There’s no justification for his murder. But don’t whitewash what he believed – his commitment to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, his hope that Israel would ‘die by force’, and the anti-Semitic Islamists with whom he spent his final days

By Petra Marquardt-Bigman, HAARETZ

Then-general manager of Alarab TV, Jamal Khashoggi, at a press conference in the Bahraini capital Manama. December 15, 2014 AFP

The entirely legitimate shock and outrage over the disappearance and likely murder of the prominent Saudi critic Jamal Khashoggi have so far largely prevented an examination of his views.

Perhaps inevitably, this has led to right-wing conspiracy theories – retweeted by Donald Trump Jr – about a nefarious media plot covering up that Khashoggi was really a veteran Al-Qaeda sympathizer who just pretended to be a “democrat reformer journalist.”

Economy sags in country with scant agriculture, tourism, energy and rule of law

Elderly men talk to each other in downtown Amman. Photograph: Muhammad Hamed/Reuters

The taxi nuzzles gently into dense rush-hour traffic as car headlamps flicker over the walls of white stone villas and residential and office blocks.

High in the sky, flashing red lights atop tinted glass towers and skeletal cranes over unfinished blocks warn aircraft of their presence in the jagged skyline of Amman.

Jordan’s sprawling capital city encompasses nine hills, two more than ancient Rome, and is encroaching on the desert. Late model cars move from district to district through eight traffic circles.

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Candidly Speaking: When I spoke to the prime minister, it was clear that Lauder’s intervention with Trump angered and distressed him.

By Isi Leibler, JPOST

Last week, World Jewish Congress President Ronald Lauder released a series of statements confirming that he had encouraged US President Donald Trump to recognize that peace between Israelis and Palestinians was now attainable. He also stressed that he considers Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to be a moderate committed to peace.

Implicit in his narrative is that the Israeli government and especially Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had previously been insufficiently flexible but that Trump could succeed in his efforts.

We have just celebrated Independence Day and are approaching commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Six Day War and reunification of Jerusalem. The country is in great shape; the economy is booming and we have emerged as a formidable military power.
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By Nazir Majli, AAWSAT
Saturday, 20 October, 2018

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Reuters file photo

In a remarkable development, US President Donald Trump sent a personal envoy to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas with a message described as “positive,” suggesting that he return to negotiations with his Middle East staff.

The envoy, US Jewish businessman Ronald Lauder, told Abbas the deal “promises to surprise you for the best.”

At the same time, the president’s Special Representative, Jason Greenblatt, advised Hamas to change its political positions.

Israeli sources revealed that Trump sent Lauder, who is also the President of World Jewish Congress and a former close associate of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to Ramallah to meet with the president’s advisers without the knowledge of the Israeli authorities.
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White House denies Israeli TV report that Trump had sent WJC President to convince Abbas to resume peace talks.

By Elad Benari, INN

The White House on Thursday denied an Israeli TV report which said that President Donald Trump had sent World Jewish Congress President Ronald Lauder to convince Palestinian Authority (PA) leaders to return to the negotiating table with Israel.

Responding to the report, National Security Council spokesman Garrett Marquis told Arutz Sheva, “The report in Channel 2 is false. Ambassador Lauder is a friend of the President but he was not sent by the White House to meet with the Palestinians on the President’s behalf — secretly or otherwise.”
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How its new executive director is betraying the organization’s purpose.
Can a Greenblatt-led Anti-Defamation League be saved?

By Seth Mandel, COMMENTARY 

The burgeoning hate aimed at Jewish immigrants at the beginning of the 20th century was the driving force behind the 1913 formation of the Anti-Defamation League. According to its original charter—as laid out by its sponsoring organization, B’nai Brith, the largest Jewish communal group in the United States—the ADL’s “immediate object” was “to stop, by appeals to reason and conscience, and if necessary, by appeals to law, the defamation of the Jewish people. Its ultimate purpose is to secure justice and fair treatment to all citizens alike and to put an end forever to unjust and unfair discrimination against, and ridicule of any sect or body of citizens.”
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By ANDREW C. MCCARTHY, NATIONAL REVIEW

From his interview in the Wall Street Journal, you would never know that his tenure at the Justice Department has been fraught with controversy.Well, did you think Rod Rosenstein was going to say, “You got me. The Mueller probe was inappropriate and politicized?”

No, you didn’t. And the deputy attorney general did not disappoint. In an interview with the Wall Street Journal on Wednesday, Rosenstein defended the investigation as “appropriate and independent.”
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53% say everyone sins but most people ‘good’ by nature

By BOB UNRUH, WND

Evangelicals apparently need a few lessons in the basics of Christianity, according to a new survey.

“This idea flatly contradicts the Bible,” Ligonier said, “which teaches the radical corruption of every human being and declares that no one does good by nature (Rom. 3:10-12). This is why we need the gospel in the first place – because none of us is good.”
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Dems, I must ask you: Is winning in the Midterms worth the price of sacrificing your ideals, of electing radical, Israel-hostile candidates?

By Abe Katsman, TOI

Regardless of where blame lies for the widening chasm between Republicans and Democrats, traditional liberals are in danger of losing their remaining grip on the Democratic Party for years to come.  One measure of this is the growth of the party’s left wing and its push for re-alignment away from Israel, which increasingly threatens continued bipartisan Israel-support. For pro-Israel Democrats, this is a dangerous trend: if you think there is hostility in the air toward Israel now, just wait til “Israel” becomes merely another partisan weapon that political parties use to hammer each other.  Please, Democrats: don’t let that happen.
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By John Hayward, BREITBART

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusgolu declared on Friday that rumored audio recordings of Jamal Khashoggi’s death have not been shared with officials from the United States or any other country.

This ended a brief and ugly news cycle in which U.S. media repeated Turkish accounts based on anonymous sources who claimed Secretary of State Mike Pompeo personally listened to the recordings and the Trump administration is merely pretending they might not exist.

ABC News published the Turkish rumors and the official response on Friday morning: Read more…

At the same time, monarchy announces the sacking of a top intelligence official following an internal investigation into journalist’s disappearance

By TOI STAFF and AGENCIES

Saudi state television reported Saturday that journalist Jamal Khashoggi was killed during a brawl with people he met at the monarchy’s consulate in Istanbul, marking the first official admission by the Gulf state that the missing individual had died, amid allegations that he had been tortured, murdered and dismembered.

“The discussions between Jamal Khashoggi and those he met at the kingdom’s consulate in Istanbul… devolved into a fistfight, leading to his death,” the Saudi Press Agency said, citing the public prosecutor.

At the same time, Saudi Arabia announced the sacking of a top intelligence official following an internal investigation into Khashoggi’s disappearance.
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By Frances Martel, BREITBART

Ahmet Hakan, a Turkish journalist with a history of criticizing President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, published a column Friday claiming that one of his reputable sources called reports that missing Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi was dead “garbage” and that he is still alive.

Hakan also claimed to receive gruesome pictures of hacked body parts this week from sources who claimed the remains belonged to Khashoggi, but he did not offer proof identifying the remains.
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By Ted Belman

It’s been a year now since I last asked for donations to support our agenda which includes:

1. First and foremost, The Jordan Option.

2. advocating for no more land for peace, Israel sovereignty to the Jordan River, the supremacy of the elected Knesset over the unelected Court, incentivizing Arab emigration and for American recognition of Israel sovereignty over the Golan Heigths.

3. advocating for rejection of the Palestinian narrative and the Palestinian Authority,

4. ending UNRWA

5. supporting the Trump agenda in the Middle East

6. advocating for Kurdish independence

If this is your agenda or close to it, please donate to help us make a difference. Be our partner, not a bystander. I know we can count on your generous support.

DONATE or send a check made payable to Ted Belman at Dan #25, Jerusalem, 93509, ISRAEL and include your email address.

Chelsea Football Club spearheads the way for fighting discrimination and antisemitism on the soccer pitch.

By Tamar Beeri, JPOST

The Chelsea Football Club training grounds were alive on Wednesday in preparation for the big game against Manchester United, but that was not the only thing haunting the minds of those in the facility.

The team were recently introduced to Holocaust survivor Harry Spiro, who chillingly recollected his experiences in Auschwitz, a concentration camp located in present-day Poland, within which the Nazis had murdered over a million innocent people, most of them due to their Jewish lineage.
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T. Belman. Who’s running the country? The eletist Court or the elected Knesset? The leftist elite or the people?

‘A disgrace, Supreme Court decision was a huge victory for BDS’

Interior Minister Aryeh Deri joins other ministers and MKs in outrage after High Court rules BDS advocate be allowed to stay in Israel.

Lara Alqasem in Supreme Court, REUTERS

Interior Minister Aryeh Deri slammed the Supreme Court’s ruling on Thursday permitting BDS activist Lara Alqasem to study in Hebrew University.

“The decision to leave the student who openly acts against the State of Israel in Israel is shameful,” said Deri. “Where is our national honor, even in the US, would it dare to act against the state and demand that we stay and study there? I will examine how to prevent such a recurrence. ”
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http://www.virtualjerusalem.com/news.php?Itemid=28797

INN – Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi-born writer who was allegedly murdered on the orders of the Saudi government in Istanbul last week, has been the subject of much concern in the mainstream media since his disappearance.

However, Khashoggi was far from a liberal journalist, writes Jordan Schachtel of Conservative Review.

Schachtel stated that Khashoggi, who wrote for the Washington Post’s serious bloodlust when it came to violence against the state of Israel Global Opinions section, was an Islamist extremist who displayed a “serious bloodlust when it came to violence against the state of Israel” and was connected to terrorist organizations.
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WOW. This is a much bigger problem than I imagined.

By Hana Levi Julian, JEWISH PRESS

More than half of the forests in the western Negev are now gone, burned down over the past six months by the Hamas terrorist organization in its arson terror campaign, according to a report prepared by the Jewish National Fund. The report summarizes the impact of the past six months of terror by the Arabs of Gaza.

According to KKL-JNF (Keren Kayemet Le’Israel-Jewish National Fund), since the beginning of the kite and balloon terror campaign (25 Nissan), more than 1,100 fires were recorded in KKL-JNF forests alone.
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By David Israel, JEWISH PRESS

The State Dept. is planning to merge its long-serving consulate in eastern Jerusalem with the newly created US embassy in the western part of the Israeli capital, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced on Thursday. This step is viewed as yet another slap in the face of the Palestinian Authority and its chairman, Mahmoud Abbas, since the consulate has been serving Arabs from Judea and Samaria and from the eastern part of the city for decades.

The announcement also does away, for all intents and purposes, with the idea that President Trump was planning to turn the consulate into a US embassy in a new Palestinian State whose capital would be eastern Jerusalem.
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The birth rate in the U.S. has fallen to a all-time record low

Most ordinary people don’t give too much thought to population issues, but for the elite this is like a religion.<

By Michael Snyder – End Of The American Dream –

The elite have worked very hard to slow down birth rates all over the world, and their efforts appear to be working. 

Just as we have witnessed in so many other countries, the birth rate in the United States continues to fall.  In fact, it just plunged to yet another new all-time record low.  So why would the elite want this to happen?  Well, they believe that climate change is the greatest threat that our planet is facing, and they also believe that humans are the primary driver of climate change, and so they are convinced that if they can get people to have fewer babies they are actually “saving the world”.  And according to the most recent CDC numbers, they have made a tremendous amount of progress in accomplishing that mission…
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