ISIS To Israel: 'We're Coming Very Soon', Russian Military In Syria: Bigger, Better Than You Think

ISIS to Israel: “We’re coming very soon”

The last 48 hours (May 7-8) have seen a major escalation of the ISIS threats against Israel...In a coordinated maneuver by all of the ISIS commands in the Middle East, the terrorist organization simultaneously released at least 10 videos that it said showed ISIS forces on their way to attack targets in Israel.

All of the videos refer to the Palestinian issue, Jerusalem and the timing of the attacks. In each one, the narrator claims the terror organization did not forget the Palestinians, and will not neglect them any more; describes Jerusalem as “a bridge to Islam”; and threatens an impending attack, saying “We’re coming, and coming very soon” accompanied by images of fighters from the ISIS affiliate in the Sinai are shown.

It was not the first time for the ISIS propaganda machine to threaten hostilities against Israel, but it was the first time for the threat to be issued simultaneously from every province or city where ISIS is located in the Middle East. 

Our sources report that every video contains the following sentences: “We know that the Egyptian army is being helped by Israeli intelligence and the Israeli Air Force in its war against us”; “We also know that Israel set up intelligence networks within the population of the Bedouin tribes in the Sinai”; and “From now on we will take action against Egyptian and Israeli targets as one.”

DEBKAfile’s intelligence sources report that these comments are intended to counter efforts by the Egyptian military to establish anti-ISIS militias among the Bedouin tribes. This came after American counterterrorism experts advised the Egyptian military to operate the same way that the US operates among the Sunni tribes in western Iraq’s Anbar province, where US military instructors are setting up local militias to prevent ISIS fighters from entering or passing through areas under the tribes’ control.    

Our sources report that three Bedouin anti-ISIS militias have been established in the Sinai so far: the “Sons of Sinai”, “Unit 103”; and the “Death Squad”.  

Meanwhile, the ISIS affiliate in the Sinai carried out one of its boldest terrorist attacks on Sunday, May 8, killing eight Egyptian policemen including an officer, in the Cairo suburb of Helwan. Four masked terrorists with automatic weapons jumped out of a commercial vehicle that had blocked a minibus transporting the policemen, fired hundreds of bullets at the minibus, killing everyone inside, and then fled the scene. Western counterterrorism experts monitoring ISIS-Sinai estimate that it not only has the ability to carry out terrorist attacks in major Egyptian cities, but also against Israel. 

Aleppo fighting rages

Syrian government forces and their allies fought insurgents near Aleppo on Monday and jets conducted raids around a nearby town seized by Islamist rebels, a monitoring group said, as Syria's military said a ceasefire in Aleppo would be extended by 48 hours starting on Tuesday.

A recent surge in bloodshed in Aleppo, Syria's largest city before the war, wrecked the 10-week-old, partial truce sponsored by Washington and Moscow that had allowed U.N.-brokered peace talks to convene in Geneva.

The United States and Russia, which support rival sides in the civil war, said they would work to revive the February "cessation of hostilities" agreement that reduced fighting in parts of the country for several weeks.

Asaad al-Zoubi, the chief negotiator for the main Syrian opposition at the Geneva talks, criticized the extended Aleppo truce, telling Al Jazeera television that such measures served only to allow thousands of reinforcing troops to be sent from Iran, which is supporting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad

Russia's military intervention last September helped Assad reverse some rebel gains in the west of the country, including in Aleppo province.

But insurgents captured the town of Khan Touman last week, inflicting a rare setback on government forces and allied Iranian troops who suffered heavy losses in the fighting. Several Iranian soldiers were captured in the clashes, a senior Iranian lawmaker said on Monday.

The city of Aleppo is one of the biggest strategic prizes in a war now in its sixth year, and has been divided into government and rebel-held zones through much of the conflict.

The Observatory said warplanes struck rebel-held areas of the city early on Monday, and rebels fired shells into government-held neighborhoods.

Russia's military in Syria: Bigger, better than you think

Last week the Russian military brought more than a hundred international journalists, including our CNN crew, to Palmyra. The trip was orchestrated to showcase Moscow's role in liberating the ancient heritage site but it also said a lot about the Russian army's capabilities and the scale of their assets in Syria. 

Ferrying that many people from Russia's air base in Latakia halfway across a war-torn country -- to a place that until recently was a combat zone -- is a massive logistical and security operation. 

The convoy involved five buses full of journalists, at least eight armored vehicles with heavy machine guns, two fighting vehicles and the constant presence of two attack helicopters hovering overhead. During the more than six-hour journey, choppers were switched out several times and the vehicles were shadowed by a variety of gunships, including Mi-28, KA-52, and the modernized Mi-35s. As we made our way across Syria we passed several bases with Russian helicopters along the Western coastline, near Homs and in the Palmyra area.

Moscow also appears to have built up substantial ground forces in various locations in Syria. There are no reliable numbers on Russian troop levels in the country but it appeared to us that there were at least several thousand troops on the ground along with modern weaponry and infrastructure.

The Hmeymim air base on the outskirts of Latakia, on the country's northwest coast, is a mix of an existing Syrian military airfield and container housing units that the Russians have set up. The camp is large, modern, and well-maintained.

The professionalism of the troops and the pristine state of the equipment they were using showed the Russian military has come a long way since it began a major modernization program several years ago. Aside from dozens of jets, Russia also has a wide range of combat helicopters, main battle tanks, armored personnel carriers and surface-to-air missile systems.

But the biggest surprise was seeing so many Russian ground forces in other places in Syria as well. The army has built a brand new outpost next to the old city of Palmyra. The freshly-paved camp is officially a base for the mining crews that cleared thousands of explosive devices from Palmyra and the surrounding towns over the past weeks since the city was retaken from ISIS. 

But aside from mine-clearing equipment, there also are dozens of fighting vehicles and armored personnel carriers stationed at the base. While those assets could be there for force protection, Russia has also deployed a state-of-the-art Pantsir-S1 air defense system that can both launch missiles and fire cannons at incoming planes.

The U.S. has said Russia is moving artillery toward the contested city of Aleppo, raising concerns that a ceasefire will not hold. But the Russians have not confirmed that. If Assad were to retake all of Aleppo, it would be a major victory.

While the exact size of Russia's military presence in Syria is still unclear, the things we saw while embedded with them indicate that it is bigger and more sophisticated than most believe. It does not look like an army that plans on leaving Syria any time soon.

Harvard Law Professor Says Treat Conservative Christians Like Nazis

Liberals, stop being so defensive. That’s the message of Harvard law professor Mark Tushnet in a new post at Balkinization, titled “Abandoning Defensive Crouch Liberal Constitutionalism.” The problem, according to Tushnet, is that liberals have been too defensive when it comes to advancing their agenda in the courts.

Now that President Barack Obama has reshaped the federal judiciary, liberal causes can win easily in court. And now that Justice Antonin Scalia has died, “judges no longer have to be worried about reversal by the Supreme Court if they take aggressively liberal positions.”

Tushnet blames what he calls the “culture wars” on conservatives, and he says liberals should now make conservatives pay. “The culture wars are over; they lost, we won,” he writes in italics. Tushnet claims that conservatives “had opportunities to reach a cease fire, but rejected them in favor of a scorched earth policy.”

Since when have liberals been defensive? The scorched earth policy has been theirs. They’ve been the aggressors—they’ve been offensive. Conservatives have been defensive.

So what’s next? Tushnet explains: “the question now is how to deal with the losers in the culture wars.” And his answer isn’t comforting: “My own judgment is that taking a hard line (‘You lost, live with it’) is better than trying to accommodate the losers.”

Tushnet makes it clear that he and his colleagues among the liberal elite want the government to treat conservative Christians worse than racists—like Nazis.

Tushnet embodies a particularly vicious form of illiberal liberalism. But protecting the rights of a minority—his “losers”—in the wake of such change is an important feature of America’s tradition of tolerance in the midst of pluralism. It’s what real liberalism requires.

Globalists Threaten Voters with World War if Britain Exits Eurozone

Without a doubt, the globalists are freaking out about the possibility of Britain leaving the EU. They even sicked their dog Obama on the Brexit movement, and had him blackmail Britain with economic consequences if the nation leaves the EU. But their latest attempt to sway the public is the most ridiculous and bombastic thing you’ll hear all week. It really shows how desperate and afraid they are of a potential Brexit.

In a recent speech, Prime Minister David Cameron claimed that if Britain leaves the Eurozone, it could cause World War Three to break out across the continent. “Can we be so sure peace and stability on our continent are assured beyond any shadow of doubt? Is that a risk worth taking?” he said. “I would never be so rash to make that assumption.”

He went on to cite Britain’s contributions to different European wars such as “Blenheim, Trafalgar, Waterloo, our country’s heroism in the Great War and, most of all, our lone stand in 1940,” and he brought up how Churchill “argued passionately for Western Europe to come together, to promote free trade and build institutions which would endure so our continent would never again see such bloodshed,” And of course, he pulled the ever effective terrorist card, saying “When terrorists are planning to kill and maim people on British streets, the closest possible security cooperation is far more important than sovereignty in its purest theoretical form.”

Then to really hammer the point home, Cameron’s Pro-EU campaign wheeled out a few war veterans to appeal against a Brexit.

Several high-profile veterans have since come out to express their disgustwith the pandering video.

Obviously, the elites are panicking as their globalist schemes are stifled by a resurgence of nationalist feelings in Europe. They’ve stooped so low as to claim that any slight fracturing of the EU will lead to World War Three, because they have nothing left to argue. They’re scraping the bottom of the propaganda barrel. They are desperate.

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