By Cliff Kincaid, CFP

[..]

“But Roger Morgan, the author of a book on hedge fund operator and billionaire George Soros, wonders how greedy Soros has been, and whether the media will bother to take a look. He notes that the hedge fund operator’s net worth rose from about $9 billion before President Obama took office to over $24 billion today.

How did this happen? Was he just a good investor? Did he have inside information? Was he the beneficiary of crony capitalism? Why don’t the investigative reporters get busy on this story?”

By Tova Lazaroff, JPOST

The modular structures with cement floors located within the boundaries of the Kfar Adumim settlement were built in 2015 and house Palestinian Beduin.

Settlers on Monday asked the High Court of Justice to order the demolition of 15 Palestinian homes in Area C of the West Bank, which they say are illegal and funded by the European Union.

The modular structures with cement floors located within the boundaries of the Kfar Adumim settlement were built in 2015 and house Palestinian Beduin.

The settlement and the non-governmental group Regavim, which monitors illegal Palestinian building, are the co-petitioners. They asked the state to force the Civil Administration to remove the structures, which they said were built illegally on state land. They presented photos of the structures, which have signs on the walls with the EU logo.
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Op-ed: Isaac Herzog’s latest comments about peace prospects reflect his unwillingness or inability to look reality in the eye and see that accords cannot be reached, no matter how Israeli leaders act.

By Eiyakim Haetzni, YNET

Herzog and Abbas in Ramallah. Delusions of a possible peace.

Isaac Herzog recently visited the Mukataa in Ramallah, headquarters of the Palestinian Authority, and returned bursting with compliments for Mahmoud Abbas, who is packing his bags ahead of a trip to Tehran before establishing an Iranian delegation office in Ramallah.

With magnetic optimism, Herzog promises that the Palestinians are ready to take “original steps on core issues.” Are we in for a historic concession of the Palestinian “right of return?” And perhaps Abbas is planning to offer Israel a defensive perimeter in the Jordan Valley south of Beit She’an, so that we may stop ISIS or the Revolutionary Guards from reaching Route 6?
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By Omri Ceren, TIP

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani declared in a speech over the weekend that “we will buy, sell and develop any weapons we need and we will not ask for permission or abide by any resolution for that,” despite the UN arms embargo in place on the Islamic Republic.

Iran has openly exported its weapons abroad, and in its latest sanction violation, the head of Iran’s expeditionary forces, U.S.-designated terrorist Qassem Suleimani, traveled to Russia, in defiance of his travel ban.Analysts have long warned that the sanctions relief as part of a final deal could embolden Iran to intensify its regional aggression and seek to further destabilize the Middle East, in part through the support of its proxy groups, such as Hezbollah in Lebanon.
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By Don Feder
http://www.grasstopsusa.com/df082415.html

It’s 220 miles and 77 years from Munich – which epitomized the appeasement that led to World War II – to Vienna, where Obama’s nuclear capitulation to Iran was negotiated. Whenever a grounded-in-reality person (non-Democrat) compares the Iran surrender to peace-for-our-time, liberals get unhinged.

In a way, they’re right. Vienna is worse than Munich.

Hyperventilating in the pathetically predictable Christian Science Monitor, on July 26, staff writer Dan Murphy insisted, “The comparison being tossed around (Iran and Munich) is full of false equivalences, a misunderstanding of European history, and perhaps a deliberate distortion of the Iran deal.”
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T. Belman. These authors are on my mailing list and keep in touch with me. They know what they are talking about.

Paul Vallely writes to say;

“President Obama, Secretary of State John Kerry, and White House advisor Valerie are treading on treason grounds under the U.S. Constitution for aiding and abetting Iran, a known enemy of the United States, while throwing Israel, a longtime U.S. ally, to the wolves,”

WITH WEAPONS DEVELOPMENT AND DELIVERY SYSTEMS

By MG Paul Vallely, U.S. Army (Ret) And LTC Dennis B. Haney, USAF (Ret)

Since 1979, a cabal of nations has aided and abetted Iran in its efforts to develop a robust nuclear program under the guise of generating a nuclear energy system. This cabal is mainly comprised of Russia, China, and North Korea. Since sanctions began being placed on Iran in 1979, with more added since, Iran still had enough free reign to develop its capabilities despite the sanctions regime because of this cabal. All the moving parts are in place, the material is there, and this means they are already nuclear – “break out” is imminent now.
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By Omri Ceren, TIP

The morning conversation has been split between worries over the stock market meltdown, on the domestic side, and stories on the Legion of Honor awards, on the foreign affairs side. By the afternoon – and certainly after today’s State Department briefing – the foreign policy debate will probably get back where it left off last week: the AP’s confirmation of the secret side deal between the IAEA and Iran on Parchin, in which the Iranians will get to inspect their own military facility for evidence of their own past illicit nuclear activities.

The Iranians used Parchin for tests relevant to the detonation of nuclear warheads. The IAEA needs to know how far they got so the agency can set up a verification regime against future violations, and so the Obama administration had consistently promised lawmakers that Parchin would be resolved before any final deal was inked. The JCPOA was nonetheless announced without that resolution and instead there was a Roadmap that included a reference a secret IAEA-Iran side deal on Parchin. Last week the AP published a copy of that side deal: instead of allowing IAEA inspectors to collect evidence from the Parchin, samples will be collected by the Iranians using Iranian equipment; instead of allowing the IAEA to collect everything it wants,only seven samples will be handed over from mutually agreed upon areas; instead of giving inspectors access to facilities, photos and videos will be taken by the Iranians themselves, again only from mutually agreed upon areas [a].
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T. Belman. This is a fun exchange. First Herzog attacked Levy for attacking him. Then Levy came back doubled down on Herzog. Worth reading.

Opposition leader Isaac Herzog responds to criticism levelled against him by Haaretz’s Gideon Levy, arguing that making peace also means fighting terror – not just accepting the Palestinian narrative hook, line and sinker.

By Isaac Herzog, HAARETZ | Aug. 21, 2015

It’s always amusing to read Gideon Levy criticizing someone else for using cliches (“The left’s counter-terrorism unit,” Haaretz, August 20). After all, Levy is the expert in the use of cliches. He has been singing For the same song for years, publishing the same article and the same text, twice and sometimes three times a week: “Occupation, occupation, occupation and once again occupation; only the Jews are to blame and only the Palestinians are right.” Levy has been a one-trick pony since way back in the 1990s.
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T. Belman. This article was sent to the the Obama Administration by Lt. Col Howard who also cc’d me. I wrote back as follows:

“The Saudi Peace Initiative should not be the basis for such a peace.

This will be accomplished by a population transfer of at least 2 million Arabs from Gaza and the West Bank to Jordan.

Jordan, of course would require considerable help to resettle these Arabs and to stabilize the country.

Anything short of such a solution would be a half measure and would maintain the conflict.”

The basis should be the original British idea when they were creating Jordan, that Jordan should be the Arab state and Palestine the Jewish state.

At a British conference in Cairo in the spring of 1921, it was envisioned:

“… establishing a Jewish National Home in Palestine west of the Jordan and a separate Arab entity in Palestine east of the Jordan. Abdullah, if installed in authority in Transjordan, could preside over the creation of such an Arab entity.”

ALGEMEINER

Anwar Eshki, a retired major general in the Saudi armed forces, has made it his personal goal to strike peace between Saudi Arabia and Israel, the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday.
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Between May and August 11, $1 billion of oil was imported into Israel

JPOST

Up to 3/4 of the oil supply in Israel was imported from Iraqi Kurdistan, a Financial Times report said Sunday.

Between May and August 11, 19 million barrels of oil from Kurdistan were imported by Israel, the equivalent of $1 billion.
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Green Left Weekly

Since Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s new wave of attacks on North Kurdistan within the Turkish state in the wake of Turkey’s June election, people of all ages have joined the effort to defend and govern themselves in the area.

Since the 1990s, the Turkish state has used tactics of denial, assimilation and annihilation in the North Kurdistan. Although the promises of peace that the Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) made when it first came to power awakened hope for many, 13 years later the promises remain unfulfilled.
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T. Belman.  Unlike Portman, I take the Holocaust personally.  I see it as a culmination of 2000 years of the persecution of Jews by Christians which had the intent to annihilate Judaism and the Jewish people. It was not an isolated event. Hitler intended to annihilate all the Jewish people.  Conversion was not an option. Yes the mass slaughter of  of 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu was just as brutal but I see nothing wrong with Jews mourning the death of fellow Jews more than the death of fellow humans. Its only natural. Jews can’t save all the peoples of the world.  Hopefully they can save themselves.

In an interview with ‘The Independent’, she questions the precedent of putting Holocaust education before all other national tragedies.

JPOST

Natalie Portman addressed the Holocaust and the protracted and deep impact it has on the international Jewish community in an interview she gave to the British daily, The Independent.

Portman, born to Israeli parents in Jerusalem, moved to the US at the age of three. She continued a Jewish curriculum in the US, learning about the foundation of her birth country as well as the Holocaust.
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By Daniel Greenfield

Israel’s quick response to recent Syria rockets show attack was no surprise for IDF Intelligence.

By Yossi Melman, JPOST

The swift Israeli reaction Thursday and Friday to the launching of four rockets from Syria at the Galilee and Golan shows how deep is the Israeli intelligence penetration of Iran’s military. It was not the first time that precise and updated intelligence data enabled Israel to prevent terrorist attacks from Syria sponsored by Iran, or to execute attacks against Bashar Assad’s regime, or whatever is left of it.

The rocket launchings – which caused no casualties or damage to property, except sparking fires in open fields – didn’t surprise IDF Intelligence.

They were expecting some sort of an attack against Israel from the Syrian Golan and prepared themselves for the eventuality.
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By Lawrence Solomon, FINANCIAL POST

Jewish voters — and more importantly, Jewish campaign contributors — are abandoning political parties of the left

Jews have historically been leftists, over the last century consistently voting for left-leaning, liberal parties in Canada, the U.S. and Europe in higher proportion than any other religious group. Those liberal, left-leaning Jews are about to experience a political sea change as they turn massively to the right.

The West’s political parties will also feel the effects – not directly at the ballot box, where the Jewish vote is generally too small to decide an election but indirectly, in their coffers, where the Jewish tilt in campaign giving has often meant the difference between victory and defeat. As one example, the U.S. Democratic Party typically receives between half and two-thirds of its funding from Jews, the Republican Party more like a quarter.
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 The courts are giving them light sentences; the severity of the acts increases – but nothing has changed.

Tova Tzimuki, YNET

The suspects charged with setting fire to the Church of Loaves and Fishes (Photo: George Ginsberg)

The number of solved cases is still negligible, the sentences handed out to Jewish terrorists are relatively light, and the government is no rush to act. One year after the attempt to declare “price tag” perpetrators as terrorists – nothing has been done.

A year ago, then-justice minister Tzipi Livni and then-public security minister Yitzhak Aharonovich asked Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to approve two unusual measures to deal with “price tag” attacks – defining the perpetrators of those hate crimes as members of a terror organization, and issuing administrative arrest orders against prominent figures, when there is evidence to back these orders.
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