Following the Barcelona terror attacks in which 14 people were killed and some 130 wounded, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) asked the Spanish city's chief rabbi, Rabbi Meir Bar-Hen, what he thought of the future of Jews there.
Generally speaking, European Jewish leaders are extremely cautious, and would seldom, if ever, dare to call upon Jews of their respective countries to pack their belongings and move to Israel. The negative backlash to Netanyahu urging Jews to leave Europe following the January 2015 attack on a Jewish supermarket in Paris is still well remembered. "To all the Jews of France, all the Jews of Europe, I would like to say that Israel is not just the place in whose direction you pray; the State of Israel is your home," said the Israeli leader at the time.
Netanyahu made a similar plea just a month later following the February 2015 attack outside a Copenhagen synagogue that left a Jewish security guard dead.
These calls to immigrate, which were made by other Israeli officials as well, were criticized by many European Jewish leaders. Rabbi Menachem Margolin, director of the European Jewish Association, argued that encouraging Jews to leave Europe "severely weakens and damages the Jewish communities that have the right to live securely wherever they are." Chief Rabbi of Denmark, Yair Melchior, likewise criticized Israel by stating that "if the way we deal with terror is to run somewhere else, we should all run to a deserted island."
The ISIS attack on Barcelona has elicited a similar reaction, but this time it's not Israeli officials urging Jews to flee to their ancestral homeland. It's coming from a prominent leader in the European Diaspora. Rabbi Bar-Hen firmly concluded that "Jews are not here permanently. I tell my congregants: Don’t think we’re here for good. And I encourage them to buy property in Israel. This place is lost … Europe is lost."
Bar-Hen wasn't referring only to the terror attack. He says that Spain is not only reluctant to confront Islamic terror, it fails to recognize the danger of Muslim fanaticism, as the case of Leila Khaled has clearly demonstrated. Khaled, a Palestinian terrorist convicted for hijacking airplanes in 1969 and 1970, was allowed to participate in the latest Barcelona "Revolution Means Life" book fair in May. Khaled was scheduled to speak at the launch of Sarah Irving's book Leila Khaled: Icon of Palestinian Liberation.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu met with Russia’s President Vladimir Putin Wednesday in the Russian resort town of Sochi to discuss how Iran’s “accelerated” presence in Syria threatens the Jewish state and the Middle East.
Netanyahu was joined in Sochi by Yossi Cohen, director of the Mossad intelligence agency, and Meir Ben-Shabbat, the recently appointed leader of Israel’s National Security Council.
“Mr. President, with joint efforts we are defeating Islamic State, and this is a very important thing,” Netanyahu told Putin. “But the bad thing is that where the defeated Islamic State group vanishes, Iran is stepping in.”
“We cannot forget for a single minute that Iran threatens every day to annihilate Israel,” he said. “It arms terrorist organizations, it sponsors and initiates terror.”
Netanyahu also noted that the Islamic Republic is “well on its way” to controlling not only Syria, but other countries in the Middle East, including Iraq, Yemen and Lebanon.
“Beyond making the argument that Iran’s growing sphere of influence threatens Israel, I hope Netanyahu pointed out to Putin in their private meeting that Moscow’s short-term benefits from working with Tehran pale in comparison with the long-term dangers,” Daniel Pipes, president of the Middle East Forum think tank, told JNS.org.
“When strong enough, the mullahs inevitably will turn their aggressive ideological attentions on an increasingly Muslim Russia,” he said.
During the portion of the leaders’ meeting that was open to the public, Putin did not respond to Netanyahu’s comments regarding Iran’s role in Syria.
In the closed-door part of the meeting, the Mossad’s Cohen reportedly presented the Russian leader with “sensitive, credible and very disturbing detailed intelligence” of Iran’s expanding military presence in Syria.
Citing a senior Israeli official, Haaretz reported in July that Israel is aware of Iranian plans to build up its forces in Syria through the establishment of permanent air and naval bases.
“Israel must put pressure on the Russians” to protect its security interests in Syria, Prof. Eyal Zisser, a senior research fellow at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, and the vice rector of Tel Aviv University, told JNS.org.
Yet Israel has “relatively little leverage” over the Russians, said Dr. Jonathan Schanzer, senior vice president of research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies think tank.
“Israel has its own missile defense and air defense systems for its own perimeter, which gives it a seat at the table,” Schanzer told JNS.org, “but in terms of telling the Russians or the U.S. what to do, this is a heavier lift.”
Netanyahu’s visit to Russia comes after a high-level Israeli security delegation met with senior U.S. defense officials last week in Washington, D.C. The Israeli officials were dismayed over a failure to secure a commitment from the U.S. for an inclusion of a clause demanding the full withdrawal of Iranian forces from Syria in the event of a peace deal to end that country’s civil war.
High above the Persian Gulf, an Iranian drone crosses the path of American fighter jets lining up to land on the USS Nimitz.
The drone buzzes across the sky at least a mile above the massive aircraft carrier and is spotted by the fighters. It is unarmed.
But for the senior Navy commanders on the ship, the presence of the enemy drone so close is worrying. Their biggest fear is the surveillance aircraft will start carrying weapons, posing a more direct threat to U.S. vessels transiting one of the world's most significant strategic and economic international waterways.
"It's just a matter of time before we see that," said Navy Rear Adm. Bill Byrne, commander of the carrier strike group that includes the Nimitz. He said the Iranian drone activity has "generated a lot of discussion" and was becoming an increasingly pressing matter of concern.
If, at some point, Byrne believes a drone is threatening his ship, he and his staff would have to carefully proceed through the required responses - efforts at communication, sounding the horn, firing flares and warning shots, and flying a helicopter close to the unmanned vehicle. If all those efforts fail and he still perceives a threat, Byrne said it would be his duty, his "responsibility," to shoot down the Iranian drone.
So far, it hasn't come to that. But the drones have become an even more dangerous security risk as U.S. carriers in the Persian Gulf like the Nimitz play a key role in Iraq and Syria. Planes from these ships are regularly flying to each country to bomb Islamic State militants and other targets. From the Nimitz alone, U.S. fighter jets flew missions resulting in at least 350 bombs being dropped on IS militants just in the last month.
The false left/right paradigm is an often misunderstood concept. Many people who are aware of it sometimes wrongly assume that it asserts the claim that there is "no left or right political spectrum;" that it is all a farce. This is incorrect. In regular society there is indeed a political spectrum among the general populace from socialism/communism/big government (left) to conservatism/free markets/individualism/small government (right). Each citizen sits somewhere on the scale between these two dynamics. The left/right spectrum is in fact real for the average person.
We do not find a " false" paradigm until we examine the beliefs and behaviors of the elitist and political classes. For many banking oligarchs and high level politicians, there is no loyalty to a particular political party or an identifiable "left" or "right" ideology. Many of these people are happy to exploit both sides of the spectrum, if they can, to achieve the goals of globalism; a separate ideology that doesn't really serve the interests of groups on the left or the right. That is to say, globalists pretend as if they care about one side or the other on occasion, but in truth they could not care less about the success of either. They only care about the success of their own exclusive elitist club.
This reality also tends to apply to national loyalty as well. Globalists do not carry any ideological love for any particular nation or culture. They are more than happy to sacrifice and sabotage a country if the action will gain them greater power or centralization in return. A globalist is only "Democrat" or "Republican," or American or Russian or Chinese or European, etc., insofar as the label gets them something that they want.
The reason globalists and the people that work for them adopt certain labels is because through this they can act as gatekeepers and better manipulate the masses. The hot button issue of the week provides us with a case in point...
The organizer of the "Unite The Right" group during the Charlottesville circus, which ended in one death and numerous injured, happened to be an ideological playmate of the extreme left only a year ago. Jason Kessler seemed to come out of nowhere as a leading figure in the white identity or "white nationalist" movement in 2017, but in 2016, he was an avid supporter of Barack Obama, and before that, an active champion of the Occupy Wall Street movement.
I suppose anyone can change their ideological worldview over time, but I'm certainly not stupid enough to believe that Jason Kessler went from hardcore leftist to white nationalist in less than a year. Though it cannot be proven conclusively that Kessler is a provocateur, he certainly idolized the position. Kessler is quoted in his own blog on December 12, 2015, (now shut down but archived) as stating:
"I can't think of any occupation I admire more than the professional provocateur, who has the courage and self-determination to court controversy despite all the slings and arrows of the world."
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