February 24, 2011

The Grad rocket attacks are back

In retrospect, what was troubling about yesterday's Grad rocket attack on Beer Sheva was not only that it happened, but the near routine reaction of my whole family to the imminent rocket impact. My wife at first thought that the siren was a continua...

February 19, 2011

Is the taboo on reporting about the ineffectiveness of MAD and Iran beginning to crack?

After years of silence finally we see Iran's intentions exposed to the American audience. The movie Iranium is now being shown all around the US.   Two days in a row Fox News had broadcasted programs about Iran. On Thursday there was Glenn ...

February 11, 2011

The Mubarak Resignation - a new 'Dewey Defeats Truman' moment

It was almost comical. For 40 minutes I watched BBC World, SKY, Fox News and France24 "experts" discuss Mubarak's resignation while waiting for the speech the Egyptian president was to give at 8:00 pm GMT to commence.  The reporters we...

February 4, 2011

US and Israeli Analysts Split Over the Egyptian Crisis

The crisis in Egypt has provoked quite a different reaction among political analysts in Israel and the United States. The differences are huge. While the majority of Israeli commentators are quite worried that we will soon ha...

January 21, 2011

You can lead a horse to water...

It puzzles and infuriates me that our western civilization is at risk because the elite political classes are not willing to devote a few hours to read about Islam, Shariah and jihad.  Khrushchev's secret speech at the 20 Soviet Communist P...

December 30, 2010

Gaining three years?

In a Wikileaks cable from June 2009 Ehud Barak, Israel's defense minister, warned that the strike on Iran was viable until the end of 2010.A 2009 American government cable released Sunday by the WikiLeaks website quotes Defense Minister Ehud Barak as...

December 23, 2010

Wikileaks: New Zealand sells out Israel for lamb?

The Guardian has this from Wikileaks on New Zealand and Israel: US diplomats disparaged New Zealand's reaction to a suspected Israeli spy ring as a "flap" and accused New Zealand's government of grandstanding in order to sell more lamb to...

December 18, 2010

WikiLeaks conspiracy theorists target Israel

Many just cannot take it. After all the exposed hypocrisy of the Arab governments vis-a-vis Iran and the incompetence of the Obama Administration in dealing with the messianic apocalyptic regime in Tehran,  people do not understand how come Isra...

December 5, 2010

Would you board a plane which had a 5 percent chance of crashing?

In the article Israel's Missile Defense:  The New Strategic Factor in the Middle East  Barry Rubin, director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center of the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) in Herzliya, Israel,  wr...

November 29, 2010

Who knows more about the Iranian people? Robert Gates or Iranian CIA spy Reza Kahlili?

Here is an AFP report taken from WikiLeaks about a statement made by Robert Gates, Secretary of Defense: The American defense secretary told Morin that he "believed a conventional strike by any nation would only delay Iranian plans by one to t...

November 27, 2010

Our lethally uninformed civilization

On November 17, at the National Press Club, there was a symposium on Iran organized by Freedom Watch, at which several distinguished speakers including former director of CIA James Woolsey, former CIA spy Reza Kahlili and former UN Ambassador Alan Ke...

November 16, 2010

Second settlement freeze in exchange for what? I've got the solution.

The Obama administration is trying to make the Israeli government impose another 90 day freeze on settlements and has promised to fund the delivery of 20 F-35 advanced stealth fighter jets to Israel if Israel agrees. So how should Israel react? ...

September 28, 2010

Is stuxnet the new Ultra?

Few people realize the importance of Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Rozycki and Henryk Zygalski. These three Polish mathematicians and cryptologists solved the Enigma machine in 1932, the main cipher used by the Germans, and in 1939 transferred their knowled...

September 21, 2010

Why is there no reaction to 'Shariah:The Threat to America'?

A week has passed since the report Shariah: The Threat to America was released and the only reaction seems to be coming from Islamic sites. I find this quite odd.OK, the report is 150 pages long if you exclude the notes, but this can be read in half ...

September 11, 2010

Don't burn the Koran, read it

The whole media uproar with the burning of the Koran misses the point. The pastor should not burn the Koran but ask his congregation to READ the Koran. They would get a clear understanding and could not be accused of cherry picking certain verses ou...

September 3, 2010

Washington peace talks and the laws of gravity

If we drop a ball what will happen to it? It will fall to the ground because of the gravitational force acting between two masses, an inherent property of all matter. If we have a Muslim minority in a country what will happen? They will try to impo...

August 20, 2010

The American media's taboo regarding the ineffectiveness of MAD with Iran

According to John Bolton's remark Israel has one day left to destroy the Bushehr's nuclear reactor, else once rods are loaded the whole complex would become too dangerous to destroy later. It also seems that Russia has made an agreement with the US ...

August 14, 2010

Iranian Bushehr reactor deadline looms

It is summer, and almost everyone I know is on vacation and people on vacation do not take the news seriously. They should.  On August 21 Russia plans to load nuclear fuel rods into the Iranian reactor at Bushehr.   John Bolton had thi...

June 30, 2010

Ayaan Hirsi Ali on the Middle East

It is truly a pleasure  to see clarity spoken by a  known public figure about an issue where there has been none.  In a few sentences Ayaan Hirsi Ali demonstrated that she knows more  about the Middle East than all the pundi...

June 20, 2010

How to fight the next Gaza bound flotilla

Apart from being the diversion by Iran to finish the bomb, the flotillas against Israel are essentially propaganda tools to discredit Israel and the Jewish people. Islamic propaganda kamikazes or kamikaze protesters, as Caroline Glick calls them, ...

June 12, 2010

What makes Erdogan, Hamas, and Ahmadinejad tick?

Ari Shavit is a respected Israeli journalist who writes for Ha'aretz and who until now was quite reasonable and thanks to whom I could actually read Ha'aretz without getting a heart attack. In other words, he is not Gideon Levi or Amira Hass for whos...

June 8, 2010

The Turkey-Iranian diversion

Looking at Erdogan's moves the last few weeks one could easily conclude that the guy had gone raving mad. Sponsoring a terror attack on Israel with the group of Islamic propaganda kamikaze, and then lecturing Israel in Hebrew ‘Thou Shalt Not Ki...

June 1, 2010

The emergence of 'propaganda kamikazes'

 The terror flotilla was just another case of the West underestimating the malevolence of jihadism. If even Israelis with all their experience underestimated the danger to their commandos from people whose only goal was to die for Allah and g...

May 18, 2010

The Auschwitz pilgrimage redirected

Many Israeli teenagers at age 17, in the last year of high school, just before the army, take an educational trip to Auschwitz.  The trip is organized by schools and the teenagers are thoroughly psychologically prepared, if that is possible....

May 17, 2010

Chomsky denied entrance to Israel

From Haaretz Left-wing American linguist, who was scheduled to speak at Bir Zeit Uiversity, given no reason by Israeli inspectors at Allenby Bridge.The most obvious question that immediately comes to mind is: If Chomsky were not a US citizen would he...

May 2, 2010

Why MAD will fail with Iran

They managed to do it.  Two leading U.S. journalists from the two most important U.S. papers, Bret Stephens from The Wall Street Journal and Roger Cohen from The New York Times, succeeded in the impossible.  In The Iran Debate on Friday, ...

April 21, 2010

Obama's non-policy on Iran is obscene

Historian Benny Morris has an excellent piece in the LA Times titled 'When Armageddon lives next door' But at the same time, Obama insists that Israel may not launch a preemptive military strike of its own. Give sanctions a chance, he says. (Last yea...

April 14, 2010

The MAD nuclear doctrine will not work with Iran

In 2006 Bernard Lewis wrote in the Wall Street Journal   : "In this context, mutual assured destruction, the deterrent that worked so well during the Cold War, would have no meaning. At the end of time, there will be general d...

March 25, 2010

Obama ignoring the real reasons there is no peace in the Middle East

The president of the United States is playing games with Israeli lives.  He is spending time on totally irrelevant construction of apartments in Ramat Shlomo while Iran is coming closer to the bomb. The construction is irrelevant because th...

March 23, 2010

Hillary sticks her foot in it in speech at AIPAC

Yesterday at the AIPAC conference Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said:"When a Hamas-controlled municipality glorifies violence and renames a square after a terrorist who murdered innocent Israelis, it insults the families on both sides who h...

March 21, 2010

Ha'aretz poll: Most Israelis see Obama as fair and friendly

No, this is not a joke. It is a real headline in Ha'aretz.But at least the readers are not buying it. The comments ranged from: 1) Where did you get your numbers? 2) Fudged the numbers? 3) Which Israelis are you polling? Arab Israelis? Meretz? My ...

March 13, 2010

US fumes over Israeli home building while Iran builds nuke

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January 17, 2010

Israeli left and Haiti

The Israeli field hospital has just begun operating in Haiti. Previously, the VOA reported:  The 220-member Israeli delegation includes 40 doctors and 24 nurses who will set up a field hospital that can treat 500 people a day. The hospital has t...

January 14, 2010

There are better ways to make a diplomatic point

As if Israel had no other problems facing it, it now has to extricate itself from the public relations blunder, Danny Ayalon, Israel's Deputy Foreign Minister, got entangled in. Instead of exposing the anti-Semitic policies of the Turkish government ...

January 7, 2010

Yes, there is a solution to airline security

Can Americans please tell me what is going on? After the near catastrophe of Flight 253 the President of the United Stales was given a second chance. He blew it. In his speech he said almost nothing new. Same methods that have failed already. H...

January 4, 2010

Profiling: The first step

The New York Times writes:  Citizens of 14 nations, including Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Nigeria, who are flying to the United States will be subjected indefinitely to the intense screening at airports worldwide that was imposed after the Christ...

December 26, 2009

Luck, not screening, saved Flight 253

The passengers of Northwest/Delta Airlines Flight 253 are lucky they are still alive. They should be the last passengers in the U.S. exposed to this kind of risk because of political correctness. The incident would have never happened on a plane flyi...

August 28, 2009

4% of Israeli Jews: Obama pro-Israel

The numbers are getting smaller by the day. Here is a report from the Jerusalem Post:The number of Israelis who see US President Barack Obama's policies as pro-Israel has fallen to four percent, according to a Smith Research poll taken this week on b...

August 14, 2009

The Fatah convention: A litmus test for the sanity of the West

The Fatah convention which has been taking place n Bethlehem offers renewed proof of their intentions, yet President Obama and much of the West insist Israel compromise with this bunch of fanatics.There have been reports in AT by Leo Rennert and Rick...

July 13, 2009

US Checkpoints

I am just back to Israel from a week long trip to Minneapolis and a day stopover in New York City. What immediately struck me were the huge airport security lines endlessly zigzagging towards the electronic devices that scan your bags, laptop and you...

June 23, 2009

What would make Obama change his Iran strategy?

Obama has no red lines that would stop his grand bargain with Iran. In his news conference the President said :QUESTION: Thank you, Mr. President. Your administration has said that the offer to talk to Iran's leaders remains open. Can you say if that...

June 14, 2009

Bibi the Houdini?

What do you do when you have a Middle East ignoramus as the president of the most powerful nation on earth demanding absurd concessions from your country which you know would be disastrous  to you?  What do you do when at the same time you ...

June 12, 2009

Bibi should give his speech as the leader of the free world

On Sunday Binyamin Netanyahu is bound to give his major policy speech. What will he say?  Charles Krauthammer in his interview  with the Jerusalem Post said: "Obviously Bibi [Binyamin Netanyahu] and the Likud will accept a two-state so...

June 6, 2009

Caroline Glick in TV debate

A video link of Caroline Glick in an English Language debate with a leading Israeli leftist. Regardless how much on the left you are in Israel and I do not think you can be much more on the left than Gershon Baskin is, you still understand the threat...

June 4, 2009

Obama quotes verse 5:32, omits 5:33

President Obama in his speech said " The Holy Koran teaches that whoever kills an innocent, it is as if he has killed all mankind; and whoever saves a person, it is as if he has saved all mankind." I really find it odd that neither Presiden...

May 20, 2009

Waiting for Obama's Godot?

So where are we now, after the Netanyahu Obama meeting?  Waiting for Obama's Godot to show up?..  No. We wait until one of these two things happens:  - One day ( this is the optimistic version) there will be an announcement on the radi...

May 18, 2009

What did Bibi tell Obama? (updated)

Something along these lines?   Dear Mr. President. The Jewish people had in their 4000 year old history been expelled twice from their land and had returned twice. More than a third of the world Jewish population of 1939, 6 out of 17 millio...

May 11, 2009

A National Security Advisor who just doesn't get it

Barack Obama's National Security Adviser General James Jones in an interview with ABC's  George Stephanopoulos said the following: JONES:  ... we understand Israel's preoccupation with Iran as an existential threat. We agree with that. And ...

May 5, 2009

The Unvarnished Middle East

While nearly all political leaders and major media outlets prefer to pretend otherwise, the reality of the Middle East is actually fairly easy to understand. Two knowledgeable writers sum it up.  The clarity of Caroline Glick is truly cathartic....

April 27, 2009

Question for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton

In the Los Angeles Times today:"Clinton defended the administration's position last week before Congress. She said that the United States supports and funds the Lebanese government, even though it includes members of Hezbollah, another militant ...

April 24, 2009

Israel to withdraw from West Bank?

Today a Ha'retz article reports that Michael Oren, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's candidate for Israeli ambassador to Washington, supports a unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and an evacuation of most of the settlements. Did Micha...

April 17, 2009

Ahmedinejad and the perpetual motion machine

With Obama being chosen as Dhimwit of the Month, and with Caroline Glick's brilliant analysis in last week's Jerusalem Post, I was beginning to seriously worry about how will all this end. Israel vs. Iran with the US more of an obstacle than help. In...

April 8, 2009

Biden: Israel would be 'ill-advised' to attack Iran

"I don't believe that Prime Minister [Benjamin] Netanyahu would do that. I think he would be ill-advised to do that," Biden told the U.S. network's reporter Wolf Blitzer. I translate what Biden was really saying:Bernard Lewis said that to I...

April 1, 2009

Netanyahu to Obama: Stop Iran - Or I Will

Last week I was wondering how Israel would survive Obama's appeasement of Iran. I got the answer today in Netanyahu to Obama: Stop Iran-Or I Will   Jeffrey Goldberg writes:The Israeli threat to strike Iran militarily if the West fails to st...

March 22, 2009

How will Israel survive Obama's naïveté on Iran?

As an American citizen I did everything I could to stop this from happening. I voted for McCain.   But now in Israel as I watch as Obama appeases the Iranians I wonder if we in Israel will be able to survive.Obama apparently believes that a...

March 17, 2009

Study: Israel could use ballistic missiles against Iran

A newsflash in Ha'aretz caught my eye. It read "16:09 Study: Israel could use ballistic missiles against Iran (Reuters)"I googled the report, Study on a Possible Israeli Strike on Iran's Nuclear Development Facilities  from the well-kn...

March 3, 2009

The $900 million US gift to Hamas

Could someone please pinch the US officials who attended the Gaza Reconstruction Conference?Daniel Pipes quotes U.S. Rep. Mark Kirk (Republican of Illinois): "To route $900 million to this area, and let's say Hamas was only able to steal 10 perc...

February 20, 2009

Netanyahu to be Israel's next Prime Minister

"News of a Netanyahu premiership will be greeted by disappointment in Washington" read the caption under Netanyahu's photo in the London Times, so I added in my comment "but will be greeted with relief in Israel!"  ...

February 13, 2009

Are Israelis suicidal?

Kadima got 28 mandates, Likud 27 , Israel Beitenu 15 and Labor 13. Who do Israelis think will save them from an Iranian nuclear attack?  Who? Will Tzipi Livni decide to preemptively attack Iranian nuclear sites? Doesn't Netanyahu ...

February 7, 2009

Iran: The stakes

Yesterday in the Jerusalem Post I read the interview John Bolton gave to Ruthie Blum Leibowitz which I consider the most important thing I have ever read in the Jerusalem Post and I sent it to dozens of friends and addresses. I got no reaction. Nothi...

January 12, 2009

Israel's Weekend Refugees

Emek Refaim in the Jerusalem German Colony reminds me of the East Village, Georgetown, St. Michel, Belsize Park.   The restaurant row is filled with people, in contrast to the empty streets of Be'er Sheva.  Same country, but here, at l...

January 7, 2009

Playing Palestinian Roulette

I had never been a gambler. I once went to Atlantic City to feel the atmosphere. I did not like it.  Yet since last Tuesday I've started gambling - with my life.It takes the Grad rocket launched from 40 km away some 60 seconds to reach Be'er She...

December 31, 2008

From Be'er Sheva, under Grad attack, with anger

Israeli president Shimon Peres gave this statement yesterday: "Nobody in this world understands what are Hamas' goals and why it continues to fire missiles,"  "This shooting has no point, no logic, and no chance."  ...

December 5, 2008

Has the New York Times got it right about New Yorkers?

A New York Times report on the last day of the Mumbai siege read: "It is not known if the Jewish center was strategically chosen, or if it was an accidental hostage scene."Is the New York Times trying to insult the intelligence of its reade...