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A day after Jewish comedian Jon Stewart caused outrage with a segment on his Daily Show on the ongoing Israel-Hamas war, he hosted former Secretary of State, and wannabe president, Hillary Clinton on his show to address the topic. After Stewart attempted to draw her into criticizing Israel, Clinton swiftly put him in his place. Stewart: Can we at least agree that the humanitarian crisis in Gaza is overwhelming and that the world must do more for the people who are trapped by this conflict? Clinton: And they’re trapped by their leadership. unfortunately, it’s a two-pronged trapping that is committed...

When a New York Times article cast doubt on the accusation Usama bin Laden had a hand in the 1998 bombings of African embassies, President Clinton questioned his own CIA, according to a note he scrawled to his national security adviser The memo, part of a 1,000-page release of documents Friday afternoon by the National Archives, was written after the president apparently read an article in the self-professed "paper of record" casting doubt on the U.S. Justice Department's case that the Al Qaeda mastermind was involved in the Aug. 7, 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Some...

A prominent American Jewish organization is denouncing The Washington Post for posting an animated cartoon on its YouTube channel depicting Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu beating a Palestinian infant. The caricature is aimed at apportioning blame equally between Israel and Hamas for the suffering of Gazan civilians. It was created by Ann Telnaes, one of the newspaper’s editorial cartoonists. The Simon Wiesenthal Center declared its outrage over the cartoon. In a statement released to news agencies on Friday, the center’s associate dean, Rabbi Abraham Cooper, said the clip was “disgusting.” "It is disgusting that The Washington Post would present an animated...

It was strange. Joe Scarborough had just completed a comprehensive indictment of failed American foreign policy around the globe. But at the very moment when he should have laid those disasters at the feet of the sitting President of the United States, Scarborough came down with a bad case of . . . cold feet. Scarborough laid out to David Gregory a tour d'horizon of failed American foreign policy from the Middle East, to Iran, to Russia/Ukraine, describing it as "one disaster after another." But perhaps fearful of where the ineluctable logic of his comments was taking him, Scarborough suddenly...

MK Hanin Zoabi (Balad) took her campaign against Israel to a whole new level this week, Israel Hayom reports Friday—after she published an article on Hamas’s official website encouraging an Islamist uprising against the Jewish state. Zoabi encouraged all Arab countries to help stoke a “popular uprising” against Israel, halt security coordination with the Palestinian Authority (PA) police in Judea and Samaria, and lay siege to the region. Zoabi—who is a member of the Israeli Knesset—also put the word “Israel” in quotation marks for the entire article. The inflammatory piece also attacks Operation Protective Edge against Hamas, which seeks to...

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As the sun went down over Kabul on Saturday July 13, Afghanistan’s future hung in the balance. Accusations of fraud in the country’s recent presidential election had paralyzed the country’s politics and threatened to trigger a civil war that could destroy the progress America’s costly military and diplomatic efforts had delivered since 2001....

The Obama administration accused Israel on Thursday of failing to do all it can to prevent civilian casualties in Gaza during cross-border attacks. Noting the deaths a day earlier of four boys who were killed on a Gaza beach by an Israeli strike, the State Department said the high civilian death toll in Gaza has been "heartbreaking." Three more children were killed in Gaza on Thursday. Still, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki also criticized Hamas militants in Gaza who continue to fire rockets and mortars into Israel, prolonging the latest round of violence in the Mideast that has so far...

Mosul (Agenzia Fides) - The last Christian families still present in Mosul are leaving the city and are heading towards Erbil, Dohuk and other areas of Iraqi Kurdistan which are considered safer. This is confirmed by sources of the local Chaldean community to Fides Agency. The new exodus has accelerated in the past two days, after Sunni insurgents and militants of the Islamic Caliphate began to mark with letters of recognition the homes of Christians and Shiites. As reported by the website www.Ankawa.com, the evacuation of the last Christians is also due to the intensification of the bombing carried out...

Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl has finally broken his silence, using his first statement since being released from the Taliban to thank President Barack Obama for his support. "Sergeant Bergdahl is deeply grateful to President Obama for saving his life," said Bergdahl's new attorney Eugene Fidell. In an interview with The Daily Beast, Fidell said the former prisoner of war had authorized him to make that statement on his behalf. The exchange of Bergdahl for five Taliban prisoners in U.S. custody has been controversial in part because several members of the Bergdahl's former unit have called him a deserter. They say he...

In a special interview on CNN Wednesday night, Economics Minister Naftali Bennett said that incidents such as the killing of four children on a Gaza beach earlier Wednesday were entirely the fault of Hamas – and were no accident. “I think it is terrible that Hamas is butchering its own children like this,” Bennett told senior CNN correspondent Wolf Blitzer. “I would never take my children and place them next to rocket missile launchers,” knowing that it was likely to be targeted by the IDF, he said. “Hamas is conducting massive self-genocide, taking women and children and placing them next...

Hamas threatened Israel on Thursday evening and warned that it will pay a "high price" for launching a ground assault on Gaza. "The start of the Israeli ground attack on Gaza is a dangerous step, the consequences of which have not been calculated," Hamas spokesman Fawzi Barhoum said in a statement quoted by AFP. "Israel will pay a high price and Hamas is ready for the confrontation," he declared. "With this action the Israeli government seeks to restore the morale of its soldiers and the morale of its army leadership - a leadership that is collapsing because of the qualitative...

The Prime Minister's Office has issued a statement that says the IDF has embarked on a ground assault into Gaza against Hamas's tunnels. The operation is deemed as "limited" and will probably not go further than two or three kilometers into Gaza's territory. This is deemed to be deep enough in enemy land to find the openings into Hamas's attack tunnels, like the one that was used in Thursday morning's infiltration into Israel by 13 terrorists. Egypt, meanwhile, has issued a statement saying that Hamas is to blame for the possible deaths of hundreds of Gazan civilians. The statement appears...

IDF fears that, without Hamas, Gaza could descend into a Somalia-like situation, in which dozens of gangs or clans would take over various parts of the strip. The next 48 hours in the Gaza Strip will likely bring more of the same: Israeli air strikes, murmurs about a limited Israel Defense Forces ground operation and continued rocket fire from the Strip to central and southern Israel. But there is also a slim chance of reaching a cease–fire agreement. Contacts aimed at achieving this are ongoing on two different fronts: one Egyptian, and the other Qatari-Turkish. The Palestinian Authority is maneuvering...

The Middle East is falling apart, according to the Palestinian Authority (PA)’s official daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida—all because of an elaborate conspiracy on the part of the US to stoke conflict in Gaza, Iraq, Syria, and Libya. “After the coffins of US soldiers returned from Afghanistan and Iraq, and before that, from Lebanon, [the US] adopted a new method [to protect US interests]: exploitation and creation of Islamic, Christian and Jewish religious extremism, in order to fight [Arabs] with it [this method] rather than with its own soldiers,” the article claims, in a translation provided by Palestinian Media Watch. “Taking a...

Iraq’s autonomous Kurdish region has begun to pump oil from Kirkuk fields previously controlled by Iraq’s central government into the pipeline system that runs in its own territory, a senior Iraqi oil official said on July 17. Kirkuk lies on the disputed boundary between the northern Kurdish region and the rest of Iraq and is at the heart of a long-running dispute between Baghdad and Arbil, the Kurdish regional capital, over territory and natural resources. Kurdish forces took control of production facilities at the Kirkuk and Bai Hassan northern fields on July 11, exploiting a power vacuum created by an...

The Pentagon recently notified members of Congress that it intends to transfer six low-level detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to Uruguay soon, including a Syrian man who is legally challenging the manner in which the military force-feeds some prisoners, U.S. officials said Wednesday. The men — four Syrians, a Palestinian and a Tunisian — are among the more than 70 detainees who have long been cleared for release from the U.S. detention facility because they are not deemed an ongoing threat. The move would mark a significant step in the Obama administration’s long-stymied quest to shut down Guantanamo Bay, where...

Between the fall of the Jewish Commonwealth to the Romans in the first century A.D. and the founding of Israel in 1948, Jews were remarkably easy to kill. Not anymore. Today, thanks to an innovative missile-defense system called Iron Dome (in Hebrew Kipat Barzel), it’s harder than ever. Yet when it was first proposed, many Israeli defense experts (and one way or another most Israelis consider themselves defense experts) were reluctant to support the idea of a defensive response to rocket attacks from Gaza and Lebanon. Throughout the history of warfare there has been conflict between those who believe in...

Introduction The current Gaza conflict, which broke out following a deliberate escalation by Hamas when it fired dozens of rockets into Israeli cities over a wide radius (including Beersheba, Rehovot, and Ashdod and later Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa) raises questions about the reasons for this rocket offensive by Hamas. Why is it that, on July 7, 2014, Hamas broadened the scope of the battle beyond the exchanges of fire with Israel that had occurred previously, and fired rockets deeper into Israel than it had since Operation Pillar of Defense in late 2012? Apparently, Hamas' decision to launch a rocket...

Backgrounder: The Students for Justice in PalestinePosted By Lee Kaplan On July 17, 2014 @ 12:35 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 4 Comments The Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) today exists as a consortium of campus “clubs” throughout the American and Canadian college systems which work to oppose the existence of Israel and to promote Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against the Jewish state. There are at least 80 chapters of these clubs on campuses throughout the US and Canada. The SJP goes under other assorted names on some campuses. Names such as Palestine Solidarity Committee or Students for...