Sierra Faith

This will be wonderful!

I love you.

And so does CA.

Not good. And thanks President Obama — for nothing:

And yet, in the face of these realities, US President Barack Obama is intensifying his pressure on Israel to agree to the now-powerless Fatah’s preconditions for negotiating. Indeed, he has adopted Fatah’s preconditions as his own.

Obama is demanding that Israel agree to surrender its right to defensible borders by insisting that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu accept the pre-1967 boundaries – that is the 1949 armistice lines – as the starting point for future negotiations. Since Obama surely recognizes that a Hamas-controlled Palestinian Authority will not accept Israeli control over anything from the Temple Mount in Jerusalem to the Jordan Valley, he knows that he is requiring that Israel surrender its right to defensible borders before it even begins negotiating.

It is not surprising that the unity talks that crowned Hamas the king of Palestinian politics have taken place in post-Mubarak Egypt. Despite the rosy, post-Mubarak scenarios put forward during the revolution in January by American liberal and neo-conservative intellectuals, post- Mubarak Egypt is shaping up to be a dangerous, frightening place.

With the supposedly liberal Wafd Party merging with the Muslim Brotherhood this week, the Brotherhood took a significant step toward consolidating its rise to political leadership of the country in the elections scheduled for September.

The ruling military junta’s decision to arrest Israeli-American Ilan Grapel on trumped-up espionage charges last week is just one more signal that post-Mubarak Egypt is turning its back on Egypt’s peace with Israel.

And as The Washington Times reported last week, the US has been reduced to begging the Egyptian military authorities to re-arrest a number of top jihadist terrorists freed from Egyptian prisons in the aftermath of Hosni Mubarak’s ouster. Yet, not only have the terrorists not been re-jailed, some of them have formed new political parties and are slated to run in September’s elections. Clearly, the US is also being betrayed by the new regime.

If the Muslim Brotherhood controls the next Egyptian government, Egypt will join Lebanon and Turkey as the newest member of the growing club of nations ruled by Islamic radicals. This week, Lebanon’s Hezbollah-appointed Prime Minister Najib Mikati finally formed his Hezbollah- controlled government.

QUEST on KQED Public Media.

Mavericks web site.

Interesting history of technology in the military here.

For those who have been to The Holy Land, this excellent piece by Michael Totten will strike a chord.

Because Hebron, historian Yaacov Lozowick wrote, “is what happens when Israelis and Palestinians agree to divide a city, but can’t agree to live together in peace. The blame for lack of peace is irrelevant: each side will doubtlessly say it’s all the fault of the other, but the result won’t be any nicer thereby. The myriads of observers, pundits, politicians, dreamers, visionaries and true believers who all know for a certainty that dividing Jerusalem is the key to peace in the Middle East need urgently to visit Hebron.”

Historian Yaacov Lozowick:

On this page I’ve brought together the various things I’ve written over the past few years explaining – and more importantly, demonstrating – why the idea of dividing Jerusalem is so mistaken. Not only will it not bring peace; the common denominator to all the alternative plans for dividing the city is that they’ll probably make things considerably worse. Dividing Jerusalem will actively promote violence. . . .

Having laid out the principles, I then began walking around the city, mostly along the putative line of division, taking pictures or making amateurish films. I can’t say why I’m the only one around who seems to be doing this, and it’s actually something of a scandal.

Evil personified:

“I don’t regret what I did, and would do it again,” Amjad Awad told reporters in court. “I’m proud of what I did and I’ll accept any punishment I get, even death, because I did it all for Palestine,” he added.

The charge sheet detailed how the two saw two young brothers sleeping in their beds, 4-year-old Elad and 11- year-old Yoav, snuck into the home, and stabbed them both to death. They then entered the parents’ bedroom, where they launched a knife attack on Ehud and Ruth Fogel. The parents fought back, attempting to fend off the attackers. Ehud died of stab wounds and Ruth was shot dead by the attackers with a stolen M- 16 gun. The two then left the house, before hearing cries from three-month-old baby Hadas. Awoken by the attack, the baby lay in its crib in the parents’ bedroom.

“They went back into the house and stabbed the baby to death to silence her cries,” a security source said following the arrests in April.