not yet felt compelled by FSA failures to join (and ultimately lead) the military effort in large numbers. In 2011, Obama also had far more credibility and political capital — important presidential assets when undertaking a foreign military intervention.

But now the Syrian crisis has deteriorated into a regional sectarian war, increasingly creeping over Syrian borders and into Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq, Israel, and Jordan. The Syrian belligerents have also radicalized, decreasing the odds that the ultimate victor will be friendly to the U.S. or able to achieve a postwar reconciliation and reconstruction in Syria.

Today, with a death toll exceeding 90,000 Syrians (and increasing by 5,000/month) and millions displaced, the humanitarian need for intervention is greater than ever. But Iran and Russia are redoubling their support for the Assad regime, so the U.S. must not enter the Syrian cauldron with half-measures or it could suffer a costly setback with far-reaching repercussions. If Obama’s “red line” was crossed months ago and the tardy “consequences” are America’s feeble and ineffective entry into the Syrian civil war, then Iran, North Korea, China, Russia, and other U.S. adversaries will only feel emboldened to challenge U.S. interests.

Thus, Obama effectively has two choices: 1) continue his disengagement from Syria to preserve whatever political capital and military deterrent he has left for the inevitable showdown over Iranian nukes, 2) enter the Syrian fray in a massive way that ensures a military victory and says to the Iranian regime: “you are next, unless you discontinue your nuclear program.” After the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, Iran feared that thousands of American troops would turn eastward and offered to negotiate the dismantling of its nuclear weapons program. The Bush administration refused to engage but Iran still temporarily suspended its nuclear program out of trepidation.

U.S. entry into the Syrian conflict could defeat Assad and deter Iranian nukes, but only with the resolve and overwhelming firepower to demolish the Syrian-Iranian-Hezb’allah axis (ideally with help from NATO forces). Joining the conflict with insufficient commitment mainly to distract a scandal-weary U.S. audience could have catastrophic consequences for the U.S., and that would be the biggest scandal of all.

AirTran Airways “abused its discretion” in forcing the 101 students off the early morning flight June 3 to their senior trip in Atlanta, according to the report, obtained by the Times of Israel and authored by the yeshiva’s executive director, Rabbi Seth Linfield.

Flight attendants said the students did not stay seated and continued to use their mobile devices in advance of takeoff, despite their requests as well as from the captain. The report found that students erred by not turning off their cellphones.

“At no time did the students disrespect the flight crew in words or tone — beyond not immediately complying with the directives… to turn off all electronic devices,” the report said, according to the report.

The yeshiva said the airline crew rejected offers of assistance from the seven school chaperones in controlling the students and that the medias headline the incident because of claims that the airplane officials acted out of anti-Semitism.

The yeshiva apologized to AirTran, a subsidiary of Southwest Airlines, “to the extent that any of our students behaved in a way that was perceived by the flight crew to be disrespectful or disobedient.”

It also praised AirTran for giving vouchers to the students to continue on to Atlanta and working to rebook them.

“Support for Israel in the United States is astonishing. I have no concerns that aid to Israel will be diminished,” said  Stuart Eizenstat, a former official who negotiated an aid package during the administration Bill Clinton.

The current 10-year aid package, worth $30 billion, expires in 2018, but negotiations already are in progress for the next agreement that will cover the decade until 2027.

Israel has three points in its favor, despite the sequestration – immense popularity among Americans, the threat of war in the increasingly unstable Middle East, and the threat of a nuclear Iran.

At the heart of Washington’s dependence on Israel is Jerusalem’s immense intelligence establishment, which frequently has supplied information far more accurate than what the Pentagon comes up with. A classic example is Israel’s warning several years, rejected by the United States, that Iran did not suspend its nuclear development

“There’s no other foreign country favored in terms of assistance; and this support is bipartisan, bicameral and largely protected by sequestration,” said Eizenstat. He told Israeli business leaders in Washington on Monday that he is not worried about the level of future American aid.

“It is in the interest of Congress and future administrations to sustain or even enhance aid to Israel, particularly given the turmoil in this region and all the threats and pressures on Israel,” he declared.

The demands by the Palestinian Authority, which wants to become an independent state based on Israel’s surrendering more than half of the country and accepting foreign Arabs who would reduce Jews to a minority, no longer are a sledgehammer that the Obama administration can gold over Israel’s head,

PA chairman Mahmoud Abbas has more or less lost all trust in Washington since he played out his hand and dumped the beloved American ides of direct negotiations with Israel by going to the United Nations for recognition.

Howard Berman, a former chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee,  told Defense News that resumption of l peace negotiations would “improve the climate” for a new 10-year aid deal but added, “I can tell you the special and strong relationship with Israel is enduring … It is not linked to any particular issue.”

Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov did not say exactly what Iranian officials agreed to this grand gesture, one day after Iran’s president-elect Hassan Rohani vowed that Iran will continue to enrich uranium. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu previously has warned that the only level of uranium enrichment that Iran should be allowed to produce is “zero percent.”

A higher grade of enrichment is a step closer to producing a nuclear weapon, but lower grade enrichment, needed for fuel roads in the Bushehr nuclear energy plant. Iran’s refusal to allow international inspectors into its nuclear facilities precludes the possibility of knowing how much 20 percent enriched uranium the country already has stockpiled.

“For the first time in many years, there are encouraging signs in the process of settlement of the situation with the Iranian nuclear program,” Lavrov said in the interview to Kuwait’s KUNA news agency. The interview was published on the Russian Foreign Ministry’s site but was not published in Iran.

Lavrov insisted that Iran’s preparedness to stop high-level enrichment of uranium “could become a breakthrough agreement.”

Then he dropped the joker in the deck: Iran’s grand gesture “implies significant reciprocal steps” by the six world powers who have unsuccessfully tried to convince Iran to cooperate with nuclear inspectors to stop its nuclear program.

“The international community must adequately respond to the constructive progress made by Iran, including gradual suspension and lifting of sanctions, both unilateral and those introduced by the UN Security Council. It would be a shame not to take advantage of this opportunity,” Lavrov concluded.

The next step is predictable. The West will demand some kind of evidence that Iran can speak for itself instead of letting Russia act as its mouthpiece.

Step Number Two will be Iran’s demand that sanctions be removed because, after all, how can it trust the West to inspect its nuclear facilities and then find a reason not lift sanctions?

Rohani won’t take office until August, so Iran still has several weeks to enrich more high-grade uranium.

After August, expect another few weeks, or months, of negotiating about how to negotiate an agreement.

By that time, maybe Iran will have enough high-grade uranium for a bomb.

Unfortunately if the rabbinic leaders of Lakewood and similar communities do not change this paradigm, this will surely happen again.

DeNiro, who is not Jewish, met with the president at his Jerusalem home, and among other topics, they spoke about the Iranian nuclear threat. The president also related to the actor and his 17-year-old son the modern history of the re-establishment of the State of Israel and the country’s relations in the Middle East.

The prize-winning actor said he brought is 17-year-old son with to learn about Israel.

“Thank you for coming, President Peres told DeNiro, “We are very happy to see you in our country. Although you received an Oscar prize for your work, you also receive a great amount of love from the People of Israel.”

DeNiro thanked him for his words and noted this is his fifth visit to Israel.

The controversial Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who has repeatedly denied the Holocaust and called for Israel to be wiped off the map as of next August will no longer be the Iranian President. Hassan Rouhani has recently won the 2013 Iranian elections presidential elections. The question arises, how does this change of power effect the State of Israel?

Although Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei still has ultimate authority when it comes to Iran’s foreign relations, the Iranian President nevertheless does hold significant power influencing decision-making and running the executive branch of the Iranian government. The change of leadership in Iran could provide momentum for less confrontational relations between Iran and the west, in addition to permitting more freedom within Iran itself.

Iranians voted for Hassan Rouhani because they believe that the internal human rights situation will improve under a non-hardliner and also think that a less confrontational leader will ease the horrible economic situation within Iran. Nevertheless, in a political system where non-Islamists are barred from running for office, Rouhani does support the present rule of the mullahs in Iran. Even though his domestic policies are more liberal, his foreign policy ideas parallel those of Ahmadinejad. Rouhani told the Arabic daily Al Sharq Al Aswat that the campaign against Iran “is being fueled and directed first and foremost by Israel, in order to divert international attention not only from its own clandestine and dangerous nuclear weapons program but also from its destabilizing and inhuman policies and practices in Palestine and the Middle East.” He has praised Assad’s regime as the “only country in the region to resist Israeli expansionist policies and practices,” reaffirmed Iranian support for the Palestinian cause, and he believes that Iran has the right to have a nuclear program.

THE IMPLICATIONS FOR ISRAEL

According an Iranian UWI source who is a supporter of the Iranian opposition named Pedram, even though Rouhani believes Iran has the right to nuclear weapons, he is more likely than Ahmadinejad was to reach an accommodation with the west, provided Ayatollah Khameini will permit him. Pedram emphasized that Ayatollah Khameini gives Islamist reformers limited wiggle-room. Under Rouhani’s leadership, denying the Holocaust is likely to cease being a prominent aspect of Iranian presidential speeches. Regardless, Israel can expect that Rouhani will make anti-Israel statements, just like his predecessor did and the initiation of Iranian-Israeli diplomatic relations is not on the table. Also, neither the Iranian governmental support for Assad’s regime nor Palestinian terror groups nor Iran’s nuclear program is likely to wane under Rouhani, unless the Iranian government continues to be under pressure and gives in for pragmatic reasons.

Visit United with Israel.

Syria rebels ‘beheaded a Christian and fed him to the dogs’ as fears grow over Islamist atrocities Daily Mail June 17, 2013

Christian Andrei Arbashe, 38, was kidnapped and beheaded by rebel fighters in northern town of Ras Al-Ayn on the Turkish border News came as pro-government forces celebrated their victory against rebels near Aleppo Airport

Syrian rebels beheaded a Christian man and fed his body to dogs, according to a nun who says the West is ignoring atrocities committed by Islamic extremists.She said his headless corpse was found by the side of the road, surrounded by hungry dogs. He had recently married and was soon to be a father.

Volatile fighting: The news of the kidnapping and beheading of Mr Arbashe came as pro-government forces celebrated their victory against rebels at the Air Defence Base in Tal Hassil near Aleppo Airport last night

There have been a growing number of accounts of atrocities carried out by rogue elements of the Syrian Free Army, which opposes dictator Bashar al-Assad and is recognized by Britain and the West as the legitimate leadership.

Sister Agnes-Miriam, mother superior of the Monastery of St James the Mutilated, has condemned Britain and the west for supporting the rebels despite growing evidence of human rights abuses. Murder, kidnapping, rape and robbery are becoming commonplace, she says.

‘The free and democratic world is supporting extremists,’ Sister Agnes-Miriam said from her sanctuary in Lebanon. ‘They want to impose Sharia Law and create an Islamic state in Syria.’

Fatal opinion: The man’s brother had criticized the behavior of members of the Free Syrian Army, seen here during heavy clashes with government forces north of Aleppo earlier this month

The 60-year-old Carmelite nun claims the west has turned a blind eye to growing evidence of a ‘fifth column’ of fanatics within the rag-tag ranks that make up the Free Syrian Army that they back to oust Assad.

One of the most effective fighting forces is the Jabat Al-Nusra, which has an ideology similar to Al Qaeda.

‘The uprising has been hijacked by Islamist mercenaries who are more interested in fighting a holy war than in changing the government,’ she said.

‘It has turned into a sectarian conflict. One in which Christians are paying a high price.’

The rebel attacked the northern town of Ras Al-Ayn, on the Turkish border, last month. The fighters entered the Christian quarter, ordering civilians to leave and leaving their homes.

‘More than 200 families were driven out in the night,’ Sister Agnes-Miriam says. ‘People are afraid. Everywhere the deaths squads stop civilians, abduct them and ask for ransom, sometimes they kill them.’

Militants wearing black bandanas of Al Qaeda recently laid siege to the Monastery of St James the Mutilated, located between Damascus and Homs, for two days in an attempt to prevent Christmas celebrations, the nun claims.

An estimated 300,000 Christians have been displaced in the conflict, with 80,000 forced out of the Homs region alone, she claims.

Many have fled abroad raising fears that Syria’s Christian community may vanish – like others across Middle East, the birthplace of Christianity.

Al Assad, a member of the Alawite Muslim sect, claims only his regime can protect Syria’s minorities from domination from the Sunni Muslims majority.

Read the rest.

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Now, most people know when they’re beat and Peter’s original broadside against me and Cory was so weak that it was easy to demolish. But some people are just gluttons for punishment and now Peter is back for more.

Not content to have damaged his reputation as a writer and editor by fraudulently accusing me of racism and then blaming it on a low-level staffer, and not content to have sullied his reputation for diligence by inventing myths like me and Cory never having discussed Israel or the Middle East, Peter is back condemning Israel, only this time he’s using pictures of Boruch Goldstein’s grave to make his desperate case.

How many Jews in the entire world support the Jewish terrorist Boruch Goldstein? Would even Peter put it at more than a few hundred out of fourteen million? Peter should have remained with his original apology – which I accept – and quit while he is behind.

Here is the main point against Peter’s rejoinder to me, and indeed his entire position on the Israel-Palestinian conflict.

Of course the Palestinians are suffering, as Cory himself said in a recent interview with The Forward. The question is, why? Who is to blame? And how can their suffering be remedied?

For Peter, who always hides behind his self-declared status as a Zionist to attack Israel, the reason is simple. Israel oppresses the Palestinians. But for those interested in facts the unfortunate suffering of the Palestinians is akin to the suffering of the Japanese or Germans during the Second World War. When you continually resort to violence, inflicting terror on your neighbors, you’re probably going to end up suffering yourself.

Israel has done everything to have a peace deal with the Arabs. It gave up land three times its size in Sinai to have peace with Egypt even after Egypt launched war of annihilation in 1967 and 1973. Its reward today is having an Egyptian President who refers to Jews as “bloodsuckers” and “descendants of apes and pigs.” Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza. Result: tens of thousands of murderous rockets being fired at Israeli nurseries and hospitals. And Israel brought Yasser Arafat to the West Bank and armed his forty-thousand-strong ‘police’ force, thereby creating the Palestinian Authority. Result, more than a thousand dead Jews, equivalent to sixty thousand Americans, blown to smithereens on buses and in discos in the terror that resulted from Oslo I and II. Could any of this have something to do with Peter’s pet peeve, that Israel now maintains military checkpoints?

When I get on a plane here in the US I’m not allowed to bring a can of Coke. When I go to a meeting in a New York building to visit a friend I have to show ID. Does Peter really believe that after two decades of terrorism from the West Bank Israel is not going to take military measures to stop the terror? Is he kidding himself that Israel should just allow Jews to die?

I am a Jew and Arabs are my brothers and sisters under God. Every Palestinian life is the equivalent of a Jewish life. Noone, least of all me, wants to see any Arab child suffer, God forbid. But my Palestinian brothers need to stop choosing bloodthirsty governments like Hamas, who were elected in a democratic vote. They have to stop putting up monuments to Shahid suicide bombers – which I witnessed with my own eyes – who kill Jews. They have to stop teaching their children in schools that Jews are of the devil. They have to stop seeing Israel as a humiliation to Arab pride. And they have to reach out to Israel in peace. Anything less is only going to prolong the Israel-Palestinian conflict as well as Palestinian suffering. And if Peter really cared more about Palestinian well being then attacking Israel he would be courageous enough to say it. The suffering of the Palestinians in Gaza under Hamas is a powerful case in point.

Mrs. Hikind suffered a massive stroke last week after having been hospitalized for several weeks in Maimonides Hospital.

She was born in Czechoslovakia in 1918 and was the sole family survivor of Auschwitz.  She moved to the United State in 1947 and married Mayer Hikind, also a Holocaust survivor.

Written on the fake picture of Lapid, complete with a Hitler-style moustache, were the words, “Israeli economy’s hateful enemy.”

It is not clear who was behind the prank, but he or she managed to arouse a storm of protest.

“This is shocking,” said public relation official Ran Rahav.

It is shocking indeed, but then he took it to the extreme and started digging up the blood libel against the national religious community following the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin in 1995.

“It is with great sorrow that the whole country has not internalized what happened before 18 years ago, when Yitzchak Rabin was murdered. In those black days before the murder, a picture of Rabin was posted showing him dressed as Hitler.

“I hope the police will immediately arrest whoever carried out this horrible posting against Finance Minister Yair Lapid.”

Koch was so concerned about his tombstone that he worked with a professional for eight months on its design, long before his death

He obviously could not write in what year he would die, and he also left out his year of birth. “I inverted 1924 to 1942, and I’m going to fix it. It was a simple human error,” said Tommy F. Flynn of Flynn Funeral & Cremation Memorial Centers Inc.

Koch was born on Dec. 12, 1924 and died on Feb 1 this year from heart failure at the age of 88.