Provided courtesy of the Peace Through Strength Institute

IDF chief Gantz unveils new policy whereby any firing from Gaza, Sinai will be met with attack on Hamas, fire from Lebanon will result in attack on Hezbollah and any overseas attack will prompt response against Iran 

Ynetnews

Shahar Chai

IDF Chief of Staff Benny Gantz on Thursday declared a change in army police whereby any firing at Israel's south will be met with an attack on Hamas, regardless of the group behind the fire. Similarly, any firing from Lebanon will result in an attack on Hezbollah, and any terror attack by Iran's emissaries overseas will prompt a response against Tehran.

Speaking at a conference in the Gelilot base, Gantz discussed the many threats Israel faces. "The IDF is Israel's sharpened sword and protector," he noted. He also addressed the firing of rockets at Eilat on Wednesday night.

Read this story at ynetnews.com ...

__The Peace through Strength Institute

Rubin Reports

Barry Rubin

It is truly astonishing how, it often seems, Western media coverage must blame Israel for everything that “goes wrong” in the Middle East, including murderous hostility to Israel.

Sentences often seem carefully formulated to push this claim and exclude any possibility of balance, much less accuracy. And no matter what the subject, it seems, this message must be snuck in.

Consider these two paragraphs in a Washington Post story about the Egyptian government’s cancellation of a Jewish pilgrimage to a site in Egypt...

Read this story at pjmedia.com ....

__The Year We Lost Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt, Turkey, Tunisia and Most of the Middle East

Sultan Knish

Daniel Greenfield

About the only people having a Happy New Year in the Muslim world aren't the Christians who are huddling and waiting out the storm, but the Islamists who use a different calendar but are having the best time of their lives since the last Caliphate.

The news that the Obama Administration has brought in genocidal Muslim Brotherhood honcho Yusuf Al-Qaradawi to discuss terms of surrender for the transfer of Afghanistan to the Taliban caps a year in which the Brotherhood and the Salafists are looking up carve up Egypt, the Islamists won Tunisia's elections, Turkey's Islamist AKP Party purged the last bastions of the secular opposition and Libya's future as an Islamist state was secured by American, British and French jets and special forces.

Time Magazine declared that 2011 was the Year of the Protester, they might have more honestly called it the Year of the Islamist. In 2010 the Taliban were still hiding in caves. In 2012 they are set to be in power from Tunisia to Afghanistan and from Egypt to Yemen. They won't go by that name of course. Most of them will have elaborate names with the words "Justice" or "Community" in them, but they will for the most part be minor variations on the Muslim Brotherhood theme.

2011 will indeed be remembered, but not because of any Arab Spring or OWS nonsense. It will be a pivotal year in the rise of the next Caliphate. A rise disguised by angry protesters waving cell phones and flags. And clueless media coverage that treated Tahrir Square as the new fall of the Berlin Wall.

This was the year that Obama helped topple several regimes that served as the obstacles to Islamist takeovers. The biggest fish that Ibn Hussein speared out of the sea for Al-Qaradawi was Egypt, a prize that the Islamists had wanted for the longest time, but had never managed to catch. That is until the Caliph-in-Chief got it for them. Egyptian Democracy splits the take between the Brotherhood and the Salafists, whom the media is already quick to describe as moderates. First up against the wall are the Christians. Second up against the wall are the Jews. Third up is all that military equipment we provided to the Egyptian military which will shortly be finding its way to various "moderate militants" who want to discuss our foreign policy with us.

But there's no reason to sell the fall of Tunisia short or the transition in Yemen. And when mob protests didn't work, NATO sent in the jets to pound Libya until Al-Qaeda got its way there. Turkey's fate had been written some time ago, but 2011 was the year that the AKP completed its death grip on the country with a final crackdown on the military, which has now ceased to be a force for stability.

Left out of the picture is Somalia. Liberals fulminated when Bush helped drive out Al-Shaab and its jolly Muslim lads with a habit of beheading people who didn't grow beards or watched too much soccer. Any number of editorials complained that we had destabilized the country and that the Islamic Courts Union were really a bunch of moderates in disguise.

Sadly Obama has not been able to salvage the position of Al-Shabab which is low on money and has turned to forcing 12 year old girls into prostitution and torturing and murdering those who refuse. They're also forcing the elderly to join its militias. But there is good news. Like every terrorist group, Al-Shabab has gotten itself a Twitter account and when O finds 5 minutes in between vacations and golf tournaments, the White House will order neighboring African countries to withdraw their armies and send in Al-Qaradawi to negotiate.

But even if the Islamists don't get Somalia, they've got a nice chunk of North Africa to chew over, not to mention a few more slices of the Middle-Eastern pie, and Afghanistan will be back in their hands as soon as they manage to outmaneuver Karzai, which given his paranoia and cunning may admittedly take a while. But the Taliban are not big on maneuvers, they have the manpower, which means it's only a matter of time until they do what the Mujaheddin did to the puppet Soviet regime. A history that everyone in the region is quite familiar with.

The ugliest part of this story isn't what Obama did. It's when he did it. If he really had no interest in winning Afghanistan, and if as he had said, the Taliban are not our enemy, then why did we stay for so long and lose so many lives fighting a war that the White House had no intention of winning? The ugly conclusion that must be drawn from the timing of the Iraq and Afghanistan withdrawals is that the wars were being played out to draw down around the time of the next election.

What that means is Obama sacrificed the thousands of Americans killed and wounded in the conflict as an election strategy. The idea that American soldiers were fighting and dying for no reason until the time when maximum political advantage could be gained from pulling them out is horrifying, it's a crime beyond redemption, an act worse than treason-- and yet there is no other rational conclusion to be drawn from the timetable.

If the Taliban were not our enemy, then the war should have ended shortly after the election. Instead Obama threw more soldiers into the mix while tying their hands with Rules of Engagement that prevented them from defending themselves or aggressively going after the Taliban. Casualties among US soldiers and Afghan civilians increased. Now the Taliban are no longer our enemy and we are negotiating a withdrawal.

There are only two possible explanations. Either we lost the war or Obama never intended to win it and was allowing the Taliban to murder American soldiers until the next election. If so we're not just looking at a bad man at the teleprompter, we are looking into the face of an evil so amoral that it defies description.

But whatever motives we may attribute to the Obama Administration the outcome of its policies in backing the Arab Spring with influence, training and even weapons is indisputable. What Carter did to Persia, Obama has done to Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan and that's not the whole of the list.

Iraq will likely fall to Iran in a bloody civil war, whether it will be parts of the country or the whole country depend on how much support we provide to the Kurds. Under the Obama Administration the level of support is likely to be none.

Once the Islamists firmly take power across North Africa they will begin squeezing the last states that have still not fallen. Last month the leader of the murderous Enhada Islamists who have taken power in Tunisia stopped by Algeria. Morocco has not yet come down, but at this rate it's only a matter of time.

Syria remains an open question. The Muslim Brotherhood is in a successor position there and would welcome our intervention against the Assad regime. The Assads are no prize and they're Iranian puppets, but shoving them out would give the Brotherhood yet another country and its sizable collection of weaponry.

All that is bound to make 2012 an ugly year in its own right, especially if the Obama Administration continues allowing the Muslim Brotherhood to control its foreign policy. For all that Time and other mainstream media outlets continue splashing the same protest pornography photos on every page, the region has become an indisputably worse place this year with the majority of moderate governments overthrown and replaced, or in the process of being replaced by Islamist thugs.

Carter can breathe a sigh of relief. In one year the Obama Administration has done far more damage than the bucktoothed buffoon did in his entire term. After 2011 we can look back with nostalgia on the days when all that an incompetent leftist in the White House did was lose one country, one canal and a bunch of hostages. Things have gotten so bad that we can safely say that Obama on a good day is worse than Jimmy Carter on a bad day.

Forget the usual end of the year roundups which focus on pop stars, dead celebrities and who wore what and when. None of that really matters. It didn't matter four years ago. It certainly doesn't matter now.

2011 was not the year that Steve Jobs died, it was the year that any hope that we were not headed for a violent collision of civilizations died as Western governments helped topple the few moderates and let the worst have their harvest of power.

Will that be considered a bad thing in the long run? It's hard to say. What Obama did was speed up the date of an inescapable conflict. A day when it will no longer be state-supported terrorists setting off bombs, but when much of the Muslim world will look like Iran and will openly declare that they are at war with us. That was almost certainly bound to happen anyway, but bringing the day forward by ten or twenty years means that we will be less weaker than we might have been when it happens.

Evil has a way of destroying itself, and in his own backward way, Barry Hussein may have helped save civilization. It will be a long time before we know for sure, but giving the Brotherhood what it wanted before they were ready for it, and before we are so completely crippled by the left's political correctness that we are left helpless, may be our best hope.

2011 was the year we lost Afghanistan, Egypt, Turkey, Tunisia and many others, but it should not be the year that we lose hope. For all that the bad guys have been gaining and domestic prospects don't look good, the bad guys have a way of destroying themselves. Give evil its head and it will kill millions, but it will also self-destruct in a spectacular way. Even when it seems as if we have run out of productive things to do, it is instructive to remember that there is a Higher Power in the destinies of men and that the aspirations of evil men to play at being gods eventually leads them to complete and utter ruin through their own arrogance.

But 2011 is also a reminder that the world cannot afford another year of Obama. That it cannot afford the appeasement, the destructive policies or the post-American politics that have made his regime the worst administration in this country's history. 2011 may be the year that we lost the Middle East, but let's work to make 2012 the year that this country loses one Barack Hussein Obama.

__ By Ambassador (ret.) Yoram Ettinger, “Second Thought”
“Israel Today” Newsletter, December 20, 2011

The legacy of Chanukah – faith, patriotism, defiance of extreme odds and tenacity in the battle of liberty against tyranny – has underlined the American spirit since the early Pilgrims, enhancing the unique foundation of the US-Israel covenant: shared values.

For instance, the statue of Judah the Maccabee, the hero of the Jewish rebellion against the Syrian-Seleucid Empire, is displayed at the West Point Military Academy, the most prestigious US military academy, founded in 1802. The statue of Judah the Maccabee, known for his principle-driven leadership and daring battle tactics, is displayed along with the statues of Joshua, David, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Hector, King Arthur, Charlemagne and Godfrey of Bouillon – “the Nine Worthies.”

George Washington became acquainted with the spirit of the Maccabees, upon settling, in December (Chanukah) 1777, at his new headquarters at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, with ill-equipped, weary troops. Faced with a super-power, George III of Britain, Washington concluded that only a dramatic change could avoid a defeat. According to the diary entries of Louisa Hart, Washington told the Harts about a Jewish solider at Valley Forge who lit a Chanukah candle and explained its significance. Washington’s reaction was: “Perhaps we are not as lost as our enemies would have us believe. I rejoice in the Maccabees’ success, though it is long past…It pleases me to think that miracles still happen.” Six months later, on June 19, 1778, the Continental Army implemented the battle tactics of Judah the Maccabee, leaving Valley Forge in pursuit of the British, who were moving towards New York. Although the war would linger for five more years, Washington won a decisive victory.

Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were inspired by the Maccabees, proposing “Rebellion against Tyrants is obedience to God” as the American official seal. Just like the Founding Fathers, the Maccabees were a tiny minority of “rebels” – condemned by the “loyalist/pragmatist” Jewish establishment – rebelling against an oppressive super-power. They prevailed due to their conviction-driven determination. They knew that swimming against the stream gets one closer to the source. The Maccabees were a role-model for Paul Revere, who was referred to as “a modern day Maccabee” and the organizers of the Boston Tea Party, who realized that there were no free lunches for freedom-seeking nations.

“In God We Trust” was inspired, also, by the Maccabees’ battle cry, which adopted Moses’ battle cry against the builders of the Golden Calf. A literal translation of the battle cry is “Whoever trusts God; join me!” The Maccabees’ sacrifice and political-incorrectness, also, inspired Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death.”

In 2011, Chanukah is still a living experience in the US. For example, the residents of Billings, Montana celebrate Chanukah in solidarity with the Jewish community of forty families, and in protest of the 1993 vandals who broke windows of Jewish homes that displayed Chanukah menorahs. In response, more than 10,000 of the city’s residents put make-shift menorahs in their own windows. They persist, annually, in this ritual.

Chanukah and the Maccabees have become an integral part of the American way of life, culturally and politically. Americans respect the legacy of the Maccabees, who fought the Syrian-Seleucid super-power, mostly, in the mountains of Judea and Samaria, in the Judean Desert and in Jerusalem. Judah the Maccabee’s own Valley Forge was at Beit El; his capital was Jerusalem; he scored dramatic victories in Beit Horon (over Seron), Hadashah (over Nicanor), Beit Zur (over Lysias) and Ma’aleh Levona (over Apolonius); he was defeated at Elazar and killed at Ba’al Hatzor – all are located beyond the “1967 Lines.”

The descendants of the Maccabees are not “occupiers” in the cradle of their own history. Chanukah is not a holiday of “occupation,” but a holiday of deliverance. Chanukah is a holiday which highlights the moral-high-ground of Jews in their ancestral homeland.

Shimon the Maccabee – who succeeded Judah and Yonatan the Maccabees – articulated the Jewish territorial case, when responding to an ultimatum by Antiochus, who demanded an end to the Jewish “occupation” of Jerusalem, Jaffa, Gaza, Gezer and Ekron: “We have not occupied a foreign land; we have not ruled a foreign land; we have liberated the land of our forefathers from foreign occupation.”

Pressuring the Jewish State to withdraw from the mountain ridges of Judea and Samaria defies the American story. Either you are with George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and other defenders of liberty, or you provide – inadvertently – a tailwind to the forces of tyranny.

__Opposition sources in Syria said that a top Syrian army general, Mustapha a-Sheikh, has defected from his post.

Aretz Sheva

David Lev

Opposition sources in Syria said Thursday that a top Syrian army general, Mustapha a-Sheikh, has abandoned his post. A-Sheikh is in charge of chemical weapons deployment in eastern Syria. According to the sources, a-Sheikh escaped over the border into Turkey in recent days.

A-Sheikh's defection came on the background of what opposition activists said was an increasing frustration among many army soldiers at being deployed to fight against Syrian citizens.

Weeks ago, soldiers were subjected to intense propaganda stressing that the protests were being organized by groups seeking to plunge Syria into anarchy, who were funded by “foreign governments,” but with the daily increasing bloodshed and the growing protests, many soldiers have come to the conclusion that the uprising in Syria is indeed a legitimate expression of protest by Syrians. The sources said that more defections were likely to follow in the coming days.

Meanwhile, IDF sources told Army Radio Thursday the increasing instability in Syria is of great concern to Israeli security officials.

In recent days Syria has conducted military exercises using its most advanced equipment, and Israeli officials fear there is a strong likelihood that those weapons will find their way to Hizbullah, either before or after Syrian President Bashar al-Assad falls.

Among the weapons Syria displayed in its exercises Wednesday were the Russian-made P-800 supersonic Yakhont anti-ship missile. “Our guiding principle is that when there is instability in Syria, with or without Assad, the likelihood of a real conflict in the region is ever greater. That is why we are taking these exercises seriously,” the sources said.

_Tom Kovach

Israel National News has reported that Major General Yoav Galant (Ret.) said on Monday that Israel's refusal to take decisive action in Gaza will only serve to force Israel to make a massive incursion into the Hamas-run enclave.

During a speech at Tel Aviv University, MGen. Galant said that anti- and counter-terrorist efforts have been successful on the east side of the country -- in Judea and Samaria.  But, at the same time, terrorists in Gaza, along the west side of Israel, have been allowed to thrive and build.

"A lack of action, negligence by military officials, has resulted in a situation in the West Bank where we took care to tend the lawn, but in Gaza - since we didn't - thorns grew into tree trunks."

"In the end we'll have to go in with bulldozers," Galant added.

Galant is not alone in his views.  Several other former Israeli Defense Force generals, plus the current Israeli minister of internal security, have called for an incursion into Gaza.

For the full story, click this link to Israel National News.