2,750-year-old temple found near Jerusalem

FoxNews

Archaeologists have discovered a 2,750-year-old temple along with a cache of sacred artifacts, providing rare insight into religious practices at the time, the Israeli Antiquities Authority announced Wednesday.

The temple was uncovered west of Jerusalem, at the Tel Motza archaeological site, in preparation for work on Highway 1. Among the finds are pottery figurines, fragments of chalices and decorated pedestals, which indicate the site was the stomping ground of a ritual cult.

“The ritual building at Tel Motza is an unusual and striking find, in light of the fact that there are hardly any remains of ritual buildings of the period in Judaea at the time of the First Temple,” said excavation directors Anna Eirikh, Dr. Hamoudi Khalaily and Shua Kisilevitz in a statement.

‘Lost Tribe’ of India Jews Return to Israel

Newser

Dozens of Jews who claim to be the descendants of a lost biblical Jewish tribe have emigrated to Israel from their village in northeastern India. The Bnei Menashe say they are descended from Jews banished from ancient Israel to India in the eighth century BC. An Israeli chief rabbi recognized them as a lost tribe in 2005 and about 1,700 moved to Israel before the government stopped giving them visas. Israel recently reversed that policy, agreeing to let the remaining 7,200 Bnei Menashe immigrate. Fifty-three arrived today. Nearly 300 others are expected to arrive in the coming weeks. Twenty-six-year-old Lhing Lenchonz arrived with her husband and 8-month-old daughter. She said that “after waiting for thousands of years, our dream came true.”

Palestinians Burning Their Bridges

CommentaryMagazine

Palestinian harassment of Israelis at the UN and in international forums will be annoying but won’t change a thing. But their decision to go back to intifada tactics is a guarantee of bloodshed. They may claim their protests will be peaceful, but rock throwing inevitably escalates to more violent tactics. It is also a given that Hamas and terrorist elements of Abbas’s Fatah that are tasked with competing with the Islamists in that category will be using the protests as cover for attacks. If the PA ends security cooperation, it will end the same way the second intifada did with PA “police” joining the terrorists in shooting at Israelis.

This will kill what little support remains inside Israel for compromise with the PA. But Abbas is not wrong to believe that it will make the Palestinians more rather than less popular in Europe, where any form of Israeli self-defense will be depicted as immoral no matter what the circumstances might be. A rising tide of anti-Semitism on the continent has made Israel particularly unpopular there. But while heightening Israel’s isolation may seem like a smart thing to do in Ramallah, it won’t do a thing to give the Palestinians a better life or to get them closer to peace or independence.

Israel’s Iron Dome Has Intercepted More Than 150 Rockets

ABCNews

Israel said that it will install a fifth “Iron Dome” battery before the end of the year, adding another installation to the country’s missile defense system, which has proven itself this week, intercepting more than 150 rockets fired from the Gaza Strip.

The missile defense system, which can identify enemy rockets, determine if they pose a threat to populated areas, and destroy them within a matter of seconds, has been praised by Israel’s leaders for saving hundreds of lives.

The system, however, comes with a steep price. Each interceptor missile, which includes a radar guidance system, costs $40,000. Israel has not disclosed how many missiles are required to take down an enemy rocket or how many interceptors it has fired, but experts estimate the country has fired $8 million worth of missiles in the past three days.

The Israelis are only trying to shoot down about a third of the rockets fired by militants, those on a trajectory towards populated areas, said Ben Goodlad, a senior aerospace and defense analyst at IHS Jane’s. But of the rockets Iron Dome has targeted, the system is between 87 and 90 percent successful in destroying.

Bloggers Spot More Dead Child Fakery by Hamas; CNN Fooled

Breitbart

Hamas has a well-established pattern of faking civilian deaths in Gaza, even as it seeks civilian deaths in Israel (and fakes that, too, pretending it is firing at military targets). Last week, Breitbart News caught Hamas using a month-old photo of a dead Syrian boy and claiming he had been killed by Israel–a double irony, since the Assad regime that killed the boy hosted Hamas for years before the outbreak of the Syrian civil war.

The international community has reinforced Hamas’s pattern of fakery by applying a double standard to Palestinian civilians killed by Israel and Palestinian civilians killed by Hamas. When Israeli artillery inadvertently killed civilians in Beit Hanoun in 2006, the world sprang into action with accusations of “war crime”; when errant Palestinian rockets have struck civilians in Beit Hanoun, the world has said nothing at all.

A picture you will never see…

PowerLineBlog

…on BBC or CNN. Found on Twitter’s #Gaza hashtag, the photo below of “Israeli soldiers helping Palestinian kids escape the rockets from Gaza.”

PHOTO: Hamas missile launch pad next to mosque, playground. Civilian factories, gas station also half a block from Fajr-5 firing site.

So, when Israel retaliates by taking out the launch pad, Hamas and the MSM can claim horrific casualties and that Israel was targeting schools, Muslim mosques and civilian points. Disgusting.

In a dramatic display, today’s rocket fired at Tel Aviv was intercepted by Israel’s Iron Dome battery system, which had deployed in the region just hours earlier.

That rocket added to more than 240 Iron Dome interceptions throughout Israel since the beginning of what the Jewish state is calling Operation Pillar of Defense.

Since the beginning of that operation, more than 400 rockets have hit Israeli territory. Five Israeli civilians and 4 soldiers were injured by rocket fire today.

CNN and BBC bucket carriers for Palestinians

Breitbart

Is there a limit to the number of times the news media will act as willing accomplices for Palestinian propaganda?

Apparently not. The BBC and CNN, which have been an enemy of Israel for years, even going so far as to quote as an authority noted Israel hater Richard Falk, who has compared Israelis to Nazis, has now been caught cutting a video showing a “victim” of the Israeli attack on Gaza being carried out, seriously wounded.

One problem. In the same video thirty seconds later, the same man is standing on his own two feet.

It’s a miracle!

The BBC’s hostility to Israel has been evidenced by acts like these:

1. BBC journalist Barbara Plett said she “started to cry” when Yasser Arafat left Israel and traveled to France for medical treatment in 2004.
2. In 2006, reporter Orla Guerin lied that the town of Bint Jbeil, Lebanon, had been “wiped out” by the Israeli air force.  It later turned out that the suburbs were left virtually untouched.
3. When the Fogel family of five was butchered in their home, including a baby girl in her bed, in Itamar, the BBC barely mentioned it, saying that it had been a “very busy news period.”
4. On October 5^th of this year, Jeremy Bowen, the BBC’s Middle East Editor, retweeted a tweet by  one Joseph Dana, who was “curious that Israeli forces can fire tear gas and use stun grenades next to the Al Aqsa mosque and the story doesn’t make international waves.” The chances of this happening are slim and none; the Al Aqsa Mosque is one of the most explosive places on earth. What actually happened was this: several hundred Arab worshippers stoned the Israeli police, an Arab man tried to stab a police officer, and then the Israeli police dispersed the crowd. Of course, Dana lives in Ramallah, and hates Israel so much that, when he spoke in November 2011 at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, he stated that he had managed to extricate himself from  a “Zionist indoctrination programme.”

Last night on CNN’s 360 with Anderson Cooper, video footage was broadcast that purported to show injuries and victims of Israeli military operations in Gaza. The footage was exposed as fraudulent here on Breitbart News yesterday..

http://landing.newsinc.com/shared/video.html?freewheel=91074&sitesection=breitbartprivate&VID=23890319

Who lobbed the first missile? And it still amazes me how the MSM weep and wail for Gaza and the Palestinians, yet the sound of crickets are heard pertaining to the Israelis. No, no bias there….

Benjamin Netanyahu talks of a battle ‘between the modern and the medieval.’ He is right, and the free world must stand with Israel

Telegraph

These forces clash around the globe, but nowhere more starkly than in the Middle East. Israel stands proudly with the forces of modernity. We protect the rights of all our citizens: men and women, Jews and Arabs, Muslims and Christians – Israel wants to see a Middle East of progress and peace. We want to see the three great religions that sprang forth from our region – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – coexist in peace and in mutual respect.

Yet the medieval forces of radical Islam, whom you just saw storming the American embassies throughout the Middle East, they oppose this. They seek supremacy over all Muslims. They are bent on world conquest. They want to destroy Israel, Europe, America. They want to extinguish freedom. They want to end the modern world.

This is not just Israel’s war, it is ours too. The threat Israel faces from the Jihadists is the same threat the West faces on the streets of London, Paris, Washington or Berlin. Al Qaeda, which has had significant ties in the past to Hamas, will be closely watching the outcome of Israel’s military campaign. An emphatic defeat for Hamas will be a huge blow not only to the Islamist dictatorship in Tehran, but to the followers of Bin Laden as well.

Ahmadinejad: World forces must annihilate Israel

JPost

In a speech published on his website Thursday, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said the ultimate goal of world forces must be the annihilation of Israel.

Speaking to ambassadors from Islamic countries ahead of ‘Qods Day’ (‘Jerusalem Day’), an annual Iranian anti-Zionist event established in 1979 by Ayatollah Khomeini and which falls this year on August 17, Ahmadinejad said that a “horrible Zionist current” had been managing world affairs for “about 400 years.”

It was Zionists, he said, who were “behind the scene of the world’s main powers, media, monetary and banking centers.”

“They are the decision makers, to the extent that the presidential election hopefuls [of the USA] must go and kiss the feet of the Zionists to ensure their election victory,” he added.

Ahmadinejad added that “liberating Palestine” would solve all the world’s problems, although he did not elaborate on exactly how that might work.

“Qods Day is not merely a strategic solution for the Palestinian problem, as it is to be viewed as a key for solving the world problems,” he said.

He added: “Anyone who loves freedom and justice must strive for the annihilation of the Zionist regime in order to pave the way for world justice and freedom.”

The Iranian president said that Israel reinforced “the dominance of arrogant powers in the region and across the globe” and that Arab countries in particular – he cited Bahrain, Yemen, Libya, Syria and Turkey – were affected by Israel’s “plots.”

Ahmadinejad, who has called the Holocaust a myth, has previously called for Israel’s annihilation, in a 2005 speech in which he used a Persian phrase that translates literally as “wiped off the page of time.”