Tag: Arab Spring

The United States did not jump into a tiger den in the Bronx Zoo. That would have been fairly sane compared to its leap into Libya. With the Arab Spring, the tigers were freed and men like Christopher Stevens jumped inside. The bloody marks on the walls of the Benghazi consulate are a grim reminder of what tigers eventually do to the men who move into their dens.

Despite relative stability, the IDF is bracing for possible escalation of violence in Judea and Samaria, Commander of the IDF Central Command, Major General Nitzan Alon, said at a recent Rosh Hashannah ceremony attended by community leaders and mayors from Judea and Samaria.

The Western media are not the only ones who fail to see the symbolism of raising al-Qaeda’s banner on 9/11. Our President missed it as well.

The Shi'a ethnic-religious tradition of pretending to be Sunni in order to avoid violent attack, even death, has resulted in a culture of deception which continues today, especially in Iran. This is reflected in Iran's dealings with the International Atomic Energy Agency and the West regarding its nuclear program and more recently when it hosted the Non-Aligned Movement conference in its capital. At the conference, Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi - a Sunni - attacked Iran's ally Bashir al-Assad and his regime for slaughtering its own citizens in Syria as well as Assad’s unnamed supporters, i.e. Iran. Iran purposefully mistranslated the speech in Farsi to make it seem that Morsi was talking about Bahrain, not Syria.

After Muslims killed thousands of Americans we did everything we could to learn about their religion, to celebrate it and soothe their ruffled feathers.

Unlike Iraq, Libya is a back-burner issue, even if the oil-rich country is beginning to look a lot like Iraq. In defending U.S. military force there, President Barack Obama said that "To brush aside America's responsibility as a leader and -– more profoundly -– our responsibilities to our fellow human beings under such circumstances would have been a betrayal of who we are." But with armed militias, car bombs going off, destruction of religious shrines, and Salafi violence, what does the current state of Libya say about who we are?

A more important and stronger phenomenon than Islamization is the escape of the factional genie from the bottle in which it was confined while dictators controlled the region.recognized the "factional genie" well , whether in the Shi'ite version or the Sunni version. The dictators took every means at their disposal, principally torture chambers, in order to deal with the factional jihadism which has no boundaries of law or ethics. Today, dictators are taken down one by one, and jihadism is flourishing.

There is no doubting the Islamist revolution in Tunisia.

By meeting separately with Khaled Mashaal and Mahmoud Abbas, Mursi has created the impression that the Palestinians have two legitimate leaders. Even more, Mursi has put Mashaal on an equal footing with heads of state, thus granting legitimacy not only to the Hamas leader, but to his entire movement.

Dagan and Ashkenazi made their comments on a panel at the 2012 Presidential Conference that included former Presidential adviser Dennis Ross. Dagan said in Egypt it matters not who votes but who counts the vote.

Israel has been threatened since birth by Arab politics in all its forms. Sometimes they send their armies to do battle. Sometimes they use terrorism. Sometimes rockets. Sometimes BDS. Sometimes what threatens Israel is the instability or potential fallout from internecine Arab warfare – as in 1970, when Palestinians threatened King Hussein; and 1991, when Saddam used rockets against Israel during a war in which Israel was not involved.

From the outset of the revolts in other Arab countries King Abdullah was very concerned that a similar revolt could threaten his regime. He was therefore quick to announce reforms. He has also been trying to divert the attention towards Israel by blaming the Jewish state for the shortcomings and failures of the Jordanian government, just like other Arab leaders have been doing for years.

The "Arab Spring" is anything but a "great revolution." It is a spring of massacres, destruction and violence, as Patriarch Beshara al-Rai, the head of Lebanon's Maronite Church, put it. "We are with the Arab Spring but we are not with this spring of violence, war, destruction and killing," he told Reuters. "This is turning to winter. We cannot implement reforms by force and arms. How can it be an Arab Spring when people are being killed every day?"

Israeli national elections are scheduled for November 2013.

Queen Rania Al-Abdullah of Jordan has commissioned a jeweler in Calcutta, India to make shoes for her out of gold.

Until recently, most of the Arab countries had boycotted Hamas. But now many Arab leaders are competing who will embrace Hamas stronger than the other.

Syrian President claims he still has his people's support.

Ismail Haniyeh receives a warm welcome in Tunis.

Syrian President Bashar Assad’s popularity continues to slide, with at least 10,000 soldiers in the army defecting.

Soon, at least meteorologically, the Arab Spring will become an “Arab Winter. It will also be an apt change of metaphor. After all, from the standpoint of civilizational vulnerabilities to jihadist terror, nothing will have been improved.

Field Marshal Mohammed Hussein Tantawi, Egypt’s de facto head of state since the ousting of President Hosni Mubarak on February 11, has failed to quiet raging protests which have now claimed 37 lives across the country.

Some years ago, I came across a Polish-Jewish newspaper published in the early thirties. It was a time when the winds of anti-Semitism were blowing throughout Europe, with particular force in Poland. I searched through every page of the paper and was appalled to find not even a hint of the tragedy that was looming for the Jewish people.