(jewishworldreview.com) - Israel’s strike on an Iranian general in Syria has prompted ominous warnings from both Tehran and its Hezbollah allies in Lebanon, including the threat of “devastating thunderbolts” against the Jewish state. As alarming as some of the rhetoric may be, neither party is likely to risk major retaliation against Israel, Middle East experts said. Instead, Hezbollah and Iran are likely to temper their response so as not to provoke a military escalation neither of them can afford to sustain at the moment.

     Along with Revolutionary Guards General Mohammed Allahdadi, five other Iranian military men were killed in the Israeli strike on Sunday, as well as six members of Hezbollah, including the Lebanese militant group’s Golan coordinator, Jihad Mughniyeh. The killings of the high-profile targets elicited the response of the chief of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, Ali Jafaari, who vowed that his country would “fight to the end of the Zionist regime,” according to Reuters.

     The high rank of the leaders targeted in the strike will make it difficult for both parties to restrain themselves from responding, said Yoram Schweitzer, a senior research fellow and the head of the program on terrorism at the Institute for National Security Studies in Israel and the former head of the Israeli Defense Forces’ Counter International Terror Section. However, neither Iran nor Hezbollah will follow through on their threats and “burn the ground under Israel.” “At this stage it's not in the interest of Iran or Hezbollah to open a war,” he said. “They would not want to open a new front in Lebanon which may deteriorate into a very messy situation.”

     Because Hezbollah, which is widely seen as Iran’s military proxy in the Levant, is already stretched thin supporting the embattled regime of Syrian President Bashar Assad amid Syria's ongoing civil war, sustaining a second front would be near impossible for the militant group. “Even for countries that are much stronger than Hezbollah, it is difficult to fight a war on two fronts,” said Schweitzer. “Both Iran and Hezbollah are heavily invested in trying to save Assad's regime so they don't need another enemy on the agenda.”

     The militant organization may have a strong record of retaliation against Israel in cases like these, but the Syrian conflict has transformed the group and made it more cautious, said Bilal Saab, a senior fellow for Middle East security at the Brent Scowcroft Center on International Security at the Atlantic Council in Washington, D.C. “This is a new Hezbollah; ever since its entry into Syria, the organization has been overstretched militarily and on the defensive politically,” he said.

Hezbollah's AlManar leads with quote from social media, in Arabic and Hebrew: "Two Words: Prepare your Shelters" (Two words in Arabic).

— Shibley Telhami (@ShibleyTelhami) January 19, 2015

     According to Saab, the heated rhetoric by Hezbollah operatives in the wake of the attack is more geared toward audiences at home than Israel. Instead, the organization is keenly aware of the consequences of an irresponsible military response to the strike, something that would be “absolutely destructive” for the group and its Shiite constituency in Lebanon, he said.

     “Israel is not going to go to war with Hezbollah over a terrorist attack outside of the country,” said Sasley. “If Hezbollah did something outside of the region, it's harder... to respond to an attack like that” especially as the group tries to cover its tracks when they’re involved in such cases, he said, though he noted that a major attack could still trigger Israeli retaliation.

     Hezbollah’s backers in Tehran are in a similar situation in that they are unlikely to want to back down following the killing of Allahdadi, but are also not interested in igniting a tit-for-tat conflict with Israel at the moment, especially in the midst of Iran’s ongoing nuclear negotiations with world powers. While Iran might be able to distance itself from attacks committed against Israeli interests abroad, a larger retaliation against Israel would make it difficult for the United States and other international players to proceed with the talks, said Sasley. “The question is," he said, "What's more important to Iran, responding and shoring up their position in the region or the nuclear talks?”

http://www.jewishworldreview.com/0115/israel_threatened_after_elimination.php3

~~~~~~~~~~

A Bright New Look

  The eBook, nObama Nation II: Judgment Day, is a critical review of nObama's presidency and the predictions Jerome Corsi made in his 2008 bestseller, The nObama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality, that stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for a month in the run-up to the 2008 presidential election.

     Dr. Corsi's goal in writing nObama Nation II is to restore America to the limited government of checks-and-balances its Founding Fathers intended to create in the Constitutional Republic Americans were bequeathed. It is the authors hope that, in rejecting the nObama presidency as an exercise in unconstitutional government, Americans will reject once and for all the imperial presidency that grew in power through the 20th century to the heights we see today.

The eBook is available exclusively on nObamaNation2.com

     Jerome R. Corsi, Ph.D., is coauthor of Unfit for Command and author of The nObama Nation, both #1 New York Times bestsellers. Since 2004, Dr. Corsi has written six New York Times bestsellers on subjects including presidential politics, the economy, and Iran. He has appeared on Fox News, Fox Business, and MSNBC, as well as in hundreds of Radio interviews. Dr. Corsi received his Ph.D. from the Department of Government at Harvard University in 1972, and is a senior staff reporter with WND.com.

     (weeklystandard.com) - When House speaker backstabber John Boehner invited Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address Congress in the coming weeks, the reaction from the White House was swift. In background interviews with reporters, top nObama administration officials made clear that they considered the invitation itself an affront and the acceptance of it a breach of protocol.

Please.

     This is the same White House that last week had British prime minister David Cameron making calls to Capitol Hill to lobby lawmakers against more sanctions on Iran. It’s the same administration that had to apologize to Senator Marco Rubio and others for violating its pledge to “consult Congress” before making any unilateral changes to U.S. policy on Cuba. This is the same president who has boasted repeatedly of his ability and willingness to ignore the legislative branch and use his “pen and phone” to do what he wants. And this is the same administration that used the cover of anonymity to call Netanyahu “chickenshit” in a recent interview.

     So spare us the whining about prerogatives and propriety and protocol. In a functioning capital—with a White House that understands the enemy is Iran and not the Republican Congress—it’d be better for Congress and the White House to coordinate efforts. But that’s not Washington today. Consider the section on Iran in President nObama’s State of the Union. It took up just 172 words of his 6,500-word address. It reads, in its entirety:

Our diplomacy is at work with respect to Iran, where, for the first time in a decade, we’ve halted the progress of its nuclear program and reduced its stockpile of nuclear material. Between now and this spring, we have a chance to negotiate a comprehensive agreement that prevents a nuclear-armed Iran, secures America and our allies, including Israel, while avoiding yet another Middle East conflict. There are no guarantees that negotiations will succeed, and I keep all options on the table to prevent a nuclear Iran.

But new sanctions passed by this Congress, at this moment in time, will all but guarantee that diplomacy fails—alienating America from its allies; making it harder to maintain sanctions; and ensuring that Iran starts up its nuclear program again. It doesn’t make sense. And that’s why I will veto any new sanctions bill that threatens to undo this progress. [Applause] The American people expect us only to go to war as a last resort, and I intend to stay true to that wisdom.

     This is delusional. The United States hasn’t “halted” Iran’s nuclear program. A week before that claim, Iran announced it would build two more reactors. During this diplomacy, it has made progress on its plutonium program and continued enriching. It was supposed to freeze centrifuge activities at the Pilot Fuel Enrichment Plant at Natanz, but the IAEA reported last fall it was feeding uranium hexafluoride gas into the IR-5 centrifuge there.

     The fact that the nObama administration still insists Iran hasn’t violated the terms of its interim agreement with the United States and its allies says more about the administration’s eagerness to continue diplomacy than it does about Iran’s behavior.

     Even as the nObama administration has demonstrated its determination to give the Iranian regime every benefit of the doubt, the president reflexively questions the motives of anyone who has a different view. In comments at a press briefing with Cameron, nObama implied that Congress—not Iran—would be at fault if military conflict erupted. And at a recent meeting with congressional Democrats, nObama accused Senator Bob Menendez of bowing to the interests of campaign contributors when the New Jersey Democrat expressed concern about never-ending negotiations without consequence.

     When backstabber Boehner announced his Netanyahu invitation, he accused nObama of downplaying the Iranian threat in the State of the Union. “There is a serious threat that exists in the world,” he said, “and the president last night kind of papered over it.”

backstabber Boehner is correct, of course. And he was right to invite Netanyahu to address Congress and the American people.

     The State Department lists Iran as the foremost state sponsor of terror in the world. According to a former top U.S. military official, the Iranian regime is responsible for more than a third of American troop deaths in Iraq. The regime talks openly about eliminating Israel.

     It’s long past time for a serious discussion of the threat posed by Iran. Let’s have one.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/author/stephen-f.-hayes

~~~~~~~~~~

A Bright New Look

  The eBook, nObama Nation II: Judgment Day, is a critical review of nObama's presidency and the predictions Jerome Corsi made in his 2008 bestseller, The nObama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality, that stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for a month in the run-up to the 2008 presidential election.

     Dr. Corsi's goal in writing nObama Nation II is to restore America to the limited government of checks-and-balances its Founding Fathers intended to create in the Constitutional Republic Americans were bequeathed. It is the authors hope that, in rejecting the nObama presidency as an exercise in unconstitutional government, Americans will reject once and for all the imperial presidency that grew in power through the 20th century to the heights we see today.

The eBook is available exclusively on nObamaNation2.com

     Jerome R. Corsi, Ph.D., is coauthor of Unfit for Command and author of The nObama Nation, both #1 New York Times bestsellers. Since 2004, Dr. Corsi has written six New York Times bestsellers on subjects including presidential politics, the economy, and Iran. He has appeared on Fox News, Fox Business, and MSNBC, as well as in hundreds of Radio interviews. Dr. Corsi received his Ph.D. from the Department of Government at Harvard University in 1972, and is a senior staff reporter with WND.com.

     (barbwire.com) - There is truly no end to the string of outrages perpetrated on our nation by Barack nObama (or whatever his name is). The laundry list seems interminable, and today we can honestly regard anyone—anyone— who supports this man and his administration as being dangerously deceived. There is simply no defense of this lawless “president,” who is a clear and present danger to our freedoms, our economy, our healthcare system, our property rights, the freedom of the Internet, our military and national defense—every aspect of our constitutional Republic.

     Many of us have long observed that nObama has traitorously aided and abetted our Muslim enemies, giving them weapons, billions of taxpayer dollars and their formerly-imprisoned “soldiers of Allah,” to continue the spread of their cancerous caliphate across the Middle East and elsewhere. If we didn’t know any better, we would believe his sympathies lie on the side of the barbaric Islamists. In truth, we don’t know any better. The only rational conclusion is that this man is an enemy of the United States.

President Barack nObama has a moral responsibility to push back on the nation’s journalism community when it is planning to publish anti-jihadi articles that might cause a jihadi attack against the nation’s defense forces, the White House’s press secretary said Jan. 12.

“The president … will not now be shy about expressing a view or taking the steps that are necessary to try to advocate for the safety and security of our men and women in uniform” whenever journalists’ work may provoke jihadist attacks, spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters at the White House’s daily briefing.

     Isn’t this always the case? Our freedoms are so often stolen by facetious claims of “safety.” It’s why we stupidly stand without shoes in airport “security” lines, and like sheep, allow junior power-trippers of the TSA to grope our bodies before boarding a plane. “Safety.”

     As with everything this man and his fellow travelers do, the ostensible reason is not the reason. Spokesmouth Earnest claims nObama’s desire to squelch media expression is for the “safety” of our military troops. That’s a lie. Since when does nObama give a rip about the military, much less its safety? Besides the fact that, if left to its own power, free from insane bureaucratic rules of engagement, the military can take care of itself, the past has shown us that caving to bully Muslims will never appease them. It only makes us appear weak and ripe for attacking. No. I’m certain that the real reason for this lunatic anti-American proclamation is that nObama agrees with one goal of the Islamists: to silence all criticism of Islam. He is just as offended by it as the most retrograde Muslim brute. After all, he claimed the future must not belong to those who “slander” the “prophet” of Islam, right?  And, in this case, “slander” means “tell the truth about.”

     I’m losing what little optimism I might have had about our chances of undoing nObama’s “fundamental transformation” of the United States. This man and his criminal cabal have their evil machine set on “full demolition,” and with a craven, corrupt Congress too scared of its own shadow to oppose him, and with a detestably compliant media—no longer a “free press,” by the way—from where can there possibly emerge a force to stop or reverse this dreadful course of tyranny on which we’re locked?