Bibi Netanyahu says 18 arrested for starting fires: police surprised

The fires ravaging the Jerusalem Hills, scorching nearly 5,000 acres of cherished land, have exposed not only the fragility of nature but also the muddled narratives of those tasked with protecting it, not to mention the Hamas supporters who are attempting to destroy the land they pretend is theirs and which they love.

Prime Minister Benjamin 'Bibi' Netanyahu, speaking with the gravitas of a leader under siege, declared that 18 individuals had been apprehended on suspicion of arson—one, he claimed, caught "in the act" during Thursday’s International Bible Quiz. 

Yet, in a twist that underscores the chaos, police sources, speaking to N12, expressed surprise at the figure, insisting they knew of only three confirmed arrests. The truth, as ever, seems to flicker just beyond reach.

The origins of these devastating blazes, which have reduced Canada Park and its surrounding forests to ash, remain shrouded in uncertainty, at least to some extent. 

One suspect, detained on Wednesday, is believed to have attempted to spark yet another fire in southern Jerusalem, as if the inferno already consuming the hills were not enough. Firefighting teams, 98 units strong, toil alongside the IDF and Home Front Command, battling both flames and the inaccessibility of the fire’s starting points. The Fire and Rescue authority, with a sigh of cautious relief, announced late Thursday that the main blaze had been subdued. But with strong winds forecast, the battle is far from won.

Netanyahu, ever the rhetorician, seized the moment at the Bible Quiz’s closing to laud the heroism of the firefighting forces. Quoting scripture with a poet’s flourish, he said: "As fire burns the forest and as flame sets the mountains on fire," before adding, "I want to express my support for the firefighting forces and all those assisting in the protection of the land. We have detained 18 individuals, one of whom was apprehended while in the act." 

The words obviously carried weight, but the discrepancy with police reports casts a shadow over their certainty.

Then, of course, there is the matter of Palestinian incitement, a spark of a different kind. Netanyahu, with characteristic defiance, condemned those who, while professing love for the land, peddle rhetoric that seeks to set it ablaze. "We are the true lovers of this land," he declared, "and we are the ones safeguarding it." 

Palestinian media channels, he alleged, are fanning the flames of destruction, their calls for further fires a grim counterpoint to the physical devastation.

The Jerusalem Hills lie wounded, their scars a testament to both human failure and resilience. As the winds gather and the investigation deepens, one thing is clear: the land, beloved and contested, burns not just from fire but from the weight of competing truths: those of Israel, aka the actual truth; and those of the Arabs, aka the lie that everywhere they set foot on the planet belongs to Islam.

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Ohad Ben Ami, Or Levy, and Eli Sharabi freed from Gaza: they look like Holocaust survivors

Israelis are making frightening comparisons to the term "Muselmann", which was used during the Holocaust to describe Jewish prisoners in Nazi camps who were nearly starved to death.

On Saturday, three Israelis were released after being held by the Hamassholes for 491 days in the Gaza Strip. This brings the number of hostages freed in the first part of the ceasefire agreement to 21.

Or Levy, 34, Eli Sharabi, 52, and Ohad Ben Ami, 56, were handed over by Red Cross officials to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) around 11:15 a.m. local time and were soon driven back into Israeli territory.

The IDF took them to a facility near the border for initial health checks and to reunite with their families. Before their release, Hamas had them on display in front of a loud crowd in Deir al-Balah, central Gaza. The men looked very weak and thin.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's office issued a statement welcoming the hostages back, saying, "The government of Israel embraces the three returnees," and warned, "The shocking images that we have seen today will not go unaddressed.

“The government, together with all of the security officials, will accompany them and their families. The government of Israel is committed to returning all of the hostages and the missing,” the statement continued.

It ended with a quote from Psalms (31:15): “Deliver me from the hand of my enemies, from those who pursue me.”

The state of the hostages has caused a strong reaction on social media, with many drawing parallels to the Muselmann from the Holocaust, noting their extreme thinness and frailty.

“This is what a crime against humanity looks like!” Israeli President Isaac Herzog posted on X.

“The whole world must look directly at Ohad, Or, and Eli—returning after 491 days of hell, starved, emaciated and pained—being exploited in a cynical and cruel spectacle by vile murderers. We take solace in the fact that they are being returned alive to the arms of their loved ones,” Herzog wrote.

“Completing the hostage deal is a humanitarian, moral, and Jewish duty. It is essential to bring back all our sisters and brothers from the hell of captivity in Gaza—every last one of them!” he added.

“A psychological war is being waged that can cause harm to us,” said Dr. Gilad Bodenheimer, chief of the ministry’s mental health division. “We urge the public to minimize exposure to distressing images and videos and to be mindful of what they, their children and their loved ones are seeing.”

The Hostage and Missing Families Forum also commented, “The disturbing images from the release of Ohad, Eli and Or serve as yet another stark and painful evidence that leaves no room for doubt—there is no time to waste for the hostages!”

Levy was kidnapped from the Supernova Music Festival near Kibbutz Re'im during the October 7, 2023, attack. His wife, Eynav, was killed, and their now three-year-old son Almog has been living with his grandparents since.

Sharabi and his brother Yossi were abducted from Kibbutz Be'eri. Sharabi’s wife and daughters were killed there, and Yossi has since been confirmed dead, his body still held in Gaza.

Ben Ami was taken from Be’eri along with his wife, Raz, who was freed during a ceasefire in November 2023.

In exchange, Israel was set to release 183 Arab prisoners on Saturday: 18 serving life sentences, 54 serving long terms, and 111 arrested in Gaza during the conflict.

Last Saturday, Yarden Bibas, Ofer Kalderon, and Keith Siegel were released from Gaza. Two days before that, IDF soldiers Agam Berger, 20, civilians Arbel Yehud, 29, Gadi Mozes, 80, and five Thai farm workers were freed.

The previous week, four female IDF soldiers—Karina Ariev, 20; Daniella Gilboa, 20; Naama Levy, 20; and Liri Albag, 19—were brought back after being taken from Nahal Oz base. 

Three civilian women—Emily Damari, Romi Gonen, and Doron Steinbrecher—were released on January 19, shortly after the ceasefire started.

According to Israeli estimates, 76 hostages are still held by Hamas in Gaza, including 73 taken during the October 7, 2023 attacks. 

Of the 251 hostages kidnapped on October 7, 2023, 178 have been returned or rescued, and Hamas is believed to hold 35 bodies, including 34 from the October 7 invasion and that of IDF Lt. Hadar Goldin, taken in 2014.

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Trump wants Arab nations to take on more Gaza Arabs

President Donald Trump said on Saturday that he wants to resettle residents of the Gaza Strip in Arab countries, shaking up Middle East diplomacy in his unique way.

Trump told reporters on Air Force One that he had asked King Abdullah II of Jordan in a phone call earlier in the day to "take people" from war-torn Gaza and planned to make a similar request to Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi in a phone call on Sunday. Trump suggested that mass emigration from the strip, whether "temporarily" or "long term," could help resolve "centuries" of conflict.

"You’re talking about a million and half people, and we just clean out that whole thing. You know over the centuries it has had many, many conflicts, and I don’t know, something has to happen," Trump said. "But it's literally a demolition site right now, almost everything is demolished and people are dying there. So I'd rather get involved with some of the Arab nations and build housing at a different location where [Gazans] can maybe live in peace for a change."

The response from Israel was notably muted, and even politicians who have advocated Gazan emigration told media outlet Washington Free Beacon that Egypt and Jordan were unlikely to agree to Trump’s requests. However, some right-wing politicians hailed the proposal as a chance to break away from the traditional U.S. call for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

"For years, politicians have proposed impractical solutions like dividing the land and establishing a Palestinian state, which endangered the existence and security of the world’s only Jewish state, leading only to bloodshed and suffering for many. Only out-of-the-box thinking and new solutions will bring about peace and security," Israeli finance minister Bezalel Smotrich said in a statement. "I will work closely with the prime minister and the cabinet to ensure that there is an operational plan to implement this as soon as possible."

Ohad Tal, a member of Israel’s parliamentary defense committee from Smotrich’s Religious Zionism party, told the Free Beacon that Trump’s remarks had given a major boost to the "only logical and just solution" to the conflict.

"It will allow the Palestinians who leave to build a better future for themselves somewhere else, and it will minimize the conflict here, which is good for everyone," said Tal, who has advocated Gazan emigration to Trump associates. "It’s good for Israel, it’s good for the region, and it’s good for the Americans, who don’t want to have to be bothered by the Palestinians starting a war every couple years."

Palestinian, Jordanian, and Egyptian leaders on Sunday reaffirmed their opposition to any large-scale resettlement of Palestinians.

"We call on the U.S. administration to cease these proposals, which align with Israeli plans and directly contradict the rights and free will of our people," Hamas, the dominant Palestinian terrorist group in Gaza, said in a statement. "We also call on Arab and Islamic countries, especially our brothers in Egypt and Jordan, to reaffirm their steadfast positions in rejecting displacement and expulsion."

President Mahmoud Abbas of the West Bank Palestinian Authority "expressed strong rejection and condemnation of any projects aimed at displacing our people from the Gaza Strip," according to a statement from his office that did not specifically refer to Trump.

Jordanian foreign minister Ayman Safadi said in a statement, "Our rejection of the displacement of Palestinians is firm and will not change. Jordan is for Jordanians and Palestine is for Palestinians."

While Egypt did not publicly comment, Saudi news station Al Hadath reported on Sunday that Sisi remained firmly opposed to accepting any Gazans into his country.

Despite the rejections of the Arab leaders, Tal voiced confidence that ordinary Gazans would be ready to leave the strip and that Trump—who has often used bold threats to win concessions from foreign interlocutors—could find countries willing to take them.

"It takes courage to execute new ideas," Tal said. "But I think Trump is someone who has proven he can implement these kinds of ideas."

Amit Halevi, another member of the defense committee from the ruling Likud party, told the Free Beacon that Israel should work with Trump to enable and encourage hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to leave Gaza, particularly young adults.

"They have no future under the Hamas regime," he said. "They want to get out. Let them get out."

Once considered mostly by Israel’s far right, the idea of facilitating Gazan emigration went mainstream after the events of October 7, 2023, when Hamas terrorists and ordinary Palestinians conducted a massacre and mass abduction in southern Israel, starting a war that left much of Gaza in ruins.

That November, Ram Ben Barack of the centrist Yesh Atid party and Danny Danon, then a Likud lawmaker and now Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations, co-wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed calling on "countries around the world to accept limited numbers of Gazan families who have expressed a desire to relocate."

The following month, Israeli prime minister Netanyahu told a Likud faction meeting, "Our problem is [finding] countries that are willing to absorb Gazans, and we are working on it."

However, in January, several Israeli officials, facing U.S. and European criticism, spoke out against their colleagues' calls for Gazan immigration, saying the idea was unrealistic and damaging to Israel’s international standing.

"It’s clear that there is nobody in Israel who wouldn’t be happy if Gazans decided to emigrate voluntarily if they were happy to leave," but that is not going to happen and public discussion of the issue is unhelpful, Likud Culture and Sports Minister Miki Zohar told Israel’s Ynet news site at the time. "We see the repercussions, we see what happened with the Americans."

Gilad Kariv, from the left-wing Democrats party, was one of the few Israeli officials to publicly oppose Trump’s proposal on Sunday.

"Israel has no interest in this happening," Kariv told Israel’s 103FM radio, "certainly not in relation to Jordan because the stability of the Hashemite Kingdom is a clear security interest of Israel."

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Omar 'chuckles' when calling Israel a democracy: compares it to Iran

Rep[ulsive] Ilhan Omar (D-MN) a congressional freshman, is getting blowback after she compared Israel to Iran, a country that has just made it illegal for their citizens to walk a dog in public and hangs gay people.

The anti-Semite Muslim said that she "almost chuckle[s]" when the Jewish state is described as a democracy, a remark she made on a Yahoo! News interview on Tuesday.

She also likes Venezuela's dictator and other U.S. adversaries.

When she was asked about how the U.S. can facilitate the peace process between Israelis and Palestinians, she criticized the U.S. for not having “an equal approach” in dealing with both sides, not realizing that Israel is an ally and the so-called Palestinians are not.

“Most of the things that have been aggravating to me is that we have had a policy that makes one superior to the other. And we mask it with a conversation about justice and a two-state solution. When you have policies that clearly prioritize one over the other,” she said.

Omar, who sits on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, was asked to explain in more detail what she meant, prompting her to criticize America’s closest ally in the Middle East.

“I mean just our relationship with the Israeli government and the Israeli state. And so when I see Israel institute laws that recognize it as a Jewish state and does not recognize the other religions that are living in it,” she said, because she is clueless and not very fair-minded.

“And we still uphold it as a democracy in the Middle East I almost chuckle because I know that if we see that any other society we would criticize it, call it out,” the lawmaker continued. “We do that to Iran, we do that to any other place that sort of upholds its religion. And I see that now happening with Saudi Arabia and so I am aggravated, truly, in those contradictions.”

The truth is, Israel is superior to the Palestinians in several ways. To begin, let's look at Israel and where it stands in terms of democracy and fairness:

1. According to the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics, in 2013, the Israeli population was comprised of 1,658,000 Arabs, or 21 percent of the population. Arabs in the Golan Heights and East Jerusalem living there after the 1967 Six Day War, were offered Israeli citizenship. While most turned it down, they were given permanent residency status with a future option of becoming citizens.

2. There are three main Arab political parties in Israel: a) Hadash, which is a joint Arab-Jewish party; b) Balad; and c) United Arab List, which is a coalition of political organizations including Islamic Movement in Israel and Ta'al. There are no Israeli-Jewish political parties in the Palestinian Authority. In fact, there are no living Jews in so-called Palestine that are free to walk the streets.

3. Palestinian Arabs sat in Israel's very first parliamentary assembly in 1949.

4. In 2011, 13 of the 120 members of the Israeli Parliament are Arab citizens, compared to zero Israelis in the Palestinian Authority government in any context. 

5. There is one Arab on the Israeli Supreme Court. There are no Israelis involved in any capacity with Palestinian law.

6. In 2004, then-Prime Minister of Israel, Ariel Sharon, declared that every state-run company must have at least one Arab on its board of directors. 

7. In 2015, there were 18 Arabs elected to the Knesset. There are no Israelis in the Palestinian Authority.

Omar's anti-Semitic comments sparked condemnation on social media, with former New York state Assemblyman Dov Hikind, a Democrat, criticizing her comparing Israel with Iran.

“Who objects to Saudi Arabia being Islamic? Or any of the other 48 Muslim states? The issue with Iran isn’t their state religion; it’s their terror-loving leaders that are condemned. @IlhanMN needs to learn about the world before she’s out of excuses for her antisemitism,” he wrote.

Jim Hanson, president of Security Studies Group who also served in U.S. Army Special Forces, meanwhile, accused Omar of being an “anti-Semite” and lamented that she’s a member of Congress.

“@IlhanMN is an anti-Semite. Give her an opportunity to speak her mind & like most bigots she'll tell you. She laughs at the idea Israel is a democracy & compares it to Iran. Shameful to have those ideas represented in Congress,” he wrote.

This isn’t the first time Omar has been slammed for her comments regarding Israel. She had to apologize earlier this month for a tweet that read: “Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel. #Gaza #Palestine#Israel.”

Yeah, the evil doings of Israel--that's why Hamassholes hurl stones and fire rockets and mortars at Israeli school buses and kill families, mothers, fathers and babies while they sleep. They do it to stop Israeli evil.

Like Antifa stops fascism. 

I hope that 2019 will be the year you follow Brain Flushings and have a few laughs while you get a conservative viewpoint. Politics is the new NFL without the mindless kneeling and this blog will both inform you and hopefully entertain you bigly.

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Merkel should be red-faced

Berlin -- The New Year's Eve robberies and sexual assaults have caused German Chancellor Angela Merkel a bit of embarrassment regarding her liberal immigration policy. People are protesting in the streets of Cologne and elsewhere.

Over a hundred women were sexually assaulted, two were raped, mostly by what police described as Arab or North African people, and they went on a robbery rampage as well.

Leaders of Merkel's Christian Democrats are meeting in Mainz on Saturday to propose greater police flexibility to conduct checks on identity papers and to exclude foreigners from being granted asylum who had been convicted of crimes and sentenced to light terms, including probation. The proposal would need parliamentary approval.

Gee, you think that's a good idea, Angela? 

Last year over a million migrants were received by liberal Germany and they are finally seeing the results of their folly.

Hopefully, Obama will stop crying over gun violence long enough to see the score.


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