THE DAILY BELL

A cluster of ghostly hand- and footprints on a mountain north of Lhasa offers evidence that humans scratched out a permanent existence in the thin air of Tibet much earlier than commonly thought, according to a new study.  Some locals believe the prints, pressed into an ancient slab of limestone located 14,000 feet above sea level near the present-day village of Chusang, were left behind by mythical beasts. A team of researchers say that the impressions were left by people and that they offer intriguing clues to the puzzle of Tibetans’ ethnic origins.  –WSJ

The dating of an ancient slab of limestone in Tibet has now been attributed to human beings between 7,000 and 12,000 years ago. But that’s still fairly recent so far as we are concerned.
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Dr. Aaron Lerner. IMRA

The Arabic language Palestinian news website, “Pulse of the Nation” reports today that there are at least 1,500 laser guided anti-tank missiles in the Gaza Strip

The article claims that in the last three weeks large shipments of North Korean weapons have been smuggled through Sinai to the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades, the military arm of Hamas.

According to the article,  units of the Izz al-Din al-Qassam Brigades can be observed engaged in exercises in the Gaza Strip that involve launching anti-tank missiles.

The article claims that while the Egyptian air force attacks the smuggling tunnels in the Rafah area every few days, Hamas continues to succeed in smuggling as for each tunnel actually used for smuggling Hamas has three or four tunnels that serve only as “camouflage” for the working tunnels.

Institute for Contemporary Affairs
By Pinhas Inbari

Vol. 17, No. 3

• The intention of U.S. President Donald Trump to move the American Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem evoked angry reactions in the Palestinian Authority which is preparing to block the initiative.
• Arab reaction to the embassy move depends on both Palestinian pressure and whether or not the Trump administration intends to follow through with his election promise to move the embassy.
• Jerusalem is very important to the Palestinian Authority and the Muslim Brotherhood and is less important to other Arab countries and Saudi Arabia in particular.
• Husam Zomlut, strategic affairs advisor to PA President Abbas and Palestinian ambassador-designate to Washington, admitted to Hamas TV that the aim of Palestinian diplomacy is to side-line the United States from its role in leading the peace process in favor of Europe and the UN.

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We lost the battle, but we are winning the war for the Land of Israel’

By morning, the demolition will be finished

BY MARISSA NEWMAN, TOI

Jewish Home leader Naftali Bennett on Wednesday hailed the residents of Amona as “heroes” whose campaign to stay in their homes will lead to the annexation of the West Bank and avert future evacuations in the settlements.

The leader of the right-wing party spoke as hundreds of police and bulldozers entered the West Bank outpost to demolish it per a 2014 court order which ruled it was built on privately owned Palestinian land.
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DEBKA

An order to remain stationary was issued Thursday night, Jan. 26, by the Russian Commander in Syria Lt. Gen. Alexander Zhuravlev to the high commands of the Syrian army and of the Iranian and Shiite forces positioned in Aleppo, as well as Hizballah units in all parts of Syria. Gen. Zhuravlev, acting on instructions from Moscow, prohibited any movement by those forces out of their current positions as of noon local time.

DEBKAfile’s military and intelligence sources report that the order banned the opening of new battlefronts anywhere in Syria and the movement of Syrian air force units between bases.

This order has been obeyed to date.
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By R. Collins

Even today, after Donald Trump has already been inaugurated as president of the United States, many pundits are still trying to figure out how it happened. How did the man with the smallest chance of victory manage to win this election, in complete defiance of all the predictions and assessments of the experts, and all the polls that seemed to be against him? In retrospect, there are many explanations for his astounding victory, some of which are more logical, while others are less so.

There is one man, Rabbi Shmuel Wagner, who has no background whatsoever in the media or in political commentary, but who is confident that he knows of at least one reason for Trump’s stunning victory: the zechus of his father.

In an exclusive interview, Rabbi Wagner, mashgiach ruchani of Yeshivas Ohr Yerushalayim in Moshav Beit Meir, shares the incredible story of how Donald Trump’s father, Frederick Trump, built a shul for the congregation headed by his father, Rabbi Yisroel Wagner, and went on to make annual donations of funding for the kehillah and to aid Jewish families in financial distress.
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By Dr. Netanel Avneri, ISRAEL HAYOM

Head of the Prime Minister’s Office speaks with Arutz Sheva about the urgent need to increase enforcement against illegal Arab building.

By Hezki Baruch, INN

Director-General of the Prime Minister’s Office Eli Groner spoke with Arutz Sheva about the urgent need to increase law enforcement against illegal Arab building.

“A debate is raging right now in the Interior Committee because people don’t understand that the Order and Building Enforcement Bill is vital – especially for the Arab sector. This will create order, the likes of which has not been seen for many years.”
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by ANDREW C. MCCARTHY, National Review

Trump’s goal is not to exclude Muslims from our country; it is to exclude sharia supremacists, a significant subset of Muslims.

President Trump’s temporary ban on entry into the U.S. by various categories of aliens has caused a firestorm. That owes in part to the rash implementation of perfectly legal restrictions, but the hysteria is out of proportion to the minimal harm actually done.
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Palestinians threaten America

By Barry Shaw,

When the incoming Trump Administration spoke about the possibility of moving the US Embassy to Jerusalem the Palestinians began making threats.

Hamas, the Islamic terror regime that controls the Gaza Strip, threatened a new upsurge of violence and terrorism by saying that the move would ”open a new chapter of conflict” and “add fuel to the fire.”
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The current media and left-wing uproar over the executive order US President Donald Trump signed on Saturday is extraordinary on many levels.

BY CAROLINE B. GLICK, JPOST

Donald Trump the new Franklin Delano Roosevelt? Does his immigration policy mimic Roosevelt’s by adopting a callous, bigoted position on would-be asylum seekers from the Muslim world? At a press conference on June 5, 1940, Roosevelt gave an unspeakably cynical justification for his administration’s refusal to permit the desperate Jews of Nazi Germany to enter the US.

In Roosevelt’s words, “Among the refugees [from Germany], there are some spies… And not all of them are voluntary spies – it is rather a horrible story but in some of the other countries that refugees out of Germany have gone to, especially Jewish refugees, they found a number of definitely proven spies.”
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Israel sometimes lives in West Bank world and sometimes in Judea and Samaria world.

BY YONAH JEREMY BOB, JPOST

For fifty yeaqrs, Israel has walked a tightrope of international law between the “West Bank world” and “Judea and Samaria world.”

The so-called “settlement regulation bill” snaps that tightrope and forces Israel to make a choice.

On one hand, Israel has implemented a “belligerent occupation” of the West Bank. That neutral legal term is not to be confused with political accusations of being an “occupier.” It means that Israel – since the 1967 Six Day War – has had certain legal rights and obligations, as long as it controlled the West Bank.
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Op-ed: As always, European countries are funding bodies that issue reports allegedly about ‘human rights,’ while in fact waging a campaign against Israel’s existence.

By Ben-Dror Yemini, YNET

The European Council, a body that is made up of all European countries and is wider than the European Union, has adopted a report written by Eva-Lena Jansson, a representative of Sweden’s Social Democratic Party, which accuses Israel of engaging in “an appalling pattern of apparently systematic unlawful killings” of innocent civilians.

The report is based on the Al-Mezan NGO, which is supported by Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark, Norway and the Netherlands. The NGO itself supports the BDS Movement and is part of the campaign that is based on denying Israel’s right to exist.
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By Maj. Gen. (res.) Gershon Hacohen, BESA, January 30, 2017

BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 401

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: With the start of a new era in the White House, Israel must let go of the two-state solution as defined by the Clinton Parameters. It is time for a reassessment of Rabin’s approach, which stressed the importance of the preservation and development of Area C in Judea and Samaria under Israeli control as a prerequisite for defensible borders.

The entry of President Trump into the White House marks a new era in the US and around the world, giving rise to crises and upheavals as well as new opportunities. The demands of the State of Israel, in the context of its overall vital interests in the region, will be reviewed and reassessed. It is imperative that Israel formulate a clear stand on central issues based on wide public support. As a first step, Israel must let go of the two-state solution as laid out in the Clinton Parameters.
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by Daniel Pipes, Middle East Quarterly, Spring 2017

Building on his earlier notion of “extreme vetting,” the order explains that

to protect Americans, the United States must ensure that those admitted to this country do not bear hostile attitudes toward it and its founding principles. The United States cannot, and should not, admit those who do not support the Constitution, or those who would place violent ideologies over American law. In addition, the United States should not admit those who engage in acts of bigotry or hatred (including “honor” killings, other forms of violence against women, or the persecution of those who practice religions different from their own) or those who would oppress Americans of any race, gender, or sexual orientation.

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The Kurds, Baluchi, and Ahwazi aspirations have never received the attention the Palestinians have by the International community.

By Joseph Puder, FPM

The Islamic Republic of Iran appears in its aggressive arrogance as a solid and intimidating force. There are however, chinks in the Iranian regime’s armor – it is beset by rebellious minorities who seek self-determination from the Tehran regime.  On December 3, 2016, an international conference on Ahwaz was held in Tunisia by the Euro-Arab Center for Studies, in conjunction with the Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahwaz.  The conference was titled “Ending the Occupation and Restoring the Country – An Historic Duty”

The Ahwazis are an Arab minority in a predominantly Persian state.  In 1925, Shah Reza Pahlavi annexed the area known historically as Arabistan to Iran, and gave it the name Khuzestan.  Ahwaz is the capital of the province, which is bordering Iraq to the West, the Persian (Arabian) Gulf to the Southwest, and the Zagros Mountains to the East, North, and Southeast, which separate it from Iran (Persia).  Arabistan was a British protectorate that was governed until 1925 by Sheikh Khazaal bin Jabber, whose family ruled Arabistan for over a century. The British, interested in preserving its oil interests in Iran, gave the Shah a green-light to occupy the province.
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By Selwyn Duke, AMERICAN THINKER

The irrational left, which means virtually all the left, is apoplectic over President Trump’s executive order halting immigration from terrorist-spawning countries. Its minions are complaining that the move is “un-American,” which in their world apparently involves playing Russian roulette with American lives.

The New York Times just ran a teary-eyed piece lamenting “immediate collateral damage imposed on people who, by all accounts, had no sinister intentions in trying to come to the United States,” as the paper put it. The fake news is right there — “by all accounts” — slipped in casually in the hope the reader will slide by it unthinkingly. In reality, there are many people, from intelligence experts to politicians to social commentators to Muslims themselves, warning that there’s no way to truly know these people’s “intentions.”
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Israeli group finds PA, Hamas partly responsible for crisis, but puts lion’s share of blame on Israel

BY DOV LIEBER, TOI

Gaza’s energy, water and sewage systems are on the verge of collapse, a new report by an Israeli group said, placing the lion’s share of the blame on Israel.

The Gisha organization, which released its report, “Hand on the Switch: Who’s Responsible for Gaza’s Infrastructure Crisis?” on Tuesday, said the 1.8 million inhabitants of the Strip are plagued by frequent blackouts, undrinkable water and an outdated cellular network.
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AL MONITOR

Russia seizes diplomatic momentum on Syria

UN Syria envoy Staffan de Mistura praised the Russian-brokered Syria talks in Astana, Kazakhstan, which ended Jan. 24, as a “concrete step” toward implementation of United Nations Security Council resolutions dealing with Syria, commending Russia, Turkey and Iran for setting up a mechanism to ensure compliance with the cease-fire announced last month.

Russia’s diplomatic blitz did not end in Astana, however. On Jan. 27, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov met with Syrian opposition parties in Moscow for further discussion of a Russian draft of a new Syrian Constitution that had been offered in Astana. While representatives of the Saudi-backed High Negotiations Committee of the Syrian opposition and the National Coalition for Syrian Revolutionary and Opposition Forces refused to attend, the Syrian Kurdish Democratic Union Party (PYD), which Turkey had excluded from the Astana talks, participated in the Moscow meeting.
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