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President Obama vigorously defended his nuclear negotiations at the end of a summit of Persian Gulf state leaders and a rocky visit to Saudi Arabia aimed at reassuring the anxious ally and seeking more support for the fight against the Islamic State. While the president acknowledged Saudi concern that the United States should not be "naïve" when dealing with Iran, he cited previous presidents' willingness to engage in talks with Russia during the height of the Cold War as models to follow. "John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan still negotiated with the Soviet Union even when the Soviet Union was...

Media spins Islam then and now: Sharia Law, our U.S. Constitution are not compatible. Moral relativism, tolerance to the point of ignorance will result in national suicide “We Muslims are one family even though we live under different governments and in various regions.” —Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, leader of Iran’s revolution Thirty-seven years ago, Time magazine dedicated its cover to “Islam, The Militant Revival,” and published a lengthy article, “The World of Islam,” in which John A. Meyer wrote, “We want to examine Islam’s resurgence, not simply as another faith but as a political force and potent third ideology competing with...

House Speaker Paul Ryan is calling on the Obama administration to rule out the possibility Iran will be given access to the dollar and the U.S. financial system. The Wisconsin Republican on Thursday criticized Secretary of State John Kerry for leaving the door open for Tehran to score what he describes as an unprecedented economic windfall as part of sanctions relief from the landmark nuclear deal. Administration officials have said repeatedly Iran will not get access to the dollar. …

Yesterday Sen. Tom Cotton moved to block confirmation of an Obama nominee for an important post at the Department of Treasury. Adam Szubin was nominated last year to fill the position of Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Crimes, and when the Democratic Senator from Ohio Sherrod Brown pressed for a vote yesterday, the Republican from Arkansas spoke out. Cotton believes that the White House has lied to and continues to lie to the representatives of the American people about the Iran nuclear deal, specifically right now about letting Iran have access to the dollar, which the White House said...

The Obama administration’s hint that it was considering allowing Iran to access directly or indirectly U.S. dollars drew furious, negative reaction from both sides of the aisle. On Monday, Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) denounced the effort and called for the administration to reaffirm definitively its explicit promise that barriers to Iran’s accessing dollars would remain in place. “Our concern is that there are at least four workarounds to provide Iran with access to the dollar, including dollar-denominated transactions, dollar-clearing, dollar-based conversions, and dollar-related foreign currency transactions,” he said. “Here’s the bottom line: The administration should definitively rule out any potential...

Report: Obama Seeks Meeting With Iranian President Adam Kredo April 20, 2016 4:06 pm President Barack Obama has sent two letters to senior Iranian leaders in recent months requesting a meeting with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, according to Persian language reports recently translated by a Middle East research organization. “President Obama asked to meet with Iranian President Hassan Rouhani in two secret letters sent in late March to both Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and President Rouhani,” according to the Middle East Media Research Institute, or MEMRI, which translated a Farsi-language report published Tuesday by a website affiliated with Iran’s...

Germany’s ruling coalition plans to look into stripping Islamic State fighters of their German citizenship to prevent them from coming back to the country, a draft document seen by Reuters on Wednesday shows. More than 800 people have traveled from Germany to Syria and northern Iraq in recent years and around 70 returnees took part in combat or military training there, the head of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency said earlier this month. […] The coalition is also considering depriving German supporters of Islamic State of identity cards and passports to prevent them from traveling to areas controlled by Islamic State,...

Blunders on Israel abound in the Bernie Sanders camp. On April 14, Sanders suspended his new national Jewish outreach communicator, Ms. Simone Zimmerman, after just two days on the job. Her sacking followed discovery of her calling Benjamin Netanyahu “an arrogant, deceptive, cynical, manipulative a[**]hole,” accusing him of “sanctioning the murder of over 2,000 people,” and presiding over a “brutal military occupation” of the West Bank (a canard I debunk here). In an April 1 interview with the NY Daily News, Mr. Sanders stated that Israel killed over 10,000 Gazans in the 2014 conflict between Israel and Hamas. He later...

President Barack Obama will host a Passover seder this year, but not on either of the nights it is required according to Jewish custom. A spokeswoman told JTA that Obama will host the seder next week following his return from travel overseas. Obama will be in Saudi Arabia on the first and second nights of Passover, Friday and Saturday, attending a regional cooperation summit.

Just when you think once-prestigious Harvard could fall further from grace, Harvard students hurled anti-Semitic epithets at Israel's former Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni during her recent talk at the University. Last Thursday, Harvard Law School hosted a panel discussion with guest speakers Dennis Ross and former Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni. During a question and answer session a president of a student organization mocked the Israeli leader, asking her, “How is it that you are so smelly?” When his question drew stunned silence, he clarified his "question." “A question about the odor of Ms. Tzipi Livni, she’s very smelly, and I...

This peaceful university town is 7,000 miles from the violence of the Middle East, but a proposal to become sister cities with a Palestinian community has stirred such rancor that the City Council is trying to negotiate a truce among its own residents. The council decided Tuesday to hire a moderator and convene a citizen panel in hopes of settling differences between two sides arguing about whether Boulder should have a formal sister-city relationship with Nablus on the West Bank. …

Reply to Slander Being defamed by a UCLA Vice Chancellor for defending the Jews. April 20, 2016 David Horowitz    Today a letter attacking me was sent to all members of the UCLA community – that would be nearly 50,000 people I think – by Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion, Jerry Kang. The Vice Chancellor’s letter attacked me as a “provocateur” who last year “put up hostile posters accusing two student organizations — the Muslim Student Association (MSA) and Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) — of being murderers and terrorists.” This is a lie. Actually it...

As I explained in my 2014 book Faithless Execution, the president takes two legally untenable positions on illegal immigration: (a) That the doctrine of prosecutorial discretion empowers him to choose which laws he will enforce, and (b) That if he chooses not to enforce laws in an area, like immigration, where the courts say federal law preempts state law, then state enforcement of congressional law is preempted by this executive branch non-enforcement policy. Obama’s first position is perverse. A president’s chief constitutional duty is to see that the laws are faithfully executed. “Prosecutorial discretion” is just a resource-allocation doctrine specific...

North Korea, which conducted a fourth nuclear test in January in contravention of U.N. Security Council resolutions, can learn from a deal struck between Iran and world powers to freeze its nuclear program, U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Tuesday. North Korea, which regularly threatens the United States and rich, democratic South Korea, also conducted a long-range rocket launch in February, defying U.N. sanctions. The Security Council last month expanded those sanctions aimed at starving North Korea of funds for its weapons program on a resolution drafted by the United States and China. ... "It's our hope...

On Wednesday, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah party paid homage to a young woman who killed six people and wounded dozens more, when she detonated the homemade bomb in her handbag at the Mahane Yehuda outdoor market in Jerusalem 14 years ago. As was reported by Palestinian Media Watch, Fatah posted this tribute to the suicide terrorist on its official Facebook page. The post reads: “Today is the anniversary of the death as a martyr (shahida) of the martyrdom-seeker (istish’hadiya), the hero Andalib Takatka from the town of Beit Fajjar, daughter of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades — Fatah’s military...

A Jerusalem court has convicted Yosef Haim Ben-David of murdering Mohammed Abu Khder, as well as a number of other crimes. The judge accepted prosecutors' claims that Ben-David led his two nephews, aged 17 and 16, in kidnapping 16-year-old Abu Khder, dousing him in gasoline and burning him to death in 2014. They then attempted to destroy any evidence of their crimes. One of the nephews received a life sentence, while the second was given 21 years in prison. While the judge rejected Ben-David's plea of insanity, he put off the sentencing in light of the defendant's mental state. Ben-David...

WASHINGTON • The U.S. government is poised to approve two long-delayed sales of Boeing Co. fighter jets to Qatar and Kuwait, and could announce the multibillion-dollar deals during President Barack Obama's visit to the Gulf this week, according to two sources familiar with the matter. The decision would mean more job security for thousands of workers at Boeing's sprawling plant in north St. Louis County, where the F-15 fighter and F/A-18E/F Super Hornets are made. Both deals have been stalled amid concerns raised by Israel that equipment sent to Gulf states could fall into the wrong hands and be used...

No incentive for Saudis to let up Getty Saudi Arabia's minister of Oil and Mineral Resources Ali al-Naimi (C) arrives for the OPEC meeting, in the Qatari capital Doha, By WilliamWatts Deputy markets editor Why would the Saudis give up now?That’s the question crude oil bulls should have been asking themselves ahead of the Sunday meeting of major oil producers that failed to produce an agreement to put a lid on production. Prospects for a deal fell apart after Iran refused to sign up, prompting Saudi Arabia, the world’s swing producer, to effectively walk away. Those that believed Riyadh had...

<p>If there's a single issue on which the U.S. and Russia should urgently cooperate, it's Saudi Arabia.</p> <p>If the Central Intelligence Agency's role is to discreetly promote the economic and political interests of the United States, then there's one country that ought to be awfully disappointing to the agency right now: Saudi Arabia. In fact, if there's an issue on which America and Russia could potentially agree, it would be the damage Saudi Arabia has recently wrought upon the national and economic security of both nations.</p>

The United States does not consider the Golan Heights to be a part of Israel, State Department spokesperson John Kirby stressed on Monday, a day after Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu vowed the Golan Heights "will forever remain under Israeli sovereignty." "The U.S. position on the issue is unchanged," Kirby told reporters during a daily briefing at the State Department in Washington, according to Haaretz. "This position was maintained by both Democratic and Republican administrations. Those territories are not part of Israel and the status of those territories should be determined through negotiations. The current situation in Syria does not allow...