Saturday Headlines

Vilnai: Israel Cannot Remain Silent In Face Of Escalation

Israel cannot remain silent in the face of continued rocket fire from the Gaza Strip, Home Front Defense Minister Matan Vilna’i said Saturday morning.

Vilnai visited the afflicted areas of Sderot and Sha'ar HaNegev Regional Council, as rockets continued to rain down in the region leaving one man moderately-to-severely injured Saturday morning in the Sderot area. Two other residents suffered shock in the Palestinian attack, and a factory sustained some damage.

The minister also paid a visit to the IDF's Gaza Division for an operational review of recent events. "We hold Hamas fully responsible for everything that happens in the Gaza Belt," Vilani said during the visit. "Israel is working, and will continue to work with a heavy hand against those terrorists that want to escalate the situation in the region."

Palestinians have fired twenty rockets from Gaza intosouthern Israel since midnight on Friday, police said. Fifteen of those landed in the Lachish region, and five in the Negev. The Iron Dome rocket defense system intercepted five of the rockets.

Rockets Continue To Fly, IAF Continues To Attack

Terrorists from Hamas-controlled Gaza continued on Friday evening to violate a ‘ceasefire’ that was declared on Wednesday and fired rockets into southern Israel.

Three rockets were fired from Gaza shortly before 11:00 p.m. local time. Two of them exploded in the Eshkol Regional Council and the third exploded in the Hof Ashkelon Regional Council.

The IAF responded to the latest attacks and struck the terrorist squad immediately after it launched the rockets. The IDF Spokesperson’s Unit said that a hit was identified.

It was the IAF’s second airstrike on Friday after IAF aircraft targeted a terrorist squadthat was preparing to fire a rocket at Israel from central Gaza on Friday afternoon.

Newly-Supplied Russian Buk-M2 Anti-Air Missile Used To Down Turkish Warplane

To ambush the Turkish Air Force F-4 Super Phantom Friday June 22, over Latakia, Syria used Russian-made self-propelled medium range anti-air Buk-M2 missiles (NATO codenamed SA-11) recently supplied by Moscow. The SA-11 can down aircraft flying at altitudes up to 14 kilometers and Mach 3 speed.

This would be the first instance in the 15-month Syrian uprising of an advanced Russian-supplied weapon hitting the military target of a NATO member. Hence the comment from Washington by US State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland who said: “We’ve seen the reports… We have obviously been in contact with our Turkish ally…. To my knowledge, they haven’t raised this at NATO at this point.”

President Abdullah Gul spoke out more strongly: “It is impossible to ignore our fighter jet being shot down by Syria,” he said after Damascus admitted to shooting down the plane, claiming its air defenses acted according to standard procedure before realizing it was a Turkish air force jet. Both are searching for the two missing pilots.

Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan admitted Saturday that the jet was shot down over the Mediterranean around 13 kilometers west of the Syrian port of Latakia. He did not explain what a Turkish bomber fighter was doing over Syrian territorial waters, but the suggestion, which Western military sources have confirmed, was that Turkish military jets have lately been carrying out almost daily reconnaissance flights over the Syrian coast. Moscow and Damascus apparently decided it was time to stop the missions which among other things spied on the Russian arms supplies transiting Russian bases at the Syrian ports of Tartus and Latakia.

Lavrov: Don't Threaten Iran Over Its Nuclear Program

Russia's foreign minister said on Friday that Iran should not face threats over its nuclear program and that a quick settlement of the standoff over it isn't realistic.

The Associated Press quoted Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov as having said the latest round of talks in Moscow this week between six world powers and Iran has been “quite useful,” even though there was no breakthrough. He said talks must continue without “any artificial deadlines or ultimatums.”

High-level nuclear talks in Russia between Iran and six world powers were suspended this week, but experts from both sides will meet next month to see if there is enough common ground for new negotiations.

AP noted that Russia's President Vladimir Putin is expected to face a strong Israeli demand to take a tougher line on Iran when he visits the Jewish state next week, but Lavrov's statement signaled that Moscow will likely respond to Israeli calls for stronger action with its usual advice to be patient and continue talks.

The Brotherhood's Useful Idiots

(This one comes from Caroline Glick)

You have to hand it to the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood. They know how to play power politics. They know how to acquire power. And they know how to use power.

Last Friday, the day before voters by most accounts elected the Brotherhood’s candidate Mohamed Morsy to serve as Egypt’s next president, The Wall Street Journal published a riveting account by Charles Levinson and Matt Bradley of how the Brotherhood outmaneuvered the secular revolutionaries to take control of the country’s political space.

The Brotherhood kept a very low profile in the mass demonstrations in Tahrir Square in January and February 2011 that led to the overthrow of then-president Hosni Mubarak

The Brotherhood’s absence from Tahrir Square at that time is what enabled Westerners to fall in love with the Egyptian revolution.

Those demonstrations led to the impression, widespread in the US, that Mubarak’s successors would be secular Facebook democrats.

THE DIFFERENCE between the Brotherhood and the secularists is a fundamental one. The Brotherhood has always had a vision of the Egypt it wants to create. It has always used all the tools at its disposal to advance the goal of creating an Islamic state in Egypt.

For their part, the secularists have no ideological unity and so share no common vision of a future Egypt. They just oppose the repression of the military.

By permitting the Brotherhood to participate in the elections for parliament and the presidency, the military signed the death warrant of its regime. The Brotherhood will rule Egypt. The only thing left to be determined is whether its takeover will happen quickly or slowly

The Egyptian military today is far weaker than the Turkish military was in 2002. And it has already been outmaneuvered by the Brotherhood. The only way for it to secure its hold onpower is through brute force. And the generals have already shown they are unwilling to use sufficient force to repress the Brotherhood.

The regime’s decision to outlaw the parliament and decree the military above the president was not a show of strength. It was a panicked act of desperation by a regime that knows its days are numbered.

Muslim Brotherhood Expects Its Win To Be Respected

The Muslim Brotherhood expects its anticipated presidential election win to be respected, its candidate Mohammed Morsi said on Friday.

AFP reported as that the comments were made as the group's supporters packed Cairo's Tahrir Square to pressure Egypt's ruling military.

Morsi said the Brotherhood wants neither “confrontation nor violence” as the country nervously awaits the official result of the divisive June 16-17 poll run-off.

UN Conference Calls For Economic "Contraction" To Combat Climate Change

Well, whaddya’ know: Yet again, overzealous environmentalists are calling for major countries to voluntarily roll back the layers of their prosperity because they believe doing so will be of great benefit to the planet’s general welfare (nevermind the planet’s peskyinhabitants, of course!). The munificent climate-change gurus at the United Nations conference this week apparently felt more dire measures than just subsidizing green energy or a global carbon tax deserved a spot on the docket:

United Nations officials refuse to allow observers to read the draft agenda for the Rio+20 conference on climate change, after an earlier draft called for the economic “contraction” in major countries.

“It seems the UN has taken the final pre-conference draft and classified it!” Lord Monckton, a climate skeptic with the Center for a Constructive Tomorrow reported in an email. “We were promised transparency. This is unacceptable.”

A proposal within an earlier draft agenda for the conference called for the “contraction and convergence for over- and under-consumers of natural resources"

I always find it singularly disturbing when self-important bureaucrats prescribe a reversal on economic growth when so many people in this world still live in poverty. Affordable energy and economic expansion are the recipe for lifting people out of poverty, and third-world countries without the wealth or means to worry about their environmental impact are oftentimes some of the worst environmental offenders.

I mean, sure, we could go back to the pre-industrial era: There was no manufactured air or water pollution, everyone’s food was organic and free range, the natural landscape was untouched, we weren’t harried by technology all the time, and we all got plenty of exercise… as we all toiled to meet our basic survival needs and lived beneath much more crushing rates of disease, poverty, and premature death. Yeah, that sounds like good times.

By the way, apparently the term “climate change” isn’t cool anymore. There’s so much science out there contradicting man-made climate change, too many people have come to think of the ostensible phenomenon as less-than-concrete. The greenies needed to update their terminology to stay hip: Global warming, to climate change, to…

In the face of this growing amount of new scientific evidence, environmentalists are not backing down, but changing their rhetoric.

One leader at a meeting related to the Rio +20 conference this week, noting that because conservatives reject the notion global warming, “We don’t use the term climate change anymore. It’s sustainable development.”

Another "Make-Or-Break" EU Summit Next Week

The EU's pre-summer-break summit looms large on next week's agenda, as the crisis, which wrecked Greece, threatens to engulf Italy and Spain.

The centerpiece of the event will be proposals drafted by the EU commission, the EU Council, the central bank and eurozone leaders on a future banking union and political Union.

Italy's Mario Monti warned that if EU leaders do not get it right, markets will wreak havoc on Madrid and Rome.

A recent €100 billion pledge to help Spanish banks did nothing to improve Spanish or Italian bond yields, which still trade at close to 7 percent.

Perhaps more importantly, we find this buried quote, but it's importance can't be underestimated:

On Monday, EU foreign ministers will debate the situation in Bosnia, Egypt, Iran, Pakistan and Syria.

They will endorse a new action plan for how the European External Action Service can better protect human rights around the world.

I personally believe that the "European External Action Service", combined with the doctrine of RTP ("Responsibility To Protect") will ultimately be used in Israel to "confirm the covenant" of Daniel 9:27. We'll see.

And lastly, this article has nothing to do with prophecy but a very good read from Greg Laurie:

Trying To Explain The Inexplicable