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US airstrikes already making headway, says Israeli official. Israel may play a frontline role in the international coalition forming against Islamic State – the jihadi group sweeping through Iraq and Syria in its bid to reinstate a Middle East caliphate. As world powers unite around a US-led plan for military action to topple the militant group, Jerusalem is signaling that if Islamic State decides to spread out to Jordan – Israel will not hesitate to act. "We will use any means necessary," a senior Israeli official told local television station Channel 2. "Let me make this clear: If Islamic State...

Next week, when President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi arrives in New York at the head of the Egyptian delegation to the UN General Assembly he will likely seek to put an end to questions of his legitimacy as head of state. He will also, according to the same diplomatic argument, be ending the “diplomatic isolation” that “some countries” – the reference is always made to Qatar and Turkey – have tried to impose on Egypt. This said, Cairo officials, including the head of the state himself, are aware that when all is said and done, ”the return of Egypt,” as would be...

Wednesday in a speech at the American Enterprise Institute, former Vice President Dick Cheney said our Israeli and Arabs allies in the Middle East no longer trust the United States and "deeply believe" the "Untied States has been supportive of the Muslim Brotherhood" because of the way "the United States has conducted itself over the last few years."

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Struggling Syrian rebels that President Barack Obama once derided as "former doctors, farmers, pharmacists and so forth" now form a key pillar of the U.S. leader's strategy to beat back the militant insurgency known as Islamic State. For over three years, Obama has kept the so-called moderate rebels at arm's length. While giving verbal and limited material support, he and his spokesmen often said publicly that adding more weaponry to the civil war would only make things worse. Now Obama is taking a different tack as he sets out his strategy to defeat the Syrian-based Islamic State,...

Originally published by the Jerusalem Post. Something extraordinary has happened.On August 31, PLO chief and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas told an audience of Fatah members that Egypt had offered to give the PA some 1,600 kilometers of land in Sinai adjacent to Gaza, thus quintupling the size of the Gaza Strip. Egypt even offered to allow all the so-called “Palestinian refugees” to settle in the expanded Gaza Strip.Then Abbas told his Fatah followers that he rejected the Egyptian offer.On Monday Army Radio substantiated Abbas’s claim.According to Army Radio, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi proposed that the Palestinians establish their...

Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi on Monday denied reports that he had offered to establish a Palestinian state in the Sinai Peninsula, the website of Egypt’s Al-Ahram newspaper reported. […] Earlier Monday, Army Radio reported that Sisi has offered Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas to cede 160 square kilometers of the Sinai Peninsula adjoining Gaza to the PA, thus creating a Palestinian state five times the present size of Gaza. In return, the PA would stop demanding that Israel return to the indefensible pre-1967 borders. […] According to the report, Abbas had rejected the offer. Later Monday, Abbas’s office wasted...

Jewish Home party chairwoman MK Ayelet Shaked responded Monday morning to reports that the Egyptian government had offered the Palestinian Authority a state extending from Gaza through the Sinai Peninsula, and called on Prime Minister Netanyahu to take it seriously. Aiming a barb at the Israeli Left, she said the initiative proved how out of touch they were. "If the report is indeed correct, the president of Egypt has managed to understand what the Left in Israel has refused to understand for decades." She asserted that the solution to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinian "needs to be regional,...

Egyptian president General Abdel Fatah Al-Sisi has offered Palestinian Authority chief Mahmoud Abbas to cede 160 square kilometers of the Sinai Peninsula adjoining Gaza to the PA, thus creating a Palestinian state five times the present size of Gaza. In return, the PA would stop demanding that Israel return to the 1967 borders. The offer was revealed on IDF Radio. Al-Sisi reportedly suggested that Palestinian “refugees” be allowed to settle in the new, much enlarged Gaza, which would be demilitarized. …

JNS.org - Several prominent Turkish Jews have written an open letter reprimanding their government for publicly asking the Jewish community to denounce Israel’s operation Protective Edge in Gaza.

World Bulletin/News Desk Arab foreign ministers meeting in Cairo on Sunday are expected to issue a resolution backing Iraqi efforts to confront militants who have overrun large areas of Iraq and Syria, diplomats said. An Iraqi diplomatic source said Baghdad had proposed a draft resolution that would endorse its efforts to confront ISIL militants and condemn the group's actions as war crimes and crimes against humanity. Other diplomatic sources said the Arab League would agree a resolution endorsing the U.S. military campaign against the group. Egypt's official Mena news agency quoted a source saying the foreign ministers would agree to...

Egypt on Saturday charged ousted president Mohammed Morsi and several other people with endangering national security by leaking state secrets and sensitive documents to Qatar, Reuters reported. Security sources had said last month that Egypt was investigating the ousted Muslim Brotherhood president in connection with documents they said were leaked to Qatar and its satellite news channel Al Jazeera. The Cairo public prosecutor's office said on Saturday its secret investigation had unearthed enough evidence of espionage to charge Morsi in a criminal court.

WASHINGTON, DC -- U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, announced today his intent to file the Expatriate Terrorist Act (E.T.A.) of 2014 as soon as the Senate is called back into session on Monday, September 8th. “Americans who choose to go to Syria or Iraq to fight with vicious ISIS terrorists are party to a terrorist organization committing horrific acts of violence, including beheading innocent American journalists who they have captured,” said Sen. Cruz. “There can be no clearer renunciation of their citizenship in the United States, and we need to do everything we can to preempt any attempt on their part to...

Egypt charges ex-president Mursi with passing state secrets to Qatar Ousted Egyptian president Mohamed Mursi stands behind bars during his trial at a court in Cairo . Egypt charged ousted president Mohamed Mursi and several other people on Saturday with endangering national security by leaking state secrets and sensitive documents to Qatar, dealing a further blow to his outlawed Muslim Brotherhood. Relations between Qatar, a Gulf Arab state, and Egypt have been icy since July 2013, when then-Egyptian army chief Abdel Fattah al-Sisi toppled Mursi after mass unrest against his rule. Qatar had supported Mursi, who is already in jail...

Islamic State fighters executed a youth in a Syrian town Friday, after hundreds of residents demanded they leave following regime air strikes that targeted the jihadists but killed eight civilians, a monitor said. Residents of Ashara, in the mostly IS-controlled eastern province of Deir Ezzor, protested in front of an IS headquarters Thursday evening, hours after air strikes killed two children, five women and a man, Syrian Observatory for Human Rights director Rami Abdel Rahman said. In response, IS gunmen opened fire and seized several young men, the Observatory and an activist said. The air strikes were part of a...

Nabil Fahmy, the former Egyptian foreign minister and a previous ambassador to the US, said that relations between Cairo and Washington remain strained because of the US’s insistence of allowing Islamists to participate in the political process. In an Egyptian television interview on Sunday evening, Fahmy said that “the Americans have not appropriately learned the lesson of dealing with terrorism” and that they “contacted us constantly in order to integrate streams of political Islam into the political process,” the Egyptian newspaper Al-Masry al-Youm reported. He added, however, that Egypt “pursued the will of the people” and did not give in...

HAVANA: Cuban ex-president Fidel Castro lashed out at the United States and Europe on Monday (Sep 1), accusing them of war-mongering and comparing the NATO military alliance's representatives to the Nazi SS. In a tortuous column published in Cuban state media, the father of the island's communist revolution also attacked US Senator John McCain over United States policy in the Middle East, calling him "Israel's most unconditional ally." "The world has seen no respite in recent years, particularly since the European Economic Community, under the strict and unconditional leadership of the United States, decided the time had come to settle...

Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi blamed Israel for fueling terrorism in the Middle East by not making peace with the Palestinian Authority (PA) on Wednesday, in light of the tensions between the West and the Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS). The lack of a “peace process” in Israel contributes to a “fertile environment for the growth and spread of extremism, violence and terrorism,” claimed Sisi, who violently overthrew former President Mohammed Morsi last July 3. […] Sisi has been critical towards Israel, despite serving as mediator between the Jewish state and the terrorist organization Hamas in negotiations that led to...

It has been 13 years since 9/11 and the West is still reluctant to link the non-ending parade of jihad groups with Islam. The West is also in denial about the similarities all radical Islamic groups share. It is important for the West to realize that there is a natural division of labor between the different terror groups. Some groups specialize in terror against non-Muslims and Western governments while others specialize in terrorizing Arab governments that refused to follow Sharia. But the truly sophisticated groups are those who reside in the West, calling themselves ‘moderate’ while at the same time...

In a July 8, 2014 interview with Egypt's Channel 1, Egyptian political scientist Ammar Ali Hassan said that the Jews had stolen Egypt's gold and treasures when they left ancient Egypt. The character of Shakespeare's Shylock is "a replica of the Jew who lived in Egypt – a merchant and a loan shark," he said, adding: "We demand that they return the treasures they stole from us." Following are excerpts: Ammar Ali Hassan: The Jews wanted [Egypt] to pay them compensation to the tune of dozens of billions of dollars, although our economy is very hard off. More importantly, they...

RESIDENT OBAMA’S acknowledgment that “we don’t have a strategy yet” in Syria understandably attracted the most attention after his perplexing meeting with reporters Thursday. But his restatement of the obvious was not the most dismaying aspect of his remarks. The president’s goal, to the extent he had one, seemed to be to tamp down all the assessments of gathering dangers that his own team had been issuing over the previous days. This argument with his own administration is alarming on three levels. The first has to do with simple competence. One can only imagine the whiplash that foreign leaders must...