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Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon criticized Economic Minister Naftali Bennett (Jewish Home) on Saturday night, after the latter issued a fiery response to the words of US Secretary of State John Kerry Friday linking peace talks with ISIS. According to Ya'alon, Bennett's criticism lacks respect for the financial and diplomatic support the US has provided for Israel's right to self-defense against Hamas terrorism. "Relations between the United States and Israel are based on shared interests and values​​, and a dispute or other comments should not cast a shadow over that," Ya'alon stated. "The United States supports Israel in a variety of...

The US State Department highly disparaged the remarks of Economics Minister Naftali Bennett (Jewish Home) against Secretary of State John Kerry's linkage of Israeli-Palestinian peace talks and ISIS, claiming that Bennett was "distorting" the remarks for his "own political purposes." "I would take issue with the part of your question that Israeli leaders, plural, have disagreed with what they thought the Secretary said," State Department deputy spokeswoman Marie Harf stated Friday, when questioned over Kerry's remarks at a press briefing. "I saw one in particular. And we would say to that that we know passions run high, politics are intense,...

Two chemical weapons-related stories this week should be considered separate, not necessarily interchangeable, parts of a whole. The first was that ISIS had used chemical weapons against Kurdish forces in Kobani, raising the question of where ISIS would have acquired such weapons.  The second, in the New York Times, detailed how U.S. forces in Iraq uncovered thousands of shells filled with chemical munitions from various areas of the country following the invasion, and how they were stored and guarded until 2011. Those disinclined to support the Iraq War, including the Times, International Business Times, and Huffington Post, posit that the...

As U.S. and coalition partners repeatedly bomb Islamic State fighters trying to capture the Syrian city of Kobani, analysts in the United States warn that the IS organization is an experienced and resilient force that will be hard to defeat. Despite days of punishing airstrikes in and around the Syrian city of Kobani and inside Iraq, the black and white flag of the Islamic State still stubbornly flies above rooftops from the Turkish border in the west to within miles of Baghdad.

“YPG fighters are now searching the homes for bombs and explosives that the Islamist militants might have left behind,” Photo: AFP KOBANE—Islamist militants have been pushed out of Kobane and fighters of the Peoples Protection Units (YPG) are now in control of the town, a Kurdish official in Kobane told Rudaw. “There is no ISIS in Kobane now,” said Omar Alush, co-chair of the TEV-DEM movement in Kobane. Alush said that following the recent air strikes on positions of the Islamic State (IS) militants in Kobane, the YPG managed to drive the rest of the jihadis out of town...

A regional judge in Munich is embroiled in a highly charged dispute over her statement in a civil case that German anti-Semitism was limited to the Nazi period of 1933-1945, suggesting that post-Holocaust anti-Semitism is not a factor in Jew-hatred. The Munich regional judge, Petra Grönke-Müller, sparked outrage on October 8 with her courtroom assertion during a civil case that “a fiery anti-Semite is someone in Germany who talks, with conviction, in an anti-Semitic way and, with conviction, does not condemn the Third Reich and cannot view the period 1933-1945 as separate from the background of history.” […] Speaking to...

The Palestinian U.N. ambassador said Friday his government wants the U.N. Security Council to vote on a resolution before the end of the year that would set November 2016 as the deadline for Israeli troops to withdraw from all Palestinian territories. Riyad Mansour said Friday that if the resolution is defeated—which is almost certain because of opposition from Israel’s closest ally the United States and others—the Palestinians have other options. …

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas suggested Jews should be banned from a holy site revered by both Jews and Muslims after hundreds of Palestinians in Gaza participated in a Hamas-organized rally Friday over Jerusalem’s flashpoint al-Aqsa mosque, the scene of recurring clashes between Israeli security forces and Palestinians in recent days. […] Abbas said Jews should be prevented from entering the site “by any means,” adding that “this is our Noble Sanctuary… they have no right to enter and desecrate it.” Palestinians also say Israel is unfairly restricting access at the site. Israel limited male Muslim worshippers this past week to...

More than 10,000 women are fighting among peshmerga forces in northern Syria, about half the overall number, she says, though other reports suggest women make up around one-third of the total. Regardless, women fighters make up a critical force in the battle to stave off the macabre IS jihadists bent on establishing a caliphate in Syria and Iraq, and massacring anyone who gets in the way of that. For the women fighters, the emergence of IS, which sees the women in society through a primitive viewpoint, is anathema. “Syrian Kurdish women are revolutionary women. Daish [IS] hate women, so we...

In 2009, a decision was made by the Norwegian Nobel Committee that has raised questions and stirred controversy ever since. In that year, then newly elected American President Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. With ample cause, many people - not only in the United States but around the world - wondered just what Obama had done to earn such an honor. In fact, as a fledgling new President with virtually no experience yet on the world stage and a limited political resume prior, the prevailing sense on Obama's receiving of the award was that it was based...

The U.S. Marines who guarded the sprawling complex in northwest Iraq where Saddam Hussein’s 1980s war machine churned out some of the most deadly chemical and biological weapons known to man had a name for one especially mysterious bunker: The Dragon’s Egg.

The latest round of negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program took place this week, pitting the United States and its European partners against the Iranian regime’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif. It seems safe to say that if Iran and the United States can’t come to a workable compromise this week, and it certainly appears that way based on what has already transpired, there will be no basis for a final deal on Nov. 24. But there are serious outstanding questions about what a viable compromise would look like. This was made clear last week, when Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s...

For more than a decade, Berlin has been governed by an openly homosexual mayor. But is the city, renowned for its tolerance, ready for a leader from a Palestinian background? It may have to be. […] … Berlin SPD parliamentary leader Raed Saleh only needs to open his mouth to stand out from the crowd. Saleh came to Berlin at the age of five with his Palestinian parents, and although his German is beyond reproach, he speaks the language with a distinct Arabic twang. “Berlin is a city of diversity; a city of 100 different accents,” Saleh told DW. “People...

The Islamist militant group Boko Haram has agreed to a ceasefire and the release of more than 200 kidnapped school girls, according to Nigerian officials. The girls were abducted six months ago from a school in Chibok. […] “Boko Haram issued the ceasefire as a result of the discussions we have been having with them,” said Hassan Tukur, who represented the Nigerian government at talks with the militant organization in neighboring Chad. “They have agreed to release the Chibok girls,” he continued. The girls have been missing for the past six months, despite international efforts mobilized by the Twitter hashtag...

The UK’s National Union of Students (NUS) has rejected a motion condemning the radical Islamic State terrorist group—also known as ISIS or ISIL—on the grounds that it could be considered “Islamophobic,” sparking a row over the dominance of radical-left groups within the student body. The decision by NUS’s National Executive Committee to shoot down the motion is all the more shocking given that the same body adopted an aggressive bill just over two months ago condemning Israel and calling for a boycott of the Jewish state. The anti-Israel motion was adopted despite objections that it risked alienating Jewish students, who...

The Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights revealed on Friday that the brutal Islamic State (ISIS) terror group has begun training pilots on three captured fighter jets, relying on the knowledge of Iraqi pilots who have joined the group. Rami Abdul Rahman, director of the monitoring group, said witnesses in northern Syria have seen the group flying the three MiG 21 or MiG 23 model jets above the al-Jarrah airbase east of Aleppo, in the first instance of ISIS going airborne, reports Reuters. […] ISIS has captured several fighter jets during its conquest of Syria and Iraq. In August it...

Remarkable fightback by Kurdish troops forces ISIS militants out of KobaneAssisted by U.S. and Arab airstrikes, Kurds are reclaiming the besieged citySustained bombing raids have killed scores of militants over the past weekNow ISIS only has two small pockets of resistance in the east of the city Islamic State militants have been almost entirely driven out of the Syrian city of Kobane following a remarkable fightback by Kurdish forces who vowed to either defeat the terrorists or die trying. The extremists have abandoned all of their positions in the city, except for two small pockets of resistance in the...

The Neil Young tour buses If only the Nazis had pursued a smaller carbon footprint, Neil Young would have joined the party. He had to settle for joining the Green Nazis. In an interview with radio shock-jock Howard Stern, Canadian rocker Neil Young suggested a fight against the Islamic State (ISIS) is not worth the release of greenhouse gases from military vehicles.“And yet we are fighting what? ISIS…al-Qaeda. And we are fighting these wars against these organizations and their carbon footprint has got to be like 1% of our huge army and our navy and all of this stuff that...

Mehmud Berxwedan, the YPG Kobanê General in Command, has said: “After a one-month resistance we have launched a step-by-step advance towards victory. In the last week in particular Kobanê has become a graveyard for ISIS.” YPG Kobanê Commander Mahmut Berxwedan spoke to Ronahi TV. He said that, as watched by the world, Kobanê had resisted for 32 days, adding that they were now close to victory. Berxwedan emphasised that the Kobanê resistance had begun in the villages, where there had been a great resistance from house to house, hamlet to hamlet and from village to village. He added that for...

What a difference a decade makes! When it was first reported in May 2004 that Saddam-era chemical weapons shells had injured U.S. troops, the editors of the New York Times dismissed that, “Finding some residual weapons that had escaped a large-scale destruction program would be no great surprise and if the chemicals had degraded, no major threat.” Now, a major New York Times report on the issue has been followed by an editorial warning of “A Deadly Legacy in Iraq”: some 5,000 chemical shells have been discovered over the years in Iraq by U.S. or U.S.-trained Iraqi forces. Many more...