Canada is buying Israeli Iron Dome radar that is able to detect rockets, artillery and mortars at long ranges, and can simultaneously engage a large number of targets.

Ottawa’s Dept. of National Defense awarded the contract to ELTA Systems, a subsidiary of Israel Aerospace Industries Ltd. (IAI), and Rheinmetall-Canada.

The radar system offers exceptional detection and accuracy performance and is a highly mobile, enabling it for fast deployment with a minimal crew.

Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama dreamed about a “new Middle East” under the leadership of the United States. They were dead wrong.

They may have fantasized that they could make peace between Israel and Sunni Muslim states, the foremost being Saudi Arabia, but their worst nightmares did not envision such an alliance being formed in opposition to none other than the United States.

Dore Gold, director of Israel’s Foreign Ministry and former Ambassador to the United Nations, finally spelled out on Wednesday what Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has whispered for months. The Muslims and the Jews have two common problems. One is an enemy, meaning Iran, which threatens to rule an Islamic Caliphate with or without a nuclear weapon.

The other problem is the Obama administration, which is appeasing the enemy.

Prime Minister Netanyahu has stated several times that Israel and Saudi Arabia have a common interest in making sure that Iran does reach nuclear weapons capability. Gold went a lot farther in his message last night to the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.

Referring to Iran, he said:

What we have is a regime on a roll that is trying to conquer the Middle East and it’s not Israel talking, that is our Sunni Arab neighbors — and you know what? I’ll use another expression – that is our Sunni Arab allies talking.

Allies?

What happened to the “unshakeable bond” between the United States and Israel? It is there as long as people believe it. An era does not in a day, and American Jews will believe in that “unshakeable bond” for a long time to come because it makes them feel good.

And isn’t it President Barack Obama who is ready help arm Israel once again, after having forced it to be armed to the teeth by surrendering to many of Iran’s terms in his ObamaDeal, which Israel and the Sunni Arabs are certain is nothing more than a well-paved diplomatic road to hell?

Americans are too far away from the shores of the Middle East to feel the threat of a nuclear-armed Iran the way Jews in Israel and Muslims in the Gulf States feel it.

If Israel and its “allies” were to get it through the State Dept.’s thick skull that a nuclear-armed Iran is no less of a threat to the United States that it is to the United States, perhaps Americans would worry a bit more about Tehran and less about Mexican immigrants, homosexual marriages and Donald Trump.

Gold was upbeat, or at least tried to sound that way, about future relations between Israel and the United States in the likely event that Congress will not be able to ditch ObamaDeal.

He said:

We will find a practical way to come up with solutions to a very dangerous situation. But in the meantime we have to tell what we think about this agreement. We have to say the truth even though it’s unpleasant.

It also may be very unpleasant for President Obama amid his successor to realize that  their influence in the Middle East is dwindling. President Obama was overjoyed at the Arab Spring rebellions for “democracy,” which in the Muslim Middle East means “anarchy” and which was the reality for too long a time in Libya, Yemen, Tunisia, Egypt and Syria. Iraq is a lost cause.

Obama may have reached out Muslims, but he grabbed a handful of radical Islam that now threatens more than half the world.

He, like most other American politicians, assumes that Israel has no choice but to rely on the “unshakeable bond” with the United States.

Minister Ze’ev Elkin will welcome 221 new immigrants from the United States and Canada at Ben Gurion Airport on Tuesday., one year after Operation Protective Edge.

The flight, organized by Nefesh B’Nefesh in cooperation with the Ministry of Aliyah and Immigrant Absorption, the Jewish Agency and JNF-USA, will carry 32 families and 53 singles from 14 states, the District of Columbia and four Canadian provinces.

Among the Olim are 95 children – 49 girls and 46 boys – who are immigrating with their parents. About one-fourth of the Olim arriving on the flight have decided to settle in Israel’s periphery as part of the “Go North and Go South” programs.

During 2015, more than 4,000 new immigrants are expected to make Aliyah from North America, and half of them will arrive ii the summer.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu tore into British students Wednesday for joining the Boycott Israel movement, while a British official tried to cover up a government boycott action by promising a “commitment” to trade with Israel.

The National Union of Students in Britain voted Tuesday to join the BDS movement to boycott Israel. The move has little practical effect but is an important propaganda victory for the Boycott Israel movement.

The British government, along with France and several other countries, also have boycotted Israel by banning companies in their countries from staging an exhibition at this week’s seventh annual Israel Defense Expo in Tel Aviv.

Rob Dixon, Britain’s Deputy Ambassador to Israel, ignored the ban at the exhibition, as if it didn’t happen, and assured Israel on Wednesday that   his government is against BDS and is “committed to advancing trade links” with Israel.

Prime Minister Netanyahu, during a meeting with visiting Canadian Foreign Minister Robert Nicholson, chastised the British students Union for joining BDS and said:

They condemn Israel and do not condemn ISIS; they condemn themselves.

Israel has an exemplary democracy. We have academic freedom, press freedom, human rights. ISIS tramples human rights to the dust. It burns people alive in cages and the national student groups in Britain refuse to boycott ISIS and have boycotted Israel. It tells you everything you want to know about the BDS movement.

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The Canadian government has vehemently denied a media report that it is considering applying hate crime laws against Boycott Israel-BDS sponsors.

The original report by the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.’s (CBC) Neil Macdonald has been called into question by Honest Reporting (HR), which said that the writer jumped to illogical conclusions in the article that was falsely headlined “Ottawa Threatening Hate Charges against Those Who Boycott Israel.”

CBC later toned down the headline to delete the word “threatening” because there was no such threat, except in the imagination of Macdonald. Honest Reporting wrote that Macdonald’s “animus against Israel is well-known.”

His story was clearly his own imitative and was written after he asked the government what exactly it meant by statements that Ottawa would show “zero tolerance” for those who promote boycotts of Israel.

The Jewish Press reported the CBC story here yesterday. The office of Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney stated in a speech at the United Nations in January:

[Canada has] zero-tolerance approach to anti-Semitism and all forms of discrimination including in rhetoric towards Israel, and attempts to delegitimize Israel such as the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement.

His spokeswoman Josée Sirois, asked by Macdonald what he meant and if Blaney intends to work against the BDS movement, e-mailed him that Canada has “one of the most comprehensive sets of laws against hate crime anywhere in the world.” She added that Canada’s Criminal Code applies to the promotion of hate against an “identifiable group,” which includes those of “national origin.”

After Macdonald wrote his article of the supposed “threat” to punish those who boycott Israel, Blaney’s office responded:

This story is inaccurate and ridiculous. These laws have been on the books for many years and have not changed…. We won’t dignify this bizarre conspiracy theory with further comment.

CBC’s “correction” insisted that the response “appears to contradict the email comments” by Sirois.

The Jewish Press wrote here yesterday that applying hate crime laws to the BDS movement would raise questions of freedom of speech, a supposed threat that may be exactly what Macdonald wanted to promote.

CBC wrote in its correction, “Those who support BDS fear that the change in the law could lump in people who speak against Israel with those who are anti-Semitic.”

Honest Reporting has asked CBC for some clarifications and charged the national media outlet with violating standards.

Concerning the original headline that Ottawa “threatened” hate crime charges against BDS promoters, HR wrote, “Can the CBC even cite one such example? The article itself does not contain anything to substantiate this charge except conjecture and Mr. Macdonald’s deductive reasoning, along with his forming conclusions based on some statements made by senior officials….

“In fact, Mr. Macdonald only says that ‘The Harper government is signaling its intention to use hate crime laws against Canadian advocacy groups that encourage boycotts of Israel.’ This may or may not be the case, but there’s a marked difference between signaling intentions and claiming outright that the government has already ‘threatened’ those who boycott Israel.”

The possibility, if not probability, that Macdonald and CBC have an agenda to trump up charges against the government is supported by another headline, in a different article, that CBC had to change, according to HR.

The headline “McMaster students who boycott Israel among those who could face hate crime charges” was changed to “Are McMaster’s Israel boycott advocates among those who could face hate crime charges?”

HR said that “CBC adroitly changed the headline from a claim to a question and never did publicly disclose that the headline had been amended, a violation of CBC standards. The same violation occurred in the CBC’s failure to publicly acknowledge it edited its original inflammatory headline to Macdonald’s article.”

The pro-Israel Canadian government may be planning to include boycotts of Israel as a hate crime, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) reported Monday.

It said that such a move would target organizations such as the United Church of Canada, Canadian Quakers, campus protest groups and labor unions. It also would raise legal questions under Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Canadian Prime Stephen Harper is unarguably the most pro-Israel head of any government in the world. He sounded like an echo of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu during his visit to Israel last year.

Recently-retired Foreign Minister John Baird in January signed an agreement with Israel to fight the Boycott Israel movement, and government ministers have said they will show “zero tolerable” towards groups that are part of Boycott, Divest and Sanction (BDS). He described the Boycott Israel movement as “the new face of anti-Semitism.”

Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney recently said that boycotts of Israel cannot be separated from anti-Semitic hate speech and the recent terrorist attacks against Jews in France.

CBC asked the government to explain the meaning of “zero tolerance,” and Blaney replied that Canada has “one of the most comprehensive sets of [hate] laws anywhere in the world.”

Last year, Canada changed its definition of hate speech to include statements made against “national origin” and not just race and religion.

That has raised fears among civil libertarians that anti-Israel remarks could be classified as statements against Jews.

The concept of associating Israel with Jews goes at the very heart of the liberal Jewish community, as well as Jews who have no interest in Judaism in Israel. Whether they like it or not, hatred of Israel and Jews increasingly makes them identified with Israel by the fact that they are Jews.

They can like it or not, but inevitably, “Jew” cannot be separated from “Israel.” They can like it not, but the “People of Israel” means Jews – everywhere.

The question is whether that definition has a legal standing.

CBC reported that the Canadian Quakers wrote a letter to Foreign Affairs Minister Rob Nicholson in March “expressing concern” about describing boycotts as acts of anti-Semitism.

Blaney’s office did not specifically say that would be the case but noted that it is illegal to promote hatred against an “identifiable group.”

However, BDS protests in other parts of the world have been anything but violent, with frequent clashes with police such as in France.

In Israel, it is against the law to boycott the country

In France, hate speech as a crime includes statements aimed at people’s “national origin,” and BDS activists sometimes have been charged with violating the law.

Belgium is considering a similar law.

On paper, it would seem that prohibiting a group from promoting a boycott of a country – and Israel is the only nation that is targeted – because of its political polices is a violation of freedom of speech.

In reality, such protests are often like the Palestinian Authority term “resistance,” a code word to encourage terrorists to kill Jews.

Pharel Williams knew what he was doing when he came to Israel to collect footage for his on-and-on “happy” music video.

The Jewish State has again found itself among the happiest nations in the world, ranking number 11 in this year’s annual World Happiness Report for the second year running.

Published by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), the report placed Switzerland as the happiest country in the world among 156 countries surveyed in 2014.

Following closely were Iceland, Norway, Denmark and Canada, along with Finland, Netherlands, Sweden, New Zealand and Australia.

The United States is not nearly as happy: America ranked at Number 15.