There are few weapons as deadly as the Israeli house. When its bricks and mortar are combined together, the house, whether it is one of those modest one story hilltop affairs or a five floor apartment building complete with hot and cold running water, becomes far more dangerous than anything green and glowing that comes out of the Iranian centrifuges.

Forget the cluster bomb and the mine, the poison gas shell and even tailored viruses. Iran can keep its nuclear bombs. They don’t impress anyone in Europe or in Washington DC. Genocide is equally not worthy of attention when in the presence of the fearsome weapon of terror that is an Israeli family of four moving into a new apartment downwind from Jerusalem.

Sudan may have built a small mountain of African corpses, but it can’t expect to command the full and undivided attention of the world until it does something truly outrageous like building a house and filling it with Jews. Since the Sudanese Jews are as gone as the Jews of Egypt, Iraq, Syria and good old Afghanistan, the chances of Bashir the Butcher pulling off that trick are rather slim.

Due to the Muslim world’s shortsightedness in driving out its Jews from Cairo, Aleppo and Baghdad  to Jerusalem, the ultimate weapon in international affairs is entirely controlled by the Jewish State. The Jewish State’s stockpile of Jews should worry the international community far more than its hypothetical stockpiles of nuclear weapons. No one besides Israel, and possibly Saudi Arabia, cares much about the Iranian bomb. But when Israel builds a house, then the international community tears its clothes, wails, threatens to recall its ambassadors and boycott Israeli peaches.

You can spit on the White House carpets and steal all the gold in Greece. You can blow up anything you like and threaten anyone you will, but you had better not lift a drill near Gilgal, where Joshua and a few million escaped Hebrew slaves pitched their camp.

Some may think that genocide or nuclear weapons are the ultimate weapons, but as we see, time and time again, the ultimate weapon is a hammer and a fistful of nails in a Jewish hand. How can even the most talented Iranian nuclear scientist hope to compete with the humble tools of a Jewish carpenter?

Obama has yet to respond to the Muslim Brotherhood coup in Egypt. The gangs of paid rapists assaulting women in Tahrir Square on behalf of the Sharia state are nothing for the White House to worry about. Tunisian protesters against Islamist rule are losing their eyes, but Tunisian eyes come and go, Jewish houses are forever.

Everyone has their standards and he and the international community have theirs. There are things that we all cannot abide. And for all the Miss America answers about ending war, hunger and people who wear plaid in public, the one thing that everyone will stand up against or sit down in opposition to is the Israeli house.

White House officials are already insisting that Netanyahu “humiliated” Obama by authorizing the building of houses. This is the worst Israeli crime since two years ago when the city of Jerusalem passed some houses through one stage of a multi-stage approval process while Biden was visiting the country.

Hillary called it an insult and spent two hours yelling at Netanyahu over the phone. Axelrod declared it an affront. Biden was so furious that he refused to come down for dinner until an hour later. For weeks the media howled that Netanyahu had humiliated Obama through the dastardly act of allowing one of the country’s mayors to approve housing while the sacred presence of Joseph Robinette Biden Jr was intersecting with Israeli airspace.

While Russia may threaten war against the United States, China may mock the United States at a ceremonial banquet in the White House, Iran and North Korea may play Obama for a fool, but only Israel has managed to achieve official recognition for “insulting and humiliating” Obama, without even trying, proving once again that the Jewish race is so talented that it often achieves things that other people may only dream of, without even realizing that they are doing it.

Now that Netanyahu has gone to the mattresses, literally, by authorizing new housing, the media has begun braying that Israel has humiliated Obama all over again. They say that every time a bell rings, an angel gets his wings. But every time an Israeli jackhammer roars, Obama stands, like that famous trash-mourning fake Indian, off Highway 1 between Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, with a tear slowly making its way down one glistening cheek at the sight of another humiliating Israeli house.

Watching Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas make his speech to the UN General Assembly, I suspect the same jolting thought passed through my head as it did for a lot of the viewers’: “Isn’t this guy meant to be the moderate?”

Coming so soon after the latest Hamas rocket-barrage against Israel, the almost physical need to hold onto that dead paradigm can still occasionally override most of the facts. On one side are the Palestinian rocket-launching squads about whom nothing apparently can be done. Then on the other side are the other Palestinians, led by moderates, who just want to sit down and negotiate if they could only find time out of their busy schedules.

Even those of us who know and follow the Palestinian Authority can find ourselves slipping into this narrative: These are the moderates and those are the extremists, and we have to choose between the two.

Except that then you get another golden opportunity to hear Mahmoud Abbas in full moderate flight mode, and you have to rethink it all over again.

When Abbas stood up to take the floor in front of the UN and the world last Thursday, he might have started with a concession. He might have started with a bid for peace or a reaching out to the Israelis. But no, he started once again, in time-honored fashion, with an attack on Israel. And the usual array of hilarious untruths and half-truths.

“Palestine comes today to the United Nations General Assembly…”

Not even a full sentence in and already the “Wrong” buzzer sounds. “Palestine” comes today? Which Palestine? Gaza? West Bank? “Palestine” is not a single entity. It is hopelessly divided. It makes the average boxing tournament look like a meeting of minds.

After all – and as he must surely know – Abbas himself has not even been to the Gaza since 2007. And not because the wicked Zionists have stopped him from doing so, but because his Palestinian brothers in Hamas have such a bad track record for shooting and hurling from high buildings most of Mr. Abbas’s erstwhile Fatah colleagues in Gaza, as during the 2007 Hamas coup.

But, undeterred by such trivialities, Abbas continued:

“…at a time when it is still tending to its wounds and still burying its beloved martyrs.”

The what? Martyrs? Oh well, perhaps it’s just a stylistic thing…

“…of children, women and men who have fallen victim to the latest Israeli aggression, still searching for remnants of life amid the ruins of homes destroyed by Israeli bombs on the Gaza Strip, wiping out entire families, their men, women and children murdered along with their dreams, their hopes, their future and their longing to live an ordinary life and to live in freedom and peace.”

Israeli aggression? Wiping out?

The question all of this begged for me, as I’m sure it did for plenty of others, was this: Does this sound like the opening number of somebody eager to engage in a peace process? Or the audition of a man who is hoping that he can take back extremism from the extremists?

Mahmoud Abbas spent his speech claiming that this was the last chance for the peace process. In reality, it was simply the last chance for Mahmoud Abbas to remain in charge. In recent weeks he has been phoning around the foreign ministries of Europe explaining that if they don’t back him this time in the non-state statehood bid, then it is all over and all we have to deal with is Hamas.

This is, of course, the classic thug extortion trick. They come to your door and tell you that you have to hand over the money. Not because they are going to do anything so bad if you don’t, but because their friend here is really, really mad, and they’re only just managing to hold him back.

On Thursday the UN General Assembly, with only a few brave souls holding out, finally gave in to this man’s gangsterism. Many of them did so in order – they thought – to avoid the rocket-firing terrorism of Hamas. So they ended up by backing the diplomatic terrorism of Mahmoud Abbas.

What he does with his new-found power we can already guess. He will use it – as he used his time on the UN stage – not to further the peace process, but to retard it, principally by demonizing the only negotiating partner that he, or any other Palestinian leader, will ever have.

(((CLICK BELOW TO HEAR AUDIO)))

Yishai and Malkah present the third segment from a crowded Jerusalem café to introduce Yosef and Emuna Murray, a couple from the United States that are in the process of finishing their conversion to Judaism and visiting Jerusalem. Yosef is the Hebrew name of Calvin Murray, an American football player (retired) who was a star college player for the legendary Ohio Buckeyes under Coach Woody Hayes and went on to play in the NFL (Philadelphia Eagles) and USFL (Chicago Blitz). The Murrays tell their beautiful story of spiritual journey from being youth leaders in a Christian church to choosing Torah and Judaism and visiting Israel.  Don’t miss this interesting and insightful segment!

Yishai Fleisher on Twitter: @YishaiFleisher
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Israel is being hanged on a public gallows erected on the grounds of the United Nations with yards of rope gleefully supplied by the Muslim world. But the hangmen are mostly Westerners who still think that the Muslim lynch mob at their doorstep can be pacified with the death of a single victim.

There are three things you can do when you are about to be hanged. You can walk proudly, recite a glorious line or two to embed your martyrdom in historical memory, and then allow yourself to be hanged. Jews have an extensive body of experience with that brand of martyrdom.

Alternatively you can plead your case all the way to the gallows, arguing that a mistake has been made, that your case has been improperly reviewed, begging for someone to listen and do something. This way also ends in a hanging. But it’s the hanging of a slave without even a shred of dignity attached to it. A man that dies pleading with his murderers, and puts his fate in the honesty of the liars and hypocrites whose own crimes makes the worst of his look like virtues, is a craven fool.

Because there is really only one thing you can do when the noose is being placed around your neck. Resist. A noose works by tightening around your neck and cutting off your air or breaking your neck. If you resist the tightening of the noose, you may actually survive. On the other hand if you follow through all the procedures, if you allow your hands to be tied behind your back, and the noose to be fastened around your neck while trusting in the system to do right by you– your death is inevitable.

For seventeen years Israel has been walking toward the gallows. Its leaders have led it there by the nose ring of international assurances. Its people have been led there by refusing to see what is waiting ahead for them, even while the blood was being cleaned off the streets. Every attempt to reach a peaceful solution, every concession and show of good faith, has only tightened the bonds around its hands and the noose around its neck.

That is because every concession Israel has made, has further restricted not only its ability to defend itself, but even its ability to do basic things such as build residential housing in the capital of its own nation. Every gesture and agreement Israel has signed has bound it to ever more restrictive terms. And none of them have brought any peace. All they have ever done is set the bar higher for the next round of concessions demanded by the enemy and its aiders and abettors in the next phase of negotiations.

This is not a peace process, and it has never been one. It is a public lynching. It is the lynching of a country whose only real crime is that its existence offends the religious fanaticism and prejudices of a billion Muslims, who control much of the world’s oil, and whose followers are willing to riot and kill in the streets of nearly every major city in the world at the slightest offense.

The lynching began as a trial where the murderer wore a fine suit and his victim sat in an orange jumpsuit in the dock. Every day during the trial, the murderer would be allowed to leave the courtroom to kill again. And every afternoon he would return to the courtroom with bloody hands that the judge and jurors would pretend not to see. And if the victim dared to call attention to those bloody hands, he would be silenced and told that those murders too were his fault. Hadn’t he after all provoked the murderer into committing them?

Now the trial is coming to a close. The farce that the proceedings ever had anything to do with peace is unraveling. And we can thank Hamas and Obama for that. The endgame is all too clear. The undoing of that “mistake” which allowed the oldest and most persecuted minority in the Middle East to briefly reclaim their homeland from the tyranny of Muslim Caliphs and Sultans. To serve as a homeland for their persecuted brethren from the east and the west. From the south and the north. That mistake.

As reported in JewishPress.com, the process of exhuming Yasser Arafat’s body is to be completed today.

Palestinian’s believe that Arafat was poisoned with radiation, by Israel.

JewishPress.com is following the story, and will try to bring you photos.

There is a long, fascinating article in Hebrew about the “Secret to Iron Dome’s Success” — I will translate just a few paragraphs for you which I found fascinating:

“At the beginning of our journey [to create the Iron Dome], it was simply almost impossible.  We believed we would succeed, but the challenge was unprecedented.

In retrospect, its clear that the [time and financial] limitations imposed on the project, which seemed insurmountable, are what led to extremely creative and successful ideas.  The simplicity is not only in the design, but in the manufacturing process.  The manufacturers have told us this is the simplest rocket they have ever produced.

As scientists, its true we dream of sitting in offices with unlimited time and budgets to create perfect products.

Yet reality and limitations forced us to “break our heads.”

There are rocket components that are FORTY TIMES CHEAPER [in Iron Dome] than those we normally would purchase.  I can even give you a scoop — this is the only rocket in the world which includes parts from toys from “Toys R Us”.

One day, I brought my son’s toy car to work.  We passed it from one to another and saw that it has components that would be useful for us. More than that, I cannot tell you… (Source).

This is the neonatal unit of the bomb-sheltered section of Barzilai hospital, down in Ashkelon. When the rockets start flying overhead, and sirens start blasting in response, the hospital staff moves the critical care patients and the babies, incubated and everyone else, to the secure area, under layers of fortified cement.

It’s a very complicated process, made easier, unfortunately, by the fact that they have to repeat it so often. Imagine having to move a patient who is connected to a whole bunch of tubes and monitors down endless corridors, elevators, halls.

It’s definitely a team sport.

The funny thing is, even while the rockets are flying from Gaza, Barzilai hospital continues to accept and treat patients who come in from… Gaza. Last night I heard from IDF Spokesperson Lt. Col. Avital Leibovich that 14 Gazan patients have been admitted since the start of the hostilities.

We care for their sick, we ship them food and provisions, we renew their fuel supply, and we provide them with electricity. Even as the fighting is going on.

What beautiful idiots we are.

The Palestinians are digging up the body of Yasser Arafat. They have been claiming that Arafat was poisoned by Israel, and are now on a quest to prove just that.

The concrete and stones of Arafat’s mausoleum in Ramallah are currently being removed, in a process that will take around 2 weeks.

After which French, Russian, and Swiss experts will determine if the exhumed Arafat was poisoned by polonium-210 as Al Jazeera has suggested.