Iran on Thursday drew a “red line” on preserving its “right” to produce enriched uranium, less than a week before the “PT5+1” begins another round of negotiations for Iran that are expected to stretch several months, plenty of time for it to race across Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s red line.

One-minded mass media this week enthusiastically reported Iran’s offer  to limit the number of centrifuges operating, restrict its amount of enriched uranium and accept verification but has totally ignored Iran’s “red line.”

Seyed Hossein Naqavi Hossein, a senior Iranian legislator  and rapporteur of the parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Commission, was reported by the government-run Fars News Agency on Thursday as saying, “The Iranian nation’s right to peaceful nuclear technology and uranium enrichment up to whatever level required by the country’s nuclear industry are regarded as our red lines.”

He said that no one is allowed to cross the red lines of the Islamic system.

The road to a nuclear-armed Iran is virtually the same one used by the Palestinian Authority to tire out the West and win all of its political and territorial demands.

First, both Iran and PA  chairman Mahmoud Abbas have learned to say the right word at the right time to the right people.

Second, they have made cosmetic changes while hardening their single-track objectives.

Third, both entities deliver a message at home that is 180 degrees opposite what they tell the West.

Fourth, the United States and its allies are willing to talk and talk so long as Iran does not have the bomb.

That is what scares Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, and rightly so. He said in the United Nations two weeks ago that the most dangerous situation would be allowing Iran to have the capacity for manufacturing a nuclear warhead and while sitting idly by until it decides to go ahead with a doomsday weapon, by which time it will be too late to stop it.

The Prime Minister has stayed on the good side of President Barack Obama and has not directly challenged his approach. Instead, he used his visit to the United States last week to go on a media blitz to take his case into the homes of Americans.

Now he is doing the same in Europe.

He conducted no less than six interviews Thursday with media outlets from Britain, Germany and France, three of the PT+1 countries that will meet next week with Iran in Geneva. The others are the United States, China and Russia.

“No deal is better than a bad deal, and a bad deal would be a partial agreement which lifts sanctions off Iran and leaves them with the ability to enrich uranium or to continue work on their heavy water plutonium, which is what is needed to produce nuclear weapons,” Prime Minister Netanyahu told the London Financial Times.

Targeting his audience, the Prime Minister referred to Nazi Germany and reminded listeners  that Churchill said, “Don’t let the Nazis arm themselves. Don’t let an implacable, radical regime have awesome power. And he was right, and there is a lesson to be learned here [to] be tough, be strong, be consistent… Europe should stop looking for excuses why it does not take action against Iran. If you want to be soft, be soft.”

Netanyahu stands almost alone against Iran, but there is still one very strong force that understands that Iran and the Palestinian Authority share the same concept of “negotiate,” which to them means, “You give and we take.”

That strong force is not a country; it is the U.S. Congress.

Republican Rep. Trent Franks of Arkansas is signing up co-sponsors to a new bill to authorize war against the Islamic Republic if it does not cease all enrichment of uranium.

There is little chance the bill will pass Congress, but a strong Congressional voice would act as brakes on President Obama’s “engagement,” just as it has acted to slow down Obama’s eagerness to give Abbas whatever he wants.

The New York Times, a regular grandstander for the president, is leading the bandwagon of “let’s trust Iran” just as it has done for 20 years to trust the Palestinian Authority, explaining that every terrorist attack only proves that Israel should surrender “land for peace” and if it turns out to be “land for war,” well, that’s Israel’s problem.

Efforts to bring Hollywood stars to Israel have extended to include Latin America, with a delegation of TV personalities and news executives arriving Monday from Central and South America as well as from the United States for a week-long visit.

The trip was announced by America’s Voices in Israel (AVI), part of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations and is partly sponsored by the Ministry of Tourism, Ministry of Foreign Affairs, David InterContinental Hotel, Inbal Jerusalem Hotel and El Al Israel Airlines.

The latest visitors will tour Israel’s burgeoning hi-tech and medical industries and listen to briefings with the IDF, Israeli diplomats and Knesset Members.

Among the personalities in the Latin-American delegation are superstar Mexican actress and comedienne Angelica Vale, best-selling author Teresa Rodriguez, who also is the first woman to anchor a national newscast in the United States, and media and [political strategist Alida Garcia, who orchestrated a large turnout of Latino voters for President Obama and now works for Mark Zuckerberg’s new advocacy organization.

Also in the group is Otto Padron, President and CEO of the Muruelo Media Holding, based in Los Angeles.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu beamed his anti-Rohani message to the Iranian people through BBC’s Persian Channel Thursday, telling them that a nuclear Iran would enslave them.

Iranians “will never get rid of the tyranny” if the regime obtains nuclear weapons, he said.

“The issue is this regime’s control of Iran, its aggressive designs, its brutalization of its own people,” the Prime Minister continued. “We don’t forget. I saw Neda on the sidewalk,” he said, referring to a protester whose murder in the anti-regime protests in 2009 was show all over the world. “I saw her choking in her own blood. I saw the desire of the Iranian people to have real freedom, a real life. I know that. It’s there.”

Prime Minister Netanyahu tossed in a couple of Persian words, saying that Israelis are not “suckers” for a fake effort by the Iranian regime to stop its nuclear weapons program.

His media blitz has reached almost every major American outlet, with a common warning to Americans that the United States, and not just Israel, will be threatened by a nuclear Iran.

He also held a private meeting with leaders of AIPAC, the Jewish Federations and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organization.

Prime Minister Netanyahu will stay in the United States one day more than planned in order to continue on the airwaves and fighting for prime time in the midst of the U.S. debt ceiling crisis.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s media blitz in the United States had one objective – counter the Iranian con game and to heck with the editors of The New York Times, which accused the Prime Minister of sabotaging President Obama’s attempts to “engage” Iran.

Prime Minister Netanyahu is smart enough to care less. He told Charlie Rose on PBS, “I’d rather have bad press and no eulogies, better a bad press than a good eulogy.”

An old expression in journalism about politicians is, “I don’t care what you say about me; just spell my name right.” The Times may hate Netanyahu, but it does not ignore him, and he got his message across.

It also would not be a surprise if President Barack Obama is not secretly happy that Prime Minister Netanyahu countered the “let’s be friends” act played out by the U.S. and Iranian presidents.

Obama may be blinded by the desert sun when it comes to Palestinian Authority bluff, but he is not entirely stupid on his home ground, where 9/11 still burns in America’s belly.

Netanyahu’s media blitz was a stark reminder to the American public, and the media, that rose-colored glasses don’t change reality.

Prime Minister Netanyahu knows the power of words, and his education in Philadelphia as a youngster strengthened his thorough understanding of the American mind.

In 1984, Netanyahu served as one of the country’s most effective ambassadors to the United Nations and led the effort that opened the U.N. Nazi War Crimes Archives in 1987. More important, his skills form the podium helped make Americans understand Israel’s security needs.

Two years ago, Congress wildly applauded him when it invited him to speak to both Houses, which accepted him as if he were the most popular Congressman.

Even Ehud Olmert, who turned left of the left as Prime Minister when he inherited the position from the ailing Ariel Sharon, turned to Netanyahu to defend Israel against the anti-Israel media campaign in the Second Lebanon War.

Britain’s illustrious David Frost was left with his mouth open after he challenged Netanyahu on IDF bombings that killed children in southern Lebanon.

Netanyahu warned Frost to drop the subject, but Frost insisted and fell into his interviewee’s trap, allowing Netanyahu to drop the little tidbit that the British Royal Air Force accidentally bombed and killed dozens of children in World War II. Frost quickly moved on to the next subject.

So who cares if The New York Times castigates Netanyahu for castigating Hassan Rohani? The newspaper is so heavily weighted – not by doves but by cowards – that more responsible media are a bit more objective. The Times quoted former National Security Council staff member and Iran specialist Gary Sick, as saying that Netanyahu was “was so anxious to make everything look as negative as possible he actually pushed the limits of credibility.” And Rohani did not punish the lines of credibility?

The newspaper insisted on its editorial pages, “It could be disastrous if Mr. Netanyahu and his supporters within the Congress were so blinded by distrust of Iran that they exaggerate the [nuclear] threat, block President Obama from taking advantage of new diplomatic openings and sabotage the best chance to establish a new relationship since the 1979 Iranian revolution sent American-Iranian relations into the deep freeze.”

It also noted that former White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said, “Netanyahu’s speech is addressed to the Israeli public. Israel did not help itself with Netanyahu’s statement especially that the world has forgotten what happened in the twentieth century.”

If the polls are judged on their face, Gibbs is correct. Approximately three-quarters of Americans favor diplomacy over military action to solve the Iranian puzzle, but what is surprising is that the number is only three-quarters. Everyone would prefer a diplomatic solution.

Netanyahu’s message is that it won’t happen, and no one can really quarrel with him. The quarrel is over whether giving it the old college try won’t blow up in Israelis’ faces.

Leave it to The Christian Science Monitor, far from being in Israel’s corner, to write, “Netanyahu…sees himself as playing a Churchillian role to alert the world to the dangers of appeasement, just as the formidable British leader did when faced by the Nazi regime. For one who sees the Iranian nuclear issue in existential terms, being perceived as a party pooper is a small price to pay.

Visit Emes Ve-Emunah .

During the years of Mubarak’s rule, he had only three true supporters: his wife Suzanne and his sons Gamal and Alaa. All of the other figures that surrounded Mubarak were politicians and sycophants who took advantage of their proximity to the president to extract favors as long as he was able to grant them. The moment that they felt that he was weak, they abandoned him to the fate of dismissal and the defendant’s cage. In contrast, in Mursi’s case there were, and still are, tens of millions of supporters who are ready at a moment’s notice to fight to the end, in order to return him to power. This is the reason for the contrast between the ease with which Mubarak was taken down and the difficulties that the army has been experiencing in its attempts to stabilize the state since Mursi was thrown out of office about three months ago, at the beginning of July of this year (2013).

The most important and sensitive indicator of the current state of political stability is what is happening in the educational system: If the schools open on schedule, students go to school as usual and studies in all of the institutions are conducted normally, it is a sign of a stable state, and a functional government, based on legitimacy and wide public acceptance. When life is disrupted, the first thing to be harmed is the educational system because parents don’t send their children out into the streets in a situation that they consider to be dangerous.

The Egyptian school year was supposed to begin these days. But despite the fact that many of its leaders are behind bars, the Muslim Brotherhood came out with the rhyming slogan: “La Dirasa wala tadris hata yarga al-Rais” – “No school and no instruction until the president’s return”.

The universities are more than just institutions of higher learning, because they also serve as a meeting place, a place to express solidarity and a field of activity for the young guard, the energetic ones of the Muslim Brotherhood, who are quite aware that after they successfully finish their academic studies, there will be several years of searching for work in their field, and many frustrations and disappointments stemming from the widespread protectionism that exists within the Egyptian job market, and certainly within the governmental job market.

Today, when the average age of marriage has risen to over thirty years of age because of economic difficulties, the young men and women channel their energies, their frustrations and their aggression into the political arena, in the absence of any other legitimate channel in a conservative society such as Egypt’s.  Because of their age and family status, the pupils and students do not yet need to submit to the need for bribery and flattery that family heads have to, in order to maintain their livelihood, and this allows them to say, and even to shout, truth to power and its henchmen.

In high schools, colleges and universities throughout Egypt, and especially those in indigent and traditional areas, there are many demonstrations these days. Although these demonstrations are mostly peaceful in character, they express the emotions of the masses, who are enraged that the revolution has led to the downfall of the Muslim Brotherhood. Some of the youths are armed, mainly with knives and handguns, and there is high potential for violence to break out.

In parallel with the teachers’ strike there have been attempts to organize commercial strikes, but these attempts have failed because many of the unemployed in Egypt are street vendors who are not unionized, so it is difficult to get them to cooperate, since their income will suffer.

As of this writing, the UN Economic Council in New York is currently conducting activities, where Egypt is represented by Nabil Fahmi, the army-appointed Foreign Minister in the current military government. This is another reason for ferment among the supporters of the deposed president, Mursi, and they have been organizing protest demonstrations in front of UN representatives in Egypt. These demonstrations, should they become habitual, might bring about a violent response from the army, similar to the violent evacuation of Rabia al-Adawiya Square last month (August, 2013), which cost the lives of dozens of people.

Last Friday morning, Nadal Amar, 42, a resident of the Arab city of Kalkilya who worked in a fast food restaurant in the Jewish city of Bat Yam, talked his fellow employee, IDF Sergeant Tomer Hazan, 20, to come visit him at his home, over in the area under Palestinian Authority rule. They took a taxi together, stopped outside the Jewish town of Sha’arey Tikva in Judea and Samaria, and proceeded on foot to an open area outside the Arab village of Sanniriya. Shortly thereafter, Hazan was thrown into a water hole and died. Investigators suspect that he was not killed before being thrown in, but rather it was the fall that caused his death.

The distinction is important, because, according to Hazan’s abductor, Amar, his purpose in luring Hazan to his side of the “green line” was to use him as a bargaining chip in getting his terrorist brother released from Israeli jail.

Amar had a very good reason to do what he did: it is a well established Israeli government policy that Israel will always negotiate with terrorists, and will always—without exception—be willing to let go of hordes of Arab murderers, sometime in exchange for an abducted citizen, sometime in exchange for the dead bodies of fallen Israeli soldiers, and on occasion simply as a good will gesture. When an Arab murders a Jew anywhere in Israel and is lucky enough not to get killed during the act, he knows he would never serve out the full sentence imposed on him. And to get out he doesn’t even need to show good behavior, much less remorse – he just needs to wait for a good abduction.

This policy of letting go of busloads of murderers was always part of Israel’s insane policy of respecting the rights of Arabs to a fault while treating Israeli citizens like human trash. But it was carved in stone, for eternity, with the support of the vast majority of Israeli media, on October 18, 2011. Back then, 1,027 Palestinian prisoners were released to obtain the release of the Hamas abducted IDF soldier Gilad Shalit.

Some of the released in that infamous deal had been convicted of multiple murders of Israeli civilians. According to Israeli government sources, they were collectively responsible for 569 Israeli deaths.

When my government releases the murderers of 569 citizens as part of a negotiation with terrorists, what does that say about the value it accords those 569 victims? Simple: they don’t exist, they’re merely the price of getting the next political reward – and my prime minister decided to sweep away the memory of those victims in exchange for the life of a very popular young man at the time, IDF Corporal Gilad Shalit.

I have more sympathy for No’am Shalit, Gilad’s father, who led a relentless crusade for the release of his boy. I actually admire his resourcefulness, his sheer energy. It was a father’s love in action. But I did not appreciate the demonizing of those who objected to the astonishingly uneven proposed prisoner exchange (analyst Dan Schueftan called the swap “the greatest significant victory for terrorism that Israel has made possible.”). There were sound reasons for exceptionally sane people to oppose the exchange, and the media, taking its cues from Shalit Sr. presented them as heartless and, worse, right wing extremists.

But if the PM did it because he gave in to media pressure, and No’am Shalit did it for love of his son, the third culprit in this story, Jerusalem Post writer Gershon Baskin did it with unhidden joy, to advance his political agenda.

Baskin, an adviser on the peace process to prime ministers Yitzhak Rabin and Ehud Barak, and founding Co-Chairman of the Israel Palestine Center for Research and Information, negotiated through secret back channels for the Gilad Shalit swap.

Baskin’s book, “Free Gilad,” relates those secret negotiations. For more than five years, the NY born Baskin “dedicated and risked his life towards achieving a goal that had both national and human significance, to redeem the life of a human being who was confined in captivity.”

As a society — and a vast majority of Israelis, duped by their media, supported the Shalit exchange rate of one innocent Jew for more than 1,000 Jew killers — we have shown a deep disdain for the value of Jewish life. Our enemies are tenacious in their labor to free their own, blood on hands and all, while we are showing, day in and day out, that we do not honor our living or our dead.

I am deeply ashamed of my country today.