By Joshua Caplan, GATEWAY PUNDIT
On Friday evening, the New York Times published a statement allegedly issued by President Trump in support of H.R. McMaster after the National Security Advisor came under heavy fire for his anti-Israel views and firing Trump loyalists. Former Trump campaign manager, Roger Stone, says the White House issued the statement without President Trump’s approval.
By Ron Jager, AMERICAN THINKER
In the United States, the two groups that most ardently support Israel are Jews and evangelical Christians. Jewish support is easy to explain, but why should certain Christians, most of them politically quite conservative, be so devoted to Israel? There is a second puzzle: despite their support for a Jewish state, evangelical and fundamentalist Christians are disliked by many American Jews.
The evidence about evangelical attitudes is clear. In 2006, a Pew survey found that evangelical Christians were more favorable toward Israel than the average American was—and much more sympathetic than either mainline Protestants or secularists. In another survey, evangelical Christians proved much likelier than Catholics, Protestants, or secular types to back Israeli control of Jerusalem, endorse Israeli settlements on the West Bank, and take Israel’s side in a Middle Eastern dispute. Among every religious group, those who are most traditional are most supportive of Israel.
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Conflict management, when applied to the Israeli-Palestinian problem, is insufficient to achieve Israel’s interests. What is needed is a strategy of renewed settlement that will educate the Palestinians about the costs of their actions, divide their ranks instead of tactically unifying them, and keep it a conflict over land – which can eventually be resolved – rather than over religion, which is probably unsolvable.
Jordanian King Abdullah’s forthcoming visit to Ramallah Monday, Aug. 7, for talks with Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas, bodes ill for Jordanian-Israeli relations at an especially jarring moment.
The Israeli embassy security officer Ziv Moyal, who on July 24 shot dead two Jordanians in the embassy compound when he was attacked with a screwdriver, left a trail of Jordanian ill will in his wake, especially since the incident occurred in the middle of the Temple House crisis in Jerusalem.
King Abdullah proposes to turn this unfortunate incident into a springboard for persuading the Palestinian leader to work with Jordan in the framework of the peace initiative US President Donald Trump is trying to resuscitate between Israel and the Palestinians.
By Zvi November
Someone asked: How can you live in Israel, a country under constant threat of extermination?
The short answer is: You can’t.
About six or seven years ago I sat next to an Israeli woman on a return flight from the US. The woman told me she was coming to Israel to visit her family but will not come back to live in Israel permanently. She explained that she just can’t endure the stress.
I once read that more Lebanese reside overseas than live in Lebanon. I don’t know if this also holds true for Israelis but huge numbers of Israelis do live elsewhere, especially in America.
WHAT THE HELL
President Trump gave H.R. McMaster a vote of confidence after the national security adviser’s rivals seized on a letter McMaster sent to his Obama predecessor Susan Rice giving her continued access to classified information.
McMaster’s letter, which his supporters said was routine, was apparently leaked to imply that the Army lieutenant general was helping Trump’s enemies. McMaster’s feud with other powerful camps inside the White House has been well-documented, and a recent spate of firings by McMaster appears to have ratcheted up tensions. But Trump issued a statement late Friday supporting McMaster.
by Linda Goudsmit
Every board game has rules. Every card game has rules. Every athletic competition has rules. Every election has rules. Every society has rules. WHY?
Rules establish the object of the game and provide the organizing principle for fair play – rules establish what is and what is not acceptable conduct in the game. You have to take turns, you cannot look at someone else’s cards, you cannot challenge or dispute the referee, you cannot vote twice – and there are penalties for not following the rules in every game. If you don’t play by the rules in a game you either lose on points or are disqualified.
Let’s examine the sport of wrestling and begin with the overview of wrestling rules provided by West Virginia Wrestling: http://www.wvmat.com/overview.htm
On one – very superficial – level I was sorry that the planned showdown between maverick Likud MK Oren Hazan and Jordanian parliamentarian Yahya Mohammad Alsaud, who has a history of punch-throwing, did not take place. We all need a little light relief when times are tense.
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Yet, Israel cannot ignore the sensitivity of the site particularly for the Hashemites, struggling to keep their power in a country where the majority of the population is Palestinian and where there has been a huge influx of more than a million refugees from Syria.
[..] Nonetheless, the gap between the two sides today seems wider than it has been for a long time.
By seeking to court the leading Shia politician, the Saudi crown prince is stirring up conflict within Iraq’s Shia factions but he could be playing with fire
By Madawi Al-Rasheed, MIDDLE EAST EYE
On 30 July Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman welcomed controversial Iraqi Shia leaderMuqtada al-Sadr.
This is not Sadr’s first visit since the 2003 American occupation. He arrived in Riyadh in 2006 at the height of the Iraqi resistance to the occupation and the Iraqi civil war. But the visit was unsuccessful then. It yielded little benefits to either side. Like other aspiring clerics turned politicians, Sadr entered Iraqi politics with his own Jaysh al-Mahdi militia that later changed its name to the Peace Brigades.
Mohammed bin Salman is building on a new strategy to lure the controversial but famous and influential Shia cleric into Riyadh’s orbit
There are no longer any doubts that the D.C. Swamp and its attendant muddied creatures are working their hardest to take down legally-elected (by the citizens of the United States of America) President Donald J. Trump and throw him out of his position as President. Now, even the Republican Swamp Things in the Senate have joined their Democrat critters in working to pass a bill that will remove President Trump’s Executive Branch powers to fire those who serve at the pleasure of the POTUS. The Republicans—who have been secret Marxists for a very long time—are now working to damage duly-elected President Trump.
We are on the brink of beginning an extremely perilous journey down the path of Venezuela and other autocratic totalitarian governments and are on our way towards losing our Constitution. We have, apparently, already lost our Republic.
The National Security Council is becoming a national security threat.
Derek Harvey was a man who saw things coming. He had warned of Al Qaeda when most chose to ignore it. He had seen the Sunni insurgency rising when most chose to deny it.
The former Army colonel had made his reputation by learning the lay of the land. In Iraq that meant sleeping on mud floors and digging into documents to figure out where the threat was coming from.
It was hard to imagine anyone better qualified to serve as President Trump’s top Middle East adviser at the National Security Council than a man who had been on the ground in Iraq and who had seen it all.
President Trump has miraculously turned the economy around. Second quarter GDP (Trump’s first full quarter as president) was far ahead of anything produced by Obama; corporate profits are soaring; job growth is phenomenal; the stock market is at all-time highs; the manufacturers optimism index is the highest in history; and the US oil rig count has doubled under Trump.
This is the Democrats worst nightmare. Despite all the chaos and firings in the Trump administration, President Trump is delivering for middle class voters. Americans don’t care about Sean Spicer, Reince Priebus or Anthony Scaramucci. They care about jobs, rising incomes, and their retirement accounts.
By Elliot Abrams, ISRAEL HAYOM
During the Obama years, concerns about Israel’s security situation focused on the Iranian nuclear weapons program. Today, the focus is changing: to the growing Iranian military presence in Syria, the growing military strength of Hezbollah, and the possibility of a devastating Israel-Hezbollah conflict.
That is the subject of a new article in Strategic Assessment, the magazine of Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies. Titled “Political and Military Contours of the Next Conflict with Hezbollah,” it was written by Gideon Sa’ar and Ron Tira. Tira is a strategist who was a longtime Israeli Air Force officer and pilot; Sa’ar is an influential Israeli politician who was for 11 years a Likud member of the Knesset.
It’s dangerous to try to summarize a complex and in many ways worrying text, but I will try.
First, war is possible: “A conflict could break out due to a miscalculation, a failure in strategic communication, or uncontrolled escalation.”
Interview with YORAM ETTINGER
By Niram Ferretti, L’INFORMALE
Among the most knowledgeable analysts of the Arab-Israeli conflict, Yoram Ettinger belongs to the tough school of the realists, those scholars and political thinkers who never deflect from looking at things as they are and not as they would like them to be. Reality is out there and often it is hard to face, but nothing is worse then projecting false assumptions and fancy schemes on it, for reality will always reject them harshly. Ex ambassador Ettinger, (formerly the Minister for Congressional Affairs to Israel’s Embassy in Washington DC) doesn’t suffer from this attitude as anyone who reads him on the The Ettinger Report know very well.
L’Informale has met him in Jerusalem.
Michael Ross explains why US President-Elect Donald Trump should develop a relationship with Mudar Zahran, the Jordanian Opposition Coalition (JOC) Secretary General. Among other things, Ross highlights that Zahran and the JOC have done more politically compared to any other government in exile in order to bring peace to the Middle East.
Nov 15, 2016,
By Michael Ross, JOC
Mudar Zahran Photo Credit: Presidential office/Wikipedia CommonsFor the last half a dozen years, Jordanian Opposition Coalition (JOC) Secretary General Mudar Zahran has been on a mission – a mission that many say is larger than life because it will not only save lives and bring peace to his people but more importantly, bring to an end an iron-fisted dictatorship that has mismanaged Jordan’s economy and threatened the lives and future of her people. As such, President-Elect Trump needs to talk with Mr. Zahran, embrace the information he is presenting and by doing so, will help stop terrorism, save lives and money and combined, help bring peace to the region. Read more…
Israel ceded the Temple Mount to terrorists last week. But with a clear goal, we can get it back in short order and keep it perpetually for the good of all humanity.
Last week, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his security cabinet caved in to the demands of the PLO and its partners in Hamas, the Islamic Movement, Jordan, Iran and Turkey by agreeing to remove metal detectors and other security screening equipment from the Temple Mount. The equipment was installed last month in response to Palestinian incitement and acts of jihadist violence against Israelis, including the murder of two policemen, at Judaism’s holiest site.
After polls showed 77% of Israelis felt he and his cabinet members capitulated to terrorism, Netanyahu issued a statement thanking US President Donald Trump’s senior adviser Jared Kushner and Trump’s senior negotiator Jason Greenblatt for their help in resolving the crisis.
The liberal mindset has taken over the thought processes of large sectors of Israeli society, just as it has taken over the thought processes of Western society as a whole. And it leads to disaster.
It is an undeniable fact that the Israeli government caved in to the religious tenacity of the Muslim side in the Temple Mount dispute. It took less than two weeks of violence to force Israel to admit to the error made by its Cabinet and all the experts with whom it consulted about probable Islamic reactions to placing security apparatus at the entrance to the Temple Mount and the gates of the Old City. There is no question that Israel’s backtracking was humiliating and that it granted a significant victory to Israel-haters.
Desperate to end the violence, Israeli public relations sources publicized a document showing similar security measures in Mecca and Medina, where not a single Muslim complains or protests at the Saudi checkpoints. They seem to have hoped that the Muslims here would agree to have Jews inspect them the way pilgrims on the Haaj to Mecca allow the Saudis to inspect them. The government and its public relations people’s basic error lay in thinking that a magnetometer in Jerusalem is the same as one in Mecca, ignoring two fundamental differences.
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Jordan’s foreign minister blames the “occupation” for the Temple Mount terror, and threatens even more dangerous crises.
As recently as the mid-20th century, when Arabs last controlled parts of Jerusalem, they exhibited no respect for the Holy City.
In 1948, when Jordan took control of the eastern part of Jerusalem, including the Old City, it divided the city for the first time in its 3,000-year history. Under the 1949 armistice agreement with Israel, Jordan pledged to allow free access to all holy places but failed to honor that commitment. From 1948 until the Six-Day War in 1967, the part of Jerusalem controlled by the Jordanians again became an isolated and underdeveloped provincial town, and its religious sites the target of religious intolerance.
America paid Iran $1.7 billion in cash—funds that by law were not to be released unless and until Iran paid what it owed to American victims of its terrorism.
On the morning of January 17, 2016, President Obama declared that this was “a good day, because, once again, we’re seeing what’s possible with strong American diplomacy.”
The Iran nuclear deal had been implemented the day before—an example, the President said, of his “smart, patient, and disciplined approach to the world.” Now Iran was releasing five American hostages, the result of the administration’s “tireless” efforts. “On the sidelines of the nuclear negotiations,” the president explained, “our diplomats at the highest level, including Secretary [of State John] Kerry, used every meeting to push Iran to release our Americans.” In return for that gesture, the president continued, he was making a “reciprocal humanitarian gesture”: namely, clemency for seven Iranians imprisoned or awaiting trial for criminal violations of American sanctions. Later it was announced that the U.S. had also dropped outstanding warrants against another fourteen Iranians.
