Is Jerusalem united? Let me throw a bucket of icy water over those of our politicians who are in denial.

BY Barry Shaw, JPOST

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu last week pledged to support a Greater Jerusalem bill that would annex places like Ma’aleh Adumim, Givat Ze’ev and villages in the Etzion Bloc and would allow their residents to vote in Jerusalem mayoral elections.

This bill would also create independent municipalities for Israeli-Arabs living within Jerusalem’s municipal boundaries, but outside the security barrier.

Members of Knesset and mayors acclaim this move.
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NEWSMAX

Sen. Tom Cotton told Politico that Cabinet members Rex Tillerson and Gen. Jim Mattis should resign if they can’t execute on the president’s directives that are in conflict with their own positions.

Cotton made the comments talking about the Iran nuclear accord, one that both Tillerson and Mattis have strongly advised the U.S. should stay in, but that President Donald Trump is reportedly going to decertify, Politico reported.

Cotton, R-Arkansas, sides with the president.
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By Mudar Zahran, ISRAEL RISING

While everyone in Israel and the Arab world was shocked with the sudden reconciliation between Hamas and Fatah, we have been aware of this being worked on since February. It was very expected by all insiders. Nonetheless, journalists may sometimes build their analysis on what they see on the outside, and some second hand inside information they get, and therefore may end up with faulty conclusions.

In fact, we have seen some writers concluding that Hamas had “won”. Some went as far as suggesting that Hamas now has a freehand to fight Israel while Abbas gets the blame as Gaza’s ruler. While these concerns may be justified when taking matters by their face value, realities on the ground maybe very different.
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by Rabbi Shraga Simmons, publishes in aish.com

Where are President Trump & the GOP?

By Anne Bayefsky, Breitbart.com.

If President Trump is backtracking on his promise to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, allegedly for the sake of a “peace process,” why is he simultaneously allowing the Palestinians to violate U.S. law and sink peace unilaterally?

American law requires that funding for Palestinians be drastically curtailed if they use the International Criminal Court (ICC) to turn Israelis into war criminals. Though Palestinians have given the ICC a veritable bear hug, hundreds of millions of American dollars are still flowing into Palestinian coffers.
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US president predicts decision ‘in not too distant future,’ but wants to give proposal US is formulating a chance to work first

By TOI STAFF

US President Donald Trump said Saturday he will not consider moving the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem until an Israeli-Palestinian peace plan his administration is working on is given a chance to succeed.

Appearing on a show hosted by former Arkansan Governor Mike Huckabee on the TBN network, Trump said a decision on moving the embassy would be made “in the not too distant future,” but also indicated it would have to wait for the results of a nascent peace proposal being formulated by the US.

“I want to give that a shot before I even think about moving the embassy to Jerusalem,” Trump said.
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By Asaf Romirowsky, BESA

BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 606, October 7, 2017

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: “Occupation” has become an all-purpose Palestinian tool. On the one hand, the Palestinians claim the Israeli “occupation” makes serious negotiations with Israel impossible. On the other, they claim the “occupation” makes the development of local institutions and civil society impossible. Western and Israeli diplomats have largely avoided criticism of this strategy, possibly because it has become a central tenet of Palestinian identity.

A consistent Palestinian strategy for seeking statehood while blaming Israel for its absence has been codified through the narrative of “occupation.” The anniversary of the 1967 war brought this to the forefront in endless accusations regarding the Israeli “occupation” of the West Bank. There is even an assertion that Gaza is still “occupied.”
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T. Belman. I disagree with her praise of the Rabbis. It was in appropriate for the Rabbis to attack the arms sales without knowing what’s behind such sales. Our government has chosen to be silent. I prefer to give the government the benefit of the doubt.

Some 150 countries are currently involved in territorial disputes. Israel isn’t to blame.

BY LIAT COLLINS, JPOST OCTOBER 5, 2017

I don’t want to start a fight, especially when there are so many already going on, but it goes with the territory. There are always two sides (or more) to self-determination efforts and if you back one (or are perceived as favoring one), you’ll inevitably upset the other.

Regular readers will know my family’s peculiar penchant for supporting independence movements largely overlooked by the rest of the world, which remains fixated for some reason on the Palestinian issue.

A few months ago, I expressed my support for the poor people of West Papua, whose plight seems to have consistently been off the radar, despite the horrific reports of persecution at the hands of Indonesian forces. Last week, according to Radio New Zealand, the UN’s decolonization committee refused to accept a petition signed by 1.8 million West Papuans calling for an independence vote, saying West Papua’s cause is outside the committee’s mandate.
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By JNi.Media

The IDF Civil Administration in Judea and Samaria is examining a project of translating from Turkish registration books and documents that are being kept in its possession, and documenting land ownership in the area under military rule, NRG reported Saturday. It will be part of an effort to streamline contemporary land registration procedures, which are naturally based on past documents.

The administration has in its possession handwritten land registration books from the Ottoman, British, Jordanian and Israeli periods. Some of the books are in Ottoman, an old Turkish dialect used by the imperial bureaucracy.
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OUR CONFERENCE IS THE TALK IF THE TOWN IN JORDAN

The interviewer runs one of the leading online shows in Jordan

By Jim Bradley, THE MILITANT

The Kurdish Regional Government in northern Iraq, backed by overwhelming support for an independent Kurdistan registered in the Sept. 25 referendum there, is standing firm in face of opposition and threats from the capitalist rulers in Baghdad, Ankara and Tehran, as well as the imperialist rulers in Washington.

“I’ve been fighting for half a century. With my people I have been through mass killings, deportations, gassings. I remember times when we thought we were done for, headed for extermination,” KRG President Masoud Barzani told Bernard-Henri Lévy, the maker of a new documentary film “Peshmerga,” in Erbil Sept. 25, after passage of the referendum. “During those decades of resistance, of hopes dashed and reborn, I never imagined that in my lifetime I would see the day when … my people would finally be able to come together and express to the world their desire to be democratic and free.”
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By Aaron Klein, BREITBART

NEW YORK — H.R. McMaster, President Donald Trump’s embattled national security adviser, hinted to a small group of Democratic senators that he opposes the drive to decertify the Iran nuclear deal, according to two sources familiar with the meeting who spoke to CNN.

The sentiment seems to pit McMaster directly against Trump, who is reportedly leaning toward decertifying the deal next week, according to numerous news media accounts in recent days citing administration officials.

Trump is facing a looming October 15 deadline mandated by a law requiring the U.S. president to certify every 90 days that Iran is keeping its side of the agreement and that the deal continues to be “vital to the national security interests of the United States.”
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United States Ambassador to Israel David Friedman said it is not a matter of “if, but when” the Trump administration will move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in a recent interview.

By Adele Nazarian, BREITBART

“The embassy will move,” Friedman told host Erick Stakelbeck in an interview set to broadcast on the TBN network. “It’s not if, but when. And I am convinced that during his term, the United States will recognize Jerusalem as the undivided and eternal capital of the State of Israel.”

President Donald Trump made the embassy move part of his campaign promise. In June, the commander-in-chief signed a six-month waiver deal to delay the move. The White House has declared that President Trump “has repeatedly stated his intention to move the embassy, the question is not if that move happens, but only when.”
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The problem is that substantively, there is no real difference between Obama and Trump, not in the Middle East and not anywhere.

By CarolinE Glick, JPOST

In an interview with Walla news site Tuesday, Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman said that “the more active the US is [in the Middle East], the better it will be for Israel.”

On paper, Liberman’s sentiments seem reasonable enough. President Donald Trump is far friendlier than his predecessor Barack Obama was. The tone of US-Israel relations has vastly improved since Trump took office.

The problem is that substantively, there is no real difference between the two administrations – not in the Middle East and not anywhere.
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By John Hayward, BREITBART

A report published by Axios on Friday cites unspecified sources who say President Donald Trump is considering current CIA Director Mike Pompeo as a replacement for Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, whose relationship with Trump is said to be “broken beyond repair.”

According to the “insiders” who spoke to Axios, the last straw for President Trump was that Tillerson did not do enough to push back against the report on Wednesday that Tillerson called the president a “moron” after a Pentagon meeting in July. It was widely noted that while Tillerson organized a hasty press conference to deny that he had to be talked out of resigning his post, he did not actually deny calling Trump a moron. State Department spokeswoman Heather Nauert did issue such a blanket denial several hours after Tillerson’s presser.
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By David M Weinberg, ISRAEL HAYOM

As Jews and Christians from around the world flock to downtown Jerusalem and its Old City for this joyous holiday week, the city’s demographic, economic and security problems fester in the background, particularly on the periphery.

Few know that there is a plan making its way up the Israeli decision -making ladder to significantly change the status of several Arab neighborhoods in the east and north of the city – essentially to decouple them from Jerusalem. The plan is to remove them from Jerusalem’s municipal jurisdiction and to create a separate local authority for them.

The main rationale behind this plan: to improve the demographic balance of the city by reducing the Arab population of Jerusalem from 40 to 30%.
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By Rabbi Aryeh Spero,  AMERICAN THINKER

Many were elated and approved of President Trump’s July speech in Warsaw, Poland acknowledging the central role Western civilization plays in defining who we are and what we believe. Our freedom and survival depend on defending it, he said. Beyond that, he celebrated Western civilization as something extraordinary: “What we’ve inherited from our ancestors has never existed to this extent before.”

A vocal few, popular in left-wing opinion circles, condemned Mr. Trump’s remarks as an affront to multiculturalism, labeling his linkage of us with Western civilization, and our pride in it, as “tribalism, white nationalism, and racism”, claiming that references to Western civilization and ancestors are code words for the above-mentioned vices. For some, even the broad term “Western civilization” is offensive and prejudicial since, as with all definitions, it necessarily conveys something distinctive and thus circumscribed.
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DEBKA

There was deep satisfaction in Cairo and Washington over the warm smiles and cordial handshakes marking the ceremonial handover of the Gazan administration from Hamas to the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority on Monday, Oct. 2, after a decade of bitter enmity.

Egypt, father of the reconciliation, and the United States, were favorably impressed by the ecstatic welcome accorded Palestinian Prime Minister Rami Hamdallah and his retinue of dozens of high officials from Ramallah, when they crossed into the Gaza Strip after passing through Israel.

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