The annual assembly of the UN’s World Health Organization today adopted a resolution criticizing Israel — in the organization’s only debate on a specific country — with Syria protesting “inhuman Israeli practices” that target “the health of Syrian citizens.” Click here for links to documents.

The WHO resolution against Israel was not yet published, but was likely a copy of last year’s condemnation.

Observers of the world body in Geneva said the annual hypocrisy nevertheless reached a new low this year.

“To see the Assad regime point the finger at Israel out of professed concern for the health of Syrians is, frankly, a sick joke,” said Hillel Neuer, executive director of the Geneva-based UN Watch, a non-governmental monitoring group accredited to the UN.

“They’ve slaughtered 80,000 of their own people, and are now busy destroying the lives of millions more. The real question is this: Why is the UN allowing mass murderers to deflect attention from their crimes by scapegoating democracies?”

“A world health assembly should be about Hippocrates, not hypocrisy,” said Neuer.

Syria’s report expressed concern that “the health conditions of the Syrian population in the occupied Golan continue to deteriorate, as a result of the suppressive practices of the Israeli occupation.”

Out of 25 agenda items on the WHO’s conference agenda, all but one address global themes.

The exception, today’s Item No. 20 — entitled “Health conditions in the occupied Palestinian territory, including east Jerusalem, and in the occupied Syrian Golan” — turned a spotlight on one specific country: Israel. No other country in the world — not Mexico, Russia, Syria, or anywhere else — is treated this way.

Despite what’s being said at the UN, the Palestinians’ own health minister recently acknowledged Israel’s extensive medical care for Palestinian children and its training of Palestinian doctors.

The UN debate also failed to mention that only last week, an Israeli hospital saved the life of a four-year-old Syrian girl, in a successful operation for a deadly heart condition.

PM Binyamin Netanyahu, US Secretary of Stat John Kerry, Justice Minister Tzipi Livni, May 23, 2013  (Photo: Courtesy – GPO)

The coming days are critical for the efforts to rekindle the frozen Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, Justice Minister Tzipi Livni said after participating in Thursday morning's meeting with US Secretary of State John Kerry and Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu.

“The effort to jump-start the negotiations, shouldn't just fall on the US, but also on the two sides,” she said.

“It is easy to fall into the blame game. I'm suggesting that everyone, including the Palestinians, refrain from doing that now,” she said.

“The objective is to re-start the negotiations and to end the conflict. I hope the Palestinians understand this,” Livni said.

“The next days and weeks are critical. It is important to stay focused,” she said.

Kerry arrived in Jerusalem from Amman on Thursday for a two-day visit to hold back-to-back meetings with Israeli and Palestinians officials.

Before heading into his meeting with Netanyahu this morning, Kerry said, “I know this region well enough to know that there is skepticism. In some quarters there is cynicism and there are reasons for it.

“There have been bitter years of disappointment. It is our hope that by being methodical, careful, patient, but detailed and tenacious, that we can lay out a path ahead that can conceivably surprise people, but certainly exhaust the possibilities of peace,” he said.

The two men smiled and shook hands as they stood next to an American and Israeli flag in Netanyahu’s Jerusalem office.

“Above all, what we want to do is to restart the peace talks with the Palestinians. You’ve been working at it a great deal. We’ve been working at it together. It’s something I want, it’s something you want. It’s something I hope the Palestinians want as well and we ought to be successful for a simple reason. When there’s a will, we’ll find a way,” Netanyahu said.

Kerry thanked Netanyahu for his efforts on behalf of restarting the peace process and said he had been working with him, along with Livni.

“I am appreciative that the Prime Minister has really put personal energy into helping us to define some of the work that we need to do to figure out the way forward,” Kerry said.

The meeting lasted two hours and included some time in which Kerry and Netanyahu spoke alone.

Strategic Affairs Minister Yuval Steinitz, Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon, special envoy Yitzhak Molho, and Military Secretary Eyal Zamir were also present at the meeting.

Next, Kerry traveled to Ramallah to meet with Palestinian officials, but the exact details of those meetings have yet to be released. Route 60 was briefly closed in the early afternoon and again later in the day to allow him to travel.

Netanyahu then met with former French president Nicholas Sarkozy and then separately with British Foreign Minister William Hague.

“We urge all parties to move the process forward and to really give the bold and decisive leadership that will allow success to happen and avoid steps that undermine it,” Hague said before his meeting with Netanyahu.

Kerry is expected to roll out a framework for returning to the negotiations in early June, and since taking office has been trying to get the various sides to take steps that would create a better environment more conducive to talks.

These steps include what is widely believed to be a de facto, but unstated, temporary freeze on construction beyond the Green Line, including in east Jerusalem; a Palestinian commitment to temporarily avoid seeking upgrades in international forum or taking Israel to the International Criminal Court; and the Arab league delegation's recent declaration that it would accept an Israeli-Palestinian peace accord that included a “mild” land swap.

Kerry is scheduled to meet with President Shimon Peres this evening.

The strategy used by General Douglas MacArthur so successfully in the Pacific during World War II can be useful in this very different kind of battle. General MacArthur won his victories while minimizing his casualties — something that is also desirable in clashes of ideas within the family.

Instead of fighting the Japanese for every island stronghold as the Americans advanced toward Japan, MacArthur sent his troops into battle for only those islands that were strategically crucial. In the same spirit, parents who want to bring their brainwashed offspring back to reality need not try to combat every crazy idea they picked up from their politically correct professors. Just demolishing a few crucial beliefs, and exposing what nonsense they are, can deal a blow to the general credibility of the professorial pied pipers.

For example, if the student has been led to join the crusade for more gun control, and thinks that the reason the British have lower murder rates than Americans have is because the Brits have tighter gun-control laws, just give him or her a copy of the book Guns and Violence by Joyce Lee Malcolm. The facts in this book demolish the gun-control propaganda fed to students by their professors, and that can create a healthy skepticism about other professorial propaganda.

There are other books that can likewise demolish other politically correct beliefs that prevail on campuses. My own recent book Intellectuals and Race has innumerable documented facts that expose the fallacies in most of what is said about racial issues in most college classrooms.

For those students who have bought the campus party line on Third World nations, the classic study of that subject is Equality, the Third World, and Economic Delusion by the late P. T. Bauer of the London School of Economics. He made a veritable demolition derby of most of what has been said in politically correct circles about the relationship between rich and poor countries.

For those students who have been conditioned to regard the welfare state as the solution to social problems, there is no book that exposes the actual human consequences of the welfare state more poignantly than Life at the Bottom by British physician Theodore Dalrymple. He has worked in both low-income neighborhoods and in prisons, so he has seen it all. Although Britain is the setting for Life at the Bottom, Americans will recognize very similar patterns here. Problems found in low-income black ghettoes in the United States are found in low-income white neighborhoods in Britain, where none of the usual excuses about racism, slavery, etc., apply. The only thing that is the same in both countries is the welfare state and its poisonous ideology.

If your student has been led to believe that “comprehensive immigration reform” — amnesty, in plain English — is the only way to go, a devastating book titled Mexifornia, by Victor Davis Hanson, introduces some cold, factual reality into a subject usually discussed in sweeping and lofty rhetoric.

A book that offers a choice between the island-hopping strategy that General MacArthur used in the Pacific and the all-out assault across a broad front that was used by the Allied armies in Europe is titled The New Leviathan. It has thirteen penetrating articles by leading authorities on such subjects as national security, Obamacare, environmentalism, election frauds, and more.

Those parents who want to follow the MacArthur strategy can recommend reading one, or a few, of these articles, while those who want to follow the strategy of attacking all across a broad front can recommend that their student read the whole book.

However the battle is fought, what is most important is that the battle be fought, since the young are the future, and the propaganda of today can become the government policies of tomorrow.

Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

On Wednesday, the New York Times became one of the more influential voices to say what many others have been saying: that the administration's methods are an attack on press freedom.

In a scathing editorial, the Times wrote that, “With the decision to label a Fox News television reporter a possible 'co-conspirator' in a criminal investigation of a news leak, the Obama administration has moved beyond protecting government secrets to threatening fundamental freedoms of the press to gather news.”

The Times editorial described the Obama administration as going “overboard” with its investigations into leaks and threatening press freedom. The board added:

Obama administration officials often talk about the balance between protecting secrets and protecting the constitutional rights of a free press. Accusing a reporter of being a 'co-conspirator,' on top of other zealous and secretive investigations, shows a heavy tilt toward secrecy and insufficient concern about a free press.

The Times editorial was just one in a chorus of hard-hitting attacks on Obama's media policy that have surfaced in the wake of the Justice Department investigations. Journalists were outraged by the inquiries into the AP and Fox News reporter James Rosen. In particular, members of the media took issue with the Justice Department labeling Rosen a possible “co-conspirator” in a leak case for the crime of trying to get a source to give up information.

The New Yorker reported on Tuesday that the investigation into Rosen was even broader than previously suspected, as the DOJ seized records from at least five different numbers used by Fox News and two different White House lines.

That followed the Associated Press' revelation that the DOJ had secretly obtained months of phone records for at least seven individual journalists across 20 phone lines while searching for the government official responsible for leaking information about a CIA-thwarted terror plot.

Obama's hyper-aggressive leak policy—and his administration's potential equation of routine journalistic interaction with criminality—is nothing new. But the fury in the pages and on the websites of elite outlets about these positions certainly is.

The Times' criticism echoed that of many other journalists and press freedom groups.

On Tuesday, the board of the Committee to Protect Journalists sent an outraged letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, in which it warned that the DOJ's secret subpoenas for over 20 AP phone lines “represent a damaging setback for press freedom in the United States.” This came on the heels of a letter signed by over 50 media outlets which made similar arguments.

Wednesday also saw Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank lash out at Obama:

The Rosen affair is as flagrant an assault on civil liberties as anything done by George W. Bush’s administration, and it uses technology to silence critics in a way Richard Nixon could only have dreamed of.

To treat a reporter as a criminal for doing his job — seeking out information the government doesn’t want made public — deprives Americans of the First Amendment freedom on which all other constitutional rights are based. Guns? Privacy? Due process? Equal protection? If you can’t speak out, you can’t defend those rights, either.

After the killing, one of the men, believed to be a British-born Muslim convert, spoke calmly into a witness’s video phone.

Pictured left – One of the attackers speaks into a witness's camera phone following the attack (ITV)

Speaking with a London accent, holding a knife and a meat cleaver and with his hands dripping with blood, he said: “We swear by almighty Allah we will never stop fighting you until you leave us alone. Your people will never be safe. The only reason we have done this is because Muslims are dying by British soldiers every day.

“We must fight them as they fight us. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. I apologize that women had to witness this today but in our lands our women have to see the same. You people will never be safe. Remove your government, they don’t care about you. Do you think David Cameron is going to get caught in the street when we start busting our guns? Do you think your politicians are going to die?

“No, it’s going to be the average guy like you, and your children. So get rid of them. Tell them to bring our troops back so we, so you can all live in peace.”

Witnesses said that the men used a car to run over the soldier just yards from the Royal Artillery Barracks in Woolwich, south-east London, before setting about him with knives and a meat cleaver as if they were “trying to remove organs”. One unconfirmed report suggested that he had been beheaded.

Passers-by said they thought at first that the attackers were trying to help the man, who was wearing a Help for Heroes T-shirt, and only realised they were killing him when they got closer.

As they attacked the soldier, one of the men shouted “Allahu akbar”, or God is Great, according to the BBC, while another witness said they appeared to pray next to the body as if the solder was a “sacrifice”.

Their victim, thought to be aged around 20, had reportedly been on duty at an Army recruitment office in central London and was on his way back to the barracks when he was murdered at 2.20pm.

It emerged that passers-by went to the soldier’s aid. One of the killers ordered that only women could tend to the body, not men.

There were also questions over why it took around 20 minutes for armed police to arrive on the scene, during which time the killers calmly walked up and down the road, carrying their bloodied knives and a pistol, while members of the public confronted them.

When police did arrive, both gunmen tried to rush at the police and were shot, reportedly by a female officer.

On Wednesday night they were under armed guard in separate hospitals. Their British accents suggested that they were “home-grown” terrorists and security sources said they did not believe anyone else was involved in the incident.

David Cameron described the attack, which had chilling echoes of a plot to behead a soldier foiled in Birmingham in 2007, as “absolutely sickening”, but said that Britain will “never buckle” in the face of terrorism. This morning he will chair a meeting of the Government’s Cobra emergency briefing committee to be updated on developments.

Speaking in Paris, where he had been meeting François Hollande, the French president, he said: “We have suffered these attacks before. We have always beat them back. We have done that through a combination of vigilance, of security, of security information, good policing.

“But above all, the way we have beaten them back is showing an absolutely indomitable British spirit that we will not be cowed, we will never buckle under these attacks. The terrorists will never win because they can never beat the values we hold dear, the belief in freedom, in democracy, in free speech, in our British values, Western values. They are never going to defeat those. That is how we will stand up to these people, whoever they are, however many there are of them, and that is how we will win.”

He added that “every aspect” of security would be reviewed. After a Cobra meeting last night, chaired by Theresa May, the Home Secretary, security was tightened at all London barracks.

Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London who attended the meeting, said: “I know that Londoners have been through terrorism before and this city has huge resilience.

“What we also have is the best, the most professional security services and the best police in the world to protect us and they are now going to get to the bottom of exactly what’s happened.”

The Queen announced that she would go ahead with a planned visit to the King’s Troop Royal Horse Artillery at Woolwich Barracks next week.

The murder appeared to have been planned to ensure maximum publicity, with the killers urging witnesses to take their picture “as if they wanted to be on TV”. One witness, identified only as James, said he and his partner watched in horror as they realised what they were seeing. He shouted at the men to stop, only for one of them to pull out a gun and threaten to shoot him.

After driving his car further up the road, he stopped and called the police, telling them to bring armed units.

He said: “These two guys are chopping this guy to pieces, literally hacking at something like it’s a bit of meat. These two guys were crazed, they were just animals. They then dragged the poor guy from the pavement and dumped his body in the middle of the road.

“They were standing there with the knives in their hand, waving the gun about. There were police at the end of the road but there were no police in the vicinity of the attackers. I think they were proud of what they were doing.”

Footage of the incident obtained by ITV News showed one woman crouched over the body of the dead soldier in an attempt to shield it from further attack. Three other women stood between the body and the killers.

Joe Tallant, a van loader who lives near the scene, said: “My friend and her mum were walking up the hill and the mum came straight to the victim.

“She asked the black guys, 'Can I help him?’ And one of them said he was already dead but she could have a go. Then one of them said, 'No man is coming near this body, only women.’

“She was so brave, she didn’t care what happened to her; she knelt down by his side and comforted him. She held his hand and put her other hand on his chest.”

Mulgrave Primary School, just yards from the scene of the killing, went into “lockdown”. However, parents said some of the children had witnessed the attack.

The Muslim Council of Britain condemned the killing as a “truly barbaric” act with “no basis in Islam”.

A spokesman said: “We call on all our communities, Muslim and non-Muslim, to come together in solidarity to ensure the forces of hatred do not prevail.”

The loot comes in different forms, but at its core it is always power. It may be the power to kill or to steal. It may be the power to claim a nice piece of real estate or to send a million people off to their deaths. The scale of it will occupy historians and shock the people of the future who leaf through the history books and walk through the silent museums, but it is all of one piece. The purpose of power, as a fellow in a little book by George Orwell once said, is power.

The quarrel between Obama and the Media is largely a lovers' quarrel, but the love is only there on one side. The media made Obama what he is. But what he is, among many other things, is a control freak spawned by a political ideology that distrusts everyone and consolidates power at all cost.

The media loved Obama, but it discovered early on that he did not love it back. Instead of basking in the adoration of the Candy Crowleys and the Anderson Coopers and the massive corporate machines behind them, the love child of every liberal fantasy shut them out, rigidly controlled their access and ruthlessly punished unauthorized conversations with the press.

The media had made Obama into a tin god, but were constantly suspected of heresy. Instead of being rewarded for their loyalty, they were kept at arm's length.

Obama Inc. knew that their biggest asset was the narrative. A close study of Obama's qualifications or accomplishments would have given no conceivable reason for voting for him. The only thing he brought to the table was race and even in this he was less qualified than most of the black men who had run for president.

The narrative was the dearest treasure of Obama Inc. It was the one thing that its cronies protected. The economy could tank, wars could be lost and an asteroid could smack into the Pacific Ocean and none of it mattered nearly as much as the golden narrative. They didn't trust anyone with it including the media.

The media these days doesn't have much. Its numbers are bad in every medium from the tube to the inky pages of newsprint to the crackling AM radio waves. It isn't very profitable. Often it's a dead weight. But it wields a great deal of institutional power. The New York Times and CNN may both be dogs when it comes to the balance sheets, but owning either one gives you an impressive amount of heft in the national dialogue; though not as much as working for one of them does.

Power is all that the media has. Its power is projected in a fairly narrow circle. Fewer people are reading, watching and listening to it, so its circle becomes more incestuous. Everyone has learned to act like a member of the D.C. press corps, interpreting events through the lens of old West Wing episodes. The resulting noise reaches fewer people, but helps form the shaky consensus on which the institutional power of the media stands.

In its dying hour, the media used that power to ensure the double coronation of a corrupt Chicago politician with a facility for mimicking speech patterns. And that politician rewarded it by trying to bypass it and set up his own media.

Obama's vision of the proper place of the media isn't just at his feet, but under his control. Instead of dealing with the media, he has tried to cut it out of the loop by putting a larger emphasis on social media and developing narratives through think-tanks and media influencing groups. It was a power struggle that the media was initially baffled by. It had held out an ice cream cone to the little boy, only to have the little boy kick it in the shin, grab the ice cream cone and run away.

For years the media had groused about a lack of transparency, the unprecedented prosecution of whistleblowers and the hostile relationship between Obama Inc's minions and many reporters. The grousing was usually understated. It could be mentioned offhand, but not too loudly. When Bob Woodward made the mistake of speaking his mind, he was swiftly punished for it by the avatars of the post-media media, while the old media sat silently and watched the show.

But then Obama pushed its limits by invading the sanctum of the Associated Press. It was one thing when the administration was targeting whistleblowers, but quite another when the media's power became part of the collateral damage.

The week of scandals was the media reminding Obama that his smooth ride had been provided by them and that the ride could get very bumpy if his media ponies decide to take the back road to Benghazigate or drop by the IRS headquarters. It's a bluff, of course. The day may come when the media takes Obama out back and disposes of him so that the new messiah, perhaps in a pantsuit, can ascend the old Camelot throne, but that day isn't here yet.

Scandal week was a game of chicken between Obama and the media to see who would blink first. Would Obama decide to respect the institutional power of the media or would be consider pushing forward until the media blinked. A brief history of Obama Inc. suggests that he will keep pushing on. Obama backs down from Muslim terrorists and Russian government thugs, but not from Americans.

Like most cowards, Obama only attacks those he knows won't fight back. And the only people who won't fight back are either helpless or bound by their politics not to resist the liberal messiah.

Obama knows that the media does not dare harm a hair on the head of the liberal agenda. And he made certain to appoint a Vice President whom no one in their right mind would want to see take over. Until 2016, it's Hussein or the highway. The media has shown that it can hamstring him even when the coverage is only mild. It is quite capable of turning up the temperature to boiling, though not without a civil war with Media Matters, Think Progress and a chunk of the liberal new media.

The media is a prisoner of its own ideology. It can't hit Obama too hard… yet. Not until they're making the case that Hillary will do a better job of governing than this inexperienced tyro did. Having abandoned any professional integrity years ago, it would be too late for most of the media to reclaim it now. Even in the name of its own institutional power.

This is the process by which leftists have collaborated in their own purges. It is why wealthy leftists financed revolutions that would rob them. The media's wealth is in its institutional power and it is being forced to accede to the redistribution of that influence.

Obama is not interested in an independent media, even if it is biased his own way. Leftists are great centralizers. They seize power by consolidating it under their control. The Democratic Party is struggling as Obama's OFA Super PAC loots their fundraising operations. Why does Obama need a Super PAC? Because it gives him another source of personal power while diminishing the power of established institutions. And the news media is just one more established institution for the children of the counterculture to beat to death with its own microphones.

The media is trying to make a statement about boundaries, but it lacks commitment. Even as it halfheartedly, though for the first time, covers actual misconduct by Obama Inc. with that smidgen of outrage which usually only creeps into its own when reporting on the dreaded (R's), it undermines its own show of force by discussing how quickly Obama will be able to get over the hump and back to his agenda. The media's blackmail of the man listening to its phone calls and scanning through its emails lacks conviction.

Obama needs the media, but the media needs him more. It doesn't need him for practical reasons, but for emotional reasons. It needs to believe that its corrupt institutional power has been put at the service of a higher purpose and a higher calling. It needs to believe this all the more as the ratings drop, the papers go unsold and the radio stations fill up with the voices of conservative talk show hosts. That emotional need makes the media the prisoner of this administration.

On his end, Obama has a practical need for the media, but no emotional need. Interviews, even of the softball media kind, challenge his control. They question him and Obama does not like being questioned. While media figures see themselves as serving a meaningful liberalizing institution, he sees them as carriers of a narrative. A narrative that can just as easily be carried anywhere else.

When Obama looks at the media, he doesn't see Walter Cronkite, he sees a bunch of radios, televisions and newspapers; which these days are little more than footnotes for the internet. There is nothing special about that to him or his cronies. Just mediums that distort his message because he doesn't control them. And so Obama chooses to control every medium he uses.

The Obama media war is good clean fun, but it's also a brief skirmish. Neither side can afford to extend the battle for very long. For the media the scandals will vanish as soon as they hear magic words like “Gun Control” or “Illegal Alien Amnesty”. And for Obama, the war will end when one side or the other blinks.

There are multiple ways in which enormous strength is required of the Israeli government now.  In no situation is this more the case than with regard to Syria and armaments shipped there, either for use by Syria or for transfer to Hezbollah in Lebanon.
 
The situation is rife with threats, claims, charges, counter-charges, and rumors.
 
What seems to be the case is that Russia recently shipped its Yakhont anti-ship cruise missiles to Syria.  And this is bad news:
 
The JPost has cited Nick Brown, editor of IHS Jane's International Defense Review, who said, “They fly at just over 2.5 times the speed of sound, have a range of about 300 kilometers (185 miles) and pack a huge punch from their 200 kg (440 pound) warhead.”
 
“They are hard to detect and ever harder to shoot down or decoy away, so they're a powerful tool for keeping warships a long way off the Syrian shore.”
 
Russia had previously supplied Assad with Yakhont missiles in 2011, but they were an earlier, less accurate model.
 
~~~~~~~~~~
 
A big question that hangs over this is whether Syria will attempt to transfer those Yakhont missiles to Hezbollah, which could use them to threaten Israeli ships and the Israeli gas fields in the Mediterranean — which would just about be in reach.
 
It is exceedingly unlikely that Israel would sit still for such a transfer of weaponry.  Last Thursday night, CIA chief John Brennan flew into Israel unannounced to consult with Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon about the escalating situation in Syria.  Ya'alon made it clear that Israel had no intention of allowing advanced weapons to reach Hezbollah.
 
http://www.timesofisrael.com/cia-chief-pays-surprise-visit-to-israel/
 
Last Friday, the Wall Street Journal cited US officials who said they anticipated another series of Israeli strikes in Syria, against these missiles.
 
~~~~~~~~~~
 
On Sunday, the Times of London reported that Syria had trained sophisticated Tishreen missiles on Tel Aviv, which would be used if Israel entered Syrian air space again.  It said that satellite images indicated this, but provided no source.
 
http://www.timesofisrael.com/syria-training-advanced-missiles-on-tel-aviv-report/
 
At the Sunday Cabinet meeting, PM Netanyahu, refusing to be intimidated by this report, responded that:
 
“The Israeli government is acting in a responsible and measured way in order to secure the safety of Israel's citizens and prevent advanced weapons from reaching Hezbollah and the terror organizations. We will know how to do this in the future as well.

“The Middle East is experiencing one of its most sensitive periods in decades. We are following developments closely and are readying for any scenario.”

~~~~~~~~~~

It's not possible to consider the current situation in Syria without looking at the role of the US — or, more correctly, the US's failure to play a decisive role at a critical earlier point in the Syrian civil war — as a factor in what's going on.  The vacuum left by American inaction has permitted Russia to move more vigorously in this region.

The Russians, who want to be able to call the shots here, have even sent in warships.  Five entered the Mediterranean last Wednesday, when the Russian foreign minister announced:

“The Russian Defense Ministry started setting up a special force of warships in the Mediterranean in order to protect Russia's interests in the region.”  

Yesterday, two additional Russian warships were brought in from its Black Sea fleet.

~~~~~~~~~~

US officials are concerned now that Russian shipments of armaments to Assad will allow him to prolong the war.  But I was stuck by how clueless the Americans are when I read this comment by Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Robert Menendez.

“We can watch from the sidelines as the scales are tipped in Assad's favor, or protect US national interests by supporting the armed opposition striving to build a new Syrian future.”

http://www.jpost.com/Diplomacy-and-Politics/US-Russian-missiles-to-Syria-could-embolden-Assad-313518

“a new Syrian future,” huh?  This might have been true a year or 18 months ago. But now there are reports of Iraqi al-Qaeda forces over-taking other rebel forces in Syria.  The Nusra Front was already Islamist, but is being splintered by the al-Qaeda forces that have a larger anti-Western, jihad, greater Islamic nation agenda.

Were the US to supply rebels with weapons, they might well end up in al-Qaeda hands.

Israel cannot say this — is taking great care not to say this — but me?  I'm hoping Assad, as vile and immoral as he is, does not fall.  For the very likely alternative is worse for this entire region.

Writes Reuters:

“… if the West were to intervene, it may now be under pressure to attack al-Qaeda opposition forces rather than Assad.”

http://www.jpost.com/Middle-East/Syrias-Nusra-Front-eclipsed-by-Iraq-based-al-Qaida-313501

~~~~~~~~~~

At the same time, rumors that Russia had already sent S-300 anti-aircraft missiles to Syria have not been confirmed.  In fact, while Russia is saying that it must honor its previously signed contract to deliver them, it is not at all certain that this will happen.

Former head of IDF military intelligence Amos Yadlin is one of the analysts who is not convinced that Moscow will actually deliver the missile batteries…”in Yadlin’s assessment, the S-300s are just one piece in the complex face-off over Syria now playing out between Moscow and Washington.”

http://www.timesofisrael.com/russia-knows-exactly-what-the-fuss-is-about/

It is enormously irksome, when Russia's Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov claims that there's no problem because the S-300 is a defensive weapon, implying that Israel just has to stop attacking and all will be fine.  He knows very well indeed that Israel attacks are not against Syria, but against the transfer of weapons to Hezbollah and are thus defensive in nature.  He is, indeed, enormously disingenuous.

There is no way that Israel will permit the transfer of S-300 missiles, should they arrive in Syria, to be transferred to Hezbollah. They would, I imagine, have to be hit before installation was complete.

~~~~~~~~~~

Please see what Shoshana Bryen, of the Jewish Policy Center, has to say about this situation.

While referring to Putin's “disdain for the Obama Administration” (her description of Putin's treatment of Kerry makes fascinating reading), and saying that “neither Secretary of State Kerry nor the president he serves seem to understand Russia's goals in the region, and thus neither is prepared to uphold our own interests,” in the end she believes Russia's policies are shortsighted and will fail.  Putin, she says, has taken on the impossible task of controlling the Shiite-Sunni fighting.

Her vision is sharp and broad.

http://www.jewishpolicycenter.org/4286/russia-playing-a-losing-hand-like-a-winner

~~~~~~~~~

One last mention of Syria here:  Last night, IDF soldiers patrolling near the border with Syria in the Golan were fired upon.  A vehicle was damaged, but no one was hurt.  The IDF issued a statement that “IDF forces returned precise fire at the source of the gunfire. They reported a direct hit.”  The Syrian army had claimed that it destroyed the IDF military vehicle and everything in it.

“We will not remain silent regarding fire from Syria at our territory,” said Defense Minister Yaalon.

~~~~~~~~~~

And then a correction: In my last posting, I had cited an article by Avigdor Haselkorn on the war over preemption.  In it, he spoke about the fact that Iran is trying to get Fateh 110 missiles into Hezbollah's hands because this would “deter Israel from launching a preemptive strike on its nuclear facilities by holding hostage Israel’s Dimona reactor as well as other strategic installations.”

Well, it has been pointed out to me (and for this many thanks to Jeff D.) that the Fateh missiles have a range of 300 kilometers, but from where those missiles would be launched to Dimona is well over 300 km.  I never would have caught that.  Haselkorn's piece still has considerable validity, but I am eager to set the record straight here.

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I had hoped to address the other matter in which Israel requires strength:  Kerry is coming on Thursday to move forward that ever elusive “peace process,” and there is much to say about the political dynamics this issue engenders.  But not today — this posting is long enough.  Hopefully, this will be my key focus when next I write.

Iran's nuclear ambitions are bigger than most people think, with the country capable of becoming a nuclear superpower, Israel's strategic affairs minister said Tuesday.

If not stopped, Iran could produce dozens of nuclear weapons a year, Yuval Steinitz said.

“This is a ramified nuclear industry that has been built not to produce a few bombs but to produce fissionable material for dozens and hundreds of nuclear bombs. The issue at hand is not a nuclear state but the possibility of creating a nuclear superpower,” Steinitz wrote in a government memo obtained by The Algemeiner.

Iran's Natanz nuclear facility currently has about 12,000 centrifuges and plans to reach 54,000, he said. That would make it capable of enriching enough uranium to produce 20-30 atomic bombs a year.

Though it has yet to produce a single nuclear weapon, Iran still poses a grave threat to the West, Steinitz said. “It already has missiles directed towards Israel and missiles that cover much of mainland Europe and is making a concerted effort to basically have intercontinental ballistic missiles.”

“The Iranian nuclear program is changing the rules of the game,” Steinitz said. “It will change the state of Israel, the state of the Middle East and even the world situation. The Iranians’ ambition is to change the global balance of power from end to end, between Islam and the West.”

In response to reporter's question about what is now being called the “Arab League land swap proposal” Kerry declared:

“This is literally a statement by the Arab world that they are prepared to make peace providing the Palestinians and Israelis reach a final status agreement. I don't think you can underestimate the – I don't underestimate the significance of Saudi Arabia, Qatar, [United] Arab Emirates, the Egyptians, the Jordanians, and others coming to the table and saying, “We are prepared to make peace now in 2013,” …” [See the full State Department transcript of Kerry's April 30th remarks here:

http://www.state.gov/secretary/remarks/2013/04/208647.htm

A simple question: If Egypt and Jordan are already “at peace” with Israel than how can they be “saying, “We are prepared to make peace now in 2013,” …”

Kerry said what everyone really knows. That is, Egypt may not be in a state of war with Israel right at this moment. And Egypt may have not taken overt military action against Israel since the 1970s but that is a far cry from peace.

Egypt's stance towards Israel is now (and was throughout the Mubarak era) one that can only be truly categorized as adversarial.

The United States and Canada are at peace. Israel and Egypt?

It should also be mentioned that Egypt's mass media is notoriously anti-Semitic and has remained stridently so since the Camp David Accords. In 2002, the ADL reported that the anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion “Emerge(d) as Key Theme (on an) Egyptian TV Series.” There had been numerous other examples of similar things throughout Mubarak's rule. Anti-Semitic images were frequently used during the Arab Spring riots in Cairo. See this author's January 2011 article about anti-Semitism during the Egyptian Revolution at http://frontpagemag.com/2011/moshe-phillips/the-future-of-egyptian-jew-hatred-is-now-2/.

This was not a mere slip of the tongue for Kerry. He knows full well that Egypt's peace with Israel is a sham. What's worse is that the State Department expects Israel to continue to negotiate away the strategic depth that it won in battle to neighbors that have never shown even the slightest interest in being neighborly or peaceful. The dangers to Israel have been compounded over the last two years as nations throughout the Arab world have shown remarkable instability. Kerry has admitted what everyday Israelis have always known: their peace agreement with Egypt is a piece of paper that means nothing to the average Egyptian.

The territory that Israel gained in 1967 provided it with strategic depth that proved to be vital to Israel's ability to defend itself.

Israel's standing army is a small percentage of its military strength. The territory that Kerry would have Israel swap takes time for enemy forces to cross and allows the Israeli army reserve to be called up and enter combat. This is something the Arab world learned in 1973 during the first days of the Yom Kippur War.

Prime Minister Netanyahu fought on the front lines in that war. Let's hope he never forgets that those lands saved Israel's cities from destruction then and may have to serve the same purpose again.

Israeli efforts to legalize West Bank outpost undermined the peace process, the US Embassy in Tel Aviv warned Wednesday in advance of US Secretary of State John Kerry’s arrival tomorrow for a two day visit to help rekindle talks with the Palestinians.

“We do not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlement activity and oppose any efforts to legalize settlement outposts, which would undermine peace efforts and would contradict Israeli commitments and obligations,” US Embassy spokesman Geoff Anisman told The Jerusalem Post on Wednesday.

He added that the United States position on these points has been clear and has not changed.

Anisman spoke in the aftermath of a High Court of Justice hearing on a Peace Now petition demanding that the state enforce the law and demolish six unauthorized West Bank outposts.

The state, however, has told the court verbally and in writing that it intends to legalize four of them; Givat Assaf, Ma’aleh Rehavam, Givat Ho-Roeh and Mitzpe Lachish.

A US embassy representative was at the hearing, but refused to speak to the press.

The Legal Forum for the Land of Israel immediately condemned his presence there, charging that it was a blatant US attempt to interfere with Israel internal legal procedures.

But Anisman said US representatives often went to court proceedings and Knesset sessions as part of their routine work to monitor Israeli activity. This is similar to how US embassies in other countries operate, he said.

Peace Now Executive Director Yariv Oppenheimer said, however, that he did not recall seeing a US representative at past hearing on the outposts. He added that he has seen in the past European representatives observe court hearing on human rights issues.

“I believe the presence of an embassy representative was a message to the government and not to the court, that the issue of the West Bank outposts is very important to the US,” Oppenheimer said.

These four unauthorized Jewish communities are part of a larger list of 24 outposts built after March 2001, which former prime minister Ariel Sharon promised the US he would remove. Former prime minister Ehud Olmert repeated that pledge to the US as did Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu shortly after he took office in March 2009.

Hagit Ofran, of Peace Now, has said that legalization of these four outposts also contradicts past Israeli promises not to create new settlements or expand existing ones.

The Palestinians have insisted that they will not hold direct negotiations with Israel until it halts all West Bank settlement activity and Jewish building in east Jerusalem. Israel has refused to ceded to that request and has insisted instead that talks be held without pre-conditions.

Kerry was due to arrive Thursday in hopes of breaking that impasse.