Glenn Beck is on a roll. He recently traveled to Israel where he made clear that he stands with the Jewish nation-state. It may be surrounded by enemies, and Obama may throw it under the bus, but Beck isn’t about to abandon Israel – the only true democracy in the Middle East, by the way.

Today, his website The Blaze published an article entitled “Obama Sides With Palestinians.” You can read it here. Beck just referred to the piece on his radio show arguing that, for the first time in history, the U.S. has joined the dark side with regards to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

The reason, of course: Obama said  yesterday that Israel has to withdraw to its pre-1967 borders.

President Barack Obama is endorsing the Palestinians’ demand for their future state to be based on the borders that existed before the 1967 Middle East war, in a move that will likely infuriate Israel. Israel says the borders of a Palestinian state have to be determined through negotiations.

Mitt Romney already said that Obama has thrown Israel under the bus – and he’s right (as is Beck).

We all knew that Obama would eventually side with the Palestinians, of course, but I’m shocked nonetheless. This demand is utterly ridiculous, insane and even murderous. Giving into these demands would mean committing suicide for Israel. Those are big words, but they’re warranted in this situation. As Joe Klein explained at NewsReal:

A future attack launched from the pre-1967 lines against Israel’s nine-mile-wide waist at its narrowest point could easily split the country in two.  Most of its national infrastructure (airports, industries, and inter-city highways) and population centers would be fully exposed to hostile fire from military forces deployed along the adjacent West Bank hill terrain, which would serve as an ideal platform of attack for Arab military forces. The Golan Heights would provide the Syrians with the same strategic military position to threaten Israeli civilians living below. Protecting against infiltration by Palestinian terrorists would be virtually impossible.

Our merry leftist friend seems to be all too happy about the prospect of letting Israelis be slaughtered by Hamas and Hezbollah. It’s almost surreal: how many true allies do we have precisely in the Middle East?

Beck is now sounding the alarm bell – thank God that at least someone does.

– FA Hayek in The Constitution of Liberty, first published in 1960.

This is breaking news: Ayman al-Zawahiri has officially been named ‘emir’ of Al Qaeda. This makes him the successor of Obama bin Laden, who was taken out by a team of Navy Seals earlier this month.

(The best) Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf reports that it has read classified documents from the Dutch secret intelligence organization (AIVD).

According to the documents, Al-Zawahiri was appointed as Al Qaeda’s new leader during a meeting on May 9, a week after the death of OBL.

“On May 9, the leadership of Al Qaeda elected Al-Zawahiri during a meeting in the tribal areas, between Afghanistan and Pakistan”, an intelligence source told the newspaper.

And that’s not all: according to Dutch intelligence, the monster from Maadi (Egypt) himself proposed to elect Sa’ad bin Laden, one of Bin Laden’s sons. He refused, however. Al Qaeda’s leaders then proceeded to appoint Al-Zawahiri.

All those present swore an oath of allegiance to the Egyptian terrorist (bayat).

Dutch intelligence sources believe Al Qaeda will announce the appointment in a couple of days time.

Sa’ad bin Laden has officially been appointed to Al Qaeda’s Shura council. This means that he is now officially one of the organization’s highest ranking members. It’s not difficult to imagine that he may succeed Al-Zawahiri when we take him out.

Finally, the meeting was held in the Kurram region in Pakistan, which once again forces us to wonder just how seriously Pakistan takes this whole war on terror. NATO forces were informed about the meeting by local informants one day after it took place.

It’s a fair question. Media from all across Europe, see here for one in Dutch, report that French socialists are angered by the way DSK the Americans have treated the (former) IMF chief. They believe it’s ‘unacceptable’ that DSK is treated like, well, like a common criminal. You see, to them he’s not. No, he’s a socialist hero, the second coming of Ché Guevara.

It goes to show that socialists talk a great deal about feminism and equal rights, but that they are, in fact, as anti-women as one can be. They don’t care about the equality of the sexes, they care about power. They continue to worship at the altar of their precious leaders, no matter what they do.

Libyan Oil Minister Shukri Ghanem has defected from the Qaddafi regime and fled to Tunisia.

This defection is a big deal. Ghanem had been at OPEC when Libya was under economic sanctions, and his return to Libya as prime minister and head of the ruling party in 2003 was intended to signal Muammar Qaddafi’s return to respectability in the international community. Ghanem became the face of the reformed Libya, which had given up its dabbling in chemical and other weapons and was willing to privatize its state sector industries and do big deals with Western oil companies. He staunchly defended Qaddafi, going so far as to, in a 2004 BBC interview, deny the regime’s responsibility for the Lockerbie bombing. Ghanem late became head of the powerful oil ministry. If Qaddafi cannot retain Ghanem, he cannot retain his technocratic elite in general. It is another sign that the regime is collapsing.

And so it seems that the ICC has some influence: not because it has any teeth, but because henchmen of dictatorial regimes are unwilling to run the risk (no matter how small) of being prosecuted.

Cole also explains that one of Gaddafi’s major problems is the fact that no other country in the region is willing to offer him shelter. Most disposed dictators flee to Saudi Arabia, but Gaddafi has alienated the Saudis to such a degree that he has no chance whatsoever of being invited to the kingdom.

In the meantime nobody knows who will succeed Gaddafi if his regime does indeed collapse.

Here’s my solution: install a (former) ally of Gaddafi as the country’s new president. Let him take charge. I don’t see any other way to prevent Al Qaeda or other radical groups from taking over.

Civil servants have voted to ballot on strike action in protest against job cuts and changes to their pensions, paving the way for a 750,000-strong walkout from schools, universities, courts and Whitehall on 30 June.

The decision at the PCS civil service union’s annual conference in Brighton on Wednesday comes as talks set up to avoid strikes spreading across the public sector are threatening to grind to a halt. Ministers and unions have failed to agree on even the basic starting point for negotiations.

This is happening in England, but it could happen anywhere where unions have power – and it does, of course.

The fact of the matter is that European welfare states have become insolvent. The British can’t keep the current system up. They’ve got to reform – and fast too. Government has become too big. Unlike what these “civil servants” seem to think, they are not working in the private sector; taxpayers are forced to pay their salaries.

Of course public sector unions are the worst of the worst. They always demand more jobs, more pay, more privileges.

Al Qaeda’s interim leader is Saif al-Adel, who has long played a prominent role in the group, according to Noman Benotman. Benotman has known the al Qaeda leadership for more than two decades. He was once a leader of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG), a militant organization that used to be aligned with al Qaeda, but in recent years renounced al Qaeda’s ideology.

Benotman told CNN that based on his personal communications with militants and discussions on jihadist forums, al-Adel, also known as Muhamad Ibrahim Makkawi, had been chosen interim chief of al Qaeda because the global jihadist community had grown restive in recent days about the lack of a formal announcement of a successor to bin Laden.

Experts still expect Al-Zawahiri will become the new official leader.

In a way, this really isn’t bad news. We knew Bin Laden would be replaced by someone else. This news only means that the West has a new target to hit; first Bin Laden had to be taken out, now it’s time to take out his successor(s): Al-Adel and al-Zawahiri.

Despite growing international pressure on the Syrian leadership, Turkey believes Bashar al-Assad’s regime should be given more time to make reforms, giving a clear message to the United States that any untimely intervention would be unwelcome.

“We want a smooth transformation and an orderly transition,” a senior Turkish Foreign Ministry official told the Hürriyet Daily News on Tuesday, after a meeting between Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and U.S. Ambassador to Turkey Francis Ricciardone.

We want? Since when is Turkey a superpower? Besides, what does Erdogan even mean when he says he wants “an orderly transition?” What kind of transition are we talking about? A deal that would leave Bashar al-Assad in power, just with a carrot, instead of a gun in his hand?

It’s remarkable how Erdogan sides with one terrible Arab dictator after another.

On the Lebanese side of the border with Syria, hundreds of people, most of them Syrians who had fled the fighting at home, watched the battle raging just a few hundred yards away between Syrian troops and unspecified assailants who, the Syrians said, represented “the people,” who were attacking a Syrian army post.

Many of the Syrians watching the fight said Sunni Syrian soldiers had defected that morning and turned against the minority Alawite regime.

This is a fascinating – and very important – development. Assad can only hold on to power if he’s supported by at least a significant minority of the country’s Sunni population. If he loses them, he’s done for.

Keep an eye, then, on what’s happening in Syria. It could very well be the uptiest Arab country where a decades old regime collapses.

The bizarre story of socialist IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn was almost storybook: The socialist guardian, now facing sordid sexual-battery charges, we are told, was slumming in a $3,000 per night hotel, with an understanding that he can show up at any time at an Air France flight and hop on a first-class seat. His sense of entitlement — from violating the law to living like 18th-century French royalty to purportedly having his way with a worker of the lower classes —was the logical bookend to the IMF’s harsh lectures to Greeks and others to suck it up, cut back, and live according to their means in these times of global recession. It is almost as if the more our global experts assure us that equality-of-result central planning works, the more such an egalitarian veneer seems to mask a self-indulgent core.

Let’s hope that this controversy will end up further discrediting the IMF and everything it represents. There’s no room for a global ministry of finance (because that’s what it is, more or less) in a free world.