Israel’s senior intelligence analyst  said on Tuesday that Syrian President Bashar Assad has used chemical weapons against the rebels, but U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry insisted there is no proof.

“To the best of our understanding, there was use of lethal chemical weapons. Which chemical weapons? Probably sarin,” Brigadier-General Itai Brun told a Tel Aviv security conference.

President Barack Obama has said that he would order military action in Syria if chemical weapons are used.

Videos of Syrian civilians, many of them children, suffering from the effects of chemical weapons have surfaced at least three times this year. Britain and France also have said that they have been used.

But the American government wants documented proof and whatever else they can come up with to get out of acting on its word. Obama talked himself not a corner because it has become clear that no matter what happens in Syria, everyone loses in  the nears-term.

Kerry not only rejected Israeli intelligence but also tried to throw the responsibility on NATO.

“We should also carefully and collectively consider how NATO is prepared to respond to protect its members from a Syrian threat, including any potential chemical weapons threat,” Kerry said at a meeting of NATO foreign ministers.

That is a clever way of taking the monkey off of Obama’s back, but it is pretty nervy to reject Israeli intelligence. First of all, Israel and Syria are next –door neighbors. Secondly, you can bet your bottom shekel that Israel has more intelligent agents than the United States who know Syrian turf and speak the language.

Thirdly, the United States has a history of making itself look silly by rejecting Israeli intelligence. Several years ago, Israel warned American officials that Iran was secretly working on its nuclear power program, but Washington categorically rejected the information. Its own bright-eyed experts knew 100 percent that Iran had dropped its plans for making a nuclear weapon.

Around two years ago, the U.S. government said, well, y’know, it looks like the Israelis are right again. And now the world is paying the price.

But just to be sure, how does General Brun know for a fact that Assad’s forces have unleashed the unthinkable?

He showed previously published pictures of a child, either dead or wounded, and said foam seemed to be coming out of the mouth.

But that still is not the hard proof the United States is demanding.

Brun is certain he is right. “The very fact that they have used chemical weapons without any appropriate reaction is a very worrying development, because it might signal that this is legitimate” he said.

Enter John Kerry. He knows that Israel has no proof of the use of chemical weapons because he talked with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who “was not in a position to confirm that in the conversation that I had.”

“I don’t know yet what the facts are,” Kerry added. “I don’t think anybody knows what they are.” Not even Gen. Brun?

No one knows what the context of the Prime Minister’s remarks were. Nor does anyone know if Prime Minister Netanyahu would prefer not to fall into a trap of telling the Secreatru of State and than being told to keep quiet. Or perhaps Netanyahu does not want to put Obama in a corner right now, despite Gen. Brun’s comments.

Meanwhile, the White House keeps pounding the podium that the use of chemical weapons is unacceptable and continues to wag fingers, saying woe to Assad if he is proven to have deployed them.

Back in the State Department, reporters are siding with Israel’s version.

At Tuesday’s daily media briefing, reporters peppered acting spokesman Patrick Ventrell with questions.

Asked about General Brun’s statements and about British and French claims of the use of chemical weapons, Ventrell said, “The bottom line is [to] continue to support an investigation of all credible allegations of chemical weapons used to establish the facts of exactly what did or didn’t happen. ”

The reporter shot back, “You are saying that we are supporting these investigations, but we all know the Syrian regime has been refusing UN team. How you are going to able to investigate it if the regime is not allowing you to do that? Or how long you are going to use this rhetoric even though nothing is happening on the ground?”

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry told Turkish officials that the anguish of Americans over the terrorist attack on the Boston Marathon helped him understand the frustration of Turks over the death of IHH thugs who were killed in the May 2010 flotilla clash after kidnapping and seriously wounding several Navy soldiers.

Nine Turks, members of the terror-linked IHH “charity” organization, brutally clubbed and knifed the commandos who reach the deck of the Mavi Mamara by climbing down a rope from a hovering helicopter and armed with nothing more than personal pistols and paint guns.

Kerry compared the American reactions to the terrorist attack in Boston with those in Turkey to the Israeli counterterrorist attack on the IHH.

“It affects the community, it affects the country. But going forward, you know, we have to find the best way to bring people together and undo these tensions and undo these stereotypes and try to make peace,” he stated.

Deputy Defense Minister Danny Danon (Likud) criticized Kerry or his remarks. “It is never helpful when a moral equivalency is made confusing terrorists with their victims,” Danon told The Times of Israel. ”The only way to deal with the evils of terrorism it to wage an unrelenting war against its perpetrators, wherever they may be.”

Kerry visited Ankara to try to bring Turkey and Israel closer together after Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s four years of snubbing Israel and falling into his own trap by embracing Iran and Syria.

The new Secretary of State, who already is a candidate to surpass his predecessor Hillary Clinton’s record for traveling around the world several times, tried to pull his diplomatic weight to convince Erdogan not to visit Hamas-controlled Gaza next month.

The trip ‘‘would be better delayed and that it shouldn’t take place at this point in time… Our sense is that it would be more helpful to wait for the right circumstances.”

Kerry met with Turkey’s foreign minister Ahmet Davutoglu but not with Erdogan, whose ego could not possibly allow anyone less than the President of the United States to sway his plans.

President Barack Obama used his trip to Israel last month to convince Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to offer an apology to Erdogan for the outcome of the flotilla clash and even agree to compensate families of those who planned and carried out the attacks on the commandos.

The Turkish Foreign Ministry quickly replied to Kerry’s request in the negative.

It would be wrong to evaluate these [Kerry’s statements] as a ‘U.S. reaction to Erdogan’s Gaza visit,’” an official from the Turkish Foreign Ministry told daily Hürriyet, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

“For now there isn’t any change in the prime minister’s Gaza schedule. The issue will be discussed during Erdogan’s visit [to the United States] on May 16. This is what Kerry says, too. After the U.S. trip, Erdogan’s Gaza trip will be realized,” he said.

Perhaps President Obama can convince Erdogan to cool off a bit, especially if Turkey wants to feel more secure against the prospect of neighboring Iran as a nuclear threat.

In return, perhaps Erdogan can convince President Obama to compensate the families of the brothers who murdered three people, wounded 200 others and threw Boston into mayhem in the Boston Marathon Massacre.

Israel is about to offer missiles and advanced technology to Turkish in exchange for Ankara’s allowing the Israeli Air Force to use a base northeast of the capital, which is approximately  1,000 miles from the border with Iran, according to the Sunday Times of London.

It said that National Security Council chairman Yaakov Amidror will visit Turkey on Monday to try to put an end to the bitter differences between Turkey and Israel over the Mavi Mamara flotilla clash three years ago.

“Until the recent crisis, Turkey was our biggest aircraft carrier,” an Israeli military source told the London newspaper. “Using the Turkish airbases could make the difference between success and failure once a showdown with Iran gets underway.”

Iran is a mutual fear for both countries, and President Barack Obama used his visit last month to Israel to put an end to the diplomatic crisis that began to develop during the Operation Cast Lead counterterrorist maneuvers against Hamas-controlled Gaza, when Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan turned Israel from a long-term friend into a new enemy. He then embraced both Syria and Iran until realizing last year he chose the wrong side.

Israel is helping him climb down from the diplomatic tree and in principle has agreed to Erdogan’s demand to compensate the families of the nine Turkish IHH members who carried out a brutal pore-mediated attack on Israeli Navy commandos who boarded their ship virtually unarmed to keep it from sailing to embargoed-Gaza. After the IHH attackers kidnapped three commandos and wounded them and several others, the Israeli force overtook them, killing nine IHH terrorists.

The London newspaper reported that Amidror’s mission is to re-open a 1996 Israeli-Turkish agreement that allows the Israel Air Force to train in Turkey’s air space and use the Akinci Air Base, northeast of Ankara. In return, Turkish pilots were allowed to train at Air Force bases in the Negev.

With the threat of an Iranian nuclear weapon staring at in its face, Turkey wants Israel’s advanced technology and missiles, such as the Arrow,  to beef up its defense not only against missiles from Iran but also from Syria.

Turkey is very worried by Iran’s missile ambitions,” the Israeli source told the Sunday Times. “With Israeli know-how based on the Jericho ballistic missiles, the time frame will be cut short.”

Illinois Rabbi Samuel N. Gordon and public relations executive Maureen Schulman are the newest members of the U. S. Holocaust Memorial Council, appointed on Tuesday by President Barack Obama.

Rabbi Gordon is the founding rabbi of Congregation Sukkat Shalom in Wilmette, Ill. and is vice president of the Central Conference of American Rabbis. He also is a member of the President’s Advisory Council of the Hebrew Union College and a senior rabbinic fellow of the Hartman Institute in Jerusalem.

Schulman is president of her public relations firm and director of public relations for The Eli’s Cheesecake Company. She is president of the board of The Happiness Club and a director of the Magnificent Mile Charitable Foundation.

Following Washington and Jerusalem’s decisions to fork over more money to the debt-ridden Palestinian Authority without requiring it to pay off its debts to Israel for electricity, the Israel Electric Corp, is considering raising electricity rates for Israelis to cover Ramallah’s debt.

Israel supplies almost all of the electricity for Jews and Arabs in Judea and Samaria. The Palestinian Authority and the Jerusalem District Electricity Company are responsible for collecting money from Arabs and paying Israel.

After PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas again violated the Oslo Accords last November, this time by going to the United Nations General Assembly for a resolution recognizing the Palestinian Authority on its own terms, Finance Minister Yuval Steinitz triumphantly stopped the monthly transfer of tax money Israel collects for the PA and handed over the cash to the Israel Electric Corp. to pay off most, but not all, of the constantly growing debt of the Palestinian Authority for electricity.

That was before President Barack Obama visited Israel and softened up Prime Minister Netanyahu to make another one of countless “goodwill” gestures to Abbas and release monthly tax revenues.

Of course, Abbas has other sources to pay off the debt for electricity, such as the American taxpayer.

But the Obama administration, Washington’s version of Chelm, thinks that American money should be used to help Abbas to bloat his debt instead of paying it off.

After the president’s return to the United States, he came up with his own goodwill measure, and with the kind support of U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, the United States freed up $200 million for direct financial support for the Palestinian Authority budget, no strings attached.

Following Israel’s Cabinet decision to free the tax revenues, Israeli Electricity Corp., sources told Israel’s Globes business newspaper that the company now has less of a chance to collect money from the Palestinian Authority. “If there is no alternative, the utility will have to record the debt in its books as lost debt and ask the Public Utilities Authority to recognize it as an expense to be covered by electricity tariffs,” according to the newspaper’s website.

Rates will have to be increased approximately 3 percent for one year to cover the debt, but that is only for electricity and does not cover other PA debts.

Three percent would not be so bad by itself, but it would come on top of a 6.5 percent hike that was approved only two weeks ago.

President Barack Obama once again will hold a Passover Seder in the White House, perhaps a bit more serious than year’s National Jewish Democratic Council’s ego-centric desecration of the Four Questions, which his aides re-invented to glorify the Commander in Chief.

After “Preacher Obama’s” revival appearance in Israel, he is likely to take more seriously the Passover Seder tradition this year and is even more likely to come up with his own interpretations and meaning of the Seder.

For a man who had the chutzpah to tell synagogue worshippers in Florida during his 2008 presidential campaign that he is “blessed,” as indicated by his name “Baruch” that he said means “Blessed” in Hebrew, he will have no trouble in skipping over 2,000 years of Talmudic study of the Exodus of the Jewish People that led us to Mount Sinai and eventually to the Land of Israel.

Somehow, he will dig into the deeper meaning of Passover and declare that God brought the Jews to Israel to divide the homeland and give most of it to the Palestinian Authority, whose Muslim clerics also have done a nifty job of rewriting ancient Bible. According to them, the Binding of Yitzchak (Isaac) is the wrong version, and it was Ishmael who was bound. If you believe that, then of course the Holy Temples never existed and the Western Wall was Mohammed’s hitching post.

The problem with President Obama’s annual Seder ceremony, as evidenced by his “I believe” Hallelujah speech in Jerusalem, is that he truly does believe he knows better than anyone else, certainly better than Israelis, better than Arabs and better than Talmudic sages.

We would be better off if he were to run a repeat performance of last year’s travesty, when the “Four Questions, designed to educate Jewish children about the Seder, turned into a mockery of the president’s intelligence.

In case anyone forgets, the questions posed by the National Jewish Democratic Council (NJDC) were: Why has President Obama provided record amounts of military aid to Israel?”; “Why has President Obama worked so hard and succeeded at uniting the world against Iran’s illicit nuclear weapons program?”; “Why has President Obama achieved the historic passage of ‘Obamacare’”?; and, “Why has President Obama fought to strengthen Medicare and Medicaid?”

Commentary Magazine’s Jonathan Tobin wrote last year, “Passover is the occasion for Jews to remember their liberation from Egypt and to embrace not only the gift of freedom but also the ability to worship God and His laws as a people.

”While Seders are appropriate moments to remember those in need as well as other Jewish communities — such as that in Israel — which are assailed by foes, it is not the time to be delivering obsequious paeans to American politicians, no matter which party they belong to. That sort of absurd distortion of the festival of freedom bears a closer resemblance to idol worship than it does to Judaism.”

President Obama is not paying any attention to Tobin. In his pre-Passover sermon at the Jerusalem Convention Center last Thursday, he said, “The Seder… is a story about finding freedom in your own land. For the Jewish people, this story is central to who you have become. But it is also a story that holds within it the universal human experience, with all of its suffering and salvation. It is a part of the three great religions – Judaism, Christianity, and Islam – that trace their origins to Abraham, and see Jerusalem as sacred….

“To African-Americans, the story of the Exodus told a powerful tale about emerging from the grip of bondage to reach for liberty and human dignity – a tale that was carried from slavery through the civil rights movement.”

After invoking a quote by Martin Luther King relating to Moses and Joshua, President Obama continued to the next obvious step – the Palestinian Authority.

President Obama’s inevitable reference to the Palestinian cause when he sits down for his version of the Seder with 20 chosen guests this week will be accompanied by everything that is totally the opposite of the message of the Seder, and that is materialism.

The matzah is the simplest of foods, unleavened bread. Jew lived on Manna during their sojourn in the desert. No cheeseburgers, no ice cream and not even meat, except for the plague that swept the Jews when they demanded meat and the quickly became sorry for what they wished.

Israeli police on Sunday removed Palestinian Authority protesters squatting on the “E-1” area of Maaleh Adumim, east of Jerusalem, with President Barack Obama safely out of the country.

The demonstrators camped out on the area just before President Obama arrived in Israel as show of their claim to the land, as well as all of Judea and Samaria and half of Jerusalem. In deference to the president’s visit, Israel ignored their presence until Sunday.

The government has announced that hundreds of new residential units will be built in the area, but the Obama administration, has expressed strong objections, arguing that additional construction for Jews would present facts on the grounds that in favor of Jewish sovereignty over the area. More than 40,000 Jews now live in Maaleh Adumim.

In a letter timed for Passover, a broad array of Jewish groups urged President Obama and Congress to facilitate a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.

“American Jews know too well the impact of restrictive immigration policies, and we have seen how the immigration issue can become a flashpoint for xenophobia,” said the letter sent March 22, spearheaded by the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society and including signatories representing all four Jewish religious streams as well as the major Jewish civil rights groups and the federation and public policy umbrellas.

“We are concerned the failure of national leaders to fix the broken immigration system has fueled racist, nativist, and extremist groups who blame immigrants for our country’s problems, and has been a central factor in the spread of state and local policies and laws that legalize discrimination against immigrants,” it says.

The letter, signed by 19 national groups and dozens of local groups and clergy, calls for legislation that “brings undocumented immigrants out of the shadows by providing a pathway to citizenship, creates safe and legal avenues for future flows of immigrants, reunites families, establishes border protection and enforcement policies that enhance our national security, and accords all immigrants the responsibilities and rights required for full integration into American society.”

It asks that such a system be “realistic” and that citizenship be available “within a reasonable timeframe of years, not decades.”

The letter also urges reform that “fixes the broken system for admitting and integrating refugees and asylum seekers.”