Following the announcement that Arabs are planning a Global March to Jerusalem, the Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center (ITIC) has presented information that Iran is behind the initiative and openly supports it.
The Global March to Jerusalem is an initiative that aims at getting over one million Arabs and their supporters to attempt to infiltrate Israel’s borders on March 30th. A spokesman for the march said this week the initiative “demand[s] freedom for Palestine and its capital Jerusalem.”
Support for the marches to Jerusalem was presented as part of a new strategy designed to increase regional unity against Israel, based on the so-called “resistance axis” (i.e., Syria and the terrorist organizations) and opposition to the so-called "occupation" of Jerusalem.
In the same vein, a report in the Iranian ISNA agency, dated March 4, quoted Ghzanfar Asl Roknabadi, the Iranian ambassador to Lebanon, as saying he hoped all “Palestine” would shortly be liberated from its “Zionist occupiers” and that cries of “Allahu Akbar” would be heard throughout Rehavia, an elite neighborhood in west Jerusalem.
Speaking to CNN's Christiane Amanpour, Mohammad Javad Larijani indicated that Iran does not exclude the possibility of blocking the Strait of Hormuz in response to an attack, nor would it exclude a missile strike on Israel.
"Here I want to copy the wording of [U.S.] President [Barack] Obama," Larijani said, adding: "Every possibility is on the table."
But there is a paradoxical side to Israel's success: Because there were barely any casualties, the response to the ongoing rocket fire was quite limited. Israel can boast as much as it likes that it has deterred Islamic Jihad, but the organization set its own price tag: The next time Israel decides to assassinate a senior figure in one of the terrorist organizations in Gaza, it will have to expect a rocket barrage in response. The GOC Southern Command, Tal Russo, was honest enough to admit on Wednesday that "there is no magic solution" to the rockets, and that he cannot predict how long the cease-fire will last before the next round.Two weeks from today, the Palestinians will mark Land Day. What started off 36 years ago mainly as a day of protest by Israel's Arab citizens, is this time supposed to provide the framework for a "march of a million," an anti-Israeli protest across the entire Arab and Muslim world. The Palestinian Authority in particular is helping to coordinate popular activity. The protest march against the settlements and the separation fence is being coordinated among dozens of local committees in West Bank towns and villages. IDF Central Command lists nine regular Friday sites of demonstrations and friction - compared to two - five years ago.
A Muslim leader in Saudi Arabia is calling for the destruction of all Christian churches in Kuwait because he believes that is what Islam demands, according to a report.In an article published by the Middle East Forum,Raymond Ibrahim, a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and an associate fellow at the Middle East Forum, cites several Arabic language web publications that quoted Sheik Abdul Aziz bin Abdullah, the grand mufti of Saudi Arabia, declaring it is “necessary to destroy all the churches of the region.”“Accordingly, the grand mufti ‘stressed that Kuwait was a part of the Arabian Peninsula, and therefore it is necessary to destroy all churches in it,’” Ibrahim reported.
Christians do not have a right to wear a cross or crucifix openly at work, the British government is to argue in a landmark court case. In a highly significant move, ministers will fight a case at the European Court of Human Rights in which two British women will seek to establish their right to display the cross.
It is the first time that the government has been forced to state whether it backs the right of Christians to wear the symbol at work.A document seen by The Sunday Telegraph discloses that ministers will argue that because it is not a "requirement" of the Christian faith, employers can ban the wearing of the cross and sack workers who insist on doing so.The government's position received an angry response last week from prominent figures including Lord Carey, the former Archbishop of Canterbury. He accused ministers and the courts of "dictating" to Christians and said it was another example of Christianity becoming sidelined in official life.
Today we live in the age of consensus. The cultural elites no longer debate opposing points of view, they dismiss them as racist or ignorant, ridiculing not only the argument, but the arguer and the very premise that there can even be an argument.The “marketplace of ideas” is replaced with “I’m offended that we’re even having this discussion” or “Only ignorant people believe that.” These alternating poses of victimhood and superiority make it illegal or pointless to even discuss the subject and leave every issue settled by consensus. Scientific debates end before they have begun. Political debates exist only to allow candidates to affirm the consensus or castigate them for standing outside the consensus. Personal exchanges of views either reflect the consensus or become perilous and illegal.The left veers between outrage and ridicule, between cries of “I’m oppressed” and “You’re an idiot”. Both are wholly subjective emotion-driven perceptions that cannot be rationally debated because they do not exist in the sphere of reason. They are the root of the “I Feel” creed which follows no intellectual or moral rules, striking poses of empathy and superiority for effect.Ridicule is a chief tool of the cultural elites because it allows them to maintain an intellectual pose
Ridicule is a chief tool of the cultural elites because it allows them to maintain an intellectual pose, while employing anti-intellectual tools. It bypasses ideas to attack entire groups on stereotypical grounds, representing dissent as a symptom of mental weakness, personal corruption or dishonesty. Directly ridiculing ideas risks bringing them into the discussion, but ridiculing the people who hold them avoids even a farcical version of a debate.
Adding to the evidence that California campuses have become the epicenter for anti-Israel, anti-Semitic, and anti-American activism, student groups at UC San Diego led by Students for Justice in Palestine introduced — for the third time — an initiative aimed at divesting university funds from “U.S. companies that profit from violent conflict and occupation.”These victimized students and faculty also self-righteously proclaimed in a letter to the UCSD administration that the pro-Israel faculty and staff who spoke against the resolution at the meeting should not even have had a voice in the proceedings: “The fact that they can state whatever they like at public meetings because of academic freedom but while also using their positions of authority as professors or staff for power and intimidation is not acceptable.”The language of the whining memo to the UCSD administration, like the language of the divestment resolution itself, is revealing. Both are laced with the tired Marxist, post-colonial vocabulary depicting a Manichean world view in which Israel is the brutal oppressor and the Palestinians are the innocent Third-World oppressed, and that the absence of peace in the region is only the fault of the militaristically mighty Jewish state. “The reality is,” the memo clarified for those on the administration who might not know, “that [the Israeli/Palestinian conflict] is a human rights issue where the oppressed are fighting against the oppressor.”“In the society of victims,” Charles Sykes observed in his engaging book A Nation of Victims, “individuals compete not only for rights or economic advantage but also for points on the ‘sensitivity’ index, where ‘feelings’ rather than reason are what count.”
In fact, the UCSD students claimed, the mere presence at the meeting of those with alternate views of the divestment resolution resulted in a “hostile campus climate being created for students of color and students from underserved and underrepresented communities,” something that served to “erase the existence of many individuals in the room,” presumably only those who hoisted the hateful resolution on this campus in the first place.
This technique is effective for those who make themselves victims on campus because it helps to insulate them from criticism and sanction for their often radical ideologies. As the signatories of the memo — members of the Muslim Student Association, Students for Justice in Palestine, MEChA, Student Affirmative Action Committee, and the Black Student Union, among them — had already made clear, the failure of the divestment resolution was the fault of others, not them, due to the racism and bigotry of pro-Israel faculty and students who obviously lack concern for social justice, Palestinians, and “students of color” like them.In his insightful book Illiberal Education, Dinesh D’Souza noted that campus groups regularly “seek the moral capital of victimhood” as the UCSD students are doing. Why? Because, he said, “by converting victimhood into a certificate of virtue, minorities acquire a powerful moral claim that renders their opponents defensive and apologetic, and immunizes themselves from criticism and sanction.”
We sit down with Kamal Saleem, a former Islamic terrorist who left jihad behind and embraced Jesus. Saleem, who was born and raised in Lebanon, worked for a variety of notorious terrorist ideologues and groups in the Middle East, including the Muslim Brotherhood, Saddam Hussein, and Yasser Arafat.As a young man, he came to America with the goal of helping to destroy the country from within. Instead, he ended up becoming a Christian and leaving his old life behind, a journey he describes in his powerful book, The Blood of Lambs.Today, Saleem devotes his life to warning about the Islamic jihadist threat and sharing his testimony of faith in Christ.
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