T. Belman. What is missing from this article is a reference to the fact that there is a huge partisan divide on support for Israel.

By any definition, The Democrats are not, or at least no longer, pro-Israel whereas the Republicans are.

One of the reasons for this gap is that Israel is very nationalistic whereas the democrats are against nationalism and the Republicans under Trump are all for it.

Also the Republican base to a large extent is religious, like Israel, whereas the Democrats wage war against religion except for Islam.

The point here is that Trump, Pence and their Evangelical supporters haven’t redefined the term “pro-Israel” in an effort to exclude liberals. The opposite is true.

By Jonathan S. Tobin, JWR 

Most Israelis may have been thrilled with Vice President Mike Pence’s visit to Israel but some Jewish liberals were decidedly nonplussed by his eloquent speech to the Knesset.

While the left’s lack of enthusiasm for anything coming out of the Trump administration is to be expected, the attempt to denigrate Pence’s stance as somehow damaging the bipartisan pro-Israel consensus is more than a little disingenuous.

In the Forward, Jane Eisner threw cold water on Pence’s heartfelt explanation for the devotion Americans feel for Israel. While not necessarily doubting the vice president’s sincerity, she disagreed with the notion that support for Israel stems from America’s religious heritage. She considers doing so a distortion of American history which downplays prejudice against Jews.
Read more…

Ambassador Haley reportedly pushing for further cuts to U.S. aid to PA, following the cut in funding to UNRWA.

By Elad Benari, INN

The State Department is considering making further cuts to the American aid to the Palestinian Authority (PA), according to a Hadashot (formerly Channel 2 News) report on Wednesday.

The report said that the cutting of funding to the PA is being pushed by Nikki Haley, the U.S. Ambassador to the UN, who was also the driving force behind the U.S. decision last week to cut a significant portion of its funding to UNRWA, the UN agency for “Palestinian refugees”.

Haley was quoted in the report as saying that PA chairman Mahmoud Abbas needs to pay a price for disrespecting U.S. President Donald Trump in his recent speech to the PLO Central Council.
Read more…

THIS WILL BLOW YOU AWAY

Ignore what he says about Israel. No where does he mention Soros or the Globalists or the NWO. That surprised me.

Ignore what he said about 9-11 and Mossad. All official sources have labelled his theory as a conspiracy theory.

I don’t buy it for a minute.

by Asaf Romirowsky and Alexander H. Joffe, Forward
January 22, 2018

http://www.meforum.org/7177/aid-to-palestinians-hurts-peace-process

Aid to the Palestinians has had a world of unintended consequences.

Last week, the US announced its intention to delay a $65 million payment to UNRWA, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency. UNRWA is a UN agency specifically dedicated to providing Palestinians with aid. The Trump Administration will be withholding $65 million out of the US’s total annual contribution of over $360 million.

The responses to the US decision have been predictable. The Washington Postimmediately sought out the Gazan on the street, who warned that

Any reduction of aid would be a death sentence for refugees in Gaza. The work is almost nonexistent. There are not enough jobs. Those who work for the Palestinian Authority receive only a stipend, and Hamas employees get a quarter of their salary.

Read more…

BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 723, January 24, 2018

By Dr. James R Dorsey, BESA

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Expressions of support for the Iranian anti-government protests by US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have provided grist for Iranian claims that the protests were instigated by foreign powers. The assertions, while largely baseless, nonetheless offer insight into the very different strategies adopted by Iran and Saudi Arabia in their vicious struggle for regional dominance.

There is little doubt that the Iranian protests were fueled by widespread economic grievances, and Iran’s detractors abroad resembled not always helpful fans on the sidelines. In fact, Saudi Arabia, Iran’s nemesis, was the one opponent of the Islamic Republic to refrain from joining those fans publicly in a bid to stop the regime in Tehran from using it as a scapegoat. The Iranian leadership pointed a finger at the kingdom anyway, and in so doing illustrated the dynamics of the Iranian-Saudi rivalry.

Read more…

The truth is that the Palestinian Authority is a dead man walking and in no position to demand anything from anyone.

By Daniel Krygier, Political Analyst, World Israel News

Throughout time, aggressors knew when they were winning and when they were losing. By contrast, Israel’s Muslim Arab enemies do not behave like your typical aggressors. The more Israel’s enemies lose, the more aggressive and demanding they become.

Japan’s hubris that led to the attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 was depleted when America dropped the nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. The difference between Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima was that the balance of power had shifted dramatically in America’s favor. The US was not popular in post-1945 Japan, but the defeated Japanese knew that they were in no position to demand anything from Washington.
Read more…

FBI “Secret Society” Coup Plotters Emerge – Lunch Alert! – DickMorris.com at DickMorris.com

Here’s the reported memo leaked to Infowars

By Kit Daniels, INFOWARS

Update: Despite media claims to the contrary, our congressional sources confirmed that the below memo documenting NSA spying on US citizens serves as a primary source of information for the Nunes summary memo:

William Binney, former tech head of the NSA contacted us this morning to send us the link to the reportedly classified memo that lawmakers said was a blueprint of how the Obama administration and the Deep State spied on President Trump.

This memo, hiding in plain site, serves as the basis for the four-page memo of Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) which reveals perjury by the Obama administration when connected to other research.
Read more…

T. Belman. A few days ago Glick wrote that the King can do what he wants. I challenged her on this. Lynfield has it right.

Take note that Trump’s intent to squeeze UNRWA will result in Jordan being squeezed.

Jordan desparately needs a two state solution

By Ben Lynfield, JPOST

[..]

The Jerusalem recognition and the dropping of previous administrations support for a two-state solution completely disregard Jordan’s concerns and needs, and put King Abdullah on the hot seat. But given Jordanian financial dependence on Washington – approximately a billion dollars a year in US aid is disbursed – there is nothing the king can do in response.

With a Palestinian majority population, the king needs to show he is fully backing the Palestinian quest for an end to Israeli military rule and the establishment of an independent Palestinian state with east Jerusalem as its capital. As Brandon Friedman, a Middle East specialist at Tel Aviv University’s Dayan Center noted, the king realizes he needs to win over those Jordanians of Palestinian origin and not rely entirely on the traditional East Bank elite that built the Jordanian state.
Read more…

By Ben Caspit, AL MONITOR

by Paul Bedard, WASH EXAMINER

Like the Middle East itself, America’s two political parties are unusually split over Israel, with Democrats abandoning their sympathy for the Jewish State and the GOP rallying around it.

A new Pew Research Center survey released Tuesday said that just 27 percent of Democrats “sympathize” with Israel over the rival Palestinians. That is a significant nearly 20 point drop in the last few years.

Some 79 percent of Republicans meanwhile favor Israel, nearly double their support from 20 years ago.

“The partisan divide in Middle East sympathies, for Israel or the Palestinians, is now wider than at any point since 1978,” said the survey.

DEBKA

The Turkish president has told Trump and Putin he would not seize N. Syrian Afrin from the Kurds after insignificant gains in his three-day military assault.

DEBKAfile’s military sources report that, notwithstanding the Turkish army’s claim to have captured four Afrin villages, there were no real military clashes and the Kurdish YPG militia simply opened the door and withdrew. Turkish forces are meanwhile making no preparations to move on to take the enclave’s main town of Afrin. They appear to have marked out a narrow strip of the northern Syrian border region to pave the way for moving east towards the Kurdish-held town of Manjib. Our sources report that Turkey’s war for Afrin is virtually at a standstill, but for sporadic cross-border artillery shelling and occasional air strikes, confirming Erdogan’s assurance to the US and Russian presidents that he was not planning to conquer Afrin.

Read more…

T. Belman. NY TIMES is whitewashing. Check out my 2012 aricle. Tiny Qatar casts a giant shadow.

Among Persian Gulf states, Qatar was the picked-on little sibling. Gas riches and an independent-minded ruling family changed that. Now it’s in the fight of its life.

In a few dizzying decades, gas exports have made Qatar very rich, very fast.

Tomas Munita, NY TIMES

DOHA, Qatar — For the emir of Qatar, there has been little that money can’t buy.

As a teenager he dreamed of becoming the Boris Becker of the Arab world, so his parents flew the German tennis star to Qatar to give their son lessons. A lifelong sports fanatic, he later bought a French soccer team, Paris Saint-Germain, which last summer paid $263 million for a Brazilian striker — the highest transfer fee in the history of the game.

He helped bring the 2022 World Cup to Qatar at an estimated cost of $200 billion, a major coup for a country that had never qualified for the tournament.
Read more…

By Ralph Peters, NY POST

The United States has been the protector and ally of the Kurds for a quarter-century. And the Kurds have proven to be, man-for-man and woman-for-woman, the best fighters in the region.
Without Kurdish boots on the ground, we would not have made the sweeping progress achieved against the Islamic State caliphate.

Now, with ISIS crushed (but still wriggling and snapping), we’re turning our backs on our Kurdish allies in Syria as they’re attacked by a NATO ally gone rogue — Turkey, which is led by an Islamist strongman, the odious “President” Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
Read more…

Report: QAnon describes plan to destroy America, reshape world

By James Corsi, INFOWARS

WASHINGTON, D.C. – In an explosive post on Sunday, QAnon explained the Barack Obama/Hillary Clinton 16-year treasonous plan to use two White House terms for a coup d’état in the United States that would end up revising the Constitution, cancelling the Second Amendment, and opening borders to flood the nation with illegal immigrants calculated to vote Democrat for the foreseeable future.

In the exceptionally long post narrative, QAnon alleged that “Deep State” rogue operatives murdered Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in an attempt to lock in a hard-left ideology on the nation’s highest court by giving President Obama one final Supreme Court nomination.
Read more…

The US and Russia, two world super-powers, and Turkey and Iran, the two regional Islamic powers, are locked into a deadly confrontation with no political issue in sight.

By Zvi Mazel, JPOST

There are so many warring sides in the Syrian crisis, it is hard to see how a consensus on a political solution to end the fighting could emerge. Countries such as Russia, Iran and Turkey, bent on clawing long-term strategic gains from the chaos, are now floundering in the quagmire and wondering whether they will be drawn into a new round of bloodshed. Yet only last November, the leaders of Russia Iran and Syria had declared victory over ISIS, hinting that Syria’s most pressing problem had been solved.

Though Assad, with the help of Russia, Iran – and its proxies Hezbollah and Shi’a militias – did reinstate his authority over the greater part of the country, this is not the whole picture. Washington just announced that it would help the Kurds set up a 30,000-man strong “Syrian border security forces” to prevent a resurgence of ISIS and control the border between Turkey and Iraq.
Read more…

Yishai Fleisher, the international spokesperson for Hebron and the moderator of panel discussions at the conference The Jordan Option, gave a speech yesterday at a rally to honour VP Pence at the Knesset.

Please listen to it.

By THE DAILY CALLER

A former federal prosecutor says the truth is starting to seep out about the Obama Administration’s “brazen plot to exonerate Hillary Clinton” and “frame an incoming president with a false Russian conspiracy,” according to an exclusive interview with The Daily Caller News Foundation.

Joe diGenova, a former federal prosecutor, connects the dots on former Obama administration Justice Department and FBI officials who may have “violated the law, perhaps committed crimes” to politicize law enforcement and surveillance against political opponents.

He says former FBI Director James Comey conducted a fake criminal investigation of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as they “followed none of the regular rules, gave her every break in the book, immunized all kinds of people, allowed the destruction of evidence, with no grand jury, no subpoenas, no search warrants. That’s not an investigation. That’s a Potemkin village. It’s a farce.”

Read more…