U.S. State Dept. spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters Thursday that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is not infallible and therefore may be wrong in opposing a potential “bad” deal with Iran.

Pressed by Associated Press reporter Matt Lee if the pope and President Barack Obama also are not infallible, she admitted everyone is.

The questioning was in response to Secretary John Kerry’s testimony at Congress where he questioned Netanyahu’s judgment for supporting the 2003 war in Iraq.

Lee asked, “I’m wondering if you can explain a bit more about what he[Kerry] meant since there were a lot of people, including himself at one point, who were supporters of that war, and why this makes Prime Minister Netanyahu’s judgment suspect and does not make anyone else’s judgment suspect….. I’m sure that there may be other things that Prime Minister Netanyahu has been wrong about.”

Psaki performed some fancy verbal acrobatics and said that Kerry’s”point was about where we are with the Iran negotiations, and that we have to look at all of the options, look at all of the information that’s available, to – and have an open mind about how to approach this. And that’s what he’s asking from the prime minister.”

When Psaki agreed with Lee that “no one is infallible,” not even the pope or the president, he persisted:

if no one is infallible, how is it possible that Prime Minister Netanyahu here in his opposition to a potential Iran deal is wrong and you guys are all right?….

It’s the approach that the prime minister has an issue with, not the goal that you both – that I think he would say that you share with him. Psaki said the Obama administration does not agree that its approach to the Iranian nuclear threat is the problem. She adds that Netanyahu is wrong because he is part of an “effort to prejudge an outcome when the details are not yet known.”

But enough of the details are known.

There is a scary parallel between the “negotiations” with Iran and the U.S.-led negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

Technically, details of a final agreement were not known, but the Palestinian Authority gradually ruled out compromise on virtually all issues, leaving as “details” its demands that were evolving into a de facto final agreement.

Netanyahu finally drew the line after his own administrations, as well as those under Ehud Barak, Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni, caved in time after time.

Instead of a “bad deal, there was no deal, forcing the Palestinian Authority to go to the United Nations to try to force an agreement on Israel and prove to the world that Ramallah really was not interested in negotiations.

Kerry and Obama failed in the “peace process.” They blamed Mahmoud Abbas, no less than Netanyahu, for the failure.

They proved that they, even more than Netanyahu, are not infallible.

The U.S. State Dept. is using more than 300 of its social media accounts to monitor and try to counter the use of Twitter, Facebook and other sites to recruit people, mostly youth, into radical Islam and jihad.

“There are 90,000 pro-ISIL tweets or other social media responses every day,” State Dept. spokeswoman Jen Psaki said Tuesday.

“We’re definitely beaten by volume, but we don’t believe that ISIL is an invincible force on social media,” she added. “So what we’re working on now is aggregating and curating and amplifying existing content, so that means utilizing the 300-plus State Department social media accounts run by embassies, consulates, and individuals. It means also coordinating that with the social media accounts of other government agencies. It means expanding and giving more tools to the CSCC.

“We have a new head of CSCC who will be leading this effort to continue to improve our coordination and make sure we’re approaching this in the smartest, most strategic way. And as you mentioned, there are obviously best practices that we can learn from other countries. And part of this is not only sharing that but also determining who the right voices are.”

The good news from Foggy Bottom is that the experts understand they cannot use an American approach to counter a Middle East mentality.  Psaki said, “We certainly are not under the illusion that the United States is the best voice in many of these cases.”

If they had taken that approach towards the “peace process” long ago they would look a lot less dumb today.

The Obama administration is keeping Israel up to date on talks with Iran for an agreement to contain and supervise its nuclear program despite reports that Washington is fed up with Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu because of his planned speech in Congress next month.

“Conversations continue with Israel on the Iran nuclear negotiations, State Dept. spokeswoman Jen Psaki told reporters Tuesday.

She cited as examples a meeting between Under Secretary Sherman and Israeli NSA Cohen and the Minister for Intelligence and Strategic Planning Steinitz in Munich and a subsequent meeting this week. “Iran negotiations were obviously the main topic of negotiations,” according to Psaki.

“As you know, Secretary Kerry regularly speaks to the prime minister about this issue, as well as many others,” she added, “And as our NSC colleagues have noted, NSA – National Security Advisor Rice maintains regular contact with her Israeli counterpart, National Security Advisor Cohen, on the full range of issues, including, of course, this issue…

“And reports that that has been cut off or we are no longer consulting are simply inaccurate…. As it relates to our relationship with Israel, our consultations on Iran are ongoing at many levels and many, many high levels, and reports over the weekend are just inaccurate.”

American taxpayers’ money helped fund a pro-Palestinian Authority group to encourage “non-violent resistance to end the occupation,” according to material gleaned from the website OneVoiceMovement website, which is involved in the “V15″ campaign against Prime Minister Netanyahu, as reported here.

“OneVoicePalestine” received grants from the U.S. State Dept. until last November, weeks after most political observers said it was only a matter of time before the Netanyahu coalition would collapse and new elections would be held.

The hammer fell in December, and two months before, OneVoicePalestine (OVP) launched “The Land is Ours” campaign last September 25 to promote the stated American policy of a “two-state solution” and the un-stated policy of deciding the borders for a Palestinian Authority country.

The OneVoice site, in a blurb on the video it produced, stated its aim is to “encourage young Palestinians to participate in non-violent resistance to end the occupation, realize the two-state solution, and establish an independent Palestinian state on the 1967 lines with East Jerusalem as its capital.”

It added:

The campaign builds on the 2012 mobilization effort – “The Land is Ours, Leave Us Be” – which addressed the expansion of settlements by planting hundreds of trees in a number of areas threatened by confiscation.

Planting trees, borrowing the Jewish National Fund campaign decades ago to plant trees in Israel,  is the message of “non-violence resistance.” The video does not show Arabs waving the PA’s Fatah movement flag, emblazoned with a rifle.

Instead, the film shows Arabs marching in Judea and Samaria and planting trees but carefully omits facts that many if not most of the campaigns have been carried out on land where violence is likely because Arabs trespasses on land where Jews live. Their justification is that their claim on the land is valid and that Jews’ claims are not valid.

The Palestinian Authority has backing from the Obama administration, which always says that it is up to both sides — the Palestinian Authority and Israel — to determine borders. However, government grants over the decades, as with the OneVoice video “The Land Is Ours, Leave Us Be,” have been used to contradict the supposed policy that the “final borders” are not to be settled by unilateral actions but by negotiations.

By that definition, Israel also has taken “unilateral actions” every time a Jew builds a home in Judea and Samaria or in areas of Jerusalem claimed by the Palestinian Authority.

The difference is that when Jews take action, the Obama administration complains it is an obstacle to peace; when Arabs take action, it is considered their right.

Against this background, the call for “non-violent resistance” is at best naïve.

Official Palestinian Authority encouragement and promotion of violence has been documented at least every week by The Jewish Press and other media, often based on research by the Palestinian Media Watch.

Al Monitor, a predominantly pro-Arab organization, wrote nearly a year ago:

Although major Palestinian nationalist and Islamist movements publicly support and endorse what they call the “popular resistance,” there is little evidence that this support is more than lip service….

Two other problems have prevented nonviolence from becoming the major force in Palestine….Leaders of the movement have been unable or unwilling to show the kind of discipline that Mahatma Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. showed in keeping the movement totally nonviolent. This partial nonviolence [sic] that features throwing stones at Israeli troops — often at the end of a mass demonstration — not only results in a brutal Israeli crackdown, but more importantly, it weakens the stance of a nonviolent movement.

It added that the second problem that silences the nonviolent movement “has been its inability to involve Israeli peace activists” because of “the lack of clarity about cooperating with Israelis and the ready accusation of ‘normalization” with Israel.

The bold statement that throwing stones is only “partial” non-violent illustrates where the American-funded OneVoice campaign is headed, whether intentional or not.

Violence becomes “non-violence” simply by changing the definition of the term, just as The Jewish Press pointed out here that the White House defeats terror by re-defining it.

Below is the OneVoice video, funded by American taxpayers.

The IDF has extended duty for Reservist units in the north as part of its maximum later presence in the wake of Hezbollah threats to retaliate against Israel for last week’s aerial strike that killed a dozen Hezbollah and Iranian Revolutionary Guards soldiers and commanders..

The high tension that is gripping the north was illustrated on Sunday by an IDF order that temporarily closed roads because of a “possible security incident.”

The defense establishment is jumpy, to say the least. It is not taking any chances with the lives of Israelis, even if it means lots of false alarms and extending reserve duty for soldiers who are bored stiff by the lack of action, which is exactly why the IDF has deployed them. A bored soldier is a lot better than his absence, which is a sign for the enemy to attack.

One important deterrent to Hezbollah retaliation is increasing anger against Hezbollah among  Lebanese politicians. The Lebanese army has tightened its security along the eastern border with Syria following attacks on Friday by radical Islamists who killed eight Lebanese soldiers and wounded 22.

The spillover into Lebanon  form the war of what remains of Syria is hurting Lebanon economically.

The U.S. Department of State issued a new travel warning advisory to Lebanon and cited reports of a possible suicide attack at a casino and hotel.

“The development serves as an important reminder of the ongoing security concerns in Lebanon – even in areas which are normally considered less dangerous,” the advisory stated.

It urged U.S. citizens not to travel to Lebanon due to “safety and security concerns.”

The Palestinian Authority on Sunday called for “resistance” and boycott of all Israeli goods, capping off a campaign of promoting the blood libel that Israel planned the recent radical Islamic terror attacks in France.

Why would Israel do such a horrid thing? Why would Israel draft the Mossad to pay off Muslims to kill Jews and Christians in France?

Abbas and his Fatah movement have the answers: Aliyah of Jews from France and “revenge on European government…because of their positions on the Palestinian cause.”

Now that we know why 17 people were killed in three straight days of barbaric murder, we must remember that Secretary of State John Kerry has said over and over again the past several years that Abbas is against violence and does not incite his lone wolves to murder the sheep.

So how can it be that a recent poll of Arabs in Judea, Gaza and Samaria found that 84.4 percent of the respondents support the claim that “the operation (i.e., terror attack) was suspicious, and that Israel may be behind it,” while “only 8.7% believed that the murder of the French [citizens] in Paris was a natural result of the spread of Islamic extremism in Europe.”

The answer is that they read official Palestinian Authority media.

The official PA daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida reported last week, as translated and published by the Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) today:

The Mossad, the Israeli Secret Intelligence Service, planned the attacks because Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu and other Israeli leaders want to encourage Jewish immigration and take “revenge on European governments… because of their… support for… an independent Palestinian state.”

One regular columnist, Muwaffaq Matar, argued that because Netanyahu “wishes to realize the myth of the ‘Jewishness of Israel’” and encourage immigration, the attacks against Jews in France and elsewhere in Europe were “no coincidence, but a carefully executed and fully controlled plan.” He further argued that these claims were true because “‘Netanyahu’s Jewish State’ was the only one to benefit” from these attacks….”

Another regular columnist, Omar Hilmi Al-Ghoul, claimed that “Turkish sources, including intelligence and the mayor of Ankara,” determined that the attacks were “planned by the Israeli Mossad.”

The Palestinian Authority also used its official television network to tell viewers on January 12, in an interview with a journalist, that “in the past, the Israeli Mossad carried out operations (i.e., terror attacks): It bombed synagogues in order to force the Jews to emigrate.”

It gets even worse. Israel even trained the terrorists and gave them weapons, according to another writer for the daily.

Yahya Rabah wrote:

We have seen how Israeli terrorism in all its forms… is what grants patronage to all the terrorist groups in the region. Eventually, we have seen that terror[ists] have begun to receive training, weapons and perhaps [even] intelligence from Israel. Therefore, many believe that there was more to the last wave of terrorism in France than [just] two young Muslims. This was an [attempt to] target the role of France… [which voted] in favor of the Palestinian-Arab proposal at the [UN] Security Council last month!

Kerry can take pleasure in the fact that the Palestinian Authority officially condemned the attack on the Charles Hebdo magazine offices while letting a writer for its official daily write that the “unknown Charlie Hebdo magazine” had published “offensive cartoons” of the Prophet Mohamed “to get publicity and “extract itself from financial crises.”

None of this is a surprise to our readers.

But it is a surprise that the Obama administration still cannot come to terms with reality because doing so would be an admission that it has been hoodwinked for 20 years by a two-faced monster that has conned successive American governments and the State Dept., which still insists that none of this would have happened if Israel simply would follow the Arab world’s orders and stop insisting on Zionist demands, such as remaining a Jewish state and protecting its citizens from terror.

The U.S. State Dept. has strongly attacked the International Criminal Court (ICC) for opening a probe of alleged Israeli war comes and left open the question whether the ICC even has the a right to conduct a probe of last year’s war with Hamas.

The State Dept. called the ICC announcement a “tragic irony,” a statement that was further bolstered by praise for the ICC decision by Hamas, which may find itself under the ICC microscope.

Jeff Rathke, director of the State Dept. press office, stated:

We strongly disagree with the ICC Prosecutor’s action today. As we have said repeatedly, we do not believe that Palestine is a state and therefore we do not believe that it is eligible to join the ICC. It is a tragic irony that Israel, which has withstood thousands of terrorist rockets fired at its civilians and its neighborhoods, is now being scrutinized by the ICC.

He told reporters at Friday’s daily press briefing:

We don’t think that the Palestinians have established a state, and we don’t think they’re eligible to join the International Criminal Court. I would highlight that many other countries share this view.

In answer to a question whether the ICC is conducting “an illegitimate preliminary examination,” Rathke responded, ” I’m not going to characterize it.,” and he declined to say one way or the other if the United States will appeal to the ICC to drop the preliminary examination.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu spoke with Sec. of State John Kerry Friday and asked him to intervene against the ICC on behalf of Israel

Hamas was thrilled by the ICC decision and declared on Saturday, “We are ready to provide (the court) with thousands of reports and documents that confirm the Zionist enemy has committed horrible crimes against Gaza and against our people.”

“Tragic irony” is an excellent definition of the ICC decision, which is even more astonishing since it apparently follows a complaint by the Palestinian Authority, which will not be a member of the ICC until April 1.

Technically, the ICC is off the hook of overreaching its authority.

The “Rome Statute” concerning war crimes states that non-members cannot ask for an investigation of war crimes.

The ICC got around this restriction by stating it is “examining” whether an investigation should be conducted, and it obviously cannot make a decision until April 1.

But how can the ICC examine alleged war crimes dating back to last year, when the Palestinian Authority did not even apply for ICC membership.

PA chairman Mahmoud Abbas presented documents to the ICC giving it authority to act retroactively.

The ICC stated it will open its examination on alleged Israeli war crimes in last summers’ war with “full independence and impartiality.”

If so, it will have a hard time ignoring Hamas war crimes, which Israel documented day by day in the war, having learned to do so after the United Nations’ scathing Goldstone Report that barely mentioned Hamas’ war crimes in the three-week Operation Cast Lead counter-terrorist campaign in late December 2008 and early January 2009.

Prime Minister Netanyahu said that the ICC announcement of a preliminary examination as based on an “outrageous request” by the Palestinian Authority.